From James Madison to Thomas Cooper, 23 March 1827
To Thomas Cooper
Mar 23. —22. [1827]
Dr Sir
Your letter of the 8th.1 is just recd & with it a copy of the Printed Circular on the same subject.2 I forward both to the Faculty of our University who are prohibited by one of its Statutes “from receiving into it any person who has been a Student at any other incorporated Seminary, but on producing a Certificate therefrom, or other satisfactory evidence, with respect to his general good conduct.”3
To this regulation the Faculty will doubtless conform, with a just sense of the obligation everywhere, to discountenance the pernicious example described in your communication.
Wishing every success to the means you have adopted for reclaiming the offenders, and re-establishing the violated order, I tender you assurances of my great esteem.
J. M
Draft (DLC). Dated 1822 in the Index to the James Madison Papers; year assigned based on internal evidence and on the draft being written on the verso of the draft of JM to John Tayloe Lomax, 23 Mar. 1827.
1. Letter not found.
2. Enclosure not identified, but it referred to a committee representing some eighty students at South Carolina College who complained about the food at the college refectory and refused to board there any longer. The boycott, which flouted regulations, moved Cooper and the faculty to recommend expulsion, and forty-one students were expelled in December 1827 (Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina [2 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1951–56], 1:90–91).
3. Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia for Constituting, Governing & Conducting That Institution ( 31630), 24. JM’s copy is in the Madison Collection, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.