• General Notes

  Biography of CARY, Archibald
  ARCHIBALD CARY OF CARYSBROOK, VIRGINIA
  Francis Burton Harrison l942
  JARMAN'S INCORPORATED PRINTERS
  CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA U.S.A.
  
  ARCHIBALD CARY OF CARYSBROOK, VIRGINIA 
  
    Archibald Cary Was born at Carysbrook, Fluvanna  County, Virginia, in 1815 and died at Cumberland, Mary-  land in 1854. He left three children him surviving, and in  this year of Grace 1942, two of his grandchildren are still  alive. It is for his great-grandchildren, numbering fifteen  today that these pages are written and privately printed. 
    Of comely presence, robust constitution, good health and  athletic habit, Archibald Cary was a handsome and manly  man. 
     In a worldly sense, his career was unsuccessful, but he  never lacked in courage, integrity nor in the high qualities  of his class. Having been born without an inferiority com-  plex, he never envied those who outstripped him in the race  for wealth and power. His chief misfortune was to have  been born a century too late. 
    He enters our story mounted on his own pony and leaves  it on foot, seeking employment as a village schoolmaster.  With him, trudging away from the land of his birthright,  went the shades of his ancestors. Tidewater Virginians  of the days of King Tobo. were already vanishing from the  stage forever. 
    If Mr. Cary's worldly career was a failure as measured  by the yard-stick of dollars and cents, his defects were  clearly those of his qualities. It is true that, unlike his  forbears, he was not a planter, and that is perhaps the  reason why he never held public office as had all of his ancestors in Virginia. Indeed he never sought an official  post, and yet he exercised a considerable influence upon his 
  contemporaries through his public addresses and by the  medium  of various newspapers of which he was the editor  or to which he made contribution. 
    He did not live to see his country torn and shattered by  civil war, but his son and daughter filled gallant roles in  the Confederacy, afterwards passing the years of their  maturity in hustling New York. Their respective children,  of whom the present writer was one were born in New  York and grew up there with very little knowledge of this  Virginia ancestor of long ago. 
      It has been the agreeable task of the present writer to  collect the surviving papers of his two Virginia grandfathers, Jesse Burton Harrison of Lynchburg and Archibald Cary of Carysbrook. 
    A curious parallel runs through the careers of these two  men. Each was born of a well-to-do father; each was  highly educated; each of them received his early impressions of public affairs at Monticello from the aged philosopher Mr. Jefferson. Both of these young Virginians became lawyers though greatly preferring belles lettres; both  migrated to the new South-West, and both edited newspapers there in support of anti-Jackson candidates for the  presidency during a chapter of our history which had already reached its climax with the mob wiping its boots on  the satin covers of the White House furniture. They lived  the mature years of their short lives in an era of acute  financial depression, as spectators of political manoeuvres  marked by wholesale drunkenness, considerable peculation  in office and unlicensed calumny. It was an age of wide- spread hate and envy. In these circumstances, one is not  surprised to find in their respective letters and published  articles many shades of sadness and disappointment. 
    Both of these men died young, long before the acrimonious passions of that era of party politics had burst into  armed conflict between the states. Neither lived to see the  ruin of that Virginia they loved so well, but each left a son  to play his part in the service of the Confederac
     Both of these grandfathers, however, had suffered in  their own day from the spectacle of the crass materialism,  greedy ambition, political chicanery and shameless intrigue  which marked the "Party Battles of the Jackson Period." 
     Under cover of the shouting and the tumult of those  days, economic changes were slowly liquidating what was  left of tidewater prosperity in Virginia. Broad acres  burnt out by incessant crops of tobacco were now only "old  fields"; with the migration from tidewater lands up to  Piedmont, the cost of transportation of their barrels of tobacco began to wipe out the profits of the planters. The 
  Wars of the Revolution and of Napoleon on the Continent,  of which our conflict of 1812 was but a minor incident,  closed foreign markets to our planters. And finally, to  cap it all, the new lands across the Alleghanies, especially  in Kentucky, produced tobacco which could reach the market down thegreat rivers at a much lower cost than Pied mont planters could meet. Tobacco, the very basis of tide-water civilization, was slowly driven from the Old Dominion except in those regions south of the James. By 1830  it is said that one-third of all those born in Virginia and  Maryland were living in the newly opened Empire across  the Alleghanie
  In this essay there is no space for a review of the manners and customs of the class known as tidewater Virginians. Nor, indeed is it the habit of mind of the present  writer to magnify the social achievements of that civilization. Wishful thinking on this subject is copious among  many of their descendants today. 
    But it is necessary in this study to refer, however briefly,  to the ancestry of Archibald Cary of Carysbrook, because  that is the key to his character and in one sense, to his  whole career. He was himself a keen and accurate genealogist and spent much time in building a family tree to  take the place of records which had been destroyed by fire. 
    For a century and a half before Archibald was born, the  Virginia Carys had lived on the banks of the father of Virginia waters, the River James. At one time they were said  to have owned more than half the land of Warwick County,  Virginia. From one generation to another, Cary men had  filled important offices in the official and social life of tidewater. When, shortly before Archibald's birth, his father  moved to Fluvanna, it was to an estate of seven thousand  acres of land which had long been managed by overseers with a force of some two hundred slaves. 
      It was, however, in their libraries that these Cary men  always felt most at home. Back of Archibald were five  generations of scholars; his own father had been known in  the Williamsburg society of the first decade of the century  as the "young Chesterfield." Hardly an adequate training  for the rude life of frontier Fluvanna ! 
      Archibald's mother was the youngest daughter of  Thomas Mann Randolph of Tuckahoe, and through her he  was the great-grandson of Archibald Cary of Ampthill, the  "Old Iron" of the revolution, after whom he was named.  The ardent patriotism of "Old Iron" and his great services  to the cause of the revolution have not received due appreciation throughout our country. This resulted, no doubt,  from the fact that the whole of his career was devoted to,  and was passed within the borders of, Virginia. 
  
  CARYSBROOK
  
      For a description of the parents of Archibald Cary and  an account of their luckless struggle to cope with frontier  life in Fluvanna we turn to a memoir written by their oldest daughter. Jane Blair Cary had been born in Williamsburg in 1808 and grew up at Carysbrook. She later met  Edward Dunlap Smith when he was at the University of  Virginia and married him when he was a Presbyterian  Chaplain to Congress. Still later, he was pastor of a  church in Greenwich Village, New York. As a small boy 
  the present writer was led with dragging foot-step to call  upon this formidable old lady. The remembrance of that   visit is unsympathetic. Her memoir from which we now  quote was written shortly before the War Between the  States.
   
  
  AT THE UNIVERSITY
  
       Down to this generation, the Carys, from father to son,  had always gone to William and Mary. But now the influence of Mr. Jefferson dominated the family circle.  Young Archibald's father had been summoned from his  books and persuaded by Mr. Jefferson to serve for two  terms in the Virginia Assembly to further the plans for  the new University. 
    By 1831, both Mr. Jefferson and Wilson Jefferson Cary  were dead, but young Archibald's guardian for the past  four years had been General John Hartwell Cocke, one of  the fathers of the University. 
  The family circle of the Carys had already begun to dissolve through the inevitable process of marriage. In 1829,  Archibald's sister, Mary Randolph Cary had married Dr.  Orlando Fairfax of Alexandria. In 1831, the elder son,  Wilson Miles Cary married Jane Margaret, daughter of  Peter Carr of Albemarle and had settled down in Charlottesville to practice law. At about the same time the oldest daughter, Jane Blair Cary married the Reverend E. D.  Smith. 
     Carysbrook was being sold. The widow Cary was thinking of going to Norfolk to open there a seminary for young  ladies to whom she could continue to expound her strict  rules for the behavior of the young. 
    September 10, 1831 was an important date for Archibald Cary. On that day he matriculated at the University  of Virginia, aged sixteen. 
  The present writer, profiting by a pleasant winter spent  in Charlottesville as a war refugee from Europe has been  privileged to study the early records of the University. 
  When the University first opened, in 1825, Wilson Miles  Cary, the elder brother of Archibald, was entered as a student. His career at the University lasted only until October second of that year, when he was expelled because  of his part in a student riot. Since he had previously been  expelled from William and Mary, probably for a similar  reason, he was evidently a very spirited youngster. These 
  incidents caused great distress to his widowed mother at  Carysbrook, and made, no doubt, a deep impression upon  the boy Archibald. 
  The story of the student riots of the first year of the University of Virginia is preserved in the faculty minutes, but  we do not find there an account of the picturesque intervention of Mr. Jefferson himself. His part in settling these  disorders has come to the present writer from the eldest  son of the Wilson Miles Cary who was expelled. 
  The University opened with a very youthful faculty selected by Mr. Jefferson himself and recruited very largely  from abroad. The first class of students were a lively lot  of boys, and resented having foreign professors. Moreover, in accordance with Mr. Jefferson's theories, there was  no president of the University, but only a presiding chairman of the faculty, chosen from time to time. In these  circumstances, there was very little effective discipline.  In this favorable situation the students found an excellent  opening for the pursuit of happiness. They did not have  the wisdom to perceive that even with the greatest of phi-  losophers, there might be a gap between theory and practice. When thestudents, in earnest pursuit of their happiness began to handle the professors roughly the aged Mr.  Jefferson stepped firmly upon their exuberance. 
     Two days after the riot of October 1, 1825, the perpetrators, in spite of the efforts of the faculty, still remained  unidentified. Mr. Jefferson mounted his horse, rode down  from Monticello and summoned the student body to line up  before him on the lawn. He then called upon the guilty  ones to step one pace to the front. The first to stand forth  was his own great grand-nephew, Wilson Miles Cary.   The rest of the story may be found in the faculty minutes from October second to sixth, 182
    "October 2nd: At a meeting of the Faculty, convened in  consequence of a serious riot and disturbance which took  place on the preceding evening. Present, the Chairman of  the Faculty,Professors Long, Emmet, Bonnycastle, Blaetterman, Key and Secretary. 
    "It was resolved that an address be drawn to the Students expressive of the abhorrence of the Faculty at the  outrages and requesting them to aid the Faculty in the discovery of the Perpetrators. 
    "It was also resolved that a Letter be addressed to the  Visitors stating the unanimous determination of the Fac-  ulty to resign unless an efficient Police were immediately  established in the Universit
                     GEORGE TUCKER, Chairman. 
  "October 3rd: At a meeting of the Faculty 
    "A paper was handed in signed by sixty-five students  expressive of their determination not to act the part of Informers and of their indignation at the aspersion thrown upon them by the Faculty in expressing a belief that they  were capable of such baseness. They denied the fact of  any assault having been made upon any Professor and asserted that on the contrary two Professors had attacked  one student and that he was justified in making resistance. 
    "The whole language of the response was highly objectionably [sic.]  It was signed by Richard Anderson as  Chairman, and by Messrs. Mason, Bowger, Lee, Saunders,  Wilson Carey and Brockenbrough as Committe
    "The paper having been read, it was resolved that as the  Visitors are now in session, the meeting of the Faculty be  adjourned until the Faculty shall be informed of their proceedings in the Business. 
  
  October 5th: At a meeting of the Faculty held this day 
  ......... 
    "Mr. Johnson with a deputation from the Board of Vis-  itors gave in the following names which had been tendered  the Board of Visitors on the preceding day as those of the  Parties Concerned in the riot of the 1st of October.   "Mr. Thomas Bolling (admonished); Mr. Wilson Miles 
  Carey (expelled); Mr. Robert A. Thompson (expelled);  Mr. Arthur Smith (case dismissed); Mr. Richard Anderson (admonished); W. Edgar Mason admonished); Mr.    Philip Bolling (admonished); Mr. Thomas Barclay (admonished); Mr. John George (admonished); Mr. Philip  Slaughter (admonished); Mr. John S. Turner (admonished); Mr. Philip Clayton (expelled); Mr. William L.  Eyre (expelled); Mr. John D. McGouder (admonished). 
  Then follow minutes of the evidence from which the fol- 
  lowing is taken: 
  "Mr. Carey's evidence: 
    Mr. Wilson Miles Carey was not intoxicated; made no  noise; was laid hold of by Mr. Tucker but escaped and afterwards by Dr. Emmet, who tore a counterpane which witness had around him as
  well as his shirt sleeve; was seized  by two professors but not at the same time; heard the language regarding the European professors; did not use it  himself; thinks he did aim a blow at Professor Emmet; cried a rescue; said in allusion to Professor Emmet: "the  damned rascal has torn my shirt"; conceived he was assaulted and therefore acted as he did; had no intention  when he left his Dormitory to make any disturbance; took  up a brick expecting that Dr. Emmet would stand back and  be intimidated; was not of the party who took up sticks;  did not throw any brick or stick; does not recollect having 
  been asked his name by Dr. Emmet." 
     Upon reviewing this case, one must perforce agree that  the sentence of the faculty was just. No explanation could  well excuse this youngster in threatening his professor  with a brick. Some sixty-eight years later, his great-  nephew the present writer was nearly expelled from Yale  in his freshman year upon the charge of inciting and participating in a student riot, but he had had the discretion  to employ a snow-ball and not a brick ! 
     The most interesting part of this story is the role played  by Mr. Jefferson. Of course he was faced with the threat  of the faculty to resign in a body if not given proper police  protection. But was he not on record himself as favoring  a little healthy uprising now and then. Had he not looked  with an approving eye upon Shay's rebellion and the whiskey insurrection? It really does seem to make a difference  whose ox is being gored. 
     Mr. Wilson Miles Cary thus left the University suddenly  after only four months of attendance. He was nevertheless  throughout a long life an accomplished classical scholar.  He was a lawyer, and at one time editor of the Virginia  Advocate, a paper loyal to the doctrines of Mr. Jefferson;  He served as a democrat in the Maryland Senate from 1846  to 1852; and, together with his wife, he was the founder of   the well-known Southern Home School of Baltimore. His  two daughters, Miss Hetty Cary and Miss Jennie Cary  were noted in the annals of the Confederacy. 
  
    We turn now to the University career of Wilson's younger  brother Archibald, who matriculated on September 10,  1831, aged sixteen, and registered his elder brother, then a  young lawyer in Charlottesville as his guardian. Though  more sedate and prudent as a boy than Wilson, this 
  was a restless youngster. Just a year after his matriculation he wrote to General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo,  formerly his guardian, begging the General to get him into  West Point. He does not wish to continue in a University  course which would lead only to the practice of law or of  medicine because he considers the conditions of those pro-  fessions "stagnant.' He writes: "At one time my friends  proposed to me to enter the Navy . . . and had it been  practicable I am sure I would have done it.... I was then  advised to endeavor to procure admission to West Point.  . . . My intentions, should I be successful in my applica-  tion, are to remain at West Point until I graduate, and  after having "served the United States five years," to re-  sign and obtain employment as an engineer. The subject 
  of Internal Improvement is daily becoming of more and  more absorbing interest in our country, and there is little doubt that in five years a good engineer may find employment in any of the states...." He signs himself "your  affectionately attached Archibald Cary." Nothing came of  this ambitious project. Four years later we find him, no  longer resisting, a student of law and still at the University of Virginia.
      The official records show each step of young Archibald's  progress as an undergraduate. The cost of a University  education at that time appears in the Ledger from September 10,1832 to July 1833, during which period his tuition fees and other expenses amounted to $305.00. This  was about the average in those days. 
     At first he attended the schools of ancient languages, of  mathematics and of natural philosophy. On May 7, 1832  he petitioned the faculty for permission to leave the school  of mathematics, which was granted. Right there, at the  beginning of his college career, he made a mistake fatal to  his ambitions, and which ultimately cost him the coveted  degree of Master of Arts. 
    From its inception, the University of Virginia has  stressed the need for mental discipline as part of an education. A diploma in mathematics is required for the degree of Master of Arts, and this may explain why so many  students have left without that degree. Archibald Cary  stood very high in the courses which he liked and received  diplomas in the other schools he attended, but not in mathematics. How deeply this hurt his pride will be shown by  a later entry in the minutes. This seems to have been the 
  first of a series of disappointments which dogged his steps  throughout life, and, in this case at least, it was clearly his  own fault.   At the examinations on July 2, 1832 he was in the first  division in both Greek and Latin and also in Grecian geography and history.   In July 1834 he graduated in the whole school of ancient  languages, in French language and literature and in the  school of moral philosophy. 
     On November 28, 1834, Messrs. Cary and Magill tried  to have the date of their examination in mathematics postponed, but Drs. Emmet and Warner stated that Mr. Cary  had been a regular attendant at their lectures, and they  could not change the law.   March 7, 1835, Mr. A. Cary was permitted to withdraw  from the school of anatomy and surgery. Two months  later, Messrs. Coleman and Cary, being reported as inattentive in some of their classes, the faculty decided that  they be reprimanded by the chairman and that a letter be  written to Mr. Cary's guardian--who was none other than  his older brother.   On July 30, 1835 he passed his final examinations in the  Class of Materia Medica and in the first and second schools  of chemistry. 
    At this moment he would seem to stand on the threshold  of success, but instead, the door was closed in his face.  On that same day of July 30, 1835 the faculty minutes record: "Mr. Archibald Cary applied to the faculty for permission to receive his diploma in the school of chemistry  privately, alledging as a reason the mortification he felt  at having failed in obtaining the degree of Master of Arts."  His application was denied. He had failed in mathematics. 
  One must sympathize with this proud and sensitive  young man in his keen disappointment. Nevertheless this  entry in the faculty minutes is very revealing as to his  character. Pride and sensitiveness are two of the qualities for which we have been looking. He had inherited  them from his tidewater ancestors.
  The next year he was back at the University as a student of law, a course for which he paid $70 in fees to his  instructors.   His personal deportment throughout his student years  shows to his advantage. During the whole five years at  the University his patron entered but one demerit against 
  him on the ledger, which was because of his failure to return number 36 of the Quarterly Review, which he had  lost. 
  Here follow notes concerning him taken from the Faculty Minutes: 
    "February 4, 1834. Messrs. A. Duke, H. B. Tomlin, J.  M. Forbes, J. T. Hendree and A. Cary, boarders at A.  Rose's Hotel were sent for and appeared before the Faculty." The testimony given by Mr. Cary was as follows:  "he has boarded at all the hotels and Mr. Rose keeps the  best house. He says the tablecloth is always clean and the  servants attendance sufficient. The bread is good--they  generally have rolls, but sometimes bisquits; and he has  never known any delay about bringing the bread but once  and that was whilst the weather was exceedingly cold.  The coffee is too weak but the tea is very excellent. There  is always sugar enough. The butter is generally very good.  The bed-linen is regularly hanged once a fortnight and  his counterpane has always been kept clean. His dormitory has been washed three times this session. His room  is always cleaned immediately after breakfast. His fire  is made early in the morning and water brought at that  time to wash with." 
    This gives us a satisfactory picture of the comfort in  which the students lived at this time. Such inquisition  made at intervals by the faculty speaks well for the care  they took of the young men entrusted to their charge. 
    "October 21, 1833 . . . Mr. Archibald Cary says he  knows nothing of the affair except what he had heard from  others. He does not think Mr.[Nedham H.] Washington  was intoxicated at the party. He did not hear Mr. Washington utter indecent language. He was a considerable  distance from him at the time.   Nevertheless this Mr. Washington was dismisse
     On March 24, 1835 a letter of protest was sent to the  faculty by a committee of students, signed by Thomas T.  Bouldin, Archibald Cary, Edw. C. Cabell, . W. Goode,  Geo. W. Ransom and L. D. Cabaniss. This was a demand  that the undergraduates be allowed to continue, as formerly, to select their own orators, but the faculty decided  to prevent any orators or essayists elected by the students  from appearing in the Rotund
  In his Centennial History of the University of Virginia,    Dr. P. A. Bruce tells of a protest against Professor Blaetterman who occupied the chair of modern languages in the  first faculty. He writes: "Those occupying dormitories  near his pavilion averred that while bending over their  books, they were distracted by the ear-racking squeals of  violins on which the boys in his house--one of them a  youthful negro slave-- were always practicing. 'When I  complained' reported Archibald Cary, 'they only played  more loudly and frequently.' " Here was a young man evi-  dently unfitted for living in mass-movements, and among  "just folks
      It is to be regretted that a more personal picture of  young Mr. Cary does not emerge from these records of  long ago. However, from what we already have read of  him, we can now dimly see the figure of the man.
  The present writer, when younger, tried upon several  occasions to get personal impressions of the two grand- fathers whom he never knew from their surviving friends  or relatives. In this, he found singularly little satisfaction. The memory of the very old is an unreliable source  of information except upon oft-told stories of past events.  The most beloved and gracious member of the family circle,known to the third generation as "Aunt Cary" was  once, in her nineties asked by the present writer to describe  his grandfather Harrison as she had seen him delivering  an address in 1827 before the Literary and Philosophical  Society of Hampden-Sidney College. The sweet old lady  considered the
  question for some time and then exclaimed:  "Now! I remember so well--I wore a blue sash that day." 
  Rather more success attended another enquiry. The oldest  member of the Metropolitan Club in Washington was asked  what he could tell of Archibald Cary, whom he had known  in Maryland. His face lit up, and he replied: "He was  the best high jumper I ever saw--he could jump over any  fence in the county." 
    Another personal touch was gained from an old photo-  graph of grandfather Cary found in a drawer of the writing-desk at Morrisania. He was leaning most incautiously upon the muzzle ofhis
  fowling-piece. This gesture would  have made him an unwelcome guest in a conventional 
  shooting party in England, and indeed it provoked in two  of his grandsons a certain uneasiness as to his character.  No surprise was felt by them upon learning that he had  lost the upper joint of his thumb in a shooting accident! 
  
  
  
  
  
  
                         
  
  
   
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Details of Archibald's family with Monimia Fairfax