The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I | Page 8

I have no power to

reinstate your boy. I could not keep the honour of the school--I could
not even keep the boys, if he were to return. They would appeal to their
parents and most of them would be called home. They are the flower of
the South, Sir!" And the social standards that controlled the thinking of
the South for so many years after the war were strongly entrenched.
"The son of a Confederate general," Page writes, "if he were at all a
decent fellow, had, of course, a higher social rank at the Bingham
School than the son of a colonel. There was some difficulty in deciding
the exact rank of a judge or a governor, as a father; but the son of a
preacher had a fair chance of a good social rating, especially of an
Episcopalian clergyman. A Presbyterian preacher came next in rank. I
at first was at a social disadvantage. My father had been a
Methodist--that was bad enough; but he had had no military title at all.
If it had become known among the boys that he had been a 'Union
man'--I used to shudder at the suspicion in which I should be held. And
the fact that my father had held no military title did at last become
known!"
A single episode discloses that Page maintained his respect for the
Bingham School to the end. In March, 1918, as American Ambassador,
he went up to Harrow and gave an informal talk to the boys on the
United States. His hosts were so pleased that two prizes were
established to commemorate his visit. One was for an essay by Harrow
boys on the subject: "The Drawing Together of America and Great
Britain by Common Devotion to a Great Cause." A similar prize on the
same subject was offered to the boys of some American school, and
Page was asked to select the recipient. He promptly named his old
Bingham School in North Carolina.
It was at Bingham that Page gained his first knowledge of Greek, Latin,
and mathematics, and he was an outstanding student in all three
subjects. He had no particular liking for mathematics, but he could
never understand why any one should find this branch of learning
difficult; he mastered it with the utmost ease and always stood high. In
two or three years he had absorbed everything that Bingham could offer
and was ready for the next step. But political conditions in North
Carolina now had their influence upon Page's educational plans. Under

ordinary conditions he would have entered the State University at
Chapel Hill; it had been a great headquarters in ante-bellum days for
the prosperous families of the South. But by the time that Page was
ready to go to college the University had fallen upon evil days. The
forces which then ruled the state, acting in accordance with the new
principles of racial equality, had opened the doors of this, one of the
most aristocratic of Southern institutions, to Negroes. The
consequences may be easily imagined. The newly enfranchised blacks
showed no inclination for the groves of Academe, and not a single
representative of the race applied for matriculation. The outraged white
population turned its back upon this new type of coeducation; in the
autumn of 1872 not a solitary white boy made his appearance. The old
university therefore closed its doors for lack of students and for the
next few years it became a pitiable victim to the worst vices of the
reconstruction era. Politicians were awarded the presidency and the
professorships as political pap, and the resources of the place, in money
and books, were scattered to the wind. Page had therefore to find his
education elsewhere. The deep religious feelings of his family quickly
settled this point. The young man promptly betook himself to the
backwoods of North Carolina and knocked at the doors of Trinity
College, a Methodist Institution then located in Randolph County.
Trinity has since changed its abiding place to Durham and has been
transformed into one of the largest and most successful colleges of the
new South; but in those days a famous Methodist divine and journalist
described it as "a college with a few buildings that look like tobacco
barns and a few teachers that look as though they ought to be worming
tobacco." Page spent something more than a year at Trinity, entering in
the autumn of 1871, and leaving in December, 1872. A few letters,
written from this place, are scarcely more complimentary than the
judgment passed above. They show that the young man was very
unhappy. One long letter to his mother is nothing but a boyish diatribe
against the place. "I do not care a horse apple for Trinity's distinction,"
he writes, and then he gives