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This chapter examines Bowdoin College, which was supported by district elites who worked to erect a regional center of higher learning to which they could send their sons rather than incur the cost of dispatching them south to other colleges. On the morning of Bowdoin's opening, appointed president Joseph McKeen pronounced the college's primary mission: “That the inhabitants of this district may have their own sons to fill the liberal professions among them, and particularly to instruct them in the principles and practice of our holy religion, is doubtless the object of this institution.” This conception of higher education's function in American society drew heavily on a social ethos of civic-mindedness that assigned priority to social responsibility over individuals' self indulgence. Characterized by the practice of civic virtue and a commitment to the public good, civic-mindedness provided social institutions, including those dedicated to higher learning, a source from which to derive their central aims.

In this essay, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai argues that the American Civil War strengthened rather than weakened three college-educated individuals’ commitment to lessons about gentlemanly character. Additionally, the war reinforced these men’s nationalistic tendencies. Examining the postwar educational careers of Joshua Chamberlain (Bowdoin College), Oliver Howard (Howard University and Lincoln Memorial University), and Samuel Armstrong (Hampton Institute), the essay notes how all three attempted to instill virtues of manly character in their students. Each faced different challenges: Chamberlain and Howard respectively confronted critics and opponents from the student body and southern whites whereas Armstrong traded freedmen’s civil rights for industrial skills.

This chapter presents a biographical sketch of John Brown Russwurm. Born on October 1, 1799 in Port Antonio, capital of the eastern Jamaican parish of Portland, John Brown Russwurm was the son of a black mother and a white American merchant on the island, John R. Russwurm. Virtually nothing is known about Russwurm's mother; Russwurm senior was born into an upper-class Virginia family and moved to Jamaica to seek his fortune. John's father later married an American widow, Susan Blanchard, a woman in her twenties, who already had three children. Mrs. Russwurm was an educated and enlightened woman who welcomed Young John as a full member of the new family. The remainder of the chapter describes Russwurm's education, including his enrollment in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1824. Upon graduating in 1826, he became one of the earliest black graduates of an American college and the first from Bowdoin.

There are so many other Bronx students and this chapter describes a few of them. A young man, a valedictorian some years ago, admitted to a few of his teachers, that he had been homeless for the last year of high school and had been living on the New York City subway, keeping warm and sleeping on the train. Then there was a female student who showed great talent as a basketball player. Title IX in 1972 had made more funds and opportunities available for girls and women in sports, and Keisha benefited from this more equitable law. Then there was Alicia, who wanted to be an astronaut, and then Robert, a brilliant young African American male who was an outstanding student in the multicultural literature class, who accepted every challenge and won a full scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine.

This chapter describes the earliest known writings of John Brown Russwurm. These include the commencement address that Russwurm delivered on September 6, 1826, as the first black graduate of Bowdoin College. Another is an essay written in Russwurm's hand that survived from his Bowdoin days, the twenty-two-page “Toussaint L'Overture [sic], the Principal Chief in the Revolution of St. Domingo.” Russwurm's essay is marked by the hagiographical treatment of Louverture prevalent in abolitionist writings of the early nineteenth century. The narrative of “Toussaint L'Overture” and the research conducted by Russwurm in creating also provided the platform for his later, more analytical argument so forcefully presented in “The Condition and Prospects of Hayti.”