Benjamin Stoddert Ewell (15 June 1810–19 June 1894), president of the College of William and Mary, was born in Georgetown, District of Columbia, and was the son of Thomas Ewell, a physician, and Elizabeth Stoddert Ewell. He attended the preparatory school of Georgetown College for several months in 1817 and 1818. In 1820 the family moved to a Prince William County farm, where Ewell excelled in his studies with a local tutor. He entered the United States Military Academy in 1828 and graduated third in a class of forty-five on 1 July 1832. Though commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery, Ewell served at the academy as assistant professor of mathematics from 1832 until 1835 and as assistant professor of natural and experimental philosophy during the 1835–1836 session. He resigned from the army on 30 September 1836 and moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he worked as assistant engineer for the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad until 1839. On 17 April 1839 he married Julia McIlvaine, of York. They had one daughter.
When the railroad's fortunes soured, Ewell secured a position as professor of mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College beginning in the autumn of 1839. The college struggled to attract students and funding during Ewell's seven-year tenure, and in 1846 he left to join the faculty of Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) as the first occupant of a military-science chair that the Society of the Cincinnati sponsored. He also taught mathematics until his resignation in 1848. On 14 July of that year Ewell was appointed professor of mathematics and president of the College of William and Mary, where power struggles among professors and members of the board of visitors had brought instruction to a standstill. He declined the presidency but held the office on an acting basis during the 1848–1849 academic year, when all classes except for the law curriculum were suspended. Having supervised building repairs and helped to replenish the depleted faculty, Ewell yielded to the new president on 1 July 1849. Well-liked among his peers and students, he continued to teach mathematics and, beginning in 1850, offered natural philosophy courses as well. Ewell's wife, who likely suffered from a mental disorder, did not join him in Williamsburg until 1850, after which their loud arguments disturbed the neighborhood until her permanent departure in 1851.
In 1854 the board of visitors again elected Ewell president of the college, and on 5 July he reluctantly assumed the office. Declining enrollment demanded that Ewell seek students, funds, and publicity. He oversaw the publication of the college's first catalog in 1855, petitioned Congress for compensation for damage French troops had done during the Revolutionary War, and directed a thorough renovation of the main building. Deeply attached to tradition, Ewell combated proposals to introduce a preparatory school and move the institution to the Eastern Shore. He resigned the presidency after a contentious board meeting in 1858 but resumed the office when the new president-elect declined the job. On 8 February 1859 fire gutted the college's main building and destroyed the library, scientific equipment, and many school records. Determined to rebuild quickly and on the same site, Ewell led efforts to collect insurance money and private donations. The new Italian Renaissance–style building was ready for use when the autumn session opened.
Ewell, who paid taxes on thirteen enslaved workers in 1860, deemed Southern secession unconstitutional and unwise. Early in 1861 he was elected captain of a new William and Mary military company, and on 23 April, following Virginia's secession from the Union, he offered his services to the state for the defense of the Peninsula. Appointed a major of volunteers the following week, Ewell recruited several companies of troops, and he commanded all forces in the lower Peninsula for about a week after his mid-May promotion to lieutenant colonel. On 27 June he was commissioned colonel of the 32d Regiment Virginia Infantry, which constructed fortifications around Williamsburg until a Union advance forced the Confederates to retreat toward Richmond early in May 1862. Ewell's enlistment expired on 21 May, and on 24 November he became colonel in the department of the adjutant and inspector general. He served in the western theater as chief-of-staff to General Joseph Eggleston Johnston before resigning the post early in 1864 to become assistant adjutant-general in Atlanta. Between September 1864 and 20 March 1865, when he resigned from the military, he served in Richmond as adjutant to his younger brother, Lieutenant General Richard Stoddert Ewell. He took the amnesty oath on 29 April 1865 and renewed it on 21 June. In August he applied for a presidential pardon, required because he had graduated from West Point.
Determined to revive William and Mary, which emerged from the Civil War with its main building again destroyed and its endowment much diminished, Ewell established a grammar school to attract new students and oversaw the resumption of classes in the autumn of 1865. With rebuilding postponed, sentiment mounted in favor of moving the college from Williamsburg, but Ewell insisted that displacement would sever the crucial connection with Virginia's glorious past and thus obliterate the school's unique character. His efforts to raise money met with little success in the impoverished South and in the embittered North. Ewell advocated sectional reconciliation, spoke in favor of Black education and suffrage, and endorsed the presidential candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and in 1872. Funds recovered from an eighteenth-century bequest finally enabled the college to replace its main building, and, following a year in which college classes were suspended, the leaky structure opened in the autumn of 1869. The board of visitors refused to accept Ewell's resignation, tendered in June.
Flagging enrollment, mounting debt, and an eroding endowment plagued William and Mary throughout the 1870s. Ewell unsuccessfully petitioned the General Assembly for land-grant funds and the United States Congress for war reparations. In 1875 his attempts to solicit private donations during a lecture tour in Massachusetts fared poorly. Ewell lent some of his own money to the college, most of which he eventually recovered. In April 1879 he spoke forcefully against the University of the South's proposal that William and Mary be moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. Although the defeat of this plan preserved the integrity of the college, the ability of the institution to sustain itself was increasingly in doubt. Without officially closing, William and Mary suspended classes in the autumn of 1881.
From 1881 until 1888 Ewell rang the college bell on the traditional opening morning of the academic session and served as caretaker of the dormant campus. He gave tours, tutored local pupils, and tried to renew interest in the college. In 1882 Ewell argued that William and Mary should seek legislative approval to become a state-sponsored, coeducational normal school for whites, but the board rejected the measure. A version of the plan was revived later in the decade, and—after failed attempts in 1886 and 1887—friends of the college in 1888 shepherded through the General Assembly a bill that established at William and Mary a teacher-education program for white men, to coexist with the regular classical curriculum. On 10 May 1888 Ewell resigned as president and professor, and the next day he became president emeritus. He retired to the James City County farm he had purchased in 1857. Benjamin Stoddert Ewell died of a stroke at his home on 19 June 1894 and was buried at the William and Mary college cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1893), 3:236–237, Lisa Heuvel, "'The Peal that Wakes No Echo': Benjamin Ewell and the College of William and Mary," Virginia Cavalcade 28 (1978): 70–77 (portrait on 71), and Anne W. Chapman, "Benjamin Stoddert Ewell: A Biography" (Ph.D. diss, College of William and Mary, 1984); Benjamin Stoddert Ewell Papers (with birth and marriage dates in family Bible), Benjamin Stoddert Ewell Faculty/Alumni File (including autobiography with variant birth date of 10 June 1810), and Board of Visitors Minutes, all Special Collections, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg; George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. …, 3d ed., rev. (1891), 1:499; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Case Files for United States Pardons (1865–1867), United States Office of the Adjutant General, Record Group 94, NARA; Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, 20 May 1872; published addresses include Remarks of Benjamin S. Ewell, President of the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, before the Committee of Education and Labor, House of Representatives, … April 1, 1874 (1874) and Report and Address of Benj. S. Ewell (1879); Parke Rouse, Jr., ed., "A College Befriended: William and Mary in 1887," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1986): 77–87; Susan H. Godson et al., The College of William and Mary: A History (1993), 1:276–435; Carol Kettenburg Dubbs, Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War (2002); Death Register, James City Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Richmond Dispatch, 21 June 1894, 22 June 1894, and Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, 22 June 1894; memorial in William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 3 (1894): 144.