Storyline
How Robert H. Chapman’s four years as president of the University unfolded: Joseph Caldwell’s step back to teaching, Chapman’s Bible study and the Chapel Hill Presbyterians, the raids on his property, the Shepard rebellion of 1816, the powder bomb, his resignation and Caldwell’s return.
In briefRobert H. Chapman led the University from 1812 to 1816, years that began with his push for Bible study and ended in a student revolt. He was credited with organizing Chapel Hill's Presbyterians, but in 1814 night raiders struck his stable, cart and gate. In September 1816 he struck Republican passages from a senior's oration, and the revolt that followed brought expulsions, suspensions and a powder bomb at a tutor's door. Chapman resigned that November, and the trustees returned the presidency to Joseph Caldwell from January 1, 1817.
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On December 12, 1812 Joseph Caldwell asked to give up the presidency to finish his geometry and study astronomy, and the trustees elected the Presbyterian minister Robert H. Chapman president at $1,200 a year, keeping Caldwell as professor of mathematics at $1,000. Chapman required students to study the Bible as a textbook, and tutor James E. Morrison credited him with a moral change in the University. Kemp Battle named him the chief factor in organizing a Presbyterian church at Chapel Hill; Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote that Orange Presbytery's records for 1812-1827 had burned. In January 1814, after night raids on Chapman's stable, cart and gate and tar and feathers on his gatepost, Caldwell asked justice Pleasant Henderson for a general warrant, one naming no particular person. Refused, he named five students, and a hearing questioned the student body under oath.
In 1815 the faculty numbered five: Chapman, Caldwell, senior tutor William Hooper and two other tutors. Enrollment rose from eighty at the start of 1816 to ninety-one by its end. On September 18, 1816 senior William B. Shepard spoke the Republican passages Chapman had struck from his oration and was ordered to sit, but students cheered him on and the next day met in the chapel to back him. The trustees expelled Shepard and George C. Dromgoole, others were suspended, and most of the rest signed apologies. In October, apparently in revenge for the suspensions, someone filled a brass door knob with powder, lit a match fuse and left it at tutor John Patterson's door; a student dropped it moments before it went off, and no one was hurt. At the first board meeting after the Shepard affair, on November 23, Chapman resigned, saying he wished to give himself to the ministry. The trustees made it effective at once, paid him half a year's salary and let him keep the president's house to the end of the session. After William Neill and Lewis von Schweinitz declined the office, they returned the presidency to Caldwell from January 1, 1817.
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Background reading on Schools & Education. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
Joanna Pearson's novel of a cold case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karlie Richards was a nineteen-year-old student when she was murdered; decades later her onetime roommate, divorced and in middle age, finds herself drawn back to the crime as online conspiracy theories about it multiply. A psychological thriller with a Chapel Hill setting, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, 275 pages.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
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