William Wallace Bennett (24 February 1821–9 June 1887), president of Randolph-Macon College, was born in Richmond, a younger member of the large family of Ely Bennett and Mary C. Warrock Bennett. In 1841 he moved to Mecklenburg County to study for the ministry with his brother John R. Bennett, a Methodist minister. He was admitted as a preacher on trial in 1842 and after serving in rural circuits in Bedford, Louisa, and Powhatan Counties, he was assigned to Charlottesville in 1847.

Bennett entered the University of Virginia in 1849 and took classes in modern languages, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, physiology, anatomy, and surgery. The faculty elected him chaplain in 1851, but he resigned soon afterward as a result of sickness. Bennett served as an itinerant minister for a short time and from 1854 to 1858 was presiding elder of the Washington District. He married Virginia Lee Sangster on 20 December 1855. Their three sons and three daughters included the wife of Methodist clergyman James Cannon Jr., who became the foremost Prohibition leader in Virginia.

During the Civil War Bennett headed the Soldiers' Tract Society and served from 1862 to 1864 as a chaplain in the Confederate army. He ran the blockade in 1864 and went to England to obtain more tracts to distribute to soldiers. He preached in the Nottoway District immediately after the war and then from January 1867 to February 1878 edited and published the Virginia Conference's journal, the Richmond Christian Advocate, which he owned entirely. In addition to rescuing the journal from financial jeopardy, Bennett used his editorial position to defend southern Methodism while taking occasional swipes at northern crime, at alcohol, and at the Catholic Church. He urged his readers to give greater financial support to the paper and the Methodist Church. In 1873 he joined several Richmond partners in editing the monthly Journal of Industry, devoted, according to its masthead, to agriculture, horticulture, immigration, manufactures, and commerce. The magazine survived for twelve monthly issues.

Bennett also wrote extensively on church history during the 1870s. He published Memorials of Methodism in Virginia, From its Introduction into the State in the Year 1772 to the Year 1829 (1871), Narrative of the Great Revival Which Prevailed in the Southern Armies During the Late Civil War Between the States of the Federal Union (1877), and A History of Methodism, for Our Young People (1878), and he wrote an unpublished book on Native Americans, "Our Brother In Red." Bennett also helped found the post-Civil War Prohibition movement in Virginia. During the 1880s he edited and published a Prohibition journal, the Southern Crusader, and in 1885 he published a trenchant pamphlet, The Great Red Dragon: An Appeal to Plain People on the Evils and Dangers of the Liquor Traffic.

In June 1867 Bennett received an honorary D.D. from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. He became a trustee the next year and was elected president of the board on 4 October 1877, serving until his resignation in June 1882. On 19 November 1877 the trustees selected Bennett to succeed James Armstrong Duncan as president of the college. Like the Methodist journal he had helped save, this Methodist college was financially imperiled. Its annual income was under $12,000, and its debt exceeded $20,000, mostly financed at 8 or 9 percent annual interest. The student body consisted of a hundred or more students, but many of them were sons of Methodist ministers who attended free of tuition. Only about half of each class typically paid tuition, which was the school's principal source of revenue. Bennett appealed personally and successfully to Methodist congregations for donations. He paid off the debt by 1881, in part through raising funds and in part by using students to assist the five-member faculty, which saved money on salaries but drove some students away.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Bennett preferred that the faculty consist of Methodists, and some faculty members left during his tenure as president. Beginning in 1883 he had several of the old frame buildings of the campus pulled down and replaced with ten cottages that collectively housed up to eighty students. At his request, in 1886 the trustees required physical education for all students. He had failed to gain board approval in 1880 for a preparatory school as part of a plan to increase college enrollment, however, and in 1883 his proposal that the college take a tentative step toward coeducation by giving women examinations, presumably for course credit or some sort of certification, garnered no support from the trustees or faculty. Bennett had a brusque manner, and he may have occasionally displayed more courage than tact. Nevertheless, a college prize in history was named for him and his name is on a dormitory, and his portrait hangs in the trustees' board room.

William Wallace Bennett resigned as president of Randolph-Macon College effective 1 September 1886, because of ill health, and he died on 9 June 1887 at Woodbourne, his house near Trevilians in Louisa County. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

Sources Consulted:
W. W. Bennett Papers, including unpublished manuscripts, Blackwell Papers, and Randolph-Macon College Board of Trustees Minutes, all in Flavia Reed Owen Special Collections and Archives, McGraw-Page Library, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia; Richard Irby, History of Randolph-Macon College (1898), 265–286, 295–303; James Edward Scanlon, Randolph-Macon College: A Southern History, 1825–1967 (1983), 150, 152, 176–178, 189–190, 213–219 (portrait), 230, 259, 381; obituaries in Richmond State, 9 June 1887, Richmond Dispatch, 10 June 1887, and Richmond Whig, 10 June 1887, and Richmond Christian Advocate, 16 June 1887, all with 9 June 1887 death date; memorial by F. J. Boggs in Virginia Annual Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church South, Minutes 105 (1887): 100–105, with 7 June 1887 death date.

Photograph in J. William Jones, Christ in the Camp: or, Religion in Lee's Army (1888).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by James Edward Scanlon.

How to cite this page:
James Edward Scanlon, "William Wallace Bennett (1821–1887)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1999 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Bennett_William_Wallace, accessed [today's date]).

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