John Baytop Cary (18 October 1819–13 January 1898), educator, was born probably at Elmwood, the Elizabeth City County plantation of his parents, Gill Armistead Cary and Sarah Elizabeth Smith Baytop Cary. He attended Hampton Academy and in 1839 received a B.A. from the College of William and Mary. On 23 January 1844 Cary married Columbia H. Hudgins, of Mathews County. Over the next fourteen years they had four daughters and two sons.
Cary taught at the Hampton Academy and was its principal for the last seven years before it became part of the new county public school system in 1852. He then established a boarding school, the Hampton Male and Female Academy, frequently referred to as the Hampton Academy or the Hampton Military Academy. Cary was principal and also taught ancient languages and mathematics. The academy offered instruction in ancient and modern languages, English grammar and rhetoric, mathematics, and natural science. In addition, boys studied military tactics under a series of teachers, the last being Wilfred Emory Cutshaw, subsequently a colonel in the Confederate army and afterward Richmond city engineer. The object of the academy, as stated in its publications, was to prepare students to attend a college or university and to help them develop habits of "independent thought" and to be ready "for the active pursuits of life." Cary was an effective, inspiring teacher and a strict disciplinarian. Painted on the wall of the classroom was the motto, "Order is Heaven's first Law." Several of Cary's own children attended the academy, as did William Gordon McCabe, who became a noted educator in Petersburg and Richmond after the Civil War and who married one of Cary's daughters. In 1854 Cary received an honorary M.A. from William and Mary.
Soon after Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Cary, who had been an ardent defender of the South, obtained a commission as a major of artillery. He was soon involved in a pair of incidents that dramatized contrasting characteristics of the war. Surprised in May by the approach of a large Union scouting party from nearby Fort Monroe, Cary negotiated a gentleman's agreement with the commander that allowed the party to march peacefully into the heart of Hampton under Cary's escort and then return to the fort. The following day Cary called on Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler to request the return of three escaped slaves who had taken refuge behind the lines. With no official instructions from the army, Butler refused to return the men, whom he declared were "contraband of war." The phrase, meaning captured property of a belligerent, became common usage throughout the war for people who had escaped enslavement and made their way to Union military lines.
Serving on the staff of Major General John Bankhead Magruder, Cary earned commendation for his conduct in the Southern victory at Big Bethel, near Hampton, on 10 June 1861. Several weeks later Cary was elected colonel of the 32d Regiment Virginia Infantry and spent nearly a year detailed to Magruder's staff and as acting provost marshal in Yorktown. When the regiment was reorganized in May 1862, the forty-two-year-old Cary failed to be reelected colonel, but he was immediately appointed a major and resumed his service as inspector general and assistant adjutant general on Magruder's staff. The general praised Cary's conduct on the field during the Seven Days' Battles near Richmond late in June 1862. Soon afterward, following Magruder's transfer to the West, Cary joined the quartermaster corps and served for the remainder of the Civil War as paymaster of troops in Richmond-area hospitals.
The war cost Cary his personal estate and his school when Confederates burned Hampton in August 1861. At the close of the war, he remained in Richmond, where for a time he held the public office of grocer for the state penitentiary. Cary then became a partner in a commission merchant business and eventually became an insurance salesman. He and his youngest son, Thomas Archibald Cary, formed a lucrative partnership as Richmond agents for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Cary was also active in the Christian Church, which he had joined after his marriage, for many years chaired Richmond's Democratic committee, and from 1884 to 1886 served on the city school board.
In the spring of 1886 the State Board of Education appointed Cary superintendent of the Richmond public schools, the largest public school system in the state. The city's schools then had an enrollment of more than 8,300 students, employed nearly 200 teachers, and had an annual budget of approximately $102,500. Shortly after taking office Cary recommended that teachers' salaries be significantly raised and that students in the high schools be given an opportunity to demonstrate whether they had a talent for teaching so that they could be directed to the normal school curriculum. Promoting increased expenditure for education of the city's African American children, Cary proposed "to educate every child, so that he can read his Bible and the Constitution of his country in his mother tongue, and thus fit him for the privileges, the duties and the responsibility of citizenship." During Cary's two and a half years as superintendent, enrollment in the city's schools increased by more than 30 percent, and the annual budget increased by about 60 percent. Although Cary earned by far the highest salary of any public school superintendent in the state (more than $1,000 per annum), he continued to direct his profitable insurance business during that time and resigned as of 15 February 1889 to return to fulltime management of his private affairs.
On 1 July 1890 Cary began a four-year term on the city's board of aldermen. Continuing his involvement in public education, he chaired the city council's school committee and in that capacity was instrumental in transferring the former White House of the Confederacy, then being used as a public school, to the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, of which one of his daughters was an officer. The house thereupon became the Confederate Museum and later the Museum of the Confederacy. Cary was keenly interested in Confederate veterans affairs, attended reunions, and was the Virginia representative on a committee chartered in 1896 to found and erect the Confederate Memorial Institute (also known as Battle Abbey). Cary served on the board of the College of William and Mary from 1892 until the end of the 1896–1897 academic term.
John Baytop Cary died at his home in Richmond on 13 January 1898 after suffering a month-long illness. He had predicted to a friend that he would be the last member of his family to be buried in the family cemetery near Hampton, but his body was interred in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. Former students served as pallbearers at the funeral. In 1906 his descendants established the nondenominational John B. Cary Memorial School of Biblical History and Literature at the University of Virginia; and, most appropriately, public schools in both Hampton and Richmond were named in his honor.
Sources Consulted:
Robert A. Brock, Virginia and Virginians (1888), 2:774–775; Charles A. Young, The Power of a Noble Life (1899); Fairfax Harrison, The Virginia Carys: An Essay in Genealogy (1919), 74–75 (portrait); Richmond Enquirer, 3 Feb. 1844; Catalogue of the Hampton Male and Female Academy (1856), first quotation on 7; Gillie Cary McCabe, The Story of an Old Town: Hampton, Virginia (1929), esp. 21–40; George Benjamin West, When the Yankees Came: Civil War and Reconstruction on the Virginia Peninsula, ed. Parke Rouse Jr. (1977), 9–10, 21–23 (motto quoted on 22); 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.; Les Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry (1990); John B. Cary Letter Book (16 May–3 Aug. 1861), and Cary's copies of Regulations for the Army of the United States (1857), given to him by Cutshaw, and H. W. Halleck's Elements of Military Art and Science (1861), which he purchased in Hampton in 1861, in Confederate Memorial Literary Society Collections at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; Richmond City Superintendent of Public Schools Annual Reports (1886–1889) (third quotation in 1888 report, p. 8); obituaries and editorial tributes in Richmond Dispatch, 14 Jan. 1898, and Richmond Times, 14 Jan. 1898 (both with birth date), Confederate Veteran 6 (1898): 41, and Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 6 (1898): 320.
Engraving in Richmond Dispatch, 14 Jan. 1898.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John M. Coski and Ruth Ann Coski.
How to cite this page:
John M. Coski and Ruth Ann Coski, "John Baytop Cary (1819–1898)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cary_John_B, accessed [today's date]).
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