Background
Smith was born on October 18, 1812 in Norfolk, Virginia, United States. He was the son of Francis Smith, merchant of Norfolk, Virginia, and Ann (Marsden) Smith.
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Smith was born on October 18, 1812 in Norfolk, Virginia, United States. He was the son of Francis Smith, merchant of Norfolk, Virginia, and Ann (Marsden) Smith.
He graduated from the United States Military Academy.
Commissioned 2nd lieutenant, 1th artillery, November 30, 1833, he was on garrison duty for a year and then taught geography, history, and ethics at the United States Military Academy for a year.
Resigning his commission in 1836 to accept the professorship of mathematics at Hampden-Sidney College in Virginia, in June 1839 he became principal professor and after 1840 superintendent of the newly organized Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, to the service of which he devoted the remainder of his life. On November 11, 1839, the Institute was opened with two instructors, Smith and John T. L. Preston, and twenty-eight cadets.
But before final action was taken the Civil War was upon the country. When, alarmed by the invasion of John Brown (at whose execution Smith was the commanding officer), the state appropriated one-half million dollars for armament, Smith was a member of the commission to supervise the expenditure of the money. With the cadets called into active service at the outbreak of the war, he was appointed a member of the governor's advisory board. At its dissolution in the summer of 1861 he was placed in command of Craney Island, near Norfolk, with the rank of major-general of Virginia Volunteers; he remained there until the reopening of the Institute, January 1862.
Although in June 1864 the Institute was burned by the army of Gen. David Hunter, for part of 1864-65 he carried on its work in Richmond, and in October 1865 saw it reopened in Lexington. In September 1865, just before its reopening, he urged the immediate rebuilding and reorganization of the institution. When a promise of an annual appropriation for current expenses had been secured from the legislature, bonds were issued to the amount of fifty thousand dollars, for the security of which Smith pledged his small estate and the faculty agreed to contribute one-third of its meager salaries.
By 1870 the restoration was completed upon a scale superior to that existing before 1864, and in 1884 the bonded debt was assumed by the legislature. Smith retired, December 31, 1889.
He died in Lexington.
Francis Henney Smith became the first Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute on its establishment and held that post for fifty years. Smith developed the expansion of the Institute into a general scientific school, publishing a famous report Special Report of the Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute: Scientific Education in Europe (1859). After the war he rebuilt and reorganized the Institute, secured from the legislature fifty thousand dollars for it. Smith was the author of An Elementary Treatise on Algebra (1858) and co-author of The American Statistical Arithmetic, Designed for Academies and Schools (1845), Best Methods of Conducting Common Schools (1849) and other well-known works.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Intensely religious, he presented every graduate of the Institute with a Bible along with his diploma.
As an educator he attacked the classical type of education prevalent in the South before the war, emphasized the utilitarian aspects of education, and advocated military organization because of its system of discipline.
In 1834 he married Sarah Henderson, daughter of Thomas Henderson; they had seven children.
