James Madison, became Rector of the University of Virginia, at the same time America's fifth President James Monroe made his home on the Grounds (at Monroe Hill) and was a member of the Board of Visitors. Both former Presidents stayed at the university until their deaths in the 1830s. The same year, 1826, poet Edgar Allan Poe enrolled at the university, where he excelled in Latin. The Raven Society, an organization named after Poe's most famous poem, continues to maintain 13 West Range, the room Poe inhabited during the single semester he attended the University (he left because of financial difficulties). The School of Engineering and Applied Science opened in 1836, making it the first engineering school in the United States to be attached to a comprehensive university. Initially, some of the students arriving at the University matched the then-common picture of college students; wealthy, spoiled aristocrats with a sense of privilege which often led to brawling, or worse. This was a source of frustration for Jefferson, who assembled the students during the school's first year, on October 3, 1825, to criticize such behavior; but was too overcome to speak. He later spoke of this moment as "the most painful event" of his life. The irresponsible behavior of the students culminated in the shooting of Professor John A. G. Davis, Chairman of the Faculty, in 1840. According to a 96-page report published by the University in 2019, "slavery was “in every way imaginable...central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.” The University of Virginia Press in 2019 published Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University. The University has erected a Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. Support for the Confederacy At the onset of the American Civil War the University of Virginia was the largest in the Southern United States and second nationwide only to Harvard University in number of students and faculty. The University was a center of pro-slavery thought: "In the 1850s, many justified southern universities—and especially the University of Virginia—because they defended slavery as a core part of southern values." When Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister Catherine came to the campus in 1855, she was burned in effigy. The university was a "hotbed of the Confederacy". Most of the students at the time supported secession, and some who opposed it believed that maintaining the Union was the best way to keep slavery intact. About 90%