University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY SURVEY

Until the dawn of the eighteenth century education
in Virginia was a special privilege. It was for
clergymen and gentlemen,—distinct, as elements,—
while the sons of the common people, a term then in
frequent use, were well enough employed in making
tobacco. The planter who had Madeira in his
cellar almost certainly had a tutor in his library
for the intellectual behoof of his children; or he
sent his sons to Princeton or to the universities of
the mother country. The offspring of less fortunate
folk grew up in an atmosphere in which Madeira,
the clergy, and the pedagogue were little
known.

The Revolution sent the thrill of a new life
through the country. The value of the yeomanry
in that war was evident, and gratefully appreciated.
Its share in the tremendous development of this new
world—for it was still new, and its possibilities not
more than suspected—was seen to be of the first
importance, and it was equally obvious that men
whose fathers had worn buckskin or jeans would
exercise in the government an influence in some
measure proportioned to their numbers. The day
of royal governors and councils, shirted in Mechlin
lace and frills, with powder on hair, was past. The

wiser men—the seers of their generation—knew
that the influence that was to control was less aristocratic
descent than democratic ascent; that in the
era then dawning men would rise, not descend, to
the discharge of the high responsibilities of citizenship,
and that enlightenment would be the one certain
safeguard of the sacred things of liberty.

Thus education was confessed to be better than
an accomplishment for gentlemen and more than a
preparation for holy orders; it was to be at once
the shield and weapon of the new order of republican
knighthood. The sons of the people were to be
educated in primary and preparatory schools, and
the best of them in colleges in which the arts and
sciences—especially the sciences—were taught by
the most eminent scholars. Where was this to be
accomplished? There were no schools in Virginia
at all competent to confer this great blessing on the
thousands of young Americans who were growing
up in the dense ignorance which was their certain
heritage.

There was William and Mary, founded nearly a
hundred years before the Revolution, in order that
the church of Virginia might be furnished with a
seminary of ministers of the Gospel, that the youth
might be "piously educated in good letters and manners,
and that the Christian faith might be propagated
amongst the Western Indians."[1] Aristocracy,
philanthropy, and the Establishment joined
hands and left no place for the sons of the soil.
But public sentiment no longer supported an overweening
anxiety for the souls of "the Western Indians."
In so far as social relations were concerned

this sentiment was still pro-aristocratic, but in
church affairs it had advanced to the point of readiness
for a statute for religious freedom. There is no
ground for wonder that dissatisfaction with a college
which was a part of the government and
avowedly a Church of England seminary had developed
rapidly. The first effective dissent was made
by the churches outside of the state religion. In
Prince Edward County, as early as 1776, Hampden-Sidney
had its beginning under the influence of
the Presbyterian denomination. Six years later
Liberty Hall, a Presbyterian academy at Lexington,
under the first charter granted by the new Commonwealth
of Virginia, was the beginning of Washington
College, now Washington and Lee University.
The Baptists and Methodists, under the same
impulse, engaged in educational enterprises for denominational
reasons. The church-and-state school,
as a controlling influence, gave way to the religious
college—which was not at all the thing demanded
by the times, the education of the masses for the
new citizenship.

Thomas Jefferson breathed the new atmosphere,
and, unconsciously perhaps, became the best living
exponent and defender of the ideas of the new man
in Virginia in the middle of the eighteenth century.
As a student at Williamsburg—a member of the
social set that surrounded Governor Fauquier—he
was occasionally, perhaps often, a listener to the debates
in the House of Burgesses at the time that
body was growing defiant of the King. He was
present at the sitting when the resolutions against
the Stamp Act were under consideration, when the
"torrents of sublime eloquence from Henry" weakened
the hitherto supreme leadership of such men

as Peyton Randolph, Bland, Edmund Pendleton,
and George Wythe.

These constituted the old set. A dozen years
later this young man who stood "at the door of communication
between the House and the lobby" during
this "most bloody" debate, as he described it a half
century after, had become the leader of the new,
and with two men of the old set—Wythe and Edmund
Randolph—was appointed by the General Assembly
to the task of a general revision of the laws.
The representative of the young democracy proposed
three bills in the interest of popular education.
The plan, as Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography,
was, first, elementary schools for all children generally,
rich and poor; second, colleges for a middle
degree of instruction calculated for the common
purposes of life; and, third, an ultimate grade of
teaching the sciences generally and in their highest
degree. The preamble is a compend of a phase of
his political philosophy. "Whereas, it appeareth,"
so runs the ample syllogism, "that however certain
forms of government are better calculated than
others to protect individuals in the free exercise of
their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves
better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience
hath shown that even under the best forms
those entrusted with power have in time, and by
slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it
is believed that the most effectual means of preventing
this would be to illuminate, as far as practicable,
the minds of the people at large, and more
especially to give them knowledge of those facts
which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of
the experience of other ages and countries, they
may be enabled to know ambition under all its

shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to
defeat its purposes; and whereas it is generally true
that the people will be happiest whose laws are best,
and are best administered, and that laws will be
wisely formed and honestly administered in proportion
as those who form and administer them are
wise and honest; whence it becomes expedient, for
promoting the public happiness, that those persons
whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue
should be rendered, by liberal education, worthy to
receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the
rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that
they should be called to the charge without regard
to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or
circumstance. But the indigence of the greater
number disabling them from so educating at their
own expense those of their children whom nature
hath fitly formed and disposed to become useful instruments
of the public, it is better that such should
be sought for and educated at the common expense
of all than the happiness of all should be confided
to the weak and wicked."

A noble appeal for a noble thing,—the best laws,
under the best administration, for the attainment of
the happiness of the people.

The bill died a lingering death. Five years it
was comatose in the original manuscript. Then it
was revived by printing. Fifteen years later
(1796) the General Assembly amended it to death
by a provision that the inauguration of these schools
for the common people should be left to the agency
of the county courts.

It was long to wait, but there was a glorious
resurrection in less than a century, and the common

schools are with us as the fruitful triumph of Jefferson's
spirit over legislative assassination.

More than one influence had plastic force in this
achievement. While Jefferson the student at Williamsburg
was taking into the fibre of his nature
and intellect the strength of the new thought and
feeling, and complying with its tendency as determined
by Henry and other whiggish leaders of the
time, he was also the subject of a formative force
exercised by Dr. William Small of Scotland, a professor
of mathematics and philosophy. This
worthy gentleman became much attached to the
youth from "the up country" and made him his
daily companion out of school. From his conversation
the young political philosopher got his "first
views of the expansion of science, and of the system
of things in which we are placed," and yielded to
the dominance of ideals to which, sixty years after,
he attributed the determination of the destinies of
his life.

Urged by Henry toward the activities of the patriot
statesman and by Small toward "the useful
branches of science," Jefferson entered upon a
career in which he united statecraft and love of
science for service to his country in preparing the
way for an educated citizenship as the only sure
bulwark of republican institutions.

This way lay through a people's college supported
and nourished by public primary and grammar
schools. The young alumnus attempted to shape
his alma mater to this service. His bill proposed
to enlarge "its sphere of science, and to make it in
fact a university."[2] It did not pass, but in 1799

he was made a member of the Board of Visitors of
that college and had the two professorships of divinity
and Oriental languages abolished and established
in their places "a professorship of law and
police, one of anatomy, medicine, and chemistry,
and one of modern languages." Before he had
finished his reforms the law of nature and nations
and the fine arts had been added to the duties of the
moral professor. But so far as meeting the educational
needs of the times was concerned he had
failed of significant results, as the Rev. James Blair,
its founder, had failed a hundred years before, and
his attempt to convert William and Mary into the
university of the State was never renewed.

A very casual survey of conditions shows that
while the period of the Revolution was one of
awakening, especially to the supreme need of popular
education, Jefferson was far in advance of his
times. Public free schools were not yet possible,
and even this strong man could not at that day convert
William and Mary into a university such as the
age required. He had to wait until the times were
propitious for his reforms. In the mean time he
had much to do in other fields, and many years
elapsed before he had again the leisure to take up
his hobby of popular education. By that time he
had become known to the uttermost ends of the
earth as statesman, scholar, thinker, and had served
his day and his country as Governor, Minister to
France, Vice-President and as President of the
United States. But in the bill of 1776 was the
germ of the university of the State. That much
Jefferson knew, although not where the institution
would be seated, and knew it so consciously that he

never lost sight of it, no matter where his activities
took him. He wrote to Mr. Priestly: "We wish to
establish in the upper country, and more centrally
for the State, an university on a plan so broad and
liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with
the public support, and be a temptation to the youth
of other States to come and drink of the cup of
knowledge, and fraternize with us. The first step
is to obtain a good plan; that is, a judicious selection
of the sciences, and a practical grouping of
some of them together, and ramifying of others, so
as to adapt the professorships to our uses and our
means. In an institution meant chiefly for use some
branches of science formerly esteemed, may be now
omitted; so may others now valued in Europe, but
useless to us for ages to come."

This was written in 1800.