University of Virginia Library

HISTORY OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

INTRODUCTORY

THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON

I. Father of the University

Thomas Jefferson, from early manhood until the end
of his sixty-sixth year, had, with short intervals of private
life, filled in succession the highest offices in the gift
of the popular voice. He had served in the General Assembly
and in the first Virginia Convention; had been a
member of the Continental Congress and Governor of
the Commonwealth; had been Minister to the Court of
Versailles, Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet
and Vice-President of the United States; and, finally, at
the summit of his career, had been President during one
of the most pregnant and critical eras in American history.
He had won distinction in the very different parts
of legislator, diplomat, and executive. His name had
been coupled with all the events forming the great milestones
of his time, with the solitary exception of the adoption
of the Federal Constitution, which was drafted and
ratified during his absence in France.

Towards the close of his life, looking back, with tranquil
discrimination, upon the achievements of his great
career, he wrote down a list of the acts which he conceived
to be his principal claims upon the remembrance
and gratitude of posterity. This list embraced all those,

which, before the establishment of the University of Virginia,
had brought him conspicuously into the eyes and
minds of men,—not one of any substantial importance,
legislative, executive or educational, was omitted. It began
with his public spirited example, as a young man, in
opening up the shallow waters of his native Rivanna to
the navigation of batteaux; then passed on to his authorship
of the Declaration of Independence; to his separation
of Church and State in Virginia; to his destruction
there of the laws of entail and primogeniture; to his paternity
of the statute that prohibited the further importation
of slaves; of the one defining the rights of naturalization;
of the one making more humane the punishment of
crime; and of the bill of 1779 for the diffusion of knowledge
among the people. He closed as he began with the
mention of an act of utilitarian patriotism, seemingly little
in itself but really of far-reaching consequence his introduction
of olives and a more hardy and fecund species of
rice into the Southern States. There was, in the list, not
the slenderest hint of the political honors which had been
showered upon him so generously by his countrymen.

In extreme old age, when he had had a longer time to
weigh and set the nicest value upon all the incidents of his
life, he determined to revise this first list, and in abbreviating
and condensing it, to retain only those facts which
indicated most clearly the characteristic spirit of his career
in all its phases. What was this spirit? The governing
and driving power of Jefferson's whole course
from youth to old age was love of freedom,—freedom
of the mind in its outlook in every direction and on all
things; freedom of the soul, in its beliefs; freedom of
action for the individual in every personal relation, and in
every department of human affairs, so far as it was not
repugnant to morality, law and order. Which were the

achievements of his life that, in his final judgment, reflected
most faithfully and pointedly this overtopping, this
all-animating aspiration of his entire existence? When,
after his death, his papers were examined to discover his
wishes for the disposal of his body, the following memorandum
was found among them, and the more closely
we scrutinize its details, the more comprehensive does it
show itself as the matured expression of the mainspring
of his long career:

His last thought, as we thus perceive, was occupied, in
no egotistic spirit, with only three facts of his life; but
they were the three, which, in his opinion, made up his
greatest contributions to the noblest of all causes,—the
cause of freedom. As the author of the Declaration,
he had proclaimed the tyranny of all Governments that
had not received their authority directly from the consent
of the governed; as the author of the Virginia statute,
he had proclaimed, with equal emphasis, the tyranny
of all spiritual domination that was rejected by the intelligence;
and as the Father of the University of Virginia,
he was convinced that he had founded a seat of learning
that, for ages, would help to preserve that freedom of
mind, spirit, and individual action, which he had always
so persistently advocated with tongue and pen, and which,
by his acts, he had done so much to encourage, to
strengthen, and to perpetuate.

There have been few men in our political history who
have had so accurate a command of the English language,
in its nicest shades of meaning, as Jefferson. He was always

lucid and precise in the use of the written word. It
will be noticed that he did not describe himself as the
Founder of the University of Virginia but as the Father.
Now, there is an important difference in the significance
of the two words, as employed in this connection, entirely
apart from any hint of endowment which may vaguely
linger about the former. There have been many founders
of scholastic institutions in the United States, but
few fathers of such institutions. Those great seats of
learning, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and Leland
Stanford, Jr.,—to mention only the most eminent,—
had their respective origins in the benefactions of single
philanthropists, who were content to impart in a general
way only, if they imparted at all, the trend and color
of certain principles to the aims of those universities,
and to the methods of their administration. But it cannot
be said of them to the degree that can be so often
said of a father in relation to his children, that their
transmitted influence has never ceased to shape those
creations of their benevolence, in the smallest detail as
well as in the largest, from the time the first charter was
obtained and the first stone was laid, down to the present
hour.

On the other hand, had Jefferson been in a position to
endow the projected University of Virginia with a million
dollars of his own, it would still have been more correct
to speak of him as the Father of that institution than
as its Founder. He was not merely the father of it in the
spiritual and intellectual sense: he was the father of it
in a corporeal sense also, for he designed the structure
in the main from dome to closet, and he superintended
its erection from the earliest to almost the last brick
and lath. It was he who had carried at the front of
his mind for more than a generation the unrealized conception

of a university for his native Commonwealth;
who, through all this long period of disappointment,
but not of discouragement, pressed it upon the attention
of the General Assembly; who, when it was at last incorporated
in its earliest form as a college, selected its site
and surveyed its boundaries; who, after its final charter
was granted, kept up a persistent and successful struggle
with faction, prejudice, and ignorance, to obtain from
the State the funds needed for its completion; who, after
its doors were thrown open, thought out minutely and
laid down with precision its courses of instruction; who
chose many of the text-books; formed the library; nominated
all the professors; and finally drafted all the
laws for the general administration of the institution,
and all the regulations for the enforcement of discipline
among the students. Almost daily, if the weather was
fair, he rode down from his mountain-top to the University
to watch the progress of the building; and when
prevented from doing this, turned from that lofty height
upon the unfinished structures the far-reaching eyes of
his telescope.

There is hardly another instance in our educational
history which approaches the noble, the almost pathetic,
solicitude which the illustrious octogenarian showed for
this child of his of brick and stone. "I have only this
single anxiety in this world," he declared. "It is a bantling
of forty years' birth and nursing, and if I can see it
on its legs, I will sing, with serenity and pleasure, my
nunc dimittis." Nor did this brooding thought leave
him even when he lay on his death-bed at Monticello, for
his physician tells us that he constantly speculated as to
the name of his probable successor in the rectorship,—
that office upon which most depended the intelligent management
of its affairs.

II. Political Principles

No biography can be accepted as complete which fails
to scrutinize the qualities of the parentage of its subject.
The laws of heredity are equally applicable to the University
of Virginia, for all its principal characteristics,
as we have just seen, were, in the beginning, derived from
the moulding hand of Jefferson. The first one hundred
years of its history turns in a very real and practical
sense upon the spirit which was breathed into its working
organization at the start by the liberal, versatile, and
sagacious brain of one man. Madison, who, from its
foundation, was a member of the Board of Visitors, very
frequently reminded the members of that body of the
propriety of permitting their venerable rector to carry
out all the plans which he had framed for its benefit; and
he did this, not simply because that rector's judgment was
entitled to peculiar deference, but chiefly because,—as
the scheme was, in the beginning, his own,—the responsibility
for its failure or success would fall on him.

Apart from its architectural setting, which was entirely
of his dictation, there were three conspicuous aspects
in which the University of Virginia reflected the
spirit of Jefferson: (1) in its political creed; (2) in its
freedom from every form of sectarianism; and (3) in its
complete dedication to the advancement of science.

Jefferson's almost extravagant love of freedom was,
perhaps, more vividly reflected in his political principles
than in any other branch of his convictions. He was in
favor of that system of government which would hamper
the least the natural liberty of the individual. This
liberty, both in private relations and in public, was to
be as completely without restraints as the working requirements
of organized society would permit. Men

were to be taught to discipline themselves so firmly and
so unselfishly that the controlling hand of a central
power would be hardly needed at all; such central power
as did exist should have before it as its supreme object,
not the curbing of the bad instincts and impulses of mankind,
but the bestowal upon the multitude of the highest
degree of happiness possible for humanity. Freedom
and Happiness,—these, in his opinion, were the principal
ends which all governments, as well as all acquisitions
of knowledge, were designed to subserve. "The general
spread of science," he wrote only a few days before
his death, when his hand trembled so violently that he
could, with difficulty, retain the pen in his fingers, "has
already laid open to every view the truth that the mass
of mankind have not been born with saddles on their
backs; nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to
ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

It was his hatred of tyranny, expressed so graphically
in this remarkable imagery, that made him the implacable
opponent of all special privilege, whether entrenched in
law or in immemorial custom. It was this feeling,—
which burnt in his breast even in youth,—that prompted
him to bring forward in the General Assembly the bill
for the abolition of entail and primogeniture, so as to
throw the soil again into the hands of the many; for the
separation of Church and State, so as to remove all the
galling burdens from the backs of the Dissenters; and,
finally, for the suppression of the harsh features of criminal
law by reducing the number of capital offenses from
twenty-nine to two. And it was this same feeling also
that led him to draft the bill to put a stop to the further
importation of slaves; and that caused him to favor a
second bill that would have brought about gradual manumission,
had the opinion of the public, at that time,

been as ripe for such a farsighted measure as his own.
His views on this momentous subject reflected most conspicuously
the openness of his mind as well as the clearness
of his vision: "Nothing is more certainly written in
the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
... The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices
of Heaven, for total emancipation." There was presented
to him, afterwards, but one other great opportunity
to show, in attempted legislation, his eagerness to
uproot African bondage, and he did not let it pass: in
his original plan for the organization of a government
for the Northwest Territory, he provided that the States
to be carved out of that area, should, after 1800, be prohibited
from holding slaves.

Valuing liberty even to the point of favoring the
emancipation of the negroes, and the curtailment of the
punishment of criminals, to what did Jefferson look for its
preservation? He asserted again and again that the people
at large were the only bulwark of a free government.
"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in
every country which has ever existed under the sun?" he
asked. "The concentration of all laws and powers into
one body. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate
powers of society but the people themselves." "Whenever
the people are well informed," he wrote to Dr.
Price in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own government."
He urged up to the end that the citizens of
every community should retain control over all persons
intrusted with the reins of administration, for, should they
neglect to do so, such authority was sure to be perverted
to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth
and dominion among the members of the intriguing officeholding
caste. With Hamilton, his persistent antagonist,
he believed that virtue and intelligence should always be

in the ascendancy in political life; but, unlike Hamilton,
he was convinced that intelligence and virtue could only
have room for full play if the natural right of every man
to the enjoyment of the suffrage,—whether he was a
property-owner or not,—was candidly acknowledged and
ungrudgingly granted. He would have relieved the suffrage
of all restrictions; and it was his clear perception of
the fact that suffrage unrestricted could not be of the
most beneficent service to the individual and the community
unless education was also universal, that caused
him, as we shall see, to advocate so earnestly a general
system of public instruction. It was this epochal proviso
that saved his sweeping opinion from the taint of demagogism.

Did Jefferson exaggerate the danger to popular freedom
in thinking, as he did, that it was always threatened
by the open or furtive encroachments of rulers, local or
national alike? The events through which he had passed
in early manhood unquestionably inflamed his imagination
in its outlook even on the events of the normal years
in which his later life was spent. The arrogant conduct
of the British Government towards the American colonists
before the Revolution; the exasperations of that conflict
after it had once begun; his observation of the unequal
laws in France, and the consequent prostration of
its people in the mass, previous to the destruction of the
monarchy,—all this had convinced him that there was an
instinctive and unavoidable antagonism between rulers
and ruled, unless the rulers were chosen by the majority
of the people; and that, even when they were, eternal
vigilance was the price of liberty.

Jefferson was the only statesman of the first order in
those times, violent as they were in both America and
Europe, who always, and with palpable sincerity, expressed

the firmest confidence in the virtue and wisdom
of the people at large. The most maturely considered
and most cautiously framed document of that period was
the Federal Constitution. Why is its tenor throughout
characterized by so many checks and balances? Largely,
no doubt, because it was only by compromise that the
sectional antagonisms of the Convention could be reconciled,
but, perhaps, principally because even that noble
body of patriots, in their secret consciousness, did not,
like Jefferson, place a solid reliance on the trustworthiness
of the people. "It is an axiom of my mind," he
affirmed on more than one occasion, "that our liberty can
never be safe but in the people's hands"; and then he
always added significantly, "I mean the people with a
certain degree of instruction."

It is one of the strangest riddles of American history
that a man born like himself to wealth and high social
position, and in a community in which the English conception
of class distinctions still lingered, should have
understood so clearly and thoroughly the aspirations of
the people as a mass that he should have become their
articulate voice. How did he catch with such niceness the
democratic idea? Was it taken in with the free atmosphere
of his frontier hills and mountains and wild primaeval
woods? Or was he simply a philosophical radical,
a speculative sage, who had reached his conclusions
by thought and reading alone? There was no more outcropping
of the democrat in Jefferson's personal bearing
and domestic surroundings than in Washington's; and yet
so obnoxious were his opinions to many of his fellowcountrymen
that he was roundly and widely decried as a
demagogue, a jacobin, an atheist, and an anarchist. And
yet what were the fundamental principles that he promulgated?
First, that all men should stand upon exactly

the same platform of equal privileges and equal opportunities
before the law; secondly, that every nation,
great or small, should possess the right to administer its
own affairs free from all dictation, compulsion, or interference
from other nations.

In Jefferson's life-time, as in our own, there prevailed
two views of what should be the relations of the State to
the individual, and of the individual to the State. According
to one view, the first duty of the individual was
to forward the welfare of the State; according to the
other, the only duty of the State was to exercise a general
oversight, which was to leave the individual in spirit and
in practice to his own self-government. Under the second
system, the individual is all important; under the first,
he is of as small consequence as one ant in a nest of millions.
The single ant is of no interest; the millions as a
body are of supreme interest. Now, Jefferson had no
toleration for such a theory of the Commonwealth as
this. He objected even to a benevolent interference by
the State in the affairs of men, and looked upon all rules
and regulations for government as arbitrary, however
wise in themselves, unless they resulted directly from the
action of the majority of the people. It was one of his
firmest convictions, after the Revolution had begun, that
America was destined to run a career entirely different in
temper and in fruitfulness from the civilization of Europe;
and long before the foot of the last English soldier
had passed from American soil, he brought in those measures
in the General Assembly of Virginia which would
introduce at once a condition of society antipathetic, from
top to bottom, to that society which still prevailed in
England, and which had previously prevailed in Virginia.
By knocking away the cornerstones, he justly anticipated
that the whole structure of privilege and monopoly would

tumble to the ground. Abolition of the law of entail
would put an end to the automatic preservation of wealth
in the hands of a few families from generation to generation;
abolition of the law of primogeniture,—which had
made the eldest son rich and all his brothers poor,—
would, by distributing the inheritance, not only improve
the pecuniary fortunes of the majority, but also diffuse
among them a passion for equality in all things; while
the separation of the Church from the State would destroy
sectarian ascendancy at a blow, and like the subdivision
of lands, would reduce each denomination to the
level of all.

It was Jefferson's uncompromising hostility to privilege
in every form, whether it showed itself in the prerogatives
of kings and nobles, or in the exclusive inheritance
of an elder son, or in the tithes of a state church, that
caused him to judge so harshly the principles and policies
of the Federalist party. His antagonism to that party
was unquestionably embittered by political opposition and
personal resentment, but, for deeper reasons than these,
it would still have inflamed his mind had he never filled
an office or left his library and fields at Monticello.
"The leaders of Federalism," he wrote Governor Hall,
"say that man cannot be trusted with his own government.
Every man and every body of men on earth possess
the right of self-government." "I am not a Federalist,"
he said to Francis Hopkinson, in 1789, "because
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the
creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy,
in politics, or in anything else, when I was capable
of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last
degradation of a free and moral agent." The then
powerful party of the Federalists was stigmatized by him
as the Parricide party, because, he asserted, they were

basely willing to sell what their fathers had so bravely
won. Or he spoke of them as the Monarchist party,
because they accepted, he said, the newly-adopted republican
form of government only as a stepping stone
to a monarchical one. He never forgot that, when he
arrived in New York, in 1790, from France, to become
Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, he found
himself plunged in a society, that, boldly expressing a
preference for royalty, did not hesitate to make a target
of him, in whatever company he might mingle, because,
fresh from the French Revolution, in its first and
pure stage, and consequently somewhat "whetted up in
his republican principles," as he declared, he ventured
to dispute the sentiments which he heard pronounced on
every side.

It is to be inferred from these perhaps exaggerated
impressions that Jefferson was a staunch opponent of
centralization in the National Government. He desired
to keep unbroken the line that had been drawn between
the Federal and State administrations by the Constitution,
and to strengthen the barriers raised to prevent the
one in the future from stepping over into the province of
the other. He favored the inviolable conservation of
that instrument within the bounds of the precise sense
in which it was adopted by its framers: the reservation to
the States of all powers not expressly delegated to the
National Government, and the limitation of the latter's
executive and legislative branches particularly to the powers
granted to those branches, without any right whatever
to trespass on the jurisdiction of the judicial branch.

In a letter to Samuel Kincheloe, in 1816, he summarized
this section of his political creed as follows: "We
should marshal our Government in (1) the General Federal
Republic, for all concerns foreign or federal; (2)

the State Republics, for what relates to our citizens exclusively;
(3) the County Republics, for the duties and
concerns of the county; and (4) the Ward Republics, for
the small and yet numerous and interesting concerns of
the neighborhood."

If there should be an attempt on the part of the highest
of these republics to steal or leap beyond its own
legitimate area, how was the usurpation to be met? The
famous Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99, formulated
the principles and the policy alike which Jefferson approved:
that the Constitution was a compact between the
different States and the United States, and that all violations
of that compact on the part of the Federal Government,
by assuming functions not intrusted to it, were illegal
and without force; that the General Government was
not made by this compact the exclusive or final arbiter of
the powers delegated to itself; that, as in all other cases
of compact in which there was no common judge, each
party had an equal right to determine whether an infraction
had been committed; and if so, the manner in which
it should be redressed. Jefferson was always most vehemently
jealous of judicial encroachments on the rights
of the States backed by the power of the Federal Executive.
In 1825, he was very much disquieted by the decisions
of the Supreme Court; by the orders of the President,
John Quincy Adams; and by the misconstructions of
the Constitution, which, in his opinion, signalized many
of the legislative measures. "It is but evident," he said
in a letter to W. B. Giles, "that the three ruling branches
of that department (the National Government) are in
combination to strip their colleagues, the States' authorities,
of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise
themselves all functions, foreign and domestic." "Are
we to stand to our arms?" he asked. "That must be the

last resource, not to be thought of until much longer and
greater sufferings. ... We must have fortitude and
longer endurance with our brethren while under delusion
... and separate from our companions only when the
sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union with
them, or submission to a government without limitation
of powers. Between these two evils, when we must take
a choice, there can be no hesitation."

Such, in bare outlines, were the political principles of
Jefferson; and it was these principles that he required
to be taught in the University of Virginia. They were
derived by that University directly from him; and unless
they are taken into account at the start, the true character
of the institution, as fashioned by his devoted zeal,
cannot be fully understood. He announced, before its
doors were thrown open, that, with one exception, all the
professors were to be permitted to choose the textbooks
for their respective classes; but that exception was a vital
one, for it was the professor of law. The textbooks
assigned to this member of the Faculty had first to receive
the approval of the Rector and the Board before they
could be used in his lecture-room in the instruction of his
pupils. The new university, he said, was not to be suffered
to become a hot-bed for the propagation of political
doctrines destructive of State and Nation alike. Monarchical
Federalism and the consolidation of the powers
of government were heresies to be fought there with all
the fiery energy of a council of mediaeval churchmen.
And no quarter whatever was to be given. He was
firmly resolved that, in the inculcation of his political
principles from those platforms at least, no room at all
was to be left for the display of opposition or even of
doubt. There was unquestionably a spirit of narrowness
and even of bigotry in the uncompromising attitude

which he thus assumed. "The young lawyers," he wrote
Madison, a few months before his death, "no longer
know what Whiggism and Republicanism mean. It is
in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive.
It is thence to spread anew over our own and sister States.
If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or
twenty years, a majority of our own legislature will be
from our own school, and many disciples will have carried
its doctrines home with them to their several States, and
will have leavened thus the whole mass."[1]

Who were the contumacious lawyers thus stigmatized?
They were the young Virginians of that day who had been
converted to the political doctrines which John Marshall
advocated, and which they had acquired from him during
their practice in his circuit, or in personal intercourse with
him in the social circles of Richmond. When it was
planned to remove the College of William and Mary to
that city, Jefferson opposed it, not simply because it would
raise up a formidable rival to his own University, but also
because it would become an instrument, through the influence
of the Chief Justice, whose residence was there,
for the propagation of the political creed of the Federalists
throughout the Southern States. Nor could he refrain
from a bitter fling at Harvard and Princeton for
the same reason. Harvard was destroying the patriotism
of Southern youths who entered its lecture-halls, with
lessons of anti-Missourianism, while Princeton, one half
of whose students had come up from the South, was busy
sowing the seeds of prejudice in their minds against the
"sacred principles of the Holy Alliance of Restrictionists."

The list of the textbooks drawn up for the use of the

professor of law indicates the works which Jefferson considered
the best for inculcating the only political principles
which he would tolerate. It embraced Sidney's
Discourse, and Locke's Essay on Civil Government, the
Declaration of Independence, the Federalist, the Virginia
Resolutions of 1798, and the Inaugural Speech and Farewell
Address of Washington. It was by the study of
these classical authorities,—as he himself said to the committee
of the Transylvania University in 1819, a few
months after his own seat of learning had been incorporated,
—that he expected to make the young men under
its arcades desirous, on the one hand, "of bringing all
mankind together in concord and fraternal love," and determined,
on the other, "to preserve as the sheet-anchor
of the people's hope and happiness, the sacred form and
principles of the State and Federal Constitutions." And
there was another course of instruction which he was
equally resolved to require, and for the same reason: the
study of Anglo-Saxon, he thought, was necessary, not simply
because the pupil would become versed thereby in
a neglected department of invaluable knowledge, but primarily
because, in learning that language, he would drink
in with it all the primitive principles of free government.

III. Religious Views

Whilst the University of Virginia has always stood for
the freest principles of government and a strict interpretation
of the Constitution, it has also stood equally unequivocally
for extreme opposition to every form of sectarian
interference in the administration of its affairs.
This attitude too was derived from Jefferson's impress in
the beginning. Again we must go back,—this time to a
study of the opinions which he held and uttered on the
subject of religion; for with such a study omitted, it

would be impossible to comprehend why it was that, in an
age when all the existing colleges offered a long course in
theology, the University of Virginia was founded without
the smallest consideration for any religious dogma
or denomination. With one breath, Jefferson could exclaim,
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility
to every form of tyranny over the minds of men,"
and with the next, he could truthfully say, "I have never
attempted to make a convert or wished to change another's
creed. I inquire after no man's religion, and I trouble
none with mine." "I am for encouraging the progress
of science in all its branches," he wrote to Elbridge
Gerry, in 1799, "and not for awing the human mind by
stories of rawheads and bloody bones to a distrust of its
own vision."

And yet the relations between man and his Creator,
and the responsibilities which resulted therefrom, were
pronounced by him to be the most important of all to
every human being, and, therefore, the most obligatory
on each person to inquire into. Of the different systems
of morality which he had investigated,—and he had been
a close student of religious history,—that of Christ always
rose before his mind's eye as the purest, the most
benevolent, and the most sublime. Epictetus and Epicurus,
he said, formulated a code of ethical laws by which
the individual should govern himself; Christ went a great
distance further by enforcing upon men the charities and
the duties which they owed to their fellowman. He had
inculcated a universal philanthropy far above the loftiest
imagination of the ancient philosophers or of the Jews
themselves. "Had his doctrines," Jefferson added,
"been preached always as pure as they came from his
lips, the whole world would have been converted to
Christianity." Who had perverted the original complexion,

the primitive spirit, of those doctrines? The
priest, was his reply. In every country and in every age,
he said, the priest had been the foe of liberty. He was
always an ally of despots, and ready to connive at their
abuses in return for protection for his own. The most
culpable members of the living priesthood, he asserted,
were the Presbyterian ministers; they are, he wrote William
Short "the most intolerant of all sects, the most
tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the lawgiver,
if such a word could now be obtained, to put the
torch to the pile. They pant to re-establish by law the
Holy Inquisition."

The acridness with which he assailed the whole clerical
profession had its origin, not so much in any real knowledge
of its history, as in resentment at the attacks which
many of that profession had made on him in retaliation
for his political and legislative changes. His successful
effort to separate the Church from the State in Virginia
had naturally enough aroused the vehement hostility of
the clergymen of the former Episcopal Establishment,
while his Republican principles had been sourly obnoxious
to the Federalist Congregational ministers of New England,
who never ceased to denounce him from their pulpits
as that crowning abomination, a French infidel; and this
charge was echoed elsewhere also. "It is so impossible
to contradict all these lies," he wrote Monroe, in 1800,
"that I am determined to contradict none, for while I
should be engaged with one, they would publish twenty
new ones." As a matter of fact, Jefferson was, in none
of his religious opinions, deserving of the anathema of
atheism. In his youth, he said, he had been "fond of
speculations which seemed to promise insight into that
hidden country, the land of spirits"; but observing at
length that he was tangled up in as great a coil of doubt

as at first, he, for many years, ceased to meditate seriously,
or at all, on the subject of religion. "I reposed
my head," he consoled himself with placid philosophy,
"on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator
has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should
be forced to use it." In a later phase of mind, he relied
exclusively on the practice of virtue as the corner-stone
of the only true religion. "I have thought it better,"
he said, "to nourish the good passions, and control the
bad, in order to merit an inheritance in a state of being
of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future
to Him who has been so good for the past." "It is in
our acts and not in our words that our religion must be
read." "Men should show no uneasiness about the different
roads they may pursue, as believing them to be the
shortest to their last abode, but following the guidance of
a good conscience, they should be happy in the hope that,
by those different paths, they shall meet together at the
end of the journey."

"Reason is the only oracle given men by Heaven," he
said on another occasion, "and they are answerable, not
for the rightness, but for the uprightness of the decision."
"I am," he added, "a Christian in the only sense Christ
wished any one to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines
in preference to all others." Under the influence of his
reverence for those doctrines, he made up, from the pages
of the Bible, with the use of a pair of scissors, a volume
which he entitled the Philosophy of Jesus, and which he
panegyrized as the most beautiful and precious morsel of
ethics that existed. It comprised numerous verses picked
out here and there from the texts of the Gospels, and arranged
in strict conformity to time and subject. That
these texts encouraged him to believe that the soul would
not perish with the body is proven by many of his utterances

during his last years. "The time is not far distant,"
he said in a letter to John Adams, "at which we
are to repose in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering
bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting
with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom
we shall love and never lose again." And when his
daughter Maria died, he declared, in reply to words of
sympathy from John Page, that "every step shortens the
distance we have to go. The end of the journey is in
sight. We sorrow not then as others who have no hope,
but look forward to the day which joins us to the great
majority." "Your age of eighty-four and mine of
eighty-one," he wrote to John Cartwright in England,
"ensures us a speedy meeting. We will then commune
at leisure and more fully, on the good and evil, which, in
the course of our long lives, we have both witnessed."
And at the close of his last interview with the members
of his weeping family, he was heard to murmur, "Lord,
now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Whatever may have been the religious tenets of Jefferson
at bottom, he was of the clear conviction that civil
government could not legitimately take even the smallest
notice of men's religious opinions, unless those opinions
were used as an engine for the destruction of peace and
order. Then and only then could the civil officers intervene.
"What has been the effect of religious coercion?"
he asks in the Notes on Virginia. "To make one half
of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." He
urged that differences of view were advantageous to religion;
that the several sects performed the office of
censor morum over each other; and that to make one sect
the Church of the State, and then to compel the other
sects to support it as offering the only correct religious
creed, was usurping the right of private judgment, and

imposing an unjustifiable and intolerable yoke upon those
who rejected that creed and all its ordinances. "I cannot
give up my guidance to the magistrate," he declared,
"because he knows no more of the way to Heaven than I
do, and is less concerned to direct me right than I am to
go right. The magistrate has no power but what the
people gave. The people have not given him the care of
souls because they could not. They could not because no
man has the right to abandon the care of his salvation
to another." Holding as he did these opinions, which
appear to be self-evident enough in our more liberal age,
and which, doubtless, were widely entertained even at that
period, Jefferson was fully resolved to tear up the Episcopal
Establishment of Virginia root and branch, whenever
the hour seemed opportune to do so. He was eager, as
we have seen, to raze the whole system of monopoly,
which, in 1776, he found in existence in the new Commonwealth;
but he was particularly impatient to demolish that
branch of it which was represented in the union of the
Church with the State. How revolutionary at that time,
and in that community, were the sentiments which were
hurrying him on, a few facts bearing on the condition of
the Dissenters then will clearly show.

The Hanover Presbytery complained as late as 1774
that their ministrations were by law confined to a small
number of places, in spite of the sparse population; that
they were not permitted to assemble at night; that they
were compelled to keep open the doors of their meetinghouses
in the day while the services were in progress;
and, finally, that they were deprived of the right as a
corporation to hold estates and receive gifts and legacies
in support of their schools and churches. They prayed
that the misdemeanors of Dissenters should be punished
by ordinances equally binding on all citizens regardless of

their religious creeds. "We ask for nothing," they declared,
"but what justice says ought to be ours; for as
ample privileges as any of our fellow-subjects enjoy."
And they concluded with the proud reminder that the petition
was not that of a sect sunk in obscurity, but of one
that belonged to the national church of Scotland, Holland,
Switzerland and Northern Europe.

The persecutions of the Baptists alone were a sharp
enough spur to quicken Jefferson's fierce drive for reform.
In the same year, Madison wrote from Montpelier to a
friend, "There are at this time in the adjoining county
not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail
for publishing their religious sentiments, which, in the
main, are very orthodox." These prisoners were Baptists.
About one year after the date of this letter, and
less than one year before the Declaration of Independence,
an anonymous signer urged every member of the
Church of England who had subscribed for the endowment
of Hampden-Sidney College, a Presbyterian institution,
to withdraw his contribution until that institution
had been put under masters who belonged to the Established
Church. "If this school is thus encouraged," so
the writer warned, "we may reasonably expect, in a few
years, to see our Senate House as well as our pulpits
filled with Dissenters, and thus they may, by an easy transition,
secure the Establishment in their favor."

In his legislative innovations, Jefferson merely rose to
the cry of these Dissenters, who naturally and rightly demanded
the alteration of the laws relating to religious
worship. An open and liberal mind like his could not fail
to respond to the just appeal which the Presbyterians and
Baptists were so persistently making for religious freedom
and civic equality; nor did he halt in his effort to
force so desirable a change, because, in winning the good

will of the outlawed denominations in general, he knew
that he was inviting the hatred of the one which had enjoyed
the exclusive privileges that he was seeking to demolish.
He allowed no inherited church affilations of
his own to stay his hand in striking the blow of separation.
He was brought up in the Anglican creed and ceremonial;
he still preferred the Anglican form at least to all others
in spite of his unorthodox opinions; and he had no wish
to place his native sect on a lower footing than that of
the rest. It was absolute equality before the law alone
which he aimed at. He had observed that Pennsylvania
and New York had flourished without any establishment
at all; and that every denomination in those communities
was prosperous and in harmonious relations with each
other. What was the explanation? It was the tolerance
with which all were treated, he replied, and the entire
absence of special privilege; there was no jealousy,
no envy, no jostling, no bickering; each stood upon its own
platform, and made no claim not founded upon its intrinsic
merit.

In 1776, the Virginia Convention declared that freedom
of religious worship was a natural right; but this
action was not satisfactory to Jefferson because that body
adopted no measure which would safeguard this right.
In October of the same year, the Convention, reassembling
as Senate and House of Delegates, repealed all the
statutes which branded the religious opinions of Dissenters
as criminal; and it also suspended the existing provisions
for the payment of salaries to the Episcopal clergymen.
The question of what constituted heresy, however,
was reserved for the interpretation of the common law.
In 1777, the General Court was impowered to pass upon
every case of the kind which should arise within the jurisdiction
of that branch of jurisprudence. At this time, the

Act of 1705 was still in force; whoever denied the existence
of the Deity, or expressed disbelief in the Trinity, or
the Christian tenets as a whole, or asserted that there were
more gods than one, or that the Scriptures were of human
origin, was liable to conviction for felony. Such, exclaimed
Jefferson, with undisguised bitterness, was the
religious slavery in which still remained a people who, by
every form of sacrifice, involving life and fortune alike,
had won their political and social freedom!

The great Act drafted by him to create a religious
equilibrium that would be comparable to the political one
already secured, was prepared as early as 1777, but was
not reported to the General Assembly until 1779; and
not until nine years had gone by, did it become a part of
the organic law of the State. The drastic alteration
which he submitted was summed up by him in a few words:
"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any
religious worship, ministry, or place whatsoever; nor
shall he be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in
his body or his goods, nor shall he otherwise suffer, on
account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men
shall be free to profess, and by argument, to maintain
their opinions in matters of religion; and the same shall
in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."
This proposition, radical as it was at that time,
but which seems to us now to be so axiomatic in its meaning,
could only be put in practice piece by piece and step
by step, as it were, although it had the sustaining and driving
power behind it of the ablest debaters in the General
Assembly. The first step was to enact that, thereafter,
no fine should be laid on any one because he neglected to
be present at public worship; but it was not until 1779
that the clergy were divested of the right to compel the
payment of their salaries through the public treasury;

and not until 1786 that the power of the Civil Government
to regulate religious observances, and to punish the
holder of heretical or atheistic opinions, was permanently
abandoned. For the first time in Virginia a father who
refused to subscribe to all the confessions of the Episcopal
creed could claim the prerogative of guardianship over his
own children; and for the first time too a Roman Catholic
could testify in court.

Correct in principle and in action as Jefferson was in
this great controversy, he frequently, in the course of it,
expressed himself intemperately. He went so far, for
instance, as to say that the despondent view taken by so
many persons of the ability to ameliorate the condition of
mankind was due to the "depressing influence" of the
alliance between Church and State. The men who fattened
on the fruits of that alliance, he declared, would
bitterly oppose every advance of society, because they
would expect it "to unmask their usurpation and monopoly
of honors, wealth, and power, and endanger all the
comforts they now enjoyed." And to such a height did
he carry this spirit of fanatical antagonism that he refused,
while President of the United States, to proclaim
a national Day of Thanksgiving, an annual regulation as
appropriate and as desirable in his time, as it is in our
own. "I don't believe," he wrote on this occasion, "that
it is for the interest of religion for the civil magistrate to
direct its exercises, its discipline, and its doctrine. Fasting
and prayers are religious exercises; the enjoining them
an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right
to determine for itself the times for these exercises; and
the right can never be safer than in their own hands,
where the Constitution has placed it."

Jefferson was not more earnest in advocating the divorce
of Church and State than he was the separation

of the Church from the organization and administration
of every seat of learning. He had perceived the hampering
effect of that alliance on the fortunes of the College
of William and Mary at the time when he was endeavoring
to convert it into an institution of the first order for
higher education. Who were the persons that disapproved
so strongly of this change that they joined in their
efforts to prevent it? The leading Presbyterians and
Baptists, who feared the spread of the sectarian influence
which the College had always nourished. In founding
the new university, therefore, he had a double motive in
making it thoroughly undenominational: all theological
leaning in a public institution was, in his judgment, not
only grossly wrong in principle, but also invited a hostility
that would seriously diminish its popularity and
cloud its prestige.

IV. Love of Science

We have now come to a third characteristic of Jefferson,
which we will find infused into the entire round of instruction
of the infant university,—this was the breadth,
versatility, and what may be called, the modernity of his
scientific outlook. If it is imperative to dwell upon his
political and religious opinions in order to obtain a just
conception of the institution at the start, it is equally necessary
to dwell, in a preliminary way, on his extraordinary
esteem for knowledge, and his unfailing interest in
all its departments. He had none of the spirit of the
specialist, which would have given a preponderance to
some one province in which he happened to be learned.
If he exhibited any preference at all, it was for architecture,
and even in this, he was, perhaps, chiefly influenced
by his anxiety to create a proper setting for his projected

university. All the different chairs which he established
enjoyed an equal dignity in his mind. Roundness and completeness
in each school was all that he aimed at. This
was as true of law as it was of the languages and the
sciences, although, as we have seen, he required that only
certain political doctrines and principles should be taught
in it; but his political creed he considered to be as much
the truth in an advanced form as the latest discoveries
brought to the attention of the students in the School of
Medicine or of Natural History.

Jefferson thought his early lessons to be so valuable
that he would often say that, if he were asked to choose
between the large estate devised to him by his father,
and the education bestowed upon him by the same bounteous
hand, he would select the last as that one of the
two benefits which he considered to be the most indispensable.
His tuition up to his fourteenth year was received
from a learned Scotchman; the next two years
were passed at the Maury School, famous in its day for
its classical thoroughness; and in his seventeenth year,
he entered the College of William and Mary. This was
in 1760, when he is said to have been very shy and
awkward in manner, rawboned in frame, with sandy hair
and a freckled face. The most fruitful side of his life
in Williamsburg was his intimate association with William
Small, professor of mathematics, and for a time
also of ethics, rhetoric, and belles-lettres, who had
brought over from his native Scotland an uncommon
share of the learning which had conferred such celebrity
on its universities. He was remarkable not only for his
knowledge of the sciences, rare in Virginia at that time,
but also for his ability to impart it; and he was still
more remarkable for the liberality of his opinions.

It was probably through the friendship of Small that

Jefferson first came to enjoy the companionship of Wythe
and Fauquier, the two most accomplished men of that day
in the Colony. At the table of Fauquier, he often
formed the fourth in what he dubbed the partie quarrée,
to which he owed the most instructive hours of this
period of his life. There, from Small he learned of that
vast field of natural science, in which he was to continue
to feel so keen an interest until the end; from Wythe,
of those great principles of jurisprudence which were
to enable him to become one of the foremost of American
social and political reformers; and from Fauquier, of the
arts of government as well as of the graces of courtly
bearing and the charms of urbane conversation. Such
familiar and constant intercourse must have deeply confirmed
those aptitudes which he, as a college youth, had
brought down to Williamsburg from his mountain home:
love of science, appreciation of literature and law, and
a relish for intellectual companionship.

He was as diligent a student throughout his college
course as he had been while still a pupil in the lower
schools. Indeed, he never sat down in idleness. "Even
in my boyhood," he once said to a grandson, "when
wearied of play, I always turned to books." It was to
the literature of Greece and Rome that he reverted with
the liveliest and most unfailing sense of enjoyment. It
was "a sublime luxury," he declared, to read the works
of the great classical authors,—that "rich source of
delight," as he also described them in a letter to Dr.
Priestley. "I would not exchange them for anything
which I could have acquired, and have not since acquired."
He often asserted that "these models of pure taste" had
saved English literature "from the inflated style of
our Teutonic ancestors, or from the hyperbolical and
vague style of the Oriental nations." "I have given up

newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides,"
he wrote John Adams, in 1812, "and I find myself much
the happier." And in his old age, when the energies
of his mind, as he said, had sunk in decay, he would turn
"to the classical pages to fill up the vacuum of ennui."

It is remarkable how slightly he depended for recreation
on the variety and beauty of the literature of his own
language. He seems to have been indebted to it only for
the clarity and precision of his flexible style. Unlike
many of his contemporaries, he had no familiar knowledge
of Shakespeare, and his letters are never garnished
by a quotation from that author, or indeed from any
English author of celebrity, with the possible exception
of Pope. His taste in English literature seems to have
been meretricious. "I think this rude bard of the North
(Ossian)," he wrote, "the greatest poet who has ever
existed." He preferred Homer to Milton and Polybius
to Gibbon. The profound impression which he made on
the character of the University of Virginia is revealed in
no particular more plainly than in the history of its school
of languages. His interest in the ancient tongues caused
him to employ the ablest scholars for those professorships
who could be procured from Europe; but the nearest
approach to an English chair was a barren school of
Anglo-Saxon. Is it the shadow of his comparative indifference
to English literature, projected through the century
which has followed, that explains the failure of the
University of Virginia to produce successful authors in
the normal proportion to successful lawyers, physicians,
clergymen, engineers, and men of business? As a
fructifying force in the field of even Southern literature,
the institution has not gained the reputation which it has
won in all the other departments of mental culture and
practical efficiency.

Although a classical scholar of merit, and a student of
several modern languages, it was toward natural science
that the intellectual curiosity of Jefferson was chiefly
directed. Nature, he wrote to Du Pont, in 1809, had
designed him for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering
them his supreme delight. Small, he declared,
had fixed the destinies of his life. "From my conversations
with him, I got my first view ... of the system
of things in which we are placed." He was equally impatient
with the ignorant adult who raised a hue and cry
against science, and with the supercilious youth who
looked upon its acquisition as a waste of time. He had
a keen taste for mathematics, and in 1811, when he undertook
to instruct his grandson therein, he spoke of himself
as resuming its study with avidity; but, in reality,
he had far more relish for the investigation of Nature,
especially in the departments which would increase the
ease and wholesomeness of life. When he arranged for
a botanical garden at the University of Virginia, he gave
direction that only those plants should be cultivated which
were certain to be of practical use to his countrymen.
"The main object of all science," he said, "was the freedom
and happiness of man"; and no detail of it was too
small or too insignificant apparently to enlist his attention
if it should tend to secure these benefits.

This was signally true of agriculture, a pursuit which
always deeply interested him. His knowledge of it, in
every feature, was unfailingly at the service of his friends,
who were constantly seeking his advice. We find him
offering suggestions to both Cabell and Cocke as to the
hedges which they should plant for fences on their
farms to shut out the vagrant hogs and cattle. Would
barriers of holly, haw, cedar, locust or thorn be the best
for the purpose? He decided in favor of the thorn

for reasons based on his personal experiments. During
many years, he kept a meteorological record that was so
minute in its details as to excite the wonder of all who
read it. "It is astonishing," writes Cabell, "how you
could find time, in the midst of your other engagements,
to make such a prodigious number of observations." A
subject of long rumination with him was as to how to
contrive the mould-board of a plough that would offer
the least resistance in breaking up the ground. Concentrating
whatever inventive talent he possessed on this
problem, he sought its solution with the patient diligence
of a trained mathematician; and the upshot was the production
of a model so excellent that it won the formal
approval of the English Board of Agriculture, and the
gold prize from the Society of Paris. He imported
from Scotland a reaping machine that was expected to
hasten and cheapen the harvest; and he brought into
Albemarle county strains of foreign stock,—sheep,
hogs, and cattle, both male and female,—which would
improve the native breeds. He put himself to extraordinary
inconvenience while abroad to procure rice and
olives for testing in the soil of South Carolina, while his
garden-book brings to light his long course of experiments
with vegetables and fruits. He frequently distributed
seeds, roots, and plants among his correspondents, or sent
them to agricultural societies; and on one occasion at
least, he received from a friend in London in return,
specimens of every kind of pea and vetch that was grown
in English ground.

No prevailing heat of partisan controversy was
allowed to divert his thoughts from the branches of natural
history that interested him most. In 1798, when
the uproar of the threatened war with France was at
its height, he was writing to Mr. Nolan for information

about the herds of wild horses which were reported as
roaming over the western prairies; and during the following
year, when Federalists and Republicans were
fighting each other with tooth and claw, he exhibited the
keenest curiosity about the possibilities of Watt's new
application of the power of steam. Even when his
chances of election to the Presidency in 1801 were wavering
to and fro, he is found composing letters of eager
speculation over the origin of the mammoth bones then
recently exhumed in Ulster county, New York; the nativity
of the wild turkey; and the influence of the moon
on the turn of weather. In 1808, when a war-cloud was
looming between the United States and Great Britain,
three hundred bones from the prehistoric beds of Big
Lick were heaped up in a room of the White House
awaiting scientific classification,—a fact strongly reminiscent
of the wagon-load that had followed him to Philadelphia
for Dr. Wistar's inspection, when he went
thither to take the post of Vice-President.

It was Jefferson who dispatched Lewis and Clark on
their romantic expedition to the Columbia; and no one
gave Pike warmer and more intelligent encouragement in
his western explorations than he. It is precisely correct
to say of him that the enlightened policy which the
National Government has always pursued towards
scientific objects had its earliest impulse in his own liberal
attitude as Chief Magistrate. While American Minister
to the Court of Versailles, he never failed to inform
the Faculties of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale and
Pennsylvania, of all the recent acquisitions to science,
such as new data relating to astronomy, improvements in
agricultural and mechanical methods, and further discoveries
in the wide province of natural history. "He
was always on the lookout," says an English friend, who

was habitually in his company at this time, "to find new
ideas to send home." In the course of his residence in
Paris, he took a conspicuous part in a controversy over
the true reason for the presence of marine shells on
mountain-tops; and he successfully disputed the assertion
that the animal frame dwindled after several generations
passed in the climate of America. Buffon maintained
that the chemical laboratory was not superior in dignity
or value to the ordinary kitchen. "I think it amongst
the most useful of sciences," retorted the far-sighted
Jefferson, "and big with future discoveries for the utility
and safety of the human race. It is yet indeed a mere
embryo." But he did not show the same prescience
about geology; he obtusely enough took little interest in
that science because he was not able to foresee its practical
helpfulness to men. "What difference does it
make," he asked, "whether the earth is six hundred or
six thousand years old? And is it of any real importance
to know what is the composition of the various strata,
if they contain no coal or iron or other useful metals?"

Jefferson evinced only a respectable ingenuity in invention.
He was often spoken of as the "Father of the
Pension Office," which was established by authority of
Congress during the time he occupied the post of Secretary
of State, but his talents for mechanical contrivance
do not seem to have risen any higher than a mould-board,
a walking-stick that could be spread out to form a seat,
or a chair that revolved on a screw. Was a tribute to
his convivialty or to his genius in small though useful
inventions, intended by William Tatham in submitting to
him a device by which full decanters could be passed
more rapidly around the table? He showed a prophetic
interest in the plans to build torpedoes and sub-marines;
and writing to Robert Fulton, recommended that a corps

of young men should be educated exclusively for their
service. Although much disposed to have a jocular fling
at physicians, he was, nevertheless, an ardent student of
the subjects which engage their attention. Dr. Dunglison,
a member of the original Faculty of the University,
frequently remarked that Jefferson could have made himself
a master of the art of surgery,—so great was the
amateur skill which he exhibited in sewing up a wound,
or in setting a broken leg. It was characteristic of him
that he was one of the first Americans to submit to vaccination
as a preventive of smallpox.

V. Taste for Architecture

Jefferson was always interested in every department
of the Fine Arts. While serving as Visitor of the College
of William and Mary during his Governorship, he
had been instrumental in adding a course of that character
to the professorship of ethics; and in his scheme of
education addressed to Peter Carr, in 1814, instruction
was to be given in civil architecture, painting, sculpture,
and the theory of music. He played on the violin with
skill; had been a patron of Caracchi; and it was at his instance
that Houdon was employed to model the full
length statue of Washington and the bust of Lafayette.
He was a sympathetic correspondent of Peale and Trumbull,
and an active member of the Academy of Fine Arts
in Philadelphia.

But it was in architecture that he felt the most penetrating
interest, and it was also in this art that he displayed
an original talent almost comparable to the genius
which he evinced in political science; indeed, it has been
said of him by several critics of distinction that his influence
in this more or less private province has been just

as notable as in the public province of either statesmanship
or education. There was perhaps not an architect
in the colonies when Monticello was planned, who possessed
either his ability or his technical knowledge as
a draftsman. His drawings, which began about 1769,
have been pronounced to be unexampled in American
history down to a much later period; and form, with
those of the White House and the Capitol, the principal
source of our knowledge of colonial architecture. In
his autobiography, he makes an interesting reference to
his "passion for architecture," a term exactly pertinent
to his feeling for the art. Nowhere is this passion so
gracefully yet so fervently expressed as in the playful
letter to Comtesse de Tesse written from Nimes in 1787.
"Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison
Carrée like a lover at his mistress. ... This is the
second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The
first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Sage Espanage
in Beaujolais. This you will say was in rule to fall in
love with a female beauty. But with a house! It is
out of all precedent! No, Madam, it is not without a
precedent in my own history. Whilst in Paris, I was
violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm."

But it has been correctly said of Jefferson that he used
his talent for architecture for other purposes besides the
mere gratification of his sense of beauty. A sense of
practical fitness too was reflected in all his designs, which
ranged from the Capitol at Richmond and the temples
and cloisters at the University of Virginia, to the jails of
Cumberland and Nelson counties; and from the mansions
of his friends at Bremo and Farmington to a chicken
coop at Pantops, his outlying farm. What had nourished
this taste in the beginning? He had visited Annapolis,
Philadelphia and New York, in 1766, before the

cornerstone of Monticello had been laid, but there is no
evidence that his observations, during his sojourn in those
cities, directly shaped his original aptitude as designer,
draftsman, and builder. Certainly there was little in
the houses of his native colony that appealed to that
spirit of innovation, as well in architecture as in politics
and education, which animated him even in his youth.
Westover, Gunston Hall, Carter's Creek, Brandon,
Sabin Hall, Shirley, and the old Virginian manor-house
of Stratford, the residence at Mt. Airy,—though some
were inspired by classic models,—were not looked upon
by him as worthy of praise, or even of incidental mention.
In the Notes, he remarks on the homely construction of
the dwelling houses in his native State. Few were built
of brick; still fewer of stone; they were merely wooden
cottages made of scantling and boards, with walls plastered
with coarse lime. There were, in his opinion, but
four structures deserving of notice,—the Palace, the
College, the Capitol, and the Hospital at Williamsburg.
Of these the College and the Hospital were held up as
rude misshapen piles, "which might easily be mistaken
for huge brick-kilns, were they not covered with roofs."
The churches and courthouses had been designed with a
blind eye to elegance; but this general want of architectural
beauty was not surprising, he said, when it was recalled
that there were no workmen in Virginia who possessed
even a moderate degree of artistic judgment and
mechanical skill. The existing styles of architecture
were, in his judgment, "a malediction, not a blessing to
the land," although it cost no more to build a beautiful
structure than to build an ugly one of the same size.

Jefferson was the son of a planter, and had come into
the world in a plain house, in a sparsely inhabited neighborhood,
removed only by a few years from the secluded

days of the pioneer. There was nothing in that early
environment to cultivate a taste for architecture. All
his friends of his own age and social standing had been
carefully drilled, like himself, in the ancient classics, but
they, no more than himself, perhaps, had been led by that
fact to acquire an insight into the art. There was no
chair of fine arts at the College of William and Mary
to increase any natural leaning which he may have had
towards it; nor is there any proof that either Small, or
Wythe, or Fauquier, who so deeply colored his character
while a student there, encouraged him to pursue
its study. Both in Williamsburg, and in the homes of
such men as William Byrd of Westover, he found illustrated
books relating to architecture, and it is possible
that access to them for casual reading ripened what was
at first merely an idle liking for the art. But the bare
taste itself very probably sprang, not from any extrinsic
influence, but from his own versatile, inquisitive, and cultured
personality, which happened to find, in that particular,
a congenial reflection in the plates of Palladio, a
copy of which he looked upon even at the age of twentyseven
as the principal treasure of his library.

The first monument of his genius was the most beautiful;
the house at Monticello was pronounced by a cultivated
and travelled French nobleman to be the handsomest
private residence in America. The environment at
the time of its foundation offered such extraordinary
obstacles to a builder that they would have discouraged
any one who lacked the sanguine and resourceful temper
of Jefferson. The nearest point from which he could
obtain supplies of any sort was a small village; and even
this afforded but a paucity of the rarer materials for
construction; and no skilled mechanics at all. He created
substitutes for the latter by training intelligent

negroes of his own to be cabinet-makers, carpenters,
blacksmiths, masons, and bricklayers. Nails were manufactured
in his own smithy by his youthful slaves; and
his bricks were made of clay dug up out of beds on his
own land. He applied his own tests to different woods
to detect their relative fitness, strength, and durability,
and chose only those varieties that stood these tests
most successfully. The mortar used by him was obtained
only after long and laborious experiments.

In those times, there were no professional architects
at work in America. All building, even along the most
ambitious lines, was in the hands of handicraftsmen who
were guided by principles that had been brought in with
the early emigration,—to be later on, perhaps, modified
by novelties which had been introduced by the most
recent comers. Not elegance, but utilitarian and economic
purposes were alone kept in view. Jefferson, however,
had beauty, utility, and economy all in his vision;
and he was fully competent to serve as his own architect,
whether design or practical specifications were demanded.

Monticello is the most remarkable of all his structures
because it was the fruit of his taste and discernment
before either had been broadened and chastened by a
study, on the ground, of the splendid architectural monuments
of Europe. It is true that the mansion was not
finished until after his return from his foreign mission,
but already in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux, a visitor,
was so impressed with its charm that he thought it deserving
of a minute description in the general record of
his travels. Mr. Jefferson, he said, was the first American
who had consulted the fine arts to find out how to
shelter himself best from the weather. The house was
begun in 1769, and completed in 1801, and during that
long interval, the original design was modified in one important

particular only; which, however, cannot be hunted
down to any suggestion which came to him abroad. It
was to Greek and Roman concepts that he turned when
he first framed that design; and to those concepts he continued
loyal to the end. He passed by the models then
standing in Virginia and in New England, which he might
have used, and took his cue from Palladio, who had
drafted the best existing representations of the surviving
monuments of ancient times. But in his drawings of
private houses, that architect had been forced to rely on
the descriptions of certain Roman predecessors. It is
an interesting fact that the country homes of the Venetian
merchants, his principal patrons, called for at least
one detail which was common to the country homes of
the Virginian planters: both sets of estates, being productive,
required a grouping of service quarters alongside
the owners' mansions. It was Palladio who solved this
problem by clothing the utilitarian outbuildings with a
decorative garb of columns at the very time that he subordinated
them to the main building.

This great master had influenced the grouping of many
planters' residences in Virginia, previous to Monticello,
through the style of architecture known by his name,
which had been transmitted from England to colonial
builders; but there was no such example of his work
there, even in an extremely modified form, as was presented
later in the design and structure of Jefferson's
mansion. As a matter of fact, there was no exact representation
of that mansion to be found in the plates of
either Palladio, or his English disciple, Gibbs; it was,
in reality, a reversion to the owner's early studies because
it fulfilled the purpose he had in view better than any
specific plan already in shape for immediate use in the
drawings of his favorite architect, for whom he was

afterwards to show his preference in the buildings of the
University of Virginia.[2] During his sojourn at home,
after his temporary retirement in 1793, he derived a
very kindly satisfaction from drafting plans for new residences
for his wealthy friends in Virginia, or in suggesting
alterations for the improvement of those already
standing. His advice and services were eagerly and
gratefully received, and in such houses as Bremo and
Farmington, already referred to, the impression of his
taste and skill remains to this day to delight the visitor.
He was consulted by Benjamin Harrison, of Brandon,
and by James Madison, of Montpelier, and on application,
supplied designs for the projected courthouses for
Buckingham and Botetourt counties, and for additions
to the Episcopal church in Charlottesville.

It was always the public building that aroused the most
enthusiasm in him as an architect. As early as 1776, he
brought in a bill in the General Assembly which provided
that, when the State Government should be removed to
Richmond, six entire squares of ground should be reserved
there as sites for the Capitol, a great Hall of
Justice, the offices of the Executive Board, and the additional
structures intended for other public purposes.
This combination of squares, broad streets, and noble
buildings was expected by him to serve as an imposing
monument that would always hold up before the eyes
of the Virginian people the most splendid examples of the
architectural art. Such a scheme was altogether unexampled
in American history up to that date; and not
until recent years has it been carried out by any foreign
or domestic community to the degree projected in the
mind of Jefferson.

He was very solicitous, while in France, to give all the
assistance then in his power to improve the taste of his
countrymen as reflected in their public buildings; his plan
for doing this was to send over the drawing of some
noble model whenever such an edifice was to be erected;
and in order to inform himself of the wide range of
models of that kind in European countries, he was not
content to study those in Paris alone, but travelled
through England, Holland, Italy, and Southern France
on a tour of inspection. In the course of these journeys,
he gathered up a large collection of books on architecture,
which further increased the weight of his advice.
Among the notable structures that are to be credited to
him is the Capitol at Richmond, which, at his suggestion,
was built along the lines of the Maison Carrée at Nimes,
one of the most "beautiful morsels" of architecture, in
his opinion, if not the "most precious," surviving from a
remote antiquity. The Capitol is said to be the first
direct imitation of a classical edifice to be found in the
United States; and while it did not conform exactly to
the model sent over by him, it has, nevertheless, always
remained a permanent memorial to the purity of his
taste.

There was now perceptible, in different parts of the
young Republic, a tendency to erect public buildings of
large dimensions. Naturally, this was most obvious in
the plans for the national capitol at Washington. Jefferson
was, at this time, Secretary of State, and the location
of the new District of Columbia fell within the
jurisdiction of that department. A trace of his early
scheme for the squares and public buildings in Richmond
is to be detected in his suggestion as to the use to be
made of the area of land set apart for the Capitol,
the President's House, and the Town Hall. The plan

chosen by L'Enfant, to whom Washington submitted
Jefferson's plan, was the Jefferson plan modified; and it
was further altered by Washington also. Jefferson's advice
was afterwards sought by the same great official as
to the style of architecture to be adopted for the projected
city, and his reply had an important influence on
its character as finally determined upon. He thought of
sending on a design which he had drawn for the President's
House; but he must have decided it to be impracticable,
either because it was too expensive, or pitched on
too large a scale. The model which he had proposed
for the Governor's House at Richmond failed of success
in the competition. His indirect recommendation of the
temple form for the Capitol at Washington was not received
with favor, for this style also was decided to be
too costly and too incommodious.

He was able to make his predilections more distinctly
felt after he assumed the Presidency, since the Capitol,
the White House, and the Department buildings were
still unfinished. He chose as architect a man who was
even more of an admirer of classic models than himself,
for Mr. Latrobe favored a return, not simply to classicism
in general, but to the original Greek form of it.
Jefferson, through this appointment, not only stamped his
own taste on the Capitol and the White House as far as
possible in their incomplete state, but in the public edifices
afterwards built in the other cities of the Union, he
was able to carry out his architectural preference without
obstruction or interference. His aim now, as formerly,
was to make the architecture of the classic era
the characteristic architecture of America; and in this
ambition, which he pursued consistently, he, fortunately
for his own success, had the support of a public opinion
which he himself had done so much to confirm and expand.

This, the distinctive bent of his genius as designer
and builder, found perhaps its most complete expression
in the edifices of the University of Virginia; and their
origin cannot be understood without a full knowledge of
their author's previous achievements as an architect.