University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II

THE ALBEMARLE ACADEMY—THE CENTRAL COLLEGE

Mr. Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1809,
after an almost constant absence of twenty-nine
years, during which he had taken the pre-eminent
place among the great men of his time which has
always been accorded him. The homage of the
world folowed him in his retirement.

His withdrawal from official participation in the
political affairs of the world, in which he could have
remained a commanding figure to the end, did not
lead to "the domestic and literary leisure" for which
his friend Joseph C. Cabell expressed a strong wish.
The seventeen remaining years were filled with unremitting
labors for "the better diffusion of knowledge"
in Virginia.

As he had ridden away from his home in the year
1783, on his way to Annapolis to take his seat in
Congress, some of his neighbors asked him to engage,
at Princeton, a tutor "of the Irish nation" for
a grammar school they had in contemplation. This
village academy had not been realized when he returned,
twenty-six years later. The letter he wrote
from Annapolis to say that he could not employ the
tutor either at Princeton or in Philadelphia is the
only known contemporary reference to it from 1783

to 1803—twenty years. In the latter year it was
chartered by the legislature, and then ensued another
period of inert existence, which ended on the
25th of March, 1814. It so happened that on that
day John Harris, John Nicholas, John Kelley, Peter
Carr, and John Carr, five of the ten trustees named
in the charter, were at the Stone Tavern in the village
of Charlottesville, discussing, as doubtless some
of them had done often in the past score of years,
the chances of the successful and profitable establishment
of the academy.

Mr. Jefferson appeared in the street before the
tavern just at this opportune time, and was invited
to take part in the conference, whose object was explained
to him. He had written to Dr. Priestly in
1800 that he had in view a university "in the upper
country." This first direct reference to the point at
which he contemplated erecting the central foundation
of his system of public schools indicated Charlottesville
as the site. And with this great thing in
contemplation for the little town, he heard his neighbors
on the subject of the academy they hoped to
place in "the house of Triplett T. Estes."

Mr. Jefferson advised the trustees to abandon
their small scheme for a large one—a college where
the sciences could be taught in "a high degree"—
and the first step, he told them, was to reorganize
their board. Whether these good and true citizens
of Albemarle took in the full meaning of the philosopher's
plan, or could have grasped it if he had explained
it to them as succinctly as he did in his letter
of a few days later to Peter Carr, may be doubted,
for nothing so thoroughgoing in educational ways
had been previously proposed in America, or, indeed,
elsewhere; but they deferred to him by filling

the vacancies in their board, and he was made a
trustee, and accepted the office.

The reorganized board convened on April 5, with
nearly all the members present. Mr. Jefferson,
always a good horseman, rode down from Monticello,
a tall, hale man of seventy-one. Peter Carr
arrived from Carrsbrook, and was made president
of the trustees, while John Carr walked in from
Belmont, on the eastern margin of the village, and
was voted into the office of secretary. They were
soon absorbed in the business before them, those
lawyers, clerks of court, merchants, physicians, land
owners, and what not. Four other meetings followed—the
last, as far as any record exists, on the
19th of August, 1814. From that date adjournment
was taken to the third Friday in November.

The minutes of these several meetings give a very
brief history of the genesis of Albemarle Academy,
important as a starting point for the story of a great
movement. At the very beginning of their deliberations
Thomas Jefferson, Peter Carr, Frank Carr,
John Nicholas, and Alexander Garrett were chosen
as a committee "to draft rules and regulations for
the government of the proposed institution," and
were also instructed "to report to the next meeting
a plan for raising funds for the erection and support
of the said institution."

A lottery was decided on as a means of raising
funds, under the act of January 12, 1803, and a
board consisting of John Winn, John Kelley, James
Leitch, Frank Carr, and Alexander Garrett was
elected to manage the lottery, of which board John
Kelley was made president and treasurer.

This arranged to their satisfaction, the trustees
bethought them to the glebe lands as a source of

capital, and before they left the Stone Tavern instructed
Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Mann Randolph
(afterwards Governor of Virginia) and Peter
Carr to draft a petition to the next General Assembly
asking an appropriation of the money arising
from the sale of these lands for the benefit of the
institution.

Other steps were taken. A committee on plan
and location was appointed, and eventually reported.
The plan and estimate it brought to the board have
not been preserved. Mr. Jefferson was present at
the meeting and it is quite probable he condemned
the plan as too small for the institution he had in
mind, and the paper thereafter was regarded as of
little value. He never contemplated the establishment
of a mere academy or college as the fruition
of all his thinking and planning for a great educational
institution in Virginia as a part of the
Commonwealth. But he was keeping his own
counsel as to the full extent of his plan. The board's
ignorance is evident from the report of its committee
on site favoring a location beyond the village if
the site and building would not cost more than the
same advantages in the heart of Charlottesville.
The "situation in town already improved" was
doubtless the Stone Tavern, where they were in
session. It had been bought by Captain Estes but
he had never been able to make the payments, and
some years later this property and all other standing
in his name were sold under deeds of trust.
The Captain probably had a great deal to do with
the revival of the long dormant scheme for an academy,
having a two-fold interest in it—the advantages
of such a school in the community of which he
was an important member and the profitable sale of

property which had not proved as good an investment
as he had expected.

Six days after this meeting he wrote to Dr.
Cooper: "In my letter of January 16th [two
months before he became a trustee of Albemarle
Academy] I mentioned to you that it had long been
in contemplation to get an university established in
this State in which all the branches of science useful
to us and at this day should be taught in their
highest degree. We are about to make an effort
for the introduction of this institution." The effort
about to be made was in preparation by the trustees
of Albemarle Academy without their knowledge.

There were a number of things to be tried before
Jefferson was prepared to avow to his colleagues
the fact that there was not to be an academy—viz:
the result of the petition for a share of the proceeds
of the sale of the two glebes of St. Ann and Fredericksville,
the outcome of the lottery, and the success
of the subscription even then contemplated. So
the Sage of Monticello sat in council with the Carrs,
Nicholases, Garlands, and others of his neighbors,
deftly steering for a haven not down in the chart of
the trustees.

Mr. Jefferson was requested by his colleagues to
report regulations for the government of the proposed
academy, and did so in a letter dated at Monticello,
September 7, 1814, which he addressed to
Peter Carr, president of the board. Its sentiments
are the convictions he expressed in the preamble to
his bill for the better diffusion of knowledge drafted
nearly forty years before, when the country was in
the midst of the agitation at the beginning of the
Revolution. "It is highly interesting to our country,"
Mr. Jefferson writes, "and it is the duty of

its functionaries, to provide that every citizen in
it should receive an education proportioned to the
condition and pursuits of his life." This is the
keynote of his philosophy as applied to the educational
problem of his time, and it is the basic principle
upon which he constructed this first complete
outline of what, in his view, the State system leading
to and ending in the State university should be.
This letter to Peter Carr remains the most striking
contribution of an upbuilding kind toward the solution
of the problem of general and higher education
as that problem was presented a hundred years ago.
So wisely were the premises taken and so finely reasoned
were the conclusions that both are universally
accepted as "the law of the case." It is the prefiguration
of the University of Virginia, and in the
ampler form it received in the report of the Rockfish
Commission, is the source of much that is vital
in the modified constitutions of other institutions.

When the master of Carrsbrook received this document
he realized that the movement was not to end
with an academy. If the original board, of which
Mr. Carr was not a member, had wanted to do more
than acquire Triplett T. Estes's house and inaugurate
a village grammar school, Mr. Carr knew now
that the wrong step was taken when Mr. Jefferson
was invited to sit with them and confer the advantage
of his advice. If it was Mr. Jefferson's plan to
have a university there could be no need to convene
the trustees of Albemarle Academy in November,
according to adjournment, and so the board probably
never sat again.

No time was lost in preparing and forwarding to
the legislature the petition of the trustees of the
academy for the county's share of the income from

the sale of the glebe lands, a part of the dividend of
the Literary Fund and certain amendments to the
charter. It must have been early autumn when
Peter Carr dispatched the papers to Mr. Watson of
Louisa, a member of the lower house; but as late as
the following January Mr. Jefferson had "seen no
trace of their having been offered." He then wrote
to Senator Joseph Carrington Cabell the first of the
letters of the correspondence which gives an almost
perfect history of their joint labors for the establishment
of a great State university.

Mr. Cabell was one of the most useful and distinguished
of the descendants of Dr. William Cabell
who came from Warminster, England, and settled
on the James River, in Goochland County. The
family in England, of Norman descent, had been
powerful for centuries before the emigre came to
the new country and founded a family whose history
is interwoven with that of the State and the
Nation. "They [the Cabells] not only made the
hunting grounds of the savage—a wilderness of
wild woods—to feel the yoke of the plow and to
blossom as the rose, but, from the time when this
section was first represented in the colonial government
to the beginning of the Revolutionary period,
Cabells were in the House of Burgesses, looking to
its interests in the public councils. During the time
that tried men's souls, Cabells and their kin were in
the conventions guarding the rights of their homeland.
And from the war between the mother
country and the colonies to the war between the
States, the Cabells and their kin were constantly
representing this region in the House of Delegates,

the State Senate, or the House of Representatives
of the United States."[1]

Joseph C. Cabell was born in 1778, two years
after Jefferson's bills for a better diffusion of knowledge
were drawn; at the beginning, therefore, of
the period of awakening to the need of better educational
methods. He was liberally educated, his
schooling beginning at home, as was usual in his
social class. From the hands of his tutors he went
to Hampden-Sidney but remained only a year, the
school not being at its best at the time. Four years
of study at the College of William and Mary,
especially directed by the venerable President,
Bishop Madison, was rewarded with the A. B. degree.
For a year or two he divided his time between
the study of law, which he never practiced,
and an effort to recuperate his health, which grew
worse, until in 1802, by advice of his physician, he
sailed for Europe.

His sojourn abroad, planned to last one year, extended
to three or four. Mr. Jefferson was an old
man when Cabell arrived in America and called to
present letters of which he was the bearer. The
President was charmed with the character of the
young Virginian—so pleased that in time he made
him offers of honorable posts at home and abroad,
all of which were declined. President Madison,
probably, and President Monroe certainly, invited
him to places in their cabinets.

A reason for Mr. Jefferson's prepossession was
not far to seek. The young Virginian, like the old
one, was deeply interested in educational problems
—nearly four years had been devoted to investigations

at Montpelier, Milan, Padua, Rome, Naples,
and in France, England, and Holland.

Mr. Jefferson kept Cabell in mind, and when that
gentleman, who had been induced by a foreign
scholar, De la Coste, to aid him in his plans to establish
a museum of natural history at William and
Mary, wrote to many of his influential friends on
the subject, he received from Mr. Jefferson's private
secretary a letter whose style and sentiments were
Jeffersonian. "If," said the secretary—or Mr.
Jefferson, "I could bring myself to consider Williamsburg
as the permanent seat of science, as the
spot where the youth of our State for centuries to
come could go to be instructed in whatever might
form them for usefulness, my objection would, in a
great measure, cease. But the old College is declining
and perhaps the sooner it falls entirely the better,
if it might be the means of pointing out to our legislative
body the necessity of founding an institution
on an extended and liberal scale. This is the point
at which we ought to begin, and this is what you
ought to attempt, if you are desirous of doing something
which will be of permanent value. This
would, indeed, be an object worthy of your attention,
and if the amelioriation of education and the
diffusion of knowledge be the favorite objects of
your life, avail yourself of the favorable disposition
of your countrymen, and consent to go into our
legislative body. Instead of wasting your time in
attempting to patch up a decaying institution, direct
your efforts to a higher and more valuable object.
Found a new one which will be worthy of the first
State in the Union. This may, this certainly will
one day be done, and why not now? You may not

succeed in one session, or in two, but you will succeed
at last."

This was the call of the old philosopher, who
recognized his need of a leader in the legislature,
and Cabell responded. The following year (1808)
he became a member of the House of Delegates. In
1810 he entered the Senate and remained until 1829.
He had served more than six years in the legislature
when Mr. Jefferson wrote him in January,
1815,—four of these years in the upper house.

Far from being discouraged by the unexplained
neglect of the person to whom Peter Carr had committed
the petition, Mr. Jefferson sent copies of that
and other important papers to Mr. Cabell. "We
always counted on you as the main pillar of their
support, and we shall probably return to the charge
at the next session," he wrote the Senator, and proceeded
to give evidence of his unabated enthusiasm.
If the legislature had granted the petition, the results
of the proposed lottery, the proceeds of the two
glebes, and the dividend of the Literary Fund, supplemented
by "a loan for four or five years only of
seven or eight thousand dollars," would, he thought,
have put it in his power to obtain three of the ablest
characters in the world to fill the higher professorships—"three
such characters as are not in a single
university in Europe!" "With these characters,"
he adds warmly, "I should not be afraid to say that
the circle of the sciences composing that second or
general grade would be more profoundly taught
here than in any institution in the United States,
and I might go further."

It was a full month before Cabell's reply was dispatched—an
unavoidable delay. He could not inform
Mr. Jefferson why the petition had not been

presented. The papers had never been shown him,
and he had heard of them only incidentally, when it
had already been decided not to offer them.

The prayer of the trustees of Albemarle Academy
was for legal authority to demand and receive certain
moneys which had arisen on the sale of the two
glebes of the parishes of St. Ann and Fredericksville,
with the interest or profits that had accrued;
and also annually from the president and directors
of the Literary Fund a dividend of the interest or
profits of that fund proportioned every year to the
ratio which the contributors of the county bore to
the rest of the State in the preceding year. The
General Assembly was also requested to reduce the
number of Visitors, to provide for their appointment
and succession, and for such other officers as
the trustees might deem necessary; to define their
powers and duties, to lay down such fixed principles
for the government and administration of the
institution as might give it stability; to change its
name to that of the Central College, and to make
such amendments to the act for the establishment of
public schools passed the 22d day of December,
1796, as would facilitate its commencement and
lighten its execution in the county of Albemarle.

Such was the tenor of the petition which had
reached Mr. Watson, and which for some reason he
withheld from the legislature.[2]

The Committee of Propositions and Grievances

of the House, to whom the petition was referred,
allowed every prayer except the one "that all
moneys now appropriated to the Literary Fund
within the said county may hereafter be vested in
the said trustees for the use of the said academy."[3]

A bill was accordingly drawn and offered. Its
vicissitudes were reported by Senator Cabell, who
found several objections were urged, among them
the fact that the enactment would confer upon the
proctor of the college the power and authorities of a
justice of the peace within the precincts of the institution.

Jefferson defended the assailed provisions. "The
establishment of a proctor," he wrote, "is taken
from the practice of Europe, where an equivalent
officer is made a part, and is a very essential one of
every such institution; and as the nature of his
function requires that he should always be a man
of discretion, understanding and integrity, above
the common level, it was thought that he would
never be less worthy of being trusted with the powers
of a justice, within the limits of his institution
here, than the neighboring justices generally are,
and the vesting him with the conservation of the
peace within that limit was intended, while it should
equally secure its object, to shield the young and
unguarded student from the disgrace of the common
prison, except where the case was an aggravated
one. A confinement to his own room was
meant as an act of kindness to him, his parents and
friends. In fine, it was to give them a complete
police of their own, tempered by the paternal attentions
of their tutors. And certainly, in no

country is such a provision more called for than in
this, as has been proved from times of old, from
the regular annual riots and battles between the
students of William and Mary with the town boys
before the Revolution, quorum pars fui, and the
many and more serious affrays of later times."

However, the points had to be yielded, after
which the bill was passed February 14, 1816.