INTRODUCTORY
THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||
1. 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 lead 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,
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
Author of the Declaration of Independence,
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,
And Father of the University of Virginia.
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 o Call 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
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 'n the main from dome to closet, and he superintended is 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
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
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,
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 office-holding caste. With Hamilton, his persistent antagonist, he believed that virtue and intelligence should always be
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,
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 fellow-countrymen 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
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
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
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 tatter'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)
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
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
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
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
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 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
" 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 be 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
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
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 meeting-houses 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
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
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 empowered to pass upon every case of the kind which should arise within the jurisdiction of that branch of jurisprudence. At this time, the
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 17'79 that the clergy were divested of the right to compel the payment of their salaries through the public treasury;
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 anal mechanical methods, and further discoveries in the wide province of natural history. " He was always on the lookout," says an English friend, who
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Ball 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
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.
INTRODUCTORY
THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||