INTRODUCTORY
THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||
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.
INTRODUCTORY
THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, Volume I | ||