History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; the lengthened shadow of one man, |
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 | FIRST PERIOD History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919; |  |
FIRST PERIOD
STRUGGLE FOR A UNIVERSITY
I. Jefferson's Faith in Education
We have now described those fundamental tastes and
convictions of Jefferson which have left a permanent
impression on the University of Virginia: his almost
fanatical devotion to political freedom; his hatred of
all forms of sectarian obtrusiveness; and his enthusiasm
for every branch of science which he believed would liberalize
and fructify the human mind. How were these
great objects, upon which, in his judgment, the liberty,
felicity, and comfort of mankind depended, to be solidly
and lastingly preserved? By education, was his emphatic
reply. "Knowledge is power," he wrote George Tickner
in 1817, "Knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness."
Education to him meant the diffusion of light
through all the ranks of society, from the highest to the
lowest; indeed, it was the chief, if not the only, means
by which the goodness of the individual could be nourished,
and his happiness secured. It was not simply
education, but "well directed education" that was to
improve his morals, enlarge his mind, clarify his decisions,
instruct his industry, and augment his material
prosperity. "Education," Jefferson remarks in the
Rockfish Gap Report, "engrafts a new man on the native
stock, and turns what in his nature was vicious and perverse
into qualities of virtue and social worth." "And
it cannot but be," he continued, "that each generation,
preceded it, adding to it their own acquisitions and discoveries,
and handing the mass down for successive and
constant accumulation, must advance the knowledge and
well-being of mankind, not infinitely, but indefinitely."
It was one of the most seductive of all Rousseau's
theories that the right to a pleasant place in the sun was
the natural right of every man; and that the only reason
for the existence of social organization, and the only
object of education, was to assure that right to every
person beyond the possibility of alienation or deprivation.
Jefferson's own convictions were in general harmony
with this view; but in one detail he went a long
stride further than the great sentimentalist of Geneva;
he thought that the aim of education should be, not simply
to make a contented and prosperous citizen, but also
a useful and unselfish one,—one who would perform all
the public duties of citizenship with as much cheerfulness
and alacrity as he would perform all the tender and benevolent
offices of his own domestic hearth and social circle.
It was the function of democracy to secure for all
men precisely equal opportunities for advancement; no
man was to be favored at the expense of any other man,
while all the prizes for which men strove should be
thrown open to free competition; but it was necessary
that they should, in this ardent and unceasing contest,
have the use of all their powers at the highest tension
of their capacity. How was this to be brought about?
Again, he replied, by education.
What were the benefits, which, in Jefferson's opinion,
would be conferred by primary education? The acquisition
of the knowledge that every citizen needs for the
transaction of his private business, such as the skill to
make his own calculations in figures, and to express and
the improvement, by reading, of his morals and faculties;
the intelligent comprehension of what was due
from him to his neighbors and country, and the capacity
to discharge, with usefulness, all duties imposed on him
by either; the full understanding of his rights, and the
ability to exercise them in his own person with justice and
discretion; the ability also to select wisely the fiduciaries
to whom he might delegate some of those rights, and to
follow up their conduct with diligence, candor, and sound
judgment; and, finally, in a general way, the capacity to
show staunchness and equanimity in all the social relations,
however difficult the situation, and however searching
the test.
The aims of the higher education rested upon a somewhat
broader platform. What were they? To mould
the characters of the statesmen, legislators, and judges
on whom the prosperity of the public and the happiness
of the individual, in the future, were to depend so largely;
to expound the proper spirit and framework of government,
and to interpret the laws that regulate the intercourse
of nations; to harmonize and nourish the growth
of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; to develop
the reasoning faculties of the young, to enlarge their
minds, cultivate their morals, and instil into them the
principles of virtue and order; to instruct them in those
mathematical and physical sciences which foster the arts
and contribute to the health, support, and comfort of
human life; and finally, to mould them to habits of reflection
and honorable conduct, so as to raise them up
to be exemplars of the highest virtue to their neighbors,
and of the most rational happiness within themselves.
As Jefferson expected primary education to reach a far
larger body of citizens than advanced education, his
attention should be paid to the primary as thereby
the greater number could be trained in the duties which
all owed to the commonwealth. For he never for a
moment forgot the value of education in its relation to
the State at large; he looked upon it, he said in 1819,
"as the means of giving a wholesome direction to public
opinion; it was the safest guide and guardian of public
morals and public welfare; it was the arbitress in every
age of happiness or wretchedness for a community."
"Is not education," he asked at another time, "the
most effectual means to prevent tyranny by illuminating
the minds of the people at large with knowledge, and
especially knowledge of those facts which history presents?
Thus possessed of the experience of other ages
and other countries, they would be able to detect ambi
tion under all its guises, and prompt to exert their
national powers to defeat its purposes." "What does
a tax for general education amount to?" he wrote to a
friend three years after the close of the Revolution.
"It is not a thousandth part of what will have to be
paid to monarchs and their satellites, who will rise up
amongst us if we leave the people in ignorance." "Educate
the people, and never again will they submit to the
prejudices and privileges that attend a government carried
on by one great class greedily bent on their own
advantage alone. Moreover, it would bring every section
of the community in harmonious relations, which
would be a lasting guarantee of its unity and vigor."
He was the first statesman of our country to foresee
clearly the extraordinary improvement which education
would produce in the purely material condition of the
nation, the sea-like multitude, as distinguished from the
condition of the simple individual. In drafting the report
1821, he used the following pregnant and prophetic
words: "We fondly hope that the instruction which
may flow from this institution, kindly cherished, by advancing
the minds of our youth with the growing science
of the time, and elevating the views of our citizens generally
to the practice of the social duties and the functions
of self-government, may ensure to our country the reputation,
the safety, the prosperity, and all the other blessings
which experience proves to result from the cultivation
and improvement of the general mind."
But Jefferson was not satisfied with simply dwelling
on the benefits to spring from the adoption of his principles
of popular education; on the contrary, from his
entrance into public life, as a delegate to the General
Assembly, he was incessantly busy with plans to put these
principles into continuous operation. Before we describe
his long struggle to create a public school system,
capped by a university, some account should be given of
his attempt to increase the usefulness of the one centre
of higher culture in existence in Virginia at that time,
and of his share in projecting another of foreign origin,
which promised, during a short interval, to secure a
stable foothold. A third, as we shall discover, failed to
enlist his sympathy and support, because, from the start,
he considered its plan to be impracticable. Naturally,
as a youthful statesman but recently graduated from the
College of William and Mary, already looked upon as a
venerable seat of culture, his activities were first directed
towards the improvement of its curriculum rather than
towards the establishment of a new institution elsewhere.
The College,—which had been created by royal warrant
in the seventeenth century,—had won a high reputation
in colonial history by the broadness of its scholastic
alumni in all the avenues of colonial life. In 1779, when
Jefferson undertook to enlarge its studies and to raise
its standards, its departments were divided as follows:
First, the Grammar School. The pupils in this school
were known as scholars, and they entered it as early as
their ninth year. The Latin and Greek languages made
up an important part of their tuition. Second, the
School of Philosophy. The pupils of this school were
known as students, and they were required to wear the
collegiate cap and gown. In one section of it, rhetoric,
logic, and ethics were taught, and in the other, physics,
metaphysics, and mathematics. The degrees awarded
were those of bachelor of arts and master of arts; and
two and four years respectively were the prescribed periods
within which they were to be won. Third, the
School of Divinity. In this school, in which lessons were
given in the Hebrew language and in the history of
dogma, the instruction was assigned to two professors;
there were two professors also in the School of Philosophy;
and one in the Grammar School. A weekly lecture
was delivered by the President of the College. In addition
to these three departments, there was, for the benefit
of a fixed number of Indian boys, a course in reading,
writing, and arithmetic, and also a supplementary course
in the precepts of the catechism, and in the fundamental
doctrines of the Christian religion.
At this College from the beginning, as at all the
chief seats of learning in America during the same period,
the first consideration was given to the subject of Divinity,
but in a form that was exclusively Anglican. The
teachers, as a rule, had been educated at Oxford, and
through them, the traditional influences of that great
university had made a deep impression on the character
triumph in its government, that the marriage of a professor
aroused censure; and this was all the keener because
the majority of the faculty were clergymen; in
1758, two of the members were removed for violating
this tacit prescription of celibacy, although they protestingly
pointed to the President of the corporation as the
one who had first set so honorable and natural an example.
It was jocularly said, at a subsequent date, that
the College of William and Mary was, by an unwritten
law, compelled to justify its existence by raising a furious
controversy with a heretic at least once in the course of
every three years.[1] It was under the direct control of
the Episcopal Church, and furnished it regularly with its
principal candidates for the ministry. Every one of the
Visitors was expected to belong to this denomination;
and every one of its professors, when appointed, had to
walk up to the faculty table and sign the Thirty-nine
Articles.
In 1779, as Governor of the State, Jefferson occupied
a seat on the Board, and he took advantage of this fact
to make definite changes in the curriculum, with the design
of converting the institution into a true university.
This was the first step towards establishing somewhere
in America a centre of learning that was patterned on the
standards of the great universities of Europe. The earliest
measure called for was one that would remove all
trace of theological flavour: the School of Divinity was
cut out root and branch, and the ancient languages were
dropped. These languages had been retained among the
courses recommended by the revision of 1776, but, in
1779, it was found by Jefferson, now a Visitor, that the
the income that had gone to the support of the professorship
of Latin and Greek. The new scientific and
political studies brought in were thought by him to be of
more practical service than instruction in the ancient
languages, which, after all, could, in his judgment, be
safely left to the secondary schools already provided for
in his all-comprehensive scheme of public education.
The courses of instruction which he proposed for the
metamorphosed College of William and Mary were as
follows: (1) law and politics; (2) anatomy and medicine;
(3) physics and mathematics; (4) moral philosophy,
law of nature and nations, and the history of fine
arts; (5) modern languages; (6) the Indian School.
He was sanguine that, with the flight of time, the endowment
of the College would grow in volume as well as
the income from the ever-increasing number of students
in attendance,—a combination that would justify a great
expansion in the work of the class-rooms. He was particularly
solicitous that the literatures of the north of
Europe should be taught under its roof, as they were, he
said, so intimately connected with "our own language,
laws, customs and history." This was one of the reasons,
though not the principal one, which afterwards led
him to require the admission of Anglo-Saxon among the
studies of the University of Virginia. He thought that
the Indian School, as then conducted, was of small utility;
and he suggested as a substitute that a missionary
should be appointed, who should, in the wigwams of the
West, investigate the aboriginal system of laws, religious
traditions, and languages,—the record of all which
should be retained as a permanent possession of the
library at Williamsburg. The School of Law proposed
by him, was the first collegiate school of the kind to be
History inaugurated there in 1803; and Charles Bellini
was also the earliest professor of modern languages to
become a member of the faculty of an incorporated seat
of learning within the same area of the Continent.
At the time that Jefferson was meditating and planning
for higher education at the College of William and Mary,
he had no examples in his native State to guide him.
Hampden-Sidney College was then hardly superior to a
grammar school, and it was altogether under the control
of a sect, which he, at least, thought to be more intolerant
than the Episcopalians. Washington College,
too, though of great respectability, could lay no claim to
exalted scholarship at that early stage of its history;
and it also was under the mastery of the same vigorous
denomination. Unless he could raise and broaden the
standards of the College of William and Mary, by transforming
it into a genuine university, Virginia, he knew,
must continue to see a large stream of her most promising
young men flowing annually into the scholastic reservoirs
of the North. He was not far enough away from
his own graduation to have lost all affection for his alma
mater; and he also perceived that it possessed two conspicuous
advantages for its own advancement: (1) its
comparatively ancient origin; and (2) its situation in the
capital city. Both of these unrivaled circumstances, he
thought, would have a very strong tendency to augment
its prosperity when expanded into a university; but, unfortunately
for the general success of his scheme, the
Dissenters' prejudices had been further inflamed by the
Revolution, and this relentless sentiment was not satisfied
short of positively discouraging the extension of the
College's patronage among the families of their own denominations.
Without the friendly countenance of every
he desired. Doubtless, too, the insalubrity of
Williamsburg[2] had some influence in bringing about the
failure of his first expectations; and this harmful influence
was increased by the remoteness of the town
from the centre of the State, for, in those times, the
stage and carriage and the back of a horse were the only
means of travelling to a distance. The removal of the
Capital to Richmond at his own instance was the final
blow.
But while Jefferson's hope for the establishment of a
university was not realized in the reformed College of
William and Mary, his effort in its behalf strongly tended
to quicken his sense of the need of a higher seat of learning
in Virginia, and, undoubtedly, enabled him to study
with more discrimination every aspect of that subject
when he came to visit and inspect the foremost scholastic
institutions of Europe. That he retained a favorable
opinion of the instruction in the College of William
and Mary, as broadened and liberalized by himself, is
clearly proven by the contents of his letter to Mr. Banister
in 1785. What are the constituents of a useful
American education? he asked. "Classical knowledge,"
he replied, "modern languages,—chiefly French, Spanish
and Italian,—mathematics, natural philosophy, natural
history, ethics, and civil history. In natural philosophy,
I mean to include chemistry and agriculture, and
in natural history, to include botany as well as other
branches of those departments. It is true that the habit
of speaking the modern languages cannot be so well acquired
in America. But every other article can be as
well acquired at William and Mary College as at any
and a young man is to prepare himself for public life,
he must cast his eye for America either in law or physics.
In the former, where can he apply himself so advantageously
as to Mr. Wythe? ... The medical class is the
only one which need come to Europe."
When it is recalled that Mr. Wythe was the preceptor
in jurisprudence of both Jefferson and Marshall,—the
first, among the greatest legislative reformers, the second,
the greatest interpreter of the law, that have appeared
in American history,—this expression of opinion seems
to be devoid of the pardonable exaggeration of local partiality.
The words too were penned when his ability
to compare the relative merits of domestic and foreign
colleges had been rendered more penetrating by careful
observation of all that was to be studied in European
countries. This preference, however, did not survive his
return to America; or if it did do so, it did not reveal
itself in a second effort to convert his alma mater into
a modern university. On the contrary, we shall see that,
after the incorporation of the University of Virginia,
he sought to deprive that venerable college of her endowment
in order to provide financial support for the system
of academies which formed a section of his comprehensive
scheme for public instruction.
The correspondence of Professor William B. Rogers at a later period,
contains many references to the unhealthiness of Williamsburg.
II. Three Foreign Schemes
Before the end of the eighteenth century, there were
three foreign schemes to usher higher education into
Virginia; but only two of them aroused Jefferson's interest;
and only one obtained his practical assistance. The
earliest, the project of Quesnay de Beaurepaire, which was
of a very ambitious and grandiose character, received a
time, was residing in Paris as Minister to the Court of
Versailles. Quesnay, before setting up a school in Richmond,
with rather mixed departments of study, had been
an officer in the American army under Lafayette's command.
He was the grandson of a man who had acquired
such fame in the medical profession as to be appointed
physician to Louis XV; and had also won a high repute
as a philosopher and an economist. Quesnay had inherited
a taste for science, but like so many young Frenchmen
of his own age of good social standing, and graceful
if not solid accomplishments, had been prompted by the
spirit of adventure to accompany the French contingent
to the United States, where, during several campaigns,
he seems to have served in the capacity of an engineer.
His health broke down before the close of the war; but
he recovered sufficiently to travel widely through the
different States. He was so much impressed by all that
he saw, that he determined later to found, on the cornerstone
of his Richmond school, a grand Academy of Arts
and Sciences; and he is reported to have spoken of the
project for the first time while visiting John Page at
Rosewell, on the York. Page was so much delighted
with the plan that he encouraged him to expect financial
aid, should he be able to engage the faculty indispensable
for carrying on the work of the Academy. Subscriptions
amounting to sixty thousand francs were soon received;
a site for the building was chosen in Richmond, which
had been selected as the place for the new seat of learning;
and the edifice was actually erected in the most fashionable
quarter of the town. The foundation stone was
laid in June, 1786, in the midst of a great multitude of
interested spectators. Six councillors were nominated
by the contributors to the building fund, and as they
one of them being John Harvie, the mayor,—the author
of the project had a right to look forward to local encouragement
and assistance in the future.
Quesnay, justly elated with the progress already made,
sailed for France to secure the patronage of influential
persons in Paris, and the countenance of the Royal Government.
He pushed his scheme in the most illustrious
circles of the French capital with energy and address;
visited the studios of artists, the closets of scientists, the
sâalons of leaders of fashion, and the reception-rooms of
public officials; and everywhere, his plans were received
with expressions of sympathy and promises of financial
support. Men standing at the summit in all the great
departments of contemporary life,—literature, science,
politics and society,—graciously permitted their names
to be entered in the already voluminous list of associates.
Lafayette, Beaumarchais, Montalembert, Houdon, Condorcet,
Lavoisier, Malesherbes, Vernet, La Rochefoucauld,
—statesmen, playwrights, warriors, sculptors,
chemists, painters, wits, the most brilliant names in
France,—were enrolled among the number.
But there was one person in that splendid city who
held back from the scheme with a discouraging lack of
enthusiasm, and that man was the very one, perhaps,
whose favorable influence, and whose active co-operation,
were the most important for its practical success. On
January 6, 1788, Jefferson wrote to Quesnay in the following
language: "I feared it (the plan) was too extensive
for the poverty of the country. You remove the
objection by observing it is to extend to several States.
Whether professors itinerant from one State to another
may succeed I am unable to say, having never known an
experiment of it. The fear that those professors might
not to intermeddle in the business at all. Knowing how
much people going to America overrate the resources of
living there, I have made a point never to encourage any
person to go there, that I may not partake of the censure
which may follow this disappointment. I beg you,
therefore, not to alter your plan in any part of it on
my account, but permit me to pursue mine of being absolutely
neutral."
What were the details of the plan on which Jefferson
commented so coldly and so distantly in these remarkable
words? The Richmond Academy of Sciences was intended
to be, in spirit at least, a trans-Atlantic rival of
the great French Academy. The central organization
was to be placed in the capital of Virginia, while there
were to be co-ordinate branches in the cities of Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and New York. The list of studies was
to embrace foreign languages, mathematics, physics, design,
architecture, painting, sculpture, astronomy, geography,
chemistry, botany, anatomy, and natural history.
There was to be a large faculty on the ground; and in
addition to the instruction to be given by them, the pupils
were to have the benefit of the learning of one hundred
and seventy-five non-resident associates, eminent in both
America and Europe for their acquirements in the provinces
of their respective pursuits. Experts in every
branch of natural science especially were to be dispatched
to Richmond from Paris, not only to teach these pupils,
but also to advise the corporations and stock companies
that were about to invest in the hitherto unexploited resources
of the country. In the extensive researches
which this would call for, the young men would assist,
and thus not only garner up valuable knowledge, but, by
turning in their wages, increase the sum already lying in
societies of both hemispheres were to be kept informed
of the work of the institution by correspondence,
and also through an annual publication. Specimens of
the flora and fauna of the North American continent
were to be collected and sent to Europe to adorn its different
museums and cabinets.
There was at least one feature of this scheme that
justified Jefferson in declining to enter without reserve
into the efforts to carry it out; it was probably rendered
impracticable, as he said, by the scale on which it was
projected. But why was it that he failed to offer a single
suggestion towards lopping off the worst of its faults
in order to reduce it to a shape that might make it workable?
It was very unlike him to look at such a scheme
with coldness, if there was any room whatever for hope
of success. Did he jump beyond its apparently bald infeasibility
and disapprove of it because it locked horns
with the plan of a university which he was undoubtedly
pondering over at this time, and which he had already
perhaps decided to build, if possible, in the shadow of
Monticello? Was the choice of Richmond, an hundred
miles away, as the site of the new Academy, the true reason
for an indifference which he had never before shown,
and was never again to show, about any university scheme
brought to his attention? The plan of transporting the
College of Geneva to Virginia, which arose a few years
later, was seemingly as impracticable in its character as
Quesnay's plan, and yet it secured Jefferson's earnest and
energetic support. There is no reason to doubt that he
expected this college to be re-established in visiting distance
of his own home at least. If he was really influenced
by personal reasons in both cases, it was due to
his perfectly correct impression that, if a university was
succeeding under his own direct patronage and supervision
than if left to the inadvertence and inexperience
of foreigners, settled an hundred miles from Monticello.
The scheme of a transplanted French Academy fell
through, not because it was impracticable, as it possibly
was, but because the hour was unfavorable for its success.
It did not pass beyond the selection of a course of
studies, and the nomination of Dr. Jean Rouvelle as the
instructor in natural history and chemistry; but there is
no reason to presume that it would not have been at least
organized had not the French Revolution, like a cyclone,
been coming up, with all the distracting influences that
went before its actual outburst. Socially and financially,
France was in no state to give such a scheme the continuous
support which it required, and naturally the scheme
itself, as well as its author, finally sank into oblivion.
But although it had never been put to the test of actual
working, it yet left a perceptible impression on Jeffer
son's views in spite of his refusal to encourage it. Of
all the plans for higher education canvassed in Virginia
before the incorporation of the State University, this
had the most affinity with the noble plan which he set in
operation in 1825. The scientific bias that so conspicuously
distinguished it was the one with which he was
most enthusiastically in sympathy; and it was also the one
that he was most anxious to give to his own seat of learning.
And in addition, he adopted for that institution the
system of separate schools which Quesnay had expected
to introduce at Richmond.
We have seen that Jefferson refused to countenance
Quesnay's projected academy because he was afraid lest
the foreign professors, disappointed in their venture,
should turn on him in censure, and yet, in 1794, eight
College of Geneva to remove that seat of learning to
Virginia. He did not seem to worry about the risk of
their criticism should the purposes for which alone they
wished to emigrate, fail. There was no difference in
spirit at least between the scheme of Quesnay and the
scheme of D'Ivernois. It is true that there was a turgidity
about Quesnay's that was absent from D'Ivernois's;
but this inflation would certainly have passed away
under the influence of the practical Americans who would
have co-operated with the Frenchman. The Genevans,
on the other hand, were handicapped by that form of
sectarianism which was most irksome to Jefferson's latitudinarian
sympathies: Calvinism; but he seems to have
been willing to wink at this drawback, as well as at the
professors' inability to lecture in any language but that
of their own country. It must, however, be borne in
mind that these men were an organized body of high reputation
in all scientific and literary spheres; and several
of them had been thrown with him personally during his
sojourn in Paris. It was this fact that led D'Ivernois,
when his faculty had become dissatisfied with their environment
in Switzerland, to consult him by letter as to
the wisdom of uprooting their famous college and replanting
it in the United States. Jefferson promptly submitted
this proposal to certain influential members of the
General Assembly, at the same time expressing the hope
that provision would be made out of the public treasury
to meet the expense of the transfer; but he was quickly
condemned to disappointment, for the reply was returned
that the State was not in the financial shape to take on
so burdensome a charge. It was asserted too that no
pupils would be found who could understand lectures in
the French tongue; and furthermore, that this scheme,
of the community to be served.
All these objections had very properly been considered
by Jefferson to be of great weight when he was discountenancing
the Richmond Academy, but he was now so
much in earnest that, when the Legislature failed to respond
to his wishes, he turned for aid to General Washington,
who, having been presented by that body with
stock in the Potomac and James River Companies, had
announced his intention of giving it all away for the
promotion of higher education. Jefferson pressed upon
him the point, that, as the Treasury of Virginia would
pay the dividends on this stock, this State should have the
preference in the selection of the site for the National
University which Washington had so long carried in
his thoughts. This site might be chosen in the vicinity
of the new Capital, if the influence of such a centre
should be decided to be essential to its dignity and success.
Washington at once disclosed that he was not in
sympathy with Jefferson's suggestion. He was convinced,
like the General Assembly, that the restriction
of the lectures to the French languages would destroy
the usefulness of the Genevan faculty in Virginia; and
moreover, as that faculty disapproved of the popular
freedom now enjoyed by the French, it was not probable
that they would find themselves in harmony with
their environment in the New World. But he was so
far impressed by Jefferson's appeal that he gave the
shares in the James River Company belonging to him
to the college at Lexington, with the understanding that
such of its students as should desire to obtain a more advanced
education should seek it in that National University
in the Capital which he intended endowing with
his shares in the Potomac Company.
When Jefferson reported to D'Ivernois his failure to
enlist support for his plan, either public or private, an
echo of regret vibrated in the tone of his letter: "I
should have seen with peculiar satisfaction," he wrote,
"the establishment of such a mass of science in my country,
and should probably have been tempted to approach
myself to it by procuring a residence in its neighborhood
at those seasons of the year when the operations of agriculture
are less active and interesting." So far as can be
discerned, the scheme of the Geneva College left no impression
on his plans for his own university beyond perhaps
satisfying him that foreign professors would not
object to a permanent appointment in Virginia; and it
was, no doubt, this conviction which, many years afterwards,
led him, through Mr. Gilmer, to invite certain
English scholars and scientists to occupy chairs in the
seat of learning which he had founded at Charlottesville.
But he was careful then to introduce no instructors from
the continent,—unless Dr. Blaettermann, who was residing
in England, can be taken to be such,—perhaps, because
he recalled the objections which had been urged,
in 1794, by the General Assembly and by Washington
in opposition to the College of Geneva.
An influence that bore more directly on Jefferson's desire
for a system of higher education in Virginia, had its
spring with Du Pont de Nemours, whom he had known
familiarly while the American minister in Paris. Du
Pont reached the United States in 1800, and during his
sojourn there, was an acceptable visitor at Monticello
on numerous occasions. This accomplished Frenchman,
who had already given much meditation to the subject
in France, drew up a treatise on popular education, which,
at this time, was deeply engaging the thoughts of some
of the most distinguished men in America. Instruction
was discussed in this memorable volume. These
advanced courses were to cover, besides other ground, all
the varied topics of professional and technical education.
The different institutions, representing every grade, from
common school to college, in which instruction was to be
given, were to be scattered here and there about the country
at large; but the apex of the whole system was to be
the National University in Washington. This grand
central institution was to consist of four distinct schools:
(1) medicine; (2) mines; (3) social science and legislation;
and (4) higher mathematics. These schools
were to assemble in one large building, but to remain
always entirely separate. There was to be erected, in
addition, an imposing national library, and also a vast
national museum, with apartments reserved for the sessions
of a National Philosophical Society. This plan of
Du Pont was, no doubt, suggested by the system which
already prevailed in Paris; but it was also modeled somewhat
on the scheme incorporated in the Bill of 1779 for
the diffusion of knowledge among the Virginian people.
It brought up to Jefferson ideas that he had already acquired
by his residence abroad rather than ideas newly imported,
which he had not turned over before in his reflections
on the subject of education in all its departments.
It was one of the most obvious peculiarities of all
Jefferson's schemes for the advancement of education
that he confined their practical, though not their theoretical,
scope to the inhabitants of his native State. The National
University of Washington and Du Pont made no
appeal to him, perhaps because he feared lest such a seat
of learning should nourish those principles of consolidation,
which, as we have seen, he detested so vehemently.
towards Quesnay that the Richmond Academy was not
intended to stand alone, but to possess branches in at least
three of the States north of the Potomac. To a clearly
defined extent, this institution was to have a national
bearing, a characteristic that was absent from the scheme
of the Swiss college, which he received with such prompt
and unreserved encouragement.
III. Bill of 1779
The first of all Jefferson's practical measures for public
education was the Bill of 1779, which carried no expressed
purpose in its text that was to reach beyond the
borders of Virginia, yet, as it was based upon principles
that went down to the foundation of society, its scope, in
its broadest significance, was really as universal as the
scope of the Declaration of Independence itself. In taking
up the subject of his share in the drafting of this bill,
we have come to the most interesting chapter in his career
as an educational reformer previous to the establishment
of the University of Virginia. By this measure, he
sought to create in his native State, even before the fires
of the Revolution had burnt out, a system of public instruction
so far ahead of his times that the community
continued too unripe to receive it until the War of Secession
had removed everyone of those impediments, which
he, with all his zeal and persistency, had found it impossible
to surmount. But the credit due him should not be
diminished but enhanced by the deferred consummation
of his complete design, for it proved that his foresight
was one hundred years in advance of the vision of the
great body of his own countrymen. It was, however, no
new and untried theory that he endeavored to put in
was the duty of the State to educate all its citizens had
prevailed in many coteries in Europe, but it was not until
the eighteenth century that the politico-economical value
of that concept was fully tested by Prussia and Austria
in a scheme of popular instruction scientifically ordered
and rigidly enforced. Massachusetts had adopted a similar
scheme as early as 1647. At first, the system in that
colony stood upon a religious platform; next, the purely
utilitarian view intruded; and then, finally, the belief that,
by universal education, the people could be trained to
govern themselves more wisely, and to preserve their
political freedom more securely.
The latter was the opinion which Jefferson himself
entertained. He wrote Washington, in 1786, that the
liberties of the community were only safe when they were
in the grasp of an "instructed people"; and that it
was the business of the State to give this instruction; and
that this could not be done successfully except in harmony
with a general plan. What he thought that general plan
should be was very lucidly expressed in the bill of 1779.
At the time that he drew up this bill, the schools of Virginia
differed but little in quality from those in existence
there during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
there were the home schools for the children of affluent
planters taught by private tutors; the old field schools
for the children of the upper and middle classes alike;
and the College of William and Mary for the higher
training of all who aspired to it. Jefferson, in later
years, justly claimed for himself the credit of having
been the first citizen of the State to propose, in a formal
way, the substitution of a concatenated system of public
education for the unarticulated methods of private education
which he discovered in use in his youth. Early in
chosen as the chairman of the committee appointed to
revise the laws of the new Commonwealth. After the
elimination of Mason by resignation, and of Lee by
death, this committee was composed of Wythe, Pendleton,
and himself, the three men whom the entire community
acknowledged to be the most fully and nicely
equipped for the work in view to be found in Virginia;
but that work was really performed by Jefferson and
Wythe, pupil and master of old, who were keenly in sympathy
with each other in liberality of opinion, and quite
on a level in breadth of information. As a proof of
their insatiable appetite for their task, it is reported of
them that they went carefully through the whole collection
of British and Colonial statutes, and drew out those
that seemed to them to be most apposite to the genius,
and most fostering to the peace and prosperity, of the
Virginian people.
Of the one hundred and twenty-six bills in which their
conclusions were precisely incorporated, the one for the
diffusion of knowledge was hammered into shape by Jefferson
alone. It was drawn up, in reality, in the form
of three bills, which provided (1) for the erection of
primary schools,—in which the children of all classes
were to be taught the rudiments of education,—and of
colleges, in which all higher grades were to be open to
older pupils; (2) for the establishment of a university in
the broadest sense of the word; and (3) for the collection
of a great library, to be used by students and readers
of all ages. Jefferson, in drafting this bill, did not narrow
his gaze to the intellectual and moral advantages of
education only, but, looking forward, he was convinced
that he had raised a new bulwark for the defense of political
freedom, by providing for the division of each
schools.
An examination of the preamble of this famous bill
reveals that it was written under the influence of all those
emotions which were most inflamed by the Revolutionary
struggle that was still in progress. All persons in power,
it states in substance, are invariably inclined to use that
power for the ends of tyranny. How is this disposition to
be combated? By educating the people so thoroughly
that they will be able to detect at once the encroachments
of sinister and scheming office-holders, and to block them
before any permanent damage is done. Education too
will make the average office-holder himself more solicitous
to guard the rights and liberties of citizens as well as
more competent to administer their affairs.
The practical clauses of the bill provided for the election
in every county of three persons to be known as aldermen,
who were to meet first at the court-house to divide
the county into hundreds, each of which was to embrace
a sufficient number of pupils to make up a school. The
site of the school-house having been chosen by the voters
of the hundred, the aldermen were to erect a suitable
building thereon, in which were to gather the children
for instruction in reading, writing, and common arithmetic,
and also in Roman, Greek, English and American
history. They were to be at no expense for this tuition
during the first three years of their attendance. Each set
of ten schools was to be under the supervision of officers,
with authority to appoint the teachers, to visit the several
school-houses, and to inspect and question the pupils;
and each school was to be subject to a competent overseer.
Next the State was to be divided into groups of
counties with a view to the establishment of colleges for
secondary education. The overseers of the elementary
of that group, which they were required to construct
of brick or stone, with ten or twelve lodging rooms for
the use of double that number of pupils. A master and
usher were, in each college, to give instruction in the
Greek and Latin languages, English grammar, geography,
and the higher branches of arithmetic,—for such was
the course which Jefferson thought to be sufficient for the
education of the average person who was in the possession
of an easy fortune. Each college was to be under
the watchful and controlling eyes of a rector and board
of visitors, who were to select its teachers and administer
its finances.
The expense of gathering up food for the students, employing
a steward, and hiring servants, was to be divided
among the pupils. Those among them who were attending
the classes gratuitously were also to be relieved,
through the public treasury, of the cost of subsistence,
while the balance of the expenses was to be met by the
parents of the pupils who were able to pay. Every elementary
school in each group of counties was to have
the right to enter its most promising scholar each year,
without charge, in the college of that district, if his father
or guardian was too indigent to provide for his
necessary outlay. Annually, too, one third of the boys
thus advanced were to be dropped from the roll; and of
those who should succeed in remaining two years because
of their industry and talents, one was to be retained, with
the privilege of staying two years longer in the college.
The students who should thus signalize themselves were
to be chosen as seniors; and every year one senior was
to be selected from the whole number of those in attendance
at each college, to be sent on to William and Mary
University,—for the bill, as we see, converted that institution
and boarded at the public charge. This regulation would
assure the presence annually in Williamsburg of about
twenty young men of no fortune, who had exhibited in
the colleges superior capacity and scholarship, and who
would, otherwise, have failed to receive the higher education
to which their ability and diligence justly entitled
them.
There were four remarkable features in this scheme
of public instruction. The first was that the pupils in
the elementary schools, which embraced the children of
the entire white population, were to be grounded in history,
both ancient and modern. The reason given for
this provision was characteristic of Jefferson: by apprising
them of the experience of other times and other nations,
they would be the better qualified to fortify themselves
against the intrigues of lurking tyranny. A second feature
was that it would enable the poorest boys of talent to
enjoy every advantage of education that was in the reach
of the sons of the wealthy. And, thirdly, by giving an
opportunity to youths of promise to advance from the
lowest to the highest grade,—that is to say, from the elementary
school to the university,—it would knit all parts
of the system firmly together. Finally, by imposing local
taxes for the support of the elementary schools, it would
establish a principle that would entirely relieve the State
treasury of their charge, and also ensure a more careful
attention to the proper use of the money to be raised, by
obtaining it exclusively from the parents of the pupils
immediately benefited.
By the terms of the second bill, the College of William
and Mary was to be transformed into a veritable university.
The courses of instruction laid off for it, in its altered
form, were to be distributed under the following
law, theology, and also ecclesiastical history so far as it
was not coupled with sectarianism. No provision seems
to have been made for languages, perhaps because the
Greek and Latin tongues were expected to make up an essential
part of the curriculum of the district colleges.
Under the head of applied science, military and naval
science was to be taught; horticulture and agriculture too;
and also the practical relations of science to the arts and
manufactures, to medicine, surgery, and pharmacy.
It was Jefferson's opinion that the whole educational
scheme of 1779 failed to become law largely on account
of this second bill. He had hoped that, by arranging
for the elementary schools and colleges in a separate
measure, and by making the divinity course at the new
university purely historical, he would disarm the hostility
of the Presbyterians and Baptists, and bring them to a
hearty concurrence with his plans; but they soon began
to suspect that there was some secret purpose to favor
the Episcopalians by placing the old Episcopal College
at the apex of the public school system; and they coldly
turned their patronage away from the whole design.[3]
But it is possible that the reluctance of the property-holders
to shoulder the additional taxes, which, as will be seen,
cropped up in 1796, when the like plan was broached,
had much to do with the defeat of these educational bills.
Had Jefferson not been kept out of the State by his mission
to France, and afterwards, by his occupancy of a seat
in Washington's Cabinet, his energy and persistency,
brought to bear directly on the spot, would, perhaps, have
led to the early adoption of his scheme of popular education,
1796, but in positive actual practice.
Jefferson wrote to Dr. Priestley, "As I had preferred that William
and Mary, under an improved form, should be the University, and it
was, at that time, pretty highly Episcopal, the Dissenters, after a while
began to apprehend some secret design of preference for that sect."
IV. Jefferson's Schemes of Popular Education
It was not until the close of his Presidential term in
1809, that Jefferson was so completely released from all
official responsibilities that he could fix his mind continuously
on the subject which had enlisted his earnest sympathy
and support so early in his political career. Hardly
had he taken up his residence under the roof of Monticello,
when he once more turns to that subject, and during
the remainder of his long life, it held a place in the very
centre of all his daily thoughts. In no form did these
ponderings find a weightier expression than in his famous
letter to Peter Carr, in 1814. In that letter, he again
laid down the various lines which a system of public instruction,
in his judgment, should follow. Again he
broadly declared, by way of introduction, that every citizen
was entitled to an education commensurate with his
condition and calling in life. How was this to be determined?
By the social station to which he belonged.
The whole community was capable of division into two
classes: (1) the laboring class; and (2) the learned class.
Members of the first would require elementary tuition to
qualify them for the proper performance of their tasks;
members of the second would need it as an indispensable
forerunner to further study. So soon as the primary
school had been left behind, the laboring class were expected
to begin the pursuit of agriculture, or serve apprenticeships
in different handicrafts, while, on the other
hand, the learned class were expected to enter the colleges,
which were to be divided into General Schools and
Professional Schools, representing, respectively, the second
The entire learned class was to receive their secondary
training in the General Schools, in which the highest
branches of knowledge were to be taught. The round
of studies there was to embrace the languages, mathematics,
and philosophy. Provision was to be made in
the department of languages for lessons in history, both
ancient and modern; and belles-lettres, rhetoric, and oratory
were also to be included in this department as well
as such special tuition as was suited to the needs of the
deaf and dumb. The course in mathematics was to embrace
pure mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history,
and anatomy and the theory of medicine, while the
course in philosophy should take in ideology, ethics, the
law of nature and nations, government, and political
economy. The Professional Schools,—to which all deciding
to follow a profession were to have access, after
passing through the General Schools,—were to cover as
wide a field as the latter, but on a higher level; they were
to consist of three distinct divisions: (1) department of
fine arts, which was to embrace civil architecture, painting,
sculpture, and the theory of music; (2) department
of military and naval architecture, projectiles, agriculture,
horticulture, technical philosophy, practice of medicine,
materia medica, pharmacy, and surgery; (3) department
of theology and ecclesiastical history, and municipal and
foreign law.
These several departments were designed to offer the
graduate of the General Schools the opportunity to acquire
the necessary knowledge of any one of the following
professional subjects: law, medicine, theology, agriculture,
army and navy architecture, painting, and landscape
gardening. In the school of technical philosophy,
metallurgist, founder, cutler, druggist, vintner, distiller,
dyer, bleacher, soapmaker, tanner, powder-maker, saltmaker,
and glass-maker, and in all the other arts pursued
by practical tradesmen. In the same school, there
would be assembled students in geometry, pure mechanics,
statics, hydraulics, navigation, astronomy, optics, pneumatics,
acoustics, physics, chemistry, natural history, botany,
mineralogy and pharmacy. All these branches of
study were to be maintained at the public expense. And
on appointed days, the entire corps of scholars in each
college were to be trained in manual exercises, and in
military evolutions and manoeuvres.
This letter to Peter Carr,—of which we have given
only a meagre synopsis,—contains the most complete description
which Jefferson ever drew up of his plans for
public education. It reveals that his point of view had
not changed in spite of the interval of forty years since
1776, during which his observations and impressions of
scholastic institutions of every sort had been broadened
and ripened by foreign travel. He himself, in a letter
written to Governor Nicholas in 1816, referred to it as
a digest of all the information which he had been able
to gather on the subject upon which it bore; and it will
always possess an uncommon interest as foreshadowing
the courses of instruction which he introduced into the
lecture-rooms of the University of Virginia. In the teeth
of popular hostility, he persisted in pronouncing the local
school, supported by local taxation, to be the only proper
one for elementary tuition; and time and reflection, he
said, had but confirmed his opinion as to the correctness
of the general principle of subdividing the counties into
wards for this purpose.
Jefferson perceived very clearly that the sentiment of
of public instruction in earnest, with the establishment of
the Literary Fund in 1810, gave the priority to elementary
education over collegiate and university education, at
the State's expense. Was it possible for the resources of
the Commonwealth to sustain the entire system as urged
by him? If that system was to be kept up, as a whole,
he was precisely right in thinking that the elementary
schools should be maintained by local taxation, and the
general funds of the State reserved for the support of
advanced tuition. And this opinion he again engrafted
in the bill which he was requested by Joseph C. Cabell,
in 1817, to prepare for submission to the General Assembly
during the session of 1817–1818. "If twelve or fifteen
hundred schools," he wrote, "are to be placed under
one general administration, an attention so divided will
amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is
surely better then to place each school at once under the
care of those most interested in its conduct. In this
way, the Literary Fund is left untouched to complete at
once the whole system of education by establishing a college
in every district of about eighty miles square, for
the second grade of education; and for the third grade, a
single university, where the sciences shall be taught in
their highest degree." The new bill which he presented
was at first entitled an Act for Establishing Elementary
Schools, but it was subsequently expanded in its scope to
take in numerous colleges and a university, and was then
entitled: A Bill to Establish a System of Public Education.
There is an undertone of pathos in the letter which
he wrote to Cabell when sending on its final draft: "I
wish it to be understood," he said, "that I do not intermeddle
with public affairs. It is my duty, and equally
my wish, to leave them to those who are to feel the benefit
of education and wards has seduced me into the part
which I have taken as to them, and still attaches me to
their success. ... There is a time to retire from labor,
and that time has come for me."
This bill differed only in petty details from the bill of
1779, or from the scheme of general education set forth
in the letter to Peter Carr, in 1814. First, a school was
to be established in each ward, in which the children of
that ward alone were to receive instruction during three
years at the common charge. The school-house and the
dwelling-house for the teacher were to be built by the
parents at their own expense. A log cabin was to be
considered sufficient in each instance, since the constant
shifting of the population was certain to render necessary
the frequent removal of both houses to some situation
more convenient for the majority of the pupils in
attendance. A teacher capable of grounding these pupils
in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, was to
be employed at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars
a year, with an allowance of bread and meat for subsistence.
In selecting the instructors, the board of visitors,
who were to have charge of the schools, were always to
give the preference to members of the laboring class, such
as mechanics, overseers, and tillers of the soil; and among
these, the first choice should fall on persons who were
infirm in health, crippled in limb, or advanced in years.
Secondly, the State was to be divided into nine districts,
in each of which a college was to be erected, to
be subject to a board of visitors composed of one member
from each county belonging to that district, and all under
the control of the President and Directors of the Literary
Fund. There was to be built for each college a house
of brick or stone, to contain two rooms in which the recitations
with sixteen dormitories for the accommodation of thirtytwo
pupils. There were to be two instructors, at least;
and they were to be required to teach the Greek, Latin,
French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages, the
higher branches of mathematics, the mensuration of land,
the handling of globes, and the fundamental rules of navigation.
Each professor was to receive five hundred dollars
out of the Literary Fund of the State, with such additions
as should accrue from the tuition fees of the members
of his classes; who were also expected to pay rent for
their apartments and the charges for their board.
Thirdly, a university was to be established in a healthy
and central part of the State; and here all the divisions of
the useful arts were to be taught in their highest branches.
Visitors were to be annually nominated by the President
and Directors of the Literary Fund, now to be known
as the Board of Public Instruction; the site of the new
institution was to be chosen by the first set of these visitors;
but the plan of the buildings was to be furnished, or
at least, approved by the Central Board. The dormitories
were to be so constructed as to admit of additions to
their dimensions as the number of students should increase.
The professors were not to exceed ten in number;
and the fixed salary of each should be one thousand
dollars, to be swelled by the tuition fees of his pupils.
The courses of instruction were to embrace history,
geography, natural philosophy, agriculture, chemistry,
theory of medicine, anatomy, botany, zoology, mineralogy,
geology, pure and mixed mathematics, military and
naval science, ideology, ethics, the law of nature and nations,
municipal and foreign law, the science of civil government,
political economy, languages, rhetoric, belleslettres,
and the fine arts. The visitors were to have the
and overlook all officers and agents; select the professors;
and draw up rules for the general discipline of the students
and regulations for their subsistence.
When Jefferson drafted this bill for public education
he was eager for the conversion of Central College into
the University of Virginia; and he went so far as to insert
the name of the former seat of learning in the alternate
column opposite the words that required the choice of a
site for the projected university to be made in a central
and healthy part of the State. He did this with the hope
that the General Assembly would, if the bill were accepted,
authorize the adoption of this secondary clause by
amendment.
The bill is significant from another point of view: now
that Jefferson was actively employed in building Central
College, and was looking forward to its transformation
into a great State university, which would need a large
annual appropriation for its support, he appeared to be
less generous and less enlightened in his attitude towards
primary education. Log cabins for schoolhouses and
crippled mechanics for teachers seem to be a rather scant
provision for elementary tuition; and in making such a
suggestion, he plainly had cheapness in view to an extent
that promised little for the real improvement of the class
that needed instruction most. He would hardly have
ventured on this suggestion, had he not apprehended that
an appropriation by the State at large for elementary education
would diminish the chance of obtaining an appropriation
for university education. In 1820, when the
highest branch of his general plan had been adopted, and
the University of Virginia was in the course of erection,
his fear of a shortened State bounty for that institution
returned, and again he deprecated a large outlay for the
wrote to Cabell that year, in repetition of his old scheme,
"meeting together as when they work the roads, building
good log-houses for their school and teacher, and contributing
for his provision rations of pork, beef, and
corn in proportion each of his other taxes, would thus
lodge and feed him without feeling it; and those of them
who were able, paying for the tuition of their own children,
would leave no call on the public fund but for the
tuition fee of here and there an individual pauper, who
would still be fed and lodged with his parents."[4]
There was an additional reason now,—and a highly
characteristic one, too,—why Jefferson advocated the
ward school: it would keep elementary education out of
the hands of fanatical preachers, "who, in the county
elections," he said, "would be universally chosen, and
the predominant sect of the county would possess itself
of all its schools."
But while he appeared to be inclined to favor the
higher institutions at the expense of the dignity and prosperity
of the elementary schools at this particular moment
of his career, he never swerved in his loyalty to his
general plan; and he went so far as to write to Cabell, in
1823, that, were it necessary to give up either the primary
schools or the university, he would rather abandon the
university, "because it was safer to have a whole people
respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science,
and the many in ignorance." "The last," he added,
"is the most dangerous in which a people can be." He
saw at this time, with regretful clearness, that the resources
of the Literary Fund were not sufficient to support
that entire system of public education which he had
so long urged, and he preferred that the second grade,
lopping off had to be done, because the large body of
students who expected to attend these colleges, were the
offspring of parents of some fortune, who could easily afford
to send them to academies of repute already in existence.
But how closely he still had the intermediate
schools in his old scheme at heart was revealed in the
plan which he sent to Cabell in 1824, when it was proposed
to remove the College of William and Mary from
Williamsburg to Richmond. He, as well as Cabell, was
hostile to that step as tending to jeopardize the success
of the University of Virginia, now on the point of throwing
open its doors. It seems that the College of William
and Mary possessed an endowment fund of one hundred
thousand dollars. Now, exclaimed Jefferson, we have an
opportunity of establishing the secondary colleges; let the
General Assembly strip the old institution of its fortune
and distribute it, in the form of endowment funds of
ten thousand dollars each, among the ten colleges which
should be erected in the ten districts into which Virginia
should at once be divided. This would relieve the central
treasury of the tax that would have to be imposed,
should these colleges have to be set up at the State's expense.
The College of William and Mary might be
reserved as one of them; so might Washington College;
and so might Hampden-Sidney College too. Thus out
of one college, there might be created ten, every one of
which would be as useful as the mother of them all, now
reduced to the level of her own numerous offspring.
Cabell threw cold water on the proposition, because, in
his judgment, the pear of public opinion was not ripe for
it; and in addition, the colleges then in existence could
not be effectively insinuated into the projected system.
This, however, was not thought by Jefferson to be essential,
endowment fund, would, he anticipated, be willing to contribute
a site and the buildings for the institution assigned
to it. As the College of William and Mary was not removed
to Richmond, the liberal disposition of its funds
which he rather gratuitously suggested, ceased to be a
practical question. When, for the last time, he brought
forward his general plan for public instruction, he stood
only a little way from the closing year of his long life.
While it may be correctly said of him that he had shown
more energy in pushing that part of his scheme which
looked to the establishment of a university, nevertheless
he made no groundless claim when he asserted, in 1818,
that "a system of general education, which shall reach
every description of our citizens, from the richest to the
poorest, as it was the earliest, so it will be the latest of
all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to
take an interest." In his advocacy of that system, he
had remained singularly consistent to his original plan,
from 1779, when it was first publicly broached, down to
1825, when it was last brought up. First, there were to
be the elementary schools, which were to be confined to
the hundreds or wards into which every county was to be
divided; secondly, the grammar schools, which were
really classical academies or colleges; and thirdly, a State
university. "But I am not tenacious," he earnestly declared
in 1818, "of the form in which it (public education)
shall be introduced. Be that what it may, our
descendants will be as wise as we are, and will know how
to amend it until it shall suit their circumstances. Give it
to us in any shape, and receive for the inestimable boon
the thanks of the young and the blessings of the old, who
are past all other but prayers for the prosperity of their
country and blessings for those who promote it."
V. Educational Measures Adopted
How far was this boon, which the venerable statesman
had striven so persistently and so disinterestedly throughout
his long career to bestow, conferred by legislative action
previous to the establishment of the University of
Virginia? To what degree did his comprehensive scheme
fall short of legislative consummation, and why did it
fail to that extent? A variety of influences were working
to scotch his activities in this field, if not to make them
wholly abortive and fruitless. In a letter to Cabell,
dated February 4, 1826, he said, "I have been long sensible,
that while I was endeavoring to render our country
the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the
public education, and placing our rising generation on
the level of our sister states, which they have proudly
held heretofore, I was discharging the odious function of a
physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient
insensible of needing it."
In reality, the patient declined to take any of the
medicine, except in a dose so small and so diluted as
to produce no perceptible improvement in his condition.
Although Jefferson informs us that the bill of 1779 was
received at first "with enthusiasm," it soon had no spark
of life in its bowels, and lay as it were still-born in the
minutes of the General Assembly for seventeen years. In
1796, a bill was introduced which was based in substance
on the principle of that of 1779, so far as the latter bill
related to elementary schools; and it was only to such
schools that the new measure applied. Each county having
been divided into districts, aldermen were to be chosen
by its voters to decide upon the expediency of summoning
the householders of each district together to pass upon
the question of erecting primary schools for that district.
of such schools,—which every child within its
bounds was at liberty to attend three years without charge,
—then a local tax was to be levied to meet the cost of
the school-house, its site, and the services of a teacher.
Unfortunately, an amendment granted the right to the
county court to determine the year in which the aldermen
were to be appointed, and until this was done, no
valid election could be held by the householders. This
clause, which was really inserted to sound the death-knell
of the bill, was a subtle political device at bottom. The
members of the General Assembly knew that the measure
was a popular one with the lowest class of voters, and an
unpopular one with the highest class, and they, therefore,
shifted the responsibility from themselves to the magistrates,
without appearing to be at all opposed to the
wishes of their constituents. It is certain that the magistrates
as a body felt no sympathy with any general plan
of popular education; and in addition, were not disposed,
as the representatives of the wealth of the community, to
shoulder the expense of providing free instruction for the
children of their less fortunate neighbors. They refused
to acknowledge the force of Jefferson's argument
that they would profit by public education because it would
people every countryside "with honest, useful, and enlightened
citizens"; nor did they discover any pertinency
to themselves in his suggestion that, as there were only
three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves,
their grandchildren, having fallen to the level of the
poor, would have to depend upon the taxes paid by the
rich for their restoration, through education, to the affluence
and social position of their grandfathers.
The opportunity opened up by this Act was used only
by those few counties which were sagacious enough to perceive
of their population. On the other hand, into such comparative
neglect did collegiate tuition in his native State
during the next few decades, gradually sink that Jefferson
thought himself justified in saying that the Old Dominion
was in immediate danger of becoming the "Barbary
of the Union." "The mass of education in Virginia
before the Revolution," he exclaimed, with an undisguised
bitterness, "placed her foremost of her sister colonies.
What is her condition now? Where is it? We have to
import like beggars from other States, or import their
beggars to bestow on us their miserable crumbs." It was
estimated that, down to 1825, the number of pupils in
attendance at the three important colleges, William and
Mary, Washington, and Hampden-Sidney, did not annually
rise above one hundred and fifty. On the other
hand, nearly one half of all the matriculates of Princeton,
from year to year, at this time, were said to be young
men from Virginia; and it was calculated that a quarter
of a million of dollars was, during every twelve months,
paid into the treasuries of Northern institutions by students
coming up from that State Perhaps this was not
so great an evil in itself as Jefferson was inclined to think,
for, by drawing young men from the South into the North
even temporarily, it had a tendency to nourish a stronger
national feeling, and to lessen the narrow and mischievous
spirit of provincialism. The reciprocation lay in the
large band of tutors from Northern States, who, during
this period, were employed in wealthy Virginian families;
they were, with few exceptions, graduates of Northern
colleges; and many of them bore old and honorable
names. It was not their scholarship, but their inherited
leaning towards Federalism, in most instances, that probably
prompted Jefferson to describe them as "beggars,"
grave injustice.
Even if he exaggerated the need of more numerous
facilities for secondary instruction,—which, in reality,
were fairly abundant,—he was right in lamenting the
languishing condition of higher education and in condemning
the very small provision for primary education which
existed in Virginia at this time. After his return to
Monticello, in 1809,—his incumbency of the Presidency
having come to an end,—he began at once to exert his influence
to bring about an improvement; and a revival of
interest in the subject in the public mind was soon to be
noted. Governor Monroe, in 1801 and 1802, and Governor
Cabell, in 1806 and 1808, had, in their annual
messages, referred to the shrinkage of general education
in the State, but no popular response had followed. In
October, 1809, Jefferson was the guest of Governor Tyler,
a man ardently in sympathy with him in all his plans for
the public welfare, and it is possible that the conference
of the two, on this occasion, was the root of the noble
message submitted by Tyler, in December of the same
year, to the General Assembly, in which he urged, with
earnest and far-sighted patriotism, the needs of Virginia
in the way of popular instruction. Tyler had been
among the most zealous supporters of the bill of 1779,
and had, at all times, upheld the plans which Jefferson
had framed for the curtailment of the general illiteracy.
That part of his message which related to education was
referred, in December, to a committee, who, in the following
January, reported the bill that authorized the
establishment of the Literary Fund.
This beneficent measure, which alone enabled Jefferson
to carry out a part,—fortunately the greater part,—
of his splendid scheme of popular education, passed the
that all escheats, compositions, fines, penalties, and forfeitures,
should be especially reserved for the encouragement
of learning. Its author was James Barbour, who
was then the Speaker of the House, and afterwards a
distinguished figure in national politics.[5] The fund thus
created was designed primarily for the instruction of the
poor, but as the parents of indigent children were slow
to take advantage of it, it was, in time, expended chiefly
for the benefit of the higher seats of learning. During
the session of 1815–16, the remainder of the principal
of the debt due Virginia by the National Government
was transferred to the credit of this fund, which, by
December, 1817, had grown to nearly one million dollars.
So soon as it was created, the principal and interest were
put under the control of a Board known as the President
and Directors of the Literary Fund, a body which was
composed of the Governor of the State, the LieutenantGovernor,
the Treasurer, Attorney-General, and President
of the Court of Appeals,—the foremost officials
and most responsible men in the Commonwealth. In
January, 1816, Cabell had shown Charles Fenton Mercer,
the Chairman of the Committee on Finance in the
House of Delegates, a copy of the letter written by Jefferson
to Peter Carr, in 1814, which gave in detail his
views as to the system of public education to be set underway
in Virginia.[6] This letter was also published in
adopted February 24, 1816, which required the
President and Directors of the Literary Fund to report
to the Legislature an elaborate scheme of public instruction.
On December 6, 1816, this scheme was submitted,
and was found to consist of a graded system of
schools; namely, elementary schools, academies, and a
university.
How had the Board arrived at a decision in harmony
at least with the framework of Jefferson's plan? The
President of that body was Governor Nicholas, a friend
and fellow-countyman. He had applied to Jefferson
for advice so soon as the report was ordered, and Jefferson
had suggested that he should read his letter to Peter
Carr as embodying his ripest thought about the subject
under investigation. While counsel was obtained by the
Board from many distinguished men, both in America
and in Europe,—whose letters were formally delivered
with the report,—its recommendations bore, in their
main features certainly, the perceptible stamp of Jefferson's
long projected system of public education. There
was the partition of the county into wards or townships
for the establishment of elementary schools; there was
the division of the State into districts for the establishment
of academies, in which the Latin, Greek and French
languages, mathematics, geography and astronomy were
to be taught; and there was provision for the erection of
a university, which would furnish advanced instruction
in the whole round of the arts and sciences. The same
opportunity was thrown open to indigent boys of promise
to pass on, at the public charge, from the lowest to the
to Jefferson to find that the Board urged that the site
of the university should be chosen in a central part of
the State; and that they adopted the plan for professorships
and courses of tuition which he had always advised,
and which he believed in as firmly now as he had
done in the beginning.
In one important particular, however, the tenor of
the report must have caused him disappointment: it recommended
that the income of the Literary Fund should
be first applied to the establishment of an elementary
school in each township; that an academy in each district
should be next founded; and that an appropriation should
be made for the university only in case the surplus remaining
should be sufficient in volume. Twenty thousand
youths, the report asserted, were looking to the Literary
Fund for primary education, and they could rightly
demand that they should be the first to be considered in
its annual distribution. This was altogether in harmony
with Jefferson's opinion, too, should the money for
public instruction be limited to the Literary Fund; and it
was his calculation that the income from this Fund would
not furnish means enough for a general system of education,
which led him to advocate a local levy for the support
of the elementary schools. But the upshot of the
bill of 1796 had shown very plainly what would be the
fate of any provision for local taxation; and in urging,
as the President and Directors of the Literary Fund did,
the education of all the poor at the expense of all the
people, they were bringing forward the only practical
scheme for the improvement of that part of the population
which had a far higher moral and civic claim upon
the benevolence of the Commonwealth than that more
fortunate part which would be able to seek the shades of
expense.
Their recommendation, however,—wise and patriotic
as it was,—was too radical for the spirit of that shortsighted
age. Charles Fenton Mercer, Chairman of the
Finance Committee, framed a bill which took in the most
important features of the Board's report. It passed the
House of Delegates, February 18, 1817, but was defeated
in the Senate two days later, on the ground that
the expenditure of so large a sum of money should be
first submitted for approval to the popular vote. It had
reached the Senate at an unfortunate moment, for that
body, as Cabell, a member of it, has recorded, was now
impatient to break up and return to their homes. Before
they adjourned, they ordered a general distribution
of the report of the Board of the Literary Fund.
Although the Mercer bill had been suggested, partly
by the letter to Peter Carr, and partly by the report of
the President and Directors of the Literary Fund, which
reflected Jefferson's views in general, it nevertheless contained,
like this report also, one stipulation of which he
disapproved. While it divided the counties into wards,
it required the Board to pay to the trustees of each elementary
school two hundred dollars to cover the necessary
outlay for the teacher's salary, and also ten dollars
with which to purchase books for the pupils. The bill
called for the acquisition of fifty acres near the centre
of the State as a site for the university; and it appropriated
one hundred thousand dollars for the buildings
and ten thousand for the library. Although provision
was thus made for the establishment of a university, and
also of a large number af academies, priority in the distribution
of the money was still to be given to the support
of the elementary schools.
When the Mercer bill, after passing the House, miscarried
in the Senate, Cabell requested Jefferson to put
his scheme for public education in a shape that would
allow of its being submitted to the General Assembly as
a substitute. He cheerfully complied. His first purpose,
he wrote, in October, 1817, "was to contrive a
plan which would conform to the real resources of the
State." "Unless something less extravagant," he said
of the Mercer bill, "can be devised, the whole undertaking
must fail. The primary schools alone in that
plan would exhaust the whole fund; the colleges as much
more; and a university would never come into existence."
We have already cited the details of the bill which Jefferson
now drafted. It followed closely the lines of all
his previous expressions on the subject. It was introduced
into the House of Delegates by Samuel Taylor, of
Chesterfield; but on February 11, (1818), it failed of passage,
and a substitute, in the form of an amendment,
offered by Mr. Hill, of King and Queen county, was
adopted. This amendment restricted the expenditure of
the income of the Literary Fund to the education of the
poor. This had always been the disposition of the members
of the popular branch of the Legislature, who were
opposed to ward taxation for that purpose because they
believed it to be altogether repugnant to the wishes and
convictions alike of their most influential constituents.
The money that was to be appropriated under the Hill
amendment was to be distributed among the counties as
a bounty for the maintenance of charity schools. There
was some political animosity to Jefferson in the support
which this amendment received; and this seems to have
been most acute in the breasts of the delegates from the
western counties, who, finding that he had inserted in
his bill, in a parallel column, the name of the Central
took it for granted that, if this institution was
established there, the State capital would soon be removed
thither rather than beyond the Blue Ridge, as they
so earnestly desired. The opposition to his bill in the
House,—of which he had been informed by Cabell,—
caused a wave of unwonted despondency to pass over his
mind, for on February 11, he wrote, "I believe that I
have erred in meddling with it (the educational provision)
at all, and that it has done more harm than good.
A strong interest felt on the subject through my whole
life, ought to excuse me with those who differ from me
in opinion, and should protect me from unfriendly feelings.
Nobody more strongly than myself advocates the
right of every generation to legislate for itself, and the
advantages which each succeeding generation has over
the preceding one from the constant progress of science
and arts."
The amended bill soon reached the Senate. It was
first brought up before a committee composed of Chapman
Johnson, John W. Green, and Joseph C. Cabell.
Cabell submitted two propositions: one, which had been
suggested by Jefferson, divided the State into academic
districts without any consideration of the existing colleges;
the other, which sprang from Cabell alone, took in
these colleges as a part of the general system. He also
renewed the demand for a university in accord with the
tenor of the original bill. His colleagues pressed upon
him that he was aiming for too much, and that, at this
stage of the campaign for the entire scheme, it would
be wiser to insist only upon the restoration of a university
to the plan. The bill passed the Senate in this form
by a vote of fourteen to three; and on February 21
finally became law. Those members who favored only
establishment of a university, while those who favored a
university were compelled to give up for the present all
hope of securing a large number of district colleges to
serve as feeders for the proposed higher seat of learning.
It was a compromise won by the advocates of advanced
education in spite of those "local interests, factious
views, and lamentable ignorance," upon which Cabell reflected,
with acute exasperation, in a letter to Jefferson
written at the time.[7]
Forty-five thousand dollars was to be annually appropriated
for the support of the elementary schools and only
fifteen thousand for that of the projected university.
School commissioners, to be appointed by the courts of
the counties, towns and cities, were to determine how
many children were to be taught, and also how much
money was to be paid out for that purpose by the different
treasurers, whose number was to be in proportion to
the needy white population. This was to be derived
from the annual appropriation of forty-five thousand dollars;
but all funds and properties in the hands of the
overseers of the poor, not otherwise assigned, were to
form an additional resource. The commissioners were
to return to the President and Directors of the Literary
Fund an annual report showing how many pupils there
were then in the schools, and estimating the sum that
would be required, the following year, to educate all
the penniless children in the State. Advantage was taken
in many counties and towns of the benefits offered by
this Act. It soon became the custom for teachers to
enroll the children of the poor in their schools, and at
the end of the session, send in a list of them to the nearest
to the sheriff; who, when all the lists had been received,
divided among the teachers proportionately to the number
of their respective indigent scholars, the sum which
had been appropriated for the county out of the Literary
Fund.
Not until the War of Secession had altered the economic
and social condition of Virginia was the system of
public education in the lower grades, advocated by Jefferson,
put in practice. Not even then, however, were
the elementary schools made entirely dependent upon
even county taxation, but in confirmation of his foresight,
it has been noticed that the most efficient public schools
are to be found wherever local taxation has been relied
on chiefly for their support.[8]
Not until 1906 was any
test made of that part of his scheme which created a
large number of district secondary schools; in the course
of that year, fifty thousand dollars, increased to one hundred
thousand later, was appropriated for maintaining a
system of such schools distributed among the Congressional
districts, with special provision for the training of
teachers.
Jefferson was not to live to see the realization of his
great scheme for public education as a whole; but when
in February, 1818, the General Assembly voted in favour
of the establishment of a State university, he had succeeded
in securing that part of it in which he was most
deeply interested, and the one which he was best equipped
to carry out by his own previous studies and observations.
It was certainly the part that supplemented most fully
the practical experiment in college building which, for
sometime previous to 1818, had seized upon his whole attention,
and absorbed all his physical and intellectual
College was converted into the university which the General
Assembly, in 1818, ordered to be established, it will
be necessary to turn back and follow up the noble record
that he had already made as the father of the promising
institution of learning which he had founded in the
shadow of his own home at Monticello. It will be seen
that he had not been satisfied to wait for the consummation
of his plans through legislative assistance, but, in
his leisure, taking hold of that section of them which he
was able to inaugurate himself, he had done so with a
clearness, persistence, and firmness of purpose, a concentration
of energy and a constancy of supervision, in spite
of his advanced years, which constitutes the most astonishing
chapter even in his own illustrious life.
Among the letters included in the Barbour Correspondence at Barboursville,
Va., is one from Governor Barbour, then in Washington, directing
his son at home to go through his papers for the original draft of the resolution
looking to the establishment of this Fund. This draft, he said,
was in his own handwriting.
J. C. Cabell writes from Richmond January 24, 1816: "Since writing
the enclosed letter, I have canvassed with Mr. Mercer of the House of
Delegates, to whom I had lent your letter to Mr. Carr. He seemed
much pleased with your view of the subject, and as he proposed to make
a report to the House, concurs with me on the propriety of availing the
country of the light you have offered in this great interest of the country."
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