University of Virginia Library

III. Struggle for the University Site

Not until November 20, 1818, did Jefferson send the
Report on to Cabell, the representative of the district in
the upper chamber, to whom it was now intrusted for
delivery to the proper officials. Cabell's first step was
to print the manuscript, and his next, to hand one copy
of it to the President of the Senate and another to the
Speaker of the House. On the second morning of the
session, it was brought to the attention of both bodies,
and its reading,—so we are informed by William F.
Gordon, now a member of the General Assembly, and a
staunch supporter of the University scheme,—was followed
by exclamations of "universal admiration." A
bill was promptly introduced in the lower chamber to
carry into effect the recommendations of the Report.
This bill was under the patronage of Mr. Taylor, of
Chesterfield county, who had been selected by the pilots
of the measure because he seemed to be entirely disentangled
from the meshes of local interests and ambitions.
Opposition was expected from the start by Cabell and
Gordon, who were marshalling the partizans of Central
College,—the one in the Senate, the other in the House.
The bill, with the Report appended, was referred to a
select committee which contained a majority in favor of
passing it; and a further auspicious condition was that the

delegation from the region of the Kanawha River were
frankly well disposed towards the measure.

The advocates of the Lexington site in the committee
urged, with persistence, that the clause recommending
Central College should be expunged, and a blank substituted
for it; and also that the bill should be held
back for more careful scrutiny before this blank should
be filled up. The members from Rockbridge in the committee
were especially vehement in questioning the correctness
of Jefferson's way of arriving at the centre of
population. They were supported by Chapman Johnson,
who represented Augusta county in the Senate. He
asserted in the presence of Cabell and Gov. Preston, that,
to start the line of division at the mouth of the Chesapeake
Bay, "was to make it nearer to the southern than
to the northern side of the State." This suggestion
seems to have worried Cabell, and he at once wrote to
Monticello for information to combat it. In his reply,
Jefferson acknowledged, what was obvious, that at its
commencement, the line was nearer to North Carolina
than it was to Maryland; but was not the area towards
the north entirely occupied by water without any inhabitants
except numerous fish and many wild fowl?
"Wherever you may decide to begin," he added, "the
direction of the line of equal division is not a matter of
choice. It must from thence take whatever direction
an equal division of the population demands; and the
census proves this to pass near Charlottesville, Rockfish
Gap, and Staunton."

Some of the advocates of Lexington shrewdly laid off
the southern half of the State in the form of a parallelogram
and the northern half in the form of a triangle.
This method, Jefferson gently intimated, was suggested

by ingenious minds seeking to force the situation in favor
of their preferred site. As the whole State was in a triangular
shape, why should not each half be made to
conform to that fact instead of only one? If the line
of equal division was drawn straight from east to west,
Lexington would be thrown out of the contest at once
by its distance from the centre of population. Not so
Charlottesville. Run that line north and south,—again
would Lexington be thrust out, but again would Charlottesville
successfully stand the test. "Run your lines
in whichever direction you please," exclaimed Jefferson,
triumphantly, "they will pass close to Charlottesville,
and for the good reason that it is truly central to the
white population."

At the third meeting, the Committee declined to strike
the words "Central College" from the bill. The measure
was then reported to the House in its original form;
but here it again ran upon the ugly snag that had threatened
to wreck it in the committee room: the advocates of
Lexington again disputed the correctness of Jefferson's
calculations, and demanded that the vote upon the bill
should be deferred until they had been given an opportunity
to refute them. Cabell soon began to feel doubt as
to its passage, for he had found out that the party
opposing the acceptance of the Central College site,—
which consisted principally of the delegation from the
West,—had decided that, should they be unable to substitute
Lexington for Charlottesville, they would endeavor
to overthrow the whole university scheme; and in this
course, they counted on the support of those members
who favored the permanent breaking up and dispersal
of the Literary Fund.

Cabell plucked up heart once more when privately informed
by his colleague in the Senate from Clarksburg

that the entire delegation from the Northwest with one
exception,—twenty-one members,—had determined to
stand by the recommendation of the committee; this
was about the 17th of December; and although Christmas
was so close at hand, and most of the members were
departing for their homes, when not too remote, he decided
to stand to his post in Richmond. His health had
been so much undermined by his assiduity that he was advised
to spend the holiday season at Williamsburg with
his wife's family, for the sake of the change; but he emphatically
refused to do so. "Even if the danger of
my life existed which my friends apprehend," he said,
"I could not risk it in a better cause." He urged the
supporters of the bill in the House to hold it up until the
opening of the New Year. At the same time, he was
very much alarmed lest his opponents should continue to
gain strength by wily intrigue and unscrupulous bargaining.
Once more, indeed, he began to fear the complete
failure of the measure through the working of these
malignant agencies. He was fully aware that, in the
strongly cohesive delegation from the eastern counties,
there were at least twenty-six members who were expected,
under the influence of their loyalty to the interests
of the College of William and Mary, to show themselves
hostile to the establishment of a university at all, by
casting their votes against the bill, whether in the original
or the amended form. There was thought to be but one
provision that could ward off this blow: the appropriation
of five thousand dollars annually to the use of that institution.
This was Cabell's not unprejudiced impression,
for the antagonism which he had to overcome had left
him in an exasperated and jaundiced mood. "The best
informed of these partizans of the ancient college," he
wrote Jefferson, "whilst they, their sons, connections, and
friends have been educated at William and Mary, quote
Smith, the Edinburgh Review, and Dugald Stewart, to
prove that education should be left to individual enterprise,
the more ignorant part pretend that the Literary
Fund has been diverted from its original object,—the
education of the poor,—and accuse the friends of the
University of an intention to apply all the funds to the
benefit of the University."

Some opposition to Charlottesville, as the site for
a great seat of learning, was expressed by a small circle
of thoughtful and enlightened members on the ground
that, as it was simply a village and remote in its situation,
it would offer no social advantages to draw thither distinguished
professors; nor could it, for the same reason,
serve to polish the manners of the students, furnish them
with the needed accommodations, or bring forward sufficient
physical force to put down large bodies of young
men, should they fall to rioting.

By January 1, 1819, the delegates from the Valley had
united in solid rank against Central College, and nearly
one-half of the delegates from the region west of the
Alleghanies had joined their company. In addition, the
delegates from the southeastern part of the State were
inimical; and there were members in the same mood who
were scattered throughout the representation from the
other districts. Cabell, bracing himself against a rising
feeling of dismay, urged all the friendly absentees to hasten
their return, and in the meanwhile, he sought encouragement
in the loyalty of his supporters on the ground.
"I consider the establishment of the University," wrote
John Taliaferro, of the Lower House, as he was about
to set out from Fredericksburg for Richmond, "of more
vital consequence to the State than the sum of all the
legislation since the foundation of the government";

and this was also the spirit of the men who had remained
at their posts. "I had indulged the hope," wrote William
F. Gordon to his wife on Christmas day, "that I
could have gone home about this time, but the importance
of our University bill is so great to Virginia, and particularly
to Albemarle county, that I feared to leave it."
In a letter to Jefferson a few days earlier, Cabell had said,
"I have passed the night in watchful reflection and the
day in ceaseless activity. ... I have conveyed from person
to person intelligence of our view, and endeavored
to reconcile difference of opinion and to create harmony.
... I have called on and influenced the aid of powerful
friends out of the Legislature, such as Roane, Nicholas,
Brockenbrough, Taylor, and others. I have procured
most of the essays in the Enquirer."

Within a few weeks, this persistent spirit had forced a
favorable turn. Absent friends came to his assistance.
Especially assiduous and energetic among these were
Captain Slaughter, of Culpeper, and Mr. Hoomes, of
King and Queen; but above all, Chancellor Green, who,
on the day of his arrival, sat up with him until three
o'clock in the morning. The foremost purpose now was
to contrive a plan to break the assaults of the delegates
from the Peninsula; and it was in consequence of such
prolonged mental strain and constant loss of sleep, that
Cabell suffered, at this crisis, an attack of blood spitting,
which lasted, without interruption, for a period of seven
or eight hours.

The ablest and most disinterested of all Cabell's coadjutors,
outside of the Assembly itself, in this protracted
contest, was the Rev. John H. Rice, the most distinguished
Presbyterian divine in the State. Perhaps his
most notable service at this time took the form of a letter
over the signature of Crito, which he contributed to

the issue of the Enquirer for January 9, 1819. "Ten
years ago," he wrote, "I made certain inquiries on the
subject (the pecuniary loss to Virginia from the absence
of a State university) and ascertained, to my conviction,
that the amount annually carried from Virginia for purposes
of education alone exceeded $250,000. Since that
period, it has been greater. Take a quarter of a million
as the average of the last eight and twenty years, and
the amount is the enormous sum of $7,000,000. But
had our schools been such as the resources of Virginia
would have well allowed, and her honor and interest
demanded, it is by no means extravagant to suppose that
the five States that border on ours would have sent as
many students, as under the present wretched system,
we have sent to them. Thus this reaches another
amount of $7,000,000. Let our economists look to that
14,000,000 of good dollars lost to us by our parsimony.
Let our wise men calculate the amount outside of our
losses, and add it to this principal."

Dr. Rice made no plea for a particular site for the
University, because he thought that this should be decided
by the General Assembly, of which he was not a
member; but his reasoning for the creation of the institution
itself was a powerful influence towards the overthrow
of the unscrupulous propaganda then prevailing
that would have shut out Central College by undermining
the whole project of setting up a great seat of learning.
A searching discussion of the several clauses of the bill
took place in the Committee of the Whole of the House
on January 18 (1819), and all the arguments in support
of, and in opposition to, its different provisions were
elaborately presented. A determined attempt was again
made to discredit the statistics of Jefferson's map showing
the centre of population in the State; but when the

last speech had been finished, and the motion was put
whether the clause relating to Central College, as the
proposed site of the University, should be accepted or
discarded, the vote stood sixty-nine in favor of rejection
and one hundred and fourteen in favor of retention.
The brilliant Briscoe G. Baldwin was then a delegate
from Augusta, of which Staunton, one of the competitors
for the University, was the county-seat. So soon as the
decision of the House was announced, he rose from his
chair, and, in proposing that the bill should be adopted
unanimously, appealed to the Western delegation to dismiss
all local prejudice, to repress all spirit of partizanship,
and to join with the majority in acquiescing in the
entire measure as it stood. His speech was so eloquent
in its utterance of the noblest patriotic emotions that
most of his hearers were melted to tears. Cabell, who
had been present in the chamber before the roll was
called, had retired to avoid the shock to his feelings,
should the upshot be adverse. The final vote on the passage
of the bill was taken on the following day (January
19), and only twenty-eight of the one hundred and sixtynine
members present persisted in their opposition.

William C. Rives, a delegate at the time, expressed to
Cocke his gratified surprise at what he described as the
"unexpected result" of the voting. "You have seen
from the newspapers," he wrote on the 20th, "the vigorous
and persevering attempts that were made on the
floor of the House to repeal it (the University bill).
The efforts that were employed out of doors to defeat it
by intrigue were not less vigorous, and possibly were
more alarming, because more difficult to be met and counteracted."

On the 21st, the measure, having reached the Senate,
was referred to a very able committee. When at last

reported, a motion to strike out of the text the choice of
Central College was lost by a vote of sixteen to seven.
It finally passed the Senate on the 25th by a vote of
twenty-two to one, an indication of more enlightened
views in that body as a whole than prevailed in the
House. The discussion of its different provisions had
continued uninterruptedly through two days; and so
strenuously did Cabell participate in the debate that a
blood vessel in his lungs, which he had formerly ruptured,
opened again, and he was compelled to sink to his
seat.

The opposition to the bill, as we have seen, had
its origin in a variety of hostile influences, some of which
were directed against the acceptance of Central College
as the site and some against the establishment of the
University at all, because supposed to be repugnant to the
interests either of the College of William and Mary or of
the poor in the distribution of the income of the Literary
Fund. At the bottom of the antagonism, there was present
a distinct political motive. The desire to obtain the
site of the Capital, should Richmond be abandoned,
prompted many of the delegates from the Valley to cast
their votes against the selection of Central College, for
it was generally anticipated that the Capital and the University
would, in the end, be located together. There was
also a lingering antipathy to Jefferson himself, in spite of
his venerable age and long retirement from public life.
This feeling, however, was not shared by many. William
C. Rives expressed the more generous attitude of
the majority towards him when he said, "Among the
many sources of congratulation that present themselves
on this occasion (the passage of the bill), it is not
the least with me that the man to whom this country of
ours owes more than to any other that ever existed, with

the exception of Washington, lives to see the consummation
of all his wishes in the establishment of an institution
which will be a lasting monument to his fame."

Jefferson himself received the announcement of the realization
of his hopes of so many years with the philosophical
moderation so characteristic of him when his
faculties were not disturbed by the red flag of Federalism
or Sectarianism. "I sincerely join in the general
joy," was his brief and simple reply when the news had
been conveyed to him.