University of Virginia Library

I. Father of the University

Thomas Jefferson, from early manhood until the end
of his sixty-sixth year, had, with short intervals of private
life, filled in succession the highest offices in the gift
of the popular voice. He had served in the General Assembly
and in the first Virginia Convention; had been a
member of the Continental Congress and Governor of
the Commonwealth; had been Minister to the Court of
Versailles, Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet
and Vice-President of the United States; and, finally, at
the summit of his career, had been President during one
of the most pregnant and critical eras in American history.
He had won distinction in the very different parts
of legislator, diplomat, and executive. His name had
been coupled with all the events forming the great milestones
of his time, with the solitary exception of the adoption
of the Federal Constitution, which was drafted and
ratified during his absence in France.

Towards the close of his life, looking back, with tranquil
discrimination, upon the achievements of his great
career, he wrote down a list of the acts which he conceived
to be his principal claims upon the remembrance
and gratitude of posterity. This list embraced all those,

which, before the establishment of the University of Virginia,
had brought him conspicuously into the eyes and
minds of men,—not one of any substantial importance,
legislative, executive or educational, was omitted. It began
with his public spirited example, as a young man, in
opening up the shallow waters of his native Rivanna to
the navigation of batteaux; then passed on to his authorship
of the Declaration of Independence; to his separation
of Church and State in Virginia; to his destruction
there of the laws of entail and primogeniture; to his paternity
of the statute that prohibited the further importation
of slaves; of the one defining the rights of naturalization;
of the one making more humane the punishment of
crime; and of the bill of 1779 for the diffusion of knowledge
among the people. He closed as he began with the
mention of an act of utilitarian patriotism, seemingly little
in itself but really of far-reaching consequence his introduction
of olives and a more hardy and fecund species of
rice into the Southern States. There was, in the list, not
the slenderest hint of the political honors which had been
showered upon him so generously by his countrymen.

In extreme old age, when he had had a longer time to
weigh and set the nicest value upon all the incidents of his
life, he determined to revise this first list, and in abbreviating
and condensing it, to retain only those facts which
indicated most clearly the characteristic spirit of his career
in all its phases. What was this spirit? The governing
and driving power of Jefferson's whole course
from youth to old age was love of freedom,—freedom
of the mind in its outlook in every direction and on all
things; freedom of the soul, in its beliefs; freedom of
action for the individual in every personal relation, and in
every department of human affairs, so far as it was not
repugnant to morality, law and order. Which were the

achievements of his life that, in his final judgment, reflected
most faithfully and pointedly this overtopping, this
all-animating aspiration of his entire existence? When,
after his death, his papers were examined to discover his
wishes for the disposal of his body, the following memorandum
was found among them, and the more closely
we scrutinize its details, the more comprehensive does it
show itself as the matured expression of the mainspring
of his long career:

His last thought, as we thus perceive, was occupied, in
no egotistic spirit, with only three facts of his life; but
they were the three, which, in his opinion, made up his
greatest contributions to the noblest of all causes,—the
cause of freedom. As the author of the Declaration,
he had proclaimed the tyranny of all Governments that
had not received their authority directly from the consent
of the governed; as the author of the Virginia statute,
he had proclaimed, with equal emphasis, the tyranny
of all spiritual domination that was rejected by the intelligence;
and as the Father of the University of Virginia,
he was convinced that he had founded a seat of learning
that, for ages, would help to preserve that freedom of
mind, spirit, and individual action, which he had always
so persistently advocated with tongue and pen, and which,
by his acts, he had done so much to encourage, to
strengthen, and to perpetuate.

There have been few men in our political history who
have had so accurate a command of the English language,
in its nicest shades of meaning, as Jefferson. He was always

lucid and precise in the use of the written word. It
will be noticed that he did not describe himself as the
Founder of the University of Virginia but as the Father.
Now, there is an important difference in the significance
of the two words, as employed in this connection, entirely
apart from any hint of endowment which may vaguely
linger about the former. There have been many founders
of scholastic institutions in the United States, but
few fathers of such institutions. Those great seats of
learning, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and Leland
Stanford, Jr.,—to mention only the most eminent,—
had their respective origins in the benefactions of single
philanthropists, who were content to impart in a general
way only, if they imparted at all, the trend and color
of certain principles to the aims of those universities,
and to the methods of their administration. But it cannot
be said of them to the degree that can be so often
said of a father in relation to his children, that their
transmitted influence has never ceased to shape those
creations of their benevolence, in the smallest detail as
well as in the largest, from the time the first charter was
obtained and the first stone was laid, down to the present
hour.

On the other hand, had Jefferson been in a position to
endow the projected University of Virginia with a million
dollars of his own, it would still have been more correct
to speak of him as the Father of that institution than
as its Founder. He was not merely the father of it in the
spiritual and intellectual sense: he was the father of it
in a corporeal sense also, for he designed the structure
in the main from dome to closet, and he superintended
its erection from the earliest to almost the last brick
and lath. It was he who had carried at the front of
his mind for more than a generation the unrealized conception

of a university for his native Commonwealth;
who, through all this long period of disappointment,
but not of discouragement, pressed it upon the attention
of the General Assembly; who, when it was at last incorporated
in its earliest form as a college, selected its site
and surveyed its boundaries; who, after its final charter
was granted, kept up a persistent and successful struggle
with faction, prejudice, and ignorance, to obtain from
the State the funds needed for its completion; who, after
its doors were thrown open, thought out minutely and
laid down with precision its courses of instruction; who
chose many of the text-books; formed the library; nominated
all the professors; and finally drafted all the
laws for the general administration of the institution,
and all the regulations for the enforcement of discipline
among the students. Almost daily, if the weather was
fair, he rode down from his mountain-top to the University
to watch the progress of the building; and when
prevented from doing this, turned from that lofty height
upon the unfinished structures the far-reaching eyes of
his telescope.

There is hardly another instance in our educational
history which approaches the noble, the almost pathetic,
solicitude which the illustrious octogenarian showed for
this child of his of brick and stone. "I have only this
single anxiety in this world," he declared. "It is a bantling
of forty years' birth and nursing, and if I can see it
on its legs, I will sing, with serenity and pleasure, my
nunc dimittis." Nor did this brooding thought leave
him even when he lay on his death-bed at Monticello, for
his physician tells us that he constantly speculated as to
the name of his probable successor in the rectorship,—
that office upon which most depended the intelligent management
of its affairs.