University of Virginia Library

II. Political Principles

No biography can be accepted as complete which fails
to scrutinize the qualities of the parentage of its subject.
The laws of heredity are equally applicable to the University
of Virginia, for all its principal characteristics,
as we have just seen, were, in the beginning, derived from
the moulding hand of Jefferson. The first one hundred
years of its history turns in a very real and practical
sense upon the spirit which was breathed into its working
organization at the start by the liberal, versatile, and
sagacious brain of one man. Madison, who, from its
foundation, was a member of the Board of Visitors, very
frequently reminded the members of that body of the
propriety of permitting their venerable rector to carry
out all the plans which he had framed for its benefit; and
he did this, not simply because that rector's judgment was
entitled to peculiar deference, but chiefly because,—as
the scheme was, in the beginning, his own,—the responsibility
for its failure or success would fall on him.

Apart from its architectural setting, which was entirely
of his dictation, there were three conspicuous aspects
in which the University of Virginia reflected the
spirit of Jefferson: (1) in its political creed; (2) in its
freedom from every form of sectarianism; and (3) in its
complete dedication to the advancement of science.

Jefferson's almost extravagant love of freedom was,
perhaps, more vividly reflected in his political principles
than in any other branch of his convictions. He was in
favor of that system of government which would hamper
the least the natural liberty of the individual. This
liberty, both in private relations and in public, was to
be as completely without restraints as the working requirements
of organized society would permit. Men

were to be taught to discipline themselves so firmly and
so unselfishly that the controlling hand of a central
power would be hardly needed at all; such central power
as did exist should have before it as its supreme object,
not the curbing of the bad instincts and impulses of mankind,
but the bestowal upon the multitude of the highest
degree of happiness possible for humanity. Freedom
and Happiness,—these, in his opinion, were the principal
ends which all governments, as well as all acquisitions
of knowledge, were designed to subserve. "The general
spread of science," he wrote only a few days before
his death, when his hand trembled so violently that he
could, with difficulty, retain the pen in his fingers, "has
already laid open to every view the truth that the mass
of mankind have not been born with saddles on their
backs; nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to
ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

It was his hatred of tyranny, expressed so graphically
in this remarkable imagery, that made him the implacable
opponent of all special privilege, whether entrenched in
law or in immemorial custom. It was this feeling,—
which burnt in his breast even in youth,—that prompted
him to bring forward in the General Assembly the bill
for the abolition of entail and primogeniture, so as to
throw the soil again into the hands of the many; for the
separation of Church and State, so as to remove all the
galling burdens from the backs of the Dissenters; and,
finally, for the suppression of the harsh features of criminal
law by reducing the number of capital offenses from
twenty-nine to two. And it was this same feeling also
that led him to draft the bill to put a stop to the further
importation of slaves; and that caused him to favor a
second bill that would have brought about gradual manumission,
had the opinion of the public, at that time,

been as ripe for such a farsighted measure as his own.
His views on this momentous subject reflected most conspicuously
the openness of his mind as well as the clearness
of his vision: "Nothing is more certainly written in
the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
... The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices
of Heaven, for total emancipation." There was presented
to him, afterwards, but one other great opportunity
to show, in attempted legislation, his eagerness to
uproot African bondage, and he did not let it pass: in
his original plan for the organization of a government
for the Northwest Territory, he provided that the States
to be carved out of that area, should, after 1800, be prohibited
from holding slaves.

Valuing liberty even to the point of favoring the
emancipation of the negroes, and the curtailment of the
punishment of criminals, to what did Jefferson look for its
preservation? He asserted again and again that the people
at large were the only bulwark of a free government.
"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in
every country which has ever existed under the sun?" he
asked. "The concentration of all laws and powers into
one body. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate
powers of society but the people themselves." "Whenever
the people are well informed," he wrote to Dr.
Price in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own government."
He urged up to the end that the citizens of
every community should retain control over all persons
intrusted with the reins of administration, for, should they
neglect to do so, such authority was sure to be perverted
to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth
and dominion among the members of the intriguing officeholding
caste. With Hamilton, his persistent antagonist,
he believed that virtue and intelligence should always be

in the ascendancy in political life; but, unlike Hamilton,
he was convinced that intelligence and virtue could only
have room for full play if the natural right of every man
to the enjoyment of the suffrage,—whether he was a
property-owner or not,—was candidly acknowledged and
ungrudgingly granted. He would have relieved the suffrage
of all restrictions; and it was his clear perception of
the fact that suffrage unrestricted could not be of the
most beneficent service to the individual and the community
unless education was also universal, that caused
him, as we shall see, to advocate so earnestly a general
system of public instruction. It was this epochal proviso
that saved his sweeping opinion from the taint of demagogism.

Did Jefferson exaggerate the danger to popular freedom
in thinking, as he did, that it was always threatened
by the open or furtive encroachments of rulers, local or
national alike? The events through which he had passed
in early manhood unquestionably inflamed his imagination
in its outlook even on the events of the normal years
in which his later life was spent. The arrogant conduct
of the British Government towards the American colonists
before the Revolution; the exasperations of that conflict
after it had once begun; his observation of the unequal
laws in France, and the consequent prostration of
its people in the mass, previous to the destruction of the
monarchy,—all this had convinced him that there was an
instinctive and unavoidable antagonism between rulers
and ruled, unless the rulers were chosen by the majority
of the people; and that, even when they were, eternal
vigilance was the price of liberty.

Jefferson was the only statesman of the first order in
those times, violent as they were in both America and
Europe, who always, and with palpable sincerity, expressed

the firmest confidence in the virtue and wisdom
of the people at large. The most maturely considered
and most cautiously framed document of that period was
the Federal Constitution. Why is its tenor throughout
characterized by so many checks and balances? Largely,
no doubt, because it was only by compromise that the
sectional antagonisms of the Convention could be reconciled,
but, perhaps, principally because even that noble
body of patriots, in their secret consciousness, did not,
like Jefferson, place a solid reliance on the trustworthiness
of the people. "It is an axiom of my mind," he
affirmed on more than one occasion, "that our liberty can
never be safe but in the people's hands"; and then he
always added significantly, "I mean the people with a
certain degree of instruction."

It is one of the strangest riddles of American history
that a man born like himself to wealth and high social
position, and in a community in which the English conception
of class distinctions still lingered, should have
understood so clearly and thoroughly the aspirations of
the people as a mass that he should have become their
articulate voice. How did he catch with such niceness the
democratic idea? Was it taken in with the free atmosphere
of his frontier hills and mountains and wild primaeval
woods? Or was he simply a philosophical radical,
a speculative sage, who had reached his conclusions
by thought and reading alone? There was no more outcropping
of the democrat in Jefferson's personal bearing
and domestic surroundings than in Washington's; and yet
so obnoxious were his opinions to many of his fellowcountrymen
that he was roundly and widely decried as a
demagogue, a jacobin, an atheist, and an anarchist. And
yet what were the fundamental principles that he promulgated?
First, that all men should stand upon exactly

the same platform of equal privileges and equal opportunities
before the law; secondly, that every nation,
great or small, should possess the right to administer its
own affairs free from all dictation, compulsion, or interference
from other nations.

In Jefferson's life-time, as in our own, there prevailed
two views of what should be the relations of the State to
the individual, and of the individual to the State. According
to one view, the first duty of the individual was
to forward the welfare of the State; according to the
other, the only duty of the State was to exercise a general
oversight, which was to leave the individual in spirit and
in practice to his own self-government. Under the second
system, the individual is all important; under the first,
he is of as small consequence as one ant in a nest of millions.
The single ant is of no interest; the millions as a
body are of supreme interest. Now, Jefferson had no
toleration for such a theory of the Commonwealth as
this. He objected even to a benevolent interference by
the State in the affairs of men, and looked upon all rules
and regulations for government as arbitrary, however
wise in themselves, unless they resulted directly from the
action of the majority of the people. It was one of his
firmest convictions, after the Revolution had begun, that
America was destined to run a career entirely different in
temper and in fruitfulness from the civilization of Europe;
and long before the foot of the last English soldier
had passed from American soil, he brought in those measures
in the General Assembly of Virginia which would
introduce at once a condition of society antipathetic, from
top to bottom, to that society which still prevailed in
England, and which had previously prevailed in Virginia.
By knocking away the cornerstones, he justly anticipated
that the whole structure of privilege and monopoly would

tumble to the ground. Abolition of the law of entail
would put an end to the automatic preservation of wealth
in the hands of a few families from generation to generation;
abolition of the law of primogeniture,—which had
made the eldest son rich and all his brothers poor,—
would, by distributing the inheritance, not only improve
the pecuniary fortunes of the majority, but also diffuse
among them a passion for equality in all things; while
the separation of the Church from the State would destroy
sectarian ascendancy at a blow, and like the subdivision
of lands, would reduce each denomination to the
level of all.

It was Jefferson's uncompromising hostility to privilege
in every form, whether it showed itself in the prerogatives
of kings and nobles, or in the exclusive inheritance
of an elder son, or in the tithes of a state church, that
caused him to judge so harshly the principles and policies
of the Federalist party. His antagonism to that party
was unquestionably embittered by political opposition and
personal resentment, but, for deeper reasons than these,
it would still have inflamed his mind had he never filled
an office or left his library and fields at Monticello.
"The leaders of Federalism," he wrote Governor Hall,
"say that man cannot be trusted with his own government.
Every man and every body of men on earth possess
the right of self-government." "I am not a Federalist,"
he said to Francis Hopkinson, in 1789, "because
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the
creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy,
in politics, or in anything else, when I was capable
of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last
degradation of a free and moral agent." The then
powerful party of the Federalists was stigmatized by him
as the Parricide party, because, he asserted, they were

basely willing to sell what their fathers had so bravely
won. Or he spoke of them as the Monarchist party,
because they accepted, he said, the newly-adopted republican
form of government only as a stepping stone
to a monarchical one. He never forgot that, when he
arrived in New York, in 1790, from France, to become
Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, he found
himself plunged in a society, that, boldly expressing a
preference for royalty, did not hesitate to make a target
of him, in whatever company he might mingle, because,
fresh from the French Revolution, in its first and
pure stage, and consequently somewhat "whetted up in
his republican principles," as he declared, he ventured
to dispute the sentiments which he heard pronounced on
every side.

It is to be inferred from these perhaps exaggerated
impressions that Jefferson was a staunch opponent of
centralization in the National Government. He desired
to keep unbroken the line that had been drawn between
the Federal and State administrations by the Constitution,
and to strengthen the barriers raised to prevent the
one in the future from stepping over into the province of
the other. He favored the inviolable conservation of
that instrument within the bounds of the precise sense
in which it was adopted by its framers: the reservation to
the States of all powers not expressly delegated to the
National Government, and the limitation of the latter's
executive and legislative branches particularly to the powers
granted to those branches, without any right whatever
to trespass on the jurisdiction of the judicial branch.

In a letter to Samuel Kincheloe, in 1816, he summarized
this section of his political creed as follows: "We
should marshal our Government in (1) the General Federal
Republic, for all concerns foreign or federal; (2)

the State Republics, for what relates to our citizens exclusively;
(3) the County Republics, for the duties and
concerns of the county; and (4) the Ward Republics, for
the small and yet numerous and interesting concerns of
the neighborhood."

If there should be an attempt on the part of the highest
of these republics to steal or leap beyond its own
legitimate area, how was the usurpation to be met? The
famous Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99, formulated
the principles and the policy alike which Jefferson approved:
that the Constitution was a compact between the
different States and the United States, and that all violations
of that compact on the part of the Federal Government,
by assuming functions not intrusted to it, were illegal
and without force; that the General Government was
not made by this compact the exclusive or final arbiter of
the powers delegated to itself; that, as in all other cases
of compact in which there was no common judge, each
party had an equal right to determine whether an infraction
had been committed; and if so, the manner in which
it should be redressed. Jefferson was always most vehemently
jealous of judicial encroachments on the rights
of the States backed by the power of the Federal Executive.
In 1825, he was very much disquieted by the decisions
of the Supreme Court; by the orders of the President,
John Quincy Adams; and by the misconstructions of
the Constitution, which, in his opinion, signalized many
of the legislative measures. "It is but evident," he said
in a letter to W. B. Giles, "that the three ruling branches
of that department (the National Government) are in
combination to strip their colleagues, the States' authorities,
of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise
themselves all functions, foreign and domestic." "Are
we to stand to our arms?" he asked. "That must be the

last resource, not to be thought of until much longer and
greater sufferings. ... We must have fortitude and
longer endurance with our brethren while under delusion
... and separate from our companions only when the
sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union with
them, or submission to a government without limitation
of powers. Between these two evils, when we must take
a choice, there can be no hesitation."

Such, in bare outlines, were the political principles of
Jefferson; and it was these principles that he required
to be taught in the University of Virginia. They were
derived by that University directly from him; and unless
they are taken into account at the start, the true character
of the institution, as fashioned by his devoted zeal,
cannot be fully understood. He announced, before its
doors were thrown open, that, with one exception, all the
professors were to be permitted to choose the textbooks
for their respective classes; but that exception was a vital
one, for it was the professor of law. The textbooks
assigned to this member of the Faculty had first to receive
the approval of the Rector and the Board before they
could be used in his lecture-room in the instruction of his
pupils. The new university, he said, was not to be suffered
to become a hot-bed for the propagation of political
doctrines destructive of State and Nation alike. Monarchical
Federalism and the consolidation of the powers
of government were heresies to be fought there with all
the fiery energy of a council of mediaeval churchmen.
And no quarter whatever was to be given. He was
firmly resolved that, in the inculcation of his political
principles from those platforms at least, no room at all
was to be left for the display of opposition or even of
doubt. There was unquestionably a spirit of narrowness
and even of bigotry in the uncompromising attitude

which he thus assumed. "The young lawyers," he wrote
Madison, a few months before his death, "no longer
know what Whiggism and Republicanism mean. It is
in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive.
It is thence to spread anew over our own and sister States.
If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or
twenty years, a majority of our own legislature will be
from our own school, and many disciples will have carried
its doctrines home with them to their several States, and
will have leavened thus the whole mass."[1]

Who were the contumacious lawyers thus stigmatized?
They were the young Virginians of that day who had been
converted to the political doctrines which John Marshall
advocated, and which they had acquired from him during
their practice in his circuit, or in personal intercourse with
him in the social circles of Richmond. When it was
planned to remove the College of William and Mary to
that city, Jefferson opposed it, not simply because it would
raise up a formidable rival to his own University, but also
because it would become an instrument, through the influence
of the Chief Justice, whose residence was there,
for the propagation of the political creed of the Federalists
throughout the Southern States. Nor could he refrain
from a bitter fling at Harvard and Princeton for
the same reason. Harvard was destroying the patriotism
of Southern youths who entered its lecture-halls, with
lessons of anti-Missourianism, while Princeton, one half
of whose students had come up from the South, was busy
sowing the seeds of prejudice in their minds against the
"sacred principles of the Holy Alliance of Restrictionists."

The list of the textbooks drawn up for the use of the

professor of law indicates the works which Jefferson considered
the best for inculcating the only political principles
which he would tolerate. It embraced Sidney's
Discourse, and Locke's Essay on Civil Government, the
Declaration of Independence, the Federalist, the Virginia
Resolutions of 1798, and the Inaugural Speech and Farewell
Address of Washington. It was by the study of
these classical authorities,—as he himself said to the committee
of the Transylvania University in 1819, a few
months after his own seat of learning had been incorporated,
—that he expected to make the young men under
its arcades desirous, on the one hand, "of bringing all
mankind together in concord and fraternal love," and determined,
on the other, "to preserve as the sheet-anchor
of the people's hope and happiness, the sacred form and
principles of the State and Federal Constitutions." And
there was another course of instruction which he was
equally resolved to require, and for the same reason: the
study of Anglo-Saxon, he thought, was necessary, not simply
because the pupil would become versed thereby in
a neglected department of invaluable knowledge, but primarily
because, in learning that language, he would drink
in with it all the primitive principles of free government.