University of Virginia Library

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,

succeeding to the knowledge acquired by all those that
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

preserve his ideas, his contracts, and his accounts in writing;
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

scheme for universal instruction required that the superior
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

of the Visitors of the University of Virginia, in
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

platform for those times, and by the prominence of its
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

of the institution. So far did the monastic conception
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

new schools could not be erected without swallowing up
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

set on foot in the United States; so was the School of
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

section of the community, it could not become the university
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

place in Europe. When college education is done with,
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.