University of Virginia Library

IX. John Hartwell Cocke

John Hartwell Cocke is not to be credited with as conspicuous
services in assisting in the foundation of the University

as Cabell, but the work which he, as one of the two
members of the committee of superintendence, performed
in aiding in its building and initial development, gives
him a place in its early history second only to that of his
friend, the principal coadjutor of Jefferson. The family
to which he belonged had been planted in Virginia in the
seventeenth century, and had always stood in the first rank
for fortune and refinement. Inheriting, like Cabell, a
competent estate, he was left at liberty to follow his own
tastes, which all leaned towards the pursuits of a country
gentleman. Unlike Cabell, he was destitute of political
aspirations; and he was drawn into enterprises of a public
character more by a high and keen sense of civic responsibility
than by any desire to raise his own personal
repute. He first appears in a public capacity in April,
1813, as captain of artillery. "After theorizing in the
nineteen manoeuvres," he jocularly wrote Cabell from the
field, "I am now making an excursion to the theatre of
the war to see a little practice." That he really possessed
military talent is evident by his promotion to the rank of
Brigadier before the war was brought to an end; and in
fact, he won such solid distinction as a soldier that his
name was, in 1814, canvassed in the General Assembly for
the office of Governor, until he positively refused to permit
its further use. "We need," said Randolph Harrison,
in a letter to Cabell, "an active, intelligent, zealous
patriot, and one possessing a good deal of military skill
and ardor. There is no man in the State who unites all
these qualifications in so eminent a degree as John Hartwell
Cocke."

Cocke, like Cabell, was a broadminded advocate of
public improvements of all kinds, and, in 1823, visited
New York in order to inspect the new Erie waterway, and
to obtain practical information for opening up the obstructed

navigation of the upper James River. A few
years afterwards, he warmly supported a scheme to launch
a fleet of small iron steamboats on the turbulent bosom
of that stream; and he was placed upon the earliest board
of directors appointed for the administration of the affairs
of the James River and Kanawha Canal.

Cocke's approval of popular education was so keen that
he threw the full weight of his influence in favor of every
attempt that was made to establish a State university;
he was chosen by the Governor, at Jefferson's request,
as a member of the Board of Visitors of Central College;
and he was retained on the University Board in spite of
his protesting his disqualification, from lack of experience,
to meet the increased responsibility. "As to my
personal views," he declared, with characteristic modesty
and unselfishness, "God forbid that I should permit such
grovelling motives to interfere with what I believe to
be the public interest." His enlightened opinion touching
education extended to primary and secondary instruction
also. He established near his beautiful home at
Bremo, in 1820, a seminary for boys under the age of
fifteen, and drew up for its government a set of rules
marked by excellent judgment. It was, however, his
own high character that was the principal ground of the
confidence which this school inspired in its patrons. "My
calculations for my son's improvement," wrote Robert
Saunders, of Williamsburg, to him, in 1819, "are made
more on his situation with you than on the talents and fitness
of the tutor. I am frank enough to say, without
intending to compliment you, that I prefer your superintending
eye to the benefit he might derive from the best
classical scholar I might know in Virginia."

But far more multiform in its scope than the Bremo
Academy was the gymnasium, on the most thorough German

model, which he strove so earnestly to set up at
Monticello, in the hope of encouraging the erection of
many others resembling it to serve as great preparatory
schools for the University of Virginia, which, at that time,
were very much wanted.[13]

The spirit of the most catholic philanthropy animated
Cocke throughout life. He was deeply interested in the
labors of the Bible, Tract, and Sunday School Societies,
and frequently made the toilsome and irksome journey
to New England simply to attend the great conventions
of those bodies periodically held in the principal cities of
those States. The familiar social intercourse with influential
Northern men of the different religious denominations
which these occasions rendered possible, created
in him a less prejudiced attitude of mind towards the
Northern States than was to be perceived among the Virginians
at large. "While we nurse an angry spirit instead
of a conciliatory one towards them," he wrote to
Cabell as late as 1855, "the distance between us will
continue to grow." But it was not merely this temper,
which so wisely deprecated the further feeding of the
spreading and consuming sectional fires, that distinguished
Cocke from the personal friends about him. He was the
boldest and most persistent advocate in his native State at
that time of the adoption of universal prohibition. Amiable
ridicule, sneering derision, and silent contempt for
the doctrine, which, in the next century, was to be incorporated
in the statute book of Virginia, did not shake his
loyalty to his convictions on this subject, or divert him
from publicly and emphatically expressing them. "Of
all the events in our history," he said, "the Maine Law

and its progress strikes my mind as the most important";
and he predicted that the great moral revolution which it
represented would pervade all Christendom. Governor
Preston, Andrew Stevenson, and Cabell, his intimate
friends, never let a chance slip without prodding him,
with high good humor, for his obsession; but Cocke's
sole reply was to send them another flight of pamphlets
barbed to a nicety against King Alcohol. At the very
moment that they, in the spirit of that drinking age,
were laughingly condemning his habits of abstemiousness
as repugnant to good fellowship, they honored
the benevolent motives in which all his actions had their
fountainhead. "I appreciate your feelings in your solitary
home," wrote Cabell, in 1848, "and do not wonder
that you roam about the world to soothe your feelings
by doing good to your fellowmen."

Cocke was as firm and outspoken an opponent of duelling
and slavery as he was of intemperance. Against the
first, he directed his pen with all the literary and reasoning
skill at his command; and the latter he was in the habit
of bitterly stigmatizing as a "curse" to his native State.
Only a man of invincible moral courage could have openly
taken such a stand in those intolerant times. As early as
1821, he pressed upon the representative in Congress
from his district the advisability of an amendment to the
Constitution that would allow an appropriation to be
made for the transfer of Southern negroes to Africa as
the only means of practical emancipation then available.
Ten years afterwards he wrote, "I have long and still
do steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all
the great evils of our land, individual as well as national,
and every man of common foresight and reflection is
obliged to admit that we or our posterity are inevitably
destined to be overwhelmed unless the cause is removed.

... How is it that all will not agree to go faithfully
and honestly about the work of removing this blot upon
our national escutcheon; this cancer that is eating into the
vitals of the Commonwealth?" He was in favor of submitting
a petition to the National Government in order
to obtain the assistance of the country at large, for he said
that the vast and complicated task of extirpation could not
be successfully prosecuted in the "straight-jacket which
the States Rights gentlemen have put on us." He did
not join in the outcry of exasperation and execration,
which, in the South, greeted the publication of Uncle
Tom's Cabin, for he anticipated that it would hasten the
end of the institution which it attacked so subtly, and
which he himself detested so heartily. Writing, in 1846,
he declared that he expected, should he survive to a great
age, "to see such changes in Virginia touching slavery
that it would now be deemed to be madness" to predict;
and as his death did not occur until after the War of
Secession, his own eyes beheld the abysmal ruin which he
had forecasted one third of a century before it actually
took place.

Cocke, in the spirit of all the Virginians who occupied
the same rank in society, found a wholesome delight in
the pursuit of the different branches of agriculture. As
far back as 1809, he wrote to Cabell that his time was
"divided between his family, his farms, his garden, and
his books"; and that he did not have a moment "to be
troubled about politics." "I would not change my situation,"
he exclaims, "with the most puissant prince of the
House of Napoleon." He exhibited this characteristic
spirit of independence even in his views of his own calling.
Tobacco was still the principal crop of the region in which
his home was situated, and it had already gone far towards
depreciating the fertility of its lands. There was

no public sentiment, however, favorable to its abandonment.
Cocke, as he expressed it, "dared to sport a new
idea" about this staple by urging that it should be no
longer cultivated; and he was probably influenced in doing
this by the hope that, not only would an improvement of
the soil follow, but that the vices of chewing and smoking
would, in the end, be seriously curtailed, even if they did
not entirely disappear. He spoke of tobacco tillage and
the use of slave labor as the twin evils of agriculture in
Virginia, and until both should come to a stop, the State,
he predicted, would enjoy no prosperity. The laws practically
debarred him from emancipating his bondsmen to
their advantage, but, in 1855, he could say with perfect
veracity that not one tobacco plant was then grown on a
single foot of soil which he had inherited from his ancestors.

Although the name of General Cocke has passed into
obscurity because he steadily declined to be elected to high
office, yet in power of foresight, he was the most remarkable
of all his Virginian contemporaries of his own generation.
He not only urged a more conciliatory attitude
towards the North, and more frequent intercourse with
its people, as a means of removing mutual antagonisms,
but he confidently anticipated the success of numerous
causes which were, in his day, looked upon with chilling
indifference or outspoken aversion, but which have become
an accepted part of the solid structure of our present social
and political life. He warmly supported every plan
to raise the standards of education in all departments,
from the lowest to the highest; he advocated with never
ceasing energy and devotion the wisdom of adopting
universal prohibition; he condemned the barbarism of
duelling, which had destroyed some of the most accomplished
and chivalrous sons of Virginia, and had gilded

the spirit of lawlessness by making it gentlemanly; he
endeavored, by his own example, to discourage the culture
of the tobacco plant as ruinous to the soil of his native
State; but above all, he solemnly, repeatedly, and consistently
declared himself in favor of peaceably abolishing
the institution of slavery before its forcible removal
should overwhelm every interest of the Commonwealth.
Ought we to be surprised that Jefferson, the apostle of
liberal principles, should have chosen this farsighted citizen
to be one of the Visitors of the untrammeled institution
which he was about to found?[14]