University of Virginia Library

XIV. The First Professors Elected

Long before these pavilions, with their annexes, were
built, Jefferson had been revolving the anxious question
as to how the professorships were to be filled, and which
of them, if necessary, should have the preference. The
Board of Visitors, at their meeting on October 7, 1817,—
the day following the laying of the corner-stone of the
first pavilion,—had decided as to who should be the
occupants of the one already going up, and the two additional
ones which they had just concluded to erect. The
first they determined to set aside for the professor of
languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, oratory, history and
geography; the second for the professor of chemistry,
zoology, botany and anatomy; whilst the third, until
wanted for the remaining professor, should be converted
into a boarding house, to be rented to a respectable
French family on condition that only the French language
should be spoken there by the students in the course of
their meals. At the meeting of the Board of Visitors

three months afterwards, there seems to have been a readjustment
of this assignment of houses: on that occasion,
there were submitted estimates of the cost of four
pavilions, with dormitories attached,—the pavilions to
be reserved for the use of the professors of languages,
physiology, mathematics, and ideology, respectively. It
was determined that, should there be, before the following
April, a failure to collect the whole amount that was
due by written promise,—this being the only fund that
was expected to be available for the construction of the
buildings,—then the money needed to pay the salaries
of the professors of chemistry and languages, the first
who were to be appointed, should be obtained by floating
a loan with the banks on the security of the property of
the College, and the several instalments of the subscriptions
as they should fall in.

Writing on January 18, 1800, to Priestley, Jefferson
said, "We should propose to draw from Europe the first
characters in science by considerable temptations, which
would not need to be repeated after the first set had prepared
fit successors, and given reputation to the institution.
From some splendid characters, I have received
offers most perfectly reasonable and practical." It will
be recalled that, at one time, he had just reason to be
confident that he would be able to secure the talents of
Say for a chair in Central College so soon as incorporated;
and also that he had sanguinely fixed his eye on
other aliens of equal celebrity. It seems like an unexpected
and puzzling anti-climax to discover that the first
man who was invited to become a professor in that college
was a clergyman and an American, Dr. Samuel Knox,
of Baltimore; at a meeting of the Board, held on July
28, 1817, several weeks before the corner-stone of the

first pavilion was laid, he was named for the chair of
languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, history, and geography,
—a multiplicity of courses that called for the most versatile
accomplishments in the teacher. As remuneration
for the performance of these laborious duties, he was to
receive a fixed salary of five hundred dollars, and the sum
of twenty-five dollars for each pupil; and since the field
to be traversed by him was wide and popular, the accumulation
of fees on this account was expected to be very
large.

Dr. Knox, either appalled by the burdens which the
task of teaching in so many departments of knowledge
would impose on him, or repelled by the non-sectarian
character of the projected institution, briefly, vaguely, but
discreetly, replied that "he had gone out of business";
which would seem to prove that he had been a professor
as well as a preacher by calling. His shadowy figure enjoys
this distinction in the history of the University
down to the War of Secession: he was the first clergyman
who was asked to fill one of its chairs during that period.
Some years afterwards, Jefferson appears to have made
it plain to Francis Walker Gilmer that, in his search for
English scholars, the application of no minister of the
Gospel was to be considered with favor.

On October 7, about two months after Knox's refusal,
the compass was boxed by the Board of Visitors, under
Jefferson's prompting, in extending to Dr. Thomas
Cooper, an invitation to become the professor of chemistry
and law. Cooper, if not openly and frankly an infidel,
was so vague and shifty in his religious beliefs that
he acknowledged that he himself could not state definitely
what they were. He seems to have been a very erratic,
if not unsavory character, on the whole, in spite of his indisputable

learning and versatile talents.[22] Jefferson enthusiastically
admired him for more than one acquirement.
For instance, he was so much impressed by a
judicial decision which Cooper had delivered that he predicted,
in a letter to Cabell, that it would "produce a
revolution on the question treated; not in the present day,
because old lawyers, like old physicians and other old
men, never change opinions which it had cost them the
whole labors of their youth to form; but when the young
lawyers sit on the bench, they will carry Cooper's doctrine
with them." "The best pieces on political economy
which have been written in this country," he added, "were
by Cooper. He is a great chemist, and now proposes
to resume his mineralogical studies."

Was Cooper the marvelous political economist, jurist,
and chemist that Jefferson pronounced him to be? Jefferson's
insight was sometimes rather awry, as his unqualified
encomiums on Ossian and the obscure economist,
Tracy, prove. It is not beyond the range of probability
that Cooper's general attainments were overrated by
some of the communities of the New World in which he
lived simply because their culture was not yet sufficiently
discriminating, as in the Old, to detect the superficiality
amid the rather glittering pretensions. But whether he
was a man of as phenomenal parts as Jefferson and others
supposed, it is not to be denied that he had, throughout
his career, exhibited a rough contempt for the sentiments
and feelings of others; and that discretion in expressing
his own views was a quality which he seemed to esteem
but little, and show but rarely. He was an Englishman
by birth, who had begun his active life as a member of

the bar; and even in his youth, was so radical and so rampant
in his opinions that he was sent on a sympathetic
mission to Revolutionary France as the representative of
eight British democratic clubs. He became a friend and
disciple of Priestley at an early date on account of their
similar relish for scientific researches, for unorthodox
religious beliefs, and for a freedom in political affairs
that verged on extreme republicanism. Priestley suffered
for his liberal opinions by their bringing down on
his head the fury of the mob that pulled his Unitarian
chapel to pieces and set the torch to his home. In his
very natural disgust, he resolved to seek an asylum in
the less heated atmosphere of the United States; Cooper,
who also found Birmingham at this time an uncomfortable
spot, accompanied him; and both settled in a quiet
back region of Pennsylvania.

Jefferson had been first interested in Priestley in consequence
of his heterodox writings, which had largely influenced
his own religious creed; and he had been further
drawn to him by the fact that he was one of the first persons
of his nation to perceive the importance of physical
science in education. The religious and political persecution
to which he had been ruthlessly subjected recommended
him still more warmly to Jefferson, who detested
every form of oppression, intolerance, and injustice, no
matter how erratic, unworthy, or humble the object of it
might be. Association with Priestley in scientific tastes,
and in a common martyrdom for opinion's sake, was all
that was needed to rivet his good-will and respect for
Cooper, now a citizen of Pennsylvania, and this was further
justified by the reputation which Cooper had won
as a judge, and afterwards as a professor in Dickinson
College and a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania.
He is said to have been imprisoned at one time by the

Federalists, doubtless under the Alien and Sedition Acts;
and this, naturally enough, further magnified his merits
in the eyes of Jefferson, whose feelings towards that party,
it will be recalled, were tempered by little of his customary
philosophy. The Board of Visitors, when they convened
on October 8, 1817, in order to secure Cooper's
services, by making it most advantageous to his pecuniary
interests to accept their appointment, agreed to reimburse
him for the expense of transporting his collection of books
and minerals to Central College, and to continue to pay
him interest, at the rate of six per cent., for the use of
his philosophical and chemical apparatus and mineralogical
specimens, until there should be surplus enough (after
the indispensable charges upon the funds of the College
had been defrayed) with which to buy the entire quantity;
and should this surplus not arise within a defined
time, then the purchase was to be made with money to be
borrowed from the banks. The cost of materials needed
in the course of the chemical lectures was to be taken over
by the Board.

Jefferson was made very sanguine by this liberal offer,
and on the 14th, about a week later, wrote cheerfully to
Francis Walker Gilmer, "Our Central College looks up
with hope. Cooper, I think, will accept a professorship
in it. We are in quest of a Ticknor for languages, but
have not yet found one. If left to ourselves, we shall
be better than William and Mary, but if the Legislature
adopts us for the University, we will then be what we
should be. I have considerable hope they will do it and
at the coming session."

These words let out into the light an important, if
not the principal, reason for Jefferson's urgency in hurrying
the first three buildings to a finish and for his premature
nomination of professors: he wished to be in a

position to say, just so soon as the discussion over the
establishment of a university should begin in the General
Assembly at its approaching term, that Central College
was now, in reality, a working institution, in possession
of teachers, dormitories, and pavilions; and that it only
needed the necromantic touch of the wand of the State
treasury to expand almost at once into a great seat of
learning. It will be recalled that he did endeavor to turn
the property of the College over to the Commonwealth
by the bill for general education, which he submitted in
the winter of 1818; that effort failed, as we have seen;
but a second was to end in the desired success, at the
meeting of the Assembly in the winter of 1819, by the
adoption of the Rockfish Gap Report.

By his shrewd stroke of making the Governor of the
State the patron of the College, Jefferson secured the
tactical advantage of laying before the General Assembly
annually a complete record of those proceedings of
the Board of Visitors which formed the history of the
institution during the previous twelve months. This offered
a regularly recurring opportunity of arousing an interest
in the College in the minds of the persons who had
the most power to serve it. In the report for January
6, 1818, he dwells on the plans that had been adopted
for filling the several chairs. "Our funds already certain,"
he wrote, "will enable us to establish, during the
ensuing season, two professorships only with their necessary
buildings; and to erect a pavilion, and—if the outstanding
subscription papers fulfil our hopes,—the dormitories
also for a third; depending for the salary, as well
as for the salary and buildings for the fourth, on future
and unassured donations. The four are to be languages,
mathematics, physiological and ideological sciences."
Each of these important professorships, on account of

its fixed remuneration of five hundred dollars, and the cost
of the pavilion and the dormitories to be attached to it,
would call for an expenditure at the start of at least
$8,333.30. Jefferson was not at all content with the
thought of limiting the number of chairs to four, as he was
aware that it would be impossible for this number of instructors
to find the time to teach in every subdivision of
the extensive and pregnant subjects which would be assigned
to them. "To do this as it should be done,"
he said, "to give all its development to every useful
branch of all the departments, and in the highest degree
to which each has already been carried, would require a
greatly increased number of professors, and funds far
beyond what can be expected from individual contributors.
For this, the resources at the command of the Legislature
alone is adequate."