University of Virginia Library

XV. Plans for Filling the Chairs

Jefferson was not one of that bigoted stamp, perhaps
as numerous in his times as in our own, who honestly believe

that America is so faultless that it cannot be improved
upon,—at least, not so from without. No one
could surpass him in unselfish devotion to his own country;
and yet no one was more candid in acknowledging
its deficiencies, and more anxious to correct them, even if
the only way was to introduce foreign substances, talents,
and devices. Whether it was an Italian species of rice,
or an English variety of vegetable or thorn for hedges;
whether it was a Scotch threshing machine, or a French
barometer; whether it was an English strain of rams,
bulls, or boars, or the ward system of New England;
whether it was a novel chemical discovery in a Parisian
laboratory, or a serpentine wall noted in a casual stroll
through an English garden; whether it was the entire
faculty of a Swiss university, or the philologians, mathematicians,
and scientists of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh,
—his inquisitive eyes looked abroad unerringly for
the best in the practical or intellectual life of every foreign
land in order to employ it for the betterment of his
own. He was resolved to make the genius of every race
contribute to the beauty, the commodiousness, and the
enlightenment of the sphere in which his own people
moved. In politics and ethics alone did he seem to feel
that there was no need of foreign illumination and fortification.

Jefferson was a provincial in his intensely partisan interest
in the welfare of his own country, but he was a cosmopolite
in his discernment in recognizing what was most
useful in alien lands, and in his solicitude to reproduce
it on this side of the water. The spirit of his mission
to France, apart from its purely diplomatic aspects, was
summarized in the ever present thought: what advantages

to America in a scientific or scholarly way can I gather up
here for the promotion of its wealth, its comfort, its
moral and intellectual condition? There was no limit to
the personal inconvenience which he was ready to defy to
obtain information which he knew would be beneficial to
the existing and the future generations.

Such was his mental attitude in considering the vital
task of selecting the professors of the new university,
when, after the completion of the buildings, and the adoption
of the system of instruction, it became imperative to
choose the entire number. He was fully determined to
appoint only the most erudite, not only because his standard
was as high in the respect of scholastic training as it
was in all others, but because he was shrewdly aware that
it was only the most shining acquirements that could give
prestige to a seat of learning which was still in its infancy.
The distinction of the teachers alone could overcome the
absence of that glamour which tradition and a long history
of achievement are so fecund in imparting. Without
this distinction, the University could not only assert
no superiority over its fellow institutions of older origin,
—it could not even claim an equality with them. The
first question, which, he said, should be asked of a candidate
was: Is he highly qualified? Nor was he to be accepted
as so qualified simply because he knew thoroughly
his own topic. On the contrary, Jefferson insisted
that "he should be educated as to the sciences generally;
able to converse understandingly with the scientific
men with whom he is associated; or to assist in the councils
of the Faculty on any subject of science on which
they may have occasion to deliberate. Without this, he
will incur their contempt, and bring disrespect on the institution."

It is to be inferred from this expression of opinion, that

Jefferson was inclined to estimate breadth of acquirements
more highly than mere specialism, however profound.
Such amplitude of accomplishments were more common
in his day than it is in our own, and the success of his
original selection of professors was, in no one particular,
more conspicuously illustrated than in the facility with
which the majority of them could pass from the chair of
languages to the chair of mathematics and from the chair
of mathematics to the chair of natural philosophy. It
was his conviction that something besides lucrative salaries
and comfortable accommodations was needed to
ensure the acquisition of a faculty of the highest reputation
for talents and learning. He thought, with a just
refinement of view, that scholars of extraordinary merit
are influenced to accept a chair as much by the distinction
of the university to which that chair belongs as by the
actual emoluments that went with it. What was the only
means by which this distinction could be created before
professors of celebrity had been chosen? By the nobility
of its architectural setting. No doubt, as we have pointed
out, Jefferson found an acute satisfaction in stately edifices
apart from their practical utility, but there is also
reason to suppose that, in adopting the classical style in
his own seat of learning, he also had before his mind's
eye the reputation for imposing beauty which that style
would give. Such a reputation was an important asset in
itself. "Had we built a barn for a college and log-huts
for accommodations," he said somewhat scornfully,
"should we ever had the assurance to propose to a European
professor of the first order?"

He knew from his own personal observation while
abroad that, among the most splendid structures in Europe,
were those that housed the ancient colleges and universities;
and he could easily comprehend the feeling of

repulsion which the first view of the rude barracks even
of great institutions like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard,
would arouse in the breast of a fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford, or Trinity College, Cambridge. It was
partly in order to create the deepest impression for
beauty that he insisted that the University should remain
shut up until the entire round of buildings had been completed,
when alone the effect of the whole in its perfection
could be fully taken in and discriminatingly relished.
This seemed to him to be the more imperative because
Charlottesville, at this time, was a small village, with no
architectural charm and no social advantages; and while
the surrounding country contained a large number of refined
and well educated families, and many attractive
homes, yet all of them were too dispersed to make the
pleasing impression on cultivated and travelled strangers
which they would have done, had they been closely and
conveniently grouped.

Had Jefferson been able to go from one American seat
of learning to another and pick out the very men whom he
preferred, it is quite possible that he would not have directed
his gaze so soon towards the universities of Europe.
During the existence of Central College, as will be
recalled, he turned first to Dr. Cooper, who, although of
English birth, had resided long enough in Pennsylvania
for his original democratical opinions to be confirmed.
Dr. Knox was a citizen of the United States. Jefferson
clearly perceived the practical advantage of employing instructors
who were already in sympathy with American
political principles and social customs, and who, he knew,
would be satisfied with the still raw American environment
because they were born to it. As early as March,
1819, the Board of Visitors, under the spur of his prompting,
instructed the committee of superintendence to overlook

no opportunity of engaging for the University
"American citizens of the first order of science in their
respective lines"; and during the following year, both
Mr. Bowditch and Mr. Ticknor, of Massachusetts, were
approached with offers of definite professorships. Nathaniel
Bowditch, who was famous as a self-taught mathematician
and navigator, and as the translator of Laplace's
Mechanique Celeste, had already declined to enter the
faculty of either Harvard or West Point. Ticknor was,
perhaps, the most accomplished man in the United States
at that time; had travelled far and wide in the Old World;
and was to win a great reputation as a teacher and as a
writer. Each refused such liberal inducements to accept
as a pavilion, an annual salary of two thousand dollars,
and a fee of ten dollars for each student belonging to his
class, with a total emolument of twenty-five hundred
dollars specifically guaranteed.

The failure to secure these distinguished men seems to
have discouraged Jefferson in his pursuit of American professors.
"It was not probable," he concluded, "that
they would leave the situation in which they were, even if
it were honorable to seduce them from their stations."
"It was easy enough," he added, "to fill the chairs with
the employed secondary characters. But this would not
have fulfilled the object or satisfied the expectation of our
country in the institution." The impossibility of obtaining
in the United States the teachers of the scholarship
by him considered to be indispensable, fully justified him
in deciding to look henceforward across the ocean for
their counterparts. And he may have done this with the
less hesitation because he was aware that a foreign professor
was, at that time, certain to be invested with the
greater prestige because he would be able to show a
diploma from some one of the famous European universities;

or what was a still higher distinction, had even occupied
a chair in one of them.

Naturally, Jefferson concentrated his earliest attention
upon the country which spoke the same language and
possessed the same points of view as Americans, and were
of the same racial descent, political principles, and social
instincts. He was too sensible to presume that an infant
university seated in the far-off New World, as yet without
reputation because still a pile of fresh bricks, and
with no large endowment fund, would be able, by the few
inducements that it could hold out, to draw to itself historical
scholars like Robertson, or classical scholars like
Porson and Parr, or scientists like Playfair. They, he
said, "occupied positions which could not be bettered anywhere."
It was upon the accomplished members of a
younger generation that he cast his eyes,—the men who
were already treading impatiently upon the heels of the
veterans; and who, within a few years, would be usurping
their shoes, and, as their successors, showing even higher
qualifications than the veterans themselves had exhibited.
The rivalry among these younger English scholars of
equal claims to recognition, he knew, was sharp and unceasing;
and he was sanguine that there would be found
among them some, who, as he said, would prefer a comfortable
certainty in Virginia to a precarious stipend in
England. So universal and so relentless, indeed, was
this competition in the struggle there for a moderate income,
that he had been told, he added, that "it was
deemed allowable in ethics for even the most honorable
minds to give exaggerated recommendations and certificates
to enable a friend or protégé to get into a livelihood."

Jefferson was well-informed as to the English universities
which must be sounded by him in his search for the

competent professors who were needed: to Oxford, he
must go for the classical scholar; to Cambridge for the
mathematical; to Edinburgh, for the anatomical expert;
and perhaps to that city also for the teacher of natural
philosophy and natural history. The professor of modern
languages should be procured from one of the continental
seats of learning.

The first foreign instructor to send in his testimonials
to the Board of Visitors was George Blaettermann, a
German by birth and education, who had been recommended
by George Ticknor and General Preston. This
was in 1821. Again, in 1823, he applied by letter to
Jefferson for the appointment, for which he had, in the
interval, prepared himself by collecting, during a tour of
France, Germany, and Holland, materials for a series of
lectures to be delivered at the University. Richard Rush,
the American minister to London, had been asked to inquire
as to his character and qualifications. It is possible
that, at one time, Jefferson was sanguine that all the
professors could be selected through the intermediary offices
of Rush; but this expectation, if ever nursed, was
soon abandoned as impracticable.

It was natural and judicious that he, in casting about
for an agent, should first think of Joseph C. Cabell, a man
upon whose good sense he had always, as we have seen, relied
implicitly, and who, by a previous visit to Europe, and
by personal acquaintance with many distinguished persons
there, seemed to be exceptionally fitted to carry out successfully
the mission which was now to be performed.
Cabell asked for time to consider the request. "I cannot
conceal," he wrote, "the gratification I feel at the confidence
the proposition discovers." At the moment, he
was debating in the closet of his own mind whether he
should not resign his seat in the Senate, and withdraw

into private citizenship again; his affairs had begun to
suffer alarmingly from the neglect that had followed his
long absences from home; and he had also pleasing visions
of devoting the leisure hours of his future plantation life
to science and literature. The suggested visit to Europe
would not be inconsistent with these agricultural and
scholarly plans, for it would not absorb a longer period
than six months at the most. Cabell, in the end, however,
determined, with Jefferson's hearty approval, to
remain in public office; and this decision, fortified, doubtless,
by his constant anxiety about his health, caused him
to decline the invitation to undertake the foreign mission.[22]

At the meeting of the Board of Visitors held on April
5 (1824), Francis Walker Gilmer was chosen in his
stead. As Jefferson had known Gilmer intimately from
boyhood, the selection was quite certainly the direct result
of his advice. From every point of view, it was both
a judicious and an interesting one. Gilmer belonged to
the same caste in Virginia as Cabell, and had passed his
early life in the midst of precisely similar social influences;
indeed, the home of Dr. George Gilmer, the father
of Francis Walker, was the exact counterpart in domestic
refinement, elevated tastes, and simple occupations, of the
home of Colonel Nicholas Cabell, the father of Joseph.
The mould in which the characters of both young men
had been shaped was the typical country-house of the
Old Dominion, with its English traditions of manliness,
uprightness, and culture of head and heart. Both were
animated by the same lofty ideal of intellectual accomplishments
and public services. Distinction in literature,

science or politics was the beckoning star of their aspirations;
they had, from their earliest youth, nursed a generous
ambition to win personal renown by such achievements
in at least one of these walks as would be distinctly promotive
of the happiness and prosperity of their fellowmen.

Cabell and Gilmer resembled each other even in their
flaws of temperament: the one exhibited on the threshold
of his active life, the other, throughout the whole of
his shortened existence, a definite infirmity of will, which,
by shifting their energies from one channel to another,
created an impression of instability and inconstancy of
character. Cabell, acquiring, by inheritance and marriage,
a large fortune, was able in time to concentrate his
powers in a brilliant political career, which he followed
uninterruptedly until the verge of old age. Gilmer, as
we shall see, wavered, not so much in his general spirit, as
in his particular aims, and died while still young, leaving
behind a memory that was held in all the more tenderness
by his numerous friends because it was invested with the
pathos of arrested achievement and unfulfilled promise.
Both Cabell and Gilmer were sufferers from weakness of
the lungs; and Gilmer succumbed to it before his powers
had fully ripened. The capriciousness and fickleness
which marked his conduct at times were probably due, in
no small measure, to the haunting thought of this terrible
disease, which naturally tended to confuse his plans for
life and debilitate his will in their pursuit. The impression
left by the study of his career is one of brilliance that
bordered on futility, and of ambition of the noblest order
that lacked the necessary fixity of purpose to blossom into
full efflorescence.