College Bill
On 7 September 1814 Jefferson wrote his now famous letter to Peter Carr, the president of
the board of trustees for the Albemarle Academy. The letter opens with a reference to "a
plan adapted in the first instance to our slender funds, but susceptible of being enlarged
either by their own growth or by accession from other quarters."[26] Although the letter is a
detailed description of Jefferson's plans for his educational institution, it includes no
references to architecture or building, unless the quoted words are interpreted as an allusion
to the preliminary plans plan drawn in 1814. At about this time, Jefferson, in the name of the
Albemarle Academy trustees, drew up a petition to the General Assembly asking it to
designate Albemarle County as the site for a state college. Carr, who was Jefferson's nephew
and a "highly agreeable man," died in December 1814,[27] however, and the petition and
supporting papers disappeared without ever being presented to the lower house of the
Virginia General Assembly.[28] Contemplating that the successful introduction into the
legislature of the petition "would have enabled us to have here immediately the best
seminary of the US.," Jefferson turned to state Senator Joseph Carrington Cabell of
Warminster in Nelson County for help and sent him the drafts of his 1814 letter to Carr and
the bill for establishing a college in the county of Albemarle, drawn up in 1815, and which
the General Assembly passed into law on 14 February 1816.[29]
With the passage of the college bill secured, Jefferson once again began promoting his
architectural concept of an educational village. His justification for building a cluster of
small buildings became more sophisticated as he pointed to reasons of safety, health, and
economy in addition to aesthetic and educational values. "I would strongly recommend," he
wrote to Virginia Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas in April 1816,
. . . instead of one immense building, to have a small one for every
professorship, arranged at proper distances around a square, to admit extension,
connected by a piazza, so that they may go dry from one school to another. This
village form is preferable to a single great building for many reasons,
particularly on account of fire, health, economy, peace and quiet. Such a plan
had been approved in the case of the Albemarle College, which was the subject
of the letter above mentioned; and should the idea be approved by the Board,
more may be said hereafter on the opportunity these small buildings will afford,
of exhibiting models in architecture of the purest forms of antiquity, furnishing
to the student examples of the precepts he will be taught in that art.
[30]
Although the passage of the college bill set the whole business of founding a college on a
more stable footing and gave Jefferson evident pleasure, it was a whole year after the
writing of his letter to Governor Nicholas before the visitors of the college met for the first
time, and Jefferson's correspondence for that period is largely silent regarding his plans for
the establishment.
[26]
26. TJ to Peter Carr, 7 September 1814, ViU:TJ. A polygraph copy of the letter is in
DLC:TJ; see also Cabell, Early History of the University of Virginia, 384-90, Niles Register,
10:34-35, and Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 19:211-21. The letter
appeared in the Richmond Enquirer the following year after Cabell wrote to TJ seeking
permission to publish it (see Cabell to TJ, 24 January 1816, in ViU:TJ, and TJ to Cabell, 2
February 1816, in ViU:JCC; see also ibid., 50-51, 52-56). In late February 1816 Cabell
informed TJ that he had at last retrieved the original letter from the newspaper's editor (see
Cabell to TJ, 26 February 1816, in ViU:TJ, and ibid., 60-61).
[27]
27. Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, 247-48.
[28]
28. David Watson, a member of the university's first Board of Visitors, "determined from
some cause or other that they should not be presented" to the legislature (see Cabell to TJ, 5
March 1815, in ViU:TJ; see also Cabell, Early History of the University of Virginia, 38-41).
[29]
29. See TJ to Cabell, 5 January 1815, Cabell to TJ, 5 March 1815, TJ's Bill for Establishing
a College in the County of Albemarle, 1815, and Cabell to TJ, 14 February 1816, in ViU:TJ;
see also Cabell, Early History of the University of Virginia, 35-38, 38-41, 391-93 (appendix
D), and 56. Joseph Carrington Cabell (1778-1856) of Amherst (later Nelson) County, the
brother of Virginia governor and judge William H. Cabell, served in the Virginia Senate
from 1810 to 1829 and in the House of Delegates from 1831 to 1835. He single-handedly
won legislative support in the General Assembly on behalf of the university, and for part of
his thirty-seven years as a Board of Visitor member he served as university rector. Cabell
also zealously promoted internal improvements in the state and served as president of the
James River and Kanawha Canal Company, and his family estate at Warminster on the
James River was the seat of one of central Virginia's busiest communities in the first half of
the nineteenthth century. For more on Cabell's role in founding the university, see Cabell,
Early History of the University of Virginia, Patton, Jefferson, Cabell, and the University of
Virginia, Bruce, History of the University of Virginia (vol. 1), and Tanner, "Joseph C. Cabell,
1778-1856."
[30]
30. TJ to Wilson Cary Nicholas, 2 April 1816, DLC:TJ; see also Lipscomb and Bergh,
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 14:446-56. Wilson Cary Nicholas (1761-1820), who was born
in Williamsburg, spent three decades in public service: Virginia House of Delegates,
1784-1786, 1788, 1789, 1794-1800; Virginia Convention, 1788; United States Senate,
1800-1804; United States House of Representatives, 1807-1809; and governor of Virginia,
1814-1816. Nicholas died at Tufton, Milton, and is buried at Monticello.
