University of Virginia Library

1. INTRODUCTORY
THE IMPRESS OF JEFFERSON

I. Father of the University

Thomas Jefferson, from early manhood until the end of his sixty-sixth year, had, with short intervals of private life, filled in succession the highest offices in the gift of the popular voice. He lead served in the General Assembly and in the first Virginia Convention; had been a member of the Continental Congress and Governor of the Commonwealth; had been Minister to the Court of Versailles, Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet and Vice-President of the United States; and, finally, at the summit of his career, had been President during one of the most pregnant and critical eras in American history. He had won distinction in the very different parts of legislator, diplomat, and executive. His name had been coupled with all the events forming the great milestones of his time, with the solitary exception of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, which was drafted and ratified during his absence in France.

Towards the close of his life, looking back, with tranquil discrimination, upon the achievements of his great career, he wrote down a list of the acts which he conceived to be his principal claims upon the remembrance and gratitude of posterity. This list embraced all those,

which, before the establishment of the University of Virginia, had brought him conspicuously into the eyes and minds of men,-not one of any substantial importance, legislative, executive or educational, was omitted. It began with his public spirited example, as a young man, in opening up the shallow waters of his native Rivanna to the navigation of batteaux; then passed on to his authorship of the Declaration of Independence; to his separation of Church and State in Virginia; to his destruction there of the laws of entail and primogeniture; to his paternity of the statute that prohibited the further importation of slaves; of the one defining the rights of naturalization; of the one making more humane the punishment of crime; and of the bill of 1779 for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. He closed as he began with the mention of an act of utilitarian patriotism, seemingly little in itself but really of far-reaching consequence: his introduction of olives and a more hardy and fecund species of rice into the Southern States. There was, in the list, not the slenderest hint of the political honors which had been showered upon him so generously by his countrymen.

In extreme old age, when he had had a longer time to weigh and set the nicest value upon all the incidents of his life, he determined to revise this first list, and in abbreviating and condensing it, to retain only those facts which indicated most clearly the characteristic spirit of his career in all its phases. What was this spirit? The governing and driving power of Jefferson's whole course from youth to old age was love of freedom,-freedom of the mind in its outlook in every direction and on all things; freedom of the soul, in its beliefs; freedom of action for the individual in every personal relation, and in' every department of human affairs, so far as it was not repugnant to morality, law and order. Which were the

achievements of his life that, in his final judgment, reflected most faithfully and pointedly this overtopping, this all-animating aspiration of his entire existence? When, after his death, his papers were examined to discover his wishes for the disposal of his body, the following memorandum was found among them, and the more closely we scrutinize its details, the more comprehensive does it show itself as the matured expression of the mainspring of his long career:

His last thought, as we thus perceive, was occupied, in no egotistic spirit, with only three facts of his life; but they were the three, which, in his opinion, made up his greatest contributions to the noblest of all causes,-the cause of freedom. As the author of the Declaration, he had proclaimed the tyranny o Call Governments that had not received their authority directly from the consent of the governed; as the author of the Virginia statute, he had proclaimed, with equal emphasis, the tyranny of all spiritual domination that was rejected by the intelligence; and as the Father of the University of Virginia, he was convinced that he had founded a seat of learning that, for ages, would help to preserve that freedom of mind, spirit, and individual action, which he had always so persistently advocated with tongue and pen, and which, by his acts, he had done so much to encourage, to strengthen, and to perpetuate.

There have been few men in our political history who have had so accurate a command of the English language, in its nicest shades of meaning, as Jefferson. He was always

ways lucid and precise in the use of the written word. It will be noticed that he did not describe himself as the Founder of the University of Virginia but as the Father. Now, there is an important difference in the significance of the two words, as employed in this connection, entirely apart from any hint of endowment which may vaguely linger about the former. There have been many founders of scholastic institutions in the United States, but few fathers of such institutions. Those great seats of learning, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and Leland,, Stanford, Jr.,-to mention only the most eminent, had their respective origins in the benefactions of single philanthropists, who were content to impart in a general way only, if they imparted at all, the trend and color of certain principles to the aims of those universities, and to the methods of their administration. But it cannot be said of them to the degree that can be so often said of a father in relation to his children, that their transmitted influence has never ceased to shape those creations of their benevolence, in the smallest detail as well as in the largest, from the time the first charter was obtained and the first stone was laid, down to the present hour.

On the other hand, had Jefferson been in a position to endow the projected University of Virginia with a million dollars of his own, it would still have been more correct to speak of him as the Father of that institution than as its Founder. He was not merely the father of it in the spiritual and intellectual sense: he was the father of it in a corporeal sense also, for he designed the structure 'n the main from dome to closet, and he superintended is erection from the earliest to almost the last brick and lath. It was he who had carried at the front of His mind for more than a generation the unrealized conception

of a university for his native Commonwealth; who, through all this long period of disappointment, but not of discouragement, pressed it upon the attention of the General Assembly; who, when it was at last incorporated in its earliest form as a college, selected its site and surveyed its boundaries; who, after its final charter was granted, kept up a persistent and successful struggle with faction, prejudice, and ignorance, to obtain from the State the funds needed for its completion; who, after its doors were thrown open, thought out minutely and laid down with precision its courses of instruction; who chose many of the text-books; formed the library; nominated all the professors; and finally drafted all the laws for the general administration of the institution, and all the regulations for the enforcement of discipline among the students. Almost daily, if the weather was fair, he rode down from his mountain-top to the University to watch the progress of the building; and when prevented from doing this, turned from that lofty height upon the unfinished structures the far-reaching eyes of his telescope.

There is hardly another instance in our educational history which approaches the noble, the almost pathetic, solicitude which the illustrious octogenarian showed for this child of his of brick and stone. " I have only this single anxiety in this world," he declared. " It is a bantling of forty years' birth and nursing, and if I can see it on its legs, I will sing, with serenity and pleasure, my nunc dimittis." Nor did this brooding thought leave him even when he lay on his death-bed at Monticello, for his physician tells us that he constantly speculated as to the name of his probable successor in the rectorship, that office upon which most depended the intelligent management of its affairs.

II. Political Principles

No biography can be accepted as complete which fails to scrutinize the qualities of the parentage of its subject. The laws of heredity are equally applicable to the University of Virginia, for all its principal characteristics, as we have just seen, were, in the beginning, derived from the moulding hand of Jefferson. The first one hundred years of its history turns in a very real and practical sense upon the spirit which was breathed into its working organization at the start by the liberal, versatile, and sagacious brain of one man. Madison, who, from its foundation, was a member of the Board of Visitors, very frequently reminded the members of that body of the propriety of permitting their venerable rector to carry out all the plans which he had framed for its benefit; and he did this, not simply because that rector's judgment was entitled to peculiar deference, but chiefly because,-as the scheme was, in the beginning, his own,-the responsibility for its failure or success would fall on him.

Apart from its architectural setting, which was entirely of his dictation, there were three conspicuous aspects in which the University of Virginia reflected the spirit of Jefferson: (1) in its political creed; (2) in its freedom from every form of sectarianism; and (3) in its complete dedication to the advancement of science.

Jefferson's almost extravagant love of freedom was, perhaps, more vividly reflected in his political principles than in any other branch of his convictions. He was in favor of that system of government which would hamper the least the natural liberty of the individual. This liberty, both in private relations and in public, was to be as completely without restraints as the working requirements of organized society would permit. Men

were to be taught to discipline themselves so firmly and so unselfishly that the controlling hand of a central power would be hardly needed at all; such central power as did exist should have before it as its supreme object, not the curbing of the bad instincts and impulses of mankind, but the bestowal upon the multitude of the highest degree of happiness possible for humanity. Freedom and Happiness,-these, in his opinion, were the principal ends which all governments, as well as all acquisitions of knowledge, were designed to subserve. " The general spread of science," he wrote only a few days before his death, when his hand trembled so violently that he could, with difficulty, retain the pen in his fingers, " has already laid open to every view the truth that the mass of mankind have not been born with saddles on their backs; nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

It was his hatred of tyranny, expressed so graphically in this remarkable imagery, that made him the implacable opponent of all special privilege, whether entrenched in law or in immemorial custom. It was this feeling, -which burnt in his breast even in youth,-that prompted him to bring forward in the General Assembly the bill for the abolition of entail and primogeniture, so as to throw the soil again into the hands of the many; for the separation of Church and State, so as to remove all the galling burdens from the backs of the Dissenters; and, finally, for the suppression of the harsh features of criminal law by reducing the number of capital offenses from twenty-nine to two. And it was this same feeling also that led him to draft the bill to put a stop to the further importation of slaves; and that caused him to favor a second bill that would have brought about gradual manumission, had the opinion of the public, at that time,

been as ripe for such a farsighted measure as his own. His views on this momentous subject reflected most conspicuously the openness of his mind as well as the clearness of his vision: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free . . . . The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for total emancipation." There was presented to him, afterwards, but one other great opportunity to show, in attempted legislation, his eagerness to uproot African bondage, and he did not let it pass: in his original plan for the organization of a government for the Northwest Territory, he provided that the States to be carved out of that area, should, after 1800, be prohibited from holding slaves.

Valuing liberty even to the point of favoring the emancipation of the negroes, and the curtailment of the punishment of criminals, to what did Jefferson look for its preservation? He asserted again and again that the people at large were the only bulwark of a free government. " What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every country which has ever existed under the sun?" he asked. "The concentration of all laws and powers into one body. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." "Whenever the people are well informed," he wrote to Dr. Price in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own government." He urged up to the end that the citizens of every community should retain control over all persons intrusted with the reins of administration, for, should they neglect to do so, such authority was sure to be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and dominion among the members of the intriguing office-holding caste. With Hamilton, his persistent antagonist, he believed that virtue and intelligence should always be

in the ascendancy in political life; but, unlike Hamilton, he was convinced that intelligence and virtue could only have room for full play if the natural right of every man to the enjoyment of the suffrage,-whether he was a property-owner or not,-was candidly acknowledged and ungrudgingly granted. He would have relieved the suffrage of all restrictions; and it was his clear perception of the fact that suffrage unrestricted could not be of the most beneficent service to the individual and the community unless education was also universal, that caused him, as we shall see, to advocate so earnestly a general system of public instruction. It was this epochal proviso that saved his sweeping opinion from the taint of demagogism.

Did Jefferson exaggerate the danger to popular freedom in thinking, as he did, that it was always threatened by the open or furtive encroachments of rulers, local or national alike? The events through which he had passed in early manhood unquestionably inflamed his imagination in its outlook even on the events of the normal years in which his later life was spent. The arrogant conduct of the British Government towards the American colonists before the Revolution; the exasperations of that conflict after it had once begun; his observation of the unequal laws in France, and the consequent prostration of its people in the mass, previous to the destruction of the monarchy,-all this had convinced him that there was an instinctive and unavoidable antagonism between rulers and ruled, unless the rulers were chosen by the majority of the people; and that, even when they were, eternal vigilance was the price of liberty.

Jefferson was the only statesman of the first order in those times, violent as they were in both America and Europe, who always, and with palpable sincerity,

expressed the firmest confidence in the virtue and wisdom of the people at large. The most maturely considered and most cautiously framed document of that period was the Federal Constitution. Why is its tenor throughout characterized by so many checks and balances? Largely, no doubt, because it was only by compromise that the sectional antagonisms of the Convention could be reconciled, but, perhaps, principally because even that noble body of patriots, in their secret consciousness, did not, like Jefferson, place a solid reliance on the trustworthiness .of the people. " It is an axiom of my mind," he affirmed on more than one occasion, " that our liberty can never be safe but in the people's hands "; and then he always added significantly, " I mean the people with a certain degree of instruction."

It is one of the strangest riddles of American history that a man born like himself to wealth and high social position, and in a community in which the English conception of class distinctions still lingered, should have understood so clearly and thoroughly the aspirations of the people as a mass that he should have become their articulate voice. How did he catch with such niceness the democratic idea? Was it taken in with the free atmosphere of his frontier hills and mountains and wild primaeval woods? Or was he simply a philosophical radical, a speculative sage, who had reached his conclusions by thought and reading alone? There was no more outcropping of the democrat in Jefferson's personal bearing and domestic surroundings than in Washington's; and yet so obnoxious were his opinions to many of his fellow-countrymen that he was roundly and widely decried as a demagogue, a Jacobin, an atheist, and an anarchist. And yet what were the fundamental principles that he promulgated? First, that all men .should stand upon

exactly the same platform of equal privileges and equal opportunities before the law; secondly, that every nation, great or small, should possess the right to administer its own affairs free from all dictation, compulsion, or interference from other nations.

In Jefferson's life-time, as in our own, there prevailed two views of what should be the relations of the State to the individual, and of the individual to the State. According to one view, the first duty of the individual was to forward the welfare of the State; according to the other, the only duty of the State was to exercise a general oversight, which was to leave the individual in spirit and in practice to his own self-government. Under the second system, the individual is all important; under the first, he is of as small consequence as one ant in a nest of millions. The single ant is of no interest; the millions as a body are of supreme interest. Now, Jefferson had no toleration for such a theory of the Commonwealth as this. He objected even to a benevolent interference by the State in the affairs of men, and looked upon all rules and regulations for government as arbitrary, however wise in themselves, unless they resulted directly from the action of the majority of the people. It was one of his firmest convictions, after the Revolution had begun, that America was destined to run a career entirely different in temper and in fruitfulness from the civilization of Europe; and long before the foot of the last English soldier had passed from American soil, he brought in those measures in the General Assembly of Virginia which would introduce at once a condition of society antipathetic, from top to bottom, to that society which still prevailed in England, and which had previously prevailed in Virginia. By knocking away the cornerstones, he justly anticipated that the whole structure of privilege and monopoly would

tumble to the ground. Abolition, of the law of entail would put an end to the automatic preservation of wealth in the hands of a few families from generation to generation; abolition of the law of primogeniture, -which had made the eldest son rich and all his brothers poor,-would, by distributing the inheritance, not only improve the pecuniary fortunes of the majority, but also diffuse among them a passion for equality in all things; while the separation of the Church from the State would destroy sectarian ascendancy at a blow, and like the subdivision of lands, would reduce each denomination to the level of all.

It was Jefferson's uncompromising hostility to privilege in every form, whether it showed itself in the prerogatives of kings and nobles, or in the exclusive inheritance of an elder son, or in the tithes of a state church, that caused him to judge so harshly the principles and policies of the Federalist party. His antagonism to that party was unquestionably embittered by political opposition and personal resentment, but, for deeper reasons than these, it would still have inflamed his mind had he never filled an office or left his library and fields at Monticello. " The leaders of Federalism," he wrote Governor Hall, " say that man cannot be trusted with his own government. Every man and every body of men on earth possess the right of self-government." " I am not a Federalist," he said to Francis Hopkinson, in 1789, " because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, when I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent." The then powerful party of the Federalists was stigmatized by him as the Parricide party, because, he asserted, they were

basely willing to sell what their fathers had so bravely won. Or he spoke of them as the Monarchist party, because they accepted, he said, the newly-adopted republican form of government only as a stepping stone to a monarchical one. He never forgot that, when he arrived in New York, in 1790, from France, to become Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, he found himself plunged in a society, that, boldly expressing a preference for royalty, did not hesitate to make a target of him, in whatever company he might mingle, because, fresh from the French Revolution, in its first and pure stage, and consequently somewhat " whetted up in his republican principles," as he declared, he ventured to dispute the sentiments which he heard pronounced on, every side.

It is to be inferred from these perhaps exaggerated impressions that Jefferson was a staunch opponent of centralization in the National Government. He desired to keep unbroken the line that had been drawn between the Federal and State administrations by the Constitution, and to strengthen the barriers raised to prevent the one in the future from stepping over into the province of the other. He favored the inviolable conservation of that instrument within the bounds of the precise sense in which it was adopted by its framers: the reservation to the States of all powers not expressly delegated to the National Government, and the limitation of the tatter's executive and legislative branches particularly to the powers granted to those branches, without any right whatever to trespass on the jurisdiction of the judicial branch.

In a letter to Samuel Kincheloe, in 1816, he summarized this section of his political creed as follows: " We should marshal our Government in (1) the General Federal Republic, for all concerns foreign or federal; (2)

the State Republics, for what relates to our citizens exclusively; (3) the County Republics, for the duties and concerns of the county; and (4) the Ward Republics, for the small and yet numerous and interesting concerns of the neighborhood."

If there should be an attempt on the part of the highest of these republics to steal or leap beyond its own legitimate area, how was the usurpation to be met? The famous Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, formulated the principles and the policy alike which Jefferson approved: that the Constitution was a compact between the different States and the United States, and that all violations of that compact on the part of the Federal Government, by assuming functions not intrusted to it, were illegal and without force; that the General Government was not made by this compact the exclusive or final arbiter of the powers delegated to itself; that, as in all other cases of compact in which there was no common judge, each party had an equal right to determine whether an infraction had been committed; and if so, the manner in which it should be redressed. Jefferson was always most vehemently jealous of judicial encroachments on the rights of the States backed by the power of the Federal Executive. In 1825, he was very much disquieted by the decisions of the Supreme Court; by the orders of the President, John Quincy Adams; and by the misconstructions of the Constitution, which, in his opinion, signalized many of the legislative measures. " It is but evident," he said in a letter to W. B. Giles, " that the three ruling branches of that department ( the National Government) are in combination to strip their colleagues, the States' authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions, foreign and domestic." " Are we to stand to our arms?" he asked. " That must be the

last resource, not to be thought of until much longer and greater sufferings . . . . We must have fortitude and longer endurance with our brethren while under delusion . . . and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers. Between these two evils, when we must take a choice, there can be no hesitation."

Such, in bare outlines, were the political principles of Jefferson; and it was these principles that he required to be taught in the University of Virginia. They were derived by that University directly from him; and unless they are taken into account at the start, the true character of the institution, as fashioned by his devoted zeal, cannot be fully understood. He announced, before its doors were thrown open, that, with one exception, all the professors were to be permitted to choose the textbooks for their respective classes; but that exception was a vital one, for it was the professor of law. The textbooks assigned to this member of the Faculty had first to receive the approval of the Rector and the Board before they could be used in his lecture-room in the instruction of his pupils. The new university, he said, was not to be suffered to become a hot-bed for the propagation of political doctrines destructive of State and Nation alike. Monarchical Federalism and the consolidation of the powers of government were heresies to be fought there with all the fiery energy of a council of mediaeval churchmen. And no quarter whatever was to be given. He was firmly resolved that, in the inculcation of his political principles from those platforms at least, no room at all was to be left for the display of opposition or even of doubt. There was unquestionably a spirit of narrowness and even of bigotry in the uncompromising attitude

which he thus assumed. "The young lawyers," he wrote Madison, a few months before his death, " no longer know what Whiggism and Republicanism mean. It is in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive. It is thence to spread anew over our own and sister States. If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or twenty years, a majority of our own legislature will be from our own school, and many disciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their several States, and will have leavened thus the whole mass."[1]

Who were the contumacious lawyers thus stigmatized? They were the young Virginians of that day who had been converted to the political doctrines which John Marshall advocated, and which they had acquired from him during their practice in his circuit, or in personal intercourse with him in the social circles of Richmond. When it was planned to remove the College of William and Mary to that city, Jefferson opposed it, not simply because it would raise up a formidable rival to his own University, but also because it would become an instrument, through the influence of the Chief justice, whose residence was there, for the propagation of the political creed of the Federalists throughout the Southern States. Nor could he refrain from a bitter fling at Harvard and Princeton for the same reason. Harvard was destroying the patriotism of Southern youths who entered its lecture-halls, with lessons of anti-Missourianism, while Princeton, one half of whose students had come up from the South, was busy sowing the seeds of prejudice in their minds against the " sacred principles of the Holy Alliance of Restrictionists."

The list of the textbooks drawn up for the use of the

professor of law indicates the works which Jefferson considered the best for inculcating the only political principles which he would tolerate. It embraced Sidney's Discourse, and Locke's Essay on Civil Government, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist, the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, and the Inaugural Speech and Farewell Address of Washington. It was by the study of these classical authorities, -as he himself said to the committee of the Transylvania University in 1819, a few months after his own seat of learning had been incorporated,-that he expected to make the young men under its arcades desirous, on the one hand, " of bringing all mankind together in concord and fraternal love," and determined, on the other, " to preserve as the sheet-anchor of the people's hope and happiness, the sacred form and principles of the State and Federal Constitutions." And there was another course of instruction which he was equally resolved to require, and for the same reason: the study of Anglo-Saxon, he thought, was necessary, not simply because the pupil would become versed thereby in a neglected department of invaluable knowledge, but primarily because, in learning that language, he would drink in with it all the primitive principles of free government.

III. Religious Views

Whilst the University of Virginia has always stood for the freest principles of government and a strict interpretation of the Constitution, it has also stood equally unequivocally for extreme opposition to every form of sectarian interference in the administration of its affairs. This attitude too was derived from Jefferson's impress in the beginning. Again we must go back,-this time to a study of the opinions which he held and uttered on the subject of religion; for with such a study omitted, it

would be impossible to comprehend why it was that, in an age when all the existing colleges offered a long course in theology, the University of Virginia was founded without the smallest consideration for any religious dogma or denomination. With one breath, Jefferson could exclaim, " I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men," and with the next, he could truthfully say, " I have never attempted to make a convert or wished to change another's creed. I inquire after no man's religion, and I trouble none with mine." " I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches," he wrote to Elbridge Gerry, in 1799, " and not for awing the human mind by stories of rawheads and bloody bones to a distrust of its own vision."

And yet the relations between man and his Creator, and the responsibilities which resulted therefrom, were pronounced by him to be the most important of all to every human being, and, therefore, the most obligatory on each person to inquire into. Of the different systems of morality which he had investigated,-and he had been a close student of religious history,-that of Christ always rose before his mind's eye as the purest, the most benevolent, and the most sublime. Epictetus and Epicurus, he said, formulated a code of ethical laws by which the individual should govern himself; Christ went a great distance further by enforcing upon men the charities and the duties which they owed to their fellowman. He had inculcated a universal philanthropy far above the loftiest imagination of the ancient philosophers or of the Jews themselves. " Had his doctrines," Jefferson added, " been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole world would have been converted to Christianity." Who had perverted the original complexion,

the primitive spirit, of those doctrines? The priest, was his reply. In every country and in every age, he said, the priest had been the foe of liberty. He was always an ally of despots, and ready to connive at their abuses in return for protection for his own. The most culpable members of the living priesthood, he asserted, were the Presbyterian ministers; they are, he wrote William Short " the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could now be obtained, to put the torch to the pile. They pant to re-establish by law the ' Holy Inquisition."

The acridness with which he assailed the whole clerical profession had its origin, not so much in any real knowledge of its history, as in resentment at the attacks which many of that profession had made on him in retaliation for his political and legislative changes. His successful effort to separate the Church from the State in Virginia had naturally enough aroused the vehement hostility of the clergymen of the former Episcopal Establishment, while his Republican principles had been sourly obnoxious to the Federalist Congregational ministers of New England, who never ceased to denounce him from their pulpits as that crowning abomination, a French infidel; and this charge was echoed elsewhere also. " It is so impossible to contradict all these lies," he wrote Monroe, in 1800, "that I am determined to contradict none, for while I should be engaged with one, they would publish twenty new ones." As a matter of fact, Jefferson was, in none of his religious opinions, deserving of the anathema of atheism. In his youth, he said, he had been " fond of speculations which seemed to promise insight into that hidden country, the land of spirits"; but observing at length that he was tangled up in as great a coil of doubt

as at first, he, for many years, ceased to meditate seriously, or at all, on the subject of religion. " I reposed my head," he consoled himself with placid philosophy, " on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it." In a later phase of mind, he relied exclusively on the practice of virtue as the corner-stone of the only true religion. " I have thought it better," he said, " to nourish the good passions, and control the bad, in order to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to Him who has been so good for the past." " It is in our acts and not in our words that our religion must be read." " Men should show no uneasiness about the different roads they may pursue, as believing them to be the shortest to their last abode, but following the guidance of a good conscience, they should be happy in the hope that, by those different paths, they shall meet together at the end of the journey."

" Reason is the only oracle given men by Heaven," he said on another occasion, " and they are answerable, not for the rightness, but for the uprightness of the decision." " I am," he added, " a Christian in the only sense Christ wished any one to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others." Under the influence of his reverence for those doctrines, he made up, from the pages of the Bible, with the use of a pair of scissors, a volume which he entitled the Philosophy of Jesus, and which be panegyrized as the most beautiful and precious morsel of ethics that existed. It comprised numerous verses picked out here and there from the texts of the Gospels, and arranged in strict conformity to time and subject. That these texts encouraged him to believe that the soul would not perish with the body is proven by many of his utterances

during his last years. " The time is not far distant," he said in a letter to John Adams, " at which we are to repose in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall love and never lose again." And when his daughter Maria died, he declared, in reply to words of sympathy from John Page, that " every step shortens the distance we have to go. The end of the journey is in sight. We sorrow not then as others who have no hope, but look forward to the day which joins us to the great majority." " Your age of eighty-four and mine of eighty-one," he wrote to John Cartwright in England, " ensures us a speedy meeting. We will then commune at leisure and more fully, on the good and evil, which, in the course of our long lives, we have both witnessed." And at the close of his last interview with the members of his weeping family, he was heard to murmur, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Whatever may have been the religious tenets of Jefferson at bottom, he was of the clear conviction that civil government could not legitimately take even the smallest notice of men's religious opinions, unless those opinions were used as an engine for the destruction of peace and order. Then and only then could the civil officers intervene. " What has been the effect of religious coercion? " he asks in the Notes on Virginia. " To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." He urged that differences of view were advantageous to religion; that the several sects performed the office of censor morum over each other; and that to make one sect the Church of the State, and then to compel the other sects to support it as offering the only correct religious creed, was usurping the right of private judgment, and

imposing an unjustifiable and intolerable yoke upon those who rejected that creed and all its ordinances. " I cannot give up my guidance to the magistrate," he declared, " because he knows no-more of the way to Heaven than I do, and is less concerned to direct me right than I am to go right. The magistrate has no power but what the people gave. The people have not given him the care of souls because they could not. They could not because no man has the right to abandon the care of his salvation to another." Holding as he did these opinions, which appear to be self-evident enough in our mote liberal age, and which, doubtless, were widely entertained even at that period, Jefferson was fully resolved to tear up the Episcopal Establishment of Virginia root and branch, whenever the hour seemed opportune to do so. He was eager, as we have seen, to raze the whole system of monopoly, which, in 1776, he found in existence in the new Commonwealth; but he was particularly impatient to demolish that branch of it which was represented in the union of the Church with the State. How revolutionary at that time, and in that community, were the sentiments which were hurrying him on, a few facts bearing on the condition of the Dissenters then will clearly show.

The Hanover Presbytery complained as late as 1774 that their ministrations were by law confined to a small number of places, in spite of the sparse population; that they were not permitted to assemble at night; that they were compelled to keep open the doors of their meeting-houses in the day while the services were in progress; and, finally, that they were deprived of the right as a corporation to hold estates and receive gifts and legacies in support of their schools and churches. They prayed that the misdemeanors of Dissenters should be punished by ordinances equally binding on all citizens regardless of

their religious creeds. "We ask for nothing," they declared, "but what justice says ought to be ours; for as ample privileges as any of our fellow-subjects enjoy." And they concluded with the proud reminder that the petition was not that of a sect sunk in obscurity, but of one that belonged to the national church of Scotland, Holland, Switzerland and Northern Europe.

The persecutions of the Baptists alone were a sharp enough spur to quicken Jefferson's fierce drive for reform. In the same year, Madison wrote from Montpelier to a friend, "There are at this time in the adjoining county not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which, in the main, are very orthodox." These prisoners were Baptists. About one year after the date of this letter, and less than one year before the Declaration of Independence, an anonymous signer urged every member of the Church of England who had subscribed for the endowment of Hampden-Sidney College, a Presbyterian institution, to withdraw his contribution until that institution had been put under masters who belonged to the Established Church. " If this school is thus encouraged," so the writer warned, " we may reasonably expect, in a few years, to see our Senate House as well as our pulpits filled with Dissenters, and thus they may, by an easy transition, secure the Establishment in their favor."

In his legislative innovations, Jefferson merely rose to the cry of these Dissenters, who naturally and rightly demanded the alteration of the laws relating to religious worship. An open and liberal mind like his could not fail to respond to the just appeal which the Presbyterians and Baptists were so persistently making for religious freedom and civic equality; nor did he halt in his effort to force so desirable a change, because, in winning the good

will of the outlawed denominations in general, he knew that he was inviting the hatred of the one which had enjoyed the exclusive privileges that he was seeking to demolish. He allowed no inherited church affiliations of his own to stay his hand in striking the blow of separation. He was brought up in the Anglican creed and ceremonial; he still preferred the Anglican form at least to all others in spite of his unorthodox opinions; and he had no wish to place his native sect on a lower footing than that of the rest. It was absolute equality before the law alone which he aimed at. He had observed that Pennsylvania and New York had flourished without any establishment at all; and that every denomination in those communities was prosperous and in harmonious relations with each other. What was the explanation? It was the tolerance with which all were treated, he replied, and the entire absence of special privilege; there was no jealousy, no envy, no jostling, no bickering; each stood upon its own platform, and made no claim not founded upon its intrinsic merit.

In 1776, the Virginia Convention declared that freedom of religious worship was a natural right; but this action was not satisfactory to Jefferson because that body adopted no measure which would safeguard this right. In October of the same year, the Convention, reassembling as Senate and House of Delegates, repealed all the statutes which branded the religious opinions of Dissenters as criminal; and it also suspended the existing provisions for the payment of salaries to the Episcopal clergymen. The question of what constituted heresy, however, was reserved for the interpretation of the common law. In 1777, the General Court was empowered to pass upon every case of the kind which should arise within the jurisdiction of that branch of jurisprudence. At this time, the

Act of 1705 was still in force; whoever denied the existence of the Deity, or expressed disbelief in the Trinity, or the Christian tenets as a whole, or asserted that there were more gods than one, or that the Scriptures were of human origin, was liable to conviction for felony. Such, exclaimed Jefferson, with undisguised bitterness, was the religious slavery in which still remained a people who, by every form of sacrifice, involving life and fortune alike, had won their political and social freedom!

The great Act drafted by him to create a religious equilibrium that would be comparable to the political one already secured, was prepared as early as 1777, but was not reported to the General Assembly until 1779; and not until nine years had gone by, did it become a part of the organic law of the State. The drastic alteration which he submitted was summed up by him in a few words: " No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship.,-, ministry, or place whatsoever; nor shall he be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or his goods, nor shall he otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men shall be free to profess, and by argument, to maintain their opinions in matters of religion; and the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." This proposition, radical as it was at that time, but which seems to us now to be so axiomatic in its meaning, could only be put in practice piece by piece and step by step, as it were, although it had the sustaining and driving power behind it of the ablest debaters in the General Assembly. The first step was to enact that, thereafter, no fine should be laid on any one because he neglected to be present at public worship; but it was not until 17'79 that the clergy were divested of the right to compel the payment of their salaries through the public treasury;

and not until 1786 that the power of the Civil Government to regulate religious observances, and to punish the holder of heretical or atheistic opinions, was permanently abandoned. For the first time in Virginia a father who refused to subscribe to all the confessions of the Episcopal creed could claim the prerogative of guardianship over his own children; and for the first time too a Roman Catholic could testify in court.

Correct in principle and in action as Jefferson was in this great controversy, he frequently, in the course of it, expressed himself intemperately.. He went so far, for instance, as to say that the despondent view taken by so many persons of the ability to ameliorate the condition of mankind was due to the " depressing influence " of the alliance between Church and State. The men who fattened on the fruits of that alliance, he declared, would bitterly oppose every advance of society, because they would expect it " to unmask their usurpation and monopoly of honors, wealth, and power, and endanger all the comforts they now enjoyed." And to such a height did he carry this spirit of fanatical antagonism that he refused, while President of the United States, to proclaim a national Day of Thanksgiving, an annual regulation as appropriate and as desirable in his time, as it is in our own. " I don't believe," he wrote on this occasion, " that it is for the interest of religion for the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, and its doctrine. Fasting and prayers are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises; and the right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the Constitution has placed it."

Jefferson was not more earnest in advocating the divorce of Church and State than he was the separation

of the Church from the organization and administration of every seat of learning. He had perceived the hampering effect of that alliance on the fortunes of the College of William and Mary at the time when he was endeavoring to convert it into an institution of the first order for higher education. Who were the persons that disapproved so strongly of this change that they joined in their efforts to prevent it? The leading Presbyterians and Baptists, who feared the spread of the sectarian influence which the College had always nourished. In founding the new university, therefore, he had a double motive in making it thoroughly undenominational: all theological leaning in a public institution was, in his judgment, not only grossly wrong in principle, but also invited a hostility that would seriously diminish its popularity and cloud its prestige.

IV. Love of Science

We have now come to a third characteristic of Jefferson, which we will find infused into the entire round of instruction of the infant university,-this was the breadth, versatility, and what may be called, the modernity of his scientific outlook. If it is imperative to dwell upon his political and religious opinions in order to obtain a just conception of the institution at the start, it is equally necessary to dwell, in a preliminary way, on his extraordinary esteem for knowledge, and his unfailing interest in all its departments. He had none of the spirit of the specialist, which would have given a preponderance to some one province in which he happened to be learned. If he exhibited any preference at all, it was for architecture, and even in this, he was, perhaps, chiefly influenced by his anxiety to create a proper setting for his projected

university. All the different chairs which he established enjoyed an equal dignity in his mind. Roundness and completeness in each school was all that he aimed at. This was as true of law as it was of the languages and the sciences, although, as we have seen, he required that only certain political doctrines and principles should be taught in it; but his political creed he considered to be as much the truth in an advanced form as the latest discoveries brought to the attention of the students in the School of Medicine or of Natural History.

Jefferson thought his early lessons to be so valuable that he would often say that, if he were asked to choose between the large estate devised to him by his father, and the education bestowed upon him by the same bounteous hand, he would select the last as that one of the two benefits which he considered to be the most indispensable. His tuition up to his fourteenth year was received from a learned Scotchman; the next two years were passed at the Maury School, famous in its day for its classical thoroughness; and in his seventeenth year, he entered the College of William and Mary. This was in 1760, when he is said to have been very shy and awkward in manner, rawboned in frame, with sandy hair and a freckled face. The most fruitful side of his life in Williamsburg was his intimate association with William Small, professor of mathematics, and for a time also of ethics, rhetoric, and belles-lettres, who had brought over from his native Scotland an uncommon share of the learning which had conferred such celebrity on its universities. He was remarkable not only for his knowledge of the sciences, rare in Virginia at that time, but also for his ability to impart it; and he was still more remarkable for the liberality of his opinions.

It was probably through the friendship of Small that

Jefferson first came to enjoy the companionship of Wythe and Fauquier, the two most accomplished men of that day in the Colony. At the table of Fauquier, he often formed the fourth in what he dubbed the partie quarree, to which he owed the most instructive hours of this period of his life. There, from Small he learned of that vast field of natural science, in which he was to continue to feel so keen an interest until the end; from Wythe, of those great principles of jurisprudence which were to enable him to become one of the foremost of American social and political reformers; and from Fauquier, of the arts of government as well as of the graces of courtly bearing and the charms of urbane conversation. Such familiar and constant intercourse must have deeply confirmed those aptitudes which he, as a college youth, had brought down to Williamsburg from his mountain home: love of science, appreciation of literature and law, and a relish for intellectual companionship.

He was as diligent a student throughout his college course as he had been while still a pupil in the lower schools. Indeed, he never sat down in idleness. " Even in my boyhood," he once said to a grandson, " when wearied of play, I always turned to books." It was to the literature of Greece and Rome that he reverted with the liveliest and most unfailing sense of enjoyment. It was " a sublime luxury," he declared, to read the works of the great classical authors,-that " rich source of delight," as he also described them in a letter to Dr. Priestley. " I would not exchange them for anything which I could have acquired, and have not since acquired." He often asserted that " these models of pure taste " had saved English literature " from the inflated style of our Teutonic ancestors, or from the hyperbolical and vague style of the Oriental nations." "I have given up

newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides," he wrote John Adams, in 1812, " and I find myself much the happier." And in his old age, when the energies of his mind, as he said, had sunk in decay, he would turn " to the classical pages to fill up the vacuum of ennui."

It is remarkable how slightly he depended for recreation on the variety and beauty of the literature of his own language. He seems to have been indebted to it only for the clarity and precision of his flexible style. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had no familiar knowledge of Shakespeare, and his letters are never garnished by a quotation from that author, or indeed from any English author of celebrity, with the possible exception of Pope. His taste in English literature seems to have been meretricious. " I think this rude bard of the North (Ossian)," he wrote, " the greatest poet who has ever existed." He preferred Homer to Milton and Polybius to Gibbon. The profound impression which he made on the character of-the University of Virginia is revealed in no particular more plainly than in the history of its school of languages. His interest in the ancient tongues caused him to employ the ablest scholars for those professorships who could be procured from Europe; but the nearest approach to an English chair was a barren school of Anglo-Saxon. Is it the shadow of his comparative indifference to English literature, projected through the century which has followed, that explains the failure of the University of Virginia to produce successful authors in the normal proportion to successful lawyers, physicians, clergymen, engineers, and men of business? As a fructifying force in the field of even Southern literature, the institution has not gained the reputation which it has won in all the other departments of mental culture and practical efficiency.

Although a classical scholar of merit, and a student of several modern languages, it was toward natural science that the intellectual curiosity of Jefferson was chiefly directed. Nature, he wrote to Du Pont, in 1809, had designed him for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them his supreme delight. Small, he declared, had fixed the destinies of his life. " From my conversations with him, I got my first view . . . of the system of things in which we are placed." He was equally impatient with the ignorant adult who raised a hue and cry against science, and with the supercilious youth who looked upon its acquisition as a waste of time. He had a keen taste for mathematics, and in 1811, when he undertook to instruct his grandson therein, he spoke of himself as resuming its study with avidity; but, in reality, he had far more relish for the investigation of Nature, especially in the departments which would increase the ease and wholesomeness of life. When he arranged for a botanical garden at the University of Virginia, he gave direction that only those plants should be cultivated which were certain to be of practical use to his countrymen. " The main object of all science," he said, " was the freedom and happiness of man "; and no detail of it was too small or too insignificant apparently to enlist his attention if it should tend to secure these benefits.

This was signally true of agriculture, a pursuit which always deeply interested him. His knowledge of it, in every feature, was unfailingly at the service of his friends, who were constantly seeking his advice. We find him offering suggestions to both Cabell and Cocke as to the hedges which they should plant for fences on their farms to shut out the vagrant hogs and cattle. Would barriers of holly, haw, cedar, locust or thorn be the best for the purpose? He decided in favor of the thorn

for reasons based on his personal experiments. During many years, he kept a meteorological record that was so minute in its details as to excite the wonder of all who read it. " It is astonishing," writes Cabell, " how you could find time, in the midst of your other engagements, to make such a prodigious number of observations." A subject of long rumination with him was as to how to contrive the mould-board of a plough that would offer the least resistance in breaking up the ground. Concentrating whatever inventive talent he possessed on this problem, he sought its solution with the patient diligence of a trained mathematician; and the upshot was the production of a model so excellent that it won the formal approval of the English Board of Agriculture, and the gold prize from the Society of Paris. He imported from Scotland a reaping machine that was expected to hasten and cheapen the harvest; and he brought into Albemarle county strains of foreign stock,-sheep, hogs, and cattle, both male and female,-which would improve the native breeds. He put himself to extraordinary inconvenience while abroad to procure rice and olives for testing in the soil of South Carolina, while his garden-book brings to light his long course of experiments with vegetables and fruits. He frequently distributed seeds, roots, and plants among his correspondents, or sent them to agricultural societies; and on one occasion at least, he received from a friend in London in return, specimens of every kind of pea and vetch that was grown in English ground.

No prevailing heat of partisan controversy was allowed to divert his thoughts from the branches of natural history that interested him most. . In 1798, when the uproar of the threatened war with France was at its height, he was writing to Mr. Nolan for information

about the herds of wild horses which were reported as roaming over the western prairies; and during the following year, when Federalists and Republicans were fighting each other with tooth and claw, he exhibited the keenest curiosity about the possibilities of Watt's new application of the power of steam. Even when his chances of election to the Presidency in 1801 were wavering to and fro, he is found composing letters of eager speculation over the origin of the mammoth bones then recently exhumed in Ulster county, New York; the nativity of the wild turkey; and the influence of the moon on the turn of weather. In 1808, when a war-cloud was looming between the United States and Great Britain, three hundred bones from the prehistoric beds of Big Lick were heaped up in a room of the White House awaiting scientific classification,-a fact strongly reminiscent of the wagon-load that had followed him to Philadelphia for Dr. Wistar's inspection, when he went thither to take the post of Vice-President.

It was Jefferson who dispatched Lewis and Clark on their romantic expedition to the Columbia; and no one gave Pike warmer and more intelligent encouragement in his western explorations than he. It is precisely correct to say of him that the enlightened policy which the National Government has always pursued towards scientific objects had its earliest impulse in his own liberal attitude as Chief Magistrate. While American Minister to the Court of Versailles, he never failed to inform the Faculties of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale and Pennsylvania, of all the recent acquisitions to science, such as new data relating to astronomy, improvements in agricultural anal mechanical methods, and further discoveries in the wide province of natural history. " He was always on the lookout," says an English friend, who

was habitually in his company at this time, " to find new ideas to send home." In the course of his residence in Paris, he took a conspicuous part in a controversy over the true reason for the presence of marine shells on mountain-tops; and he successfully disputed the assertion that the animal frame dwindled after several generations passed in the climate of America. Buffon maintained that the chemical laboratory was not superior in dignity or value to the ordinary kitchen. " I think it amongst the most useful of sciences," retorted the far-sighted Jefferson, " and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. It is yet indeed a mere embryo." But he did not show the same prescience about geology; he obtusely enough took little interest in that science because he was not able to foresee its practical helpfulness to men. " What difference does it make," he asked, " whether the earth is six hundred or six thousand years old? And is it of any real importance to know what is the composition of the various strata, if they contain no coal or iron or other useful metals? "

Jefferson evinced only a respectable ingenuity in invention. He was often spoken of as the " Father of the Pension Office," which was established by authority of Congress during the time he occupied the post of Secretary of State, but his talents for mechanical contrivance do not seem to have risen any higher than a mould-board, a walking-stick that could be spread out to form a seat, or a chair that revolved on a screw. Was a tribute to his convivialty or to his genius in small though useful inventions, intended by William Tatham in submitting to him a device by which full decanters could be passed more rapidly around the table? He showed a prophetic interest in the plans to build torpedoes and sub-marines; and writing to Robert Fulton, recommended that a corps

of young men should be educated exclusively for their service. Although much disposed to have a jocular fling at physicians, he was, nevertheless, an ardent student of the subjects which engage their attention. Dr. Dunglison, a member of the original Faculty of the University, frequently remarked that Jefferson could have made himself a master of the art of surgery,-so great was the amateur skill which he exhibited in sewing up a wound, or in setting a broken leg. It was characteristic of him that he was one of the first Americans to submit to vaccination as a preventive of smallpox.

V. Taste for Architecture

Jefferson was always interested in every department of the Fine Arts. While serving as Visitor of the College of William and Mary during his Governorship, he had been instrumental in adding a course of that character to the professorship of ethics; and in his scheme of education addressed to Peter Carr, in 1814, instruction was to be given in civil architecture, painting, sculpture, and the theory of music. He played on the violin with skill; had been a patron of Caracchi; and it was at his instance that Houdon was employed to model the full length statue of Washington and the bust of Lafayette. He was a sympathetic correspondent of Peale and Trumbull, and an active member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

But it was in architecture that he felt the most penetrating interest, and it was also in this art that he displayed an original talent almost comparable to the genius which he evinced in political science; indeed, it has been said of him by several critics of distinction that his influence in this more or less private province has been just

as notable as in the public province of either statesmanship or education. There was perhaps not an architect in the colonies when Monticello was planned, who possessed either his ability or his technical knowledge as a draftsman. His drawings, which began about 1769, have been pronounced to be unexampled in American history down to a much later period; and form, with those of the White House and the Capitol, the principal source of our knowledge of colonial architecture. In his autobiography, he makes an interesting reference to his "passion for architecture," a term exactly pertinent to his feeling for the art. Nowhere is this passion so gracefully yet so fervently expressed as in the playful letter to Comtesse de Tesse written from Nimes in 1787. "Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison Carrée like a lover at his mistress . . . . This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Sage Espanage in Beaujolais. This you will say was in rule to fall in love with a female beauty. But with a house 1 It is out of all precedent 1 No, Madam, it is not without a precedent in my own history. Whilst in Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm."

But it has been correctly said of Jefferson that he used his talent for architecture for other purposes besides the mere gratification of his sense of beauty. A sense of practical fitness too was reflected in all his designs, which ranged from the Capitol at Richmond and the temples and cloisters at the University of Virginia, to the jails of Cumberland and Nelson counties; and from the mansions of his friends at Bremo and Farmington to a chicken coop at Pantops, his outlying farm. What had nourished this taste in the beginning? He had visited Annapolis, Philadelphia and New York, in 1766, before the

cornerstone of Monticello had been laid, but there is no evidence that his observations, during his sojourn in those cities, directly shaped his original aptitude as designer, draftsman, and builder. Certainly there was little in the houses of his native colony that appealed to that spirit of innovation, as well in architecture as in politics and education, which animated him even in his youth. Westover, Gunston Hall, Carter's Creek, Brandon, Sabin Hall, Shirley, and the old Virginian manor-house of Stratford, the residence at Mt. Airy,-though some were inspired by classic models,-were not looked upon by him as worthy of praise, or even of incidental mention. In the Notes, he remarks on the homely construction of the dwelling houses in his native State. Few were built of brick; still fewer of stone; they were merely wooden cottages made of scantling and boards, with walls plastered with coarse lime. There were, in his opinion, but four structures deserving of notice, -the Palace, the College, the Capitol, and the Hospital at Williamsburg. Of these the College and the Hospital were held up as rude misshapen piles, "which might easily be mistaken for huge brick-kilns, were they not covered with roofs." The churches and courthouses had been designed with a blind eye to elegance; but this general want of architectural beauty was not surprising, he said, when it was recalled that there were no workmen in Virginia who possessed even a moderate degree of artistic judgment and mechanical skill. The existing styles of architecture were, in his judgment, "a malediction, not a blessing to the land," although it cost no more to build a beautiful structure than to build an ugly one of the same size.

Jefferson was the son of a planter, and had come into the world in a plain house, in a sparsely inhabited neighborhood, removed only by a few years from the secluded

days of the pioneer. There was nothing in that early environment to cultivate a taste for architecture. All his friends of his own age and social standing had been carefully drilled, like himself, in the ancient classics, but they, no more than himself, perhaps, had been led by that fact to acquire an insight into the art. There was no chair of fine arts at the College of William and Mary to increase any natural leaning which he may have had towards it; nor is there any proof that either Small, or Wythe, or Fauquier, who so deeply colored his character while a student there, encouraged him to pursue its study. Both in Williamsburg, and in the homes of such men as William Byrd of Westover, he found illustrated books relating to architecture, and it is possible that access to them for casual reading ripened what was at first merely an idle liking for the art. But the bare taste itself very probably sprang, not from any extrinsic influence, but from his own versatile, inquisitive, and cultured personality, which happened to find, in that particular, a congenial reflection in the plates of Palladio, a copy of which he looked upon even at the age of twenty-seven as the principal treasure of his library.

The first monument of his genius was the most beautiful; the house at Monticello was pronounced by a cultivated and travelled French nobleman to be the handsomest private residence in America. The environment at the time of its foundation offered such extraordinary obstacles to a builder that they would have discouraged any one who lacked the sanguine and resourceful temper of Jefferson. The nearest point from which he could obtain supplies of any sort was a small village; and even this afforded but a paucity of the rarer materials for construction; and no skilled mechanics at all. He created substitutes for the latter by training intelligent

negroes of his own to be cabinet-makers, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and bricklayers. Nails were manufactured in his own smithy by his youthful slaves; and his bricks were made of clay dug up out of beds on his own land. He applied his own tests to different woods to detect their relative fitness, strength, and durability, and chose only those varieties that stood these tests most successfully. The mortar used by him was obtained only after long and laborious experiments.

In those times, there were no professional architects at work in America. All building, even along the most ambitious lines, was in the hands of handicraftsmen who were guided by principles that had been brought in with the early emigration,-to be later on, perhaps, modified by novelties which had been introduced by the most recent comers. Not elegance, but utilitarian and economic purposes were alone kept in view. Jefferson, however, had beauty, utility, and economy all in his vision; and he was fully competent to serve as his own architect, whether design or practical specifications were demanded.

Monticello is the most remarkable of all his structures because it was the fruit of his taste and discernment before either had been broadened and chastened by a study, on the ground, of the splendid architectural monuments of Europe. It is true that the mansion was not finished until after his return from his foreign mission, but already in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux, a visitor, was so impressed with its charm that he thought it deserving of a minute description in the general record of his travels. Mr. Jefferson, he said, was the first American who had consulted the fine arts to find out how to shelter himself best from the weather. The house was begun in 1769, and completed in 1801, and during that long interval, the original design was modified in one important

particular only; which, however, cannot be hunted down to any suggestion which came to him abroad. It was to Greek and Roman concepts that he turned when he first framed that design; and to those concepts he continued loyal to the end. He passed by the models then standing in Virginia and in New England, which he might have used, and took his cue from Palladio, who had drafted the best existing representations of the surviving monuments of ancient times. But in his drawings of private houses, that architect had been forced to rely on the descriptions of certain Roman predecessors. It is an interesting fact that the country homes of the Venetian merchants, his principal patrons, called for at least one detail which was common to the country homes of the Virginian planters: both sets of estates, being productive, required a grouping of service quarters alongside the owners' mansions. It was Palladio who solved this problem by clothing the .utilitarian outbuildings with a decorative garb of columns at the very time that he subordinated them to the main building.

This great master had influenced the grouping of many planters' residences in Virginia, previous to Monticello, through the style of architecture known by his name, which had been transmitted from England to colonial builders; but there was no such example of his work there, even in an extremely modified form, as was presented later in the design and structure of Jefferson's mansion. As a matter of fact, there was no exact representation of that mansion to be found in the plates of either Palladio, or his English disciple, Gibbs; it was, in reality, a reversion to the owner's early studies because it fulfilled the purpose he had in view better than any specific plan already in shape for immediate use in the drawings of his favorite architect, for whom he was

afterwards to show his preference in the buildings of the University of Virginia.[2] During his sojourn at home, after his temporary retirement in 1793, he derived a very kindly satisfaction from drafting plans for new residences for his wealthy friends in Virginia, or in suggesting alterations for the improvement of those already standing. His advice and services were eagerly and gratefully received, and in such houses as Bremo and Farmington, already referred to, the impression of his taste and skill remains to this day to delight the visitor. He was consulted by Benjamin Harrison, of Brandon, and by James Madison, of Montpelier, and on application, supplied designs for the projected courthouses for Buckingham and Botetourt counties, and for additions to the Episcopal church in Charlottesville.

It was always the public building that aroused the most enthusiasm in him as an architect. As early as 1776, he brought in a bill in the General Assembly which provided that, when the State Government should be removed to Richmond, six entire squares of ground should be reserved there as sites for the Capitol, a great Ball of Justice, the offices of the Executive Board, and the additional structures intended for other public purposes. This combination of squares, broad streets, and noble buildings was expected by him to serve as an imposing monument that would always hold up before the eyes of the Virginian people the most splendid examples of the architectural art. Such a scheme was altogether unexampled in American history up to that date; and not until recent years has it been carried out by any foreign or domestic community to the degree projected in the mind of Jefferson.

He was very solicitous, while in France, to give all the assistance then in his power to improve the taste of his countrymen as reflected in their public buildings; his plan for doing this was to send over the drawing of .some noble model whenever such an edifice was to be erected; and in order to inform himself of the wide range of models of that kind in European countries, he was not content to study those in Paris alone, but travelled through England, Holland, Italy, and Southern France on a tour of inspection. In the course of these journeys, he gathered up a large collection of books on architecture, which further increased the weight of his advice. Among the notable structures that are to be credited to him is the Capitol at Richmond, which, at his suggestion, was built along the lines of the Maison Carrée at Nimes, one of the most "beautiful morsels" of architecture, in his opinion, if not the "most precious," surviving from a remote antiquity. The Capitol is said to be the first direct imitation of a classical edifice to be found in the United States; and while it did not conform exactly to the model sent over by him, it has, nevertheless, always remained a permanent memorial to the purity of his taste.

There was now perceptible, in different parts of the young Republic, a tendency to erect public buildings of large dimensions. Naturally, this was most obvious in the plans for the national capitol at Washington. Jefferson was, at this time, Secretary of State, and the location of the new District of Columbia fell within the jurisdiction of that department. A trace of his early scheme for the squares and public buildings in Richmond is to be detected . in his suggestion as to the use to be made of the area of land set apart for the Capitol, the President's House, and the Town Hall. The plan

chosen by L'Enfant, to whom Washington submitted Jefferson's plan, was the Jefferson plan modified; and it was further altered by Washington also. Jefferson's advice was afterwards sought by the same great official as to the style of architecture to be adopted for the projected city, and his reply had an important influence on its character as finally determined upon. He thought of sending on a design which he had drawn for the President's House; but he must have decided it to be impracticable, either because it was too expensive, or pitched on too large a scale. The model which he had proposed for the Governor's House at Richmond failed of success in the competition. His indirect recommendation of the temple form for the Capitol at Washington was not received with favor, for this style also was decided to be too costly and too incommodious.

He was able to make his predilections more distinctly felt after he assumed the Presidency, since the Capitol, the White House, and the Department buildings were still unfinished. He chose as architect a man who was even more of an admirer of classic models than himself, for Mr. Latrobe favored a return, not simply to classicism in general, but to the original Greek form of it. Jefferson, through this appointment, not only stamped his own taste on the Capitol and the White House as far as possible in their incomplete state, but in the public edifices afterwards built in the other cities of the Union, he was able to carry out his architectural preference without obstruction or interference. His aim now, as formerly, was to make the architecture of the classic era the characteristic architecture of America; and in this ambition, which he pursued consistently, he, fortunately for his own success, had the support of a public opinion which he himself had done so much to confirm and expand.

This, the distinctive bent of his genius as designer and builder, found perhaps its most complete expression in the edifices of the University of Virginia; and their origin cannot be understood without a full knowledge of their author's previous achievements as an architect.