University of Virginia Library

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.