University of Virginia Library

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.