University of Virginia Library

I. Jefferson's Faith in Education

We have now described those fundamental tastes and convictions of Jefferson which have left a permanent impression on the University of Virginia: his almost fanatical devotion to political freedom; his hatred of all forms of sectarian obtrusiveness; and his enthusiasm for every branch of science which he believed would liberalize and fructify the human mind. How were these great objects, upon which, in his judgment, the liberty, felicity, and comfort of mankind depended, to be solidly and lastingly preserved? By education, was his emphatic reply. "Knowledge is power," he wrote George Tickner in 1817, " knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness." Education to him meant the diffusion of light tough all the ranks of society, from the highest to the lowest; indeed,. it was the chief, if not the only, means by which the goodness of the individual could be nourished, and his happiness secured. It was not simply education, but "well directed education" that was to improve his morals, enlarge his mind, clarify his decisions, instruct his industry, and augment his material prosperity. "Education," Jefferson remarks in the Rockfish Gap Report, " engrafts a new man on the native stock, and turns what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth." "And it cannot but be," he continued, " that each generation,

succeeding to the knowledge acquired by all those that preceded it, adding to it their own acquisitions and discoveries, and handing the mass down for successive and constant accumulation, must advance the knowledge and well-being of mankind, not infinitely, but indefinitely."

It was one of the most seductive of all Rousseau's theories that the right to a pleasant place in the sun was the natural right of every man; and that the only reason for the existence of social organization, and the only object of education, was to assure that right to every person beyond the possibility of alienation or deprivation. Jefferson's own convictions were in general harmony with this view; but in one detail he went a long stride further than the great sentimentalist of Geneva; he thought that the aim of education should be, not simply to make a contented and prosperous citizen, but also a useful and unselfish one,-one who would perform all the public duties of citizenship with as much cheerfulness and alacrity as he would perform all the tender and benevolent offices of his own domestic hearth and social circle. It was the function of democracy to secure for all men precisely equal opportunities for .advancement; no man was to be favored at the expense of any other man, while all the prizes for which men strove should be thrown open to free competition; but it was necessary that they should, in this ardent and unceasing contest, have the use of all their powers at the highest tension of their capacity. How was this to be brought about? Again, he replied, by education.

What were the benefits, which, in Jefferson's opinion, would be conferred, by primary education? The acquisition of the knowledge that every citizen needs for the transaction of his private business, such as the skill to make his own calculations in figures, and to express and

preserve his ideas, his contracts, and his accounts in writing; the improvement, by reading, of his morals and faculties; the intelligent comprehension of what was due from him to his neighbors and country, and the capacity to discharge, with usefulness, all duties imposed on him by either; the full understanding of his rights, and the ability to exercise them in his own person with justice and discretion; the ability also to select wisely the fiduciaries to whom he might delegate some of those rights, and to follow up their conduct with diligence, candor, and sound judgment; and, finally, in a general way, the capacity to show staunchness and equanimity in all the social : relations, however difficult the situation, and however searching the test.

The aims of the higher education rested upon a somewhat broader platform. What were they? To mould the characters of the statesmen, legislators, and judges on whom the prosperity of the public and the happiness of the individual, in the future, were to depend so largely; to expoundthe proper spirit and framework of government and to interpret the laws that regulate the intercourse of nations; to harmonize and nourish the growth of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; to develop the reasoning faculties of the young, to enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instil into them the principles of virtue and order; to instruct them in those mathematical "and physical sciences which foster the arts and contribute to the health, support, and comfort of human life; and finally, to mould them to habits of reflection and honorable conduct., so as to raise them up to be exemplars of the highest virtue to their neighbors, and of the most rational happiness within themselves.

As Jefferson expected primary education to reach afar larger body of citizens than advanced education, his

scheme for universal instruction required that the superior attention should be paid to the primary as thereby the greater number could be trained in the duties which all owed to the commonwealth. For he never for a moment forgot the value of education in its relation to the State at large; he looked upon it, he said in 1819, "as the means of giving a wholesome direction to public opinion; it was the safest guide and guardian of public morals and public welfare; it was the arbitress in every age of happiness or wretchedness for a community." " Is not education," he asked at another time, "the most effectual means to prevent tyranny by illuminating the minds of the people at large with knowledge, and especially knowledge of those facts which history presents? Thus possessed of the experience of other ages and other countries, they would be able to detect ambition under all its guises, and prompt to exert their national powers to defeat its purposes." " What does a tax for general education amount to?" he wrote to a friend three years after the close of the Revolution. " It is not a thousandth part of what will have to be paid to monarchs and their satellites, who will rise up amongst us if we leave the people in ignorance." " Educate the people, and never again will they submit to the prejudices and privileges that attend a government carried on by one great class greedily bent on their own advantage alone. Moreover, it would bring every section of the community in harmonious relations, which would be a lasting guarantee of its unity and vigor."

He was the first statesman of our country to foresee clearly the extraordinary improvement which education would produce in the purely material condition of the nation, the sea-like multitude, as distinguished from the condition of the simple individual. In drafting the report

of the Visitors of the University of Virginia, in 1821, he used the following pregnant and prophetic words: " We fondly hope that the instruction which may flow from this institution, kindly cherished, by advancing the minds of our youth with the growing science of the time, and elevating the views of our citizens generally to the practice of the social duties and the functions of self-government, may ensure to our country the reputation, the safety, the prosperity, and all the other blessings which experience proves to result from the cultivation and improvement of the general mind."

But Jefferson was not satisfied with simply dwelling on the benefits to spring from the adoption of his principles of popular education; on the contrary, from his entrance into public life, as a delegate to the General Assembly, he was incessantly busy with plans to put these principles into continuous operation. Before we describe his long struggle to create a public school system, capped by a university, some account should be given of his attempt to increase the usefulness of the one centre of higher culture in existence in Virginia at that time, and of his share in projecting another of foreign origin, which promised, during a short interval, to secure a stable foothold. A third, as we shall discover, failed to enlist his sympathy and support, because, from the start, he considered its plan to be impracticable. Naturally, as a youthful statesman but recently graduated from the College of William and Mary, already looked upon as a venerable seat of culture, his activities were first directed towards the improvement of its curriculum rather than towards the establishment of a new institution elsewhere.

The College,-which had been created by royal warrant in the seventeenth century,-had won a high reputation in colonial history by the broadness of its scholastic

platform for those times, and by the prominence of its alumni in all the avenues of colonial life. In 1779, when Jefferson undertook to enlarge its studies and to raise its standards, its departments were divided as follows: First, the Grammar School. The pupils in this school were known as scholars, and they entered it as early as their ninth year. The Latin and Greek languages made up an important part of their tuition. Second, the School of Philosophy. The pupils of this school were known as students, and they were required to wear the collegiate cap and gown. In one section of it, rhetoric, logic, and ethics were taught, and in the other, physics, metaphysics, and mathematics. The degrees awarded were those of bachelor of arts and master of arts; and two and four years respectively were the prescribed periods within which they were to be won. Third, the School of Divinity. In this school, in which lessons were given in the Hebrew. language and in the history of dogma, the instruction was assigned to two professors; there were two professors also in the School of Philosophy; and one in the Grammar School. A weekly lecture was delivered by the President of the College. In addition to these three departments, there was, for the benefit of a fixed number of Indian boys, a course in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and also a supplementary course in the precepts of the catechism, and in the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion.

At this College from the beginning, as at all the chief seats of learning in America during the same period, the first consideration was given to the subject of Divinity, but in a form that was exclusively Anglican. The teachers, as a rule, had been educated at Oxford, and through them, the traditional influences of that great university had made a deep impression on the character

of the institution. So far did the monastic conception triumph in its government, that the marriage of a professor aroused censure; and this was all the keener because the majority of the faculty were clergymen; in 1758, two of the members were removed for violating this tacit prescription of celibacy, although they protestingly pointed to the President of the corporation as the one who had first set so honorable and natural an example. It was jocularly said, at a subsequent date, that the College of William and Mary was, by an unwritten law, compelled to justify its existence by raising a furious controversy with a heretic at least once in the course of every three years.[3] It was under the direct control of the Episcopal Church, and furnished it regularly with its principal candidates for the ministry. Every one of the Visitors was expected to belong to this denomination; and every one of its professors, when appointed, had to walk up to the faculty table and sign the Thirty-nine Articles.

In 1779, as Governor of the State, Jefferson occupied a seat on the Board, and he took advantage of this fact to make definite changes in the curriculum, with the design of converting the institution into a true university. This was the first step towards establishing somewhere in America a centre of learning that was patterned on the standards of the great universities of Europe. The earliest measure called for was one that would remove all trace of theological flavour: the School of Divinity was cut out root and branch, and the ancient languages were dropped. These languages had been retained among the courses recommended by the revision of 1776, but, in 1779, it was found by Jefferson, now a Visitor, that the

new schools could not be erected without swallowing up the income that had gone to the support of the professorship of Latin and Greek. The new scientific and political studies brought in were thought by him to be of more practical service than instruction in the ancient languages, which, after all, could, in his judgment, be safely left to the secondary schools already provided for in his all-comprehensive scheme of public education.

The courses of instruction which he proposed for the metamorphosed College of William and Mary were as follows: ( 1 ) law and politics; ( 2 ) anatomy and medicine; (3) physics and mathematics; (4) moral philosophy, law of nature and nations, and the history of fine arts; (5) modern languages; (6) the Indian School. He was sanguine that, with the flight of time, the endowment of the College would grow in volume as well as the income from the ever-increasing number of students in attendance, -a combination that would justify a great expansion in the work of the class-rooms. He was particularly solicitous that the literatures of the north of Europe should be taught under its roof, as they were, he said, so intimately connected with " our own language, laws, customs and history." This was one of the reasons, though not the principal one, which afterwards led him to require the admission of Anglo-Saxon among the studies of the University of Virginia. He thought that the Indian School, as then conducted, was of small utility; and he suggested as a substitute that a missionary should be appointed, who should, in the wigwams of the West, investigate the aboriginal system of laws, religious traditions, and languages, -the record of all which should be retained as a permanent possession of the library at Williamsburg. The School of Law proposed by him, was the first collegiate school of the kind to be

set on foot in the United States; so was the School of History inaugurated there in 1803; and Charles Bellini was also the earliest professor of modern languages to become a member of the faculty of an incorporated scat of learning within the same area of the Continent.

At the time that Jefferson was meditating and planning for higher education at the College of William and Mary, he had no examples in his native State to guide him. Hampden-Sidney College was then hardly superior to a grammar school, and it was altogether under the control of a sect, which he, at least, thought to be more intolerant than the Episcopalians. Washington College, too, though of great respectability, could lay no claim to exalted scholarship at that early stage of its history; and it also was under the mastery of the same vigorous denomination. Unless he could raise and broaden the standards of the College of William and Mary, by transforming it into a genuine university, Virginia, he knew, must continue to see a large stream of her most promising young men flowing annually into the scholastic reservoirs of the North. He was not far enough away from his own graduation to have lost all affection for his alma mater; and he also perceived that it possessed two conspicuous advantages for its own advancement (1) its comparatively ancient origin; and (2) its situation in the capital city. Both of these unrivaled circumstances, he thought, would have a very strong tendency to augment its prosperity when expanded into a university; but, unfortunately for the general success of his scheme, the Dissenters' prejudices had been further inflamed by the Revolution, and this relentless sentiment was not satisfied short of positively discouraging the extension of the College's patronage among the families of their own denominations. Without the friendly countenance of every

section of the community, it could not become the university he desired. Doubtless, too, the insalubrity of Williamsburg[4] had some influence in bringing about the failure of his first expectations; and this harmful influence was increased by the remoteness of the town from the centre of the State, for, in those times, the stage and carriage and the back of a horse were the only means of travelling to a distance. The removal of the Capital to Richmond at his own instance was the final blow.

But while Jefferson's hope for the establishment of a university was not realized in the reformed College of William and Mary, his effort in its behalf strongly tended to quicken his sense of the need of a higher seat of learning in Virginia, and, undoubtedly, enabled him to study with more discrimination every aspect of that subject when he came to visit and inspect the foremost scholastic institutions of Europe. That he retained a favorable opinion of the instruction in the College of William and Mary, as broadened and liberalized by himself, is clearly proven by the contents of his letter to Mr. Banister in 1785. What are the constituents of a useful American education? he asked. "Classical knowledge," he replied; modern languages -chiefly French, Spanish and Italian, -mathematics, natural philosophy, natural history, ethics, and civil history. In natural philosophy, I mean to include chemistry and agriculture, and in natural history, to include botany as well as other branches of those departments. It is true that the habit of speaking the modern languages cannot be so well acquired in America. But every other article can be as well acquired at William and Mary College as at any

place in Europe. When college education is done with, and a young man is to prepare himself for public life, he must cast his eye for America either in law or physics. In the former, where can he apply himself so advantageously as to Mr. Wythe? . . . The medical class is the only one which need come to Europe."

When it is recalled that Mr. Wythe was the preceptor in jurisprudence of both Jefferson and Marshall, -the first, among the greatest legislative reformers, the second, the greatest interpreter of the law, that have appeared in American history, -this expression of opinion seems to be devoid of the pardonable exaggeration of local partiality. The words too were penned when his ability to compare the relative merits of domestic and foreign colleges had been rendered more penetrating by careful observation of all that was to be studied in European countries. This preference, however, did not survive his return to America; or if it did do so, it did not reveal itself in a second effort to convert his alma mater into a modern university. On the contrary, we shall see that, after the incorporation of the University of Virginia, he sought to deprive that venerable college of her endowment in order to provide financial support for the system of academies which formed a section of his comprehensive scheme for public instruction.