University of Virginia Library

3. SECOND PERIOD
GERMINATION -ACADEMY AND COLLEGE

I. Jefferson's Preference for University Site

We have seen that, until the outset of his mission to France, at least, Jefferson persisted in hoping that the College of William and Mary could be lifted up to the level of a real university, both in its standards of instruction and in the number of its professorships; and that down to this point in time, he used every means in his power to bring about the transformation. The change in its curriculum which he had suggested, was certainly a long step towards the desired conversion; but the upshot, as the years passed, was disappointing in spite of the fact that the college was in the enjoyment of the subtle advantage which springs only from age, and was also, in the beginning, situated at the very centre of the political and social framework of the Commonwealth. The enlargement of its field of studies failed to secure for it that popularity with the members of all social classes and all religious denominations, with which alone it could win the highest prosperity.

When did Jefferson abandon the expectation that it would become a university to the extent that alone would satisfy his exacting requirements? When did the thought that he might be able to found an entirely new university, in the neighborhood of Monticello, invade his mind? Now, as has been pointed out, he had, from early manhood, felt a keen aversion to sectarianism in all its

shapes and voices. He was, of his own personal knowledge, aware that the College of William and Mary had been, and probably still was, as saturated with the vapours of Episcopalianism as Oxford itself. No influences but his shrewd recognition of the sentimental value of age in a seat of learning, the prestige of its situation at first in the capital, and that affection for his alma mater which still tarried in his breast, had, perhaps, impelled him, even in the beginning, to plan for its elevation to so high a point that it would satisfy the educational wants of the whole State. But all these influences, powerful as they once were, in making his attitude towards the ancient college so favorable and so sanguine, must have gradually weakened and fallen away as he perceived, with ever increasing clearness, that popularity with the old dissenting sects was not likely to be won even by the proposed broadening of its curriculum; and that the mere suppression of the theological school would not suffice in itself to blot out the historic sense of the unquestionable, though, perhaps; exaggerated, wrongs which those sects had suffered in the past, through the workings of the Episcopalian system. In his own heart, he probably sympathized with their lingering animosity, although he may have thought that they were hardly justified by common patriotism in letting that feeling deprive the new university of their support, without which it could not hope to represent the whole community in its attendance of students.[11]

So deep was the impression made on him by this hostility, coupled with his own wide and discriminating observations abroad, that, after his return from France, he seems never to have seriously considered the College of William and Mary in his plans for the establishment of a great State institution. If that institution was not to be the old college, still further remodeled and enlarged, and with its seat unremoved from the ancient town of Williamsburg, where was it to be placed? What other locality was to become its site? Apparently, there was never in his mind but one reply to this question: in the vicinity of Charlottesville. If he was mortal enough to be influenced by personal reasons in his selection of that site, it was a form of selfishness that was fully redeemed by the nobility of his aims. If there was one citizen of the State, during those years when he was so persistently nursing this "bantling," as he termed it, who was fully equipped by broad philanthropy, liberal opinions, unfailing love of knowledge, and an eager interest in education, clarified by study and observation, to set up a true university for his countrymen, that man was Thomas Jefferson. The most signal stroke of good fortune for this offspring of his spirit, throughout the first century of its existence, was this: that its site was chosen so close to his home at Monticello that he was able to impress upon its structure, whether physical, moral, or scholastic, the full force of his principles and his tastes. While it may be acknowledged that it might, at a distance from him, have caught his lofty tenets of political freedom and religious tolerance, and his devotion to science in all its departments, there is no likelihood whatever

that, without his dominating personality and his indefatigable supervision, it would have presented to the eye to-day perhaps the most beautiful group of college buildings, the noblest academical setting, to be discovered on the American Continent.

La Rochefoucauld, who was travelling in the United States during the years from 1795 to 1797 inclusive, and visited Monticello in the course of his tour, has recorded the fact that there was then a rumor in circulation that the General Assembly would soon establish a " new college in a more central part of the State." It was at this time that the bill of 1796, which, as already shown, only nominally assured a moderate degree of public instruction, was a subject of general conversation and debate. Before two years had passed, the groundlessness of this report had been proven; but Jefferson, in writing to Dr. Priestley, expressed the hope that a new university, planned on a " broad, liberal, and modern " scale, would be erected " in the upper country, and, therefore, more centrally for the State." He does not mince his words in giving his reasons for wishing to turn his back on the college in Williamsburg. " She is just well endowed enough," he remarked to the same correspondent, " to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed her." He then repeats the practical objection which was coming to have an ever-increasing influence with him in his view of its site. " It is, moreover, eccentric in its position, and exposed to all the bilious diseases, as all the lower country is, and, therefore, abandoned by the public care, as that part of the country is, to a considerable degree, by its inhabitants." [12]

A few years afterwards, Jefferson, now President of the United States, had an opportunity to express indirectly an equally emphatic opinion in opposition to all further efforts to develop the old college in preference to founding a new university elsewhere. Joseph C. Cabell, who was to be so honorably associated with him at a later period in the establishment of such an institution, had returned from Europe in May, 1806, after a tour of the principal European countries, and having married Miss Carter, a step-daughter of judge St. George Tucker, the first of that distinguished family to settle in Virginia, had decided to make Williamsburg, where his wife had resided, his permanent home. He was an alumnus of the College, and through this connection and those domestic bonds, soon became a warm partisan of a scheme having its origin with De la Costa, a foreign savant, to erect a museum of natural history in the former capital, and to attach it to the professorship there which embraced the various departments of that subject. The cost of building and collecting was to be defrayed by private subscription.

Isaac A. Coles, of Albemarle, Cabell's intimate friend, was, at this time, Jefferson's private secretary, and in that capacity stationed in Washington. Cabell was but a recent acquaintance of the President, and he, doubtless, for that reason hesitated to approach him by direct correspondence, although aware of Jefferson's interest in science. Possibly, too, he may have had some reason for questioning the President's fidelity to his alma mater, for reports of his views as to the need of a new seat of learning, to be founded in a more central situation, must have come to his ears. Cabell wrote to Coles instead. The letter itself was, perhaps, not shown to Jefferson, but the subject of it was, by Coles's admission in his reply,

discussed between them. The President thought " the attempt premature," by which cryptic expression he probably meant that the museum should be reserved for the institution which was yet to be established elsewhere. He returned the same reply to De la Costa, when his assistance was sought directly at a somewhat later date. In the meanwhile, Coles had fully stated Jefferson's present mental attitude towards the venerable college and the hoped-for new university. " If I could bring myself," he wrote to Cabell, " to consider Williamsburg as the permanent seat of science, as the spot where the youth of our State, for centuries to come, would go to be instructed in whatever might form them for usefulness, my objection would, in great measure, cease. But the old college is declining, and perhaps the sooner it falls entirely, the better, if it might be the means of pointing out to our legislative body the necessity of founding an institution on an extended and liberal scale. Instead of wasting your time in attempting to patch it up, a decaying institution, direct your efforts to a higher and more valuable object: found a new one."

Cabell, who had not yet been weaned from his alma mater by close confidential intercourse with Jefferson, was palpably nettled by the tone, and by the suggestions, of his friend's letter. " If the great new university of which you speak," he wrote in reply, " were in existence, or could be expected to appear within the space of a few years, then it would be prudent to defer the intended museum and to connect the two objects. But knowing as you do, the spirit of our Legislature, can you calculate anything of the kind from them? I doubt very much whether we do not evince more prudence in patching up what we have than in reposing in indolence under the expectation of what may never come . . . We ought to

make the most of it, as it is all we have, indulging at the same time the hope that the Legislature will either remove it to Richmond, or found a new one in the upper country." [13]

One would hardly recognize in these partial and loyal words, the presence of the man who was to be, after Jefferson himself, the most influential instrument in the establishment of the university at Charlottesville, which was comparatively to throw the College of William and Mary into the academic shade. They show, however, that he would not be averse to the erection of that university in another part of the State, should the sentiment of the General Assembly declare in favor of it. So soon as he should directly pass under the spell of Jefferson's personality, and catch the full inspiration of his devotion to his great scheme, Cabell was to become as earnest a supporter of all his plans for his projected seat of learning as Coles himself.

A few years after the date of these letters passing between the two friends, Jefferson committed himself definitely, over his own signature, to Charlottesville as the site of the institution which he had so long carried in his mind. Hitherto, in his correspondence at least, he seems to have referred with politic vagueness to a site " in a healthier and more central part of the State." But, in 1814, he mentions specifically his own vicinage as the spot which might be chosen. " I have long had under contemplation, and been collecting materials for a plan of the University of Virginia," he wrote to Dr. Cooper, " which should comprehend all the sciences useful to us, and none others . . . . This would probably absorb the functions of William and Mary College, and transfer them to a healthier position; perhaps to the neighborhood

of this place. The long and lingering decline of William and Mary, the death of the last President (Bishop Madison), its location and climate, force on us the wish for a new institution more convenient to our country generally, and better adapted to the present state of science." When these words were written, Jefferson, unknown to himself, was within a few months of the practical inauguration of a scheme, started by others, but soon adopted by himself, which was destined to expand, in a comparatively short time, into the very institution which he had been pondering over for so many years. Before taking up the narrative of the very small acorn which was to grow into so great a tree, it will be germane to our subject, anti conducive to a clearer understanding of it, should we give a short description of the immediate country in which the proposed university was now so soon to be planted, a summary history of its settlement, and a concise recital of the social influences which had governed it down to the establishment of that seat of learning.

II. History of the University Region

The whole region that formed the background of Charlottesville, from whatever point of the compass it might be viewed, differed altogether from the environment of the College of William and Mary.[14] Around Williamsburg, one saw an almost perfectly level country overgrown with a forest of varied species, broken in many places by farms under cultivation or by abandoned fields, and here and there deeply penetrated by winding creeks that ran up into the land from the broad waters of the York and James Rivers. The population that

occupied this region were descended from settlers who had taken possession of it early in the seventeenth century, while Williamsburg itself was the oldest town of historic importance in the State, the former seat of government and of colonial fashion, and retaining, even in its decay, the glow of the culture and refinement which had distinguished it from the beginning.

Unlike this old city, standing upon the wide, wooded coastal plain, Charlottesville was placed in a deep valley spreading from the rampart of the Southwest Mountains, on one side, to the chain of the Blue Ridge, on the other. Towards the south, and not far off, rose the repulsive wall of the Ragged Mountains, while towards the north, the land rolled away as far as the eye could reach. The entire surface of the country, thus pent in on all sides but one, was broken up picturesquely by long, high-shouldered hills, isolated mounts, uneven plateaus, and deep, narrow rocky gorges. Everywhere, it was liberally watered by the romantic Rivanna and its brawling tributary streams, flowing down between ridges that disputed the way so successfully that the channels were forced to follow abrupt and winding courses. The broad scene taken in from some moderate height, that commanded the whole without blending the details, was not surpassed in Virginia for diversified beauty as the seasons, in procession, laid a green or russet or white finger on the face of the landscape below. There, on the western skirts of the valley rose the Blue Mountains, as changeful in color as the mountains of Greece; now as deeply azure as the Bay of Naples itself; now so faint and ethereal in hue as to be almost invisible; now as gray and massive as a cliff of the purest granite; now bare and bleak at the side and crowned with fields of shining snow at the top. In the interval, lay the floor of the valley itself, with a few

country residences and farm-houses scattered about it here and there, and open fields in fallow or in wheat, and pleasant groves of primaeval trees. There, in the shadow of the Southwest Mountains at sunrise and of the Ragged Mountains at sunset, stood the little hamlet of Charlottesville; and not far off flowed the Rivanna, showing a narrow turbid glimpse of its surface as it turned to pass onward to the James.

To the spectator, thus gazing around from one point of the compass to the other, the rim of the sky appeared to rest upon the massive shoulders of mountain caryatides, with the fast field of the sky itself open to full view as the troops of clouds glided across it, or the storms brewed in its depths, or the last rays of the dying sun flooded it with color. Sky and mountain and plain, -all offered themselves to the eye in stupendous shapes, and only the presence of a large sheet of water was wanting to make a scene upon which nature had bestowed every beautiful and impressive feature in her gift.

Behind this physical charm, that appealed to the eye, there lurked the suggestion of what man had done for the scene that appealed even more romantically to the historic sense. The University of Virginia was incorporated in 1819, and its classical group of buildings, that carry the mind back to the remote age of Greece and Rome, was not finished in 1825, when its doors were opened. Ninety years before the cornerstone of the first pavilion was laid, and less than one hundred before the Rotunda was completed, the region now embraced in Albemarle county was a primaeval wilderness, unoccupied and unclaimed by a single white settler whose name has survived. The first patents to any parts of its virgin soil were acquired in June, 1727. Only two were issued during that year, and they were confined to the area of

ground lying on the eastern slopes of the Southwest Mountains. Slowly, yard by yard, as it were, in the course of many years, the settlements had been creeping up the headwaters of the Pamunkey towards the northwest, and the main stream of the James towards the west. The third patent, obtained a few years later, embraced land along the banks of the latter river. It was not until 1730 apparently that any part of the soil adjacent to the Rivanna was appropriated. Only five patents were sued out in 1730 and only three in the following year. It was not until 1732 that the western base of the Southwest Mountains was arrived at: the land that afterwards formed the site of the little town of Milton, -which became the port of entry for much of the material used in the original construction of the University, -was taken up during this year. This was the nearest point to the present town of Charlottesville so far reached by the settler. Among the four patents granted in 1733, one was obtained that spread from the mouth of Moore's Creek to a boundary line running beyond the modern estate of Pen Park, the birthplace of Francis Walker Gilmer, Jefferson's staunch coadjutor in the next century. By 1734, the plateau of Pantops and Lego, overlooking the valley of the Rivanna and visible from the present Observatory Mountain, had been occupied by patentees; and before the close of the year, Lewis Mountain, and the land situated immediately towards the west, had been acquired by Joseph Terrell and David Lewis.

Down to 1734, the patentees had, with barely an exception, been prominent men residing in Eastern Virginia, who were influenced alone by the prospect of speculative profit in engrossing such large areas of unappropriated soil, and who made no actual settlement beyond the small degree required by law. This was complied with by

placing on the lands a few tenants or slaves, who were not expected to snatch more than their own support out of the new ground. Enterprising and independent yeomen began to come in, in 1734, and now the real social and economic development of the region took a start in earnest. The swollen patent, however, continued to be sued out by prominent gentlemen in Eastern Virginia, only a very small proportion of whose number had any intention of removing their homes to these back lands: in 1735, for instance, the father of Patrick Henry was a patentee; and in the same year, William Randolph acquired the tract which included the modern estates of Shadwell and Edgehill; Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas, a tract of one thousand acres on the southern bank of the Rivanna; and Abraham Lewis, the tract which takes in the present site of the University.

Not until this year, did the engrossment of the soil spread out as far as Buck Mountain Creek, which flows into the Rivanna in the northwestern part of the present county, and Ivy Creek which waters the middle portion. Patents were now obtained to the lands lying around Farmington and Ivy station. By 1737, the banks of Mechums River had been reached. The area of ground thus taken up, however, was not in the way of a solid extension of boundaries; as we have seen, the site of the University was not patented until after the present Birdwood estate had been appropriated; and in harmony with the same fact, it was not until 1737 that William Taylor obtained, by patent, title to the lands situated on Moore's Creek which are supposed to have contained the present site of the town of Charlottesville. By this time, nearly every division of the county had been patented in a very dispersed manner, -to he extended gradually to those intervening spaces which remained vacant because

holding out so much smaller inducements for preoccupation. As late as 1796, a patent was granted for twenty-five thousand acres of land in Albemarle that was still in the possession of the State.

How little perceptible change had been worked in the face of the county by 1737 is revealed in the situation of Peter Jefferson, who removed to his estate on the Rivanna in the course of that year: the entire region about him is described as having been, at the time, a slumbering, savage wilderness; nor did any substantial transformation in its character take place before 1743, the year of Thomas Jefferson's birth. If one had walked up from Shadwell, during that year, to the top of a neighboring height which commanded a view of the landscape as far as the peaks of the Blue Ridge, he would have had unrolled below him a region almost as untouched by the white man, and quite as unmoulded to the permanent uses of civilization, as it had been one hundred years before, when it was only trodden by the feet of warring or hunting Indians. How completely it was in the possession of wild animals at the time of the first settlement is apparent in the names which the pioneers bestowed on the natural features of the valley. Many varieties of the fourlegged denizens of the original forests are represented in these names. So numerous were deer that it is recorded of one of the earliest settlers on the eastern slope of the great Ridge that he had only to step across the threshold of his cabin in the morning to obtain with his rifle all the venison that would be needed for his food; and that there was no exaggeration in this statement is proven by the frequency with which Buck mountains and Buck creeks are entered on the face of the first maps; and equally indicative of the like condition is the number of Elk runs, Beaver and Bear creeks, Buffalo meadows

and mountains, within the same area of country. One of the modern roads that crosses the Ridge followed, when first laid down, a trail which herds of bison had been tramping over during uncounted centuries. As late as 1896, there were domiciled in Albemarle persons who had conversed with a man whose father had watched a long string of these animals wading the Roanoke River at a ford situated less than two hundred miles from the site of the University.[15] The Pigeon Tops of the present day point to the haunts where the wild pigeons gathered in flocks of hundreds of thousands, either to roost or to feed on the acorns that had dropped to the ground in the autumnal woods on the mountain sides.

There is no surviving proof of the existence of Indian wigwams in Albemarle when the first settlement began, but during Jefferson's boyhood, small bands of warriors would sometimes pass through, and, in one instance at least, revisited a mound standing on the banks of the Rivanna, where their dead had been formerly buried. A deed recorded in 1751, refers, in the definition of boundary lines, to a spot where a pioneer had been scalped by a lurking brave. It was not until 1744, seventy-five years before the University was chartered, that the county had filled up with people enough to justify the General Assembly in organizing a court within its borders; it was not until 1762 that Charlottesville, -named for the queen of the monarch whom Jefferson was to arraign in the Declaration of Independence, -was incorporated; and down to 1820, it continued to be the only post-office in all that region. In 1745, the number of inhabitants within the boundaries of Albemarle was thought to be about 4,250; by 1790, that number, as

counted in the first census, had swelled to 12,585; by 1810, to 18,268; and by 1820, when the University was building, to 32,618.

III. Early Social Life

The social and economic history of the first settlement of Albemarle county was an exact continuation of that transit of population and civilization in Virginia which had been noted from the foundation of Jamestown. Not only was this original movement westward to the mountains more halting, but it was less crude in spirit than the flood which, in our own times, has carried the American frontier across an entire continent. It was not a migration of petty farmers and rough adventurers of all sorts. Among the names of the early patentees of Albemarle, we find numerous representatives of the oldest and most influential families in the Colony: Garters, Randolphs, Lewises, Nicholases, Meriwethers, Walkers, Henrys, Carrs, Hopkinses, Terrells, Eppeses, and others of the like social eminence. While spacious areas of ground were, at first, taken up by these families with a nominal residence only, as we have seen, nevertheless it was not many years before their younger scions began to lay the corner-stones of their homes in this forest wilderness. At no stage of its growth was it a scattered community of wild hunters and trappers alone; on the contrary, from the second decade at least, it was a community whose principal citizens had brought up from Eastern Virginia all the subservience to law, refinement of manners, and high civic spirit, that had distinguished the plantation homes in the older shires during many generations. The Meriwethers and Lewises, and the long stream of gentle families who followed them, had possessed,

from their first settlement in Virginia, all the social advantages which the Colony had to bestow; and when they made their way up from the open country, through the dark woods, and built their houses along the slopes of the Southwest Mountains, and in the eastern shadow of the Blue Ridge, they simply transferred to those green and quiet sites all the points of view, all the moral convictions, all the domestic habits, all the personal demeanor, which had given such a distinct flavor to the social life on the banks of the tidal rivers below. So soon as the children of these first settlers had arrived at maturity, and inherited the parental estates, there was no substantial difference to be discerned between the homes in which they dwelt and the original homes of their fathers still standing in the counties lying towards the sea.

It would hardly be correct to accept Thomas Jefferson as an average representative of this second generation born in the valley of the Rivanna, for he stood high above the multitude of his fellow Americans even in the oldest communities; but in mere social culture and domestic refinement, apart from native talents and acquired knowledge, he was not one whit superior to the representatives of those families who had patented the virgin lands contemporaneously with his father.

If any one now living could have taken his stand on the portico of Monticello, in 1825, on the day that the University threw open its doors to students, and gazed down upon the broad map of the country below towards the west, south, north, and northeast, his eyes would have caught sight of many residences that were already celebrated in the social history of the State, not only for the culture and refinement of their atmosphere, but for the high distinction of many of the citizens who owned them. First, would be discerned, on the banks of the Rivanna,

the site of Shadwell, the birthplace of Jefferson himself, now marked by a group of sycamores, as the original house had been consumed by fire. Beyond, on a height that suggested its name, would be visible the walls of Pantops erected in 1815, and occupied by James Leitch, who married the granddaughter of Nicholas Lewis, one of the original settlers. Close by was Lego, the home of a second Lewis, whose wife was the daughter of the explorer Dr. Thomas Walker. Not far towards the northeast stood Edgehill, the home of the Randolphs, who had so named it in honor of the battle in which their cavalier ancestor had fought so bravely yet so unavailingly. Beyond Edgehill was to be seen Belmont, the home of Dr. Charles Everett, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and the private secretary of President Monroe; next, Cismont and Cloverfields, with the graveyard in which the older members of the Meriwether family were buried; Belvoir, the home of the Nelsons, who had acquired it by a fortunate marriage; Castle Hill, the home of the Walkers, and afterwards of the Riveses, through a similar intermarriage; and Keswick, the home of the Pages.

Looking in turn towards the west, north and south, there rose, within the scope of the eye, the homes of the Monroes, the Maurys, the Gilmers, the Coleses, the Nicholases, the Barbours, the Madisons, the Lewises, the Woodses, the Minors, the Terrells, the Carrs, and numerous other families identified with that region, in most instances, from the earliest years of the community. Either then, or a short time after the University was founded, there resided in houses in sight from the same eminence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and third President of the United States; James Madison, the Father of the Constitution

and fourth President; James Monroe, the fifth President and author of the celebrated Doctrine which bears his name; Andrew Stevenson, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Minister to the Court of St. James; Thomas Walker Gilmer, Governor of the State and Secretary of the Navy; Edward Coles, Governor of Illinois; William C. Nicholas, Governor of Virginia and United States Senator; Thomas Mann Randolph, member of Congress and Governor of Virginia; James Barbour, Governor of the State, United States Senator, and Minister to Great Britain; Philip P. Barbour, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Justice of the Supreme Court; George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest Territory; Meriwether Lewis, the explorer of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers; William C. Rives, United States Senator and twice Minister to the Court of Versailles; Hugh Nelson, member of Congress and Minister to Spain; William Short, Minister to the Hague; and William F. Gordon, member of Congress and author of the sub-treasury scheme. In this list of distinguished citizens, there are to be found three Presidents of the United States, seven Governors of Commonwealths, seven envoys to foreign countries, two Speakers of the Lower House of Congress, one justice of the Supreme Court, one Secretary of the Navy, two Secretaries of State, one Secretary of War, three United States Senators, one noted soldier, and an equally noted explorer. In no commensurate area of the Republic, at that time, could there have been descried so many men, either already celebrated, or destined, within a few years, to win fame in political life. A region of country that had been occupied only one hundred years surpassed the oldest parts of Virginia and the other States alike, in the acknowledged eminence of its principal residents, on account of their splendid public services.

The social life of the county was, at all seasons, enlivened by constant personal intercourse between neighbors, and at times by a succession of gaieties. Isaac Coles, writing to Cabell from his home in Albemarle, in 1811, mentions that his hours were mainly "given up to visits, Christmas dinners and Christmas balls!" Judge Dabney Carr, describing a recent sojourn in the county in 1821, remarks, by way of apology for failing to reply to Cabell, " I was in such a constant round of company, dining to-day here, and to-morrow there, that I could not find a moment for a letter." "From a long and intimate knowledge of Albemarle county," Gilmer wrote to George Long, in 1824, "I assure you, I know no place in America where there is a more liberal, intelligent, hospitable, and agreeable society, nor where respectable strangers could receive a kinder welcome." Jefferson, who had passed so much of his life in the most polished coteries of the Old and the New World, held a similar view: "The society in Albemarle," he stated to a European correspondent in March, 1815, " is much better than is common in country situations. Perhaps, there is not a better country society in the United States. But do not imagine this a Parisian or an academical society. It consists of plain, honest, and rational neighbors, -some of them well informed, and men of reading, all superintending their farms, hospitable and friendly, and speaking nothing but English."

Charlottesville, situated on a gentle eminence that sloped to the Rivanna, was a small collection of houses built around the court-house square. It hardly possessed the consequence of a village from the point of view of

population alone, but as the seat of justice, the site of several general stores and the foremost lawyers' offices, and the scene of popular assemblages when the court was in session, or a political rally was holding, it formed the central point in the civic life of the community. Apart from the court-house itself, the two principal houses in the little town were the Swann and the Old Stone taverns. It was here that the promiscuous concourse of citizens dined on court days; it was here that travellers, passing through to the Valley or the West, stopped to bait their horses or to spend a night; and it was here also that the rather liberal taste for strong waters prevailing in those times could always find indulgence. The lawyers probably met some of their clients here; and here certainly many important conferences of all kinds were held. The most animated spot within the limits of the village out side of the court-house square itself was, on court days at least, the porch of the Old Stone tavern, for this ordinary was kept by one of the most popular citizens of the county, Triplett Estes, the condition of whose affairs, as we shall soon see, threatened, at one time, to have some connection with the origin of the University of Virginia.

Albemarle county, before the Revolution, was divided between Fredericksville and St. Anne's parishes; and of the two, Fredericksville, which had been extended from Louisa county, was laid off first. St. Anne's was formed in 1762 by drawing its eastern boundary line along the Rivanna to a point opposite Charlottesville; and thence the line ran through the town westward to the Blue Ridge. The parish itself was situated south of this line. The history of these parishes is pertinent to our subject, for the clergymen who filled their pulpits were, in several instances, well known teachers before and after the Revolution, and the sales of the glebes, when the

Church was disestablished, created an important fund for the promotion of public education. The glebe of Fredericksville, which seems to have embraced four hundred acres, was purchased for four hundred pounds in colonial currency. On the other hand, the glebe of St. Anne's, which lay not far from the Green Mountains, was, perhaps, not so extensive or so profitable.

IV. Origin of Albemarle Academy

The most famous school situated nearest to Charlottesville previous to the Revolution was the one conducted by the Rev. James Maury, who had been the rector of Fredericksville parish at the time that it took in also the county of Louisa. Dying in 1770, he was succeeded by his son, Matthew Maury, as the clergyman of Trinity parish, -the new parish created in the first division of Fredericksville, -and as the headmaster of his school. .It was here that Jefferson received his earliest tuition after leaving home. This school enjoyed a high reputation for thoroughness many years before Albemarle Academy was incorporated, and was, no doubt, patronized, before and after the Revolution, by many families in Albemarle county, although more or less inconvenient to them on account of its remoteness. Another clergyman, Rev. Samuel Black, had established a school near the foot of the Blue Ridge; and about 1760, James Forbes was teaching in the neighborhood of Ivy.

But the need of a school in the immediate vicinity of Charlottesville became so pressing by 1783, that the first practical step was taken to establish an academy there. There is no evidence that Jefferson suggested this project, but there is proof that he felt so deep an interest in it that he exacted of a friend in the county

the promise that he should be informed of its prospects of success during his own absence in Annapolis; and he also assured his neighbors of his willingness to give personal aid by endeavoring to procure a tutor during his travels in the North; and this promise he faithfully kept, for while stopping in Princeton, he sought the advice of Dr. Witherspoon, President of Princeton College; but no tutor could be obtained there, as that institution had not yet recovered from the confusion caused by the war. In Philadelphia, a short time later, he renewed his search by inquiring for an Irish instructor; but he was told that the state of learning in Ireland was so low that few natives of that country had sufficient accomplishments for such employment; or if they should have, desired to secure it. Jefferson, in his perplexity, now thought of a Scotch tutor; but before resuming the hunt, he wrote back to his correspondent in Albemarle that he would not go on until he had heard that the plans for the academy were fixed upon so firm a basis that he would be justified in empowering some person in Scotland to engage there a competent teacher. " It was from that country," he said, " that a sober, attentive man would he most certainly obtained." He was so soon called away by his mission to France that he does not appear to have had a chance for forwarding the design by further personal cooperation; and afterwards, down to 1809, was so constantly absent from home, owing to his official duties in Washington, that he had not leisure to consider it further in a practical way.

The purpose of establishing the school seems to have slumbered for many years, but, in 1803, or on some day just previous to it, the plan was revived, and so keen was the interest now aroused, that, in the course of that year, a charter was obtained and the school incorporated

as the Albemarle Academy. By this date, the population of the county had substantially increased, and the need of a good classical school must have been more urgent than it had been twenty years earlier, when the scheme was broached for the first time.

Did the new academy enter at once upon an existence more solid than that of an academy on parchment? Apparently, it did not. In 1802, an Act of the General Assembly laid down the manner in which the money accruing from the sale of the glebe lands in Fredericksville and St. Anne's parishes was to be secured for any permissible object: a majority of the freeholders and householders of the county had only to submit a petition to the overseers of the poor clearly defining their purpose. It is possible that this Act was passed at the instance of persons interested in the projected academy; but that the fund was not appropriated is demonstrated by the fact L, that, when, in 1814, the scheme was resuscitated by the surviving trustees under the old charter, one of the first steps taken was to apply to the General Assembly for the possession of this fund, -an indication that it had not yet been disposed of, for it would certainly have been used had the original design been carried out in 1803. About this time, there was a school at Milton on the Rivanna conducted by William Ogilvie, an excellent classical scholar of Scotch birth, who gave the earliest tuition to the sons of many conspicuous families of Albemarle and adjoining counties. In 1806, Professor Girardin determined to resign his chair in the College of William and Mary, and consulted Joseph C. Cabell, then in Williamsburg, as to the most promising site for founding a large school of his own. Cabell conferred with his brother, Judge William H. Cabell: "Shall we place Girardin in the academy at New Glasgow," he wrote, "or shall we

Connect him with Ogilvie and establish them at Charlottesville? I wish to do the latter." [16] Now, it is quite improbable that Cabell, whose birthplace and original home was at Warminster, on the James River, not very many miles away, would have suggested Charlottesville as a suitable place of settlement for two distinguished teachers like Ogilvie and Girardin had he known that they would have to meet and overcome the rivalry of an academy already in operation, and backed by an influential board of trustees and a large circle of wealthy patrons.

Not until 1814 does the Albemarle Academy exhibit the feeblest sign of practical life. When the project was revived, only five of the first trustees, namely John Harris, John Nicholas, John Kelly, Peter Carr, and John Carr, took hold of it, for all the others had either died, resigned, or emigrated to the West. The vacancies in the list, the natural result of the lapse of a decade, had not been filled as they arose; and this would certainly have been done had the Academy, in reality, been under way, since, in that case, it would have called for and received the close supervision of a large and interested Board. The original members had fallen off, it would seem, because there were no duties to perform. Indeed, the Academy so far had been merely a name.

What was the motive at the bottom of the resuscitation of the charter? Quite probably the principal one now, as during many years past, was that there was an immediate need for the school; the subordinate one, perhaps, was the desire to bolster up financially Triplett Estes, the proprietor of the Old Stone tavern, the jovial friend of all those citizens of the county who had eaten of the dishes from his kitchen and drunk of the spirits

from his cellar. In a letter which George W. Randolph wrote to Dr. James L. Cabell, in 1856, when the Stone tavern was yet standing, he repeated the story of the tentative purchase which had been told to him by Alexander Garrett, one of the new trustees of the Academy after its revival in 1814, and one, therefore, conversant with all the details of this event at the time, though his memory may have been weakened subsequently by age. It was Mr. Garrett's impression, says Mr. Randolph, that "the owners of the present Monticello House, with which the Stone tavern had been incorporated before 1856, -for the purpose of raising the value of their property, and partly, no doubt, from public spirit, undertook to establish an academy." [17] As the petition which certain citizens of Albemarle, at a later day, addressed to the General Assembly sought the right to collect funds by lottery to buy this house for the expressed purpose of profiting Triplett Estes, it seems unlikely, as Mr. Randolph reports, that any of the trustees had a personal interest in the property beyond a mortgage. On the contrary, the concern shown by Estes and his friends in the proposed sale would appear to demonstrate that he alone was to be the beneficiary. The building itself was ample security for any lien which may have rested on it.

As the scheme of the Academy had been under consideration during many years, and as the need for it was greater now than ever, the five surviving members of the old board probably saw in Estes's offer a very uncommon chance of securing the right kind of structure for the projected school in Charlottesville, where alone they perhaps thought it should be placed, and where alone an edifice large enough for its purpose was likely to be

found. If, in establishing the Academy, a popular citizen, who happened to have the property wanted, could also be assisted, the housing thus made attainable was not, on that account, rendered less desirable or less satisfactory to the trustees. Furthermore, those trustees were aware that it would be necessary to turn to a lottery to raise in part at least the fund which they would require. That lottery was certain to be looked upon with more favor in Albemarle and the adjacent counties if it were associated in the minds of the citizens in general with the expectation of succoring so worthy and so genial a boniface as Estes.

So far as can he discovered, Jefferson had no part of any kind in the consultations that led up to the first meeting of the five trustees on March 25, 1814. He went back to Monticello in 1809, and from that time became a permanent resident of the county. There was an interval of five years before the surviving members of the old board reassembled. Why had he manifested no interest in the charter of 1803, and, so far as we know, why was he not previously approached by the trustees with the view of enlisting his influential co-operation? Apparently, during these years, he made no suggestion with respect to the Academy; he gave no advice; nor did he take any step whatever, either alone or along with others, to revive the scheme. While his concern for the advancement of education was never more lively than during the immediate period that followed his return to his home, it is quite possible that his long absences from the county, and the dignity of the great offices he had filled, had produced a certain aloofness in his intercourse with his neighbors. There is little proof of any intimate association on his part with the community around him. He was not a public speaker, and so far as can be judged,

his attention was now absorbed by his correspondence, his agricultural experiments, his domestic circle, and his private visitors, who furnished him with the most cultivated and distinguished society. Had he been in close affiliation with the trustees of the Academy, either before or after he became a member of its board, it is not probable that, when the Academy was converted into Central College in 1816, he would have omitted the entire number from the governing body of the new institution, even if he were anxious to increase the influence of that body by placing on it only men known throughout Virginia.

Jefferson's participation in the memorable first meeting of the surviving trustees at the Stone tavern was wholly accidental and unexpected. It seems that, following his habit after one o'clock in the day, he had left Monticello for his afternoon ride, and had turned his horse's head in the direction of Charlottesville. As he passed through the village, he was seen from the Stone tavern by one of the trustees, who, aware of his interest in education, and justly thinking that his advice would he of substantial service, suggested that he should be asked to dismount, and take part in the discussion then going on in one of the rooms in the inn. He cheerfully complied with the invitation, got down from the saddle, and joined the circle within. He first counseled them to fill at once all the vacancies in the board; and this seems to have been promptly done. His own name was inserted at the head of the list, which ran as follows: Thomas Jefferson, Jonathan B. Carr, Robert B. Streshley, James Leitch, Edmund Anderson, Thomas Wells, Nicholas M. Lewis, Frank Carr, John Winn, Alexander Garrett, Dabney Minor, Samuel Carr, and Thomas Jameson. To this list should he added the names of the surviving members of the original board: John Harris, John Nicholas, John

Kelly, Peter Carr, and John Carr. Further additions to the number were made in the course of the ensuing twelve months.

What were the histories of the principal men who composed the reformed board? Without exception, they were drawn from the body of the substantial and responsible citizens of the county, those "plain, honest, rational, and well-informed neighbors" of Jefferson, to whom he referred in the letter, already quoted, written this very month of the same year. Frank Carr was, at one time or another, a physician, teacher, editor, and farmer, and in the latter character filled the useful office of secretary of the Albemarle Agricultural Society. He also sat on the bench of magistrates and served as sheriff. Edmund Anderson was a brother-in-law of Meriwether Lewis, the famous explorer of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. Nicholas M. Lewis was a great-grandson of Nicholas Meriwether, one of the earliest landowners in Albemarle. His father had been a distinguished officer in the War of the Revolution, surveyor, sheriff, and magistrate, and the adviser of the family at Monticello during Jefferson's numerous absences from his roof. John Winn had laid by a competence in mercantile pursuits in Charlottesville, and had afterwards purchased the valuable estate of Belmont, which he occupied as his home. Alexander Garrett, who was to become the bursar of the University, was, at one time, the deputy sheriff and deputy clerk of the county. Peter Carr was a member of the bar, and had formerly been associated with Jefferson as his private secretary. John Kelly, like John Winn, was a successful merchant, was very alert in the affairs of his church, and enjoyed such a high reputation for integrity and good sense that he was frequently appointed to act as the administrator of estates. John

Nicholas, who was sprung from one of the first settlers, was a grandson of Colonel Fry, who, with Peter Jefferson, drafted the celebrated map of Virginia that is designated by their names. He owned a large area of land in the neighborhood of the town, and for some years was the clerk of the county in succession to his father. James Leitch was, during a subsequent period, the proprietor of the Pantops estate. Dabney Minor was a member of a family that has always been actively and honorably identified with every interest of the county. Samuel Carr, whose pursuit was that of farmer, had sat on the magistrates' bench and served as colonel of cavalry in the War of 1812; and he also won political distinction as a delegate and senator in the General Assembly. John Carr was the first clerk of the circuit court of Albemarle, and was also the clerk of the district court of Charlottesville. Thomas Jameson, a descendant of one of the earliest patentees of the lands on Moorman's River, was a physician who practiced at the county seat and in its vicinage. Streshley, Wells, and Harris, the three remaining trustees, were all citizens of respectable position in the community, well fitted by character and intelligence for the performance of the highly responsible duties which they had undertaken.

Merchants, lawyers, physicians, farmers, clerks of court, magistrates, sheriffs, members of the General Assembly, either then or yet to be, -such were the men who sat on the board of trustees of Albemarle Academy. With a few exceptions, they were sprung from fathers or grandfathers who had come into the county with the first immigration, and all were bound to its soil by financial interests, ties of home and family, and the associations of a life-time with kinsmen and friends. At their head stood Jefferson, ready to give them the full

benefit of his long experience of men, and ripe wisdom in the management of the most intricate public affairs. There was not another among them who approached him in personal distinction, or in knowledge of educational principles; and all were willing to follow his serene and farsighted leadership, now so essential to the success of their plans.

V. Acts of the Albemarle Academy Trustees

Adjourning on March 25, the trustees re-assembled on April 5. The principal business transacted on that day was the election of Peter Carr as President of the Board, and of Frank Carr as Secretary, and the appointment of a committee, with Jefferson as its chairman, to draw up a code of general regulations for the government of the Academy so soon as its doors should be thrown open to students. A motion to choose at once the site for its building was put off, in order, doubtless, to await the report of the committee now selected to suggest the means of obtaining the funds needed for the completion and maintenance of the projected institution. Adjourning over from April 15, because barely a majority of the trustees were present, -Jefferson himself being one of the absentees -they re-assembled on May 3. Again Jefferson did not attend; but as fifteen trustees answered to their names at roll-call, matters of the first importance were straightway called up for consideration and debate. The committee chosen to devise a plan for procuring money recommended that a lottery should be used for that purpose. The terms adopted for this lottery demonstrate the seductive manner in which it was to be employed: four thousand filled-in tickets were to be printed; and as each was to be sold for five dollars, it was expected

that, by this means, the sum of $20,000 would be collected for distribution as prizes. The largest of these prizes was to amount to five thousand dollars; the next largest to two thousand; and the third, fourth, and fifth, to one thousand dollars each. The remaining ten thousand dollars was to be divided into smaller sums for prizes running all the way from one of five hundred dollars to one thousand of five dollars respectively. The profit was to be derived from twenty-six hundred and eighty-five blank tickets, to be disposed of at the same time as the prize tickets at five dollars a piece. The drawing was to take place in Charlottesville eighteen months after the sale of all the tickets had been completed; or if the trustees should so determine, at an earlier date.

The report of the committee on rules and regulations, which bore throughout the scholastic and administrative stamp of its chairman, Jefferson, stated that the Academy's aim would be to provide higher instruction for youths already thoroughly grounded in a course of reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was to consist of such studies, at first, as promised to be most useful; and as the income of the institution should grow in volume, the number of these studies was to be enlarged so as to embrace other and wider fields of knowledge. A committee of three was to be nominated yearly by the Board to keep every branch of the tuition under observation; to suggest what new departments should be added; to enforce discipline among the students; to regulate the expenses; and to overlook the entire domestic economy of the Academy. Thomas M. Randolph, Jefferson's son-in-law, was now a member of the Board, and he, Peter Carr, and Jefferson, the three most conspicuous and influential trustees, were selected as the committee to petition

the General Assembly for an appropriation, in support' of the Academy, out of the money that had arisen from the sale of the plebe lands of St. Anne's and Fredericksville's parishes. By an act passed February 13, 1811, the county court of Albemarle had been authorized to appoint a commissioner to invest the funds accruing from this sale in the stock of the Bank of Virginia. It seems that only the interest, at this time at least, could be used for the establishment of a public school or schools in the county, in harmony with the provisions of the Act of 1796 for the education of the people. But before either principal or interest could be disposed of, the consent of the freeholders had to be obtained, as required by the Act of 1802, already referred to. It was important for the trustees of the Academy to secure this acquiescence beforehand, since it would fortify their petition for the entire sum when brought before the General Assembly. At this moment, the money was already in the custody of John Winn, a member of the Board, who had become the commissioner by order of the court; and it seems now to have only needed the approval of a majority of the voters, and the authorization of the Legislature, to assure the immediate diversion of the whole amount, -principal as well as interest, -to the use of the Academy.

On June 17, a committee, composed of John Winn, James Leitch, John Nicholas, Frank Carr, and Alexander Garrett, was named to decide upon the most suitable site for the institution. Should a new edifice be erected on the most commodious and economical plan, or should a house already in existence he chosen? The question before the committee really was: should the Stone tavern be purchased from Estes, or should they buy new ground in the neighborhood of Charlottesville where no building was already standing?

It is no cause for surprise to find that, when the trustees re-assembled on August 19, Jefferson was present for the first time since their second conference. The point corning up for determination was the one which interested him most. It is easy enough to comprehend that the mind which conceived the splendid group of University structures at a later date, shrank from the possibility of a rough tavern, of no architectural beauty whatever from cellar to garret, being accepted as the correct housing for the institution which he had already resolved to enlarge into a great seat of learning. Fortunately, he was not a common local politician, for had he been, he would have looked upon the good will of a popular innkeeper as important to the success of his political future, and, therefore, not to be jeoparded; nor were his social relations with that innkeeper such as to make him hesitate to derange his plans. Jefferson concentrated his gaze upon the paramount claims of his own great scheme; and he was too sagacious to yield one inch, even in the obscurity and uncertainty of its initiation. As he was on a footing of friendship with all the members of the building committee, it is reasonable to presume that he was consulted by them when they came to draft their report; unquestionably, its tenor was in harmony with his own wishes and convictions; and when it was handed in, he was in the room to support it with the weight of his influence with the board. The report took the ground that it was not advisable to purchase a building within the town, but that an unoccupied site, at least half a mile from its boundaries, should be bought. The Academy, however, in making this selection, was not to be compelled to pay a higher price than it would have been required to do had an improved and convenient situation in Charlottesville been preferred. As there were now no funds

in the board's possession, the committee recommended that the choice of the site should be put off until a definite offer could be submitted.

The expectation of obtaining funds was based on three petitions to be sent to the General Assembly: the first, for the appropriation of the money from the sale of the glebes, now in the custody of Commissioner Winn; the second, for a dividend accruing from the interest of the Literary Fund; and the third, for a lottery.

The first two of these petitions had already been drawn by Jefferson, Randolph, and Carr. The petition for the lottery was signed by one hundred and forty-seven citizens of Albemarle county, who did not disguise the fact, even in the document itself, that one of the purposes they had in view was to make certain the collection of funds sufficient for the purchase of the Old Stone tavern, in order to assist its genial proprietor financially. There was no word of disapproval by Jefferson of that petition on this account, although it is altogether probable that he had no patience with this particular side of it. With another of its clauses, however, he was warmly in sympathy; in deed, this section seems to have received its tone from his own exasperated and outspoken opinion of the impoverished means of acquiring a higher education in his native Commonwealth. "We have too long slept in unpardonable apathy," it ran, "over the crying and lamentable fact that, in the rich, populous, and liberal State of Virginia, there stands not one literary academy calculated to command the education of her youth. . . . We see our youth flying to foreign countries (Yale, Princeton and other Northern colleges) to obtain that of which they are deprived at home: a liberal education. We behold them asking of foreigners (the North) what their fathers refuse them. It is calculated, in an alarming

degree, to alienate the young from the spot of their nativity, to instil into their young, open, and unsuspecting minds, opinions and sentiments inimical to the interest and happiness of their parent country (Virginia), for we see that they have too frequently returned back into the bosom of that country with a respect and affection for everything abroad, the effect of which is a contempt and disrespect for everything at home." [18]

These words have the characteristic ring and flavour of Jefferson in writing about Northern institutions of learning at that time, or in commenting upon the supposed monarchical designs of the Federalist leaders.

After the meeting of the Board on August 19, his interest in the plans for the Academy grew rapidly warmer and far more personal. On September 7, nineteen days subsequently, he penned the famous letter to Peter Carr, the president of the board of trustees, from which quotations have already been made, as offering the most precise and voluminous statement by himself of his views on education. That letter demonstrates in the clearest manner that his mind was now deeply engaged with the thought of converting the projected academy into the university which he had so long been contemplating. "What are the objects of our institution?" he asks. "Let us take a survey of the general field of science," he replies to his own question, "and mark out the field we mean to occupy at first, and the alternate extension of our views beyond that, should we be able to render it as comprehensive as we would wish . . . . We must select the materials from the different institutions of others which are good for us, and with them erect a structure whose arrangement shall correspond with our own conditions,

and admit of enlargement. With the first (primary) grade of education, we shall have nothing to do. The sciences of the second grade are our first object: (1) languages, including history; (2) mathematics, including chemistry, zoology, botany, mineralogy, anatomy, and the theory of medicine; and (3) philosophy. To adapt them to our slender beginnings, we must separate them into groups comprehending many sciences each, and greatly more in the first instance than ought to be imposed on, or can be completely conducted by, a single professor permanently. They must be subdivided from time to time as our means increase, until each professor shall have no more under his care than he can attend to with advantage to the students and ease to himself. In the further advance of our resources, professional schools mist he introduced and professorships established in them also."

Jefferson asserts, in the same remarkable letter, that he had "lost no occasion to make himself acquainted with the best seminaries in other countries, and with the opinions of the most enlightened individuals on the subject of the sciences worthy to be taught in the new institution" So keen was the interest which he now felt in its expected evolution into a great seat of learning, that, for the first time, he began to regard with just apprehension the possible dissipation of the moneys, derived from the sale of the plebes, that had been deposited in the several State hanks. Were such banks safe places of custody?" Perhaps, the loss of these funds," he wrote Cabell, only three weeks after the date of the letter to Carr, "would be the most lasting of the evils proceeding from the insolvency of those banks." There is a suggestion of pathos in this solicitude about a sum so small and so inadequate for the development of the noble

scheme which he had in mind; but he was clearly aware of the opposition which he would have to overcome before he could hope to obtain even a meagre legislative appropriation; and he was, therefore, the more earnestly disposed to husband the few petty resources for public education which he knew could not be disputed or withheld. In the prosecution of his plans, he seems to have gone so far as to submit to the trustees of the Academy a sketch for the building of a separate pavilion for each separate school, with the entire number grouped along three lines of a square, and in each a spacious lecture-hall and two apartments for the use of the professor who would occupy it.[19] This is an additional proof of how little he was thinking of the small local academy, and how much of the university which he intended to take its place. The Academy, indeed, was a mere figure of straw in his scheme, to exist only for such time as would be required to procure the charter of the College, which was to forerun the University somewhat as the Academy was to forerun the College.

VI. The Academy Converted into a College

Did the papers sent to David Watson, the delegate from Louisa, by Peter Carr, as president of the hoard of trustees, to he submitted to the General Assembly at the session of 1814-15, contain a petition for the conversion of the Academy into Central College? At this time, Charles Yancey and Thomas Wood represented the county of Albemarle in the Lower House, and Joseph

C. Cabell in the Senate. Why was it that David Watson, the delegate of a neighboring county, was preferred for an important service that did not concern directly his own constituents? He was probably a friend of Carr's, and perhaps more influential than the Albemarle delegates; but to pass the latter by was a slur upon them which the future interest of the new seat of learning apparently did not justify. Why were not the papers enclosed first to Cabell, the senator for that district? Possibly because Cabell, having married and resided in Williamsburg, was supposed to be a staunch friend of the College of William and Mary, the prospects of which were certain to be damaged by the establishment of a college in Albemarle. In spite of this fact, it is probable that, had Jefferson been consulted, he would have recommended Cabell as the principal steersman, for Cabell also represented the district, and although, at that time, not intimately known to him, was sufficiently known to raise a high opinion of his talents in Jefferson's mind.

An unnecessary delay would have been avoided had Carr enclosed the papers to Cabell, for, during the whole session of 1814-15, Watson held them back without giving any explanation of his dilatoriness. Jefferson wrote to Cabell on January 5 (1815) that the petition had not been presented to the General Assembly, and he gave expression to his regret, for he thought that, had it been submitted and received favorably, a small appropriation, in addition to that asked for, might have been obtained, which would have enabled the trustees to erect in Charlottesville what he said would be "the best seminary in .the United States." In his impatience, Jefferson sent Cabell copies of all the papers, -with the exception apparently of the petition for the lottery, -which had been reposing in Watson's inert hands, for, with characteristic

foresight, he had been careful to retain duplicates of the originals. The package forwarded contained: (1) a letter that described the plans for the institution; (2) Jefferson's reply to the observations of Dr. Cooper on this plan; (3) the trustees' petition; and (4) the draft of the Act which the General Assembly was expected to pass.

It was stated in the petition that the resources relied upon by the trustees were the proceeds of the projected lottery; the fund, with the interest added, accruing from the sale of the glebes of Fredericksville and St. Anne's parishes; and the dividend from the profits of the Literary Fund of the State as pro-rated to Albemarle county. The additional aid which Jefferson, but for Watson's neglect, had hoped to procure from the General Assembly was a loan of seven or eight thousand dollars for a period of four or five years. He declared that, with this amount of money available, he would be in a position to engage three of the ablest characters in the world to fill the higher professorships, -"three such characters," he said, "as are not in a single university of Europe "; and for those of languages and mathematics, able instructors could also, at the same time, be employed. "With these characters," he exclaims, "I should not be afraid to say that the circle of sciences composing the second and final grade would be more perfectly taught here than in any institution of the United States." In these words, we have again that almost pathetic touch to which we have previously referred: the contrast between the magnitude and nobility of his designs for higher education in Virginia, and the smallness of the funds at his disposal. This was the inception of that protracted struggle for State appropriations for the most beloved and treasured scheme of his illustrious life, which was not to end until he sank on his deathbed at Monticello, and which, attended

throughout by alternate dejection and encouragement, was pursued with an unselfish persistence and devotion that forms one of the most inspiring chapters in the history of American education.

Before the Academy was merged in the College, his correspondence with his most loyal and zealous coadjutor in this prolonged appeal for assistance, began. "I had no hint from any quarter," Cabell wrote on March 5, 1815, "that I was expected to bestow particular care on the business. There was nothing which should have defeated the petition unless objected to by some of the people of Albemarle, who might not wish to appropriate the proceeds of the sale of the glebes to the establishment of the Academy at Charlottesville; or a few members of the Assembly who might have other views for the disposition of the income of the Literary Fund; or from Eastern delegates from the lower counties, who may have fears for William and Mary . . . . I hope that there would be no other effect produced by the plan on William and Mary than that necessarily resulting from another college in the State." This petition, the second of the documents which Jefferson sent to Cabell in Richmond, contained a prayer for the substitution of a college for the Academy, and as this was a copy of the original petition which Carr enclosed to the Louisa delegate, Watson, the original petition itself must also have been of precisely the same tenor. It was re-submitted, with the other papers, to the General Assembly at the beginning of the session of 1815-16, but now under Cabell's general direction. On December 18, he wrote to Isaac Coles as follows: "Notwithstanding my unabated regard for the institution of William and Mary, I shall do everything in my power to give success to Mr. Jefferson's scheme of a college now pending before the Assembly. The more the better. He

has drafted a beautiful scheme of a college at Charlottesville."

The patron of the bill in the Lower House of Assembly was Thomas W. Maury, one of the delegates from Albemarle. When the debate upon it began, antagonism at once arose to that clause which asked for an appropriation out of the profits of the Literary Fund in proportion to the population of the county. This opposition was based on the presumption that the public uses to which this fund was to be applied had not yet been determined; and on Cabell's advice, this provision was struck out as not likely at that time to be adopted. All the other clauses were ultimately approved by the House. Before the measure, however, could reach the Senate, Yancey, the other representative of Albemarle in the lower body, seeking out Cabell, requested him to offer an amendment to it, when called up in the upper chamber, that would eliminate the clause empowering the trustees of Central College to carry out the main requirement of the law of 1796 by fixing the exact date for putting in operation the general plan for public education in Albemarle. Mr. Yancey was worried by the apprehension that his constituents would be displeased should they find themselves placed on a different footing in this respect from the freeholders and householders of the other counties, all of whom enjoyed the right to designate the time by popular vote. Cabell seems to have belittled the grounds for this fear; but he shortly afterwards discovered that the Governor of the State, a shrewd politician, held the same opinion as Yancey.

His hope of securing the final passage of the bill in the form in which the Lower House had left it, was soon dissipated; discussion in the Senate brought out at once an expression of hostility to that clause which clothed the

proctor of the College with all the functions of a justice of the peace within the academic precincts. Cabell hurried off a letter to Jefferson the very day the bill was reported in the Upper House (February 16, 1816), to find out why this stipulation had been inserted. His purpose was to silence the unfriendly senators. Jefferson, in his reply, which was delayed until the 24th, pointed out that he had simply suggested the adoption of a rule which had always prevailed in every great European seat of learning; and that if the proctor was a man of integrity and discretion, -which might be presumed from his selection for his office, -he was just as likely as the neighboring justices of the peace to prove himself entirely trustworthy in the exercise of all his judicial powers. Another desirable feature was, that, acting as he would do in the privacy of the College, he would be able to shield culprits among the immature students from the disgrace of the common prison by confining them to their rooms, when their offenses were not very heinous. "My aim," Jefferson added, " was to create for the young men a complete police of their own, tempered by the paternal affection of their tutors." Nowhere, in his opinion, would such a local police be so much required, for the history of the College of William and Mary had demonstrated, both before and after the Revolution, that students and town boys would be constantly kicking up rows and breaking out into riots to gratify their mutual feeling of animosity. Should the proctor, in the performance of his magisterial duties, expose himself to the charge of either partiality or remissness, the nearest magistrate could quickly and easily interpose.

Jefferson's argument failed to convince the opposing senators, and the clause was stricken out by Cabell; and the like fate also befell at his hands that clause to which

both Mr. Yancey and the Governor had expressed their emphatic objection as being impolitic and untimely.

Would the Senate, unlike the Lower House, be willing to vote in favor of any kind of appropriation for the benefit of the new College? Cabell thought that their consent could be only obtained to a plausible subterfuge. At that time, a Mr. Broadwood had acquired a great reputation in the country below Richmond by his success in teaching the deaf and dumb. " Why not invite him to Charlottesville," Cabell wrote Jefferson in January, "and establish him in the house which Estes has offered to sell? Would it suit your purpose to get an Act pissed for a lottery to purchase that house for an establishment for the deaf and dumb as a wing to Central College? "So convinced was Cabell that only in some indirect way resembling this could an appropriation be assured, that he wrote to Jefferson again on the same subject before time sufficient had passed for a reply to be returned to his first letter. "It is barely possible," he remarks on this second occasion, "that the General Assembly may give the Central College something for teaching the deaf and dumb. I am endeavoring to prepare the more liberal part for an attempt at an amendment of a professorship of the deaf and dumb. Thus far it is well received, but it may be baffled. I have thought that such a plan might engage the affection of the coldest member." Could there be a more pertinent commentary on the obstacles, that, on every side, confronted the advocates of popular education in Virginia than this scheme, which Cabell brought forward only in a spirit of despair? But Jefferson, while he was anxious to get assistance from the public treasury, was unwilling to lower the dignity of his great plan by obtaining that aid on conditions which were inconsistent with its true character. In his reply, he candidly

stated, that, in his opinion, Charlottesville offered no special advantages that would justify Mr. Broadwood in removing his school thither. A large town, like Richmond, was far preferable for such an establishment. The aims of an academic college and the aims of a school for the deaf and dumb were fundamentally different. The one was designed for science, the other for mere charity. "It would," he added, "be gratuitously taking a boat in tow which may impede but cannot aid the motion of the principal institution."

Before the bill was put upon its final passage, Mr. Poindexter, who represented the Louisa and Fluvanna district, submitted a resolution that the share of those counties in the sum accruing from the sale of the Fredericksville and St. Anne's globes, so far as these parishes overlapped the area of that district, should be reserved for their use, and as the proportion was small, Cabell thought it advisable to assent; and he was swayed in doing this further by his own conviction that the new college should rely upon State appropriations rather than upon such meagre resources as were set forth in the bill for its creation.

Albemarle Academy was converted into Central College by an Act of Assembly dated the fourteenth of February, 1816. Among the .influences which are said to have hastened the passage of the bill was the success that had crowned the canvass to obtain subscriptions for the Academy; and also the announcement that the great political economist of France, Say, having expressed his willingness to remove his home to Albemarle, would, in that event, quite certainly consent to be employed as a professor in the new seat of learning. Perhaps, the most curious fact associated with the incorporation of the College was the strong probability, at one time, that it would

be established without the elimination of the Academy. So much for the hold which Triplett Estes had on the affections of the one hundred and forty-seven citizens of Albemarle who had been urging the lottery as a means of raising the fund needed to buy his property in Charlottesville! An independent bill was submitted in the Senate authorizing the lottery to be carried out, and providing that, if the Visitors of the new college should prefer the Old Stone tavern as a site, they should have the right to buy it with the proceeds of the lottery. Should they fail to do so, however, this sum could be used to secure that site for the revived Academy. Cabell offered an amendment that the proceeds should be put absolutely at the disposal of Central College even if the Visitors should decide that it would be improper to locate the institution in the Estes house or unwise to purchase that house even at a .reasonable price. Cabell feared that, if the bill should become law without this amendment, there would arise a conflict between the Academy, -which, under the terms of that bill, would have to be placed in the Old Stone tavern, -and the Central College, created by an entirely. different Act, under the provisions of which its Visitors were impowered to choose a site wherever their judgment should guide them. The bill for the lottery was rejected by the Senate, and with it disappeared all danger of the threatened duality.

VII. Jefferson's Foresight for the College

One of the conspicuous qualities of Jefferson's many-sided mind was a far-sightedness that was at once minute and imperialistic in its scope. His possession of this characteristic to an extraordinary degree has come to light in the course of our previous narrative, but perhaps it was

never more clearly evinced than in the name which he gave to the new college, and in his choice of the men who were to be coupled with himself in its organization and development. Had he styled it Albemarle College, he must have put aside all hope of ultimately obtaining a larger support from the State than would be granted to any other of the local academies. At the best, the most sanguine expectation that he could nurse would be, that, in time, it would rise to the respectable but not preeminent rank of Washington and Hampden-Sidney Colleges.

Jefferson had a State university really in view, and as such an institution could be only founded with the assistance of the Commonwealth, he wisely decided to give the new seat of learning the name that would approximate the closest to the broad meaning of the words, "University of Virginia"; in short, a name that, from the very start, would lift it above the common level of the academies and colleges already in existence, by clothing it with the dignity of an institution rightly bidding, in the opinion of all, for the patronage of the Virginians in the mass. By such a name alone, the supreme convenience of its situation, in those days of stage coach and private carriage, would be indicated to every citizen in the State who had a son to educate. But Jefferson looked upon this last fact as important only because it would be promotive of his main object. He anticipated that, when the struggle for the site of the university, which he was confident would be built in the future, began, the people would have become accustomed to thinking of the college at Charlottesville as the only really central seat of learning underway in Virginia, and for that reason, if for no other, possessing the prior claim to final conversion into a great State institution. In other words, he reckoned

the value of the temporary success to Central College chiefly in the light of its increasing the chance of the College's transformation into the University, when they hour was ripe for that long forecasted event.

There was a choleric debate going on, at this time, as to the wisdom of removing the capital from Richmond to some. place which would better subserve the convenience of the Virginian people by its more central situation. The advocates of Staunton were active to uproariousness in urging the superiority of her claim on this score; and some of them even put out a plain threat, that, unless the seat of administration was transferred to the west of the Blue Ridge, those parts of the Commonwealth would confederate to erect a new State. It is not improbable that, in the midst of this scramble for preference, Jefferson harbored the hope that Charlottesville would be selected as the new metropolis; and had he been a member of the General Assembly at this hour, and as young as he was in 1776, he might have secured the simultaneous establishment of both the capital and the university on the banks of the Rivanna, in his native county. He had shown how important he considered the association of the two to be at the time that he was endeavoring to broaden the course of study at the College of William and Mary, when Williamsburg was still the seat of government. Being fully aware, through his frequent correspondence with Cabell, of the ferment in the General Assembly over the question of removing the Capital, he clearly foresaw the opposition which both Staunton and Lexington would stir up to the erection of the university in the eastern shadow of the Ridge, -Staunton because it would interfere with the success of her campaign to acquire the new seat of administration; and Lexington because it would put an end to the realization of her ambition

to become the site of the proposed State institution. In giving the name "Central College" to the new seat of learning, Jefferson, in a spirit of quiet calculation, defied the political aspirations of the one town, and the academic aspirations of the other; and at the same time, tacitly announced to the entire Commonwealth that, when the hour should arrive for locating the university, he was going to make a bid for the site on the score of this centrality, to which he knew no rival could pretend.

But he was not satisfied with creating but one favorable condition, at the very start, to sustain the claim which he expected to bring forward just so soon as the General Assembly should decide to establish a university: his next step was to join with himself in the directorate of his new college men of such preeminence in the social and political affairs of the Commonwealth that their personal distinction would be a powerful agency in winning popular respect for it, thus influencing public sentiment in support of his ultimate designs.

One of the baffling questions that offers itself in this somewhat obscure initial stage of our history is: how did Jefferson succeed, apparently so amicably,[20] in getting rid of the very estimable board of trustees of Albemarle Academy? That board embraced, as we have seen, fifteen or sixteen citizens of the county who deservedly enjoyed a high degree of repute in their own community. Was no bad feeling aroused in them when the seat was withdrawn so abruptly from under them? No reason for their elimination that could have been submitted, however sound from a practical point of view, could have been entirely acceptable to their sensibilities. Were they too

numerous? This was a fault which could have been removed by reduction. Were they lacking in influence? To intimate that they were was perhaps too delicate an assertion to make even by innuendo. The plausible and soothing explanation that was given by Jefferson was probably this: (1) that the original board was too large, and that it was better to drop all its members than to irritate the many by choosing only a few from its number to serve on the second board: (2) that the only solid hope of enlarging the scope of the new college was by drawing together for its support a board which would represent, not one county, but the entire State; and (3) that the conversion of the College into a university, which could only be accomplished by such means, would confer both a sentimental and a material advantage on the people of Albemarle county. It was, perhaps, this ulterior scheme, well known to every member of the old board, that softened the chagrin which must have been felt by them as a body. In one alone did exasperation against Jefferson show itself in action, and in that instance, this may have been due to political and not to personal irritation. John Kelly was the exception. When an offer was made for his land near Charlottesville for the purpose of using it as the site of the College, he seems to have declined it with a brusqueness that was decidedly offensive; and this conduct was emphasized by the fact that he was conspicuous in the religious life of the community.

The Board of Visitors of Central College comprised Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, David Watson, Joseph Carrington Cabell, and John Hartwell Cocke. Jefferson and Madison, besides their extraordinary services in other lofty public positions, had each occupied the Presidency during eight years in critical

times. Mr. Monroe was, at the hour of his appointment, the actual incumbent of that exalted office. The careers and the characters of these three distinguished statesmen belong to the history of the whole country, and are too well known to call for any description here. The reputations of the other three members of the Board were confined to Virginia. It is not necessary to dwell on the character of David Watson, or the events of his life, as he seems, either from indolence or ill health, to have taken no part in the labors of the Board; and a substitute was ultimately found for him, apparently with his full approval. There was a wide gulf between his conduct in this respect, whether voluntary or involuntary, and that of the remaining members of the body, Cabell and Cocke, Jefferson's two most faithful and persevering coadjutors, -the one in assisting him to obtain the appropriations from the General Assembly, which were indispensable to the success of the University; the other, in aiding him in its actual construction. The indefatigable services of. both to the institution continued during a period of many years after the death of the "sachem," as they admiringly called him in the privacy of their correspondence; and they stand in its history second only to him in the energy, devotion, and intelligence of their unceasing efforts in its behalf. That history would not be adequately treated without a full account of their careers to show the reader the spirit and the calibre of the two men, to whom, after Jefferson, the University was most deeply indebted, either for its foundation, or for its prosperity during its formative years. It is only by examining the honorable record of their lives that we can clearly understand why, after choosing a famous former President of the United States, and an actual President, as members of the new board, he should then have selected two younger men, whose reputations were limited to the area of their native State.

VIII. Joseph C. Cabell

Joseph Carrington Cabell, who was born in the tumultuous atmosphere of the Revolution, was the grandson of William Cabell, an English gentleman who emigrated to Virginia, patented a principality in the valley of the upper James, and founded a family of social and political importance in itself, and of remarkable ramifications by inter-marriage. Joseph's mother was sprung from the Carrington family, which occupied a corresponding position of distinction in the general history of the Colony and State. The course of his education followed the normal groove of those times, -first, he sat under a tutor in his father's house; next, attended two private schools in Albemarle county; and then, after one term passed at Hampden-Sidney College, recommended perhaps by its nearness to his maternal kinsfolk, he entered the College of William and Mary. Here he soon won the affectionate interest of the venerable president, Bishop Madison, by his accurate scholarship, uncommon talents, and genial temper. The same superior qualities made an equally strong appeal to his companions among the students; his friends felt for him a tenderness so deep and true that it continued to soften the tone of their letters to him many years after they had become absorbed in their callings; and that they were entirely worthy of him in character and abilities alike, is proven by the eminence which they reached in their native State, -Isaac Coles, private secretary of President Jefferson; Henry St. George Tucker, Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeals; Benjamin Watkins Leigh, Senator of the United States;

Philip P. Barbour, Justice of the Supreme Court; Chapman Johnson, Robert Stanard, and John T. Lomax, famous lawyers; and finally, John Hartwell Cocke. Graduating in 1798, he began the study of the law under St. George Tucker, professor of jurisprudence and politics in the College; but seems to have found constant distractions in the gaieties and political demonstrations that diversified the life of the little town.

Cabell was fettered throughout life with a delicate constitution. Alarming pulmonary weakness began to assail him even before his final departure from Williamsburg. In 1801, he made his first voyage for the restoration of his strength; his tour, in this instance, did not carry him further than Norfolk; but after spending several months in the office of Daniel Call, in Richmond, during the autumn of that year, he made a second voyage, which reached as far as Charleston, where he passed the winter. His taste for travel, which had its earliest stimulus in this search for health, was not yet satisfied, for, during the following summer (1802), he visited the principal resorts in the mountains of Virginia, and in the autumn, set out on horseback on a long journey; Turkey Island, on James River, was his first goal; from that place, he rode to Fredericksburg, Mt. Vernon, Western Maryland, Harper's Ferry, and Winchester; and from Winchester returned to his home. He derived so little permanent benefit from this excursion in the open air that he decided to pass a winter in Southern France. "While I am compelled to spend time and money in pursuit of health," he wrote his father, Colonel Nicholas Cabell, in November (1802) "is it not better, at the same time, to travel for improvement, and where can I turn my attention with more propriety than to the two most cultivated countries on earth, England and France?"

During the detention of his ship in the port of Norfolk by unfavorable winds, he made his first and last application for a Federal office. James Monroe had been appointed by the President to settle the irritating differences which still hung on between the United States, on the one side, and France and Spain, on the other. Cabell sought the position of private secretary to the envoy, or the secretaryship of legation attached to the mission, should the former place have been already filled. "I hope," he wrote Monroe, "that you will favor the views of one who has impaired his constitution in the pursuit of science, and who now goes to Europe chiefly with the view to widen the sphere of his knowledge." But this high-minded aspiration for office was frustrated so soon as it expressed itself. Arriving at Bordeaux in February, 1803, very much debilitated by a rough voyage, he, nevertheless, at once resumed his journey to Paris, and after he reached that city, had opportunities to enjoy many of the public and private pleasures which it offered, -witnessed a brilliant review of troops by Napoleon; dined with Volney and Kosciusko; and went on long rambles through the streets with Robert Fulton, who had come over from London to continue his experiments with the submarine in the waters of the Seine. Fulton urged his companion to interest himself in internal improvements on his return to Virginia; and the advice was not lost, as the course of Cabell's future career will reveal.

During a visit to Italy, with the view of inspecting the celebrated universities of that country, Cabell, while stopping in Naples, was brought into delightful intercourse with Washington Irving. They strolled through the famous museums and palaces of the city together, climbed to the crater of Vesuvius, and were nearly suffocated with gas from its crevices by a sudden shift in the

wind. Together they slowly travelled to Rome, where they passed Holy Week in the enjoyment of all those ceremonies of the Church which made that part of the year so splendid in the Eternal City. After his return to Paris, in the same genial companionship, Cabell started upon a second tour, which carried him, by measured stages, into Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland, and later still into England, where he was introduced into the literary circle that had as its centre the unconventional William Godwin.

By the advice of his physician, he dropped his books, and filled up his time with lectures and conversation only. His principal aim was always the acquisition of knowledge, -especially in the several departments of natural science, -and this led him to sit at the feet of Cuvier and other eminent professors, in the study of zoology, vegetable chemistry, chemistry proper, anatomy, and mineralogy. "France," he wrote, "presented to my view all the branches of natural history under the aspects of new and captivating splendor." He assisted an American friend, MacClure, in collecting a valuable quantity of minerals, in the course of which they explored together the hills of Auvergne, and sauntered as far as the Alps; and in order to extend and perfect his information about botany, he spent a winter at the University of Montpelier, famous at that time for the thoroughness of its instruction in this province of Nature. So keen was his interest in education that he visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon to observe the original methods of that celebrated teacher of the young. His intimacy with Washington Alston stimulated his native taste for the fine arts; he made detours in his travels to inspect the most renowned galleries; and during his stay at Rome, purchased many engravings of

Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, and also of the noblest paintings by Poussin, Guido, and Domenichino.

When Cabell was on the point of setting out from Virginia for Europe, his brother William H. Cabell, had warned him "not to suffer anything to shake his attachment for his own country, or to render him dissatisfied with the American state of society, manners, and customs." "The moment you feel any disposition -of the kind," he concluded, "fly back to America." There was no need of this counsel, amiably designed as it was. Cabell's thoughts, in all his travels, researches, and studies abroad, were principally directed towards serving his native State by gathering up all sorts of knowledge that were likely to be useful to it when applied for its benefit later on. He returned to the United States in the spring of 1806, after an absence of three years, which had quadrupled his stores of information without weakening his loyalty to the land of his birth. He brought back with him a letter of introduction to Dr. Barton, of Philadelphia, who possessed a wide reputation for his attainments in the sciences of botany and natural history. Through a letter of introduction from Barton, Cabell for the first time, made the personal acquaintance of Jefferson, whose reception of him was marked by uncommon warmth and cordiality, for Cabell was a friend of his secretary, Isaac Coles; belonged to a family of high social station in Virginia; and was known to be interested in the sciences which appealed most directly to the President's taste. Jefferson tried to induce him to enter the Federal service, -offered him in turn the consulate at Tunis, the Under-Secretaryship of State, the Secretaryship of Orleans Territory, and finally, the Territorial Governorship; but Cabell had been too long abroad to be seduced into accepting

offices that would further prolong his absence from Virginia, with which he was now anxious to identify himself again in both social and civic life.

He soon found a charming wife in Williamsburg in the stepdaughter of the eminent jurist, St. George Tucker, the daughter of Mrs. Tucker by her marriage with George Carter, in early life. Mrs. Tucker herself was a daughter of Sir Peyton Skipwith. In the veins of the youthful and lovely Mrs. Cabell there ran, from these two sources, the most aristocratic blood to be found in a State that could rightly boast of the gentle descent of its leading families. She was also the wealthiest heiress in Eastern Virginia; her Corrotoman estate spread over an area of nearly seven thousand acres of land, peopled by several hundred slaves and many white tenants; and in some years, the products of its soil swelled in volume to four thousand bushels of wheat and three thousand barrels of corn.

Although the laws of the State, at that time, vested in the husband the property of the wife, Cabell kept the splendid estate thus acquired entirely detached from his own; administered its affairs in his name as trustee with the most scrupulous care; and at his death, it reverted to her trebly augmented in value through his sagacious management. With his own inheritance thus largely increased, he was in the position of a man of handsome fortune, who could follow his own inclinations in the pursuit of a calling, without being harassed by the necessity of earning his daily bread. Should he begin again the study of law? "Watkins Leigh was here yesterday," wrote W. H. Cabell to him in April, 1807, "and said that you ought not to think of law except as a politician, or except as it will advance your political aims. He thinks there is a moral obligation on every man in your situation to be

a politician" St. George Tucker, who was one of the best, wisest, and most accomplished men of that day, held a different opinion: he urged Cabell, with characteristic earnestness, to aim at eminence in the law. Cabell replied that he "meant to begin as a lawyer, and allow the passage of time to settle the question whether or not he should diverge permanently into the field of politics." In the meanwhile, he resolved to attend the course of lectures on jurisprudence which judge Nelson was delivering in Williamsburg, where Cabell was now residing with his wife; but this turned out to be only an excellent preparation for the political career upon which he was so soon to embark, and which he was to pursue so usefully and so honorably for so many years. His most intimate friends, Watkins Leigh, Isaac Coles, and John Hartwell Cocke, understood the predominant bent of his tastes. "You have been a wanderer long enough," wrote Coles in December, 1807, "it is now fit that you should have a home . . . . Build a box on your Warminster farm and become a candidate for the Legislature from Amherst."

He adopted this counsel, went back to his native county, offered himself for office, was successful, and took his seat in the House of Delegates in December, 1808. He continued a member of that body during two very notable terms, and was one of the committee that reported in favor of the establishment of the Literary Fund, the most vital legislative stroke of those times. He represented the new county of Nelson in the Lower House; but, in 1810, was elected to the Senate as the member for the district composed of the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, and Nelson. He retired from that body in 1829, and from 1831 to 1833, sat again in the House of Delegates, as that division of the General Assembly was the one in which he could uphold and push the interests of

the James River and Kanawha Canal to the most signal advantage. In 1833, he was pressed to become a candidate for the Governorship, but declined to permit his name to be used; and although an opportunity was frequently open to him to enter Congress, he was content to be of use to his State exclusively within its own borders He pointedly discouraged the effort to bring about his nomination in 1822, with these simple and modest words, "I have devoted the prime of my life to the service of our district. I shall endeavor to close my course with fidelity to my friends . . . . My mind feels relieved, now that the world will be pleased not to regard my zeal on certain subjects as sprung from a thirst for office and popular favor."

In political as well as in personal intercourse, Cabell was in the closest harmony with Jefferson. We shall soon come to that epic chapter in the history of the University which records their great struggle, with tongue and pen, to obtain the necessary appropriations for its construction; but they were together interested in numerous other questions of hardly less importance in principle In their voluminous correspondence, they are discovered exchanging views on all sorts of subjects: on the right of one generation to bind another by legislative enactment; on whether a member of the House of Representatives could legally represent a district in which he did not reside; or whether it was expedient to divide a State into townships rather than into counties. "My object," wrote Cabell, in 1814, "is to be useful to my country in the station which I occupy (Senate), and in availing myself occasionally of your valuable aid, it would be highly improper to disturb the tranquility of your retirement," and he, therefore, assures the venerable statesman of the scrupulous privacy in which all his letters would be kept.

Again and again he seeks that aid, either for a general or a particular purpose bearing directly on his legislative duties. In September, 1814, before setting out for Richmond, he writes, "I would wish to carry some useful ideas with me when I join the Senate, and I take the liberty once more to ask you to furnish me with such suggestions as you may deem useful." And a few weeks afterwards, he writes again, evidently in acknowledgment of Jefferson's prompt compliance with this previous request, "I should be extremely thankful for any further communication you may, at any time, be pleased to make me, feeling myself always highly gratified and instructed by any views which you take of any subject."

Cabell's sense of integrity as a public servant was so pure and delicate that it amounted at times to feminine sensitiveness. "Why will you suffer your peace of mind and your happiness," wrote his brother, William H. Cabell, in 1814, "to be at the mercy of any man who chooses to assail you, or to make even an insinuation against the propriety of your conduct? I believe I should be less concerned, were I convinced that ninety-nine one hundredths of the world thought me a villain than you would if you thought an obscure individual, one thousand miles away from you, believed you only incorrect." [21]

The faithful and lofty spirit that animated him throughout his political career is transparent in all he did, spoke, and wrote. "I think the greatest service a man can render," he remarked in one of his letters, "is to speak the truth and to show that is his only object," and these simple words epitomized his personal as well as his political motives. "You have pursued an erect

and honorable course," said Cocke to him, in 1819, "and as an enlightened and high-minded public servant ought, you must be satisfied with the approbation of your own conscience." Such was the attitude towards him of all who had observed his actions, whether calculated to bring to him universal popularity or general disfavor.

There were three great public interests of which Cabell was an ardent and indefatigable supporter: Internal Improvements, Education, and Agriculture. We have already mentioned Robert Fulton's advice to him to make the question of Internal Improvements a part of his political platform on his return to the United States. He lived long enough to earn the name of the DeWitt Clinton of Virginia by his unwearied exertions for the revival, construction, and extension of the James River and Kanawha Canal, which, before the building of many railroads in the Commonwealth, was looked upon as an enterprise as imperial in its scope as the Erie Canal itself; and justly so, for had it been situated in a community of large financial resources, and not been obstructed by a vast mountain crossing, it would have been extended to the Ohio and Mississippi, and by pouring the wheat and corn of the West into the lap of Norfolk, would have made that city a second New York, and changed the destinies of the State. Previous to 1821, only twenty miles of the canal, beginning at Richmond, -where it united with tidewater, -had been completed, and that only partly at public expense. With the assistance of Chapman Johnson, the distinguished lawyer, Cabell drew up a charter for the new James River and Kanawha Canal Company, and then undertook to obtain popular support for the resuscitated enterprise. From the shores of Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio, he travelled through county after county, addressing the people from the steps of the

court-houses in the spirit of another Peter the Hermit, as was said at the time, and earnestly soliciting subscriptions to carry the bed of the proposed waterway far beyond the crest of the Alleghanies. Under his Presidency, the line was constructed westward for a length of two hundred miles. In the administration of its affairs, he exhibited, according to Governor Wise, -a man particularly competent to judge him correctly, -"such conspicuous zeal, ability, and decision, such unsullied integrity and becoming dignity, and yet so much amenity, with so choice, vigorous, and discriminating an intellect, and bore himself with so much honor and justice, that he carried with him, in his retirement, the universal respect, confidence, and regard of those who knew him."

Cabell's interest in general education in Virginia was not limited to one great seat of learning: he used his influence on every occasion, and by every means, to improve all the facilities for secondary and primary instruction also, and for both sexes too. At the hour that he was the Atlas of the fortunes of the University in the General Assembly, he was acting as one of the trustees of the Charlottesville Ladies' Academy. He apparently went so far as to have the methods of Pestalozzi adopted in the schools of Nelson county; and he also made a patient investigation of the Lancasterian system, which was based on the social principle. He also planned to erect so ambitious an institution as a college at Warminster in the immediate neighborhood of his home at Edgewood, and would probably have successfully carried out this scheme by means of a public lottery, had not his friends united in warning him of its supposed impracticability, which dispirited him for its further prosecution. "My great object," he wrote to one of the critics, who had described the projected college as a lighthouse in the

sky, owing to the remoteness and seclusion of the site chosen for it, "was to prove how much could be effected by studious measures judiciously directed, and to encourage their introduction into other parts of Virginia."

Cabell's unfailing support of all bills before the General Assembly to improve the condition of agriculture in Virginia had its stimulus in part in his keen interest in the diversified operations of his own plantation. In correspondence with Cocke, his most intimate friend, who was an enthusiastic farmer, he is repeatedly making or replying to inquiries that played about all sides of the farmer's life. Fruit trees, grass, wheat, tobacco, buildings, timber, rams, overseers, hedges, lime, machinery and ploughs, one after another, are the subjects upon which special information was either sought or given. In September, 1818, he writes to another friend, Isaac Coles, that he is too busy with surveying his lines to compose certain essays which he had promised to read before the Agricultural Society. " Confound politics," he exclaimed in a letter to Cocke, in 1821, "welcome my native fields." "I am jogging on here," he wrote to the same correspondent, in 1828, from Edgewood, "riding over my farms and superintending the servants." He was not in sympathy with the impatient sentiment that prevailed among many Virginians, about 1830, in favor of Abolition, because he was convinced that slavery was so intertwined with all the roots of the community's life that it could not be torn up without jeopardizing the health, even should it not destroy the existence, of every associated interest. But no master was ever more benevolent or more watchful in his relations with his slaves; in 1848, when he was far advanced in years, a typhoid epidemic broke out on his plantation; notwithstanding his physical infirmities, he passed four or five hours daily on horseback engaged in

visiting the sick, comforting them with kind and encouraging words, and administering their medicines with his own hands. He declined to accept Cocke's invitation to Bremo at this time. "It is quite inadmissible for us," he replied, "to leave those dependent on our care for their lives to visit even the most valued friends."

Cabell died in 1856, and the last scene of his life was consistent with the noble tenor of it throughout. "Never," reported his nephew, N. F. Cabell, who was present at the closing hour, "have I seen more dignity, calmness, and resignation to the divine will." His death was appropriately announced by the Governor of the State, who spoke of him as emphatically and peculiarly "the Virginia Statesman," the man whose entire public services had been absorbed in building up and advancing the general welfare of his native commonwealth. Having possessed the close personal friendship of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, he had caught that spirit of wise moderation, in both word and act, which had given them such preeminence as political sages. And there was something too about his temper and demeanor that recalled to those who knew him a still loftier example of manhood and statesmanship. "No one could be much with Mr. Cabell," remarks a friend of his in his last years, "without seeing that he had taken George Washington for his model. In his principles and his conduct, in the dignity of his character, and even in the gentlemanly and becoming particularity of his dress, you could not fail to observe the resemblance." [22]

IX. John Hartwell Cocke

John Hartwell Cocke is not to be credited with as conspicuous services in assisting in the foundation of the University

as Cabell, but the work which he, as one of the two members of the committee of superintendence, performed in aiding in its building and initial development, gives him a place in its early history second only to that of his friend, the principal coadjutor of Jefferson. The family to which he belonged had been planted in Virginia in the seventeenth century, and had always stood in the first rank for fortune and refinement. Inheriting, like Cabell, a competent estate, he was left at liberty to follow his own tastes, which all leaned towards the pursuits of a country gentleman. Unlike Cabell, he was destitute of political aspirations; and he was drawn into enterprises of a public character more by a high and keen sense of civic responsibility than by any desire to raise his own personal repute. He first appears in a public capacity in April, 1813, as captain of artillery. "After theorizing in the nineteen manoeuvres," he jocularly wrote Cabell from the field, "I am now making an excursion to the theatre of the war to see a little practice." That he really possessed military talent is evident by his promotion to the rank of Brigadier before the war was brought to an end; and in fact, he won such solid distinction as a soldier that his name was, in 1814, canvassed in the General Assembly for the office of Governor, until he positively refused to permit its further use. "We need," said Randolph Harrison, in a letter to Cabell, "an active, intelligent, zealous patriot, and one possessing a good deal of military skill and ardor. There is no man in the State who unites all these qualifications in so eminent a degree as John Hartwell Cocke."

Cocke, like Cabell, was a broadminded advocate of public improvements of all kinds, and, in 1823, visited New York in order to inspect the new Erie waterway, and to obtain practical information for opening up the obstructed

navigation of the upper James River. A few years afterwards, he warmly supported a scheme to launch a fleet of small iron steamboats on the turbulent bosom of that stream; and he was placed upon the earliest board of directors appointed for the administration of the affairs of the James River and Kanawha Canal.

Cocke's approval of popular education was so keen that he threw the full weight of his influence in favor of every attempt that was made to establish a State university; he was chosen by the Governor, at Jefferson's request, as a member of the Board of Visitors of Central College; and he was retained on the University Board in spite of his protesting his disqualification, from lack of experience, to meet the increased responsibility. "As to my personal views," he declared, with characteristic modesty and unselfishness, "God forbid that I should permit such grovelling motives to interfere with what I believe to be the public interest." His enlightened opinion touching education extended to primary and secondary instruction also. He established near his beautiful home at Bremo, in 1820, a seminary for boys under the age of fifteen, and drew up for its government a set of rules marked by excellent judgment. It was, however, his own high character that was the principal ground of the confidence which this school inspired in its patrons. "My calculations for my son's improvement," wrote Robert Saunders, of Williamsburg, to him, in 1819, "are made more on his situation with you than on the talents and fitness of the tutor. I am frank enough to say, without intending to compliment you, that I prefer your superintending eye to the benefit he might derive from the best classical scholar I might know in Virginia."

But far more multiform in its scope than the Bremo Academy was the gymnasium, on the most thorough German

model, which he strove so earnestly to set up at Monticello, in the hope of encouraging the erection of many others resembling it to serve as great preparatory schools for the University of Virginia, which, at that time, were very much wanted.[23]

The spirit of the most catholic philanthropy animated Cocke throughout life. He was deeply interested in the labors of the Bible, Tract, and Sunday School Societies, and frequently made the toilsome and irksome journey to New England simply to attend the great conventions of those bodies periodically held in the principal cities of those States. The familiar social intercourse with influential Northern men of the different religious denominations which these occasions rendered possible, created in him a less prejudiced attitude of mind towards the Northern States than was to he perceived among the Virginians at large. "While we nurse an angry spirit instead of a conciliatory one towards them," he wrote to Cabell as late as 1855, "the distance between us will continue to grow." But it was not merely this temper, which so wisely deprecated the further feeding of the spreading and consuming sectional fires, that distinguished Cocke from the personal friends about him. He was the boldest and most persistent advocate in his native State at that time of the adoption of universal prohibition. Amiable ridicule, sneering derision, and silent contempt for the doctrine, which, in the next century, was to be incorporated in the statute book of Virginia, did not shake his loyalty to his convictions on this subject, or divert him from publicly and emphatically expressing them. "Of all the events in our history," he said, "the Maine Law

and its progress strikes my mind as the most important"; and he predicted that the great moral revolution which it represented would pervade all Christendom. Governor Preston, Andrew Stevenson, -and Cabell, his intimate friends, never let a chance slip without prodding him, with high good humor, for his obsession; but Cocke's sole reply was to send them another flight of pamphlets barbed to a nicety against King Alcohol. At the very moment that they, in the spirit of that drinking age, were laughingly condemning his habits of abstemiousness as repugnant to good fellowship, they honored the benevolent motives in which all his actions had their fountainhead. "I appreciate your feelings in your solitary home," wrote Cabell, in 1848, "and do not wonder that you roam about the world to soothe your feelings by doing good to your fellowmen."

Cocke was as firm and outspoken an opponent of duelling and slavery as he was of intemperance. Against the first, he directed his pen with all the literary and reasoning skill at his command; and the latter he was in the habit of bitterly stigmatizing as a "curse" to his native State. Only a man of invincible moral courage could have openly taken such a stand in those intolerant times. As early as 1821, he pressed upon the representative in Congress from his district the advisability of an amendment to the Constitution that would allow an appropriation to be made for the transfer of Southern negroes to Africa as the only means of practical emancipation then available. Ten years afterwards he wrote, "I have long and still do steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the great evils of our land, individual as well as national, and every man of common foresight and reflection is obliged to admit that we or our posterity are inevitably destined to be overwhelmed unless the cause is removed.

. . . How is it that all will not agree to go faithfully and honestly about the work of removing this blot upon our national escutcheon; this cancer that is eating into the vitals of the Commonwealth?" He was in favor of submitting a petition to the National Government in order to obtain the assistance of the country at large, for he said that the vast and complicated task of extirpation could not he successfully prosecuted in the "straight-jacket which the States Rights gentlemen have put on us." He did not join in the outcry of exasperation and execration, which, in the South, greeted the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, for he anticipated that it would hasten the end of the institution which it attacked so subtly, and which he himself detested so heartily. Writing, in 1846, he declared that he expected, should he survive to a great age, "to see such changes in Virginia touching slavery that it would now be deemed to be madness" to predict; and as his death did not occur until after the War of Secession, his own eyes beheld the abysmal ruin which he had forecasted one third of a century before it actually took place.

Cocke, in the spirit of all the Virginians who occupied the same rank in society, found a wholesome delight in the pursuit of the different branches of agriculture. As far back as 1809, he wrote to Cabell that his time was "divided between his family, his farms, his garden, and his books"; and that he did not have a moment "to be troubled about politics." "I would not change my situation," he exclaims, " with the most puissant prince of the House of Napoleon." He exhibited this characteristic spirit of independence even in his views of his own calling. Tobacco was still the principal crop of the region in which his home was situated, and it had already gone far towards depreciating the fertility of its lands. There was

no public sentiment, however, favorable to its abandonment. Cocke, as he expressed it, "dared to sport a new idea" about this staple by urging that it should be no longer cultivated; and he was probably influenced in doing this by the hope that, not only would an improvement of the soil follow, but that the vices of chewing and smoking would, in the end, be seriously curtailed, even if they did not entirely disappear. He spoke of tobacco tillage and the use of slave labor as the twin evils of agriculture in Virginia, and until both should come to a stop, the State, he predicted, would enjoy no prosperity. The laws practically debarred him from emancipating his bondsmen to their advantage, but, in 1855, he could say with perfect veracity that not one tobacco plant was then grown on a single foot of soil which he had inherited from his ancestors.

Although the name of General Cocke has passed into obscurity because he steadily declined to be elected to high office, yet in power of foresight, he was the most remarkable of all his Virginian contemporaries of his own generation. He not only urged a more conciliatory attitude towards the North, and more frequent intercourse with its people, as a means of removing mutual antagonisms, but he confidently anticipated the success of numerous causes which were, in his day, looked upon with chilling indifference or outspoken aversion, but which have become an accepted part of the solid structure of our present social and political life. He warmly supported every plan to raise the standards of education in all departments, from the lowest to the highest; he advocated with never ceasing energy and devotion the wisdom of adopting universal prohibition; he condemned the barbarism of duelling, which had destroyed some of the most accomplished and chivalrous sons of Virginia, and had gilded

the spirit of lawlessness by making it gentlemanly; he endeavored, by his own example, to discourage the culture of the tobacco plant as ruinous to the soil of his native State; but above all, he solemnly, repeatedly, and consistently declared himself in favor of peaceably abolishing the institution of slavery before its forcible removal should overwhelm every interest of the Commonwealth. Ought we to be surprised that Jefferson, the apostle of liberal principles, should have chosen this farsighted citizen to be one of the Visitors of the untrammeled institution which he was about to found? [24]

X. Site of the College Selected

The space that has been used in describing the personalities of Jefferson, Cabell, and Cocke is fully warranted in the light of a fact that will become increasingly perceptible as our theme advances; namely, that the establishment of the University of Virginia was not dictated by an irresistible popular impulse, but was due primarily to the unwearied exertions of Jefferson and Cabell; and its actual construction to Jefferson, assisted throughout with ability and fidelity by the modest Cocke in the background. Unless we take in the public spirit that had previously animated these men, we cannot arrive at a perfectly accurate conception of all the influences in which the institution had its origin. We have now to relate the story of the practical work which was done in founding it, for, as we shall see, the incorporation of Central College was really the incorporation of the University; the history of the College is the history of the University in its chrysalis state, which must be studied if we are to understand correctly

the first phase of its existence. It is in this phase that we discern the embryo of the nobler structure to follow; the springs as it were of the stream which was so soon to begin to flow in full volume; the slender sapling that was so soon to grow into a fruitful tree.

Among those features inherited from the College which became highly characteristic of the University was its official organization, its system of administration, its plans for buildings, and its requirements for professors. The provisions of the Act of Incorporation of Central College show as plainly as the design for its construction how long the thought of a university had been simmering in Jefferson's consciousness, for when the real university was determined upon a few years afterwards, the only alterations made in those provisions were such as were called for by the widening of the scope of the original scheme. One of the first clauses in the charter of Central College reveals that it was this future university, and not the present college, that he had most vividly in mind: the Governor of Virginia was to be the patron of the new seat of learning; and there was to be a board of six visitors by his appointment. Jefferson himself informs us that this provision was inserted for the explicit purpose of "divesting the situation of the College of all local character and control, and placing it under the will of those who represented the Legislature." The visitors were to hold office for a term of three years; were to come together at least once in the course of each twelve months; were to possess the right to choose a treasurer and proctor; to select the professors, determine their salaries and fees, and prescribe their courses of instruction; to lay down rules for the discipline of the students, and adopt regulations for their lodging and board; to overlook in a general way the officers, agents, and servants in the performance

of their respective duties; and, finally, to draw up such by-laws as would be needed to conserve the general welfare of the institution, and protect and increase its estate.

The treasurer was to continue in office during the pleasure of the Board, and was only to pay out moneys in obedience to their specific or general instructions. The title to all the college property was to be invested in the proctor as trustee; suits were to be brought in his name; and he alone was to receive donations and subscriptions He was to be the custodian of the buildings and all other estate in the College's possession; the provider and dispenser of the food and fuel that would be required by the students; the immediate overseer of the agents and servants; and the personal medium through whom all the orders, laws, and regulations of the Board were to be carried out.

By the Act of Incorporation, Central College became the beneficiary of all the rights and claims of Albemarle Academy. The only certain income which it could expect to enjoy at an early date consisted of the subscriptions, which had been pledged, chiefly, it would seem, by the citizens of the surrounding region; and the money accruing from the sale of the glebe lands in Fredericksville and St. Anne's parishes. No steps had been taken as yet to swell these funds by means of the lottery which had been authorized. It was due to the emptiness of its coffers that, although the College was chartered in February, 1816, more than twelve months passed before the Board of Visitors assembled. If the proceeds of the plebe sales had been received from the commissioner of the county in the meanwhile, the amount was looked upon by them, previous to that meeting, as too small to justify them in buying a site and laying the foundation stone.

Apparently, it was not until April 8, 1817, that the Visitors endeavored to hold a sitting, end even on that occasion, only three were present; namely, Jefferson, Cabell and Cocke. As a quorum was wanting, no business was transacted beyond fixing upon May 5 as the date for the convening of the whole Board; but the real purpose of the three Visitors was perhaps to inspect a site for the College which had been offered to Jefferson, and which he, probably, thought should be secured, at least optionally, at once. This was done; and when the full Board met on the day appointed, one of their first acts was to ratify this provisional purchase. Jefferson's preference had been for the ground situated on the first ridge lying to the east of the present site of the University, property that belonged to John Kelly, a member of the former board of trustees of Albemarle Academy. Kelly is said to have been a Federalist in political creed; and for this reason, it is reported, the purpose for which the land was to be bought, and Jefferson's connection with it, were kept secret when the tender for it was made. It is quite probable, however, that he had a more personal motive for disliking the master of Monticello. We learn from the recollections of Alexander Garrett, that, when the first suggestion came up of converting Albemarle Academy into Central College, the trustees, presumably Kelly among them, proposed that the new institution should be named Jefferson College, and that Jefferson emphatically objected to this, and recommended "Central College" instead. If Kelly, as one of the trustees, was ready to honor his distinguished neighbor so signally at this time, there must have been some reason besides his Federalism why he, one year later, was so brusque in declining the tender for his property; and that reason, as we have already surmised, was his possible resentment at the summary

dropping of the old board of trustees. So soon as he found out that Jefferson was behind that offer, he turned his back on all further negotiation: " I will see him at the devil," he exclaimed, " before he shall have it at any price." When this rough and abrupt reply was carried to Jefferson, he quietly remarked, " The man is a fool, but if we cannot get the best site, we must be content with the best we can get."[25]

Perhaps, he would not have taken his disappointment so philosophically had he not felt that the land belonging to John M. Perry, lying to the west of Charlottesville also, but at a somewhat greater distance, afforded a fairly satisfactory substitute. This site was formed by a narrow ridge that sloped gently from north to south. It fell sharply away from the eastern edge of the small plateau at its top, and from the western edge spread downward here and there in a declivity quite as marked. Although this site was on very high ground, the view of the Blue Ridge must have always been screened more or less by the former Carr's Hill and the present Preston Heights. The Southwest Mountains, -which were then, as now, directly in the scope of the vision, -shut out the horizon too closely at hand to make the scene in that quarter as impressive as the grand spectacle of the Blue Ridge would have done in the other, had a site been obtainable which would have offered an unobstructed outlook on that splendid chain. In a country distinguished for its magnificent landscapes, the spot chosen for the Central College commanded not one entirely; not even from the future northern portico of the Rotunda.

This was the first drawback. The second lay in the

fact that the trend of the slope required that all the buildings, with the exception of those on the northern line, -the southern line was expected to remain open, should face east and west. The architect Latrobe pointed out the practical disadvantage of this arrangement before the first pavilion had been erected. "Everyone," he wrote Jefferson in August, 1817, "who has had the misfortune to reside in a house,-especially if it constituted a part of a range of houses, facing east and west, -has experienced both in summer and winter the evils of such an aspect. In the winter, the accumulation of snow on the east, and the severity of the cold on the west, together with the absence of the sun during three fourths of the day, and in the summer, the horizontal rays of the morning sun heating the east side and the evening sun burning the west side, of the house, render such a situation highly exceptional." To this critical but thoroughly practical suggestion, Jefferson replied by saying that "the lay of the ground was a law of nature to which they were bound to conform," but that the objection urged could be partially overcome; first, by placing but one family room in each pavilion in front, and one or two in flank, and leaving apertures for windows in the southern wall. The lecture-room below, he added, could be given "the same advantage by substituting an open passage adjacent instead of dormitory." He conceded, however, that "the dormitories admitted of no relief but Venetian blinds to their windows and doors." "There," he said, "the heat would be less felt because the young men would be in the school-rooms most of the day."

There was perhaps a third drawback, -one, however, that had so little practical importance that it does not seem to have come up for consideration in the selection of a site for the proposed group of buildings. If anyone

will take position at the foot of the last terrace of the Lawn towards the south, and follow the east and west lines of the pillars in front of the pavilions and dormitories, as far as the line of the Rotunda, the impression is a more or less blended one, since the pillars, in that perspective, appear to run together to such an extent as to form to the eye a continuous white mass. The nobility of the Rotunda alone relieves the too solid effect of the almost indistinguishable individual features of the pavilion and dormitory fronts. Had the academic village been erected in a circular form, after the model of the great square of St. Peter's at Rome, the result would probably have been more striking because then each pavilion and each column of the arcades would have stood out distinctly from their respective fellows, with the Rotunda rising in stately dignity at the northern opening of the architectural circumference. But neither the nature of the ground, nor the bent of Jefferson's taste, nor the practical character of his scheme, whether for the buildings or for the professorships, permitted this finer and more impressive disposition of the numerous structures he had in view. In his earliest plans, there was no arrangement for the East and West Ranges, for, in the beginning, he was contriving simply for Central College, which might or might not become the University of Virginia, with its far broader need of accommodation for an ever increasing number of teachers and pupils. Had he been designing for what was certainly to be the supreme State institution so soon as finished, with a large attendance of students and an ample endowment fund assured, it is remotely possible that the plan for the new seat of learning would have taken this nobler circular form at the start. But, as already stated, it would have been first necessary to choose a wider and more level site than the one selected for the site of a college with an obscured future.[26]

The first parcel of land, which covered an area of fortyseven acres, was, at the time of the purchase, an impoverished, disused field. The second parcel, amounting to one hundred and fifty-three acres, and situated about five-eighths of a mile from the first, contained a large quantity of valuable timber and stone for building, -the reason in part for its acquisition, since it was not needed as the site of any of the projected structures. It was also expected to form the watershed for the reservoir which was to supply the cisterns within the precincts.

The first parcel had been patented, in 1735, by Abraham Lewis, as a segment of a tract embracing eight hundred acres. In the course of the previous year, David Lewis and Joel Terrell, his brother-in-law, had acquired title to three thousand acres, which took in the whole of Lewis Mountain, situated on the western flank of the present University site. At an early date, George Nicholas, son of the colonial treasurer, Robert Carter Nicholas, had purchased a tract of two thousand acres, which included, among other sections of these first patents, that portion on which the University buildings now stand. In 1790, James Monroe bought the part to which the present Monroe Hill belongs. Twenty-four years afterwards, John M. Perry purchased of John Nicholas, then filling the office of county clerk, -the actual site of the University, and after holding it only three years, disposed of it to the Visitors of Central College. Perry was always addressed with the title of Captain, and had

sat on the bench of the county magistrates. He was a man whose business branched out in many directions, which would seem to indicate that he possessed at least the qualities of energy and industry, -he was the owner of large areas of ground, the proprietor of mills, and a professional contractor. It was this combination of interests, perhaps, that made him more inclined than John Kelly to accept the offer of the Visitors for his two parcels of land, for he not only thereby sold a respectable number of worn-out acres at a satisfactory price, but, in doing so, created for himself the prospect of securing profitable jobs in the course of the future building.. His residence at Montibello, in the immediate neighborhood, enabled him to give his personal attention without inconvenience. As we shall see, he, as well as his son-in-law, George W. Spooner, had an important share, in the construction of the College and University alike.

There seems to have been at first a cloud on the title to the site, for it was not until June 23, 1817, that a valid conveyance of it could be, made to Alexander Garrett as the trustee. On that day, Garrett, by the written order of Perry, paid to John Winn $1,066.81 of the money due for the area sold. That both tracts had passed into the possession of the College by September 16, 1817, is confirmed by Perry's acknowledgment of a deferred payment by Garrett, the late proctor of the College, for Nelson Barksdale was now the incumbent of that office.

XI. The Subscription List

Having acquired a suitable site for the College, the next step was to erect the requisite buildings. Before describing the remarkable architectural plan which Jefferson had already drafted for use, it will be necessary to

dwell at some length on the sources upon which the Board were relying for the funds that would be indispensable for so expensive an undertaking. The most important was the subscription list. Although a canvass had, with conspicuous success, been made among the citizens of Albemarle county and the surrounding region before the incorporation of Central College, yet so far as it appears, none of this money had been paid before May 5, 1817, when the Visitors convened with a quorum for the first time. It was at once perceived by them that a much larger sum would be required for the new college than was anticipated when the scheme had not as yet passed beyond the stage of an academy. Jefferson, with characteristic energy and promptness, submitted to the Board the preamble for a new subscription list, the tone of which reflected the extreme importance that he attached to education. The right of self-government, he declared, was among the greatest of political blessings, and only an intelligent and instructed people could preserve it for themselves. How was information to be disseminated among them? By multiplying the number of seats of learning, and thus bringing at least one within the convenient reach of every parent or guardian. Central College, he concluded, would "facilitate the means of education to a considerable extent of country"; and it was further recommended, he said, by the salubrity of its climate, and by other local advantages. The subscriber was asked to make a contribution payable as a whole on April 1, 1818, or in four equal instalments, the first to be handed in on that date, and the remainder, in annual succession, during the ensuing three years.

Jefferson, Cabell, and Cocke led off with a subscription of one thousand dollars apiece. So speedy was the success following the appeal, that an early meeting of the

Board was desirable to authorize the beginning of the building. Albemarle county alone had pledged, through its principal citizens, the sum of nineteen thousand dollars. "We are already sure of enough," Cocke informed Cabell, in a spirit of high satisfaction, "to lay the foundation of what I trust may be improved to be a noble work." Cabell himself had, in the meanwhile, been indefatigable in distributing the subscription lists in many parts of Virginia, -he had sent copies to, among others, Colonel Lewis, of Campbell county, Dr. Cabell, of Lynchburg, Edmund Winston, John Camm, Stirling Claiborne, Hill Carter, David Garland, Robert Rives, Henry St. George Tucker, William Brent, and Ellyson Currie, all of whom were influential citizens in their several communities. Brent and Currie were residents of the Northern Neck, which had not even yet recovered from the ravages of the marauding British fleet; but this did not discourage Cabell from asking them to solicit subscriptions at the meetings of the county courts in their district.

Colonel Lewis, of Campbell, made a counter proposition. It appears that he was the owner of a virgin gold mine situated in Buckingham county at a spot not far from Cabell's home near Warminster. "It is the richest mine of that metal ever discovered," he wrote, with honest enthusiasm. He offered to convey a half interest in this amazing underground storehouse of wealth to Central College on condition that the whole was to be drawn for in a lottery, in which twenty thousand tickets were to be used, at a valuation of ten dollars a ticket; or ten thousand issued at a valuation of twenty dollars. The profit would, on this calculation, amount to two hundred thousand dollars, which was to be equally divided between Lewis and the College. The scheme, seductive as it was,

failed to dazzle Cabell's judgment, probably because the mine was situated so close to his own plantation that he had reason, from his own observation, to be skeptical as to its richness. Only a week later, he was visiting Buckingham courthouse, and still interested in the more prosaic method of procuring funds by solicitation in person; but neither he nor his friend, Eppes, the member of Congress from that district, was encouraged by the upshot.

Jefferson too, about this date, found serious impediments in the same path. The main obstruction .which he had to surmount, he wrote Cabell in September, 1817, was the "idea that it was a local thing, a mere Albemarle Academy. I endeavor to convince them it is a general seminary of the sciences meant for the use of the State. In this view, all approve and rally to the object. But time seems necessary to plant this idea firmly in their minds."

When the report of the Visitors was drawn up on January 6, 1818, the total amount of the subscriptions had grown to $35,102; and to this should be added $3,195.86 derived from the sale of the glebes and now in the custody of the court commissioner. Unhappily, the larger proportion of the voluntary contributions was payable in four annual instalments; none were due until April 1, 1818; and some not until three years should have passed after that date. At least one-half of the total amount would be needed in the summer of 1818; and in anticipation of this fact, Jefferson, on January 15, asked Cabell, then in attendance in the Senate in Richmond, to obtain a loan from the banks of ten to twenty thousand dollars on the security of the subscription lists; but the application was turned down until the Board should consent to give their personal endorsement. Although additional subscriptions continued to come in, this had no

influence in removing the uneasiness with which Jefferson regarded the situation in several of its aspects. "I should be much relieved," he wrote Cabell on the 16th, "if the members of the Board, in the want of visitorial full meetings, would individually call here whenever they happen to pass. Even separate conferences with them would lighten my mind of some of its load."

Taking the returns of the subscription as a whole, there seems to have been no permanent reason for dissatisfaction. In Albemarle county, where every prominent family put its name in the list, the amount of the several contributions ranged.. from one thousand dollars to twenty dollars; seven citizens pledged themselves each for the former sum and eleven for five hundred dollars respectively; there were one hundred and twenty-nine subscribers in all, and the total sum promised was $27,440.33. In Richmond city, there were only eleven subscribers, and the largest amount pledged was five hundred dollars. Most of these contributors were bound to Jefferson by ties of kinship or personal loyalty. The amount pledged by the eleven aggregated $2,225.00. In Stafford county but one subscriber was secured, and in Winchester, but four, who together pledged themselves for eight hundred dollars. All these subscribers were personal friends of Cabell. In Amherst and Buckingham counties, there was only one subscriber respectively, and each pledged himself for a small sum. In Cumberland county, which faced on the fertile low grounds of James River, and contained the homes of many wealthy and cultured families of gentle descent, the number of subscribers rose to twenty-five. The sum contributed by them was $2,190.00. In Fluvanna, there were fourteen subscribers, -among them General Cocke, -and their offerings amounted to $2,590.00; in Goochland, twenty

subscribers, with a total contribution of $1,185.00; in Louisa, six, with a total of $1,400.00; in Lynchburg, seven, with a total of $1,300.00; in Nelson, eighteen, with a total of $2,952.00; in Orange, two, -one of whom was Madison, -with a total of $1,030.00.

The list of the subscribers is a notable one, not simply from a social point of view, but also for the high public spirit and esteem for learning which their contributions so plainly indicate. In the list for Albemarle, we discover the following respected names: Carr, Divers, Coles, Dawson, Duke, Garrett, Gordon, Garth, Harper, Harris, Kinsolving, Lindsay, Maury, Randolph, Lewis, Leitch, Minor, Monroe, Morris, Nicholas, Patterson, Shackelford, Waddell, Southall, Watson, Shelton, Walker, Winn, Wertenbaker, Wood and Woods; in Stafford county, Brent; in Winchester, Carr, Holmes, Lee, and Tucker; in Buckingham, Eppes; in Cumberland, Bondurant, Deans, Daniel, Harrison, Hughes, Page, Skipwith, Trent, Thornton, Walker, and Woodson; in Fluvanna, Cocke, Scott, Cary, Fuqua and Winn; in Goochland, Carter, Garland, Pickett, Pleasant, Pendleton, Sampson, Randolph, and Watkins; in Loudoun, Mason; in Louisa, Morris, Minor, Trueheart, and Watson; in Lynchburg, Harrison, Pollard, and Yancey; in Nelson, Rives, Galloway, Digges, Garland, Lewis, McClelland and Mosby; and in Orange, Madison.

Many of the local subscribers, with the full concurrence of the Board of Visitors, were anxious to pay the entire amount of their contributions in a form that was suggested by the needs of the College in the course of its building. W. D. Garth, for instance, furnished many feet of dressed plank in return for the release of his pledge; Reuben Maury supplied a large quantity of farm products on the same acceptable condition; so did

Garland Garth; and so did James Dinsmore with his work as contractor.[27] As we shal1 see, a small number of the subscriptions, chiefly because of death, insolvency, or emigration, remained unpaid until as late as 1824, when a collector was appointed at a handsome percentage to obtain by suit or solicitation such as had not as yet been settled. In order to swell the amount that was confidently expected from the subscription list, the Board of Visitors, at the meeting held on May 5, 1817, approved the plan for the lottery which had been drawn up by the trustees of Albemarle Academy; and they instructed the proctor to carry it into execution at once through such agents as he should appoint. The proceeds of the sale of the voluminous tickets were to be deposited in the Bank of Virginia in Richmond. It is to be inferred that the lottery scheme remained in abeyance, for there is no reference to any income acquired by this means. The passage of the bill, in 1818, providing for the establishment of a university, and appropriating an annual fund of fifteen thousand dollars for its support, may have caused the lottery to be put off indefinitely.

XII. Plan for the Buildings

But a far more important transaction of the Board at this meeting was the adoption of Jefferson's plan for the buildings. This plan, it seems, had been carefully

thought out by him many years before.[28] We learn from a letter which he wrote the architect, Latrobe, in I817, that he had formed his general idea of an academic village about fifteen years before, in response to a request from Littleton Waller Tazewell, at that time a member of the General Assembly, which was then disposed to consider the founding of a university for the State. It was this plan which he had submitted to the trustees of East Tennessee College in I8I0, when they had asked of him an appropriate design for that institution; he had then described it as follows: "a small and separate lodge for each professorship, with only a hall below for his class, and two chambers above for himself; these lodges to be joined by barracks for a certain portion of the students, opening into a covered way to give a dry communication between all the parts, the whole of these arranged around an open square of grass and trees."

The same plan, -except that one side was left open, -was submitted to the trustees of Albemarle Academy and accepted by them. The exact description of it as adopted by the Board of Visitors of Central College was in these words: "a distinct pavilion or building for each separate professorship; these to be arranged around a square; each pavilion to contain a school-room and two

apartments for the accommodation of the professor's family, and other reasonable conveniences." It will be perceived that there was, in this curt statement, no reference at all to a Rotunda on the north line of the square; indeed, the original scheme called for no difference whatever between that line and the other lines in the general character of its buildings.

In drafting this first plan of his academical village, which was to contain pavilions on each closed side of the square, with dormitories between, -there were two practical advantages that Jefferson kept clearly and constantly before him. The foremost was that this arrangement would sensibly diminish the possibility of serious loss by fire. Had the dormitories and the professors' apartments been crowded into one large building, there would have been a perpetual hazard of the structure being burnt up as a whole; this fate did overtake the central building of the University of Missouri in 1893; and, in 1895, it also befell the Rotunda and its annex at the University of Virginia itself. In the time of Jefferson, there was less facility for smothering an incipient conflagration, and the danger of one was then far more justly alarming because of its certain fatal consequences, should it occur. But the second and most influential reason in Jefferson's mind for the academic village was the ability, which this plan created to prolong the east and west lines of the square indefinitely. He was forced to consider the economic aspects of the situation primarily from the point of view of the cost of supplementary buildings. The scheme of a square open at its southern end was nicely adapted to the financial condition of the College; one pavilion or two pavilions, ten dormitories or twenty, could, from year to year, or decade to decade, be added on to the east and west side, or to both sides, as the increase

in the number of students, in the course of time, should justify it. Suppose that, instead of this flexible arrangement, one large dormitory building had been erected. Did that allow in itself room for extension? Either an unsightly wing would have to be attached, or a second two-story barrack would have to be constructed, a combination that would hardly have conformed to those canons of taste which were sacred in Jefferson's eyes.[29]

With his acute sense of architectural beauty and his taste for building, his mind must have been elated by the prospects of gratifying both, which opened up to him when the Visitors of Central College, on May 5, 1817, recorded their approval of his noble plan and appointed Cocke and himself a committee with full authority, jointly or severally, to carry it out in detail. Not since the completion of Monticello had he possessed such an opportunity to show his extraordinary aptitude for architecture, without being trammeled by the intervention of others. In his designs for the Capitol at Richmond, and for public edifices in Washington and private residences in Virginia, there was always some one with the power to modify or push aside his recommendations. In this new field, he was quite as unhampered as he was in constructing his own home, for Cocke, his colleague on the building committee, while he did not, from a practical point of view, approve the plan in many particulars, never undertook to interfere or obstruct;[30] and this seems to have

been the attitude also of the Board of Visitors as a whole. All recognized with Madison that the whole scheme of the University belonged to Jefferson, and that his wishes in regard to it should govern their action without question or dispute.

Jefferson wrote to Cabell, his most sympathetic correspondent, that, in his judgment, a remarkable "material basis" for the University was necessary "for its intellectual superstructure." It will be recollected that he had once asserted that it was not more costly to build a beautiful house than to build an ugly one, and he tacitly refused to contract his general plan on the score of economy except to cake brick or stone as a substitute for marble, which alone was really in harmony with his splendid design. There was a time, even in the history of Central College, when he was harassed with the thought of his inability to secure the funds which he needed for his projected pavilions and dormitories, but this prospect never caused him to draw back to a commoner level. Indeed, his disposition, after the projection

of the first pavilion, the plainest of all, was to grow more ambitious in the character of his principal structures as a means of further enhancing the beauty of the whole group. That group, when finished, was, as we shall see, to be marked by great variety, not only in small details, but in general outlines; and it was in planning this variety that his architectural talents had found the widest scope for exercise and gratification. He did not disguise to himself the fact that this variety, by its striking combinations, would arouse the opposition of the ignorant and tasteless from its very novelty. "That the style and scale of the buildings," he remarked in one of his reports to the General Assembly, " should meet the approbation of every individual judgment was impossible from the various structure of various minds . . . . We owed the State to do, not what was to perish with ourselves, but what would remain and be preserved through other ages."

The question now offers itself: how far were the details of Jefferson's general plan altered by him at the suggestion of others after the Visitors had authorized the erection of the first pavilion? Up to that date, the scheme in its entirety appears to have been precisely the same as he had formed it in the beginning. So far as we now know, not even a hint had as yet been obtained from any one with any pretension to architectural training. The nearest models to his proposed group in existence were the cloistered retreats in Europe that had come down from the Middle Ages. These were distinguished for similar quadrangles and colonnades, with dormitories or cells opening into covered ways, which ran the whole length of the quadrangles. The real inspiration, however, as we shall see, sprang from another and more ancient source.

But that Jefferson received suggestions after May 5, 1817, when the first pavilion was determined upon, which were reflected in the final construction of some of the buildings, is now very clearly proven. Four days subsequent to the meeting of the Visitors, he wrote to William Thornton, the distinguished architect, whom he had known in Washington: "What we wish," he said, "is that these pavilions, as they will show themselves above the dormitories, shall be models of taste and good architecture, and of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the architectural lecturer. Will you set your imagination to work, and sketch some designs for us, no matter how loosely with the pen, without the trouble of referring to scale or rule, for we want nothing but the outline of the architecture, as the internal must be arranged according to local convenience? A few sketches, such as may not take you a minute, will greatly oblige us."

It is palpable that Jefferson was seeking, not formal designs that would materially alter the fundamental character of his whole scheme, but simply hints or sketches that would further enhance its beauty by variety. Two sketches seem to have been sent to him by Thornton, accompanied by suggestions, some of which were accepted and others ignored. Thornton, counseled that the front of the first pavilion should be supported by. arches next to the ground, with Doric columns above the arches; and this advice was adopted; but not so the advice given at the same time, that the lecture-room should he placed at the top of the house, and the height of the house increased,-changes which were recommended to be followed in .all the pavilions. Thornton, further thought that the roofs of the dormitories should be made to slope outward from a parapet, and that the arcades in front

should be supported, not with piers, but with columns, such as are now to be seen there. An equally important suggestion was that a single Corinthian pavilion should be built on the north line of the square, which would thus become the most conspicuous structure on the three closed sides of that square. Apparently, under Jefferson's original plan, more than one pavilion, with adjacent dormitories, had been designed to fill up the whole of this north line.

Jefferson was not satisfied with Thornton's aid alone, but also wrote to Latrobe, his associate in public building during his Presidency, and perhaps the most competent professional architect in the United States at this time. He gives him the same general description of his plan which he had given Thornton, but with several additional details; thus he mentions the width and depth of each pavilion; and furthermore, points out that there is to be a colonnade running the entire length of all the structures as high as the lower story of the principal ones. As in his letter to Thornton, so in this letter to Latrobe, he asks only for outlines, however loose or rough, of fronts; the interior arrangements, he repeats, will be governed by convenience alone. A few sketches only, he concludes, were desired. Latrobe was so much flattered and gratified by Jefferson's request for assistance, that, unlike Thornton, who replied rather promptly, he delayed his answer until June 17 in order to study the plan which had been submitted to him. So bulky were the drawings that he made in the course of this study that he did not venture to enclose them by mail. Jefferson was visiting his estate in Bedford county when Latrobe's letter reached Monticello; and it was not until July 16 that he acknowledged its arrival. "I did not mean to, give you this trouble," he wrote, " but since you have been so kind as to

take it, I shall turn it to good account. I am anxious to receive your first draft as soon as possible because we must immediately lay the first stone, as the first pavilion must be finished this fall."

The magnificent conception of placing a structure of the most imposing character in the middle of the north line had its origin, it would seem, with Latrobe. "The centre building," he wrote on July 24, "ought to exhibit in mass and detail as perfect a specimen of good architectural taste as can be devised." [31] Thornton, it will be recalled, had simply suggested that a single Corinthian pavilion should be erected there instead of the less imposing pavilions, with adjacent dormitories, which had been projected by Jefferson; who seems; however, to have been at once favorably impressed with Latrobe's nobler proposal: "We will leave the north side open," he replied on August 3, "so that, if the State should establish there the university they contemplate, they may fill it up with something of the grand kind." It was characteristic of his architectural taste that the "something" which he finally adopted was on the model of the Pantheon.

The original plan had provided only two rooms for the accommodation of each professor. It has been supposed that Jefferson, having in mind the early principle of the College of William and Mary, favored the employment of unmarried instructors alone, and, therefore, was only inclined to furnish bachelor quarters for each member of the teaching staff. The quick eye of Latrobe caught this defect in the plan at once, but Jefferson, in his reply, explained it away by pointing out that the back-side

of each pavilion was left without windows, in expectation of an addition of two or three apartments, should they be required for a man of family.

The roll of Latrobe's drawings arrived on October 6. Two more pavilions having been authorized by the Board, Jefferson, on the 14th, wrote to him, "We shall certainly select their fronts from these (drawings) . . . . Some of your fronts would require too great a width for us because, the aspects of our fronts being east arid west, we are obliged to give the largest dimensions to our flanks, which look north and south." The influence of Latrobe is distinctly reflected in pavilions III and V, and it possibly comes out also in several of the pavilions erected after the incorporation of the University; but this cannot be positively stated owing to the loss of the drawings. It is most strongly suspected in pavilion X, which closely follows III; and also in pavilion VIII. While both Thornton and himself left the stamp of their genius on some of the important details of the general design, -Latrobe especially, by his recommendation of pavilions at the angles and of a great dominating building at the central axis, perceptibly modified and improved it, -the credit of the general architectural conception of Central College belongs to Jefferson. His fundamental inspiration lay, not in the suggestions of contemporaries, valuable as they were, but in the monumental works of Greece and Rome as delineated in the plates of Palladio. This fact will disclose itself more clearly when we come to describe the progress of the whole design after Central College had been converted into the University of Virginia.

XIII. The Actual Building

The Board of Visitors of the College, it will be recalled, authorized on May 5 (1817) the erection of the first pavilion, and empowered a special committee, composed of Jefferson and Cocke, to supervise the successive stages of construction. The first step was to lay off the plat of ground selected for the site of the institution. It was not until July 18 that Jefferson staked out his plan. The theodolite was fixed in the ground at the middle point of the northern line of the square, on which now rises the circular walls of the Rotunda. In the beginning, there had to be embraced in the survey an area sufficient to allow twenty dormitories to be attached to each of the pavilions projected for the three lines. The same area was still required when the number of pavilions for the east and west lines, respectively, was increased to five, for, at the same time, the number of dormitories to be attached to each pavilion was reduced to ten. At this period, as we have mentioned, the site was simply an open worn-out field rising high and dry by itself, and without any obstructions in the way of trees or bushes. The lay-off was completed under Jefferson's eye, and certainly partly, if not entirely, with his actual assistance. Ten working men, quite probably hired slaves, were promptly turned in to change the surface, with spade and hoe, to the exact condition required for the foundation of the several buildings. The design of East and West Ranges, as distinguished from East and West Lawn, had not yet been considered; the lay-off in the beginning was confined to the present lawn and the sites of the structures that were to confront it.

It was not until October 6 (1817) that the corner-stone

of the first pavilion, the modern Colonnade Club, was put in place. It is a fact tending to arouse some speculation that the site of this pavilion should have been selected at so obscure a point in the lines forming the three sides of the square. Why was it not chosen nearer the northeast or northwest corner? Why not on the ground now occupied by the Rotunda? According to the original plan, no pavilion was to be erected at a corner, but Latrobe seems to have altered Jefferson's resolution in this detail. The suggestion from Thornton in favor of a very handsome Corinthian pavilion at the centre of the northern line, and from Latrobe of a Rotunda there, may also have decided him at this tune to reserve this spot for a more imposing use in the future.

The morning that was to witness the ceremony of laying the corner-stone was at first fair, but the clouds later on began to gather; -happily, however, only to disperse and leave the weather clear again. The county and superior courts, with their promiscuous attendance of citizens, set upon business or amusement, were in session in Charlottesville; but when informed of the impending event, the judges left the bench, and accompanied by the crowd of hangers-on, repaired to the scene. The doors `of all the stores were locked, private houses shut up, and the entire population of the little town darkened the road to the College. They were animated, some by an interest in learning, some by a spirit of diversion, and some, perhaps, by a desire to gaze at a group of three men composed of two former Presidents of the United States, Jefferson and Madison, and the present incumbent of that office, Monroe. Among the persons who occupied the seats of prominence at the ceremony was David Watson,

a member of the Board of Visitors, who seems, on this. occasion, to have shown his first, and, with one exception, his last interest in Central College.

The corner-stone was laid with the customary state by Lodges 60 and 90. Rev. William King was the chaplain, John M. Perry, the architect, and Alexander Garrett, the worthy grand-master. President Monroe applied the square and plumb, the chaplain asked a blessing on the stone, the crowd huzzaed, and the band played "Hail Columbia." Corn was now scattered, and then Valentine W. Southall delivered the address to the general audience. With the grand-master's address to the Visitors, the ceremony was concluded.

Alexander Garrett, as proctor, had already contracted with John M. Perry for the erection of the first pavilion. It was to be built of brick and was to contain one large room on the lower floor, two on the upper, and offices and a cellar in the basement. All the carpenter's and joiner's work was to be done by Perry; and he was also to supply the lumber as well as the ironmongery. Payment was to be made in three instalments: two hundred dollars to be delivered in cash at once; five hundred so soon as the roof was raised; and the remainder when the house was accepted as satisfactorily finished. This contract is interesting for a reason additional to its being the first: it not only bore the signature of Jefferson, but it was witnessed by William Wertenbaker, then a young man, but afterwards to become one of the most useful and honored officers of the institution through more than half a century.

Jefferson had early taken steps in person to procure bricklayers of the highest expertness. With that purpose in view, he, during his sojourn at Poplar Forest, in Bedford county, in the summer of 1817 visited Lynchburg,

for "they have there," he wrote Latrobe, on July 16, "the new method of moulding the stock-brick in oil, and execute with it the most beautiful brick which I have ever seen."

So dilatory were the workmen in constructing the first pavilion that he grew doubtful as to whether it would be finished before the ensuing January. He rode down to the College on alternate days, although, at this time, in his seventy-fifth year, to quicken the laborers by the stimulus of his presence. "I follow it up," he wrote Cabell on October 24, "from a sense of the impression which will be made on the Legislature by the prospect of its immediate operation. The walls should be done by our next court, but they will not be by a great deal." In the following December, while again stopping at Poplar Forest, he visited Lynchburg a second time to hire bricklayers to construct the two additional pavilions which the Board of Visitors had ordered to ,be erected. At that time, this class of workingmen were asking fifteen dollars a thousand for laying place-brick and thirty for laying oil-stock, there having been recently a sharp advance in prices owing to the increased charge for corn. Jefferson entered into a provisional engagement with Matthew Brown, a local builder, to pay him as much as was obtainable for similar jobs in Lynchburg; but he hoped that, for a contract involving the purchase and use of three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand bricks, a cheaper undertaker might be found in Richmond; and for that reason he urged Cabell, then attending a session of the Senate, to look about for one in that city. "Pray make a business of it," he wrote, "make such a bargain as you can and inform me immediately." Cabell, although assisted by Major Christopher Tompkins, a builder of experience, was unable to conclude a satisfactory arrangement,

and Jefferson, in consequence was constrained to close with Brown.

He preferred to use slate for roofing, and in June, 1818, corresponded with Colonel Bernard Peyton, of Richmond, for the purpose of obtaining a man with sufficient practical information to pass correctly upon the quality of the products of certain quarries in Albemarle county and willing to undertake the contract for covering the pavilions and dormitories, should that quality sustain the requisite test. One Jones, of Wales, who had already done work of this character in Charlottesville, had removed to Richmond, and it was he whom Jefferson was anxious to employ. It was soon shown that the stone in the strata around the College was not suitable for a delicate tool, -it proved both expensive and tedious to chisel it. In July, 1817, Jefferson had been authorized by the Board of Visitors on his own motion to import a stone-cutter from Italy; he had decided to construct the two additional pavilions on a more ornate and ambitious model than the one followed in the first pavilion; and for this reason, he thought that it would be imprudent to depend exclusively on the domestic workingman, and that he ought to go abroad for the most highly trained skill that could be found there. One of the most competent of the domestic builders was James Dinsmore, whom Jefferson had, in 1798, discovered in Philadelphia and brought to Monticello, where he remained as his principal employee in house joinery for ten years. "I have never known," said Jefferson, "a more faithful, sober, discreet, honest, and respectable man." Associated with Dinsmore at Monticello was John Neilson, whom Jefferson had also come to know in Philadelphia, in 1804, and who continued under contract to him during a period of four years. Both of these men were

at one time in the service of Madison at Montpelier; but Neilson was, at the beginning. of the building at Central College, engaged in working for General Cocke; and it was not until the construction of the University itself was fully underway that he took an important part in it, in partnership with Dinsmore.

Jefferson was sanguine that the first pavilion, with its dormitories, would be completed before the end of 1817, but it was not finished by August 4, 1818, although it was, on that date, reported to be "far advanced." A second pavilion, with its dormitories too, was expected, -without good reason, however,-to receive the final stroke of the hammer and trowel by the ensuing January (1818).

XIV. The First Professors Elected

Long before these pavilions, with their annexes, were built, Jefferson had been revolving the anxious question as to how the professorships were to be filled, and which of them, if necessary, should have the preference. The Board of Visitors, at their meeting on October 7, 1817, the day following the laying of the corner-stone of the first pavilion, -had decided as to who should be the occupants of the one already going up, and the two additional ones which they had just concluded to erect. The first they determined to set aside for the professor of languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, oratory, history and geography; the second for the professor of chemistry, zoology, botany and anatomy; whilst the third, until wanted for the remaining professor, should be converted into a boarding house, to be rented to a respectable French family on condition that only the French language should be spoken there by the students in the course of their meals. At the meeting of the Board of Visitors

three months afterwards, there seems to have been a readjustment of this assignment of houses: on that occasion, there were submitted estimates of the cost of four pavilions, with dormitories attached, -the pavilions to be reserved for the use of the professors of languages, physiology, mathematics, and ideology, respectively. It was determined that, should there be, before the following April, a failure to collect the whole amount that was due by written promise, -this being the only fund that was expected to be available for the construction of the buildings, -then the money needed to pay the salaries of the professors of chemistry and languages, the first who were to be appointed, should be obtained by floating a loan with the banks on the security of the property of the College, and the several instalments of the subscriptions as they should fall in.

Writing on January 18, 1800, to Priestley, Jefferson said, "We should propose to draw from Europe the first characters in science by considerable temptations, which would not need to be repeated after the first set had prepared fit successors, and given reputation to the institution. From some splendid characters, I have received offers most perfectly reasonable and practical." It will be recalled that, at one time, he had just reason to be confident that he would be able to secure the talents of Say for a chair in Central College so soon as incorporated; and also that he had sanguinely fixed his eye on other aliens of equal celebrity. It seems like an unexpected and puzzling anti-climax to discover that the first man who was invited to become a professor in that college was a clergyman and an American, Dr. Samuel Knox, of Baltimore; at a meeting of the Board, held on July 28, 1817, several weeks before the corner-stone of the

first pavilion was laid, he was named for the chair of languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, history, and geography, -a multiplicity of courses that called for the most versatile accomplishments in the teacher. As remuneration for the performance of these laborious duties, he was to receive a fixed salary of five hundred dollars, and the sum of twenty-five dollars for each pupil; and since the field to be traversed by him was wide and popular, the accumulation of fees on this account was expected to be very large.

Dr. Knox, either appalled by the burdens which the task of teaching in so many departments of knowledge would impose on him, or repelled by the non-sectarian; character of the projected institution, briefly, vaguely, but discreetly, replied that " he had gone out of business "; which would seem to prove that he had been a professor as well as a preacher by calling. His shadowy figure enjoys this distinction in the history of the University down to the War of Secession: he was the first clergyman who was asked to fill one of its chairs during that period. Some years afterwards, Jefferson appears to have made it plain to Francis Walker Gilmer that, in his search for English scholars, the application of no minister of the Gospel was to be considered with favor.

On October 7, about two months after Knox's refusal, the compass was boxed by the Board of Visitors, under Jefferson's prompting, in extending to Dr. Thomas Cooper, an invitation to become the professor of chemistry and law. Cooper, if not openly and frankly an infidel, was so vague and shifty in his religious beliefs that he acknowledged that he himself could not state definitely what they were. He seems to have been a very erratic, if not unsavory character, on the whole, in spite of his indisputable

learning and versatile talents.[32] Jefferson enthusiastically admired him for more than one acquirement. For instance, he was so much impressed by a judicial decision which Cooper had delivered that he predicted, in a letter to Cabell, that it would "produce a revolution on the question treated; not in the present day, because old lawyers, like old physicians and other old men, never change opinions which it had cost them the whole labors of their youth to form; but when the young lawyers sit on the bench, they will carry Cooper's doctrine with them." "The best pieces on political economy which have been written in this country," he added, "were by Cooper. He is a great chemist, and now proposes to resume his mineralogical studies."

Was Cooper the marvelous political economist, jurist, and chemist that Jefferson pronounced him to be? Jefferson's insight was sometimes rather awry, as his unqualified encomiums on Ossian and the obscure economist, Tracy, prove. It is not beyond the range of probability that Cooper's general attainments were overrated by some of the communities of the New World in which he lived simply because their culture was not yet sufficiently discriminating, as in the Old, to detect the superficiality amid the rather glittering pretensions. But whether he was a man of as phenomenal parts as Jefferson and others supposed, it is not to be denied that he had, throughout his career, exhibited a rough contempt for the sentiments and feelings of others; and that discretion in expressing his own views was a quality which he seemed to esteem but little, and show but rarely. He was an Englishman by birth, who had begun his active life as a member of

the bar; and even in his youth, was so radical and so rampant in his opinions that he was sent on a sympathetic mission to Revolutionary France as the representative of eight British democratic clubs. He became a friend and disciple of Priestley at an early date on account of their similar relish for scientific researches, for unorthodox religious beliefs, and for a freedom in political affairs that verged on extreme republicanism. Priestley suffered for his liberal opinions by their bringing down on his head the fury of the mob that pulled his Unitarian chapel to pieces and set the torch to his home. In his very natural disgust, he resolved to seek an asylum in the less heated atmosphere of the United States; Cooper, who also found Birmingham at this time an uncomfortable spot, accompanied him; and both settled in a quiet back region of Pennsylvania.

Jefferson had been first interested in Priestley in consequence of his heterodox writings, which had largely influenced his own religious creed; and he had been further drawn to him by the fact that he was one of the first persons of his nation to perceive the importance of physical science in education. The religious and political persecution to which he had been ruthlessly subjected recommended him still more warmly to Jefferson, who detested every form of oppression, intolerance, and injustice, no matter how erratic, unworthy, or humble the object of it might be. Association with Priestley in scientific tastes, and in a common martyrdom for opinion's sake, was all that was needed to rivet his good-will and respect for Cooper, now a citizen of Pennsylvania, and this was further justified by the reputation which Cooper had won as a judge, and afterwards as a professor in Dickinson College and a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania. He is said to have been imprisoned at one time by the

Federalists, doubtless under the Alien and Sedition Acts; and this, naturally enough, further magnified his merits in the eyes of Jefferson, whose feelings towards that party, it will be recalled, were tempered by little of his customary philosophy. The Board of Visitors, when they convened on October 8, 1817, in order to secure Cooper's services, by making it most advantageous to his pecuniary interests to accept their appointment, agreed to reimburse him for the expense of transporting his collection of books and minerals to Central College, and to continue to pay him interest, at the rate of six percent., for the use of his philosophical and chemical apparatus and mineralogical specimens, until there should be surplus enough (after the indispensable charges upon the funds of the College had been defrayed) with which to buy the entire quantity; and should this surplus not arise within a defined time, then the purchase was to be made with money to he borrowed from the banks. The cost of materials needed in the course of the chemical lectures was to be taken over by the Board.

Jefferson was made very sanguine by this liberal offer, and on the 14th, about a week later, wrote cheerfully to Francis Walker Gilmer, "Our Central College looks up with hope. Cooper, I think, will accept a professorship in it. We are in quest of a Ticknor for languages, but have not yet found one. If left to ourselves, we shall be better than William and Mary, but if the Legislature adopts us for the University, we will then be what we should be. I have considerable hope they will do it and at the coming session."

These words let out into the light an important, if not the principal, reason for Jefferson's urgency in hurrying the first three buildings to a finish and for his premature nomination of professors: he wished to be in a

position to say, just so soon as the discussion over the establishment of a university should begin in the General Assembly at its approaching term, that Central College was now, in reality, a working institution, in possession of teachers, dormitories, and pavilions; and that it only needed the necromantic touch of the wand of the State treasury to expand almost at once into a great seat of learning. It will be recalled that he did endeavor to turn the property of the College over to the Commonwealth by the bill for general education, which he submitted in the winter of 1818; that effort failed, as we have seen; but a second was to end in the desired success, at the meeting of the Assembly in the winter of 1819, by the adoption of the Rockfish Gap Report.

By his shrewd stroke of making the Governor of the State the patron of the College, Jefferson secured the tactical advantage of laying before the General Assembly annually a complete record of those proceedings of the Board of Visitors which formed the history of the institution during the previous twelve months. This offered a regularly recurring opportunity of arousing an interest in the College in the minds of the persons who had the most power to serve it. In the report for January 6, 1818, he dwells on the plans that had been adopted for filling the several chairs. "Our funds already certain," he wrote, "will enable us to establish, during the ensuing season, two professorships only with their necessary buildings; and to erect a pavilion, and -if the outstanding subscription papers fulfil our hopes, -the dormitories also for a third; depending for the salary, as well as for the salary and buildings for the fourth, on future and unassured donations. The four are to be languages, mathematics, physiological and ideological sciences. "Each of these important professorships, on account of

its fixed remuneration of five hundred dollars, and the cost of the pavilion and the dormitories to be attached to it, would call for an expenditure at the start of at least $8,333.30 Jefferson was not at all content with the thought of limiting the number of chairs to four, as he was aware that it would be impossible for this number of instructors to find the time to teach in every subdivision of the extensive and pregnant subjects which would be assigned to them. "To do this as it should be done," he said, "to give all its development to every useful branch of all the departments, and in the highest degree to which each has already been carried, would require a greatly increased number of professors, and funds far beyond what can be expected from individual contributors. For this, the resources at the command of the Legislature alone is adequate."

XV. Fight Against Cooper

By February, 1818, the prospect of retaining Cooper had become overclouded. An acute hostility to his appointment had already been expressed by members of the religious denominations. During the following autumn, after the Report of the Rockfish Gap Commission, in favor of converting Central College into the State University, had been drafted for delivery to the General Assembly, Abbe Corrèa endeavored to strengthen Cooper's position by trumpeting his great attainments. "Learning and love of science and of its diffusion," he wrote Francis W. Gilmer, "are as different as light and caloric. They are not always united. I have met through life many a phosphoric savant who did not communicate heat. Judge Cooper does both." The University having been chartered, his reappointment came up

again for discussion by the Board at a meeting held at Montpelier, the home of Madison. In the teeth of weather graphically described by General Cocke as the "most snowy that he had ever seen," Jefferson rode on horseback over the clogged country highways to be present; he was now close upon his seventy-sixth birthday; but neither the infirmities of old age, nor obliterated roads, nor a nipping wind, were suffered to create insurmountable obstructions to the journey. It was not simply that he wished to hasten the progress of the buildings, -he was acutely interested in Cooper's prompt reelection because that would allow two professorships to be inaugurated practically at once.

Chapman Johnson, one of the most astute lawyers of the State, and a very accomplished and winning man, had taken David Watson's place on the Board. He, together with Cabell and Cocke, were averse to Cooper's reappointment. Cabell had written to Jefferson and hinted a doubt about the expediency of the choice, but if he was employed, said he, he should not be permitted to come alone. Nevertheless, Cabell thought that Jefferson should be sustained if he had committed himself to Cooper; and this seems to have been Johnson's attitude, too, when he learned from R. H. Lee, of Staunton, who had been one of Cooper's pupils, -that his character was entitled to unquestionable respect. Cocke, however, was not so much inclined to yield, though pained by the position in which his conscientious objections put him. "The thought of opposing my individual opinion," he wrote Cabell on March 1, 1819, "upon a subject of this nature against the high authority of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison, has cost me a conflict which has shaken the very foundations of my health, for I feet now as if I should have a spell of sickness. But I could not act

otherwise, for if I had expired under the trial, I should have held out to the last."

Jefferson, however, was not to be turned in his resolution; he urged that the new institution was bound in law to enter into a contract with Cooper, should he accept the proposal which had been made to him.[33] "Moreover," he added with the extravagance which tinged his impressions quite frequently when the spirit of the partisan was aroused in him, " Cooper is acknowledged by every enlightened man who knows him to be the greatest man in America in the powers of his mind, and in acquired information, and that without a single exception. I understand that a rumor unfavorable to his habits has been afloat in some places, but I never heard of a single man who undertook to charge him with present or late intemperance, and I think rumor is fairly outweighed by the counter-evidence of the great desire shown at William and Mary to get him; that shown by the enlightened men of Philadelphia to retain him; and the anxiety of New York to get him; that of Corrèa to place him here, who is in constant intercourse with him; the evidence I received on his visit here, when the state of his health permitted him to eat nothing but vegetables and drink nothing but water; his declaration to me at the table that he dared not drink ale or cider or a single glass of wine, and this in the presence of Corrèa, who, if there had been any hypocrisy in it, would not have failed to tell me so."

Jefferson carried his point, and on March 29, 1819,

Cooper, -who, it will be remembered, had been elected professor of chemistry and law in Central College, was appointed to the diversified chair of chemistry, mineralogy, natural philosophy, and law, in the recently incorporated University; he was guaranteed a salary that was not to fall short of $3,500 in amount; and the Board agreed to purchase his apparatus at cost, and twenty-five hundred specimens of his mineralogical collection at fifty cents apiece. Furthermore, the annual expense of all articles consumed in the experiments of his chemical lectures was to be defrayed by the institution, provided that it did not exceed two hundred and fifty dollars. There was but one condition in modification of this contract; namely, that payment for the mineralogical specimens was to be deferred until more schools had been created, and more professors engaged; but, in the meanwhile, an annual interest of six per cent. was to be paid on the sum of the purchase money. When this liberal agreement was entered into, there was a prospect that the first lecture would be delivered at the University in the spring of 1820; but by October, 1819, it was clearly foreseen that this would be impracticable, and the Board, through the committee of superintendence, -Jefferson and Cocke, -so informed Dr. Cooper; who consented to put off the commencement of his duties to a later date, without any compensation beyond the advance of fifteen hundred dollars for his subsistence. This was to be deducted from the first instalment of salary after he should begin to discharge his functions; but he reserved the right to occupy a pavilion in the meanwhile. Jefferson, who, in the first instance, had been too impatient to contract with him, looked upon these terms as moderate and reasonable. Cocke, the other member of the committee, demurred to Cooper's establishing his domicile at the University before he could be usefully employed there, since it was calculated, he said, " to injure the institution at a time when it stood in need of every friend who could rally around it."

The deep aversion of the religious sects now again raised a threatening voice. Cooper had published an edition of Dr. Priestley's works, in the preface to which he had given expression to views flagrantly unorthodox.[34] Dr. John H. Rice, editor of the justly influential Evangelical Magazine, who, as we shall soon see, had taken an energetic part in creating a popular sentiment favorable to the passage of the University bill, came out with a vigorous but temperate article condemning Cooper's employment as a teacher of youth. The quotations which he submitted from Cooper's writings were such as to shock the minds of a conservative people like the Virginians; and he was, therefore, sustained by public opinion in the assertion that, as the University was a State institution, the different denominations who joined in supporting it had a right to be offended by the selection of professors whose heresies struck, as they thought, at the foundations of "social order, morals, and religion." Jefferson's choler was quickly and thoroughly aroused by these clerical reflections on Cooper, who, he declared with bitterness, had been charged with Unitarianism "as presumptuously as if it were a crime.." "For myself," he wrote General Robert B. Taylor, "I am not disposed to regard the denunciation of these satellites of religious inquisition"; but his colleagues differed in view from him, and when the mortified Cooper offered his resignation,

they wisely and discreetly accepted it. He received the remainder of the fifteen hundred dollars promised him, of which seven hundred and fifty had already been anticipated by him. His final communication with the Board was marked by both dignity and manliness: "Whatever my religious creed may be, and perhaps I do not exactly know it myself, it is a pleasure to reflect that my conduct has not brought, and is not likely to bring, discredit on my friends."

Jefferson did not disguise his chagrin over this miscarriage. "I have looked to him," he wrote General Taylor, in May, 1820, "as the corner-stone of our edifice. I know of no one who could have aided us so much in forming the future regulations for our infant institution, and although we may hereafter procure from Europe equivalents in the sciences, they can never replace the advantages of his experience, his knowledge of the character, the habits, and manners of our country, his identification with its sentiments and principles, and the high reputation he has obtained in it generally." Such was the unlucky upshot of the only formal arrangement which was entered into to procure a professor for Central College. The contract was passed on to the University, where it ended in the disaster which has been described. The later experience with Professors Long and Key, who did not remain until the end of the terms for which they were employed, confirms the pertinency of Jefferson's reasons for so ardently wishing to engage Cooper so far as those reasons related to his residence of many years n the country, and to his sympathy with Republican doctrines and institutions. From other points of view, his resignation, perhaps, was no cause for regret. He seemed to flourish most in a storm-centre created by himself; but that was not the atmosphere which would have

brought respect and prosperity to an infant seat of learning, with a reputation yet to be made and confirmed.

XVI. The Bill for Conversion

In the midst of all these plans for building pavilions and dormitories and engaging professors, how did Jefferson expect to acquire the funds which would be needed for so many purposes? The subscription list was his only immediate reliance, and knowing how slender and inadequate it was, he began to direct a wistful eye towards the State treasury, which now possessed, in the Literary Fund, a source of large income for the benefit of public education. He was convinced that no institution of permanent importance could be sustained by private contributions alone; and this, as we have already pointed out, was a powerful motive with him in hastening the completion of the College, for as long as it was without pavilions, dormitories, and instructors, no appeal could be made to the General Assembly for assistance with any prospect of success.

When, in the winter of 1817-18, Jefferson's bill for general education was submitted, with an alternate clause for the adoption of Central College as the university then talked of, Cabell hoped that, should that clause be ignored and no university authorized, a separate bill asking for an appropriation for the College would be more fortunate. "I have often observed," he wrote shrewdly to his chief at Monticello, "a disposition in the Assembly to console the disappointed by granting them something on the failure of a favorite scheme. Miserable omen for science and literature that their friends should fly to such a sentiment on such an occasion, yet it would be better to do this than to fail altogether." It was his plan, should

the conversion be refused, to obtain an annuity, ranging from $3,500 to $5,000, from the Literary Fund for the College, to be used for the support of its professorships, while the money from the subscriptions might be reserved for the construction of the buildings. But he soon found that there were many obstacles in his path. On February 6, 1818, he again wrote to Jefferson, "The friends of Staunton and Lexington wish to keep down the Central College. I believe that they would oppose the appropriation of a dollar to it. Should it get even a little amount, it would be established, and one year more would throw Staunton out of the chase altogether, and Lexington in the background. For these reasons, I think the back country will oppose a small appropriation to the Central College with nearly as much zeal as it would the establishment of the University at that place."

After struggling against this illiberal attitude, and witnessing the defeat of Jefferson's bill, Cabell became so much disheartened that he doubted the expediency of petitioning for the desired annuity at this session. "Let it be done at the next," was his frequently reiterated advice. Such was the character of the present House, he said, that it was questionable whether it would grant the College even the right to hold a lottery. "Certain interests," he continued, "have conspired to cause the Assembly to turn its back on literature and science. A portion of the middle country delegation, by cooperating with these interests, have darkened our prospects on this occasion. These, it is thought, are opposed to the Central College, partly because of their hostility to some of the persons who support it, or from other motives but little more commendable. It is of infinite importance to the best interests of the State to send some able and virtuous men to the next Assembly." And again he said,

"If I had the cooperation of some four or five men, such as I could describe, everything could be effected." And again, "Our only safe course is to look around and select suitable persons and to try and prevail on them to come into the next Assembly. It is a subject of infinite delicacy and should be handled with great discretion."

Whilst Jefferson's bill, which really aimed at the conversion of Central College into a State university, was thrown out at this session, nevertheless an Act was passed, as a substitute, that authorized the establishment of a great seat of learning for the whole Commonwealth, and the selection of a commission to choose its site. The struggle for that site was to be adjourned to Rockfish Gap, and the conference there was to be attended by Jefferson. For the first and last time in the history of this protracted controversy, he was to be present in person on the ground where the battle was actually fought; and the complete success which crowned his participation in that occasion, demonstrates that the influence of his tongue could be quite as powerful as the influence of his pen, whenever he considered it wise to exert it.