University of Virginia Library

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]