University of Virginia Library

III. Struggle for the University Site

Not until November 20, 1818, did Jefferson send the Report on to Cabell, the representative of the district in the upper chamber, to whom it was now intrusted for delivery to the proper officials. Cabell's first step was to print the manuscript, and his next, to hand one copy of it to the President of the Senate and another to the Speaker of the House. On the second morning of the session, it was brought to the attention of both bodies, and its reading, -so we are informed by William F. Gordon, now a member of the General Assembly, and a staunch supporter of the University scheme, -was followed by exclamations of "universal admiration." A bill was promptly introduced in the lower chamber to carry into effect the recommendations of the Report. This bill was under the patronage of Mr. Taylor, of Chesterfield county, who had been selected by the pilots of the measure because he seemed to be entirely disentangled from the meshes of local interests and ambitions. Opposition was expected from the start by Cabell and Gordon, who were marshalling the partizans of Central College, -the one in the Senate, the other in the House. The bill, with the Report appended, was referred to a select committee which contained a majority in favor of passing it; and a further auspicious condition was that the

delegation from the region of the Kanawha River were frankly well disposed towards the measure.

The advocates of the Lexington site in the committee urged, with persistence, that the clause recommending Central College should be expunged, and a blank substituted for it; and also that the bill should be held back for more careful scrutiny before this blank should be filled up. The members from Rockbridge in the committee were especially vehement in questioning the correctness of Jefferson's way of arriving at the centre of population. They were supported by Chapman Johnson, who represented Augusta county in the Senate. He asserted in the presence of Cabell and Gov. Preston, that, to start the line of division at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, "was to make it nearer to the southern than to the northern side of the State." This suggestion seems to have worried Cabell, and he at once wrote to Monticello for information to combat it. In his reply, Jefferson acknowledged, what was obvious, that at its commencement, the line was nearer to North Carolina than it was to Maryland; but was not the area towards the north entirely occupied by water without any inhabitants except numerous fish and many wild fowl? "Wherever you may decide to begin," he added, "the direction of the line of equal division is not a matter of choice. It must from thence take whatever direction an equal division of the population demands; and the census proves this to pass near Charlottesville, Rockfish Gap, and Staunton."

Some of the advocates of Lexington shrewdly laid off the southern half of the State in the form of a parallelogram and the northern half in the form of a triangle. This method, Jefferson gently intimated, was suggested

by ingenious minds seeking to force the situation in favor of their preferred site. As the whole State was in a triangular shape, why should not each half be made to conform to that fact instead of only one? If the line of equal division was drawn straight from east to west, Lexington would be thrown out of the contest at once by its distance from the centre of population. Not so Charlottesville. Run that line north and south, -again would Lexington be thrust out, but again would Charlottesville successfully stand the test. "Run your lines in whichever direction you please," exclaimed Jefferson, triumphantly, "they will pass close to Charlottesville, and for the good reason that it is truly central to the white population."

At the third meeting, the Committee declined to strike the words "Central College" from the bill. The measure was then reported to the House in its original form; but here it again ran upon the ugly snag that had threatened to wreck it in the committee room: the advocates of Lexington again disputed the correctness of Jefferson's calculations, and demanded that the vote upon the bill should be deferred until they had been given an opportunity to refute them. Cabell soon began to feel doubt as to its passage, for he had found out that the party opposing the acceptance of the Central College site, -which consisted principally of the delegation from the West, -had decided that, should they be unable to substitute Lexington for Charlottesville, they would endeavor to overthrow the whole university scheme; and in this course, they counted on the support of those members who favored the permanent breaking up and dispersal of the Literary Fund.

Cabell plucked up heart once more when privately informed by his colleague in the Senate from Clarksburg

that the entire delegation from the Northwest with one exception, -twenty-one members, -had determined to stand by the recommendation of the committee; this was about the 17th of December; and although Christmas was so close at hand, and most of the members were departing for their homes, when not too remote, he decided to stand to his post in Richmond. His health had been so much undermined by his assiduity that he was advised to spend the holiday season at Williamsburg with his wife's family, for the sake of the change; but he emphatically refused to do so. "Even if the danger of my life existed which my friends apprehend," he said, "I could not risk it in a better cause." He urged the supporters of the bill in the House to hold it up until the opening of the New Year. At the same time, he was very much alarmed lest his opponents should continue to gain strength by wily intrigue and unscrupulous bargaining. Once more, indeed, he began to fear the complete failure of the measure through the working of these malignant agencies. He was fully aware that, in the strongly cohesive delegation from the eastern counties, there were at least twenty-six members who were expected, under the influence of their loyalty to the interests of the College of William and Mary, to show themselves hostile to the establishment of a university at all, by casting their votes against the bill, whether in the original or the amended form. There was thought to be but one provision that could ward off this blow :the appropriation of five thousand dollars annually to the use of that institution. This was Cabell's not unprejudiced impression, for the antagonism which he had to overcome had left him in an exasperated and jaundiced mood. "The best informed of these partizans of the ancient college," he wrote Jefferson, "whilst they, their sons, connections, and friends have been educated at William and Mary, quote Smith, the Edinburgh Review, and Dugald Stewart, to prove that education should be left to individual enterprise, the more ignorant part pretend that the Literary Fund has been diverted from its original object, -the education of the poor, -and accuse the friends of the University of an intention to apply all the funds to the benefit of the University."

Some opposition to Charlottesville, as the site for a great seat of learning, was expressed by a small circle of thoughtful and enlightened members on the ground that, as it was simply a village and remote in its situation, it would offer no social advantages to draw thither distinguished professors; nor could it, for the same reason, serve to polish the manners of the students, furnish them with the needed accommodations, or bring forward sufficient physical force to put down large bodies of young men, should they fall to rioting.

By January 1, 1819, the delegates from the Valley had united in solid rank against Central College, and nearly one-half of the delegates from the region west of the Alleghanies had joined their company. In addition, the delegates from the southeastern part of the State were inimical; and there were members in the same mood who were scattered throughout the representation from the other districts. Cabell, bracing himself against a rising feeling of dismay, urged all the friendly absentees to hasten their return, and in the meanwhile, he sought encouragement in the loyalty of his supporters on the ground. "I consider the establishment of the University," wrote John Taliaferro, of the Lower House, as he was about to set out from Fredericksburg for Richmond, "of more vital consequence to the State than the sum of all the legislation since the foundation of the government";

and this was also the spirit of the men who had remained at their posts. "I had indulged the hope," wrote William F. Gordon to his wife on Christmas day, "that I could have gone home about this time, but the importance of our University bill is so great to Virginia, and particularly to Albemarle county, that I feared to leave it." In a letter to Jefferson a few days earlier, Cabell had said, "I have passed the night in watchful reflection and the day in ceaseless activity . . . . I have conveyed from person to person intelligence of our view, and endeavored to reconcile difference of opinion and to create harmony . . . . I have called on and influenced the aid of powerful friends out of the Legislature, such as Roane, Nicholas, Brockenbrough, Taylor, and others. I have procured most of the essays in the Enquirer."

Within a few weeks, this persistent spirit had forced a favorable turn. Absent friends came to his assistance. Especially assiduous and energetic among these were Captain Slaughter, of Culpeper, and Mr. Hoomes, of King and Queen; but above all, Chancellor Green, who, on the day of his arrival, sat up with him until three o'clock in the morning. The foremost purpose now was to contrive a plan to break the assaults of the delegates from the Peninsula; and it was in consequence of such prolonged mental strain and constant loss of sleep, that Cabell suffered, at this crisis, an attack of blood spitting, which lasted, without interruption, for a period of seven or eight hours.

The ablest and most disinterested of all Cabell's coadjutors, outside of the Assembly itself, in this protracted contest, was the Rev. John H. Rice, the most distinguished Presbyterian divine in the State. Perhaps his most notable service at this time took the form of a letter over the signature of Crito, which he contributed to

the issue of the Enquirer for January 9, 1819. "Ten years ago," he wrote, "I made certain inquiries on the subject (the pecuniary loss to Virginia from the absence of a State university) and ascertained, to my conviction, that the amount annually carried from Virginia for purposes of education alone exceeded $250,000. Since that period, it has been greater. Take a quarter of a million as the average of the last eight and twenty years, and the amount is the enormous sum of $7,000,000. But had our schools been such as the resources of Virginia would have well allowed, and her honor and interest demanded, it is by no means extravagant to suppose that the five States that border on ours would have sent as many students, as under the present wretched system; we have sent to them. Thus this reaches another amount of $7,000,000. Let our economists look to that 14,000,000 of good dollars lost to us by our parsimony. Let our wise men calculate the amount outside of our losses, and add it to this principal."

Dr. Rice made no plea for a particular site for the University, because he thought that this should be decided by the General Assembly, of which he was not a member; but his reasoning for the creation of the institution itself was a powerful influence towards the overthrow of the unscrupulous propaganda then prevailing that would have shut out Central College by undermining the whole project of setting up a great seat of learning. A searching discussion of the several clauses of the bill took place in the Committee of the Whole of the House on January 18 (1819), and all the arguments in support of, and in opposition to, its different provisions were elaborately presented. A determined attempt was again made to discredit the statistics of Jefferson's map showing the centre of population in the State; but when the

last speech had been finished, and the motion was put whether the clause relating to Central College, as the proposed site of the University, should be accepted or discarded, the vote stood sixty-nine in favor of rejection and one hundred and fourteen in favor of retention. The brilliant Briscoe G. Baldwin was then a delegate from Augusta, of which Staunton, one of the competitors for the University, was the county-seat. So soon as the decision of the House was announced, he rose from his chair, and, in proposing that the bill should he adopted unanimously, appealed to the Western delegation to dismiss all local prejudice, to repress all spirit of partizanship, and to join with the majority in acquiescing in the entire measure as it stood. His speech was so eloquent in its utterance of the noblest patriotic emotions that most of his hearers were melted to tears. Cabell, who had been present in the chamber before the roll was called, had retired to avoid the shock to his feelings, should the upshot be adverse. The final vote on the passage of the bill was taken on the following day (January 19), and only twenty-eight of the one hundred and sixty-nine members present persisted in their opposition.

William C. Rives, a delegate at the time, expressed to Cocke his gratified surprise at what he described as the "unexpected result " of the voting. "You have seen from the newspapers," he wrote on the 20th, "the vigorous and persevering attempts that were made on the floor of the House to repeal it (the University bill). The efforts that were employed out of doors to defeat it by intrigue were not less vigorous, and possibly were more alarming; because more difficult to be met and counteracted."

On the 21st, the measure, having reached the Senate, was referred to a very able committee. When at last

reported, a motion to strike out of the text the choice of Central College was lost by a vote of sixteen to seven. It finally passed the Senate on the 25th by a vote of twenty-two to one, an indication of more enlightened views in that body as a whole than prevailed in the House. The discussion of its different provisions had continued uninterruptedly through two days; and so strenuously did Cabell participate in the debate that a blood vessel in his lungs, which he had formerly ruptured, opened again, and he was compelled to sink to his seat.

The opposition to the bill, as we have seen, had its origin in a variety of hostile influences, some of which were directed against the acceptance of Central College as the site and some against the establishment of the University at all, because supposed to be repugnant to the interests either of the College of William, and Mary or of the poor in the distribution of the income of the Literary Fund. At the bottom of the antagonism, there was present a distinct political motive. The desire to obtain the site of the Capital, should Richmond be abandoned, prompted many of the delegates from the Valley to cast their votes against the selection of Central College, for it was generally anticipated that the Capital and the University would, in the end, be located together. There was also a lingering antipathy to Jefferson himself, in spite of his venerable age and long retirement from public life. This feeling, however, was not shared by many. William C. Rives expressed the more generous attitude of the majority towards him when he said, "Among the many sources of congratulation that present themselves on this occasion (the passage of the bill), it is not the least with me that the man to whom this country of ours owes more than to any other that ever existed, with

the exception of Washington, lives to see the consummation of all his wishes in the establishment of an institution which will be a lasting monument to his fame."

Jefferson himself received the announcement of the realization of his hopes of so many years with the philosophical moderation so characteristic of him when his faculties were not disturbed by the red flag of Federalism or Sectarianism. "I sincerely join in the general joy," was his brief and simple reply when the news had been conveyed to him.