Among his many talents, Thomas Jefferson knew how to make enemies. Long before his profile was stamped on the nickel and long before his bust was carved into a South Dakota mountainside—in short, long before his image became a symbol of the American democratic impulse—the sage of Monticello had adversaries, and they were legion. Many citizens of the new nation did not warm to the laconic Jefferson the way they did to his equally taciturn fellow Virginian George Washington. Upon the old general they virtually conferred Old Testament status. Meanwhile, the studious Jefferson, with his hair the color of hell-fire and his mind constantly at war with tradition, became a lightning rod for critics.
In his time, Jefferson was publicly accused of cheating his legal clients, detesting the Constitution, denying Noah’s flood, and turning his slave plantation into a “Congo Harem” by bedding house slave Sally Hemings, one of the hundreds of slaves Jefferson owned.1 Weary of his world-shaking, “leveling” ways,2 his conservative foes opined that the whippet-thin intellectual should stick to pinning insects and tinkering with swivel chairs. When he won election to the presidency in 1800, tradition holds, the women of New England hid their Bibles in their wells, convinced that Jefferson’s atheistic minions would snatch them up and cast them on bonfires.3 Even when he doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson’s detractors were unimpressed: thanks to an unabating anti-Jeffersonian sentiment, none of the states formed from the newly purchased land were named after the president. And, in a criticism that wounded him far more deeply than any of the crackpot assertions about his religious beliefs, political opponents accused him of running a con game to get the money he needed to build a university in Virginia. “There are fanatics both in religion and politics,” Jefferson complained to state senator Joseph C. Cabell, “who, without knowing me personally, have long been taught to consider me as a raw head and bloody bones.”4
Jefferson sowed the seeds of his own unpopularity as a young member of the Virginia legislature. Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, not far from the dusty trade town of Charlottesville, Jefferson was in his twenties when he won election to the state House of Burgesses in 1768. He was a young radical in the midst of what until then had been an archly conservative lawmaking body. Jefferson’s early years in the Williamsburg chamber passed quietly, but in 1776, after he had taken time out to ride to Philadelphia, attend the Continental Congress, and pen the Declaration of Independence (thereby putting the colonies at war and adding the entire British government to his growing list of enemies), he suggested to his fellow legislators that the laws of Virginia needed a thorough overhaul. They were a hodgepodge of ancient British law and turgid legalistic jargon, and furthermore, in Jefferson’s view, they enshrined superstition and unnecessarily restricted the freedom of citizens.
So in October 1776, Jefferson offered a bill proposing that the House of Delegates (formerly the House of Burgesses) appoint a committee of five members to reform state laws. His liberal allies backed the plan, and the House appointed Jefferson to the committee. He immediately set about rewriting the laws of Virginia, crafting so many bills that the General Assembly, slowed perhaps by the ongoing Revolutionary War, would need years to discuss and vote on them. By the spring of 1779 Jefferson’s committee had written 126 reform bills. Jefferson pushed his colleagues to adopt them, convinced that the revolutionary mood was the best time to make radical changes. “The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united,” Jefferson wrote of his flurry of bill writing. “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.”5
The legislature, often descending into rancorous debate, took a decade to ponder Jefferson’s reforms. And though some bills—such as the one calling for the eventual emancipation of slaves—were never acted on, others passed, turning the Old Dominion into a testing ground for democratic reform. In accordance with Jefferson’s bills, the laws of primogeniture and entail, which restricted who could inherit and own land, were abolished. The capital was rooted up from Williamsburg and moved to the village of Richmond, more central to the state’s population. The death penalty, a possibility for petty criminals and horse thieves, was abolished for all crimes except murder and treason. And, importantly, laws compelling financial contributions to support religion were discarded.
Every change had its foe, however. The old aristocracy steamed at the land reforms that made it easier for the common man to hold property. The “Tories” of conservative Williamsburg were shocked to find themselves on the periphery of power as the state capital moved west. When Jefferson was nominated for Speaker of the House in May 1778, the conservatives, led by Benjamin Harrison (whose son, William, would one day become the nation’s ninth president), took the opportunity to punish him, sending him to inglorious defeat on a vote of 51 to 23.
The Episcopalians were outraged at the cut in state funding. So powerful were religious leaders, in fact, that they were able to stymie Jefferson’s religious reforms for years. Even after the General Assembly abolished mandatory contributions to religion in 1779, it was still a crime to deny the Trinity, and mothers and fathers could lose custody of their children if they did not subscribe to the Episcopal (formerly known as Anglican) creed. But in 1786, even though it was to cost him decades of enmity, Jefferson’s “Act for establishing Religious Freedom” became law, separating the church from state control and leaving citizens free to follow their own beliefs without fear of state punishment. The law is one of the three accomplishments Jefferson had carved into his gravesite obelisk. The others are the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the University of Virginia.
Still, any joy Jefferson felt at displacing the Anglicans from their place of prominence was tempered by the defeat of the bill closest to his heart—the bill for educational reform (titled the “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge”). In Jefferson’s view, the survival of democracy depended completely upon an educated citizenry: the ignorant could be led astray into any false political doctrine. Therefore it was imperative that citizens be educated at an early age. According to the plan Jefferson submitted to legislators, every child, boy or girl, would have access to a nearby state-supported elementary school. Superior boys would have access to secondary schools. A state library would be established at Richmond at a cost of £2,000 per year. And capping off the entire system, William and Mary College in Williamsburg would be converted from a church-controlled divinity school to a public university, free of religious dominance. Here, professors would emphasize science, mathematics, and modern languages over theology and the ancient languages of the Bible. The plan was radical, an assertion of the state’s responsibility for the education of its citizens and a full-frontal assault on the role of religion in higher education in an era when Protestant denominations controlled the nation’s colleges, public and private.6
The bill died a slow, agonizing death. Plantation owners paid the taxes in Virginia, and they couldn’t understand why they should foot the bill to send poor children to school. Without their backing, no bill could pass the General Assembly. Furthermore, debts from the Revolutionary War made Jefferson’s expensive educational reform too costly. Legislators, while enthusiastic in theory, refused to support it in practice.
The defeat, while giving Jefferson a clear picture of the conservative mind-set he was up against, also marked the beginning of his nearly half-century-long struggle to establish a modern public university in his home state. Galling to Jefferson, perhaps, was the success the religious groups were having at founding their own schools. While he was making no headway in the General Assembly, the Presbyterians had established Hampden-Sydney College in rural Prince Edward County in 1776, and they had followed that up six years later by creating Liberty Hall, an academy that ultimately would become Washington and Lee University. The Methodists and Baptists, meanwhile, were carrying out their own educational designs. Religious leaders had a head start, but Jefferson refused to give up his plan for a secular university.
In 1779, Jefferson was not only elected governor but appointed to the Board of Visitors of William and Mary, his alma mater. Full of his customary energy, he quickly set about to change the creaky old institution. And here he had temporary success. The school had been founded by the Church of England a century before the Revolution to supply the colony with seminary-trained Gospel ministers, to educate the young “piously” in “good letters and manners,” and to spread Christianity “amongst the Western Indians.” So said the school’s charter.7 Under Jefferson’s influence, the Board of Visitors abolished the two professorships of divinity and “Oriental” languages. In their place, the school established a professorship of law and police, one of modern languages, and another of anatomy, chemistry, and medicine. To the duties of the moral philosophy professor were added the law of nature and nations and the fine arts. But the Episcopal Church still controlled the college, and it resisted change. Other denominations, meanwhile, withheld their support, interpreting Jefferson’s involvement in the school as his support for the Episcopal denomination. And finally, the college languished because Williamsburg, as previously noted, was no longer the cultural center of the state—Jefferson had successfully pushed to move the state capital to Richmond.
But William and Mary wasn’t Jefferson’s only avenue toward creating a modern university. He toyed with a couple of other options. The first involved a Frenchman, Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who served under Jefferson’s great friend the marquis de Lafayette during the Revolution. De Beaurepaire, the grandson of Louis XV’s physician, was a modernist when it came to education, and he used his connections to France’s elite society to enlist backers for a grandiose plan to establish an academy in Richmond modeled on the great French Academy of Science. According to de Beaurepaire’s plan, the Richmond academy of arts and sciences would offer classes in anatomy, architecture, astronomy, botany, chemistry, design, engraving, foreign languages, geography, mathematics, mineralogy, natural history, painting, and sculpting.8 It was a modern curriculum, in short, nothing like that taught in the religious colleges of eighteenth-century America. It even surpassed the modest reforms Jefferson had brought to William and Mary. It was the kind of curriculum Jefferson could endorse.
De Beaurepaire envisioned branches in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, with affiliations with the royal societies of Paris, Brussels, and London. One hundred and seventy-five associates were to help the professors, who would be selected from among the best minds of Europe and America. Jefferson, by now the U.S. minister to France, allowed his name to be associated with the project, and de Beaurepaire raised 60,000 francs and laid the cornerstone in Richmond in May 1786. But Jefferson had decidedly cooled to the project by 1788. He wrote the energetic Frenchman a letter wishing him success but suggesting that his plans were too grand for a nation as impoverished as the fledgling United States.9 Jefferson’s abandonment of the plan was just as well. The coming of the French Revolution put an end to the scheme as funds dried up. De Beaurepaire’s academy was never built.
But less than a decade later, Jefferson, now back at Monticello, was once again entertaining a plan to improve higher education in his state. In 1794, reports reached Jefferson that the professors of the University of Geneva could possibly be enticed into migrating en masse. Several had already stated their willingness to come to the United States. A power struggle had put an aristocracy in charge of the Swiss government that was at odds with the school’s doctrines, and the professors were looking for a political haven. Jefferson was intrigued by the idea. In one fell swoop, he could bring an entire faculty of brilliant scholars to Virginia and create a university almost overnight. He could do by himself what the state legislature had refused to do.10
Jefferson wrote private letters to several trusted members of the legislature, feeling them out about the possibility of bringing the Geneva faculty to Virginia. Their response was disappointing. Universally, they deemed the project too expensive and too grand for a state as small as Virginia. Furthermore, they balked at the thought that Virginia’s youth would be educated in a foreign language. No one but Jefferson, it seemed, found the idea worth pursuing.
Jefferson then appealed to George Washington. Washington had previously spoken of creating a national university by selling some stock he owned in the Potomac and James River companies. Jefferson suggested that the Geneva professors could form the nucleus of the school, which could be located just outside the capital—in Virginia. Washington, arguing that his plans for a national university were still in embryonic form, demurred, noting also his distaste for importing a single group of professors.11
Jefferson had been defeated on all fronts. Through inaction, the General Assembly had killed his plan for a public university. De Beau-repaire’s plan had proved impractical and too expensive. The great Washington himself had refused to support the importation of the Geneva faculty. And as for William and Mary, Jefferson was ready to wash his hands of it. In 1800, he wrote to fellow scientific tinkerer Joseph Priestley that the old college was “just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it.”12
Still, Jefferson had not given up hope of establishing a university elsewhere in Virginia. In the same letter to Priestley, he spoke of a university established “on a plan so broad and liberal and modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other States to come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternize with us.”
Whatever plans he entertained, though, would have to be put on hold. First, Jefferson would seek the presidency.