Americans spent much of 1800 embroiled in one of the first—and possibly still the fiercest—partisan presidential campaigns in the nation’s history, and at the center of the political storm that threatened to capsize the ship of state stood Jefferson. The campaign attacks on his character from politicians and preachers alike deepened the Virginian’s mistrust of power and reinforced the anticlerical views he would hold for the rest of his life. And those views, in turn, would help him define for himself how a modern university should work.
As the year 1800 opened, Jefferson was serving out his final months as vice president to President John Adams, an awkward circumstance for the two rivals brought about by Jefferson’s loss to Adams, by three electoral votes, in the 1796 election. As runner-up, Jefferson assumed the vice presidency, as the Constitution then dictated. While virtually impotent in matters of policy within the Adams administration, Jefferson wielded great political influence as head of the Republican party. Adams, after Washington’s death, had emerged as the leader of the Federalists. While the contest between the two parties occasionally seemed like a quarrel between Anglophiles and Francophiles—Federalists wore the black cockades of the British, while Republicans sported the tri-colored cockades of the French—the two parties’ supporters genuinely hated each other. Each side was convinced that the other’s ascendancy would spell the ruin of the fledgling republic. The rematch between the candlestick-thin Jefferson and the teapot-portly Adams promised to be a bloody affair.
To the Republican way of thinking, the Federalists, with their insistence on a strong executive power, were secretly scheming to establish a government controlled by aristocrats or, worse, a king. Further alarming Republicans, Adams had created an army of fifteen thousand men under the command of the brilliant intriguer Alexander Hamilton—and hadn’t one of the complaints against George III been that he’d used the colonies as a garrison for a standing army? Giving Republican suspicions even more credence, the Federalist-controlled Congress had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which threatened jail time for the president’s critics and made it easier for the Adams administration to throw pro-Republican foreigners out of the country.
Adams, according to Republicans, was on his way to becoming a tyrant. The Polish writer Julien Niemcewicz noted in his diary that the Alien bill, “conceived in a truly Turkish spirit, shows to what point the administration attempts to adopt and imitate the arbitrary means of despots.”1 As Adams’s presidency wore on, printers and pamphleteers who opposed him were tried, convicted, and jailed. Among them was British émigré Thomas Cooper, who would later figure prominently in Jefferson’s plans for a university. Cooper, who like Thomas Paine began his career as an agitator in Britain before bringing his rabble-rousing skills to America, had published a handbill accusing Adams of trying to create a standing army. On trial in Philadelphia before Justice Samuel Chase, Cooper said he knew that England’s king was infallible but didn’t know the president shared the attribute. Cooper was led off to prison to serve a six-month sentence, exclaiming as he went, “Is it a crime to doubt the capacity of the president?”2
To Federalists, the large army and Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary wartime measures. The country was engaged in an undeclared naval war with France, and many of the most conservative Federalists viewed a French invasion as a possibility. Adams and fellow Federalists considered France, where the Jacobins had overthrown the monarchy and church, the most extreme example of the dangers of egalitarianism, and, at home, they viewed the Republicans’ sympathy for French democracy as a portent for potential violence in America. Furthermore, some thought it plausible that French agents would be able to recruit Republicans and immigrants to their banner if they invaded the United States. The Republicans, Jefferson included, had been notoriously easygoing about accounts of French aristocrats being dragged from their carriages and killed.
So a smear campaign against Jefferson—dubbed “the great arch priest of Jacobinism and infidelity”3—began in earnest. Timothy Dwight, a leading evangelical minister and president of Yale, labeled Jefferson a tool of French secularism, asking, “For what end shall we be connected with men of whom this is the character and conduct? Is it that our churches may become temples of reason? … Is it that we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire? … Is it that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution?” This was going on in France, Dwight contended, and Jefferson would bring it to America. Dwight added: “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire … or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”4
The Gazette of the United States, a pro-Federalist newspaper, called Jefferson an “audacious howling Atheist.”5 A month before the election, the newspaper baldly declared that the question before voters was simply “Shall I continue allegiance to GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; Or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!”6 Critics saw Jefferson’s tolerance of the religious views of others as proof that he was an unbeliever, and his opinion that young students in public schools should study history instead of the Bible enraged them. “On account of his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures, and his attempts to discredit them, he ought to be rejected for the Presidency,” the Reverend William Linn summarized in one pamphlet.7 Another sermonizer summed up Jefferson’s disqualifications for the presidency by noting simply, “He does not go to church.”8 Jefferson concluded that religious leaders had singled him out for abuse—despite the fact that his religious views differed little from those of other leading statesmen, including Adams—because he had separated church from state in Virginia. Ministers, Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush, would be happy to undo the law and reestablish their links to the government. But, he noted hopefully, “The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, and they believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”9 The final twenty words are carved into the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. So hostile and active were the Federalists that Jefferson worried that their agents in the post office were reading his mail.10
In the end, Jefferson won the election and was later reelected. The achievements and failures of his presidency are the subject of numerous other books. What is important to note here is that Jefferson had made enemies not just in Virginia but across the nation and, significantly, among the religious. Their attitude toward the great democrat would play a role in how Jefferson fashioned his university and how he and his successors managed it.
But Jefferson was unable to turn his attention to the problem of education in Virginia until 1814, and only then through a piece of luck. Riding from Monticello into Charlottesville one winter day, the retired president, now in his seventies, was hailed by a gentleman who stepped out of the Stone Tavern. Inside, five men had gathered to discuss their plans to establish a local grammar school, the Albemarle Academy. The men (Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr, John Carr, John Harris, John Nicholas, and John Kelly) had been appointed trustees of the proposed institution eleven years earlier, yet nothing had been done to turn the idea into reality. The man who stepped outside invited Jefferson to join them. Jefferson did, and the gentlemen promptly elected him to the board of trustees.11 Whether Jefferson knew of the meeting and intentionally set out for the Stone Tavern remains a mystery, but it seems unlikely he would have been unaware of such an important enterprise in his neighborhood.
Ten days later Jefferson was elected to chair a committee to draft regulations for the school. Six months later he was already scheming to turn the small academy into something much more significant. To Peter Carr, president of the board of trustees, he wrote that he had long contemplated an institution “where every branch of science, deemed useful at this day, should be taught in its highest degree.”12 The Albemarle Academy must be a college, Jefferson concluded, where several of the best professors could teach Virginia’s young men.
Of course there was no money for such a scheme. So in January 1815, Jefferson turned to his young friend Joseph Cabell, a member of the state senate, to obtain funds for the school, as well as permission to rename it the Central College. Cabell, in the senate since 1810, was the right man for the job. Virginian Chapman Johnson described him as “clever” with a certain “strength of mind” and a “communicative disposition,” as well as being “respectable and respected” and “amiable and beloved.”13 Cabell, a handsome man with a strong jaw, aquiline nose, and broad forehead, also had an introverted side and a tendency to drift.
Born December 28, 1778, in the middle of the Revolution on a plantation on the eastern slopes of Virginia’s Blue Ridge, Cabell attended Hampden-Sydney College for one year before enrolling at the College of William and Mary. He idled away his days there before returning home, where he read law with his brother William, who would one day be governor. In 1800, Cabell returned to William and Mary, this time vowing to study hard, but once there, he later recalled, “Scarcely a single Ball or Party of pleasure has escaped me.”14 An ardent Republican and the scion of a Republican family, Cabell noted Jefferson’s 1800 election to the presidency as a moment of great joy for himself and his classmates. However, Cabell disliked studying the law. “It deserves all the censure that the lazy, the idle, or the industrious have bestowed on it,” he wrote. “The labours of Sysiphus or the punishments of the Daniades were not much worse than the incessant and never ending task of pouring over the mouldey records of Law.”15
Weary of study, the lifelong sufferer of sundry ailments—he was diagnosed with illnesses as diverse as bleeding lungs, malaria, and liver disease—persuaded his family to let him travel to Europe in order to improve not only his education but his health. So from 1803 to 1806 he traveled about England, France, the Netherlands, and Italy, visiting famous universities along the way.
He returned to Virginia in 1806 and married Mary Walker Carter, the stepdaughter of his law professor at William and Mary, Henry St. George Tucker. Cabell also met his Republican hero President Jefferson, who warmed to the young man. In quick succession, Cabell was elected to the House of Delegates and then to the state senate. By the time Jefferson reached out to him for help, Cabell was a seasoned navigator of Richmond’s turbulent political waters.16
Regarding Jefferson’s request for money to build the school, Cabell was optimistic that he could get the job done unless “certain delegates from the lower counties who might have fears for William and Mary” moved to thwart him.17 Cabell’s political instincts were acute: proponents of the Williamsburg college did indeed feel threatened by the rise of a new institution. In the years that followed, every plan Cabell pitched for the Central College met with opposition from the legislators from the coastal “lower counties.”
As the General Assembly wrestled with the issue of higher education, talk turned to the establishment of a state university, and new enemies arose. Friends of Hampden-Sydney fought to make sure their school was not slighted. Meanwhile, delegates from the western part of the state—which then included what is today West Virginia—felt any new university should be located west of the Blue Ridge, possibly at Washington College in Lexington.
In February 1816, Cabell was finally able to write that the senate had established the Central College. However, the victory was not complete: the only money available to build the institution was what Jefferson and the other trustees had been able to get their neighbors to pledge. There was no state funding. Still, the bill establishing the college demanded that the governor appoint six powerful men to serve as a board of trustees. Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas chose Jefferson and Cabell, former president James Madison, future president James Monroe, the politician David Watson, and General John Hartwell Cocke.
Jefferson immediately turned his attention to getting the Central College chosen as the new state university, even as legislators from Staunton and Lexington agitated to have the proposed university placed in western Virginia. Jefferson’s strategy was simple: he would buy land and begin building the college. With buildings already in place, he and Cabell reasoned, legislators might be more inclined to pick the Central College as the site of the university.
In May 1817, the trustees agreed to buy a tract in Charlottesville from John Perry. Jefferson had wanted to buy a tract farther east, but it was owned by John Kelly. Kelly was one of the original Albemarle Academy trustees and a Federalist—a member of the political party that championed a strong central government. Jefferson, head of the rival Republican party, had ousted Kelly from the board. Not surprisingly, then, Kelly refused to sell his land, saying, “I will see him at the devil before he shall have it at any price.”18 So the board purchased Perry’s land, which had once been owned by Monroe. The board also approved Jefferson’s plan for an “academical village.”19 The scheme called for “erecting a distinct pavilion or building for each separate professorship, and for arranging these around a square, each pavilion containing a school room and two apartments for the accommodation of the professor, with other reasonable conveniences.”20 Because none of the pledge money had been paid, construction could not begin. Thus Jefferson and the other trustees also decided to embark on a new fund-raising campaign, with Jefferson promising the first $1,000. By January 1818, they had received more than $35,100 in pledges. On October 6, 1817, workers laid the cornerstone of the first pavilion—one of ten meant to serve as professors’ homes and lecture rooms. According to an eyewitness account, to President James Monroe went the ceremonial task of laying the school’s cornerstone.21 Construction was under way.
Meanwhile, Jefferson moved ahead with his plans to turn the college into a university. In the legislative session that year, he had Cabell present his entire scheme for an overhaul of the state’s education system. The bill called for a state university, leaving it up to the legislature to determine where to put it. Cabell became a whirlwind of activity, pushing the plan under the nose of every legislator he could find. But everywhere he turned, he found obstacles. Still, he wrote to Jefferson that he hoped the ex-president’s bill could unite the sundry factions. “I have only this single anxiety in this world,” replied Jefferson, on edge for any word regarding the fate of his educational scheme. “It is a bantling of forty years’ birth and nursing, and if I can once see it on its legs, I will sing with sincerity and pleasure my nunc dimittis.”22
Ultimately, though, the legislature rejected Jefferson’s bold plan, opting instead only to provide for the education of the poor. A disheartened Cabell, whose only success in Richmond had been in finding the best bricklayers to send to Charlottesville to work on the school’s pavilions, wrote to Madison to share his bleak assessment of Jefferson’s plan to turn Central College into a state university. “This Assembly will do nothing for the Central College,” he wrote in February 1818. The delegates west of the Blue Ridge were divided on whether Staunton or Lexington would be the best site, but they had united to oppose Charlottesville. The Presbyterians, meanwhile, were “hostile” to Jefferson’s plan, Cabell noted, while Jefferson’s old foes, the Federalists, “view it with a malignant eye.” Finally, supporters of William and Mary still regarded Central College as “a future rival.”23
Cabell concluded: “This combination of unfortunate circumstances defeat our expectations and throw us into utter despair of any success with the present Assembly.”24 But for once, Cabell, usually an astute observer of political winds, was wrong. A few days later the senate passed a bill, on a vote of 14–3, calling for a university. The bill provided that the governor and his council should create a commission, with one commissioner per senate district, to meet at Rockfish Gap on August 1, 1818, to select a site for the university.
The legislative approval was more than Cabell and Jefferson had hoped for. Now they only needed the governor to choose commissioners friendly to the Central College and their dream could be realized. Cabell suggested that all available funds should be spent on construction so that, when August rolled around, as much of the Central College as possible would be standing. Cabell also urged Jefferson to serve on the commission, but Jefferson knew he was a lightning rod for criticism and balked. Ultimately, though, Jefferson allowed himself to be persuaded to join the commission.
Cabell and Jefferson’s worries that the commission might be stacked against them were unfounded. Governor James Preston, after all, was a Republican. The two dozen men who formed the commission included not only Jefferson and Madison but Cabell’s brother, William H. Cabell; Creed Taylor, who had written to Cabell early in 1818 to pledge his support for Central College; Spencer Roane, a Jefferson supporter; William Brockenbrough, a college chum of Cabell’s and the banker who had loaned money to fund construction of Central College; and A. T. Mason and Hugh Holmes, both of whom had given money to the school.25
The Rockfish Gap commission met to determine where the new university would be established. The choices were clear: at Central College in Charlottesville, at Washington College in Lexington, or in the city of Staunton. Jefferson arrived with a map and statistics from the 1810 census to show that Charlottesville was at the very center of the state’s white population. He also displayed a list of octogenarians living in Albemarle County, a supposed proof of the area’s healthy atmosphere. One tale runs that Jefferson carried in addition a cardboard cutout of Virginia with the exact center of the state marked by a dot. Jefferson proved the dot was at the center by balancing the cutout atop a pencil point. The dot, of course, represented Charlottesville. On August 3, the commission voted Central College and Charlottesville as the site for the new university.
In a detailed report to be given to the General Assembly at its upcoming session, the commission adopted Jefferson’s architectural plan and recommended ten professorships and a curriculum that would boldly break from the courses taught at other American colleges. The classes included ancient languages, modern languages, physics (then known as natural philosophy), botany and zoology, anatomy and medicine, mathematics, physico-mathematics, government and history, municipal law, and a hodgepodge of topics including grammar, ethics, rhetoric, belles lettres, and fine arts. These classes would form the heart of Jefferson’s new educational scheme—an elective system in which students could choose what to learn. Furthermore, Jefferson envisioned a school where students could come and study for as little as a year or as long as they liked, taking whatever courses they desired to satisfy their academic passions. This fresh, democratic approach to higher education would ultimately spread across the nation. Notably, there was no place for a professor of divinity. “A University with sectarian professorships, becomes, of course, a Sectarian Monopoly: with professorships of rival sects, it would be an Arena of Theological Gladiators,” Madison later explained.26 Students who wished to worship, he added, could always attend the nearby churches in Charlottesville. Meanwhile, according to Jefferson’s wishes, the ethics professor would be welcome to lecture on the proofs of God’s existence.
The commission’s report was the springboard for further far-reaching reforms. Though the report did not spell it out, it allowed Jefferson to ultimately create a school free of religious control. All colleges in America had presidents, and they were almost always trained ministers. Virginia’s new school, thanks to Jefferson, would have no church affiliation and no president; professors would serve as chairmen in rotating order. After arranging for boardinghouses and dormitories, the report moved on to student discipline. Jefferson believed that fear was not a proper motivating force for young men, so the commission report recommended that the university’s Board of Visitors be allowed to adopt an approach that would exploit students’ “pride of character, laudable ambition, and moral dispositions” to curb any excesses.27 Unlike other universities, Jefferson’s school would trust students to behave; the least government would be the best government.
But the battle was not over. The General Assembly still needed to approve the plan, and the western delegates and William and Mary supporters were hard at work to stymie Jefferson’s ambition. The western legislators moved for more time, ostensibly to double-check the population figures that Jefferson had used, while the eastern legislators maneuvered to kill any funding.
“I am really fearful for the ultimate fate of the bill,” Cabell wrote Jefferson in December 1818. “Should these parties unite on the question on the passage of the bill, it will be lost; and this result is much to be apprehended.”28 Seven days later, on Christmas Eve, the situation had worsened. The opposition, Cabell wrote, “is growing so rapidly, we have just grounds to fear a total failure of the measure.”29
Cabell swung into action. Convinced that the western legislators would never change their position, he focused all his attention on the legislators east of the Blue Ridge, who outnumbered their western counterparts. Working district by district, he sought to rally the eastern legislators to his side. By early January, Cabell began to feel he had averted disaster.
But in January 1819, a delegate from Rockbridge County, west of the Blue Ridge, moved to strike out of the university bill the section that named Central College as the site of the university. The delegate suggested Washington College instead. A raucous debate followed, with eastern and western delegates pitted against each other. Delegate Briscoe Baldwin of Augusta County made a novel pitch for Staunton, arguing that the healthy atmosphere “conspires to give the finest bloom to our girls.”30 Two days later, the question of whether to scratch out Central College was put to a floor vote. Cabell, tense with anxiety, could not bear to watch. When the smoke cleared, a vote of 114–69 kept Central College as the designated site. Baldwin, the main proponent for Staunton, now urged reconciliation. He urged statewide support for the school to be built in Charlottesville. “Mr. Baldwin, with a magnanimity only equaled by his eloquence, then came forward to invoke the House to unite in support of the University,” the Richmond Enquirer noted in a subsequent issue. “He said, he had attempted to discharge his duty to his constituents; he had supported the pretensions of Staunton, as long as there was the slightest hope of success; but now he came forward to conjure the House to sacrifice all sectional feelings on the altar of their common country.”31
“I am told the scene was truly affecting,” Cabell wrote. “A great part of the House was in tears; and, on the rising of the House, the Eastern members hovered around Mr. Baldwin; some shook him by the hand; others solicited an introduction.”32 The next day, the bill establishing a state university passed the House of Delegates. Debate then began in the senate, where Cabell argued for its passage until an illness gripped him and he found himself unable to continue. But later in January, the senate approved the bill on a vote of 22 to 1. After months of strenuous politicking, Cabell, who saw the university as a “holy cause,” had realized Jefferson’s dream.33
The General Assembly action would put in motion the South’s largest construction project to date. At the same time, one of the northern states, New York, was embarking on a massive project of its own—the building of the Erie Canal. The canal, dubbed by Jefferson “little short of madness,”34 would nonetheless help create a unified national market economy out of the myriad hamlets and farmlands scattered across the landscape. It turned New York into a commercial colossus, just as Jefferson hoped his university would turn Charlottesville into the nation’s center of intellectual inquiry. Both ultimately opened in 1825.
But first Jefferson would have to drum up support for his school. Following the General Assembly vote, he began a fight for state funding that would last years. Cabell would become Jefferson’s leading ally, carrying the burden of wringing money from the state. In creating the university the legislature had authorized $15,000 annually—a woefully inadequate amount considering the $300,000 ($4.1 million today) it would actually cost to build Jefferson’s grand vision. As the campus buildings, the dormitories, and the professors’ pavilions went up, brick by brick, Jefferson and Cabell cajoled and pleaded with the General Assembly to keep funding flowing. The fledgling university borrowed tens of thousands of dollars. Constantly in debt, the school was dependent on the goodwill of the legislature. That meant the school’s image had to be squeaky clean. Despite the amicable conclusion to the General Assembly’s debate, enemies, political and religious, were always looking for reasons to shut down Jefferson’s unique secular experiment. The necessity to appear as a model of decorum would color how the school reacted to student misbehavior. Professors and school officials would feel constant pressure to downplay, cover up, and gloss over student crimes and misdemeanors.
In addition to the struggle for money, Jefferson also ran into trouble in choosing one of his first professors. Dr. Thomas Cooper of Pennsylvania, whom Jefferson hailed as “the greatest man in America in the powers of his mind,” was offered the chair of chemistry.35 The job paid $1,000 a year, plus $20 for each student who attended his class. Jefferson’s opponents pounced. Cooper had been jailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts during the Adams administration, making him anathema to Federalists. He was also a noted freethinker who did not believe in the immortality of the soul and believed even atheists could be good citizens. There were already concerns that Jefferson’s school was barren of any religious influence, and the prospect of Cooper’s appointment further stirred the wrath of Virginia’s churches. The Reverend John Rice, editor of an influential Presbyterian journal, issued Jefferson a warning: “Should [the university] finally be determined to exclude Christianity, the opinion will at once be fixed that the institution is infidel.” The opposition forced Cooper to resign.36
Jefferson, undeterred from his goal of hiring the best scholars available, dispatched the local lawyer Francis Gilmer—noted for successfully defending a “notoriously guilty” horse thief37—to Europe to recruit up to eight professors. Gilmer, born at the Pen Park estate in Albemarle County, was deemed educated and polished—perfect for the job.
Church leaders, especially Presbyterians, Jefferson thought, feared his university was an attempt to overthrow their “ambition and tyranny over higher education.”38 To mollify the ire of the religious establishment, Jefferson also offered to allow churches to hire their own professors, who could teach “their own tenets” on the edges of the university but independent of it. None did so. The barrage of opposition to almost every aspect of building the university—the legislature’s moaning at the constant request for money and the church’s loathing of Enlightenment views—caused Jefferson to despair. So pessimistic was Jefferson at the university’s prospects that he wrote Cabell in 1821, “I perceive I am not to live to see it open.”39 On this point at least, Jefferson was wrong. The university opened its doors in March of 1825. But Jefferson’s triumph would soon turn to travail.