Thomas Jefferson's Education
THOMAS
JEFFERSON’S
EDUCATION
ALAN TAYLOR
For Pablo, Ana,
Isabel, and Camila Ortiz
And in Memory of
Jan Lewis
and
Wilson Smith
This institution will be based on the
illimitable freedom of the human mind.
For here we are not afraid to follow
truth wherever it may lead.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1820
Is this the fruits of your education, Sir?
—“A Slave,” addressing Thomas Jefferson, 1808
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
INTRODUCTION
1.COLLEGE
2.REVOLUTION
3.HONOR
4.MOUNTAIN
5.SLAVERY
6.SCHOOLS
7.BUILDINGS
8.PROFESSORS
9.STUDENTS
10.ENDS
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS
Benjamin Tanner, engraving, University of Virginia, 1826
Jefferson’s Albemarle, 1809–1826
Jefferson’s Virginia, 1809–1826
Building Jefferson’s University of Virginia, 1817–1826
Thomas Jefferson, by Saint-Mémin, 1805
College of William and Mary, c. 1740
Bishop James Madison (1749–1812), by unknown
John Randolph’s dueling pistols
Robert Barraud Taylor (1774–1834), by Cephas Thompson
John Randolph (1773–1833)
Samuel Myers, c. 1810, by unknown
Anne Cary Randolph Bankhead (1791–1826), by unknown, 1823
Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge (1796–1876), by Francis Alexander, c. 1830
Francis W. Gilmer (1790–1826), by unknown
Isaac Granger Jefferson (1775–1850), daguerreotype, c. 1850
William Wirt (1772–1834), by Saint-Mémin, 1807
Joseph Carrington Cabell (1778–1856), by Louis M. D. Guillaume
John Holt Rice (1777–1831), by unknown
John Augustine Smith (1782–1865), by unknown
Virginia Randolph Cary (1786–1852), by Charles C. Ingham
George Tucker (1775–1861), by Thomas Sully
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), by H. Inman, c. 1825
John Hartwell Cocke (1780–1866), daguerreotype, by W. A. Retzer, 1850
Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), by James Westhall Ford, 1823
Jefferson’s Albemarle, 1809–1826 (©Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
Jefferson’s Virginia, 1809–1826 (©Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
Building Jefferson’s University of Virginia, 1817–1826 (©Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
THOMAS JEFFERSON’S EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Thomas Jefferson, by Saint-Mémin, 1805 (Library of Congress)
IN HIS OLDEST SURVIVING LETTER, written on June 14, 1760, Thomas Jefferson discussed his education. Jefferson lived on the family plantation, known as Shadwell or “the Mountain” (near where he would later build Monticello), in Albemarle County, Virginia. Aged seventeen, he sought permission from the executor of his father’s estate to attend the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg: “In the first place as long as I stay at the Mountain the Loss of one fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company’s coming here and detaining me from School.” He added, “By going to the College, I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me.”1
Jefferson was an unusual young man: the first, and probably the last, who could plausibly pledge that he would party less if he went to college. While seeking distance from the gregarious sociability of wealthy planters, he also aspired to “universal Acquaintance,” which meant building ties with sons from other prominent families. How he could make useful new friends while reducing sociability Jefferson did not explain.
Forty-eight years later, in a letter to his grandson, Jefferson credited education for saving him from “the society of horse racers, card players, [and] foxhunters.” When he “recollect[ed] the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, & become as worthless to society as they were.” Education enabled him to make the most of his privileged birth, large inheritance, and powerful friends by serving society rather than playing cards, racing horses, and hunting foxes. Jefferson had mixed feelings about his fellow Virginians, longing for their approval while hoping to reform their sons through improved education, just as he had transformed himself.2
In Jefferson’s Virginia, most education was informal and took place in households, where parents taught sons and daughters how to make a living, usually by farming or housekeeping. This book deals instead with formal schooling, which was limited and sporadic for most Virginians, who acquired basic literacy from a few months in a crude, neighborhood school. Only the wealthiest families could afford further education: several years in the study of foreign and ancient languages and the new sciences at an academy and then college. In Jefferson’s youth, the colony had only one college, while the postrevolutionary state had three until 1825, when Jefferson’s University made four. Excluded from academies and colleges, females rarely even went to a primary school.
This book examines Jefferson’s efforts to reform Virginia through education. Treating curriculum only in passing, I explore the social relationships of education: between professors, teachers, students, parents, and politicians. In this version, Jefferson’s social context in Virginia looms even larger than his unique personality and career achievements. Slavery dominated that society, affecting everyone and every institution, including schools. Enslaved labor subsidized education for masters but complicated attempts to school common whites; limited female education; and blocked literacy for black Virginians. The profits of slavery also underwrote the planter hedonism that so troubled Jefferson as antithetical to self-discipline and study. The story told here was more tragic than heroic, as Jefferson’s more noble aspirations became entangled in the inequalities of Virginia.
Often Jefferson serves as the inspirational prophet of schooling for all Americans, but he appears here constrained by politics and society in his own time. Never has a failed proposal received more acclaim than Jefferson’s 1779 bill to educate all white children. That program faltered because Virginia’s legislators preferred to keep taxes low rather than invest in schools and teachers. In 1805, a Richmond newspaper writer complained that the state would spend $50,000 annually on criminal prosecutions “and yet not give a single cent towards educating the poor”: a skewed priority all too familiar today. Jefferson contributed to that failure by opting, in 1819, to secure state support for only the most elitist element of his vision: a university to educate the sons of wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants. Never quite the egalitarian that we now wish him to be, Jefferson believed in elite rule; he just wanted to improve the planter class into a meritocracy through education. He made the University of Virginia his great legacy project, meant to train an improved generation of leaders for the state.3
Colonial Virginians rarely spoke of generations as distinct, for they favored continuities over time. The revolution, however, promoted a new sense of time and change, which induced leaders and educators to think of generations as real and powerful. The revolution created a republic in Virginia, but it seemed fragile as well as precious. The aging generation wanted to train young men to cherish and defend free government. In 1810, Jefferson explained
, “The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.”4
Unlike most of his elite peers, Jefferson also wanted the next generation to reform Virginia. By 1785, when only forty-three years old, Jefferson announced that it was too late for him to transform society. Let younger men take up the challenge of democratizing the state constitution and emancipating the enslaved: “It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.” Students were supposed to accomplish what Jefferson and his generation could not, or would not, do. By building a university, Jefferson claimed to keep faith with his radical goals, even as he backed away from pushing them. But he made a desperate bet in counting on the sons of wealthy planters to liberalize Virginia. And he assigned to them a second, contradictory goal: to restore Virginia’s primacy in the American Union of states. In the end, the next generation would focus on defending Virginia rather than on reforming their state.5
Claiming national preeminence, Virginians celebrated the superior size, population and wealth of their state. They also cited the brilliance and prominence of their great statesmen, who included Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington. In the new Union, Virginians saw an opportunity to lead an “empire of liberty” as a projection of their power. During the early nineteenth century, however, they found their leadership challenged by northern states with dynamic economies and a moral critique of southern slavery. By creating a university in Virginia, Jefferson promised to defend state sovereignty in an increasingly contentious Union. But the revolution had changed Virginia in ways that increased the defiance of young men.6
During the revolution, Virginia’s Patriots rejected an old regime that imagined society as properly organic and cohesive. Such a society arranged everyone in slots on a hierarchy dominated by an elite defined by superior wealth, education, manners, and connections. In that social order, common people deferred to gentlemen, who, in return, were supposed to protect the liberties and small properties of ordinary folk. Favoring social stability, that old regime distrusted social mobility from one class into another. Colonial Virginia also empowered a single Anglican Church that could tax and regulate everyone in a parish. But that church establishment had frayed during the 1760s and early 1770s, as dissenters grew in number and defiance.7
To rally broad support for a revolutionary war against British rule, Virginia’s Patriots offered a new vision of society as a loose association of competitive individuals, each striving to get ahead. The great champion of individual rights was Jefferson, who insisted, “The rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.” When accused of promoting anarchy, Jefferson replied that truly free individuals formed social bonds naturally because of an instinct for benevolence and sociability. They needed no management by a privileged elite or an established church.8
In the name of individual rights, Patriots ditched the declining church establishment that had held society together in colonial Virginia. In the new republic, every free man could choose his church (or to attend no church) and elect his political leaders. No one would have to pay any tax to support a church. Virginia’s Patriots took pride in separating church and state, destroying what had been the most expensive and powerful establishment in British America. Stripped of tax support and its lands, the Anglican Church withered in Virginia, as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists surged in number, with no single denomination enjoying a majority or any privileged status. When challenged for failing to end slavery, Virginians replied that they had achieved something even greater by separating church and state.9
Individual choice meant burdens as well as opportunities, pitfalls down as well as ladders up, losers as well as winners in the race for property and power. In 1809, St. George Tucker, a judge and educator, declared: “If there was a period in the History of Man which demonstrated the necessity of a Man’s being able to place his reliance on Himself, the last thirty years may be considered as furnishing the most awful and instructive Lessons upon that Head.”10
Virginia’s postrevolutionary society never developed the internal cohesion promised by Jefferson and other liberal theorists. Premised on equal opportunity, individualism provided weak bonds in a society as unequal as Virginia. Two-fifths of the inhabitants lived in slavery because of their race. Among free and white people, the male half denied political and property rights to women. Even among free, white men, a huge gap separated wealthy planters and lawyers from the many common people with a small farm or no land at all. A third of white men lacked enough property to qualify for the vote under Virginia’s state constitution adopted in 1776. The old regime had celebrated such inequalities as a source of stability. But those inequalities seemed more ominous in a new society that was supposed to offer equal chances to get ahead. All men may have been created equal, but in Virginia they grew up unequal. Despite Jefferson’s efforts, Virginia failed to endow the poor with free land or to establish a system of public schools that could have promoted social mobility by common people. Primary education cost enough to exclude most poor whites and all slaves, while higher education remained an elite monopoly.11
Individualism in an unequal society bred an aggressive new emphasis on honor among young gentlemen. By asserting honor, they claimed superiority over common whites, who allegedly were more crass, cowardly, and conniving. Young gentlemen defended honor so forcefully because they could no longer count on deference from common people in the new republican order. Above all, gentlemen claimed honor to display complete mastery over enslaved people. In their calculation, the true opposite of slavery was honor rather than freedom, for common whites were free but not honorable. Only gentlemen were both.12
Prickly about honor, young men troubled the academies and colleges of Virginia. They felt dishonored by rules that treated them as children instead of respecting them as gentlemen: as the future masters of slaves and their state. They even asserted a right to defend honor by dueling with one another. By doubling down on eating, drinking, and carousing, young men defied school rules and became the horse racers, card players, and foxhunters that Jefferson had disavowed. Above all, they refused to inform on one another when summoned before faculties or magistrates investigating misdeeds and disorder. Leading Virginians worried that a wayward new generation would fail to sustain their state’s leadership in the Union.13
These turbulent young men created a troubling paradox for Jefferson. Only a new university could enlighten and discipline them to lead Virginia, but how could they become educated without submitting to their professors? Their disorder threatened to ruin his new university meant to save them and their state. To resolve this paradox, Jefferson designed an integrated system of curriculum, rules, and buildings meant to coax students toward self-improvement. The University expressed Jefferson’s vision of an ideal society composed of liberated and cooperating individuals. But slavery skewed that University not least through the defiant honor of young masters.
Celebrating its bicentennial, the University of Virginia tends to extoll Jefferson as founder and seek a straight line from his precepts to modern strengths. But a historian wants to understand the very different context of two hundred years ago, when Virginians created a university to defend a way of life that included slavery. Many twists and turns separate Jefferson’s university from today’s version, which has become far larger, more complex, and cosmopolitan. During the last sixty years, the University made new commitments to diversity and equal opportunity, including the overdue admission of women and African Americans. There is more to celebrate in what the University has become than in how it began. But we could benefit from cherished parts of Jefferson’s legacy, including the pursuit of democracy, a devotion to rational inquiry, and a determination to pursue truth wherever it leads. If that pursuit leads us to conclude that he fell short, the burden is on us to do better.
Although set two hundred ye
ars ago in a slave society, this book tells a story with modern resonances. Our political leaders also praise education as essential to preserving freedom, but too few invest enough public money to fulfill their words. We also retain the Jeffersonian conceit of seeking reform on the cheap by redesigning education for the coming generation. Young people seem conveniently malleable if provided with proper instruction by suitable teachers. We just cannot agree on the means, as some reformers seek more testing while others favor more money for schools. We also clash on the ultimate goals of education: to remake students into consistent egalitarians, or rugged individualists. In fact, we cannot fully do either, for students are less moldable than we imagine. We can find a cautionary tale in Jefferson’s failure to bend students to his reformed vision through a new university. Most of the students remained horse racers, card players, and foxhunters.14
Modern inequality impedes our efforts to reform education, and better schools, while necessary, are not sufficient to heal social divisions. True reform will have to advance on many fronts and with a sense of urgency—rather than repeat Jefferson’s investment of all hope in the distant future and the elusive promise of a better-educated generation.
1
COLLEGE
The College of William and Mary, c. 1740, appears on the top row, with the capitol and palace on the middle tier (Library of Congress)
LATE IN LIFE, Thomas Jefferson recalled “the regular, annual riots & battles between the students of William & Mary, with the town boys, before the revolution, quorum pars fui.” The Latin translates as “of which I was a part.” The colonial college’s most spectacular riot erupted in July 1760 during his first year there. Some students gathered in the gallery of the Williamsburg church during services and spat and urinated on the townspeople below. Chased away, the students rallied at the College and returned to counterattack, led by two professors, who carried cutlasses and pistols. Anticipating that foray, the town’s apprentices gathered in the main street, but broke and fled upon seeing the weapons. A witness reported that “the exulting Conquerers” returned to the College, where they drank “Bumbo and Madeira,” shot off their pistols, and whipped some captive apprentices.1