Thomas Jefferson's Education Page 3
Leading Virginians sustained the monarch’s favored church, and they discouraged religious dissenters from rival denominations. In 1751, five parsons praised the “Glory of this Colony, which hitherto hath been remarkably happy for uniformity of Religion.” The Church of England (or “Anglican Church”) provided a bond of community in a colonial society in which people lived dispersed and usually pursued pleasure and profit. The church was “established”: favored over competitors by law and supported with taxes. Virginia’s leaders insisted that religious uniformity promoted a Christian morality deemed essential to law and order. Maury explained that church and government had “such a close & mutual Dependence & connection with each other, & reciprocally give & receive such Stability & Support to & from each other, that they must necessarily stand or fall together.” Without such cohesion, gentry and clergy imagined society collapsing into a grim and violent anarchy of unrestrained self-assertion.29
The establishment was expensive. Each parish sustained a substantial brick church and provided the minister with a farm (known as a “glebe”) and an annual salary, set by provincial law, at 16,000 pounds of tobacco, which the minister then sold for cash or credit. About half of the parishes also provided a few slaves to help work the glebe. At an average of thirty-five pounds of tobacco per taxpayer, the parish levy was twice as high as any other tax paid in a Virginia county.30
Virginia lacked a bishop, which invited the colony’s gentry to fill the gap between king and parsons. In each parish, a dozen gentlemen served on the vestry, which administered the church and collected taxes to pay the parson’s salary and maintain his glebe. As county magistrates, the gentry enforced laws requiring every free man, no matter his private beliefs, to attend church and pay the parish tax. No marriage in Virginia was legally valid unless performed, for a fee, by an Anglican parson, and the vestry provided poor relief for free whites.31
Learning pulled gentry and parsons together—and set both apart from the common folk, who were barely literate. But clergy and vestry contested the uncertain and uneasy boundary between their spheres of authority. A parson expected to correct the morality and guide the spirituality of the gentry, who set a tone for the rest of the community. Vestrymen, however, meant to control the parson as an employee, hiring and firing as they saw fit. Coveting status as gentlemen, parsons dreaded dependence on another man as demeaning and impoverishing. According to Maury, parsons wanted recognition as “Gentlemen, Christians, and Clergymen”—a revealing sequence of priority. Many parsons shared in the gentry vices, buying fine clothes, and drinking and gambling at cards and dice with the glee of vestrymen. Gentlemen often caroused at night with their parson, only to denounce his excesses once everyone sobered up in the morning. The gentry held the clergy to a double standard: to behave like gentlemen without their sins.32
Virginia had some spectacularly wicked parsons, including Reverend John Ramsay, who held the southern parish in Albemarle County. In 1767, the vestry denounced Ramsay for beating his wife, seducing a parishioner’s spouse, and preaching while drunk with profane results. But we find only a handful of such cases among more than a hundred clergymen. As fair-minded people noted, most parsons were dutiful and moral men like James Maury. But Virginians loved to gossip, spreading and magnifying the scandals of a few through the colony to tar most parsons as lazy degenerates who lost the respect of their laity.33
The crisis came in 1755, when a prolonged drought reduced the tobacco crop, so prices tripled to 6 pence a pound. Instead of their usual pay in tobacco worth about £140, a parson stood to make £400. Planters, large and small, struggled to pay their tax in tobacco, but parsons relished the windfall income as their just desserts. They wanted to profit in tough times just as planters did when the market favored them, but the gentry held a trump card: control of the House of Burgesses. In 1755, that legislature passed the “Two-Penny Act,” a law converting the tax from tobacco to money at an artificially low price of 2 pence per pound. Payment reverted to tobacco in the good harvests of 1756 and 1757, but the Burgesses passed another Two-Penny Act in 1758, when drought again curtailed the crop and inflated the price of tobacco. In 1755 and 1758, the governor approved both acts because he needed legislative support for his priority: raising money and men to fight the French.34
Parsons howled that their compensation shifted from tobacco to money and back again depending on which “shall happen to be the least profitable.” Clergymen felt subordinated to the gentry, who governed the colony for their own benefit. “Our being deprived of the benefit of this rising market, will still keep us in debt & so in a dependent State, a thing much aimed at by the great men of this Country,” ten parsons complained to the Bishop of London.35
Several intrepid parsons, including Maury, petitioned the Crown to reject the Two-Penny Act. Their leader was John Camm, the learned but acerbic professor of moral philosophy at William & Mary. Governor Francis Fauquier denounced Camm as “a Man of Abilities but a Turbulent Man who delights to live in a Flame.” English-born and Cambridge-educated, Camm had risen from a middling family thanks to a scholarship. In late 1758, he returned to London to lobby the Crown on behalf of the parsons. In August 1759, the king’s Privy Council vetoed the Two-Penny Act and impugned Fauquier for approving an unjust and irregular law.36
That ruling outraged Virginia’s leaders, who felt insulted and exposed when denied their cherished pose as the king’s most loyal subjects. In response, they developed a new constitutional position that defined the House of Burgesses as fully sovereign within Virginia, conceding authority to the empire only for external trade and war. The gentry denied that the Crown could intervene in social relations within Virginia—such as those between parsons and vestries. No longer able to shelter under the Crown’s authority, the gentry recast their common constituents as sovereign within Virginia and treated the parsons as traitors to the colony.37
Both gentry and parsons claimed to defend liberty, which in Virginia always brought up its inversion, slavery. A young lawyer, Edmund Randolph, noted, “The system of slavery, howsoever baneful to virtue, begat a pride, which nourished a quick and acute sense of the rights of freemen.” Parsons often interpreted this gentry pride as domineering. In a moment of frustration, one parson urged his patrons in England to “send no more of your young gentlemen into this wretched land of Tyrants & Slaves.” Camm mocked Colonel Richard Bland, a leading Burgess, for describing Virginia as a land of English liberty where “all Men are born free.” Detecting hypocrisy, Camm asked, “Does the Colonel mean to affirm that Virginia is not an English Government, or that Negroes are not under it born Slaves, or that the said Slaves are not Men?” Had Bland forgotten “the Aegyptian Bondage of his own Slaves.” Camm also owned slaves, but he never mistook Virginia for a land of liberty.38
Returning to Virginia with the Privy Council ruling in 1760, Camm called on Governor Fauquier at his palace in Williamsburg. In a rage, Fauquier confronted Camm in the lobby and ordered him to depart and never return. To complete the insult, Fauquier summoned his slaves. Pointing at Camm, the governor told them, “Look at this gentleman, look at him that you may know him again & if he ever attempt[s] to come hither do not suffer him to enter my gates.” One of the other parsons noted the depth of “this last indignity, for it is the greatest affront that can be put upon a free man here to give orders concerning him to the slaves. It is what a white servant would not endure.” By subjecting Camm to the authority of slaves, Fauquier declared the parson as no longer a proper white man. Another Virginian explained that Fauquier had marked out Camm as “a black Sheep.”39
After the Privy Council ruling, the battle over the Two-Penny Act shifted into the courts of Virginia, where several parsons sought back pay from their vestries. The most celebrated case involved Maury. In November 1763 in Hanover County, judges ruled in his favor, but left determination of the damages to a jury. In that phase of the trial, a young, ambitious, and eloquent lawyer, Patrick Henry, defended the vestry by escalating
the stakes. Henry denounced parsons as greedy “Enemies of the Community” for appealing to the distant king, who acted as a tyrant by annulling the Two-Penny Act. After just five minutes of deliberation, the jurors returned with an insulting award of a single penny for Maury, far short of his true loss of £288.40
Celebrated for his courtroom performance, Henry won election to the House of Burgesses, where he became a fiery critic of king and parliament. The other parsons also lost their cases, depriving them of any benefit from the Privy Council’s ruling. Despite this legal nullification, the gentry had received a great scare from the ruling, which put them on high alert to resist all British measures to enhance imperial power. In particular, they resented new taxes levied on the colonists by Parliament during the 1760s.41
As gentry and parsons wrangled, they emboldened dissenting preachers to seek converts, challenging the ideal of religious uniformity. During the 1740s and 1750s, evangelical Presbyterians, known as New Lights, competed with the Church of Virginia. During the 1760s, an even fiercer challenge appeared with “Separate Baptists,” who claimed a license from Jesus to preach wherever and however they wished. They compensated for their lack of schooling with emotional fervor. The Baptist itinerant preachers shocked Anglicans, who insisted that a minister required years of formal education and ordination by learned parsons.42
The itinerants offered a fiery and spontaneous style of extemporaneous preaching that appealed to common people. Practicing a more emotional and evangelical faith, dissenters denounced parsons as sinners devoid of divine grace; their soothing, droning, soulless words could only lull poor listeners to a hellish eternity. If few parsons were truly wicked, most seemed dull, for they read written sermons and appealed to reason. In sharp contrast, evangelical preaching was so pointed, personal, and emotional that listeners fell down twitching and speaking strange words. Evangelicals insisted that only complete submission could win salvation from the awesome power of God. They appealed to souls troubled by the world and longing for a heavenly respite after death. Preachers cultivated in listeners a painful despair until it ripened into an emotional release, known as the New Birth, a feeling of blissful union with God.43
Evangelicals demanded a strict new code of behavior, renouncing the worldly pleasures of Anglican gentry and parsons as soul-sapping distractions from the pursuit of eternal salvation. An Anglican teacher complained that dissenters were “destroying pleasure in the Country; for they encourage ardent Prayer, strong & constant faith, & an intire Banishment of Gaming, Dancing, & Sabbath-Day Diversions.” Joining an evangelical church meant submitting to moral supervision by new brethren and sisters.44
Asserting the right of each soul to choose his or her own faith, evangelicals challenged the overlap of church, state, and society so dear to gentry and parsons. Itinerant ministers defied Virginia law, which demanded that they obtain a license and preach in no more than one county. Magistrates arrested, jailed, and fined preachers or encouraged common mobs to disrupt evangelical meetings, sometimes flogging or dunking preachers, to parody their baptisms. Relishing the role of martyrs, they converted punishment into performances of evangelical zeal by shaking off a jailing, dunking, or whipping to resume preaching. This persistence through pain won converts and spread doubts among the gentry about the wisdom of further persecution.45
Some parsons concluded that they needed a bishop in Virginia to resist inroads by dissenters. A resident bishop would save prospective clergymen from the high cost and many miseries of crossing the Atlantic for ordination in distant and expensive London. A bishop could purge the clergy of a few bad apples who tainted the rest. Fewer bad, old parsons and more good, new ones promised to roll back the rising tide of dissent. Proponents added that a bishop would reverse Virginia’s drift away from British rule.46
But the proposed bishop outraged Burgesses, who defended their control over the clergy in Virginia. Many gentlemen questioned their uneasy partnership with parsons in propping up a tottering establishment. With religious uniformity declining, gentry sought a new way to manage society without a church establishment. The path forward lay with Thomas Jefferson, who proposed to make individual consent the basis for religious and political authority. He developed these radical ideas as a student at the College of William & Mary.47
Masters
In March 1760, on the cusp of his seventeenth birthday, Jefferson enrolled at the College in Williamsburg. He was tall and thin, with red hair and freckles. He disliked William & Mary’s large, rambling main building that he described, along with the nearby insane asylum, as “rude, misshapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns.” A friend recalled that Jefferson developed a passion for building after buying a book on architecture “from an old drunken Cabinetmaker” who lived near the College gate. The friend marveled that this purchase later led Jefferson to design a sprawling university and “that immense pile of building on the top of Monticello.”48
Located on a level plain, Williamsburg had a population of 1,800 and a main street one hundred feet wide, a mile long, and named for the Duke of Gloucester. At the east end of town, a brick Capitol housed the legislature. A royal coat of arms, featuring lion and unicorn, appeared over the front door. At the west end of the street, three brick buildings comprised the College. Midway along the street on the north side, a traveler came to Bruton Parish Church, where a parson preached from a lofty pulpit and the governor had an elevated pew with a canopy overhead. Across the street stood a brick magazine filled with gunpowder and weapons to arm free men in case of a slave revolt or French invasion. On the opposite side of a green lay the local courthouse. At the northern edge of the green stood the governor’s elegant brick palace, topped with a wooden cupola. Artificially sustained by its status as the colonial capital, Williamsburg lacked any port or other geographic advantage and supported no manufacturing and little commerce. Most of the 250 private homes and shops were built of wood and painted white, giving the village a gleam.49
During the 1760s, the College of William & Mary was an intense microcosm of the larger clash of Virginia gentry with imperial authority. On this smaller stage, the conflict also pivoted on a constitutional controversy, in this case over the College’s royal charter. That document failed to specify the boundary between the authority of faculty and the superintending Board of Visitors, composed of eighteen prominent men, including the colony’s governor. The Visitors made governing statutes, dismissed defiant and deviant professors, and meddled in managing students and staff: housekeeper, gardener, bursar, and usher. The Visitors treated the college as their property and the faculty as employees. In return, a professor denounced the Visitors as “ignorant & intemperate men totally unqualified for the important Trust of directing & governing” a college devoted to “propagating Religion & Learning.”50
Born in England and educated at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the professors were ordained Anglican clergymen. They claimed life tenure and the power as “Masters” to govern the staff, design curriculum, award degrees and scholarships, and discipline students: “We presume to think that we are not the servants of the Visitors; we have a Charter to incorporate us into a regular Society.” While accepting the Visitors as legislators who framed the institution’s rules, professors claimed equal power as executives who applied the rules “without further Control from the Visitors.” Professors appealed to the king, “as supreme Visitor of the College,” to determine their dispute by defining the charter’s terms. That appeal outraged Visitors as repeating the treachery of the parsons in protesting the Two-Penny Act.51
The six faculty included an overworked Master of the grammar school, who taught Greek and Latin to many adolescent students preparing to enter the College. By contrast, the underworked Master of the Indian school usually had only a couple of Natives to instruct—and soon enough those managed to escape. Few students worked with the two professors of divinity. Many more attended the two professors of philosophy, one special
izing in rhetoric, logic, and ethics, and the other in physics, metaphysics, and mathematics. A professor usually doubled his income by serving as a parson in a nearby parish, where he performed Sunday services.52
The College’s arrangement of space reinforced a hierarchy derived from Oxford and Cambridge. At meals in the dining hall, the Masters sat at an elevated table overlooking the lower tables for students. In each classroom, the presiding Master occupied a raised seat atop a pulpit. In chapel, the students sat on crude benches while honored guests filled the prime pews in front. At 3,000 volumes, the library was substantial for the time, but heavy on theology and light on contemporary science.53
Defined by a religious purpose, the student’s day began with morning prayers in the chapel: at six in the summer and seven in winter. After a round of classes, the day ended with readings in chapel from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. At nine in the evening, students attended a roll call in the Common Room, before they retired to their beds. Sunday offered a full Anglican service either in the chapel or in nearby Bruton Parish Church. Every student had to learn the Anglican catechism in English and Latin. But the regimentation had scant impact on young Virginians used to having their way. In a given year, about seventy attended the grammar school, and fifty the College. Most came for only a year or two to get a smattering of education, so almost all left without a degree rather than meet the high standards enforced by the Masters.54