Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  The recruitment of the faculty exposed again his contradictory attitude toward Europe as both a den of political iniquity and the cradle of all learning. He insisted that only European scholars could provide the high level of intellectual distinction necessary for a truly first-rate university, so he persuaded a reluctant Board of Visitors to dispatch Francis Gilmer, a bright young Virginia lawyer, to recruit prospective faculty in England, France and Germany. When Adams learned that his old friend was scouring Europe for scholars, he poked fun at the unpatriotic scheme and jokingly reminded Jefferson of his most colorful condemnations of Europe as an intellectual swamp brimming with infectious political diseases. But Jefferson persisted in his quest for the best; that is, until Gilmer reported that none of the leading European scholars was interested in moving to an unfinished campus in the American wilderness. He tried to put the best face on this unexpected turn of events: “I consider that his [Gilmer’s] return without any professors will completely quash every hope of the institution… . I think therefore he had better bring the best he can get. They will be preferable to secondaries of our country because the stature of these is known, whereas those he would bring would be unknown, and would be readily imagined to be the high grade we have calculated on.” In short, the commitment to unalloyed excellence had to be abandoned in favor of at least the appearance of respectability. Poor Gilmer, whose health was destroyed by the trip, eventually returned to America in late 1824 with commitments from five youngish foreign scholars who agreed to come over shortly. Adams suggested mischievously to Jefferson that at least one of these foreigners should be charged with teaching about “the Limits of human knowledge already acquired… , though I suppose you will have doubts of the propriety of setting any limits… on human Wisdom, and human Virtue.” Jefferson chose not to respond. At least, and at last, he had his faculty.95

  Then there was the ardent defender of unbridled freedom of thought and inquiry who was equally ardent about the beneficiaries of such freedom reaching certain universal truths that all could then embrace as self-evident. Jefferson tended to associate restrictions on freedom of thought with religious creeds and doctrinal rules demanded by established churches. One of the most distinctive features of the University of Virginia was its disavowal of any religious affiliation—virtually all the major colleges in the nation up to this time had defined themselves as seminaries for particular denominations or religious sects—and Jefferson went so far as to prohibit the teaching of theology altogether. He was also extremely sensitive to the way boards of trustees at other American colleges, usually dominated by the clergy, imposed restrictions on what could be taught or what books could be read. He was absolutely insistent that his university not succumb to such forms of censorship.

  And he meant it. But his acute sensitivity to religious creeds did not carry over to politics. As he explained to Madison, “there is one branch in which I think we are the best judges,” an area of study so crucial “as to make it a duty in us to lay down the principles which are to be taught.” That area was the study of government, where the Board of Visitors had an obligation to protect tender minds from the treasonable thoughts of “rank Federalists and consolidationists.” Jefferson went on to prepare a list of standard texts to be required in the classes on law and government; his list included the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, the Virginia Resolutions of 1799, and George Washington’s Inaugural and Farewell addresses. Although certain numbers of The Federalist Papers ought to have given Jefferson pause, the list represented his attempt to ensure that the rising generation imbibe the doctrines of republicanism according to Virginia’s version of the American Revolution.96

  Once again, Madison rescued him from his lapse in judgment and called him back to his own first principles. There were political creeds just as there were religious creeds, Madison observed, and Jefferson would not want to impose, albeit inadvertently, his political values in the manner of a priest or pope. Moreover, it was “not easy to find standard books that will be both guides and guards for the purpose.” The Declaration of Independence, for example, could be read in different ways by different people (one of Madison’s most telling and pointed acts of understatement), and Jefferson’s selection of the Virginia Resolutions of 1799, though flattering to Madison himself, who had written them, left much “room for hesitation” because of their “narrow and local focus.” (Madison already sensed danger in these earlier defenses of states’ rights and wished to protect both Jefferson and himself from being appropriated by more militant southern spokesmen.) All in all, the very idea of a required list of readings, Madison concluded, was perhaps misguided. “I have, for your consideration, sketched a modification of the operative passage in your draught,” he noted discreetly, “with a view to relax the absoluteness of its injunction… .” As usual, when Madison talked in this prudent way, Jefferson listened: “I concur with entire satisfaction in your amendment of my resolution.” Despite the founder’s initial instincts, there would be no tests of political faith at Jefferson’s university.97

  There remained, however, an unresolved tension between Jefferson’s vision of the University of Virginia as America’s premier national institution for higher education and the increasingly sectional character of his own thinking. What began as a suitable American alternative to Oxford or Cambridge, where America’s natural aristocracy could be trained for the responsibilities of national leadership, became more provincial as Jefferson’s obsession with a northern “conspiracy of consolidationists” grew more severe. As the buildings in Charlottesville were going up, his own optimistic version of a national university was going down, replaced by a more narrow and defensive sense of his school as a southern fortress where Virginia’s young men could seek refuge from the poisonous environment of Harvard or Yale, which now specialized in producing “fanatics and tories.” Here was yet another manifestation of his “Virginia-writ-large” version of patriotism toward the end.98

  Two truly distinctive features of the university were very much a projection of Jefferson’s personality. First, most of the traditional rules and curricular requirements that governed the operation of all other American colleges were completely abandoned. There were no distinctions among freshmen, sophomores or upperclassmen. Jefferson also wanted “to leave everyone free to attend whatever branches of instruction he wants, and to decline what he does not want.” No specific courses or programs of study were required. It was a wholly elective system, indeed the rejection of any prescribed system at all. Nor was there any separate administration. The school was to be run by the faculty with the cooperation of the students, all overseen by the Board of Visitors. Jefferson was insistent that his university be devoted to the principle of “self government,” which meant that proctors, provosts and even a president were superfluous. When the opportunity arose to attract William Wirt, the renowned biographer of Patrick Henry, as the first professor of law, Jefferson was enthusiastic—that is, until he learned that Wirt’s acceptance was conditional upon his being named president. He blocked the appointment on the ground that his university did not require an executive presence. (In keeping with his wishes, the University of Virginia did not have a president until 1904.) In sum, the internal architecture of Jefferson’s “academical village” was just as original as its physical exterior, and the guiding principle was not classical or Palladian, but rather the removal of all forms of external authority. There was no need for flying buttresses to order or stabilize the interior structure of his university; all meaningful discipline was internalized and invisible. It was the epitome of the Jeffersonian ideal—a society without government.99

  The second distinctively personal feature of his plan for the university used architecture to institutionalize an educational version of domestic intimacy and harmony. At one level the campus plan was designed to replicate the idyllic New England village with its separate but proximate dwellings arranged around a common or green. This scheme maximized both independence
and daily face-to-face encounters among neighbors. It almost certainly grew out of the thinking he had been doing about wards as the primal political and educational units in Virginia, where town meetings and schools were infused with those essential energies available only when participants knew one another in multiple contexts and civic trust, like a natural force, was simply taken for granted. The chief flaw in his ward scheme for education, apart from the legislature’s rejection of the plan as wildly expensive, was that Virginia was demographically different from New England; the population was spread out rather than clustered in towns. Nevertheless, the intimacy and authenticity of social interactions in the village environment appealed to Jefferson enormously as the seminal source of what he was now willing to call “the democratic spirit,” or the civilized version of political purity present in the tribal culture of Indians. Whatever the demographic problems might be in Virginia, his “academical village” would create its own demography. Unlike Oxford or Cambridge, which replicated the Gothic world of castles and drawbridges, or the preferred American collegiate scheme of a single large building, which suggested a fortress or prison, the Jeffersonian school would re-create the autonomous intimacies of the New England village.100

  At yet another level the professors and students were clustered in conjugal units with each professorial house flanked by student dorm rooms along a colonnade. The intent was to create the semblance of a family environment with professors as quasi-parents or guardians. If the village was the idyllic essence of the harmonious society, the family was the essential component of the village, the place or space where mutual affection and familiarity came together and one learned, in all the invisible ways, to internalize discipline. The very design of the three-sided colonnade captured Jefferson’s youthful ideal, which he cherished in his memories of William Small and George Wythe at William and Mary, of the teacher as mentor, friend, personal guardian. It aimed to close the distance, both physically and psychologically, between faculty and students and thereby make learning benefit from the interpersonal dynamics one normally associated with family life in its most affectionate and attractive forms.101

  Though illustrative of Jefferson’s deepest and fondest convictions, this was all pure theory. The more mundane and palpable realities struck with a vengeance in September 1825, when a group of fourteen drunken students rioted, broke windows up and down the colonnade and threatened two faculty members with physical injury. In an inverted version of the honor code, none of the students proved willing to confess his own guilt or testify against his peers. The incident required the calling of a special meeting of the Board of Visitors in October with the eighty-two-year-old Jefferson in the chair. It was quite a scene. The aging patriarch was flanked by Madison and Monroe—the flower of the Virginia dynasty and all former presidents—at a large table in the Rotunda, only recently completed. One of the students, Henry Tutwiler, described what happened. Jefferson rose to address the students. He began by declaring that it was one of the most painful events of his life, but he had not gone far before his feelings overcame him, and he sat down, saying that he would leave to abler hands the task of saying what he wished to say. His own world was falling apart just as he was about to leave it. Even the ideal world of perfect freedom, pure democracy and human affection he thought he had created in Charlottesville refused to cooperate with his expectations. He seemed destined by fate to end up a disappointed idealist.102

  TRAGEDY

  THE LAST FEW months were uniformly sad and grim, punctuated by one final effort to rescue at least a portion of his burdened estate for his heirs and one last and truly defiant display of the inimitable Jeffersonian style. The depth of his indebtedness now defied even his awesome powers of denial, and the looming character of his own death quashed the long-standing illusion that something would turn up before he headed for the hereafter. “To keep a Virginia estate together requires in the owner both skill and attention,” he confided to Monroe, whose own financial prospects were also bleak, but “Skill I never had and attention I could not have, and really when I reflect on all the circumstances my wonder is that I should have been so long as 60 years in reaching the result to which I am now reduced.” He was about $100,000 in debt; in modern equivalents, several million dollars.103

  His one hope was a public lottery, which was officially against the law and therefore required a waiver from the Virginia legislature. If he could get the waiver, however, and if the lottery proved successful, he had some chance of selling off a portion of his estate and retaining Monticello, along with enough land to support his heirs and some fraction of his slave population. In February 1826 he drafted a lengthy petition to the legislature in which he reviewed the earlier history of lotteries in Virginia and—this must have been excruciatingly painful—provided an account of his lengthy public service on behalf of the state and the nation. For a man with Jefferson’s sense of pride and personal honor, it was a truly desperate act justified only by his desperate circumstances. Then the legislature, in a fit of inexplicable ingratitude that also enhanced his embarrassment, denied his petition. “It is part of my mortification,” he confessed to his equally bankrupt son-in-law, “to perceive that I had so far overvalued myself as to have counted on it [the lottery] with too much confidence. I see, in the failure of this hope, a deadly blast of all my peace of mind during my remaining days. You kindly encourage me to keep up my spirits; but, oppressed with disease, debility, age, and embarrassed affairs, this is difficult. For myself I should not regard a prostration of fortune, but I am overwhelmed at the prospect of the situation in which I may leave my family.”104

  A few weeks later, however, Jefferson’s many friends and admirers successfully lobbied the legislature to reverse its decision. The approval of the lottery injected a last ray of hope into his final months of life. (This hope too proved illusory, but Jefferson was not around to face the facts.) He prepared his will in March with the expectation that Monticello would be salvaged from his creditors and some of his land would pass to his heirs. Knowing that the auctioneers would claim many, if not most, of his slaves, he chose to free five members of the Hemings family: Burwell, his personal servant, immediately upon his death; John Hemings and Joe Fossett one year later; Madison and Eston Hemings, sons of Sally, who would be apprenticed to John Hemings until they were twenty-one, then freed. Sally herself was not freed or mentioned in the will.105

  Perhaps buoyed by the false hope that the lottery would rescue him from total ruin, he managed one last burst of bravado in late June, just before his final illness confined him to bed. Officials planning the Independence Day celebrations in Washington invited him to attend the ceremonies honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Jefferson was in no condition to leave his mountaintop, but he agreed to send a written statement. He sensed that this would be his last public utterance, so he mustered up one final surge of energy, correcting and revising his statement with the same attention to detail that he had brought to the original draft of the Declaration and to his First Inaugural. After gracefully regretting his inability to rejoin in Washington “the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election… between submission and the Sword,” he then offered his distilled final rendering of just what the band of worthies had done:

  May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government… . All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of men. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this da
y forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.106

  It was vintage Jefferson: the uplifting vision of the American Revolution as the opening chapter in the global struggle against the entrenched prejudices of the past; the lyrical language, pitched at a height that caused one to look up and feel the inspiration as the head lifted to catch the verbal airbursts. As with his draft of the Declaration, the core idea was not original and never intended to be; Jefferson had been insisting on seeing the Revolution as a liberation movement, a breaking away, for half a century. Again like the Declaration, the felicity of the style was also secondhand, borrowed from a famous speech delivered by Colonel Richard Rumbold on the gallows in 1685 before he was hanged for treason. Rumbold, a crusty Puritan soldier, had coined the phrases about “saddles on their backs” and “a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them” just before he went to his maker. Jefferson owned copies of several English histories that reprinted the Rumbold speech. Perhaps certain phrases had lodged themselves in his memory, then inadvertently leaped into his mind as he wrote. Or perhaps the borrowing was done more consciously, justified on the ground that, like Rumbold, he was a dying man who should be permitted the leeway to claim a favorite piece of eloquence as his own. Whatever the truth, and no matter how personally despondent he was about the prospective fate of his family and his beloved Monticello, Jefferson sounded a triumphant final note that correctly captured his optimistic message to posterity. About the core meaning and the abiding significance of the American Revolution, he had no doubts.107