VI
In his sixth annual message, Mr. Jefferson proposed the establishment of a national university, to which the élite of the whole land, according to his selective theory of public education, might resort. He suggested, though he did not precisely recommend, that this institution should get its supporting revenue from land-grants, remarking that if Congress thought it should be maintained in this way, “they have it now in their power to endow it with those [lands] which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income.” He also made the interesting observation that land is the one and only imperishable security, in an economic sense, and that the income from land-values is the only one whose continuity can be relied on in all emergencies. “This foundation would have the advantage of being independent on war, which may suspend other improvements by requiring for its own purposes the resources destined for them.” This project, however, came to nothing. It was by no means popular; “people generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education.” Since the public did not much insist on it, Congress did not move in the matter. The characteristic which John Bright remarked of the British Parliament in particular, is common to legislative bodies in general; they sometimes do a good thing, but never do one merely because it is a good thing. Mr. Jefferson was aware of this. “A forty years experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take.” He therefore neither pressed the matter upon Congress, nor made it an issue of popular agitation. “There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind,” he observed to Joel Barlow, “under which we must acquiesce. . . . If too hard pushed, they balk.”
But one could always “set a good example”—indeed, perhaps, people are more effectively attracted by the force of example into the support of a great reform, than argued, browbeaten or legislated into it. If the nation were not ready to establish a university, Virginia might be; so, on his retirement from the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson took up the project of a State university as “the last object for which I shall obtrude myself on the public observation.” William and Mary would not answer the purpose under any kind of re-organization and renovation. As it stood, it was “just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it”—that is, its original constitution as a part of the establishment of the Church of England, which made it an object of immitigable jealousy on the part of other sects. It should be left as it was; the extension of the frontier some three hundred miles from tidewater, and the consequent shift of the centre of population, called for a new institution, “not disturbing the old one in its possessions or functions, but leaving them unimpaired for the benefit of those for whom it is convenient.” Again, Mr. Jefferson’s own personal recollections of Devilsburg reminded him that the town was “eccentric in its position, exposed to all bilious diseases, as all the lower country is,” and therefore it was by way of being progressively abandoned by all who could do so, “as that part of the country itself is in a considerable degree by its inhabitants.”
On the whole, the project went better than one could have expected. The Legislature of Virginia contemplated it with circumspection and diffidence, but, stimulated by the force of a considerable private subscription, rather gingerly endorsed it and made an initial appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars a year for its support. Mr. Jefferson made a felicitous choice of terms in describing his own relation to the new institution; he was the “father of the University of Virginia.” He was its architect; he superintended its physical structure; he laid down its lines of organization and educational policy, and directed the assembling of its faculty. These preliminaries occupied six years, and the cost of construction so far exceeded all estimates and expectations as to put Mr. Jefferson in impregnable character as a first-rate architect, and also to arouse an immense amount of dissatisfaction which was promptly turned to account by those to whom, on other grounds, the project was distasteful.
Nearly all the professors were foreigners, the intention being “that its professors shall be of the first order in their respective lines, which can be procured on either side of the Atlantic.” This objective view was held to imply a disparagement of sound Americanism. The University, moreover, had no official connexion with organized Christianity and no chair of divinity, which gave unlimited range for the odium theologicum on the part of what Edmund Burke so well called “the dissidence of Dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.” The red rag thus deliberately unfolded was then as deliberately flourished in the face of sectarian ecclesiasticism by the appointment of Dr. Cooper to a professorship. No one could deny that Dr. Cooper was a man of first-rate ability, reputation and character. But he had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act; his patriotism, good enough for Mr. Jefferson, good enough for James Madison, good enough for the University’s Board of Visitors, had not been good enough to serve, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Besides, he was a friend of the arch-heretic, Dr. Joseph Priestley, and might possibly, even probably, be a Unitarian! This was too much. All the hard, dogged, unintelligent inveteracy of official Protestantism promptly dug up the tomahawk and went on the warpath after Dr. Cooper, nor did it rest from its militant vindication of the true faith until the appointment had been cancelled.
Mr. Jefferson wrote John Cartwright, the stout old British reformer, that there were “some novelties in the University of Virginia. . . . They will be founded in the rights of man.” To the French philosopher, Destutt Tracy, he wrote that “this institution of my native State, the hobby of my old age, will be based on. the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.” In choosing a law-professor, he wrote Madison, “we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles,” in order that the student might assess “the honied Mansfieldism of Black-stone,” under whose influence all the younger lawyers had already begun to “slide into toryism,” not as a matter of logical conviction or intellectual persuasion, but through mere darkenings of counsel, supposing themselves all the time, indeed, “to be whigs, because they no longer know what whiggism or republicanism means!”
One can hardly wonder, therefore, that the University was not a commanding project with the Legislature or the people, and that appropriations sometimes stopped and at all times came hard. One wonders rather that it fared as well as it did, dedicated so explicitly to the satisfaction of non-existent wants and to the promotion of purposes in which no one had any particular interest. Indulgence of this respectable old man and his phrases about the rights of man and freedom of the human mind, his pre-occupation with a sterile nominalism, should be exemplary and to a degree punctilious, but obviously it could not be carried on forever. “The attempt ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views and so much ignorance, and I have been considered as so particularly its promoter, that I see evidently a great change of sentiment towards myself.” Well, but if one will dance, one must pay the piper—it is only fair that one should pay. Mr. Jefferson was a distinguished man, an excellent man —a great man, if you like—but the fact remained that he had always been persistently on the side of some wholly impossible loyalty. He had always been against a hierarchy, against primogeniture and entail, against monopoly, against speculation, against every incentive, in short, which keeps alive the spirit of enterprise in the development of a great land of opportunity. Now, in the organization of the University of Virginia, he was proposing in a sense to institutionalize the spirit of his own life and of its heterodox philosophy and undertakings. Really, with the best will in the world and the utmost imaginable tolerance, what was one to do?
Yet the maintenance of the University was never too seriously threatened. “I can not doubt its having dissatisfied with myself a respectable minority, if not a majority, of the House of Delegates”; but even so, the indisposition towards Mr. Jefferson did not obscure the advantage of possessing his traditio
n. Certain traditions have great power of prepossession, even if they be not followed; indeed, much of the usefulness of a tradition is in the fact that it need only be possessed, not followed. In time the University of Virginia would swing out of the shoals and backwaters of obsolescence, and into the current of a progressive national life. Meanwhile, and even afterwards, the tradition of Mr. Jefferson would have value; even his glossary of words and phrases would have great value. Much could be done with them, even if one were not always precisely clear about their meanings and connotations. “The scope of words is wide,” said Homer; “words may tend this way or that way.”
The first professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Virginia was a very young Englishman by the name of George Long. He served but a short time, and then returned to take a similar post in his own country. There was perhaps some significance, perhaps only coincidence, but at all events a singular and felicitous fitness, in the fact that in his old age Mr. Long made the translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that is probably definitive. For many years those English readers who knew no Greek and who yet have gained a satisfying view of perhaps the most exquisite figure in human history, have gained it through the work of Mr. Long.
1 It is impossible to resist quoting the portion of this “crazy letter” which deals with the celebrated Mlle, de l’Espinasse. One hears in it the voice of the best in a culture which sought its end so largely “through a process of moral reasoning,” speaking to the best in a culture which sought the same end through the practice of taste and manners. This may be the place to say also that whoever wishes disinterestedly to know what manner of men John Adams and Mr. Jefferson were, can not do better than begin with their correspondence of 1812-1826. This alone will carry a reader a long way, if he has any literary experience and a fair power of constructive imagination. Unhappily, this correspondence is as yet only to be picked out piecemeal from the standard volumes of “collected works.” The Bobbs-Merrill Company deserves praise for a thin volume of extracts put out lately under the editorship of Mr. Paul Wilstach. As far as it goes, it could probably not be improved, but it goes only far enough to remind a reader of Oliver Twist’s rations in the workhouse and the paternalism of Mr. Bumble. Perhaps the recent increase of interest in the literature of that period will touch the flinty heart of some publisher and induce him to let the world once more see, in accessible and convenient form, the best that the period could do,
February 23, 1819.
“As you were so well acquainted with the philosophers of France, I presume the name and character of Mlle, de l’Espinasse is not unknown to you.
“I have almost put my eyes out by reading two volumes of her letters, which, as they were printed in 1809, I presume you have read long ago. I confess I have never read anything with more ennui, disgust and loathing; the eternal repetition of mon Dieu and mon ami, je vous aime, je vous aime éperdùment, je vous aime à la folie, je suis au désespoir, j’espère la mort, je suis morte, je f rends l’opium, etc., etc.
“She was constantly in love with other women’s husbands, constantly violating her fidelity to her own keepers, constantly tormented with remorse and regrets, constantly wishing for death, and constantly threatening to put herself to death, etc., etc., etc. Yet this great lady was the confidential friend of M. Turgot, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, the Duchess d’Enville, M. Condorcet, the only lady who was admitted to the dinners which Mme. Geoffrin made for the literati of France and the world, the intimate friend of Mme. Boufflers, the open, acknowledged mistress of the great d’Alembert, and much admired by Marmontel.
“If these letters and the fifteen volumes of de Grimm are to give me an idea of the amelioration of society and government and manners for France, I should think the Age of Reason had produced nothing better than the Mahometans, the Mamelukes or the Hindoos, or the North American Indians have produced in different parts of the world.”
Chapter VIII
ADVESPERASCIT
I
WHEN he left the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson was about twenty thousand dollars in debt. His own Embargo Act had hit him hard, in common with all agrarian producers. He had accepted certain obligations of others, in addition to his own, some for his son-in-law, Martha’s husband, who had sunk into despondency and inertness, and some for a friend as unfortunate as himself. Hence his later years were a continuous and unsuccessful struggle against insolvency. In a normal market, his property would have come to a total value of perhaps two hundred thousand dollars; enough to make him feel, by any kind of reasonable expectation, that his debts were not excessive, and that they were well secured—“not beyond the effect of some lopping of property,” as he wrote Madison, “which would have been but little felt.” But there is never a normal market for a forced sale. He even believed that in time he could have paid his debts out of income, “had crops and prices for several years been such as to maintain a steady competition of substantial bidders,” and it is just possible that he might have done so. But by 1825 the screws had been put hard down on the agrarian; “a long succession of unfruitful years, long-continued low prices, oppressive tariffs levied on other branches (of industry) to maintain that of manufactures, . . . calamitous fluctuations in the value of our circulating medium . . . had been long undermining the state of agriculture.” This kind of thing was already an old story. Besides, the rich new lands of the West stood in desolating competition with the relatively poor, mismanaged and largely exhausted lands of Virginia. Aside from use-value, too, since the government permitted unlimited private ownership in these new lands and in whatever resources of minerals and timber they might be found to contain, they held out the lure of an incalculable speculative value. This also was an old story in the year 1825.
Mr. Jefferson had already sold his library. When the first Congressional Library was burned by the British in 1814, he offered his books to Congress at their own price, as the nucleus of a new collection. The Congress behaved a good deal better about this, on the whole, than one would expect. They wrangled a good deal. It was said that some of Mr. Jefferson’s books were of an immoral and atheistical tendency. They had been told that his library contained one book at least, maybe more, by a man named John Locke, and something by another man named Rousseau, who was thought to be a Frenchman. These were reputed to be subversive, perhaps specifically, perhaps only in a general way—they were under suspicion, at allevents—and it would be a matter of evil example for the Congress to buy them and make them accessible. Furthermore, many of Mr. Jefferson’s books were printed in foreign languages, and therefore of no use whatever to the members of Congress. Still, for some reason, there was a good deal of public feeling in favour of the purchase; the newspapers had been very strong about it. So it was finally decided that if the library could be had at something under half price, it would probably be about the fair thing all round, and the purchase might be made. The Congress accordingly appraised the library at a little under twenty-four thousand dollars; Mr. Jefferson accepted the offer and never permitted himself to comment upon it. He threw in a catalogue and a classification for good measure, gratis; and his classification remained in official use in the Library of Congress for seventy-five years.
This transaction was closed in 1815. Within the next ten years, things went into such desperate straits that in 1826—within two months of eighty-three, within six months of death, and with the responsibility of several dependents—Mr. Jefferson faced the prospect of being turned out of doors. He had only landed property, and everywhere in Virginia this had “lost the character of being a resource for debts.” Buyers were few, at best; and those who might buy held off for a bottom price, knowing that the sale was forced. In these circumstances, he thought of putting a fair valuation on his property, and disposing of it by lottery. This was a regular practice, “often resorted to before the Revolution to effect large sales, and still in constant use in every State for individual as well as corporation purposes.” But the Legislature of Virginia had
taken over the licensing and regulation of lotteries, which made it necessary to move for the passage of a special Act. There was no alternative, nothing else to do. “If it is permitted in my case,” he wrote Madison, “my lands here alone, with the mills, etc., will pay everything and leave me Monticello and a farm, free. If refused, I must sell everything here, and perhaps considerably in Bedford, move thither with my family where I have not even a log hut to put my head into, and whether ground for burial, will depend on the depredations which, under the name of sales, shall have been committed on my property.”
He accepted the bitter choice of appealing to the Legislature. There were great searchings of heart about the propriety of his proposals. Lotteries were immoral, somewhat like games of chance with cards or dice. They were immoral because they offered something for nothing, which was really gambling, and gambling was wrong—wrong in a broad general sense, that is, and admitting certain definite exceptions, like transactions in stocks and governmental securities, and holding land for a rise. The Legislature had grave doubts; the moral and religious sentiment of the State was very sensitive on the subject of lotteries, and this sentiment was probably sound. Its soundness or unsoundness was of little practical moment, however, for an unsound sentiment expresses itself at the polls as effectively as a sound one. Something should be done for Mr. Jefferson, no doubt. Perhaps he might accept a loan from the Treasury, of eighty thousand dollars, without interest, for the rest of his life. This could be managed; the proposer of this alternative might take it up tactfully with Mr. Jefferson, and see how he felt about it.
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