Seven years younger than Henry, Jefferson, too, was at an unsettled time in his life. After Christmas he visited Chatsworth, the stately manor of Peter Randolph, his mother’s cousin and his guardian. A congenial host and a good mentor, Randolph made time for a frank talk with his guest about his educational plans. As Jefferson understood the situation, he had two possible choices. On one hand, he could stay in the mountains and continue his classical education privately; on the other, he could relocate to Williamsburg and begin attending the College of William and Mary. During their conversation, Randolph expressed hope that Jefferson would attend William and Mary and tried to persuade him that doing so would be to his advantage. Randolph made a good case: Jefferson was convinced. Before packing his bags and his books, however, he needed to secure John Harvie’s permission.
Leaving Chatsworth, he returned to Shadwell, put pen to paper, and outlined his reasons for wanting to attend William and Mary in a carefully worded letter to Harvie. Dated January 14, 1760, this is Jefferson’s earliest known letter, and it reveals that its author was already capable of formulating a brief but persuasive argument. In the manner of a classical oration, the letter describes the problem with the status quo: “In the first place as long as I stay at the Mountains the Loss of one fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company’s coming here and detaining me from School.” Jefferson followed this statement of the problem with an advantage that would accrue were he to attend college: “And likewise my Absence will in great Measure put a Stop to so much Company, and by that Means lessen the Expences of the Estate in House-Keeping.”2
Three months shy of his seventeenth birthday, Jefferson was unwilling to assume the mantle of country gentleman and head of the estate, a position that carried with it much responsibility. The tradition of Southern hospitality was already well ingrained in eighteenth-century Virginia society. Staying at Shadwell, he had no choice save to play host to whomever might visit. Shutting himself indoors with his books was not an option. Far from being a place to retreat from society, the colonial Virginia home was a place to welcome it. Oftentimes a pleasure, hospitality could be a burden, especially for a bookish young man more intent on opening books than throwing open his doors. Whether pleasure or burden, hospitality was an obligation, and Jefferson, like it or not, was the head of the household at Shadwell and therefore compelled to uphold the social customs the position demanded.
Continuing his argument in the letter to Harvie, he supplied another important advantage that would result from attending William and Mary. Living in Williamsburg would bring him much closer to men in power, potential acquaintances who could advance his career regardless which direction it might take: “And on the other Hand by going to the College I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me.” Williamsburg lacked the appearance of a seat of colonial power to more urbane visitors; British traveler-novelist Edward Kimber called it “a most wretched contriv’d Affair for the Capital of a Country, being near three Miles from the Sea, in a bad Situation.”3 Still, it was the place where the governor lived in a handsome home known as the Governor’s Palace, where the two legislative branches—the Virginia Council and the House of Burgesses—met, where the General Court convened, and where young men from many of Virginia’s most well-to-do families attended college.
William and Mary had been founded in 1693, but wealthy Virginia planters remained prejudiced against the college during the early decades of its existence. They believed that the only way for their sons to obtain a good education was for them to attend Oxford or Cambridge and, if destined for the legal profession, the Inns of Court. By sending their sons to England, however, Virginia parents were putting them at risk. Maria Byrd, the widow of William Byrd II, for instance, considered sending her only son to England to complete his education, and even began planning the trip, but ultimately decided against it. As she wrote a friend, “I thought again he would certainly get the Small-Pox, which is most terrible fatal to those who are born in America, and that I should be accessory to his Death.”4 Many colonial Virginia parents, on the other hand, decided the benefits of an English education outweighed the potential risks and shipped their more-than-willing sons across the ocean.
Toward the mid-eighteenth century, Virginia planters began questioning the value of a British education yet sometimes remained unconvinced of the value of William and Mary. Making his will in 1745, William Randolph, for one, stipulated his educational plans for his son: “And my will further is that my son, Thomas Mann Randolph, shall not be educated at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, nor sent to England on any account whatever, but my executors shall keep a private tutor for his education.”5 Because Randolph chose Peter Jefferson as his principle executor, he obviously put greater stock in the judgment of a loyal and trustworthy friend than in the uncertain influences his son might encounter in college either at home or abroad.
Though the curriculum did not change drastically, over time attitudes toward the kind of education that William and Mary could provide became increasingly positive. Undergraduate students continued to take classes in two main branches of learning, moral philosophy and natural philosophy, and classes continued to be taught primarily by ordained Anglican ministers. What did change was Virginians’ attitude toward the land where they made their homes: they came to appreciate their local college for many of the same reasons colonial Americans generally came to appreciate their unique society.
Preference for William and Mary increased as more and more young men who had been sent to England for their education returned to Virginia with a number of bad habits yet without visible intellectual improvement. Originally, John Page’s father had planned to send him to England for his education but changed his mind because “several Virginians, about this time, had returned from that place (where we were told learning alone existed) so inconceivably illiterate, and also corrupted and vicious, that he swore no son of his should ever go there, in quest of an education.”6 Instead, he enrolled his son in the grammar school at William and Mary. Upon finishing his course of studies at the grammar school, John remained at William and Mary and entered the undergraduate program the same time Jefferson did.
Later in the century Jefferson became one of the most strident advocates of a local, American education over a European one. He often articulated his confidence in the American educational system. His stay in Paris during the 1780s confirmed the superiority of an American education to his mind. In a letter to Walker Maury, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, the Reverend James Maury, and became both minister and teacher, Jefferson wrote, “Of all the errors which can possibly be committed in the education of youth, that of sending them to Europe is the most fatal. I see clearly that no American should come to Europe under 30 years of age: and he who does, will lose in science, in virtue, in health and in happiness, for which manners are a poor compensation.”7
Jefferson continued thinking about the subject and further developed his ideas in a letter to John Bannister, Jr. Written the same year as the letter to Walker Maury, this letter constitutes one of the most spirited defenses of American education ever written. Jefferson enumerated the disadvantages of a European education at length:
Let us view the disadvantages of sending a youth to Europe. To enumerate them all, would require a volume. I will select a few. If he goes to England he learns drinking, horse racing and boxing. These are the peculiarities of English education. The following circumstances are common to education in that and the other countries of Europe. He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country; he is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees with abhorrence the lovely equality which the poor enjoys with the rich in his own country: he contracts a partiality for aristocracy or monarchy; he forms foreign friendships which will never be useful to him, and loses the seasons of life for forming in his own country those friendships which of all others are
the most faithful and permanent.8
This last idea, that an American education will allow the student to form useful, life-long friendships, echoes one of the original arguments Jefferson made in the letter to John Harvie. Concluding his comments to Bannister, he recommended: “Cast your eye over America: who are the men of most learning, of most eloquence, most beloved by their country and most trusted and promoted by them? They are those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals and habits are perfectly homogenous with those of the country.”9
Jefferson concluded his argument to Harvie by projecting how William and Mary would affect his personal education: “I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.” This, the only comment in the letter regarding possible areas of study, suggests that Jefferson did not put much stock in the college’s curriculum. He was primarily interested in continuing his linguistic studies, but William and Mary offered no advanced courses in the ancient languages, which were taught only in the grammar school.
Detailing the admission process to the undergraduate program at William and Mary, the college statutes stipulated that applicants should be tested to determine “whether they have made due progress in their Latin and Greek. …And let no Blockhead or lazy Fellow in his Studies be elected.”10 Because students were expected to have a reading knowledge of Latin and Greek before they started working toward bachelor’s degrees, the study of languages was not part of the undergraduate curriculum. Whatever additional linguistic studies Jefferson wished to pursue, he would pursue on his own. In the letter to Harvie, he appears intent on continuing the educational program in classical learning he had developed with James Maury’s help regardless what coursework the college might offer. Jefferson was looking for a quiet place where he could study without being disturbed, where he could free himself from the social demands placed on him at Shadwell. His willingness to learn more about mathematics comes as an afterthought to his main argument.
He made a good case: Harvie was convinced and gave his consent. Two months later, Jefferson left Shadwell for Williamsburg. Travelers’ accounts provide a good indication of how Williamsburg appeared around the time of his arrival. A Frenchman visiting Virginia called William and Mary a very fine college that made a grand appearance. Elaborating his general description of Williamsburg, this traveler interjected some irony as he noticed that while Bruton Parish Church, where Jefferson attended services, was on one side of the Duke of Gloucester Street, the powder magazine was right across the street.11
Andrew Burnaby, a British traveler who had arrived in Williamsburg shortly before Jefferson, penned a good description of the city. Burnaby found it “regularly laid out in parallel streets, intersected by others at right angles” with “a handsome square in the center, through which runs the principal street, one of the most spacious in North America, three quarters of a mile in length, and above a hundred feet wide. At the opposite ends of this street are two public buildings, the college and the capitol: and although the houses are of wood, covered with shingles, and but indifferently built, the whole makes a handsome appearance.”12
Impressed with the Duke of Gloucester Street, Burnaby remained condescending toward the city as a whole. His negativity is understandable. After all, he saw Williamsburg with the eyes of a worldly traveler. Depicting Williamsburg after he had become a little more urbane, Jefferson would describe its buildings in a similar manner. Yet, as a new college student, he saw it differently: Williamsburg was the largest and finest city he had ever seen.
On Tuesday, March 25, Thomas Jefferson matriculated at William and Mary. The detailed weather records from the period kept by Francis Fauquier, lieutenant governor of Virginia, and appended to Burnaby’s Travels indicate that the skies were a little cloudy as Jefferson headed to class that day, but warmer weather appeared imminent. The northeast winds that had brought snow a few days earlier had now shifted to the southeast, and the temperature would climb into the fifties early this afternoon. In short, it was the kind of pleasant spring day that might render study difficult for a less serious college student, but not for young Jefferson.
William and Mary was divided into four schools: the Grammar School; the Philosophy School, which provided the undergraduate education leading to the baccalaureate; the Divinity School, which offered the college’s only graduate training; and the Indian School, which, with marginal success, sought to educate Native American youth. The Philosophy School had two professors: one took charge of moral philosophy, while the other taught natural philosophy. The statutes of the college—updated just two years before Jefferson matriculated—included such subjects as physics, metaphysics, and mathematics under the general rubric of natural philosophy.
The biggest change made when the statutes were revised involved the amount of time required to earn a bachelor’s degree. Formerly, it had taken only two years. In order to align William and Mary more closely with Oxford and Cambridge, the college administrators, known collectively as the board of visitors, raised the degree requirement to four years. The change did not necessarily mean that students received a more extensive education. Instead, it meant that more students left the college without taking a degree.
William and Mary had experienced a significant faculty turnover two years before Jefferson’s arrival. In 1758, new masters were installed in the Grammar and Philosophy Schools. Goronwy Owen had become Master of the Grammar School. This name may mean little to students of American literature, but Owen is a major figure in the literary history of Wales. The poetry he began writing in the early 1750s marked the revival of traditional Welsh verse forms. In 1755 he became secretary of the Cymmrodorion Society of London, which encouraged other Welsh poets to continue the revival. Owen dreamed of writing a Welsh epic in the manner of Milton yet never fulfilled the dream.
An ordained minister in the Church of England, he had less success in his professional career than in his avocation as poet. Unable to find a place in Wales, he worked in a series of positions as curate and schoolmaster in England, receiving little respect or remuneration. His fondness for drink did not help his professional career. When the fairly lucrative position at William and Mary became available in 1757, Owen obtained the post and arranged passage for himself and his family. Sadly, his wife and one of his three children died on the voyage, and Owen reached Williamsburg a sad and broken man.
As a student in the Philosophy School, Jefferson did not take courses with Owen, but he could have become acquainted with him. Owen had been John Page’s teacher in the Grammar School; once Page was promoted to the Philosophy School and became Jefferson’s good friend and classmate, he may have introduced him to Owen. Jefferson traced his ancestral roots back to Wales. Given this heritage and his growing interest in the study of languages, he was poised to make the acquaintance of a leading authority of classical Welsh verse. An entry in Jefferson’s legal commonplace book, written a half dozen years later, reveals his ongoing interest in the Welsh language. He noted a case from Robert Raymond’s Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, in which the propriety of the Welsh language in British courts of law came under dispute.
An expert linguist, Owen had a fine personal library that included nearly two hundred volumes, most quite old and in such languages as French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Welch. Owen’s Welsh books included a number of devotional manuals, Theophilus Evans’s history of the early Welsh church, and John Davies’s dictionary, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae. A standard through much of the seventeenth century, Davies’s work was ultimately surpassed by Thomas Jones’s dictionary, The British Language in Its Lustre; or, A Copious Dictionary of Welsh and English. Even as he compiled an extensive Welsh vocabulary, Jones reflected a sense of nostalgia for the language, which seemed to be passing into the realm of ancient tongues.13 Eventually, a copy of Jones’s Welsh dictionary would find its way to the shelves of Jefferson’s library.
The same year Goronwy Owen became head of the grammar school at William and Mary, the Reverend Jacob Rowe began serving as Professor of Moral Philosophy, taking over the position from Richard Graham, who had been dismissed earlier. More important, William Small assumed the position as Professor of Natural Philosophy. Rowe had received an excellent education, having earned his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1755. He was ordained by the Bishop of London and may have served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy before coming to William and Mary. During his first year at the college, he established a reputation for his outspokenness. As a clergyman, he was among those parsons displeased with the Two-Penny Act and was unafraid to make his displeasure public. Joking that some burgesses should be hanged for passing the Act, Rowe declared that he would deny the sacraments to any burgess who voted in its favor. His words provoked their ire, and the House of Burgesses forced him to apologize for such untoward remarks.
Less that six months after Jefferson matriculated, further indiscretions on Professor Rowe’s part prompted his departure from the college. Rowe’s irascible nature and Owen’s drink-induced lapses in judgment prompted the two professors to play leading roles in a riot between the college students and the young men of Williamsburg. Required by the college statutes to be exemplary in terms of learning, morality, observance of discipline, orderliness, piety, prudence, and sobriety, Rowe and Owen had clearly violated the conditions of their employment. Rowe was summarily dismissed; Owen was allowed to resign and subsequently became rector of St. Andrew’s Parish in Brunswick County in southern Virginia, where he remained until his death in 1769. Rowe left no lasting impression on Jefferson, whose reminiscences of his college days make no mention of him.
The Road to Monticello Page 7