The following year Jefferson began an important scientific correspondence. Five years earlier, he had learned about a promising young Florentine named Giovanni Fabbroni from their mutual friend, Philip Mazzei, and had tried to persuade Fabbroni to relocate to Monticello to become music master and tutor to his children. Mazzei had written Fabbroni, telling him that Jefferson was waiting for him with open arms. Mazzei encouraged Fabbroni to come to Virginia by emphasizing the wisdom and friendship Jefferson and his neighbors possessed.9
After receiving Mazzei’s letter, Fabbroni wrote Jefferson directly, telling him that he wanted very much to come. Influenced by Mazzei’s encouraging words, he imagined Virginia as a fine, fertile country populated with warm-hearted inhabitants. But before he could accept the offer, he came under the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who magnanimously assigned him the task of traveling to France and England to observe scientific progress in each nation. Though deprived of an amply qualified tutor for his children, Jefferson was pleased to have such an intelligent and well-connected correspondent.
The letter he wrote Fabbroni in mid-1778 offers a glimpse into his mindset as work on the revision of the Virginia laws was entering its late stages. Since Fabbroni had heard all sorts of horrific stories about the war, Jefferson allayed his concerns, assuring him that the danger of war had largely passed: “From the kind anxiety expressed in your letters as well as from other sources of information we discover that our enemies have filled Europe with Thrasonic accounts of victories they had never won and conquests they were fated never to make.” Calming Fabbroni, Jefferson indulged in some Thrasonic fervor himself as he boasted that Americans, especially those from Virginia, possessed a “superiority in taking aim when we fire; every soldier in our army having been intimate with his gun from his infancy.”10 Though written to encourage Fabbroni to immigrate to Virginia, Jefferson’s words reveal how much he was distancing himself from current events. To him, Monticello was becoming an idyllic retreat completely separated from the dangers of war.
Thoughts of Italy brought music to Jefferson’s ears, and he spent much of this letter voicing his musical inclinations. Writing to an accomplished Italian, he expressed his love of music in terms of passion, jealousy, and fantasy: “If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” Ingratiating himself to his new correspondent, Jefferson confessed to Fabbroni one of his domestic fantasies: to have a workforce of skilled craftsmen at Monticello who were also fine musicians. Each would play a different instrument: a tutor who could sing and play the harpsichord, a gardener who could play the French horn, a cabinetmaker on clarinet, a weaver on bassoon, and a stonecutter on hautboy or oboe. Dreaming of an oboe-playing stonecutter, Jefferson was further distancing himself from the war as he imagined himself in a music-lover’s paradise.
Jefferson offered Fabbroni the opportunity to correspond on any and all scientific matters, including meteorology. He explained how he was keeping track of local weather conditions. In June 1778, he expanded the scope of his weather data significantly. To the morning and afternoon temperature readings he had been keeping, he now added barometer readings. In his records, he placed the temperature and barometer readings in an initial set of columns and devised a second set of columns to record other pertinent data twice daily, early morning—the same time he took the temperature—and sunset. Jefferson planned to measure wind velocity and rainfall, too. He made space in his weather record for additional columns to list the appearance of buds, leaves, fruit, birds, and insects—the kinds of information he had been including in his Garden Book. He also made room for a miscellaneous column to note unusual aspects of the climate.
Less than a week after beginning the expanded weather records, Jefferson recorded a near total eclipse of the sun. His brief entry obscures the amount of effort that went into the observation of this eclipse within Virginia’s scientific community. Beforehand, Jefferson had arranged with John Page and the Reverend James Madison to observe the phenomenon from different locations and to compare their notes after the event. The day turned out to be cloudy and his equipment inadequate, so Jefferson was disappointed with his results: he did not see the eclipse until the moon had already covered a third of the sun’s disk. Thereafter, clouds interfered with the eclipse off and on throughout its duration.
Observing it in Williamsburg, Madison and Page also experienced a cloudy morning that hindered their initial findings. Happily for them, the clouds broke before the eclipse became total, and the two had a very good view of it. Describing the totality of the eclipse, Madison wrote, “There was really something awful in the Appearance which all Nature assumed. You could not determine your most intimate Acquaintance at 20 yds. distance. Lightening Buggs were seen as at Night.”11
Frustrated by his efforts to observe the eclipse, Jefferson renewed contact with David Rittenhouse, who had promised to make him an accurate clock for taking astronomical observations. He had met Rittenhouse in Philadelphia and had been impressed with his scientific genius. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson applauded Rittenhouse and the orrery he had created: “We have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught. As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed made a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day.”12
The letter to Rittenhouse may start as a discussion of astronomical instruments, but by the time it ends, it turns into a treatise on the relationship between genius and governance. People who have a capacity to govern have the responsibility to govern. This rule was not hard and fast: Jefferson acknowledged an important exception. Those who possess true genius should be exempt from governmental responsibility regardless of their administrative abilities. Explaining his ideas to Rittenhouse, Jefferson took Sir Isaac Newton for example: “No body can conceive that nature ever intended to throw away a Newton upon the occupations of a crown. It would have been a prodigality for which even the conduct of providence might have been arraigned, had he been by birth annexed to what was so far below him.” Rittenhouse himself, Jefferson continued, offered another good example. Surely, anyone with the capacity to design and construct precise astronomical instruments capable of mapping the heavens should be exempt from governmental administration. Natural genius is “intended for the erudition of the world, like air and light” and should not be “taken from their proper pursuit to do the commonplace drudgery of governing a single state, a work which may be executed by men of an ordinary stature, such as are always and every where to be found.”13 Genius deserves recognition.
Though Jefferson said little about his efforts to revise the laws of Virginia in the letter to Rittenhouse, the ideas concerning natural genius he articulated significantly shaped his composition of the laws, specifically those concerning public education. In addition to the bills regarding religious freedom and crime and punishment, Jefferson’s bills concerning education are the most important ones he drafted as part of the revision of the laws of Virginia.
Clustered together in the Report of the Committee of Revisors, three bills specifically concern the matter of education: “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” “A Bill for Amending the Constitutions of the College of William and Mary, and Substituting More Certain Revenues for Its Support,” and “A Bill for Establishing a Public Library.” Though all three encountered opposition from the legislature, each exerted an influence on the development of public education in Virginia and across the United States.
On December 15, 1778, the House of Delegates gave leave for the presentation of the first of these three bills. Richard Parker and George Mason were ordered to prepare “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” for present
ation. After Parker presented the bill the following day, many of the delegates were impressed with its purpose, scope, and design. To make Virginians throughout the state aware of these new ideas regarding public education, the House ordered that the public printer issue the bill and distribute four copies of it to each county. Despite the order, the bill was not printed at that time. Nevertheless, word of it got around and sparked much talk about education.
Two days after Parker presented the bill before the House, Jefferson wrote Edmund Pendleton to inform him of its general purpose. Jefferson’s letter does not survive, but Pendleton’s response indicates what Jefferson had written. Catching his friend’s enthusiasm, Pendleton reused Jefferson’s words, telling him, “I have been impatient to see what you call your Quixotism for the diffusion of knowledge, a passion raised by its title and its being yours.”14 Jefferson as an educational Don Quixote: the image fits. He had great dreams for his country and the improvement of its people. Trying to get these bills through the Virginia legislature, he may have been chasing windmills, but he was going to try anyway.
Jefferson recognized that an educated citizenry was the best way to guarantee and perpetuate democracy. The preamble to this bill his editors have called “one of the classic statements of the responsibility of the state in matters of education.”15 Jefferson himself called the bill the most important of all those they drafted: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.”16 Though some forms of government are better than others when it comes to protecting individual freedoms, those people entrusted with power, even in the best of governments, can pervert it into tyranny. The surest way to prevent such tyrannical usurpation of democracy, Jefferson understood, would be to enlighten the minds of the people and give them a knowledge of history, making them aware of the experiences of others from different times and places and thus enabling them to recognize and overcome dangerous ambition regardless what form it takes.
To guarantee just laws, a nation needs wise and honest people to carry them out. A well-designed educational scheme would allow those citizens “whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue” to emerge as natural leaders and be trained for leadership or, in Jefferson’s words, to be “rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” A proper educational scheme would make sure future leaders are “called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.”17 In short, all citizens deserved an education at public expense, and the new nation deserved a well-educated citizenry.
Jefferson projected two levels of schooling: an elementary school and a grammar school. Each elementary school would teach reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. In the course of learning how to read, children could be taught other subjects simultaneously. Traditionally, American children had learned to read by reading the Bible. In a system of public education, children should learn to read by reading history. Clarifying his scheme for primary education in the Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson observed that since “the principle foundations for future order” would be laid in these primary schools, what students read is crucial: “Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history.”18 The books we read as children stick with us all our lives. Jefferson sought to establish a habit of history reading among all children, a habit that would shape their thought and encourage them to continue reading throughout their lives.
The bill stipulated that all free children, male and female, within a school district were “intitled to receive tuition gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians or friends, shall think proper.”19 Aware that mandating a completely public system of education throughout all grades was much too giant a step for contemporary legislators to take, Jefferson projected a modified form that combined public and private education: the state would support the education of all students for the first three years, and parents would take the responsibility afterward. Jefferson did provide a mechanism whereby bright students from poor families could further their education and proceed to the grammar school: each September, elementary school students would be examined, and the top student whose parents were too poor to afford further education would proceed to the local grammar school to be educated and boarded at public expense.
After this bill was presented to the House of Delegates, news of Jefferson’s plan for public education circulated around Virginia and generated enthusiasm among educators. Samuel Stanhope Smith, then rector of Hampden-Sydney Academy and later president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), applauded the scheme. Though not personally acquainted with Jefferson, Smith initiated a correspondence with him to encourage his educational plans. Smith wrote, “The nature of the design must recommend it to every lover of learning and of his country; the idea was greatly imagined; and the whole plan bears an impression of the wisdom of antiquity, when legislation and philosophy were always connected, and but different parts of the same sage characters.”20 Smith did have some reservations about specific aspects of Jefferson’s proposed educational scheme, but in general he was quite supportive.
With “A Bill for Amending the Constitutions of the College of William and Mary, and Substituting More Certain Revenues for Its Support,” Jefferson proposed to take the college away from the Anglican Church and make it a state institution. As he summarized the present situation of the college, it “was an establishment purely of the Church of England, the Visitors were required to be all of that Church; the Professors to subscribe its 39 Articles, its Students to learn its Catechism, and one of its fundamental objects was declared to be to raise up Ministers for that church.”21
Of the four different schools within William and Mary, Jefferson wanted to eliminate three. His scheme for a statewide system of grammar schools obviated the need for a grammar school at the college. Making the college a public institution rendered the divinity school inappropriate given the separation of church and state essential to any successful democracy. The Indian school, which had never been very effective in its purpose of educating and christianizing Native Americans, should also be eliminated.
The main reason Jefferson gave in the bill for improving the quality of higher education was much the same as the reason for mandating public education: to guarantee good governance.
The late change in the form of our government, as well as the contest of arms in which we are at present engaged, calling for extraordinary abilities both in council and field, it becomes the peculiar duty of the Legislature, at this time, to aid and improve that seminary, in which those who are to be the future guardians of the rights and liberties of their country may be endowed with science and virtue, to watch and preserve the sacred deposit.22
The bill stipulated that the college curricula be greatly expanded. Altogether Jefferson imagined eight professorships:
Moral Philosophy, the Laws of Nature and of Nations, and of the Fine
Arts
Law and Police
History, Civil and Ecclesiastical
Mathematics
Anatomy and Medicine
Natural Philosophy and Natural History
Ancient Languages, Oriental and Northern
Modern Languages
Providing for two professorships concerning the law, Jefferson imagined one devoted to law enforcement and the other to legal theory. Putting the professor of natural law also in charge of moral philosophy and art, Jefferson confirmed ideas he articulated elsewhere: law, like art, must follow nature, and the study of law should be tempered by a knowledge of art and literature. Jefferson greatly expanded the linguistic curriculum to include the study of Anglo-Saxon as well as Oriental languages, by which he
meant Arabic and Hebrew.
What Jefferson imagined in place of the Indian school might be termed in modern parlance a Native American language research institute. Specifically, “A Bill for Amending the Constitutions of the College of William and Mary” provided for
a missionary, of approved veracity, to the several tribes of Indians, whose business shall be to investigate their laws, customs, religions, traditions, and more particularly their languages, constructing grammars thereof, as well as may be, and copious vocabularies, and, on oath, to communicate, from time to time to the said president and professors the materials he collects to be by them laid up and preserved in their library, for which trouble the said missionary shall be allowed a salary at the discretion of the visitors out of the revenues of the college.23
In the role Jefferson envisioned, the missionary could make a significant contribution to the study of linguistics. As he would explain in Notes on the State of Virginia: “Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and South America, preserving their appellations of the most common objects in nature, of those which must be present to every nation barbarous or civilised, with the inflections of their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with these, now, or at a future time, and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.”24
The bill was not enacted, but when Jefferson became governor of Virginia, he also became a member of the college’s board of visitors and was able to institute some of his proposed changes, including the abolition of the grammar school and the establishment of several new professorships.
The third bill pertaining to education provided for a public library. It stipulated that the legislature appoint a board of visitors for the library, whose responsibilities would include procuring books and maps and, if necessary, a librarian to administer the collection. The collection would not be a circulating library. In other words, people would not be able to borrow books, but “the learned and the curious” would be welcome to do research in the collection without fees, provided they handled the books carefully and safely.25
The Road to Monticello Page 29