American Sphinx (48 page)

In that sense, at least, Madison was right to insist that his old mentor would have disavowed any claims on his legacy by southern states’ righters. His abiding legacy was a profound suspicion of governmental power of any sort and a political rhetoric that depicted any relationship between the people and their government as problematic and contingent. The only unkind observation about Madison that Jefferson ever made, at least the only one that found its way into the historical record, came on his deathbed, in the final hours when he was passing in and out of consciousness: “But ah!” he blurted out. “He could never in his life stand up against strenuous opposition.” While not fully fair to his most loyal friend, the remark captured Jefferson’s derogatory sense of all political accommodation as a betrayal of principle. He remained a rebel to the very end.
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EDUCATIONAL DREAMS

T
HE HAPPIEST MOMENTS
in those increasingly unhappy last years were unquestionably private occasions: the hours in his garden; the afternoons on horseback; the early-evening romps with his grandchildren on the back lawns of Monticello. The one bright spot amid the deepening sense of gloom about public affairs was provided by the project taking shape a few miles away in Charlottesville, barely visible on a clear day from his mountaintop, which Jefferson called his “academic village.” Now known, of course, as the University of Virginia and recognized at the bicentennial celebrations of 1976 by the American Institute of Architects as “the proudest achievement of American architecture in the past 200 years,” it became Jefferson’s major retirement project in 1817.
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In that year he wrote a semiscolding note to Madison, who was still trying to disengage himself from the presidency, for missing the first meeting of the committee charged with planning what was then being called Central College: “A detention at Washington I presume prevented your attendance. . . . Circumstances which will be explained to you make us believe that a
full meeting
of
all
visitors, on the first occasion at least, will decide a great object in the State system of general education; and I have accordingly so pressed the subject on Colo. Monroe [the incumbent president replacing Madison] as I think will ensure his attendance, and I hope we shall not fail in yours.” In case Madison had missed the point, Jefferson reiterated his annoyance at Madison’s absence and his expectation that the next session would be “a
full meeting
of all. . . .” The episode illustrates Jefferson’s total immersion in his new educational and architectural venture; it never occurred to him that the outgoing and incoming presidents of the United States might have more important things to do.
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He threw himself into the project with the same youthful enthusiasm he had earlier given to the renovations of Monticello. Indeed one can understand the architectural and construction challenges posed by the University of Virginia as convenient conduits for the same restless energies previously expended on his mansion on the mountain, which was now just about finished; it was the perfect building project to keep him busy. But it was also much more, since it involved cajoling the Virginia legislature for money, selecting a faculty, building a library, shaping a curriculum, in effect creating a model American university in his own image and likeness. Once Madison began attending the meetings of the Board of Visitors, he immediately recognized that the enterprise was intended to serve as a projection of Jefferson’s personality. All members of the board understood they were appointed to follow Jefferson’s lead, and all displayed “unaffected deference . . . for his judgment and experience.” They were merely accomplices as he attempted, for what was obviously the last time, to institutionalize his dreams.
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His educational dreams went way back. First as governor of Virginia and then in his
Notes on Virginia
he had proposed a statewide system of public education designed to raise the Old Dominion out of its scandalously inadequate condition and place it on a par with the New England states. As president he had taken on George Washington’s favorite scheme for a national university, presumably located in the nation’s capital. But nothing came of the idea, and the academy established in New York with his blessing became an engineering school for army officers at West Point, not quite what he had in mind. Soon after his retirement from the presidency his broodings assumed the more tangible form of a master plan for Virginia. Each county would be divided into a series of local “hundreds” or “wards” modeled on the New England townships. Each ward would support a primary or elementary school funded out of public taxes, giving Virginia about twelve hundred local schools to teach basic literacy. Then each county would contain an academy or secondary school where the best graduates of the ward schools could learn their Latin and Greek and the rudiments of science, the poorer students at public expense. The capstone of the plan was a state university where the best graduates of the county academies would receive the best education available in America, again the poorest of the best on tax-supported scholarships.
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The scheme was pure Jefferson: magisterial in conception, admirable in intention, unworkable in practice. The Virginia legislature refused to provide the funds necessary for the comprehensive plan but did appoint a commission to meet at Rockfish Gap in 1818 and make recommendations for the site of a state university. Jefferson had himself and Madison appointed to the commission, dominated the deliberations and personally wrote the Rockfish Gap Report that advocated the creation of a state university in Charlottesville. Madison lent an editorial hand in his familiar way, suggesting that Jefferson’s use of the term “monastic” to describe the preferred collegiate atmosphere, while graphic, “may not give umbrage,” and that “the idea of seeking professors
abroad
may excite prejudices with some. . . .” Jefferson expressed his own apprehension that Virginia was deciding to place a capstone on an educational foundation that did not exist, but his enthusiasm for the project overwhelmed his reservations. He relished the prospect of reviving the Jefferson-Madison collaboration one final time, in yet another campaign to lead reluctant citizens toward truths that lay just beyond their vision. On the state commission, for example, Jefferson explained to Madison that “there is a floating body of doubtful and wavering men,” so in his written report “I have therefore thrown in some leading ideas on the benefits of education . . . in the hope these might catch on some crotchets in their mind, and bring them over to us.” It was like the old days.
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Several old and familiar Jeffersonian patterns also presented themselves, like characters in a play reappearing for a final encore. There was the meticulous master of detail, operating with a grand but clear vision to guide him, yet never quite able to perform successfully in that middle region where detail and vision intersect to create cost overruns. Jefferson surveyed the site for the Charlottesville campus himself, even personally laid out the stakes. For the Rotunda, which was to be the architectural centerpiece, he selected the Pantheon of Rome as his model and designed it to serve as both the library and a planetarium, with movable planets and stars on the interior of the dome manipulated by an ingenious and invisible set of pulleys and gadgets. (Control should never be visible.) He worked four hours each day for several months to assemble the catalog for the library of 6,860 volumes, which he estimated would cost $24,076. The false sense of mastery conveyed by such precise numbers kept being undermined by financial realities that always eroded Jefferson’s most careful calculations. In 1820 the Virginia legislature, believing it was acting responsibly to meet the total costs, authorized the Board of Visitors to borrow $60,000. But the Rotunda proved more expensive than Jefferson had anticipated, and he revised the estimate upward—again the misleading precision—to $162,364. The following year, facing heavy criticism from the legislature for the Rotunda’s cost, he predicted that $195,000 would completely cover all expenses. It did not, of course, but by then the pavilions were going up, the undeniable grandeur of Jefferson’s architectural vision was becoming visible and the momentum of the enterprise had passed the point where anyone but a foolish spendthrift would demand a halt.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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