The Sage of Monticello by Malone Dumas

Author:Malone, Dumas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826, University of Virginia, Presidents
Publisher: Boston : Little, Brown and Company
Published: 1992-03-15T05:00:00+00:00

Cabell was to choose between in the light of circumstances. One called for the establishment of a university in a central and healthful part of the state, while the other specified that the choice should fall on Albemarle County and Central College. He described the scope of the institution much as he had done elsewhere, saying that it should have no more than ten professors. In this carefully drawn bill he provided in specific detail for the organization and government of the university, as he did also for the colleges and elementary schools. Speaking to Cabell of his bill, he said:

Take it and make of it what you can, if worth anything. ... I meddle no more with it. There is a time to retire from labor and that time has come with me. It is a duty as well as the strongest of my desires to relinquish to younger hands the government of our bark and resign myself as I do willingly to their care. 8

During the long legislative struggle over public education he sought to keep out of sight, but inevitably he was identified in the public mind with the issue that was closest to his heart. No other in his entire career seems to have evoked more emotional expressions of concern on his part. This concern was not merely, nor even primarily, for the college which was under his particular charge and which he hoped would develop into a university, but for the system as a whole.

It was several weeks after this letter to Cabell that he complained to Ticknor of the legislators' insufficient faith in knowledge. He was even more plaintive in a letter to his botanical friend Correa that same day. After describing his general plan, he said: "Mine, after all may be an Utopian dream, but being innocent, I have thought I might indulge in it until I go to the land of dreams, and sleep there with the dreamers of all past and future times." 9 It would be difficult to match these words elsewhere in his voluminous correspondence. He regarded himself as no visionary, and he contended that his plan was practicable — as, to his mind, the Mercer bill clearly was not.

His hopes had revived somewhat by the time he wrote Cabell a week before Christmas. To that young legislator he said:

Pray drop me a line when any vote is passed which furnishes an indication of the success or failure of the general plan. I have only

8 Oct. 24, 1817 (Cabell, p. 84).

9 TJ to Correa, Nov. 25, 1817 (L. & B., XV, 155-157). The letter of the same date to Ticknor is quoted on p. 266, above.

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