Recent studies of the founding of UVA seem to come to contradictory conclusions about Jefferson’s intentions for the university in terms of combatting slavery or not. I’m wondering if there’s a good review essay someplace that explores the question and perhaps comes to a reliable evaluation of better and worse.
I ask because in my own work I found that Jefferson, before he gave up on W&M, seemed to see the younger generations educated at the College in skepticism about slavery as likely able somehow to do away with slavery, something beyond him and his peers.
Did he give up on that vision, that hope as he founded UVA? If so, why?
Anyway, below is a survey of what I find regarding UVA’s founding mission (the UVA webpages are remarkably quiet about the history of the institution and for some unknown technical reasons I cannot access the Monticello account on the “Establishment of the University of Virginia”).
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"He [Jefferson} believed that a southern institution was necessary to protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North. Jefferson wrote his friend James Breckenridge in 1821, expressing his concern with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a place 'against us in position and principle.' He worried that in northern institutions, young Virginians might imbibe “opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country. This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.’
In other words, Jefferson believed it was important to educate Virginians, and other southerners, in an institution that understood and ultimately supported slavery." (p. 15)
"The University that grew after Thomas Jefferson’s death in July 1826 in many ways fulfilled his vision in creating a southern pro-slavery Ivy League school." (p. 35)
--from the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, Report to Teresa A. Sullivan (2018). https://slavery.virginia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PCSU-Report-FINAL_July-2018.pdf
[The letter, Feb. 15, 1821, to Breckeridge is an important statement, but it was pointed out to me by a friend, a close student of Jefferson, that another letter the same day suggests that Jefferson was writing it simply to advance his interests in the General Assembly, that he deeply hoped it would never been seen in public. In effect, this second letter seems a repudiation of the first.
https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Dates-From%3A1821-02-15%20Author%3A%22Jefferson%2C%20Thomas%22&s=1111311111&r=3&sr=<https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Dates-From:1821-02-15%20Author:"Jefferson,%20Thomas"&s=1111311111&r=3&sr=>
TLM]
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In Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University (2019), the editors, Maurice D. McInnes and Louis P. Nelson write in the Introduction that
“He [Jefferson] believed that a southern institution was necessary to protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North. Jefferson wrote to his friend James Breckinridge and expressed his concern with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a place ‘against us in position and principle.’ He worried that in northern institutions young Virginians might imbibe ‘opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country. This canker is easting on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.’ In other words, Jefferson believed it was important to educate Virginians, and other southerners, in an institution that understood and ultimately supported slavery” (p. 4).
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The editors of The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University (2019), John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onur, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, seem to suggest in a prefatory note, “Building an Idealized Academical Village,” that even though Jefferson “necessarily adapted to the political and social realities of a society in which the peculiar institution was deeply, inextricably entrenched,” “the University’s design nonetheless testified to his enduring commitment to progress, enlightenment, and republican government” (p. 93). As I read this, I see an implicit suggestion that Jefferson still had in mind in educating UVA’s students some hope to see them in the future somehow erode slavery (see the discussion on p. 92).
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In Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019], Alan Taylor suggests that Jefferson did back away from his hopes for W&M students, that “Jefferson had grown ambivalent about acting on the anti-slavery words [Notes on the State of Virginia] he had planted in the College [of William and Mary] in 1787” (p. 136). But he also comments of Jefferson’s hopes for graduates of UVA that “he wanted them to make the sweeping reforms, including gradual emancipation, that his generation had failed to enact “(p. 214).
Taylor comments that one of Jefferson’s two goals in founding UVA was to educate “a more enlightened leadership [that] could reform Virginia,” having. among other goals to “both free and deport enslaved people.” He notes Jefferson’s counting “on a new generation to succeed where he had fallen short,” but says of that generation that “rejecting Jefferson’s denunciation of slavery as immoral, they overtly celebrated slavery as a positive good for enslaved people as well as masters”: “rather than uproot slavery, as Jefferson had hoped, the University’s students defended it and served the Confederacy in the Civil War” (p. 307).
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In The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University (2021), Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes that Jefferson’s “vision for the University of Virginia did not originate in the sectional crisis between the North and the South over slavery as an attempt to create ‘a southern pro-slavery Ivy League school” (p. 58). He footnotes both the Commission on the University and Slavery (pp. 15, 35) and the McInnis/Nelson Introduction, noting that those “polemical claims” were repeated in a number of reviews (p. 274, n.85). In a detailed discussion of Jefferson and slavery O’Shaughnessy writes that “Jefferson gave priority to establishing the university in the belief that it would train a generation of political leaders who would not only perpetuate the republic but solve those problems left by his own generation…” (p. 197).
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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg 23187
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