In working recently on Benjamin Ewell, President of W&M 1854-1888, I’ve been reading his requests to Congress for reparations for the burning of the College in 1862.  Ewell is seemingly a careful scholar in crafting his case.



	Yet in referring to Jefferson’s having been educated at the College he seems to quote a phrase that I can’t discover Jefferson ever used.



	in his 1872 testimony, Ewell says of Jefferson that he “was the first to proclaim that the aim of free America should ever be ‘universal emancipation and universal education.'”



	In a Washington newspaper account of his 1874 testimony he comes at this from a slightly different angle, that Jefferson was the one “who first proclaimed, as a fitting motto for free America, ‘Universal emancipation and universal education’” (“National Republican,” April 6, 1874, p. 2a).



	Google suggests that Ewell is the only one ever to have used these five words in this order.



	Is there any chance Ewell might have had access to some Jefferson document long since lost?





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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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 Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.                 --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."





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