I've been working on this same question, and I haven't found an answer either. I'd note that besides including free blacks (of whom there were many in Virginia in 1781), Jefferson's language also includes females.
Kevin R C Gutzman, JD, PhD
Professor of History
Western Connecticut State University
Author, JAMES MADISON AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA (cloth: St. Martin's Press, 2012; paper: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013);
WHO KILLED THE CONSTITUTION? THE FATE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY FROM WORLD WAR I TO GEORGE W. BUSH (cloth: Crown Forum, 2008; pb, 2009)--co-author with Thomas E. Woods, Jr.;
VIRGINIA'S AMERICAN REVOLUTION (cloth & paper: Lexington Books, 2007);
THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO THE CONSTITUTION (Regnery Publishing, 2007).
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Terry Meyers [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2015 9:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VA-HIST] "free children"?
In Jefferson’s 1779 proposal for a system of public education in Virginia, the most rudimentary schooling is allowed for “free children”:
At every of these schools shall be taught reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Græcian, Roman, English, and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be 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.
“Free children” clearly excludes enslaved black children.
Does it include free black children?
Notes on the State of Virginia may or may not illuminate my question. There Jefferson allows for emancipated blacks possibly to "continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age.”
I know Jefferson’s scathing and racist views of blacks and their intellectual potential, but in thinking about the impact of the Bray School affiliated with William and Mary from 1760, I was struck by the notion that Jefferson would have known of the College’s involvement in religious education for free and enslaved black children. I wondered whether that school might have encouraged him to imagine at least a modicum of education to free black children in 1779.
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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia 23187 757-221-3932
http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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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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