This modern onslaught against Jefferson dilutes the importance of the 
moral force he marshaled against his own society. There is no record of 
any kind which supports the interpretation of the Breckenridge letter 
which the PCSU advances.

  All of Jefferson's correspondence in this time .frame reflects his 
concern that southern students, educated in northern schools, would 
become indoctrinated in political principles of federalism. The Board of 
Visitors adopted a resolution at its meeting on March 4, 1825, “to pay 
special attention to the principles of government” which are not 
“incompatible with those on which the Constitution of the state, and of 
the United States, are genuinely based” ( John Ritchie, The First One 
Hundred Years, 8).

  While the other professors were allowed to choose their textbooks 
Jefferson would not permit this with the professor of law. It was 
earlier agreed between Jefferson and Cabell that the chair of law must 
be filled by an American (Cabell to TJ, 16 Apr. 1824).Jefferson 
communicated his concern to him about choosing a “Gothic lawyer,” one 
who did not have an academic background, and who accepted the principle 
of “consolidation” (20 Jan 1825). This became a rigid test for Jefferson 
on who might now be selected.His admonition to Cabell, which he also 
communicated to James Madison, was very explicit that he was opposed to 
“a Richmond lawyer,” or a believer in “quondam federalism, now 
Consolidation.” His solution to guard against the “diffusion of that 
poison” was by prescribing the texts that could be used(TJ to Cabell, 3 
Feb. 1825).


The construction firms used by Jefferson did employ slave labor. That 
was the economic system in Virginia, and until the Revolutionary war, 
throughout all of the thirteen colonies. But Jefferson died in 1826 and 
the history of the slaves over the next forty years should not be the 
basis of any claim that Jefferson constructed the University of Virginia 
in order to "protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings 
in the North."

Richard Dixon


On 7/31/2018 10:11 AM, Meyers, Terry L wrote:
> The report from UVA’s President’s Commission on Slavery and the University has been released.
>
> http://vpdiversity.virginia.edu/sites/vpdiversity.virginia.edu/files/PCSU%20Report%20FINAL_July%202018.pdf
>
> For me (and I was on an advisory board to the Commission), a surprise was Jefferson’s apparent desire to inculcate UVA students with pro-slavery thinking, a dramatic turn from what decades earlier he’d praised at W&M, its teaching skepticism about slavery and his hopes its students could, when in power, do something about it.
>
> The report says
>
> Even in Jefferson’s own imagining of what the University of Virginia could be, he understood it to be an institution with slavery at its core. He 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. In fact, Jefferson’s own world was one that was so intimately connected with slavery that he likely could not imagine a different reality.
>
> Full text of the letter is at
>
> http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-1839
>
> The report adduces further evidence along these lines—I thought I’d passed along a salient fact not in the report, that long after Jefferson had died, UVA, in 1845, sought to headhunt W&M's special shame, Thomas Roderick Dew.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187
>
>                                  http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
>
>                                  http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
> ————————————————————————————————————————————————————
>
>   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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-- 
Richard E. Dixon
"The Virginia Presidents: A Travel and History Guide"
571-748-7660


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