For those unfamiliar with it, the authoritative text of Jefferson's 1779 BIll for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge can be found at http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0079.
Given the lawyerly care with which Jefferson drafted this bill (as he did all such materials); and the fact that "all the free children, male and female" strictly speaking, if implicitly, includes free black children; it seems probable that the bill was intended to comprise them as well. (I don't have a statistic at my fingertips on the relative proportion of free African-Americans in Virginia in 1779, but at that point it was surely quite small). In other words: had Jefferson wished it to exclude free black children from the bill, it seems likely that he would have so specified.
Here are two additional pieces of possibly relevant evidence:
1. The fact that the general emancipation plan that Jefferson advocated from the 1770s until his death involved the education of all slave children born after a certain date in order to prepare them for emancipation (and then deportation, which was also central to the plan). As he described it in the Notes on Virginia, "they [the children] should continue with their parents [who were not going to be freed] to a certain age, and 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 . . . " ( http://books.google.com/books?id=UO0OAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq )
2. The fact that in the mid-1790s Jefferson corresponded with Robert Pleasants and advised him that the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (which had not yet been passed in any form) would require only "[v]ery small alterations" to include slave children-- and noting that such an approach would be further "desireable as they would in the course of it be mixed with those of free condition." (See the very helpful page from the Jefferson Library on the Jefferson-Pleasants correspondence, at http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/robert-pleasants).
I hope that this information is helpful. It's an interesting question.
--Jurretta Heckscher
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"I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."
On Apr 20, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Terry Meyers wrote:
> 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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>
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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
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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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