Thomas Jefferson's Education

by Alan Taylor

Overview

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.

By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university.

In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652420
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	1,167,981
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Alan Taylor, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History, is the author of American Revolutions and American Republics, prior volumes in his acclaimed continental history of the United States. He is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Illustrations and Maps xiii

Introduction 1

1 College 9

2 Revolution 43

3 Honor 69

4 Mountain 101

5 Slavery 133

6 Schools 161

7 Buildings 192

8 Professors 215

9 Students 243

10 Ends 277

Epilogue 308

Acknowledgments 317

Notes 321

Bibliography 395

Index 419

Editorial Reviews

"An account of Jefferson's home state and university…A complex but fascinating story."

Booklist

★ 2019-07-15
The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian enlightens us on the mindset of Colonial Virginia through Thomas Jefferson's drive to change the education system.

Beginning with young Jefferson's student days at the College of William & Mary, Taylor (History/Univ. of Virginia; American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, 2016, etc.) describes a church-run school whose students had little or no interest in learning; few stayed long enough for a degree. They were irreverent and defiant, and they drank, gambled, fought, and even destroyed church and town property in drunken riots. Due to certain entrenched rules about honor, no Southern gentleman would testify against a fellow student. Within this milieu, Taylor depicts Jefferson as a man trained from childhood to exercise sovereign authority over slaves. Jefferson felt slavery was wrong in principal but essential in practice, and his abolition plan could only work with deportation. Officials in Virginia used the Bill of Rights' guarantee of free exercise of religion to ban state assistance to churches and repealed the incorporation of the Episcopalian Church. This included cutting funding and eliminating the parish tax. Jefferson fully supported this secularization and planned to use those savings and taxes for a public education system. His master plan included primary schools, including girls, and colleges (secondary) run by each county feeding one university—at Charlottesville. His schools were to be absolutely secular, and while rejecting leadership by blood, he ensured that class distinctions remained, seeking enlightened aristocrats of merit. The narrative bogs down a bit at the end with the history of the university, but Taylor is a master historian, and he delivers a highly illuminating account in which "Jefferson's social context in Virginia looms even larger than his unique personality and career achievements." Furthermore, the author plumbs the depths of his subject's objectives, faults, and ideals.

A book that refreshingly adds real substance to the abundant literature on Jefferson.

Kirkus Reviews

"A richly detailed account of the origins of UVA.… Lively and informative."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Glenn C. Altschuler

"With characteristic eloquence, Alan Taylor chronicles the unlikely emergence of one of the most important experiments in American education: the University of Virginia. Caught between the promise of a new nation of freedom and the reality of a declining slave society, Thomas Jefferson and his allies forged an institution at once intellectually innovative and socially conservative. Taylor’s rich, evocative book captures the surprising drama of that invention."

Edward L. Ayers

"Mr. Taylor does a splendid job of documenting the sordid goings-on at William & Mary and the University of Virginia, establishing how saturated in slavery they both were."

Wall Street Journal - Alan Pell Crawford

"[Taylor’s] overarching purpose [is] to demonstrate how the University of Virginia was from its very conception shaped and distorted by slavery."

Drew Faust

"Alan Taylor’s extraordinary new book illuminates the limits of republican reform in a society built on slavery. It is a major contribution to our understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s career as an educational reformer and to the history of democratic self-government in Virginia."

Peter S. Onuf

"No historian has more astutely investigated or more powerfully written about the early American republic than Alan Taylor. In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, Taylor adds to his previous prizewinning studies of early American politics, expansion, and arts and letters, with an examination of the founders’ vision of education, reckoning, at once, with its audacity and its timidity."

Jill Lepore

"A Pulitzer prize–winning historian, Taylor explores the links between slavery and the founding of the University of Virginia.… Taylor shows how modern inequalities still undermine attempts to improve higher education."

Michael T. Nietzel