Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

This rigorous selective process looks very familiar to any one acquainted with the modern French system of free elementary schools, boarding colléges and lycèes, and the system of competitive scholarships and fellowships of the French. But it was not fully developed in France before the Third Republic and it was not even dreamed of before the Revolution. Many times the French have been criticized for the undemocratic features of an educational system which reserves secondary education to those who are able to pay and to the small number of children who win scholarships. There is no possibility that this scheme was ever borrowed by Jefferson from any French theorician, and there is, on the contrary, some reason to believe that in France it owes its beginning to the publication of Jefferson's plan in the "Notes on Virginia" printed in Paris and in French in 1786.

The educational structure of the State would not have been complete if Jefferson had not provided for a reorganization of William and Mary College. Such is the purpose of the next bill (Bill LXXX) in the Report of the Committee of Revisors. There he was more ruthless and more radical. After a first section which recounts the foundation of the college and its history, Jefferson concluded that "the said college, thus amply endowed by the public has not answered their expectation, and there is reason to hope, that it would become more useful, if certain articles in its constitution were altered and amended." By one stroke of the pen, Jefferson abolished the school of theology, took the administration out of the hands of the former trustees to place it in the hands of visitors appointed by the Legislature and "not to be restrained in their legislation by the royal prerogatives, or the laws of the kingdom of England, or the canons of the constitution of the English Church, as enjoined in the Charter." The president and faculty were to be dismissed, and six professorships created; to wit, one of moral law and police; one of history, civil and ecclesiastical; one of anatomy and medicine; one of natural philosophy and natural history; one of the ancient languages Oriental and northern; and one of modern languages.—

A missionary will be appointed to the several tribes of the Indians, whose business will be to investigate their laws, customs, religion, traditions, and more particularly their languages, constructing grammar thereof, as well as may be, and copious vocabularies, and on oath to communicate, from time to time, to the said President and Professors the material he collects.

Thus the college was to become the training school in which "those who are to be the future guardians of the rights and liberties of their country may be endowed with science and virtue, to watch and preserve the sacred deposit." It was not a democratic institution, but the finishing school of the future legislators and experts in the science of government.

As to disinterested "researches of the learned and curious", they were to be encouraged by the establishment at Richmond of a Free Public Library with yearly appropriation of two thousand pounds for the purchase of books and maps.

One may state here without any fear of contradiction that no system so complete, so logically constructed and so well articulated had ever been proposed in any country in the world. It already embodied the ideas for which Jefferson stood during all his life, it preceded by more than fifteen years the plans of the French Convention. As the first charter of American public education it is an astonishing document and deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.

The Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Jefferson's opinion ranked in importance with the Declaration of Independence. It was not intended to be a revolutionary document, but simply a common-sense adjustment of the situation brought about by the repeal of several provisions of the old Virginia laws. Jefferson took care to explain the true purpose of the bill in the "Notes on Virginia" (Query XVII). The Virginia Bill of Rights had proclaimed "it to be a truth, and a natural right that the exercise of religion should be free." On the other hand, no mention of it had been made in the Convention and no measure had been adopted to protect religious freedom. The Assembly, however, had repealed, in 1776, "all acts of Parliament which had rendered criminal the maintaining any opinion in matters of religion", and suspended the laws giving salaries to the clergy. This suspension was made perpetual in October, 1779. But religious matters still remained subject to common law and to acts passed by the Assembly. At Common Law, heresy was a capital offence, punishable by burning, according to the writ de haeretico comburando. Furthermore, by an act of the Assembly of 1705, "if a person brought up in the Christian religion denies the being of a God, or the Trinity, or asserts there are more gods than one, or denies the Christian religion to be true, or the Scriptures to be of divine authority, he is punishable on the first offence by incapacity to hold any office or employment ecclesiastical, civil, or military: on the second by disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian, executor, or administrator, and by three years' imprisonment without bail."[65]

This being the situation, the article of the Bill of Rights concerning religious freedom remained a dead letter until provisions could be made to take religious matters out of the jurisdiction of the Common Law.

Historians seem to have been somewhat misled both by the lofty and philosophical tone of the Bill for Religious Freedom and the comments made by Jefferson in the "Notes on Virginia", specially written by him, as we always must remember, for a group of French philosophers and the French public. A philosopher he was, but before all he was a purist and a historian of law. For him the main question was first to determine whether the jurisdiction of the Common Law in matters of religion was founded in law. He had already studied minutely the history of Common Law and made copious extracts in his "Commonplace Book"; he had noticed in Houard's "Coutumes Anglo-Normandes" that some pious copyist had prefixed to the laws of Alfred four chapters of Jewish law. "This awkward Monkish fabrication makes the preface to Alfred's genuine laws stand in the body of the Work; and the very words of Alfred himself form the frauds, for he declares in that preface that he has collected these laws from those of Ina, of Offa, Ethelbert, and his ancestors, saying nothing of any of them being taken from the scripture." Consequently the pretended laws of Alfred were a forgery.

Yet, palpable as it must be to a lawyer, our judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was shrouded. In truth, the alliance between Church and State in England, has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy; and even bolder than they are: for, instead of being contented with these four surreptitious chapters of Exodus, they have taken the whole leap, and declared at once, that the whole Bible and Testament, in a lump, make part, of the Common law.... Finally in answer to Fortescue Aland's question why the Common law of England should not now be a part of the Common law of England? We may say that they are not, because they never were made so by legislative authority; the document which imposed that doubt on him being a manifest forgery.[66]