THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
In alluding to this year of his life, his biographer says, "Mr. Jefferson's absorbing topic throughout 1824 was the University." He had first interested himself in this institution in the year 1817. The plan originally was only to establish a college, to be called the "Central College of Virginia;" but in his hands it was enlarged, and consummated in the erection of the University of Virginia, whose classic dome and columns are now lit up by the morning rays of the same sun which shines on the ruin and desolation of his own once happy home.[66] The architectural plans and form of government and instruction for this institution afforded congenial occupation for his declining years, and made it emphatically the child of his old age. While the buildings were being erected, his visits to them were daily; and from the northeast corner of the terrace at Monticello he frequently watched the workmen engaged on them, through a telescope which is still preserved in the library of the University.
His toil and labors for this institution, and the obstacles which he had to overcome in procuring the necessary funds from the Virginia Legislature, served to distract his thoughts, in a measure, from those pecuniary embarrassments which, though resulting from his protracted services to his country, so imbittered the closing years of his honored life. None appreciated more highly than himself the importance of establishing Southern institutions for the instruction of Southern young men. We find allusions to this subject scattered through the whole of his correspondence during this period of his life.
How entirely he was absorbed in this darling project of his old age, may be seen from the following extract from a letter written by him to Mr. Adams, October 12, 1823:
I do not write with the ease which your letter of September 18th supposes. Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious. But while writing to you, I lose the sense of these things in the recollection of ancient times, when youth and health made happiness out of every thing. I forget for a while the hoary winter of age, when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, and how to get rid of our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at once. Against this tedium vitæ, however, I am fortunately mounted on a hobby, which, indeed, I should have better managed some thirty or forty years ago; but whose easy amble is still sufficient to give exercise and amusement to an octogenary rider. This is the establishment of a University, on a scale more comprehensive, and in a country more healthy and central, than our old William and Mary, which these obstacles have long kept in a state of languor and inefficiency.
The following extract from a letter to a friend, inviting him to Monticello, shows what little interest he took in politics:
You must be contented with the plain and sober family and neighborly society, with the assurance that you shall hear no wrangling about the next President, although the excitement on that subject will then be at its acme. Numerous have been the attempts to entangle me in that imbroglio. But at the age of eighty, I seek quiet, and abjure contention. I read but a single newspaper, Ritchie's Enquirer, the best that is published or ever has been published in America.
In one of his letters to J. C. Cabell, written about the appointment of Professors for the University, we find the following passage, which sounds strangely now in an age when nepotism is so rife:
In the course of the trusts I have exercised through life with powers of appointment, I can say with truth, and with unspeakable comfort, that I never did appoint a relation to office, and that merely because I never saw the case in which some one did not offer, or occur, better qualified; and I have the most unlimited confidence that in the appointment of Professors to our nursling institution every individual of my associates will look with a single eye to the sublimation of its character, and adopt, as our sacred motto, "Detur digniori!" In this way it will honor us, and bless our country.