Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson's Struggle to Save the University That Changed America

3. Building a University in Virginia

3 Building a University in Virginia Americans spent much of 1800 embroiled in one of the first—and possibly still the fiercest—partisan presidential campaigns in the nation’s history, and at the center of the political storm that threatened to capsize the ship of state stood Je≠erson. The campaign attacks on his character from politicians and preachers alike deepened the Virginian’s mistrust of power and reinforced the anticlerical views he would hold for the rest of his life. And those views, in turn, would help him define for himself how a modern university should work. As the year 1800 opened, Je≠erson was serving out his final months as vice president to President John Adams, an awkward circumstance for the two rivals brought about by Je≠erson’s loss to Adams, by three electoral votes, in the 1796 election. As runner-up, Je≠erson assumed the vice presidency, as the Constitution then dictated. While virtually impotent in matters of policy within the Adams administration, Je≠erson wielded great political influence as head of the Republican party. Adams,aµerWashington’sdeath,hademergedastheleaderoftheFederalists . While the contest between the two parties occasionally seemed like a quarrel between Anglophiles and Francophiles—Federalists wore the black cockades of the British, while Republicans sported the tricolored cockades of the French—the two parties’ supporters genuinely hated each other. Each side was convinced that the other’s ascendancy would spell the ruin of the fledgling republic. The rematch between the candlestick-thin Je≠erson and the teapot-portly Adams promised to be a bloody a≠air. Building a University in Virginia 21 To the Republican way of thinking, the Federalists, with their insistence on a strong executive power, were secretly scheming to establish a government controlled by aristocrats or, worse, a king. Further alarming Republicans, Adams had created an army of fiµeen thousand men under the command of the brilliant intriguer Alexander Hamilton—and hadn’t one of the complaints against George III been that he’d used the colonies as a garrison for a standing army? Giving Republican suspicions even more credence, the Federalist-controlled Congress had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which threatened jail time for the president’s critics and made it easier for the Adams administration to throw proRepublican foreigners out of the country. Adams, according to Republicans, was on his way to becoming a tyrant. The Polish writer Julien Niemcewicz noted in his diary that the Alien bill, “conceived in a truly Turkish spirit, shows to what point the administration attempts to adopt and imitate the arbitrary means of despots.”1 As Adams’s presidency wore on, printers and pamphleteers who opposed him were tried, convicted, and jailed. Among them was British émigré Thomas Cooper, who would later figure prominently in Je≠erson’s plans for a university. Cooper, who like Thomas Paine began his career as an agitator in Britain before bringing his rabble-rousing skills to America, had published a handbill accusing Adams of trying to create a standing army. On trial in Philadelphia before Justice Samuel Chase, Cooper said he knew that England’s king was infallible but didn’t know the president shared the attribute. Cooper was led o≠ to prison to serve a six-month sentence, exclaiming as he went, “Is it a crime to doubt the capacity of the president?”2 To Federalists, the large army and Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary wartime measures. The country was engaged in an undeclared naval war with France, and many of the most conservative Federalists viewed a French invasion as a possibility. Adams and fellow Federalists considered France, where the Jacobins had overthrown the monarchy and church, the most extreme example of the dangers of egalitarianism , and, at home, they viewed the Republicans’ sympathy for French democracy as a portent for potential violence in America. Furthermore, some thought it plausible that French agents would be able to recruit 22 Rot, Riot, and Rebellion Republicans and immigrants to their banner if they invaded the United States. The Republicans, Je≠erson included, had been notoriously easygoing about accounts of French aristocrats being dragged from their carriages and killed. So a smear campaign against Je≠erson—dubbed “the great arch priest of Jacobinism and infidelity”3 —began in earnest. Timothy Dwight, a leading evangelical minister and president of Yale, labeled Je≠erson a tool of French secularism, asking, “For what end shall we...