The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University ed. by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University ed. by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy Mary N. Woods The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University. Edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 341. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4322-0.) The University of Virginia is the only American institution of higher education conceived, nurtured, designed, built, overseen, and, I would add, obsessed over by one of the nation’s founding fathers and presidents. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a modern university that would educate the next generation of leaders for the young American republic. At the same time, he wanted an institution whose faculty and graduates would protect and defend the South and its dependence on slavery. Published to coincide with the university’s bicentennial celebrations in 2019, The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University intertwines the man with the university he considered one of his greatest achievements. The very first account of the University of Virginia appeared in 1856 (only thirty-one years after the first students arrived on campus); it drew on at that time unpublished correspondence between Jefferson and Senator Joseph C. Cabell, his chief ally for the university in the state legislature. Extensive use of archival materials housed at the university and at Monticello is also at the heart of these fourteen essays curated and edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, all eminent Jefferson scholars. The book’s center of gravity is the period between 1814, when Jefferson prepared funding estimates and an architectural design, and 1825, when the university opened with eight faculty members and sixty-eight students. The authors—who are architects, librarians, and archivists as well as professors—deal with the university’s prehistory, students, campus design and buildings, curriculum, and library. The editors do not shy away from the painful, difficult, and contradictory histories of Jefferson and the university. By having students live close to faculty around a central lawn, Jefferson believed he was creating an Academical Village that would instill order, decorum, learning, and domestic tranquility. In their essays, Ervin L. Jordan Jr. and Maurie D. McInnis reveal another village: the attics, barns, kitchens, laundries, dining halls, and smokehouses where African Americans dwelled and labored. Drawing on archival materials only recently transcribed and digitized by the university-sponsored “Jefferson’s University— the Early Life” project as well as on archaeological findings, Jordan and McInnis recuperate the histories of Black people, both free and enslaved, at the university. They make abundantly clear that Jefferson’s Academical Village relied on slave communities like those that sustained the plantations and created their wealth. There the sons of planters first learned the lessons of racial oppression and white supremacy that they applied so brutally to enslaved people at the Academical Village. In “‘Chastising a Servant for His Insolence’: The Case of the Butter Bully,” Jordan recounts histories of students such as Thomas Jefferson Boyd, who brutalized a Black male waiter (nameless, as was usual in university records) for serving him supposedly rancid butter. McInnis shows just how long and egregious the history of sexual violence at American universities has been in an account of the attempted gang rape of a Black girl, aged twelve, by three students. [End Page 117] These two essays demonstrate how slavery, violence, and white supremacy were bred in the bone of the University of Virginia. Breaking from the tight focus on the early years that otherwise prevails in the collection, McInnis explains that the university’s history of racial violence and oppression is exactly why Richard B. Spencer, an alumnus, chose the campus and downtown Charlottesville for his rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in 2017. I hope others will bring theories of class, race, Blackness, and whiteness to bear, building on Jordan’s and McInnis’s exemplary work. Melding theory and history may help us grapple with the systemic racism that has for far too long pervaded daily life and institutions in the United States. “A Look Back at Jefferson’s Forward-Looking Mission for the University...