Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

But Washington and Adams, critics pointed out, had proclaimed thanksgivings. Jefferson argued that this precedent should have no significance, and that the first two presidents' proclamations (which Jefferson gently implied were thoughtless mistakes) had probably been responsible for sanctioning the essentially illogical assumption that the federal government has any right to intervene in this area.

I am aware that the practice of my predecessors may be quoted. But I have ever believed that the example of state executives led to the assumption of that authority by the general government, without due examination, which would have discovered that what might be a right in a state government, was a violation of that right when assumed by another. Be this as it may, every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, & mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the U.S. and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.

During Jefferson's long retirement from public service, which lasted from 1809 until his death in 1826, his favorite project was the creation of the University of Virginia. The College of William and Mary, which he himself had attended and which had been Virginia's principal educational establishment since colonial times, he saw as retrograde, worn out, and philosophically nil: "just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it." As he described it in his autobiography,

The College of William and Mary was an establishment purely of the Church of England; the Visitors were required to be all of that Church; the Professors to subscribe to its thirty-nine articles; its Students to learn its Catechism; and one of its fundamental objects was declared to be, to raise up Ministers for that church.

The new university, on the contrary, would be created on a plan "so broad and liberal and modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come and drink the cup of knowledge and fraternize with us."

Jefferson took the primary role in establishing the curriculum of the new university: those interested in the subject might consult his letter to Peter Carr of 7 September 1814, in which he laid out his ideas for the curriculum in great detail. He had many guiding principles, but of these the most important was that the university should act as a philosophical reflection of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; he opposed the establishment of a Chair of Divinity, explaining his reasons for doing so in a Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia:

In conformity with the principles of our Constitution, which places all sects of religion on an equal footing, with the jealousies of the different sects in guarding that equality from encroachment and surprise, and with the sentiments of the legislature in favor of freedom of religion, manifested on former occasions, we have proposed no professor of divinity; and the rather as the proofs of the being of a God, the creator, preserver, and supreme ruler of the universe, the author of all the relations of morality, and of the laws and obligations these infer, will be within the province of the professor of ethics....