Thomas Jefferson’s Vision for Civic Education and the Founding of America’s First Public Universities

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson, the Author of the Declaration of Independence and the Father of the University of Virginia, considered it a self-evident truth that our rights must be secured through government and that the people themselves are the only safe guardians of their liberty in a republican form of government. The civic education of the people is, therefore, imperative, in his view, if they are to be informed citizens. This article examines the ways that the first States sought to institute public universities, through both constitutional and legislative means, and highlights Jefferson’s vision for civic education against the activity of the States in establishing education. Surveying early State constitutions and university charters reveals, for those States instituting public education, a wide range of approaches, particularly with respect to three aspects: authorizing mode (constitutional or legislative mandates); civic rhetoric; and scope (tiered system or single institution). While several of the States recognize education as important to republican government, their commitments to public civic education vary. Against this backdrop, Jefferson’s views on education appear both comprehensive and constant, from his reform Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge and Notes on the State of Virginia, which envision a three-tiered public system, to his efforts in retirement to pass education reform and establish a new university, with his purpose being explicitly civic. While his State never adopted his full system, Jefferson continued to advocate for ward republics and public instruction throughout his life. The founding of the University of Virginia in 1819 partially fulfilled this pursuit, embodying the keystone in his educational architecture. Yet Jefferson’s broader system—grounded in local participation and universal civic instruction—remained unrealized. This survey further reveals that statesmen in early America did not always agree with Jefferson that States must have an enduring institutional commitment to public civic education, as the best means to inform the people and to secure republican self-government.

1. Part One: Thomas Jefferson’s Vision for Civic Education

Thomas Jefferson, the Father of the University of Virginia, from the moment he helped to declare our independence as a nation had “two great measures at heart, without which,” he argued, “no republic can maintain itself in strength”—first, public “general education” as the best means for citizens to judge properly what will secure or endanger their rights and liberty, and second, providing for schools to place such an education within “reach” of all children. A nation which “expects to be ignorant and free … expects what never was and never will be.” Jefferson considered it a self-evident truth, or an “axiom” in his mind, “that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves,” and only if the people had “a certain degree of instruction,” which “it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.” Late in life, he still argued that his proposed Bill to establish public schools of civic education, if it had been adopted, “would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly government, and would have completed the great object of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government,” and he continued to “have great hope that some patriotic spirit” in the Virginia legislature would, “at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government.” (Jefferson [1786] 1994, [1810] 2005, [1813] 2010, [1816] 2013).

What Jefferson envisioned for Virginia and proposed in his reform Bill never came fully into being. But in conceiving his idea for public education as essential to republican government, the Sage of Monticello was not alone among the founders. Though it lies beyond the scope of this article to trace the history of colonial education prior to the founding, or the particular role of other individuals from the revolutionary and early founding era in advocating for public education, my purpose here is to provide a survey of the establishment of the first universities established through State constitutional mandates. The founding generation reflected upon the need for public education, even to the extent of entrenching that duty and obligation on occasion in State Constitutions. What becomes evident from a study of these mandates is not only the diversity of intent and success among the new States, but also the degree to which States aspired to or fell short of the comprehensive vision which Jefferson set forth for his own Virginia (Dinan 2006).

The notion that securing rights and liberty in a Republic, a popular form of government, depends upon an educated citizenry was a sentiment shared by many at the founding. For a century after the revolution, most State legislatures undertook to create universities as public institutions, sometimes situating them within broader systems of primary and secondary schools. Yet the purposes explicitly articulated in these charters varied widely: some foregrounded the civic mission of forming citizens and sustaining republican government, while others restricted themselves to mandating educational institutions without explicit reference to civic education. To assess the differences, it is necessary, first, to examine not only the various State public university charters themselves, but also the constitutional frameworks and justifications which gave rise to them. In doing so, we see an emerging picture of civic education instituted through a public system, gradually coming into focus over the course of the post-revolutionary and founding era of the new republican States.

While such institutions of education emerged in several of the States, Jefferson’s plan for public education—with an explicitly civic mission, mandated by state authority, and put into effect in a comprehensive manner from local schools to universities—remains the fullest account of the vital need for such institutions to maintain the virtue of a people responsible for guiding their republican institutions of self-government. This brief study of public universities provides the backdrop against which to assess Jefferson’s otherwise well-known efforts to establish public civic education in his State, from his early drafting of a “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” in 1778, to the partial fulfillment of his vision with the 1819 state charter of the University of Virginia. Doing so highlights the comprehensiveness and elusiveness of Jefferson’s vision for educating an educated people able to secure their own rights and liberty, as well as his own determination and perseverance in striving to bring about his vision of public education with a civic mission in his home State of Virginia.

2. Part Two

2.1. Constitutional Mandates for a System of Public Education: Pennsylvania (1776/1779), North Carolina (1776/1789), and Vermont (1777/1791)

Among the first to adopt constitutional mandates related to public education, the people of Pennsylvania provided the earliest significant example of a new State grounding higher education in a constitutional and legislative mandate. The constitution of the State, adopted soon after the signing of the Declaration of Independence (adopted 28 September 1776), was the first of the newly independent States of America to include within its founding charter an explicit provision calling for the establishment of a system of public education.

Within the “Plan or Frame of Government for the Commonwealth,” Section 44 explicitly directed that public education would be available across the state:

“A school or schools shall be established in each county by the legislature, for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters paid by the public, as may enable them to instruct youth at low prices: And all useful learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more universities.”

(The Avalon Project 1776b).

From schools in each county up to one or more universities, public education was to be “encouraged and promoted.” Section 45 went even further, stressing the importance of maintaining the encouragement of virtue and prevention of vice in the people, not only through the laws but also through both religious and public institutions:1

“Laws for the encouragement of virtue, and prevention of vice and immorality, shall be made and constantly kept in force, and provision shall be made for their due execution: And all religious societies or bodies of men heretofore united or incorporated for the advancement of religion or learning, or for other pious and charitable purposes, shall be encouraged and protected in the enjoyment of the privileges, immunities and estates which they were accustomed to enjoy, or could of right have enjoyed, under the laws and former constitution of this state.”

(The Avalon Project 1776b).

The importance of these two provisions in the Pennsylvania Constitution becomes clear, when they are taken together with a preceding statement in the Frame (Section 7), which says that educated and informed citizens will select from among themselves other worthy citizens of integrity entrusted with representative office by election: “The house of representatives of the freemen of this commonwealth shall consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue, to be chosen by the freemen of every city and county of this commonwealth respectively.” Implied in this electoral mandate is that citizens of virtue are to be found within the State, worthy of selection for office-holding, and that the people themselves are the worthy judges of their virtue. Public education is introduced as a way to maintain an informed people and prepare those worthy of holding republican office.

Pennsylvania’s constitutional provisions here preceded by several months nearly identical provisions in North Carolina’s 1776 Constitution, and by several years the ones that would later appear in the Massachusetts’ Constitution of 1780. Pennsylvania led the way as a model for creating a system of public education, from local schools up to a state university, within a frame of republican constitutional law. When the legislature finally acted on this mandate in 1779, it seized the property of the College of Philadelphia (a private corporation) and created a new public institution, the University of the State of Pennsylvania (Legislative Reference Library of Pennsylvania 1779). This action was the first instance in the new States of America of a state legislature directly establishing a university as a public institution, with trustees formally appointed by its authority. Its founding documents justified the change in republican terms: by converting a private and elitist institution into one directed by the representatives of the people, Pennsylvania sought to ensure that “useful learning” would serve the public good rather than serve sectarian or aristocratic interests. But in 1791, the University of the State of Pennsylvania merged with the revived College of Philadelphia to form the University of Pennsylvania under a new charter (Penn Libraries 1791). While the university reverted to a mixed governance structure rather than remaining a purely state institution, the brief period from 1779 to 1791 reveals the extent to which Pennsylvania pioneered a republican approach to higher education.

North Carolina, through both constitutional and statutory provisions, consistent with Pennsylvania, also explicitly envisioned a system of schools and a university. In the drafting of the new State constitution in 1776, the delegates embedded education directly in its founding articles. In the State Constitution of North Carolina (adopted 18 December 1776), one provision explicitly called for a system of public education. Article XLI declared:

“That a school or schools shall be established by the Legislature, for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters, paid by the public, as may enable them to instruct at low prices; and all useful learning shall be duly encouraged, and promoted, in one or more universities.”

(The Avalon Project 1776a)

This provision linked the civic mission of education directly to the responsibilities of the legislature and implied a public responsibility for instituting state-supported learning that would be broadly accessible. The “instruction of youth” through local schools ensured that citizens of North Carolina would receive basic literacy and education in civic knowledge, while the envisioned one or more universities would encourage “all useful learning.” However, the post-war efforts of the General Assembly to charter a university in 1784 met with resistance from delegates who feared that access to this one institution of higher education would be limited to the sons of wealthier families in the state, thus further entrenching their political power (Lindemann 2026).

With the ratification of the new State Constitution by the people in November 1789, authorization for a public university in North Carolina formally became a popular mandate. When the General Assembly finally chartered the University of North Carolina on 11 December 1789, it did so in partial fulfillment of this constitutional duty. The main supporter of the charter in the House of Commons was William Richardson Davie, who had served as a state delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Under his guidance, the legislature moved to adopt the charter, and the resulting institution of higher education became the first public university in the new States actually to admit students, opening its doors in 1795, and to confer degrees (Battle 1907). Davie helped to establish the location at Chapel Hill, recruit faculty, and promote the adoption of a curriculum that would teach science and the practical arts, as well as the classics. In 1811, Davie received the first honorary doctorate awarded by the University.

Pennsylvania and North Carolina, therefore, were the first States to adopt through the will of the people constitutional mandates for public education, conceived as a tiered system established on a broad base of schools for free primary instruction, with salaries of teachers to be “paid by the public,” leading up to at least one State university intended for advanced studies. While their new State Constitutions did not specify intermediate institutions of education, legislatures would have had discretion to establish additional academies or intermediate institutions as needed. Pennsylvania and North Carolina thus provided a republican model for civic education supported through public funding in fulfillment of their constitutional mandates.

Vermont’s Constitution, adopted in 1777, along the basic lines of the educational systems adopted by Pennsylvania and North Carolina, called for the establishment of an educational ladder, or scaffolding, with three tiers of learning (towns, counties, state). Chapter II, section XL of the Constitution stated that:

“A school or schools shall be established in each town, by the legislature, for the convenient instruction of youth, with such salaries to the masters, paid by each town; making proper use of school lands in each town, thereby to enable them to instruct youth at low prices. One grammar school in each county, and one university in this State, ought to be established by direction of the General Assembly.”

(Constitution of Vermont 1777/1791, Ch. II, Sec. XL–XLI).

This section is notable for its limited instruction, mandating town schools for elementary education, grammar schools in each county for secondary instruction, and calling further for a university of higher learning. A systemic structure of public education is envisioned, but without linking the activities of these institutions to the public good through republican rhetoric of civic virtue. When the legislature chartered the University of Vermont in 1791, the same year that the State joined the Union, it was fulfilling, in part, this limited constitutional mandate. The creation of “one university” was mentioned as aspirational, but no fiscal commitment in support was mandated.

The following section XLI points to the broader imperative to promote and encourage the enforcement of virtue and the prevention of vicious or immoral conduct, though it is not clear that the societies that exist to advance such behavior are educational in nature. But, as with the preceding section, the language here is reminiscent of that which was embedded within the 1776 Pennsylvania Frame of Government:

“Laws for the encouragement of virtue and prevention of vice and immorality, shall be made and constantly kept in force; and provision shall be made for their due execution; and all religious societies or bodies of men, that have or may be hereafter united and incorporated, for the advancement of religion and learning, or for other pious and charitable purposes, shall be encouraged and protected in the enjoyment of the privileges, immunities and estates which they, in justice, ought to enjoy, under such regulations; as the General Assembly of this State shall direct.”

(Constitution of Vermont 1777/1791, Ch. II, Sec. XL–XLI).

The 1791 Act that incorporated the University of Vermont as a public institution located it in Burlington and assigned it Trustees, but did not establish guaranteed public funding or state oversight. Thus, the state-chartered university of Vermont in practice functioned more as a private college, with state funds and involvement waxing and waning. For this reason (the lack of a funding mandate and limited oversight by the Trustees), it is unclear whether to classify the public university that was called for by the Vermont Constitution (“ought to be established”) and instituted by the legislature as truly a “public” university, in the same sense as those institutions which were chartered in the other States.

2.2. A Constitutional Duty to Cherish Public Education: Massachusetts (1780) and New Hampshire (1784)

Whereas these first two States, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, established systems of public education, the people of Massachusetts and the people of New Hampshire, in their fundamental charters, articulated an obligation to preserve virtue through education, and thus set a high bar as exemplars of the new republican approach to securing rights and liberty by embedding a civic mission in both constitutional and legislative frameworks.

Immediately subsequent to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the people of Massachusetts, like the people of Pennsylvania, quickly moved to create a proper frame of government. After the people refused to support a constitution drafted by the State legislature, a constitutional convention of delegates tasked solely with drafting a constitution gathered in 1779. The Massachusetts Constitution, drafted largely by John Adams (a “subcommittee of one”) (Adams [1776] 1851)2 and ratified in 1780, offered the most vivid republican statement among the newly independent States regarding a public duty to sustain education. (This 1780 Constitution is still in effect today, as the oldest existing Constitution in the world.)

After the 30 Articles comprising its opening Declaration of Rights, the framework of this State Constitution turned to the powers of government within the Commonwealth, outlining the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial investments of power (Chapters I–III), followed by an authorization of a commission of delegates to the Continental Congress (Chapter IV). In Chapter V, the Constitution speaks of education, first (§ I), affirming the officials and possessions of Harvard College, and then going further, explicitly providing for “The Encouragement of Literature, etc.” (§ II). Here, we discover the earliest and most robust statement (apart, as we shall see, from the reform Bill drafted by Jefferson in 1778) of the fundamental obligation in a Republic to educate citizens; for it declares:

“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar-schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, and good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments, among the people.”

If indeed this Constitution derives its language from Adams, this provision, like the Bill of Jefferson, reflects his own detailed thinking on what republican government entails.

Two features stand out immediately. First, the language of civic obligation (“it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates…to cherish”), in effect, constitutionalizes what Pennsylvania (1776) and North Carolina (1776) had already treated as a legislative charge to establish public “schools” and “one or more universities.” Massachusetts, having an institution of higher learning already (Harvard College), the constitutional mandate is for the state to take care that education be cultivated at the level of primary public schools and grammar schools. Second, this section embeds that obligation on the part of the state within a broader republican formula for civic education linking the preservation of rights and liberties to a general diffusion of knowledge among the people. Like a shining beacon on a hill, the Massachusetts Constitution also sought to lead the way for the new Republics, with its “duty…to cherish” provision.

The people of New Hampshire, for their part, eventually followed that light, but not immediately. Delegates of the colony had convened a Congress in December 1775 in order to frame a civil government for the people, in accordance with the recommendation sent by the Continental Congress. This constitution was adopted by delegates in January 1776 and thus was the very first to be framed by an American Commonwealth; however, it was not submitted to the people for ratification. This first constitutional framework was an urgent response to “unhappy circumstances” resulting from “the sudden and abrupt departure” of the colonial Governor and Council, which had left the people of the colony without any administration of law and order, but it contained no provision whatsoever related to education.

In its subsequent Constitution of 1784, the first ratified by the people themselves, New Hampshire followed the lead of Massachusetts, adopting a long provision of its own for the “Encouragement of Literature, etc.” (Part II, Article 83), thereby elevating the duty of public officials to support the cause of general education throughout the state:

“Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country, being highly conducive to promote this end; it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people…”

This provision cast public education as a constitutional obligation of the State, framed in the “duty to…cherish” language pioneered by Massachusetts, and it did so also without stipulating a plan for establishing basic public education from primary schools up to higher universities, as the Constitutions of Pennsylvania and North Carolina mandated. Also like Massachusetts, which had Harvard College, the oldest private institution in the colonies, New Hampshire had a private institution, Dartmouth College, which had been recently established in 1769. These two States, while articulating the principle of public civic education, did not mandate a system of education, but trusted in the legislators and magistrates to take care of the educational institutions which already existed. Thus, in its own way, did Massachusetts and New Hampshire affirm and fulfill the idea that the civic education of the people broadly construed is essential to the encouragement of virtue and the preservation of republican liberty.3

2.3. A Public University with a Civic Mission, but Without a System: Georgia (1777/1785)

Under its revolutionary Constitution, which was adopted in February 1777, but not sent to the people for ratification, the representatives at the constitutional convention for the new State of Georgia made a spare reference to public education, declaring, in Article LIV: “Schools shall be erected in each county, and supported at the general expense of the State, as the legislature shall hereafter point out.” Like the State of Vermont and the partial fulfillment of its constitutional mandate, this mandate, which did not explicitly mention a university, would also take some time to be put into effect.

The University of Georgia, which was chartered by an Act of the State legislature after the war in 1785, is often recognized as the first public university established in the new independent States of America. The Act itself announced, with unparalleled candor, that civic education is the only reliable safeguard of liberty. The preamble, framed in republican language, says that civil order in free governments results from choice and not necessity, a principle later echoed by “Publius” in the opening of Federalist No. 1. Furthermore, the charter further declares that the “public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their Citizens.”

The republican rhetoric of this preamble explicitly calls for civic education and the formation of citizens in civic virtue as the bulwark of a civil and orderly political body:

“As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil Order should be the Result of choice and not necessity, and the common wishes of the People become the Laws of the Land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their Citizens.

When the Minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their Conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater Confusions and with Evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated State of Nature. It can only be happy where the public principles and Opinions are properly directed and their Manners regulated. This is an influence beyond the Stretch of Laws and punishments and can be claimed only by Religion and Education. It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of Religion and morality, and early to place the youth under the forming hand of Society that by instruction they may be moulded to the love of Virtue and good Order.

Sending them abroad to other countries for their education will not answer these purposes,—is too humiliating an acknowledgment of the Ignorance or Inferiority of our own and will always be the Cause of so great foreign attachments that upon principles of policy it is not admissible. This Country in the times of our common danger and distress found such Security in the principles and abilities which wise regulations had before established in the minds of our countrymen, that our present happiness joined to pleasing prospects should conspire to make us feel ourselves under the strongest obligation to form the youth, the rising hope of our Land to render the like glorious & essential Services to our country.”

(Special Collection of Libraries 1785).

Only education and religion, the preamble insists, can properly regulate the opinions and manners of citizens in such a way that sustains free government. In this language, the people of Georgia gave the most direct and extensive statement of a public university’s civic mission: it was to be a guardian of republican liberty by forming citizens’ minds and morals. But in doing so, it must be noted, a strict separation of religion and civic education was not maintained. On the other hand, the document warns of the necessity to ward off a descent into some kind of Hobbesian horrors, for without inculcating such civic virtue, “a free government will be attended with greater Confusions and with Evils more horrid that the wild, uncultivated State of Nature.” Given the demographics of the State, whose enslaved population numbered more than one-third of the total population, this concern with virtue formation through public education (“suitably forming the minds and morals of their Citizens”), for the sake of maintaining “good order” and avoiding the miseries of a natural state of war, may have been felt more acutely here than in any of the other States in the union, perhaps with the exception of South Carolina.4

The university charter entrusts the superintendence and regulation of this “public seat of learning” to the Governor and the Council, the Speaker of the House of Assembly, and the Chief Justice of the State, who form the Board of Visitors. This Board, with an appointed Board of Trustees, together comprises the “Senatus Academicus”, which is responsible for establishing the governing ordinances of the university. Moreover, this Academic Senate was duly instructed to recommend other kinds of public “schools, and Academies” which were to be instituted and distributed across the State. Despite laying emphasis on the vital need for public education, the 1785 charter concentrated exclusively on founding a university under state authority and did not explicitly legislate a system of primary or secondary schools but instead relying upon the Academic Senate to make recommendations in this regard.

Although the first of the public State universities to be officially chartered in 1785, the University of Georgia did not actually admit students or begin instruction until 1801. The evident urgency of the preamble’s insistence on the significance of public education failed to hasten the authorized Academic Senate in its task of setting up such a system for the State. Later acts of the Georgia legislature would provide for academies, eventually even for common schools, but the university charter only envisioned a single institution ultimately responsible for the cultivation of the kind of civic virtue, knowledge, and order that is necessary to sustain republican government. For a full and comprehensive account of an entire public education system dedicated to a civic mission, we will have to wait for our return to the reform Bill proposed by Jefferson.

2.4. Narrow Charters of Education in the Territories: Tennessee (1794) and Ohio (1804)

Before ending this survey of the first State Constitutions and public education systems, let us take a look at education in those States admitted from the first territories. In 1794, the legislature of the Southwest Territory chartered its first institution of higher education, two years prior to Tennessee’s admission to the Union as a State in 1796. The charter issued by the territorial legislature that founded Blount College contrasts importantly with the origins of the other State public universities thus far, in that it incorporated a college explicitly nonsectarian. However, the Act establishing this institution included no language of a civic mission (Creekmore 2018), nor did it stipulate local schools or a system below the level of the college. This absence reflects its context: a frontier territory still in the process of organizing its political institutions.

While Blount College later became East Tennessee College (1807) and then, later, the University of Tennessee (1879), its original charter demonstrates that not all public universities in the early Republics were imagined as civic institutions in the same sense that they were in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia. The chartering of Ohio University in 1804 by its legislature likewise did not embed any civic mission language into the founding act itself. The General Assembly established its trustees and corporate powers, but did not articulate the republican need for education. The grounding of Ohio’s educational system in an explicitly civic mission came instead from its foundation in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—a charter which in fact traced its origins back to Jefferson.

As the first university created in the former territory, after Ohio became a State in 1803, its origin has roots in earlier documents, which called for land to be reserved for schools and a university. The relevance of public education, envisioned as part of the future fabric of institutions in the states to emerge from territorial possession, appears in the language of the Northwest Ordinance: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” (National Archives 2022) This federal ordinance provided guidance in public education—the ideological and legal framework for reserving lands to support both schools and a university. But the Ohio charter itself, like the Tennessee charter, said little to nothing about the civic mission of State-sponsored public education. Thus, while the State of Ohio inherited a civic educational mission, in some sense, from the original charter of the territory from which it had emerged, it did not inscribe that mission into the founding document of its first university or otherwise entrench a republican purpose for public education in its Constitution or the university charter.

2.5. Public Education in the First States

This survey makes evident the variety of origins for public education in the first States in the American union. A few of the new Republics stand out for tasking public education institutions with a civic mission, such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia, while others offer constitutional instructions that called for a system of public education, although in varying degrees of specificity and extent. Some constitutional mandates for public institutions of higher education created by State authority reveal the limits of civic imagination or perhaps a limited trust in State responsibility for establishing a system of public education; others seem more intent on mandating a more comprehensive system comprising local schools, intermediate institutions, and state university, but without an explicit mission to cultivate and promote civic education for the purpose of securing the rights and liberty of citizens in a republican form of government. Many of the first States, in fact, avoided mentioning education in their Constitutions at all: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Kentucky, and (as we shall see next) Virginia made no mention of public education in their first State Constitutions.5

3. Part Three

3.1. The Civic Mission of Jefferson’s Vision for Public Education in Virginia

Thomas Jefferson’s path toward establishing a comprehensive system of civic education through public schooling took shape in the immediate aftermath of the independence of the American States, which he himself shaped through the power of his pen. In June 1776, while serving in the Continental Congress, Jefferson prepared his draft Constitution for Virginia, one of which he later appended to his Notes on the State of Virginia (Gish and Klinghard 2017; Jefferson [1776] 1950b). This draft reflected his commitment to republican institutions and individual rights but did not include provisions for public education. Its silence on schools underscores the fact that Jefferson, at this stage, was focused almost entirely on restructuring the political authority of the new Commonwealth and was less concerned with the need to inscribe civic education into constitutional law. But that focus would soon change. As he would later write in his Notes, public civic education would be vital to the health of the new Republics: “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.” (Jefferson 1984).

Soon after his signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia and was elected as a delegate for Albemarle County to the General Assembly, where, once in session, he was promptly appointed to the Committee of Revisors in November 1776 (Jefferson [1776] 1950c). This committee, composed of Jefferson, George Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton, was tasked with overhauling the entire body of Virginia’s colonial statutes to make them fit for republican government (Jefferson [1779] 1950d). Over the next three years, Jefferson drafted a series of bills, including what became his most enduring contribution to the idea of civic republican education: “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (introduced as Bill no. 79 in the Assembly) (Jefferson [1779] 1950a).6 Submitted to the legislature on June 18, 1779, this reform Bill laid out a three-tiered public education system, the foundation of which was laid upon the republican principle that the people not only consented to be ruled but also would be the judges and guarantee that the new form of government that they instituted actually secured their rights.

First of all, then, Jefferson’s proposed Bill mandated that free elementary schools be established at the most local level, in every “hundred”:

“In every county within this Commonwealth … shall be chosen three of the most discreet and honest men … to divide the county into so many districts as that the most convenient school house may be within the reach of every inhabitant of the county…And it is declared that the children of all the free inhabitants of this Commonwealth, male and female, shall be entitled to three years instruction gratis, in reading, writing, and common arithmetic.”

Second, each county was to support a grammar school, staffed by masters paid through public funds. Finally, a select number of the most talented boys from the grammar schools would receive public scholarships to attend the College of William and Mary, thereby creating a meritocratic path from elementary instruction to higher learning. Jefferson, in his proposed Bill, justified the scheme in explicitly civic terms:

“The most effectual means of preventing [government’s] perversion into tyranny, is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.”

This preamble captures the heart of Jefferson’s civic mission: education was not a private good but a public necessity, the foundation of republican virtue and self-government. Had the reform Bill proposed by Jefferson been adopted by the legislature, the State of Virginia would have had the most comprehensive constitutional mandate for a system of public education in the union—establishing the standard for all other States by which to preserve republican government through a commitment to the civic education of citizens.

Jefferson’s Bill stated that “the most effectual means of preventing perversion [of government] into tyranny…would be, to illuminate…the minds of the people at large.” (Jefferson [1779] 1950a). It proposed a three-tiered system to accomplish this end: elementary schools in each ward, grammar schools at the district level, and a state university. Though the Bill would never pass the Assembly, Jefferson’s comprehensive philosophy of republican education for citizenship found its first full articulation: liberty requires an education available to all the citizens, first at the local level of the ward republics, through secondary grammar schools, up to the national university—in other words, civic education is not just for elites. This philosophy of education would be expanded in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and Jefferson would adhere to and promote its principles for decades, despite the opposition of a few of his fellow Virginians in the legislature to be persuaded.

The comprehensive nature of Jefferson’s education Bill soon became the subject of discussion among his contemporaries, far beyond the Virginia Assembly. In a letter from Samuel Stanhope Smith to Jefferson in March 1779, Smith reflected on the challenges to Jefferson’s proposed school system, noting that “the hundred schools” or ward republics were likely to meet with the public’s approval, provided that legislators offered sustained encouragement and support (Stanhope Smith [1779] 1950). Smith, a Presbyterian minister and a professor of moral philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), was at that time one of the rising intellectuals in American public life. Though not a member of the Virginia Assembly, he corresponded with Jefferson on questions of both public reform and moral philosophy. His engagement with Jefferson’s plan demonstrates that the proposal was circulating in influential intellectual circles outside of Virginia.

Even so, Jefferson himself remained committed to the task of establishing a system of public education in Virginia. From his drafting of three versions of a Constitution for Virginia in 1776 (which did not include a provision for education), to his appointment to the Committee of Revisors and his 1779 Bill, Jefferson’s course shows a rapid deepening of his commitment to public education as a civic mission. By embedding schools into the legal framework of Virginia, Jefferson sought to make the people themselves—through education—the safe guardians of republican liberty. When the General Assembly failed to enact the bill in 1779, he refused to abandon the cause, working tirelessly to persuade others to embrace his vision of “ward republics” as the foundational elements within his system of public civic education.

Jefferson’s early political philosophy of ward republics, first articulated in his education Bill, and later reiterated in his Notes (Queries XIV–XV), always provided the conceptual foundation for his public school system. Writing to Edmund Pendelton, his colleague on the Committee of Revisors, Jefferson referred to his plan for civic education as a “Quixotism for the diffusion of knowledge.” (Pendleton 1779). As visionary and elusive as his plan was, he endeavored to advance it—despite setbacks and obstacles, he continued late into life with his intention to establish a means by which young citizens of natural genius and virtue might be rendered by “liberal education” and “examination” worthy to receive the public trust and, through the wise administration of laws, to “guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberty of their fellow citizens.” (Jefferson [1779] 1950a).

3.2. Jefferson’s Continuing Efforts at Civic Education Through Legal Reforms

In 1780 and again in the early 1780s, Jefferson prepared revised versions of the Bill for consideration by the Virginia Assembly (Jefferson [1779] 1951a). These revisions retained the tripartite structure of elementary schools, grammar schools, and higher learning, though Jefferson worked to streamline the provisions in response to political objections raised over anticipated costs and administrative complexity. His persistence reveals the intensity of his conviction that republican liberty cannot survive without educating “the mass of the people.” But he still could not persuade the Virginia Assembly to adopt his proposed Bill.

When Jefferson sailed to France in 1784 and began his diplomatic service as an American minister in 1785, he carried with him both his frustration at Virginia’s inaction and his determination to press the cause from abroad. In his letters back home, Jefferson continued to advocate for his conviction that civic education was the only real guarantee of republican government: the diffusion of knowledge is the surest bulwark of freedom. These letters demonstrate his abiding belief in public education as the indispensable civic foundation for a Republic. Writing to Wythe in 1786, he insisted: “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.” He implored his teacher to continue in his task of civic education:

“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against tyranny, and that this can only be by enlightening their minds.”

(Jefferson [1786] 1954, pp. 243–45).

In another letter from Paris on 16 January 1787, this time to Edward Carrington, Jefferson linked the preservation of liberty to universal literacy:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

(Jefferson [1787] 1955a, pp. 48–49).

This insistence upon making “every man … capable of reading” reinforced Jefferson’s central theme: civic education through public schooling was the necessary foundation for republican government. Jefferson also continued to press the issue with James Madison, whom he had trusted on his departure with his unfinished legislative reforms, writing on 20 December 1787:

“Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”

(Jefferson [1787] 1955b, pp. 243, 440).

He stressed to his friend that “the people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” At virtually the same moment, their letters apparently passing one another in transit, Madison reported to Jefferson that his education Bill was once again being studied and debated in the Assembly, where it “went through two readings by a small majority,” and yet, he must have added knowing that it would be taken badly, the Bill “was not pushed to a third one.” (Madison 1787). Once again, Jefferson’s comprehensive proposal to secure rights and liberty through civic education had failed to win the support of a sufficient majority of his fellow Virginians.

Jefferson thus remained, to the best of his ability, even from his post in Paris, deeply engaged in the task of legislative reforms. Focused upon securing the good of the nation as a whole while serving as the Minister to France, the loyal Virginian never lost sight of the importance of the civic mission for a system of public education in his own state. Upon his return to America, Jefferson would be immediately drawn by his sense of duty into the administration of President Washington. National affairs thus dominated much of his time and energy. But even as he rose in rank, holding the highest national offices, as Vice-President and then President, Jefferson never abandoned his Bill for establishing public civic education in Virginia.

In 1816, writing to Samuel Kercheval with new proposals to revise the Virginia Constitution, Jefferson continued to insist that “wards” were “the elementary republics” where citizens participated in governing themselves, and where local schools would cultivate civic virtue. Within each ward, citizens learned to attend to public affairs, taking care of local municipal affairs related to justice, keeping ready a militia, aiding the poor, maintaining local roads and waterways, selecting local officers, and especially overseeing the school where all children in the ward—regardless of wealth, birth, or circumstances—would be educated at common expense and disposed to become “useful instruments” for the public good. Reflecting on the civic importance of such small-scale governance and local public education, Jefferson was persuaded that: “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic… the energies of the whole are exerted on the greatest principles of self-government.” (Jefferson [1816] 2012b, [1816] 2012c).

Jefferson argued, in his 1816 letters to Kercheval and to Joseph Cabell, that liberty could only endure if the republic were built from the bottom up, beginning with small units of self-government (Jefferson [1816] 2012c, [1816] 2014). “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic,” Jefferson wrote, “he feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs.” To do so required an arena for local civic participation: “Divide the counties into wards of such size as that every citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person. As elementary schools, wards will thus be the pure and elementary republics.” In his own mind, Jefferson conceived of his mission as old Cato in the Roman Senate, making his call for the creation of ward republics the ending of his every letter, equivalent to the staunch republican’s conclusion: <Carthago delenda est>.

In this formulation, local ward schools were not merely educational but political institutions: they were the “elementary republics” in which citizens learned both literacy and self-government. Jefferson thus united his theory of popular sovereignty with his educational philosophy. When he finally secured the charter for a University of Virginia in 1819, he had realized only the apex of this system. This institution stood as the capstone of a vision that, in its fullest expression, would have begun with ward schools, ascended through grammar schools, and culminated in a university devoted to the useful sciences, all for the sake of informing the people as the best defenders of their rights and bulwarks for the preservation of republican liberty. His determination refused to waver.

When Jefferson learned in 1824 that there was a call for a constitutional convention in Virginia to amend the existing frame of government, which had been put into effect during the revolution at a time when the people were still “novices” in the science and insufficiently grasped the principles of republican self-government, he proposed once again the division of the state into wards. Training grounds for citizenship in a republic, each of these local units would “be a small republic within itself, and every man in the state would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence.” He declared that “the wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well administered republic” than this widespread participation in local governance as the means to disperse power among the citizens and preserve liberty (Jefferson 1824).

3.3. Jefferson as the Father of the University of Virginia

Jefferson’s vision for establishing these “ward republics” as the firm foundation of civic education in a republican form of government thus stands out as one of the brightest threads within this grand tapestry of the establishment of the first public universities in the American States. As a prudent statesman in his retirement, when the comprehensive plan that he envisioned (starting with the ward republics) had little prospects for success (and he never stopped promoting it in private correspondence), Jefferson wisely decided that he would advocate for the establishment of a new public university for his country, one worthy of his high aspirations for civic education—and his determination and vigor in pursuit of this aim, even in old age, would eventually bring about one of the greatest accomplishment of his life.

As early as his two years as Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), Jefferson had in mind reforms for the one great institution of higher learning in Virginia. On 4 December 1779, he spearheaded a reorganization of the College of William and Mary, creating a new Professorship of Law and Police and reorienting the curriculum away from divinity toward the study of the law, medicine, and the sciences. He thereby attempted to institutionalize civic instruction at Virginia’s flagship college (Jefferson 1951c). In a letter to Madison on 26 July 1780, written from his office in Richmond, he underlined the civic purpose of these curricular reforms, explicitly referring to “Wythe’s school,” which will educate and send “new hands well principled, & well informed into the legislature.” By such means, higher education will educate the minds of future legislators, cultivate civic virtue, and be, in Jefferson’s estimation, “of infinite value” to Virginia (Jefferson [1780] 1951b).

In the early 1800s, as President, Jefferson again turned his attention directly toward revising higher education in Virginia—not through reforms to the College (which could perhaps never be reformed sufficiently for the purpose), but rather through the founding of a new public university. In his 1800 letter to Joseph Priestley, he proposed “a plan of an institution… where every branch of science useful at this day should be taught in its highest degree.” (Jefferson [1800] 2004). And as early as 1804, while in the Presidency, he was evidently pressing his allies in the Virginia legislature for support in establishing a new university, one that would embody his lifelong commitment to civic education but require reorienting his own efforts slightly. While he would continue to work behind the scenes to promote revised legislative proposals for his system of ward schools, Jefferson began actively pursuing the institutional realization of his plan for a university.

Jefferson’s correspondence reveals this shift from his earlier focus on ward schools and local academies to the creation of a single institution that could crown the system—a university devoted to republican knowledge, useful sciences, and civic virtue (Jefferson [1805] 2021). The Albemarle Academy (1803), which was never begun but reconstituted as Central College (1817), served as the local seed. Jefferson designed its buildings, recruited allies, and pressed Joseph Cabell to secure legislative support. Central College, he insisted, would become “the future university of our state.” (Jefferson [1815] 2012a). His vision for a system of ward republics anchoring his comprehensive plan for public civic education could not be realized in his lifetime. But still, Jefferson held out hope until the end of his life that the Commonwealth would eventually revise its Constitution and adopt his proposal.7

After his efforts to reform the College of William and Mary were rebuffed by entrenched interests, Jefferson dedicated himself to the creation of a new public university for Virginia. The Rockfish Gap Report (1818), largely drafted by Jefferson and supported by his related correspondence (Jefferson [1818] 2017a, [1818] 2017b), declared that the essentially civic mission of public education for the State demanded the establishment of a prominent institution of higher education where “every branch of science deemed useful at this day should be taught in its highest degree.” Among those sciences to be studied at the new university, of course, must be a new science of republican government, with “a professorship of the free principles of government…founded in the rights of man.” (Jefferson 1824). Finally chartered in 1819, the University of Virginia became the crowning achievement of Jefferson’s four-decade-long commitment to establishing public civic education for his State, reflecting his belief that the success of any republican form of government required the instruction of citizens, of the people, in both practical and civic knowledge (Jefferson 1819). Along with his authorship of the Declaration of American Independence and the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, Jefferson wished most to be remembered as the Father of the University of Virginia (Jefferson 1826).

4. Conclusions: Public Education as the Foundation for Republican Citizenship?

The founding charters of the nation’s first public universities reveal a wide spectrum of educational commitment. Pennsylvania was the first to mandate in its constitution public support for education. Massachusetts and New Hampshire embraced the duty to cherish the civic mission of public education, but neither acted on the civic obligation to establish a state university for some time. Georgia articulated in its authorizing legislation the most eloquent statement of that civic mission, but established only the State university, without a plan for a comprehensive system of public education. North Carolina constitutionally required both schools for youth and universities, envisioning a two-tiered system, but the civic mission was stated only implicitly. Vermont mandated the minimum, whereas Ohio and Tennessee created universities as a territorial obligation (the former benefiting from the republican principles of the Northwest Ordinance), but without civic mission clauses. When considered together, these public university charters and Jefferson’s own writings reveal several basic categories of institutions mandated by the States: those that explicitly articulated a public civic mission for educational institutions (as in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia); those that conceived education in terms of a comprehensive or tiered system of public instruction (as in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Vermont); and those that simply chartered public universities without employing any of the rhetoric associated with the civic mission of education (South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio). Indeed, other States even chose to leave the task of education—practical or civic—in the hands of private institutions, only establishing public institutions decades after the founding.

Jefferson’s vision for public civic education transcends this federal landscape. His reform Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge in Virginia had envisioned a complete public system, from ward schools up to a state university. His Notes on the State of Virginia further elaborated on this proposal, defending his educational philosophy in print before a public audience, and his public letters and private correspondence throughout his long life and career continually defended his view that the fate of our American experiments in self-government ultimately requires “improving the minds of the people at large,” for the “diffusion of knowledge” is the only sure foundation of republican self-government. His proposal for the ward republics, while perhaps quixotic, sought to establish the solid political ground for a first tier of public instruction, situating local education as the broad base upon which intermediate and higher institutions of learning would be instituted and made accessible to all citizens. Jefferson’s vision, spanning more than five decades and formally institutionalized in the establishment of the University of Virginia, sought to provide for public civic education so that the people themselves could responsibly serve as the only “safe depositories” of their own rights and liberty. This system of public civic education for citizens would thus constitute the architecture of the republican polity.

The wide array of approaches that we have seen taken here by some of the first republican States in America to mandate or establish public institutions of education, together with the fact that some States chose not to do so at all, suggests that there was uncertainty at the founding about the imperative for civic instruction of citizens. There was not then (as perhaps even today there is not) unanimous agreement about the formal role of a state in educating the people in civic knowledge. Not everyone deemed public civic education to be—as certainly Franklin, Adams, and especially Jefferson understood it to be—the necessary means of guarding our republican governments from succumbing to vices and corruption, degenerating into tyranny, and becoming destructive of the very rights that governments are instituted to secure. It is clear where several of the most prominent founders stood with respect to this issue. Whether civic education ought to be formally incorporated into the academic mission of public institutions of higher learning remains an important and urgent question for our own times to grapple with—and answer.