January 24

[In this letter dated January 24, 1816, written from Monticello during my retirement as a private citizen and rector of the Central College, which would become the University of Virginia, I address Joseph C. Cabell, a prominent Virginia state senator and my indispensable political ally in the General Assembly. Following the War of 1812, my primary focus was establishing a comprehensive public education system in Virginia, though it faced fierce resistance from wealthy elites who balked at being taxed to educate the impoverished. In pushing to bypass local courts to establish simple elementary schools, I sought to implement my cherished ward system to decentralize local governance. I have faith in a localized democracy that I envisioned neighborhoods eagerly volunteering their own labor to construct log-house schools, believing that even the poorest citizens would gladly build them just to keep education close to their doorsteps.]

The transfer of the power to give commencement to the Ward or Elementary Schools from the court and aldermen to the visitors, was proposed because the experience of twenty years has proved that no court will ever begin it. The reason is obvious. The members of the courts are the wealthy members of the counties; and as the expenses of the schools are to be defrayed by a contribution proportioned to the aggregate of other taxes which every one pays, they consider it as a plan to educate the poor at the expense of the rich. It proceeded, too, from a hope that the example and good effects being exhibited in one county, they would spread from county to county and become general. The modification of the law, by authorizing the alderman to require the expense of tutorage from such parents as are able, would render trifling, if not wholly prevent, any call on the county for pecuniary aid. You know that nothing better than a log-house is required for these schools, and there is not a neighborhood which would not meet and build this themselves for the sake of having a school near them.