DANBURY, Connecticut — July 4, 2024, will be the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration had the purposes of encouraging Americans in their struggle with the British and reassuring potential European allies that the division of the British Empire would not be papered over. Ultimately, its argument led to numerous societal reforms — such as the establishment of public universities like Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut.
The Declaration’s second sentence, marked by the famous Jeffersonian assertion of the “self-evident” facts “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” has come to be a measuring stick of our governments’ behavior. Over and over, reformers have pointed to that sentence in justification of their policy aims. When we ponder successes based on such arguments, we are apt to think that they trace to the mid-to-late 19th century — or even to the 20th.
Members of the Second Continental Congress, however, acted on them in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. For example, the chairman of the committee that drafted the Declaration, John Adams, as chief draftsman of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 was responsible for language a Massachusetts court read as having abolished slavery in Massachusetts. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania served as president of America’s — the world’s — first abolition society. Connecticut’s Roger Sherman as a state legislator co-authored the law abolishing slavery in his state. Yet, the committee member who did the most work to make the Declaration’s equality principle a reality was its draftsman, Thomas Jefferson.
In his home state, Virginia, the dominance of the political and economic elite depended on five supports: the tie to the British monarchy, the feudal land tenures, the established church, slavery, and their exclusive access to education. Jefferson argued before and in the Declaration against the tie to the British monarchy, and ultimately his countrymen were persuaded. He wrote the law that abolished the feudal land tenures, which meant that current owners could sell land if they wanted and that they no longer had to leave their estates entirely to their oldest sons. He took the lead in the campaign to disestablish the Episcopal Church, Virginia’s state church.
Besides that, Jefferson took numerous very significant steps against slavery. As a congressman, he wrote the first draft of the law that banned slavery from the Midwest. As president, he called on Congress to pass and himself signed the law banning slave imports — which had been averaging more than 23,000 people per year in South Carolina alone — at the earliest moment the Constitution empowered Congress to ban it: the stroke of midnight in the morning of January 1, 1808. He argued at length in the most important American book of the eighteenth century, Notes on the State of Virginia, that slavery was unjust and inconsistent with republican government. This book was very widely circulated, his arguments widely repeated.
Jefferson also took the lead in working to democratize education in Virginia. The only public school in Jeffersonian Virginia was the College of William and Mary, America’s second-oldest college. A couple of dozen boys per year matriculated there. Their preparation generally had been tutoring by teachers their fathers had hired to live in their houses or being sent to regional schools for sons of wealthy parents. The curriculum at William & Mary focused on Greek and Latin.
In his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Jefferson proposed something radically different: three years for all Virginia children at local primary schools, where they would learn to read and write, basic math, and republican history, a further three years for the best student in every local class at a regional secondary school, and four years at William & Mary for the best student in the graduating class of every regional school. He said “children” did not exclude girls. Asked by a Quaker reformer, he said it could be read to include slaves.
Jefferson also proposed that college students be able to choose their own curricula, which ultimately became the familiar college majors. Failing to persuade the General Assembly to adopt these reforms for William & Mary, Jefferson worked to establish a new university: the University of Virginia. Students would take the courses they wanted to take, not the politicians, but the teaching faculty would govern the place, and professors would live among the students. Jefferson designed the buildings. His friend James Madison joined him on the Board of Visitors, and the two former presidents corresponded about the books to be included in the library. Their mutual friend President James Monroe joined them in breaking ground for UVA’s first new building.
If a citizenry is to have republican government, Jefferson believed, it must be educated. In distant Philadelphia, that other co-author of the Declaration Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania for similar reasons. Ultimately, citizens in every state decided that such institutions were essential to the success of their newly republican societies. In supporting such schools, including Danbury’s own Western Connecticut State University, they are acting on the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence.
Dr. Kevin J. Gutzman
Professor of History, Philosophy and World Perspectives
Western Connecticut State University