ALEXANDER CAMPBELL AND THOMAS JEFFERSON

A Comparative Study of Two Old Virginians

It was an October day in 1839 when Alexander Campbell stood at the tomb of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He had just driven the three miles from Charlottesville where he had visited the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1819. He later recorded his impression of the University: “Its localities are well selected; and its architectural designs, execution, and general taste reflect great credit on the distinguished mind of its illustrious founder.” He went so far as to say that the Grecian orders of architecture are “the best specimen of good style and taste that we have seen in the United States.”

He was not so impressed as he stood at the grave of the Sage of Monticello. The man who had served as the third President of the United States had been dead thirteen years, and yet his country estate was in such a state of disrepair that Campbell viewed it as having “the appearance of a splendid failure.” The farm was sterile and exhausted, to use Campbell’s description, while the mansion had “the patchwork appearance.” Campbell suggested that the whole scene implied that its proprietor had been “a rather ideal and imaginative than practical sound in his views and undertakings.” Then he added: “Of the wisdom of his other theories, it is to be hoped that time, the great interpreter of all human effort, will speak more favorably than of those that appear to have been cherished by the occupant and proprietor and improver of Monticello.

Campbell found the tomb and its surroundings in ruins. The fence was dilapidated, the frame of the gate was swinging in the air, the post and bars prostrate on the ground, the monument tottering, the tombstone broken and trodden by swine. To him it all seemed to say, “Here lies in this neglected spot, some Arnold guilty of his country’s blood” rather than Here lies the Author of the American Declaration of Independence.

The visitor from the little village upstate called Bethany was shocked and incensed by what he saw. On previous celebrations of the Fourth of July he had delivered orations in tribute to Jefferson. Often had he said: “The praises of a Washington, a Franklin, and a Jefferson will long resound through the hills and vallies of this spacious country.” (Mill. Harb. 1, p. 307)

And yet here at Monticello, so loved by its illustrious sage, it was as if he were a forgotten man. “Ought not the nation, the state of Virginia, or the citizens of Albemarle, to pay some attention to this deserted piece of ground!!” He complained that the inscription on the monument had no nominative case, but only “Was born April 13th, O. S. 1743 — died July 4th, 1827.” He protested: “Did Mr. Jefferson or his heirs presume that all the world would forever find, by intuition, the subject of this verb! What eccentric folly!” (Mill. Harb. 10, p. 59)

The interesting thing about all this is that the attitude of Campbell at Jefferson’s estate is much what we would expect Jefferson’s own attitude to be should he have visited Monticello when Campbell did. He too was particular and meticulous; he too insisted that things should be done right. He would have registered the same complaints, I think and much the same way Campbell did.

That there was an affinity of thought between these two old Virginians I have thought for sometime. Having lived in (West) Virginia for awhile, serving on the faculty of Bethany College with its rich traditions, I have basked somewhat in the historical splendour of both of these men. Since it has long been my conviction that the best study of historical values is through biography, I concluded that it might be well to look at Jefferson and Campbell in an essay together.

They should both be remembered first of all as dedicated citizens of the Old Dominion. They were Virginians first, then Americans; or at least it was this way in the early part of their lives, but they eventually gave themselves not only to America but to the entire world. It is evident that Campbell came to view Virginia, its University, and Thomas Jefferson as a kind of triumvirate. It was typical for him to say to the people of Tennessee in 1855: “We plain folks of Virginia, with the immortal Jefferson and his State University, dare not emulate the magnificence of this rich and enterprising maiden State.” (Mill. Harb. 26, p. 218)

Campbell talked about Virginia much as one would speak of his mother: “Men of truth, whose feet have trod the mountains and plains of Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, concur in awarding to this delightful region the greatest amount of attractions, the most to please and admire, the most to raise, excite, and transport the mind of a scientific and cultivated beholder.” (Mill. Harb. 16, p. 345) He was incidentally speaking of that particular part of Virginia made holy by “the grave of the far famed Jefferson.” But he talked about the hills of Bethany the same way, “salubrious” being his overworked adjective.

He had an affection for Monticello similar to that of its famed proprietor. Even though it was over 300 miles from Bethany in a day when travel was difficult, he made no less than three pilgrimages to the place, the last time being when he was nearly 70 years old (“We thought it expedient that Mrs. Campbell should make a visit to Monticello”).

But these visits, as we have seen in part, appear now to have been disturbing to Campbell. Perhaps it did not make sense for him, a religious reformer, to have such admiration for an irreligious man, yea even a Deist. What he saw inside the edifice during his 1855 visit disturbed him as much as the dilapidation he witnessed outside the edifice during his 1839 visit. There were busts of Voltaire and Paine in the chambers! “Why should this Voltaire stand enshrined in the antechamber and Paine in the bedchamber of the sage of Monticello!”

If Campbell did not know why Jefferson would esteem these two, we now know why. Loving France almost as well as his native country, having lived there as Ambassador, hardly any event was viewed more seriously by him than the French Revolution, which began to brew while he yet lived there. It was Voltaire (partly because of the literary influence of John Locke) who helped to inspire that revolution, giving it what it most needed, philosophical and moral justification. But the most significant thing in Jefferson’s life was the American Revolution, and it was Thomas Paine who helped to ignite it. So, to the Sage of Monticello these busts symbolized freedom, the biggest word of all in the lives of both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell was hurt that Jefferson’s life was not made perfect by Christianity: “He repudiated the Bible,” Campbell complained while viewing those busts and thinking of Jefferson, “and he dreamed of making a free and a happy people without faith, a hope, or a desire for Christian immortality.” His mixed feelings become even more apparent when he writes: “the painful associations, the unwelcome reminiscences of the godless life and the hopeless death of its gifted and politically honored proprietor.” (Mill. Harb. 27, p. 89)

It is a point of interest around Bethany that Alexander Campbell’s son-in-law, Dr. Judson Barclay, was once the owner of Monticello and lived there for sometime. In his account of the 1855 pilgrimage Campbell mentions this fact (Ibid. p. 88), pointing out that Barclay sold it “for a tythe of its intrinsic value.” He adds: “It is a place too much visited to be a private residence for any Christian man.”

This essay proposes to show that Campbell had a hero who was much closer to his own views than he realized, for much of what Jefferson believed (especially about religion) was hidden away in private letters that have since become public. This study also aims to show that the two men had so much in common that if they could have known each other they might well have started a third revolution, a religious renaissance in America that might well have changed the course of history!

The two men almost certainly never met personally. Jefferson was 45 years older, representing the preceding generation. When Jefferson died at 84, Campbell was in his fourth year as editor of Christian Baptist, a man of 39, he was already well-known throughout Virginia. Being mentally alert to the very last, Jefferson could well have known of the Sage of Bethany. In this essay we not ony make mention of a reference by Jefferson to the Campbellites as one of the creedless groups in Christendom, but there are the remarkable statements about the restoration of primitive Christianity, which express hope that there will be younger men coming along who can accomplish this great work.

Campbell was unhappy to see busts of Voltaire and Paine within the sacred confines of Monticello. Let us say that in this essay we will show that it might be in order for a bust of Thomas Jefferson to be enshrined at Bethany College and for a bust of Alexander Campbell to grace the halls of the University of Virginia, or even at Monticello alongside Paine and Voltaire, as a testimonial to what might have been, the third Revolution, if these two old Virginians could have walked together in their prime.

UNIVERSAL MINDS

Jefferson’s interests were vast. In his library at Monticello there were books on art, science, farming, poetry, architecture, history, music, religion and philosophy. He read avidly from the works of Homer, Cicero, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Locke, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu — and on and on the list could be extended, including of course the Bible. As in the case of Campbell, he was especially impressed by John Locke’s writings.

In his study of Jefferson, Gilbert Chinard points out that America’s third president complained in his old age that “the decays of age had enfeebled the useful energies of the mind,” but that in fact Jefferson remained alert and retained his encyclopaedic curiosity and unusual capacity for work almost to the very end of life. Chinard observes that in 1820 alone Jefferson personally replied to 1,267 letters, many of which required painstaking research in his vast library. Some of his letters turned out to be essays that dealt with every possible subject under heaven.

His visitors at Monticello were from all walks of life, kings and peasants alike, and he entered into conversation with them on many subjects: political economy, education, woolen goods, nails, boats, warfare, farming-and like his young neighbor upstate, Alexander Campbell, he was very interested in merino sheep.

His interest in books was so great that after selling his library to Congress he undertook to collect another, a difficult task in his day. From France and Germany he ordered the best editions of Greek and Latin classics. Friends in Europe were asked to send copies of the latest publications. He was a man of ideas as well as action and his mind was as big as the universe itself.

Campbell’s attitude toward the world of ideas and learning was strikingly similar to Jefferson’s. One only needs to thumb through the many volumes of Millennial Harbinger or to peruse the remains of his personal library in the Campbell Room at Bethany College to appreciate the magnitude of his interests. And if one were to look for that vast Jeffersonian dimension in Campbell’s thinking in but a single essay, I would suggest his “Philosophy of Memory” in the 1841 Harbinger. Indeed, it would take a mind like a Campbell or a Jefferson to create such a work of genius.

When I conjure up my fanciful dreams I sometimes envisage Jefferson and Campbell at “Table Talk” either at Monticello or the Bethany Mansion. Chinard’s description of the Sage of Monticello in a dinner conversation can only be equaled by Selina Campbell’s portrayal of the Sage of Bethany at table-talk. In Home Life of Alexander Campbell she describes these table-talks as edifying and engaging, including such topics as the eye and eyelash, the hand and fingers, and — especially when the candles would flicker out — a dissertation on the value and nature of light. Selina was convinced that her husband’s table-talks exceeded those of Coleridge himself.

Like Jefferson at Monticello, Campbell received both the rich and the poor, the elite and the commoners at his guest house at the Mansion, dubbed by a neighbor as “Stranger’s Inn,” a name that stuck. He could entertain guests for days and talk about the progress of reformation in the Western Reserve with Jeremy Vardeman, merino sheep and the wool industry with John Brown the abolitionist (and slavery too of course!), the Bible with Walter Scott (and everybody else), the military with Robert E. Lee and future president Garfield, politics and education with Henry Clay, and public welfare and morality with them all. He had the best flock of sheep in Virginia, helped build roads to Wheeling and Wellsburg, and served in the state legislature.’ He was a husbandman, wool-grower, educator, legislator, debater, lecturer, editor, publisher, preacher, college president, and even a phrenologist!

Only the astronauts are in the class of Jefferson and Campbell!

APOSTLES OF FREEDOM

Edward Dumbauld in his Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson says: “The central feature of Jefferson’s political creed was his concern for human freedom.” Jefferson believed in the goodness of man and avowed that man is capable of self-government. And so his creed is well embodied in his thrustful affirmation: “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

It was for his devotion to the freedom of man that Jefferson wished to be remembered by his fellow Americans. Though he achieved such high offices as governor of Virginia, Secretary of State and President of the United States, he wished to be remembered as a crusader for human liberty. He asked that his tombstone identify him not as a governor or president, but as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the statue of Virginia for religious freedom, and the Father of the University of Virginia. Campbell’s tombstone likewise hails him as a defender of the faith and the Founder of Bethany College.

But the affinity between Jefferson and Campbell relative to their devotion to human liberty is measured other than by epitaphs. Both were adamantly anti-sectarian and anti-clerical in both politics and religion. Concerning the University of Virginia President Jefferson said: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” His philosophy of education was to make man free through learning.

Campbell too founded a college, not to support a sect, but to free man’s mind of parochial thinking. He set up a course of studies at Bethany that he referred to as “science and literature, the useful arts, agriculture, and the learned and foreign languages.” These had two general purposes: “to free the human mind from vulgar prejudices, ignorance, and error” and “to open to us an extensive acquaintance with literature, science and art, and thus furnish us with the means of extending our acquaintance with nature, society, and the Bible.”

Both Jefferson and Campbell opposed creeds and partyism in their crusade against tyranny. The President once said: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” And Campbell affirmed: “No human creed in Protestant Christendom can be found that has not made a division for every generation of its existence.” He even warned against unwritten creeds as more destructive than written ones. To those who sought to make his own unity movement simply another sect, Campbell replied: “They cannot make a sect of us, for we will acknowledge all as Christians who acknowledge the gospel facts and obey Jesus Christ.”

Jefferson said that his fight for religious freedom was the bitterest of his life. Campbell also believed that his enemies were those clergymen who wished to hold their people in ecclesiastical bonds. Both men contended that religion in Virginia was being stifled by religion itself. We must remember that when Jefferson commenced his crusade for religious liberty the Anglican Church bore the official seal of Virginia. Jefferson’s task was to free Virginia from an established church, thus giving all denominations the right to flourish; Campbell’s job was to free man’s heart of sectarian pride and untie all believers in the one great Church of Christ on earth. One was more political, the other more religious.

They talked alike in their efforts to unhorse religious tyranny. In his Bill for Religious Freedom in Virginia Jefferson said: “All men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion . . .” Again he said: “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship . . . nor shall he be enforced, restrained, molested or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs . . .”

Campbell said it this way: “We do not ask men to give up their opinions; we ask them only not to impose them upon others. Let them hold their opinions, but let them hold them as private property. The faith is public property; opinions are private property. Men have foolishly attempted to make the deductions of some great minds the common measure of all Christians.”

There are many interesting parallels in the campaigns these two Virginians conducted in the name of religious liberty, one of the significant being the calumny heaped upon them by their antagonists. Jefferson was attacked as an unbeliever. Such notable libraries as the Philadelphia Public Library refused him a place on their shelves, branding him as an infidel. When he ran for president he suffered that acrimony that only sectarian minds can invent.

The story is somewhat the same with Campbell. He was accused of dividing churches and causing trouble. He did not believe in the Holy Spirit or in the Trinity. He was a Sandemanian, which sounded like something very bad. He wanted to start a sect of his own. He was a slave owner, a charge that led to his imprisonment in Scotland.

Another interesting parallel in their struggles for religious freedom is that each of them issued a Bible of his own, to put it the way their enemies did. Jefferson’s “Bible” was what he called the philosophy of Jesus and entitled “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” which was an effort to set forth what Jefferson believed to be that part of the Bible that really counts. He was very interested in the moral force of Jesus’ teaching. Said he: “A more precious morsel in ethics was never seen.” And yet many modern moralists virtually ignore the ethics of Jesus!

Campbell’s Living Oracles was a much more ambitious and extensive piece of work, being a new version of the entire New Testament. But it called forth the same kind of criticism Jefferson received: “This man has put out a Bible of his own!”

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY

In the immediate generations before Jefferson the Puritans of New England had constructed a religious philosophy that was a synthesis of Protestantism and Platonism. The Platonic heritage inspired the idea of a Holy Commonwealth, which called for a totalitarian religion and anything but religious freedom and separation of church and state. The first Protestants in America set up church states similar to the Roman Catholic states they had left behind in Europe. Back in Geneva Calvin had been such a religious despot that he fined people for not going to church, jailed them for wearing jewelry and lace, and burned them at the stake if they were heretics. A father was jailed for naming his child other than a Bible name and a woman was incarcerated for wearing her hairdo too high. Calvin condemned 58 to death as heretics during his theocratic rule in Geneva.

It was this kind of Calvinism that came to America, and once it was fused with Platonic philosophy, it provided the religious austerity found in colonial America and which in part followed the frontier as it moved west. Plato’s philosophy not only supported regimentation of men and ideas, censorship, collectivism, and thought control, but it was also critical of democracy. It also provided resource for metaphysical speculation. Roman Catholicism, on the other hand was more Aristotelian, due to the influence of Thomas Acquinas some centuries before. This is to say that while Calvinistic Protestantism was more mystical and speculative, Roman Catholicism was more scholastic and institutional.

Jeffersonian democracy and what might be called Campbellian individualism drew their inspiration other than from Plato and Aristotle. Jefferson had an aversion of Plato, viewing his writings as “sophisms, futilities and incomprehensibilities.”

In a letter to John Adams he said of Plato:

“His foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions. Yet this, which should have consigned him to early oblivion, really procured him immortality of fame and reverence.” Of the clergy’s use of Plato he commented: “The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system. . . The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them, and for the obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.” (Norman Cousins, In God We Trust, p. 162)

Jefferson went on to explain that the divines had canonized Plato for speculative purposes and “it is now deemed as impious to question his merits as those of an Apostle of Jesus.” He goes on to tell John Adams: “It is fortunate for us, that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity, or we should now have been all living, men, women and children, pell mell together, like beasts of the field or forest.” He points out that Plato is especially appealed to on the immortality of the soul, but contends that no one would believe such if there were no better arguments than those given by Plato.

The Monticello sage would have been pleased if he could have read after a different kind of “divine” up in Bethany. Campbell made it clear that his reformation was not philosophically oriented: “We build not on poetry nor on philosophy. We build on the living oracles of the living God. We have the full assurance of understanding only when we build or rest upon the express oracles of the Holy Spirit, addressing us in the Apostolic writing.” (Mill. Harb, 1862, p, 292)

And Jefferson would surely have nodded his approval if he could have read the following from Campbell: “We are ashamed to see any brother, young or old, learned or unlearned, gifted or not gifted, substituting any philosophy of faith for faith itself, any philosophy of hope for hope itself, any philosophy of love for love itself, and thus, unintentionally however it may be, substituting any theory however specious and plausible in his own eyes, for the simple belief of the simple testimony of the Holy Spirit.” (Ibid, p. 294) On the other hand he argued that a true philosophy and a true faith were not antagonistic. (Mill. Harb. 1857, p. 481)

It is especially interesting that just as Jefferson poked fun at Plato’s arguments for the immortality of the soul, Campbell too lampoons those “simple philosophers” who speak of the immortality of the soul. It is the spirit of man that is eternal, he contends, distinguishing between soul and spirit, and he insists that: “The body and the soul die, but the spirit is immortal. An immortal soul is not once found in Holy Writ.” (Mill. Harb. 1862, p. 112)

Surely Thomas Jefferson, after reading Plato, would have become very interested in Alexander Campbell could he have read the Millennial Harbinger, which unfortunately circulated throughout Virginia a little too late for Jefferson.

Jefferson would have admired Campbell’s anti-Calvinism, for he himself viewed that school of Protestantism as tyrannical and demoralizing. Like Campbell, Jefferson was anti-Trinitarian, contending that the Calvinistic idea of three Gods is a blasphemous dogma. Both men voiced strong objection to the Calvinistic teaching that, as Jefferson put it “God from the beginning elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others to be damned, and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save.” (Cousins, Op. Cit. p. 161)

The two men even talked similarly about the restoration of primitive Christianity. One wonders if Jefferson might possibly have had Campbell in mind when he wrote the following in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse in 1822, one year before Campbell began his publications, but well after he began his crusade throughout Virginia for the restoration of primitive Christianity: “Happy is the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity. I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologies of the middle and modern ages.” (Ibid. p. 162) Did he see in Alexander Campbell, then only 35 years old, one’ of those “younger athletes” who would tear down the strongholds of speculative Calvinism?

In any case Jefferson saw a restoration preacher as having a lot of trouble with the clergy: “He might be excluded by our hierphants from their churches and meetinghouses, but would be attended in the fields by whole acres of hearers and thinkers.” He would have endorsed most of all Campbell’s effort to restore a creedless religion free of the speculative dogmas that only confused and divided people. He would also have appreciated Campbell’s concept of the priesthood of all believers, his emphasis upon reason as well as faith, and his “common sense” approach to theological questions. But Jefferson feared that any effort to reestablish the true religion of Christ would be followed by “the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and confessions of faith, the engines which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus” and thus negate any restoration effort.

While both men were heterodox in religion, Jefferson’s nonconformity is more difficult to define. Was he a deist as he was accused of being? Deism in Jefferson’s time was at its peak in American thought. Forms of it are much alive in present-day Unitarianism and perhaps Quakerism. Unlike an atheist who rejects wholesale any notion of God, a deist views God as the Great Architect of the universe, but not as one who interferes with the creation or in any way involves himself in human affairs. God is the perfect clock maker who has left his creation to tick on as it will. To think of the Supreme Being as tinkering with his finished clock is to make him seem trivial, anxious, and ridiculous. So God politely bowed out of the universe according to deism. There can therefore be no miracles, and any idea of God as a “Father” who cares for each one of his children is to be rejected.

If Jefferson was a deist, he was a “Christian” type deist, for he could speak of “the revival of primitive Christianity” with as much excitement as a Tennessee “Campbellite.” He saw three great principles in Christianity: the belief in one God, a future state of rewards and punishments, and the Golden Rule. From this point on much of his religious thinking was negative in that it was mostly antagonistic to the “crazy imaginations” of Calvinism. He saw Calvinism as believing in three Gods and as urging that the love of one’s neighbors and good works are nothing. He complained that in Calvinism “faith is everything and the more incomprehensible the proposition the more merit is its faith.” It teaches that reason in religion is of unlawful use, and its Deity “is not the God whom I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of the world, but a demon of malignant spirit.” (Russell: Jefferson, Champion of the Free Mind, p. 338)

Calvin was to Jefferson “an impious dogmatist” and “a false shepherd” that taught “a counter-religion as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet.” “Their blasphemies have driven thinking men into infidelity,” Jefferson lamented, “who have too hastily rejected the supposed author himself with the horrors so falsely imputed to him.” He insisted that the whole civilized world would be Christian “had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips.”

It is difficult to tell Jefferson and Campbell apart when they are speaking on the evils of Calvinism, the jargon of Trinitarianism, the corruption of the clergy, or the confusions of creedalism. Compare their views on these subjects in these quotations:

Thomas Jefferson: “When we shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding, reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciplines.” (Cousins, p. 156)

Alexander Campbell: “I object to the doctrine of the Trinity not because it is contrary to reason or revelation, but because of the metaphysical technicalities, the unintelligible jargon, the unmeaning language of the orthodox creeds on this subject, and the interminable war of words without ideas to which this word Trinity has given birth.” (Mill. Harb. 1833, p. 155)

Thomas Jefferson: “The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Serverus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic Creed. They want to re-establish, by law, that holy inquisition, which they can only infuse into public opinion.” (Cousins, p. 151)

Alexander Campbell: “If the legislature incorporate a University for creating priests, let all the religious sects in Kentucky, who desire to have priests manufactured in modern style, have a fair, that is, an equal chance of participating in its advantages . . . But, perhaps, it may be thought expedient to have a few high priests in the state; if so, then do not give the control of the University to the Presbyterian synod, for they stand in the least need of it, inasmuch as they are pretty generally high priests already.” (Chris. Bap. 2, p. 13 7: Gospel Advocate Edition)

Thomas Jefferson: ‘You ask my opinion on the items of doctrine in your catechism. I have never permitted myself to meditate on a specific creed. These formulas have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughter-house, and at this day divides it into casts of inextinguishable hatred to one another.” (Cousins, p. 158)

In this same letter Jefferson states that all present sects have creeds except “religionists calling themselves Christians” and the Quakers, which is a reference no doubt to the Campbellites.

Alexander Campbell: “Human creeds have made more heretics than Christians, more parties than reformations, more martyrs than saints, more wars than peace, more hatred than love, more death than life.” (Campbell-Rice Debate, p. 765)

Thomas Jefferson: “It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel if there had never been a priest.” (Cousins, p. 147)

Alexander Campbell: “In this country we have no kings and no king-craft. We are not, therefore, afraid to laugh at the impious and vain pretensions of the allied sovereigns. But in this country we have priests and priestcraft, and therefore many tremble to lisp a word against priests and priestcraft:’ (Chris. Bap. 1, p. 88)

Needless to say that such views as these brought the wrath of the clergy upon them. Jefferson, for instance, was branded “ an atheistical monster” by the president of Trinity College (Methodist), now called Duke University. The president said Jefferson’s establishment of the University of Virginia was “a long-range plan for the subversion of Christianity” and “a bold enterprise and deistic daring of enormous proportions.” He called him “a deist, an infidel, agnostic and materialist:’ (M. D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image, p.243)

As for Campbell, the leading clerics did everything but curse him, and some of them did worse than that. In Scotland he was imprisoned; in America church buildings were closed to him. In the press he was castigated with such mildness as Andrew Broaddus’ “unsound and dangerous” and such harshness as J. B. Jeter’s “There is a screw loose in his mental machinery.”

VIEWS ON SLAVERY

Jefferson wrote into his Autobiography that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” speaking of the Negroes living on his own and other plantations in the South. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he said. As if to anticipate the dark days of the Civil War, which came just twenty years after his death, he wrote: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever . . . But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” (Russell, p. 57)

He had his own plan for the liberation of the slaves. All the children born of slave parents should be declared free, but they should stay with their parents until old enough to shift for themselves. Then they would be educated it public expense in farming, arts, or sciences. At age 21 for the males and 18 for the females they would be placed in colonies apart from the whites where they could build their own culture. When he saw that the public would not buy his idea, he wrote as if by prophecy: “the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow.”

He would colonize the Negroes off to themselves because he believed they were inferior to the white race: “I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.” Being an inferior race, it would be futile and harmful to attempt to make them “equal” in social intercourse. Yet slavery must go, or “it is as degrading for the master as for the slave.” He claimed that slavery “is destructive of the morals of the people and of industry.” Slavery became a political issue in Jefferson’s time. He jeopardized his political future, especially with southern leaders, by his view that slavery was a “national sore” but had to be remedied as soon as possible. As much as he desired to promote the industrial development of the United States, he hesitated to do so in that e believed such progress would perpetuate slavery.

He believed slavery could be abolished if Congress had sufficient power of the states to declare all men free. Yet he was a champion of state rights and so he opposed the kind of centralized power that would be required to end slavery by legal action. While he argued that slavery was poor economics, was a matter of moral and religious principles that he opposed the system. It simply is not right for one man to own another man. He himself owned 75 (or 90 by one account) slaves who worked his plantation at Monticello. He freed none except the five who were liberated in his last will and testament.

Alexander Campbell owned his first slaves only a few years before Jefferson’s death in 1826, and he lived through the stormy period of the slavery question up to and during the Civil War, dying in 1866. Attending his funeral was an old Negro that Campbell had owned as a slave, whom he set free long years before and placed on a pension. Slavery was a “hotter” issue in Campbell’s prime than in Jefferson’s day, for the abolitionists and anti-abolitionists were at war with each other. The fight had entered the churches, tearing them asunder.

Campbell owned only two or three slaves, probably by way of inheritance from his father-in-law, all of whom he set free. While he was their master they were taught to read and they received religious instruction, a testimony to his disapproval of the abuses that so often characterized the system. He believed the New Testament recognizes, or at least does not condemn, the relationship of master and slave. Yet he favored emancipation. And there were times when he used stern language in condemning the system: “Slavery is the largest and blackest blot upon our national escutcheon, that many-headed monster, that Pandora’s box, that bitter root, that blighting and blasting curse under which so far and so large a portion of our beloved country groans.”

Conscious of Thomas Jefferson’s plan to colonize the slaves, Campbell set forth a proposal whereby it could be effected: that the ten million dollars that had annually been spent on the national debt, which was now paid off (which sounds strange to 1962 ears!!), should from then on be used to colonize the colored race. Let these millions be spent each year in building a separate culture for the freed slaves, he insisted, “until the soil of our free and happy country shall not be trod by the foot of a slave, nor enriched by a drop of his sweat or blood; that all the world may not believe that we are a nation of hypocrites, asserting all men to have certain natural and inherent rights, which in our practice we deny; and shedding crocodile tears over the fall of Warsaw, and illuminating for the revolution of the Parisians, while we have millions of miserable human beings at home held in involuntary bondage, in ignorance, degradation and vice, by a republican system of free slaveholding.” (Richardson, Memoirs, 2, p. 368)

Like Jefferson who avowed that slavery is as bad for the master as for the slave, Campbell wrote from the south to his friend Dr. Richardson in which he said “None are more enslaved to men than slave-owners,” and also, like Jefferson, he had a word to say in the same letter about the clergy as partly responsible for the blindness: “In religion two or three little popes govern all the associations and conferences — they think — and the people pay them for it.” (Richardson, Memoirs, 2, p. 452)

Just as President Jefferson had condemned slavery as economically unwise as well as morally wrong, Campbell told an audience of South Carolinians that “slavery has proved no greater blessing to the far South than it has done to Virginia. It has exhausted whatever natural fertility had been originally in the soil; and South Carolina seems to have once had a reasonable proportion of fruitful territory. It has superinduced the worst system of agriculture which one could easily imagine; and it has imposed on the whole community views, feelings and habits exceedingly inimical to the resuscitation of the soil and the agricultural improvement and advancement of the State.” He went on to point out that tobacco, rice and cotton are profitable crops for slave labor, but that for all other crops slave labor is very unprofitable.” (Richardson, p. 450)

By 1845 the slavery dispute among religious leaders had become what Campbell described as a “period of excitement and extremes upon a very exciting subject.” At the beginning of this year he promised the readers of Millennial Harbinger in his Preface that he would define his position in detail, beginning with an essay on the subject by his honored father, Thomas Campbell. He followed with 12 essays of his own, stating his position as clearly as anyone could expect. Yet it seems that he was always misunderstood by some. In 1847 he was imprisoned in Scotland over a circumstance growing out of the charge that he was pro-slavery, yea even a man-stealer — he was so caricatured on posters as such! In America as early as 1840 he had fixed upon him in The Philanthropist, an abolitionist journal, “the brand of pro-slavery.” The editor wrote: “Mr. Campbell may yet live to curse the day when he took his pen to prove slavery sinless.”

In the essay alluded to it was Campbell’s intention to show that the slavery question would largely be solved if this divine precept were obeyed: “Masters, render unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” He made it clear that he opposed slavery: “I always regarded it as a great evil, as a great misfortune to the American family, and have always cherished the pleasing anticipation that a day was rapidly advancing on which, with the consent of all parties, by an inclined plane, or a gradual approximation, the difficulty would be met and overcome, and this otherwise safe and happy Republic saved from shipwreck and ruin on this ominous and tremendous rock.” (Mill. Harb. 11, p. 99)

And yet he rejected the proposition that “the holding a person as a slave (or in a state of involuntary servitude) is always a sin.” If this were true, he pointed out, then Paul would not have urged masters to be good to their slaves, but would have said, “Masters, immediately emancipate your slaves, and pay them wages, or let them go and seek other employment.” Rather Paul accepts slavery as a social institution of his time, but sought to control it through Christian love. As Campbell put it: “There are many things that the laws will permit slave-holders to do that Christian masters cannot do. The laws will authorize a master to sell a wife from the bosom of her husband, and an infant from the breast of its mother; and does anyone believe that a follower of Jesus Christ could do such a deed!”

In the essay by Thomas Campbell, referred to above, the old patriarch of the Campbell clan (he was in his 80’s when he penned it!) answers the argument that “slavery is sinful in the extreme” with 17 quotations from the Bible indicating that God regulates rather than condemns slavery. He sees it as part of God’s judgment against sin. Yet it is an evil that must end, and he predicts its downfall, urging that “no Christian can either approve or practice it.”

Both of the Campbells were moderates between two extreme positions. Alexander painstakingly distinguished between pro-slavery, abolitionism, and anti-slavery. “The doctrine of the pro-slavery party is that the relation of Master and Slave is one of divine authority, consonant to the genius of human nature — to all the principles of morality and piety; and is, therefore, morally right, and may, with all propriety exist among Christians.” He rejects this position.

Abolitionism is the doctrine that the relation of master and slave “as in its very nature evil, and only evil, and that continually; that living in that relation was just as criminal as living in adultery or any other immoral and wicked connection.” Campbell further observes that the abolitionist insists upon breaking up the relationship by an immediate emancipation of all slaves: “Peaceably if they could, forcibly if they must.” He rejects this position also: “I have always been anti-slavery, but never an abolitionist.” He shows that many slave-owners are anti-slavery in that they contemplate the end of the system.

Along with all this Campbell urges the abolitionists of the North to mind their own affairs and leave the South free to work its way out of slavery, which he believed it would do. Taking Paul’s statement in I Cor. 7:20-21 (but we will use the RSV rendition): “Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity,” he shows that while the apostle accepts slavery without censure he nonetheless hopes for the Christian slave’s freedom. Campbell says he too hopes for the freedom of slaves, then adds: “But till that day arrives, which, in my opinion, would arrive much more speedily if the South were permitted to follow its own policies without any foreign interference — let all Christian men mind their own business.” He further charges that abolitionists are unchristian and indiscreet when they encourage discontent and rebellion on the part of slaves.

The sorest spot with Campbell was that some churches were disfellowshiping slave-owners. He insisted that “no Christian community can religiously make the simple relation of master and slave a subject of discipline or a term of Communion.” While he grants that both master and slave in a congregation might be censured for neglecting their God-ordained duties to each other, he goes on to say: “He that censures a man merely because he is a master of a slave, censures the law and the gospel, Moses and Christ, for they all sanction the relation, and denominated some masters as ‘faithful and beloved’.”

It was gratifying to Campbell that the gospel had reached large segments of Southern slaves. He observes that in one state that numbered 60,000 Baptists three-fourths of them were slaves! He tells of seeing 2,000 slaves in railroad cars in Charleston who were “well dressed and of the finest appearance, returning from a protracted meeting.” He also quotes the governor of South Carolina as saying that the Negroes of his state are much better off than their cannibalistic ancestors in Africa, one reason being that they are given religious education.

Campbell liked to say: “Christian masters are the Lord’s slaves, says Paul, while Christian slaves are the Lord’s freedman.” This is a good summary of his position. He believed that Christianity should accept its social situation, then work toward the betterment of that society by way of Christian principles. And so he urged: “The master, then, being a slave to the Lord, must not be inhibited by law from discharging his duties to his servant. He must carry out the golden rule, and teach him to read the Bible, and extend to him all the means of moral and spiritual improvement.” (Mill. Harb. 16, p. 261)

NATURAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS

During the eighteen days that he spent writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson penned a single statement that stands as one of the great monuments in the history of ideas: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.” In his first draft he had written “sacred and undeniable” instead of self-evident, added “independent” to equal and “inherent” to unalienable. All these words were laden with much meaning in the mind of Jefferson.

Lincoln said of this statement: “All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” (Quoted by Peterson, op cit, p. 162) Lincoln saw in this document “a moral principle” that gave life to the new republic, and he believed it was this principle of the liberty and rights of the individual that would save the union in his own day. Borrowing from a biblical proverb, he likened Jefferson’s statement to “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” his words being the golden apple and the union with its constitution the picture. “So let us act,” said Lincoln, “that neither picture or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken.”

Jefferson believed in natural (or “inherent” to use his other word) rights. By this he meant that by virtue of being a man the individual has freedoms and privileges. They are God-given, innate, and undeniable. The purpose of government is to preserve and protect the natural rights of man, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even in a natural state (before he forms government) man has these rights, and civil power is for the purpose of realizing these rights more easily and more equally for all men.

He admitted that these ideas were not original with him, and he concedes that the main points in the Declaration came from several of his reading sources. Thomas Paine is one thinker that inspired these ideas, the man who was partly responsible for both the American and French Revolutions. Paine shows how twenty people thrown together by accident in an uninhabited country would each be a sovereign in his own natural right. His will would be his law. Yet he would be in danger of injustice from one or all of the others, so his power to defend his rights would not be equal to his rights. He therefore agrees to civil law, which should be a constitutional expression of natural law. There are two kinds of rights: those of thinking, speaking, forming and giving opinions, and all those that can be exercised by the individual apart from outside assistance. The second kind has to do with the acquiring of property and personal protection against injury or tyranny.

Paine taught that the first kind of rights, such as freedom to think and speak, are never surrendered by the individual; but he does give up the right to take the law into his own hands, which he has in the natural state, in order to make civil law work. And so Jefferson wrote into the Declaration: “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The last phrase may well have been inspired by John Locke who said: “Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and. subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.” As we shall see in the case of Campbell also, Jefferson was a faithful disciple of Locke, including the philosopher’s ideas on religious freedom such as he taught in his Letters on Toleration in which he called for the separation of church and state.

But Jefferson did not follow Locke in his emphasis upon the right of property as a natural right. Locke said in his Treatise of Civil Government that “The great and chief end of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” While “property” was included in the rights listed by the First Continental Congress and in the Virginia Bill of Rights, it was conspicuously absent in the Declaration of Independence. That this was a studied omission is indicated by the fact that when Lafayette presented to Jefferson while he was in France that country’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man” Jefferson put in brackets the words right of property, thus eliminating it from the list of natural rights.

The significance of this may be related to his agrarianism. He always believed that the agricultural class was the only productive class, and he had no confidence in the laborers in the cities. He said: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural . . . When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” (Russell, Jefferson, Champion of the Free Mind, p. 147) In the same vein he spoke of the ploughman acting in a moral case before a professor because he has not been “led astray by artificial rules.” It was the gentleman farmer who lived the very best life, social as well as moral.

Like Jefferson, the Sage of Bethany also idealized the gentleman farmer and expressed distrust of cities. After one trip among the city folk in 1843 he wrote: “The American cities, like all other cities, are not favorable to the prevalence of pure religious influences. Like frontier settlements, they are good theatres for Methodism and such forms of religion as require more soul than spirit, more animal feeling than Christian knowledge.” He went on to point out that it is a mistake to suppose that because the city folk dress more fashionably and understand trade and politics better that they are therefore superior. It is “a grand and pernicious mistake” to suppose them superior in science, piety, or morality.” He added: “Those living in favorable rural positions are more learned in Biblical science and better acquainted with the Christian Institution and with all the ways and means of exhibiting Divine truth in its proper attractions than those with whom it has been my lot to mingle in the great cities.” (Mill. Harb. 1843, p. 64)

To his graduates at Bethany College he said: “An American farmer, well educated, is in my humble opinion one of the most elevated in rank of all earth’s noblemen and lords.” The farmer, he said, has leisure for his own personal improvement and to serve his country. He is freer from temptation and is more independent-”a position that throws him more into communion with God and Nature than any other.” (Mill. Harb. 1844, 360)

Campbell was altogether as conscious and articulate about the rights of man as Jefferson. Early in his career he expressed gratitude for “the most illustrious of all national conventions, that which framed this Magna Charta of American liberty.” He said in one of his first debates: “Had sectarian priests framed our Constitution do you think that I, my friends, dare have stood here as I do this day.. “(Quoted by D. R. Lindley, Apostle of Freedom, p. 68)

He referred to the principle “All men are born free” as golden words. Jefferson, however, was cautious to say that men are created free and equal, not born that way. There is a difference. Jefferson meant “independent” (a word used in his first draft before others called for changes), for he realized that no one is born either free or equal. It is interesting that one of Campbell’s expression of human rights is precisely that used by Jefferson in his first draft of the Declaration: man has, as Campbell put it, “certain inherent and inalienable rights, of which he cannot be divest with impunity.” When he said this he was speaking of man’s right to a voice in the government (See Lunger, Political Ethics of Alexander Campbell, p. 91)

He and Jefferson both followed Locke in asserting the right of a people to rebel against tyranny, Locke as well as Paine inspired the American and French Revolutions. Sovereignty is always in the people rather than in the government. The people select their representatives, whether monarch or president, and they can ask for any office back that they have bestowed in case of injustice. If the magistrate does not surrender his office peacefully, the people can depose him by force. This is the principle of revolution, the safeguard against tyranny. It is the will of the people that counts.

Campbell and Jefferson attempted at various times to list the rights of man, which they believed grew out of the natural law. The Sage of Monticello not only emphasized life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as in the Declaration of Independence, but he also mentioned that man is endowed with a sense of right and wrong, so there is the right to make moral discriminations and to live a morally responsible life. He said, “The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.” Each man has the right to care for his own soul and to think for himself. Free inquiry, right to opinion, and right to dissent he also stressed.

The Sage of Bethany often spoke of political and Christian rights as based on natural rights. He mentions the preservation of life and property, the pursuit of happiness, seeking food and entertainment for mind and body, the forming of character and reputation as political rights of all. He refers to “Christian health and prosperity” as the peculiar rights of Christians. (Chris. Bapt. 7, p. 4) Like Locke but unlike Jefferson, he made much of the right of private property as natural. In his debate with Robert Owen he suggested that society loses its meaning without private property. In this debate and on other occasions he proved himself to be one of the first to oppose the various communistic enterprises of his day. He scorned Owen for endeavoring to abolish private property, contending that it is part of man’s nature and society for him to bargain and buy, to build and improve for his own enrichment. The Sage of Bethany must be listed as one of the first anti-communists in American history.

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Not only did both of these old Virginians build a college of his own liking, but they both promoted an educational philosophy that was far in advance of their time. It is also interesting that both men saw such a relationship between education and aesthetics that each played an important role in the architectural plans of his college. Jefferson drew his designs from “chaste models taken from the finest remains of antiquity,” especially from Greece and Rome; while Campbell was inspired by his own University of Glasgow.

The University of Virginia, established in 1819, could boast of having three former presidents of the United States on its board (Madison, Monroe, Jefferson), at the same time, the only college in history that can make such a boast. Bethany College, founded in 1840, did however have one president on its board and that while he was in office — J. W. Garfield, a great personal friend and admirer of Alexander Campbell. Bethany’s first faculty was composed largely of men who were either products of Jefferson’s university or admirers of it. Campbell even used the same menu in his dining hall as was followed at the University of Virginia.

An even more interesting parallel between these two institutions is that each ruled out of its curriculum any offering in theology. The Monticello educator explained this to the religionists as an effort to keep church and state separate, but a better reason was likely that he did not consider theology good education. And so with Campbell. It is in the charter of Bethany College that there is never to be a theological professorship, and yet Bethany, unlike Virginia, was an independent “church” college. It is simply a matter of Campbell not believing in theology — or rather theologians!

The editor of the Chicago Tribune remarked in 1880 that “It somehow happens that now and then a man lives who seems to have in his head every important idea that all his countrymen together get into theirs for a century after he is dead.” He went on to say that almost any new project of human welfare was anticipated “and likely enough the whole identical plan worked out in detail, somewhere in Jefferson’s writings.” This appears to be particularly true regarding education, for he postulated a plan for public education as early as 1778, a plan not unlike that which finally came into being generations later. It called for three distinct grades of education: elementary schools for all children; colleges (or secondary schools) for further common education for the more capable; university for the teaching of the sciences in their highest degree and to the most capable.

It was with this educational plan that he introduced the idea of government by wards, based on the old English “hundred” system of one hundred families to a unity. He would divide each county into several wards of five or six miles square. Each ward would have its common school on the elementary level for the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The school would be supported by the ward, and each child would attend three years free of charge and as much longer as the parents wish at their own expense.

These wards would be under the scrutiny of supervisors who would annually select from each ward the most promising children for further education.)His plan called for twenty secondary schools scattered across Virginia where these select students would study Greek, Latin, geography and higher arithmetic. One “genius” would be selected from each school every year or two for six more years of advanced study. At the end of the six years the best ten of the twenty would be sent on to a university for three years, the rest dismissed.

He insisted that this plan would provide a basic education for all, rich and poor alike, and that it would make possible advanced training for Virginia’s brightest youth who would otherwise be lost to the state’s great need for talent. Since the Russian Sputnik went into orbit America has been very conscious of its gifted youth, and in recent years thousands of programs have been initiated in our schools for the purpose of enriching their education. That Jefferson as early as 1787 proposed a plan of public education that provided special training for gifted youth is a commentary on how slow we are in catching up with the thinking of our greatest minds. He realized at the very birth of our republic that our greatest natural resource was the talented mind. We have not erred in trying to educate everyone, for he too saw the need for this, but we have erred in trying to educate everybody alike. Jefferson knew better.

He believed that the education of the people is the best guardian of liberty. Since those in power tend “by slow operations” to pervert it into tyranny, the most effectual means of preventing this is to illuminate the minds of the people at large. “It becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons whom Nature hath endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” (Russell, op cit, p. 51)

Education was therefore closely related to his political theory: “Whenever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” As for the ends to be realized in education, he made this clear in his six objects of primary education which he stated in 1818. These aims, which according to some “ought to be emblazoned in letters of gold in every schoolroom of the land,” are as follows:

1. To give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.

2. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing.

3. To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties.

4. To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either.

5. To know his rights.

6. To observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

Emerson once said that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” In many respects the University of Virginia was a reflection of its illustrious founder, for it embodied what Jefferson believed necessary for a prosperous future for America. Even though he became a Governor of a great state, Ambassador to France, Secretary of State, Vice-President, and even President of the United States, he wished to be remembered above all as Father of the University of Virginia. To him the university was a citadel of liberty, a bulwark of freedom, and an invitation to intelligence and maturity. Nothing else he ever did “showed him more clearly to be a major American prophet,” as one of his present-day biographers describes his work with the university, is an appraisal that would please him greatly.

It was not until about 1850 that the United States established on an extensive basis systems of elementary education. Afterwards came the public high schools and colleges. Alexander Campbell joined such contemporaries as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard in an effort to realize Jefferson’s ideal of free education for all. In 1838, when he was contemplating the founding of his own private college, he wrote as follows regarding public education:

I am perhaps too sensitive on the subject of education; but, really, I regard my brethren and my fellow-citizens as generally too remiss in this great matter. If I had a thousand votes in the State they should all go for universal education at public expense. I would make the literary and moral education of every child born on the territory of the commonwealth the first and paramount duty of the State.

In the absence of such provision, he said he would encourage Sunday schools, private schools, church schools wherever they are possible, for “I go for schools of every sort so long as there is one of my neighbor’s children uneducated.” In his efforts to convince people of the wisdom of public education he was confronted with the same old excuse: it is too expensive. His answer to this was that the people of Virginia were already spending as much money to educate only part of the children inadequately as it would take to educate all of them properly in a state-wide system.

He also pointed out that the “vicious mass of ignorance, idleness, and crime” is costing more in terms of courts, prisons and law enforcement than it would cost to banish these evils through proper education. This was a key point in his educational philosophy: intelligence and virtue are the safeguards of life, liberty, reputation and property; and these can be realized only through education. (Mill. Harb. 1, p. 555) Jefferson had said very much the same thing. Both believed that America’s future depended upon the moral character of its people, and that character can be developed only through education. It is the free mind that is the issue in the thinking of both men.

Campbell’s educational philosophy is best expressed perhaps in the many addresses he gave through the years to teachers’ conventions. In 1841 he was asked to lecture in Clarksburg, Virginia to a convention called for the purpose of setting up common schools in that part of the state. Unable to attend personally, he sent a long manuscript to be read by another in which he gave his views on two lively questions: what kind of education is best adapted to the needs of the community and how are schools to be made truly common and accessible to all?

In this presentation he spoke often of the “educated mind” and what it means to a community. Everything from the skill of the cultivator and the manufacturer to the mariner’s compass and the steam-engine belong to society only because of educated mind. He concluded, therefore, that in due time society would look to the schoolmaster and the district school more than to mighty generals and standing armies and immense navies. We are beginning to see that “it would be less expensive to educate an infant than to support an aged criminal in a state prison.” He posed an ethical question: does a society have a right to punish a man for crimes that grow out of conditions that society itself has imposed through neglect and indifference?

As with Jefferson, Campbell sees education as basically moral, and so he speaks of “education which is essential to their clear discrimination of right and wrong.” He mentions also that “the intellectual and moral improvement of all the mind belonging to the State” should be the first concern of the people. Another important insight into his philosophy of education is his freedom and education: “intelligence and freedom are but two names for the same thing.” To be free one must be intelligent; an ignorant community is always enslaved. With the Greek philosophers the sages of Monticello and Bethany would both agree that man is morally obligated to be intelligent.

What is good education? ‘Campbell insists that the answer to this question depends upon understanding the nature of man. And so the teacher cannot truly educate until he sees his students as sensitive, intellectual, and moral beings who have an ultimate destiny. He goes on, like Jefferson, to list certain objectives of primary education, which he calls the seven arts. These are: the art of thinking, the art of speaking, the art of reading, the art of singing, the art of writing, the art of calculating, the art of bookkeeping.

In teaching these arts one will have to teach more or less the following: orthography, orthoepy, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, music, elocution. He emphasizes geography, physics, political science and history — “especially the history of our own country” — and “the admirable science of self-knowledge.” This would include what we now call psychology as well as philosophy and physiology. He points out that “the laws of physical health” should be taught in the classroom. The pupil should come to understand that he is “fearfully and wonderfully made” by learning about the body. He quotes an educator that laments that students are not taught “the causes of good and bad health nor the physical consequences of immoral conduct.”

When I wrote my master’s thesis on The Educational Philosophy of Alexander Campbell at Southern Methodist University my examining committee was more impressed with Campbell’s emphasis upon health education than any other. They figured that he was something like a century ahead of his day in this regard. Perhaps it would not be an oversimplification to say that his educational theory can be summed up in his view of man’s knowledge of three books: the book ‘of Nature (physics, biology, geography, etc.), the book of Human Nature (psychology, sociology, etc.), the book of God, the. Bible (moral and spiritual education).

The last point was the most vital of all to Campbell, for he placed the Bible at the very center of a man’s education, both at the college level and in the primary grades. “To educate the head and neglect the heart is only giving teeth to the lion” he would say, and by educating “the heart” he refers to a Bible education. To have schools without Bible and moral training is a natural calamity that should not be tolerated by any civilized community. He avowed that there is a way to teach what he called “common Christianity” in the public schools, which would be the inculcation of the great fundamental truths believed alike by all parties of Christendom. There is a common ground on which “all Christian people can unite, harmonize, and cooperate in one great system of moral and Christian education.” (Mill. Harb. 12, p. 443f.)

All these ideas were presumably embodied in the founding of Bethany College, which was at first a kind of educational colony rather than a mere college. There was an elementary school for pupils from 7 to 14 years, an academy for those above 14 (agriculture, mechanics, etc. “more scientific and extensive than is usually allowed”), the College Proper (“a very liberal education both literary and scientific”), and finally a Normal School for the training of teachers. He stipulated that in all these departments “physical and moral education must keep pace with the intellectual and no young gentleman will be allowed to devote all his energies to the mere improvement of intellect at the expense or hazard of his moral and physical constitution.”

Students at Bethany were not only fed the same menu as those at the University of Virginia, but were likewise on the same academic diet, for both institutions were well ahead of their time in emphasizing mathematics and science as well as classical literature. The big difference between the schools reflects the big difference between their founders, for Bethany, while not a Bible college, was founded upon the Bible. The Bible is at the center of the sources that provide an understanding of man and the universe, Campbell believed, with science, mathematics and world literature revolving around the Bible, illustrating it and corroborating it as God’s revelation to man.

Jefferson would, of course, agree in part. After all, he too issued a Bible; and he too saw the ethics of Jesus as the strongest moral force in the world. But the Bible was safeguarded by the clergy in Jefferson’s day, and with the clergy came priestcraft and sectarian bigotry, none of which Jefferson wanted. We believe that if he could have seen how Campbell related the Bible to all the arts and sciences, and as the key to understanding both man and the universe, he would have been so impressed that he would have been glad to have had the Sage of Bethany on his university faculty.