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Economics in Virginia
[Note: Part of the HET Website. This page is not related to or endorsed by the University of Virginia, William & Mary or George Mason]
The US state of Virginia boasts several universities which have had a distinct role in the development of American economics. The oldest college in Virginia (and second oldest in the United States) was the College of William & Mary, founded in 1693, in what was to become the colonial capital of Williamsburg. The University of Virginia was chartered in 1819, and opened in 1825 in Charlottesville. The University of Virginia established a northern campus at Fairfax in 1957, that evolved into the separate George Mason University in 1972.
Virginia is the oldest English colony in north America (est. 1606), and home of its earliest governing institution (the House of Burgesses, est. 1619). As a result, Virginia elites liked to conceive of themselves as the enlightened vanguard of the fledgling United States in the 18th Century. Virginia was the homeland of several founding fathers and early presidents of the United States - notably George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Unlike commercial and manufacturing rivals of Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, Virginia's wealth was primarily agricultural, much of it resting on large slave plantations. As such, in the late 18th and early 19th Century, the Virginia elites embraced a different economic vision of the future of the United States, envisioning a primarily agricultural country, and articulated Enlightenment liberal ideals of limited small government, laissez faire and free trade. The Virginia vision contrasted sharply with the more mercantilist, activist and protectionist ideas (the "American system") frequently found among leaders in Northern states.
gave the Virginia elite the self-conception as the vanguard of the Enlightenment in the fledgling United States in the 18th Century. Virginia was the homeland of several founding fathers and early presidents of the United States - notably George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Unlike commercial and manufacturing rivals of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Virginia's wealth was primarily agricultural, much of it resting on large slave plantations. As such, Virginia elites articulated a different vision of the future of the United States, resting on agriculture and free trade, echoed in the South, rather than the Mercantilist and Protectionist instincts of the North.
Thomas Jefferson perhaps personifies the Virginia outlook - attracted to the land-oriented doctrines of the Physiocrats, and following up on the doctrines of the ideologues of Destutt de Tracy, Say and the French liberal school. Already in the 1770s
Jefferson was educated at the College of William & Mary. But he graduated well before James Madison (future Bishop of Virginia and a cousin of the namesake politician) took up the presidency of William & Mary in 1777. As was to become customary in many American colleges, from 1784, the college president took on the responsibility of delivering a "moral philosophy" course to students in their final year. In the standard curriculum of the time (modeled on Oxbridge), the first few years were almost solidly focused on ancient classics, some mathematics, and dabs of theology. The final "moral philosophy" course was designed to top off the education of gentlemen-students, to inculcate the future civic leaders of the state with a general outlook on man and society. The moral philosophy course was usually rather wide-ranging, covering ethics, law and politics. Bishop Madison's course assigned readings from recent Enlightenment writers, such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, William Paley, Dugald Stewart, and others. The difference in Bishop Madison's course is that, sometime in the the late 1790s, he began including "political economy" as part of it, assigning Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as the textbook. Bishop Madison's moral philosophy course at William & Mary is consequently the first instance we know of economics being taught at an American college.
Bishop Madison died rather suddenly in 1812 .After a two-year stint under John Bracken, the presidency of William & Mary was taken up by the physician John Augustine Smith in 1814, Smith's course on moral philosophy retained the economic sections introduced by Madison.. J.A. Smith notably published his Syllabus in 1817, what ostensibly can be characterized as the first American college economics textbook.
It was around this time that Jefferson was advancing his plans for a new state University of Virginia. Already in 1779, while governor of Virginia, Jefferson had outlined plans to overhaul the system of education in Virginia, into a comprehensive public system, to be topped by a state university. Jefferson had originally envisaged assigning William & Mary to that top role. But W&M was a Episcopalian college, and so the plan was opposed by Presbyterians and Baptists in the Virginia assembly, who did not like the exclusion of Presbyterian colleges like Augusta College (f.1749, future Washington & Lee) and Hampden-Sydney College (f.1776) from the proposed system. Jefferson's bill was not passed, and he gradually came around to the idea that a new non-sectarian college would have to be created from scratch. His spell as a diplomat in Europe during the 1780s brought Jefferson into contact with European Enlightenment thinkers, who had their own grand ideas about educational reform. Over the next few years, Jefferson consulted repeatedly with several educational reformers, notably Joseph Priestley. The Physicorat Dupont de Nemours wrote an outline of an education plan for Jefferson in 1800. Jefferson came around to firmly embrace the idea of a secular college, with a curriculum centered around modern subjects. Jefferson set his educational plans aside during his presidency (1801-09) - although the foundation of West Point academy in New York, designed in imitation of the French engineering schools was foretaste of what was to come. After his retirement, Jefferson picked up the idea again. In 1810, he persuaded the Virginia assembly to establish a "Literary Fund", to funnel Virginia state money for education, the first step towards his grand plan for a state-funded universal education system. In 1814, while residing in Monticello, Jefferson joined a neighborhood committee planning to establish a modest local academy to serve Albermarle County. Jefferson quickly persuaded the Albermarle academy board to aggrandize its ambitions and erect a college of higher education to serve all of central Virginia. In February 1816, the Virginia assembly chartered "Central College". Jefferson launched a public subscription campaign, and raised enough private donations to begin construction of Central College in Charlottesville by October 1817, and make its first hire - Thomas Cooper. But Jefferson's ambitions were grander. In February 1818, the Virginia assembly finally capitulated to Jefferson's intense lobbying. It declined Jefferson's plan for a system of universal public education for primary and secondary schools, but agreed to assign $15,000 from its Literary Fund to help fund a non-sectarian statewide university. Governor James Preston appointed the "Rockfish Gap Commission" (chaired by Jefferson) to determine its location, structure and curriculum. After a year's discussion, the Rockfish Gap Commission recommendations were adopted by the Virginia assembly, and the "University of Virginia" was chartered on January 25, 1819. It would take over Central College, then still under construction, in Charlottesville (Albermarle County). But it would take several more years before it was finally ready. Jefferson's ambitious architectural designs escalated costs rapidly - the state of Virginia would end up having to fork over some $250,000 by 1827, well more than the $15k originally envisaged. The Board of Visitors finalized the curriculum in 1824 on a more modest scale, and the University of Virginia finally opened for classes in 1825.
Jefferson had planned to have political economy on the UVA curriculum from the outset. Indeed, as far back as 1814, Jefferson had tried to lure the great French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to move to Virginia, to teach economics. Jefferson had also arranged for the translation and publication of Destutt de Tracy's Treatise in 1817, hoping it would be adopted as the textbook at Virginia (indeed, Jefferson had pressed J.A. Smith to adopt Tracy's book at William & Mary, but Smith found it inadequate and dismissed it in a footnote in the 1817 Syllabus). In 1819, Rockfish Gap Commission had recommended the establishment of ten professorship, including a separate professor of "Government and Political Economy". Jefferson had originally wanted Thomas Cooper (his 1817 hire) to teach it, but opposition to Cooper's heterodox religious opinions had provoked opposition in the Virginia assembly and threatened to sink the plan. To alleviate Jefferson from embarrassment, Cooper agreed to resign and decamped to South Carolina in 1820. Nonetheless, the plan would not come to pass. In 1824, citing financial difficulties, the University of Virginia's Board decided to appoint only eight professors - ancient languages, modern languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy, moral philosophy and law. Political economy was to be subsumed under law. But there was some delay hiring a professor of law, and as a result, the professor of moral philosophy, George Tucker, appointed in 1825, began to teach political economy at University of Virginia in 1826. When the law professor, John Tayloe Lomax, was finally hired later that same year, he was happy to leave economics in the hands of Tucker.
In 1826, the year Jefferson died and the same year Tucker began teaching economics at UVA, the College of William & Mary hired its own new professor, Thomas R. Dew, to take over the moral philosophy and economics courses from J.A. Smith, who had recently resigned the presidency of W&M.
For the next twenty years, Virginia elites were delivered a steady diet of economics from either Thomas R. Dew at W & M or George Tucker at UVA. Both Dew and Tucker were of the apologist school, defending laissez faire and free trade, widely embraced in the South, against the protectionist American System being pushed in the North.
(to be completed)
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca