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Thomas Jefferson's Education (Hardcover)

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From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.


By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university.


In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.



About the Author


Alan Taylor, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History, is the author of American Revolutions and American Republics, prior volumes in his acclaimed continental history of the United States. He is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Praise For…


No historian has more astutely investigated or more powerfully written about the early American republic than Alan Taylor. In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, Taylor adds to his previous prizewinning studies of early American politics, expansion, and arts and letters, with an examination of the founders’ vision of education, reckoning, at once, with its audacity and its timidity.

— Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

Alan Taylor’s extraordinary new book illuminates the limits of republican reform in a society built on slavery. It is a major contribution to our understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s career as an educational reformer and to the history of democratic self-government in Virginia.
— Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus of History, University of Virginia

With characteristic eloquence, Alan Taylor chronicles the unlikely emergence of one of the most important experiments in American education: the University of Virginia. Caught between the promise of a new nation of freedom and the reality of a declining slave society, Thomas Jefferson and his allies forged an institution at once intellectually innovative and socially conservative. Taylor’s rich, evocative book captures the surprising drama of that invention.
— Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom

A highly illuminating account…a book that refreshingly adds real substance to the abundant literature on Jefferson.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

An account of Jefferson's home state and university…A complex but fascinating story.
— Booklist

Product Details
ISBN: 9780393652420
ISBN-10: 0393652424
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: October 15th, 2019
Pages: 448
Language: English