ABSTRACT
During the early 1820s, after his political retirement, Jefferson created a University of Virginia and sought his faculty primarily in Britain. That shift reflected his growing animus toward the northern states as hostile to his beloved Virginia. Yankees had replaced Britons as his state’s primary villains. He calculated that about 300 young Virginians went north to study at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Jefferson warned, “We see our youth flying to foreign countries to obtain that of which they are deprived at home: a liberal education.” Jefferson turned to the young lawyer Francis Walker Gilmer, who eventually managed to recruit a number of professors during his trip to Britain. The University opened on March 7, 1825, but on the night of October 1 masked students gathered on the central lawn and chanted, “Down with the European Professors!” and “Damn the European Professors,” while the rest make a racket designed to awaken and startle. The riot threatened to ruin the new university, which might lose its faculty in disgust at the student disorder.
