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Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University
From the University of Virginia's very inception, slavery was deeply woven into its fabric. Enslaved people first helped to construct and then later lived in the Academical Village; they raised and prepared food, washed clothes, cleaned privies, and chopped wood. They maintained the buildings, cleaned classrooms, and served as personal servants to faculty and students. At any given time, there were typically more than one hundred enslaved people residing alongside the students, faculty, and their families. The central paradox at the heart of UVA is also that of the nation: What does it mean to have a public university established to preserve democratic rights that is likewise founded and maintained on the stolen labor of others?
In Educated in Tyranny, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, and a group of contributing authors tell the largely unknown story of slavery at the University of Virginia. While UVA has long been celebrated as fulfilling Jefferson's desire to educate citizens to lead and govern, McInnis and Nelson document the burgeoning political rift over slavery as Jefferson tried to protect southern men from anti-slavery ideas in northern institutions. In uncovering this history, Educated in Tyranny changes how we see the university during its first fifty years and understand its history hereafter.
In Educated in Tyranny, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, and a group of contributing authors tell the largely unknown story of slavery at the University of Virginia. While UVA has long been celebrated as fulfilling Jefferson's desire to educate citizens to lead and govern, McInnis and Nelson document the burgeoning political rift over slavery as Jefferson tried to protect southern men from anti-slavery ideas in northern institutions. In uncovering this history, Educated in Tyranny changes how we see the university during its first fifty years and understand its history hereafter.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
280 pages, Hardcover
First published August 13, 2019
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May 29, 2020
I took my degree from the University in 1974 as an actual History major. At the time my field was medieval, and I am embarrassed to say that I never took a single course in American history. But I was steeped, I thought, in the atmosphere of Jefferson's America: free, rational and just. Did I mention I am white?
I started reading more and more American history as I got older. Annette Gordon Reed's works on the relationship between the Hemings and Jefferson families at Monticello was formative. Her research was superb, persuasive and boy, howdy, can she write. The flaws in Mr. Jefferson's character became more obvious. I should probably have paid more attention earlier on to Abigail Adams, who had him pegged by the 1780s. He is still a giant, and in many respects a hero. At least to white people. Because the fact remains that he owned human beings long after most Europeans and many Americans had rejected the concept of slavery. He owned his own children. The work done by historians since Fawn Brodie first brought Sally Hemings into the mainstream of discussion has given us --- Americans in general and UVA alumni in particular --- a far more nuanced and just appreciation of Jefferson, warts and all. And some of the warts are enormous.
Educated in Tyranny is a collection of articles that examine the role slavery played at the University from 1819-1865. Modern alumni have only known the Lawn, the centerpiece of Jefferson's academic village, as a place of beauty and peace. UVA alumni were horrified in 2017 when the tiki-torch Nazis desecrated the Grounds by their presence. I keep a picture of the students who ringed Jefferson's statue at the front of the Rotunda to protect it on my study desk.
But here is the dichotomy. While UVA can, and should, and above all does have contempt for these jerks, the fact remains that the foundations of the University were laid by men and women enslaved, mistreated and denied their value as human beings. The past thirty years have seen a great deal of research into UVA's own past, and it blows earlier works such as Virginius Dabney's out of the water.
The articles in Educated in Tyranny divide between archaeological and social concerns. They take up the arrangement of the Lawn itself, how the original buildings were constructed and what has disappeared. Spoiler alert: no longer present are the buildings in what are now gardens behind the Pavilions, where slaves and a sprinkling of free blacks toiled to feed, clean and maintain the professors and students during the early days. Behind the gentle curves of the serpentine walls, livestock wandered, meat was smoked, laundry washed and a community of people maintained a hum of activity from before dawn until well after dark.
Students were not supposed to bring personal body servants from home. The overwhelming number of early Wahoos came from slaveholding families, and had grown up inside the institution of slavery. They either flouted the regulation, or more often simply took the same position on slaves that had prevailed at their homes. All of the slaves at the University were treated more or less as common property. This also spilled into the students' relationships with local slaves. One chapter focuses upon a horrific incident in which a student mercilessly beat a ten year-old African American girl for her "insolence." She was not his property, but he managed to convince the faculty committee who investigated the matter that he was performing a service to the community. Any insolence by any slave left unchecked by a white man harmed the entire slave holding power structure. The chapters dealing with the culture of white on black violence that pervaded the academic village are sobering.
However, even they are diminished by the chapter that discusses the use of slave cadavers in the dissection classes. Students (and some faculty) as well as paid grave robbers routinely desecrated slave graves in order to keep a steady supply of bodies for the University anatomy classes. It reached the point where slaves were buried secretly by their families in order to prevent this grotesque last assertion of the white domination of black lives. This chapter in particular makes hard reading.
I lived in Echols dorm my first year, just next to the University cemetery. I remember wandering through it upon occasion, reading gravestones and matching names on them to buildings on the Grounds. What I do not remember is seeing any headstones marking the burial place of slaves who lived and died at the University. The ultimate chapter explains that these were buried outside the low walls around the official area, and in unmarked or as close as made no difference graves. The African American graveyard is in the process of being brought forward into the official history of UVA, and at long last historical markers and naming rights are being applied to the Grounds themselves.
A difficult read. While it will of course be of particular interest to members of the University community, I also recommend it for the general reader. It provides an eye-opening window upon the early days of the United States, and the racial issue that has always undergirded the nation. What makes it notable is that the descriptions of that moral conflict are placed against the backdrop of a major institution of learning.
Highly recommend.
I started reading more and more American history as I got older. Annette Gordon Reed's works on the relationship between the Hemings and Jefferson families at Monticello was formative. Her research was superb, persuasive and boy, howdy, can she write. The flaws in Mr. Jefferson's character became more obvious. I should probably have paid more attention earlier on to Abigail Adams, who had him pegged by the 1780s. He is still a giant, and in many respects a hero. At least to white people. Because the fact remains that he owned human beings long after most Europeans and many Americans had rejected the concept of slavery. He owned his own children. The work done by historians since Fawn Brodie first brought Sally Hemings into the mainstream of discussion has given us --- Americans in general and UVA alumni in particular --- a far more nuanced and just appreciation of Jefferson, warts and all. And some of the warts are enormous.
Educated in Tyranny is a collection of articles that examine the role slavery played at the University from 1819-1865. Modern alumni have only known the Lawn, the centerpiece of Jefferson's academic village, as a place of beauty and peace. UVA alumni were horrified in 2017 when the tiki-torch Nazis desecrated the Grounds by their presence. I keep a picture of the students who ringed Jefferson's statue at the front of the Rotunda to protect it on my study desk.
But here is the dichotomy. While UVA can, and should, and above all does have contempt for these jerks, the fact remains that the foundations of the University were laid by men and women enslaved, mistreated and denied their value as human beings. The past thirty years have seen a great deal of research into UVA's own past, and it blows earlier works such as Virginius Dabney's out of the water.
The articles in Educated in Tyranny divide between archaeological and social concerns. They take up the arrangement of the Lawn itself, how the original buildings were constructed and what has disappeared. Spoiler alert: no longer present are the buildings in what are now gardens behind the Pavilions, where slaves and a sprinkling of free blacks toiled to feed, clean and maintain the professors and students during the early days. Behind the gentle curves of the serpentine walls, livestock wandered, meat was smoked, laundry washed and a community of people maintained a hum of activity from before dawn until well after dark.
Students were not supposed to bring personal body servants from home. The overwhelming number of early Wahoos came from slaveholding families, and had grown up inside the institution of slavery. They either flouted the regulation, or more often simply took the same position on slaves that had prevailed at their homes. All of the slaves at the University were treated more or less as common property. This also spilled into the students' relationships with local slaves. One chapter focuses upon a horrific incident in which a student mercilessly beat a ten year-old African American girl for her "insolence." She was not his property, but he managed to convince the faculty committee who investigated the matter that he was performing a service to the community. Any insolence by any slave left unchecked by a white man harmed the entire slave holding power structure. The chapters dealing with the culture of white on black violence that pervaded the academic village are sobering.
However, even they are diminished by the chapter that discusses the use of slave cadavers in the dissection classes. Students (and some faculty) as well as paid grave robbers routinely desecrated slave graves in order to keep a steady supply of bodies for the University anatomy classes. It reached the point where slaves were buried secretly by their families in order to prevent this grotesque last assertion of the white domination of black lives. This chapter in particular makes hard reading.
I lived in Echols dorm my first year, just next to the University cemetery. I remember wandering through it upon occasion, reading gravestones and matching names on them to buildings on the Grounds. What I do not remember is seeing any headstones marking the burial place of slaves who lived and died at the University. The ultimate chapter explains that these were buried outside the low walls around the official area, and in unmarked or as close as made no difference graves. The African American graveyard is in the process of being brought forward into the official history of UVA, and at long last historical markers and naming rights are being applied to the Grounds themselves.
A difficult read. While it will of course be of particular interest to members of the University community, I also recommend it for the general reader. It provides an eye-opening window upon the early days of the United States, and the racial issue that has always undergirded the nation. What makes it notable is that the descriptions of that moral conflict are placed against the backdrop of a major institution of learning.
Highly recommend.
December 16, 2020
Book was too erratic to get any more stars. First chapter surmises that serpentine walls were built so students would be unaware of the slaves that lived among them. Remainder of book discusses the various ways in which the students abused these invisible slaves. Ignores Jefferson's love of tinkering and sense of aesthetics as reasons behind gadgets at Monticello and structures at U. Va. If both were efforts at keeping slavery invisible it only redounds more to Jefferson's credit. By his actions he is crediting enslaved people with intelligence, knowledge, and discernment. One cannot imagine the same attitude from R.M.T. Hunter or Alexander Stephens, let alone John C. Calhoun. Also there is sloppy writing here. A slave named young Sam is assumed to be the son of carpenter Sam. It's a reasonable assumption but pages later it has morphed into a fact.
Chapters by Kurt von Daacke appear to be most thoroughly researched and finely written. The episode where students attempted to get the bodies of the Harper's Ferry raiders for dissection is inadvertently hilarious. If they had succeeded one can only imagine Union troops swinging up the Valley Pike singing "John Brown's body lies a-boiled at U.Va." Perhaps it is just as well or the University might not have gotten off so lightly in March of 1865.
The most intriguing chapter to me was the one on the cemetery. In the early 70s Mike Plunkett and I did oral history interviews with older professors who had been here in the 20s. They in turn knew professors from the 80s and 90s. If I had read this chapter I would have asked other questions than I did.
I wish more of the writers had done a thorough search of the Cocke papers on the building.
Authors on the harshness of slavery at U. Va. need to take a more comparative approach, reading such books as The Sugar Masters,
Finally I would love to know if the quote by Isabella Gibbons is about slavery in general or slavery at U. VA.
Chapters by Kurt von Daacke appear to be most thoroughly researched and finely written. The episode where students attempted to get the bodies of the Harper's Ferry raiders for dissection is inadvertently hilarious. If they had succeeded one can only imagine Union troops swinging up the Valley Pike singing "John Brown's body lies a-boiled at U.Va." Perhaps it is just as well or the University might not have gotten off so lightly in March of 1865.
The most intriguing chapter to me was the one on the cemetery. In the early 70s Mike Plunkett and I did oral history interviews with older professors who had been here in the 20s. They in turn knew professors from the 80s and 90s. If I had read this chapter I would have asked other questions than I did.
I wish more of the writers had done a thorough search of the Cocke papers on the building.
Authors on the harshness of slavery at U. Va. need to take a more comparative approach, reading such books as The Sugar Masters,
Finally I would love to know if the quote by Isabella Gibbons is about slavery in general or slavery at U. VA.
March 28, 2025
I was hoping for something comparable to Harvard Professor Dr. Tiya Miles, who proves that one can write scholarly books that are person-centered, even when the details on the persons involved are slim. With the vast records available to them, the University of Virginia authors in this collection could have taken that path but did not. I was disappointed.
The majority of chapters centered the architecture of the UVA campus and the way the design of the school reinforced the tyranny the enslaved persons living and working there experienced. Two chapters would have covered that sufficiently, leaving more space to talk about the human lives that lived under the specific tyranny Thomas Jefferson designed into the physical structure of the original campus.
The majority of chapters centered the architecture of the UVA campus and the way the design of the school reinforced the tyranny the enslaved persons living and working there experienced. Two chapters would have covered that sufficiently, leaving more space to talk about the human lives that lived under the specific tyranny Thomas Jefferson designed into the physical structure of the original campus.
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