Before the Civil War none of the states south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers had public school systems. In the 1780s and 1810s the former governor Thomas Jefferson recommended creating a statewide school system, and the governors David Campbell and James McDowell made similar recommendations in the 1830s and 1840s. But the Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 refused even to debate a proposal that the state take responsibility to educate its children. White Virginians who could afford it hired tutors or sent their children to private schools. By the middle of the nineteenth century numerous academies for both boys and girls operated throughout Virginia, and some Presbyterian, Catholic, and Episcopal churches sponsored schools. The General Assembly did little more than authorize counties to establish schools for educating paupers. That system, some Virginians complained to the assembly in the mid-1850s, “has been a failure. It has failed to enlist public confidence, because it has failed to confer public benefits … The poor parent, too often ignorant of the blessings of learning, erects a barrier of pride against the progress of his child. He refuses as a gift, what he would gladly use as a right.” Among Virginia’s local governments, Norfolk County created a public school system in 1845, and the neighboring city of Norfolk created its own system in 1850.