ion of the distribution of representation in the legislative branch; the use of unappropriated lands for the establishment of a society of independent farmers who would hold their lands “in full and absolute dominion of no superior whatever”; the just and equitable treatment of the Indians; the use of the western lands so as to remove friction with neighboring states and promote the cause of nationality; the encouragement of immigration and the lowering of barriers to naturalization; the elevation of the civil over the military authority; the abolition of privilege and prerogative; and so on. Indeed, Jefferson’s constitution foreshadowed much of his legislative reforms of 1776–1777: the provision for the regulation of descents went even further than his later bill for abolishing primogeniture—a provision much more radical in the First Draft than in the Second and Third Drafts. The adoption of his constitution would also have eliminated the need for his Bill for Religious Freedom and would have avoided years of discussion and debate on that subject. And the provisions against capital punishment and the denial of the pardoning power anticipated the views expressed in his later Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments.
These fundamental topics form the subject of a notable exchange of letters between Jefferson and Edmund Pendleton, president of the Virginia Convention, between 24 May and 26 Aug. (the last is particularly notable). Therein Jefferson explained clearly what he had in mind in drafting various provisions in his proposed constitution—why he had long favored an allodial system of land tenure, why he proposed an extension of the suffrage, what he intended by his treatment of crimes and punishments, &c. Pendleton, an able and intelligent product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, could not, however, go all the way with Jefferson. This correspondence is only a fragment—what must have been one of its best examples, Jefferson’s letter of 29 July, is missing-but enough remains to show with remarkable clarity how two intelligent, responsible statesmen of Virginia discussed dispassionately the principal issues of their day. Each presented his arguments cogently, each respected the other’s integrity and point of view. But their differences serve only to emphasize the strength and extent of Jefferson’s early convictions and to explain in large measure some of the events of the ensuing months. Certainly these differences over land tenure help to explain the remarkable vigor of Jefferson’s legislative reforms in the autumn of 1776, as they do Pendleton’s opposition at that time to Jefferson’s attack upon the holding of lands in fee-tail. Bitterly disappointed over the Convention’s failure to remold Virginia society in accord with republican principles, Jefferson then set about, as he declared later, to reframe the whole body of law, to achieve by legislation what he had not been able to accomplish in the framing of a constitution.
The text of the Constitution adopted by the Convention is included here in order to provide a basis of comparison with these leading Jeffersonian principles: on the essential questions of extension of the suffrage and equalization of the basis of representation the contrast is greatest. Here the Convention’s plan of government tended to support the status quo. But there is another reason for including this Constitution: it is, in part, a Jefferson document and, as the notes below indicate, more of Jefferson’s constitution was incorporated in it than he remembered or most historians have discerned. Whereas Jefferson’s catalogue of the misdeeds of “George Guelph” prefaced a constitution that sought to establish a polity where such misdeeds and the authority under which they were committed would be forever abolished, making preamble and text a complementary whole, this catalogue of the results of privilege and prerogative became rather incongruous in a constitution that sought to substitute one kind of privilege and prerogative for another. Yet the Convention did incorporate several other pr