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 provisions from Jefferson’s draft.
Quite aside from these fundamental points, it is necessary to present all of Jefferson’s drafts because the first of the three must now assume a stature greater than has hitherto been accorded it. As a result of a minute comparison of the three texts, the First Draft must now be regarded as a single document adapted to two purposes. Its first page, bearing the list of charges against the king, served as the rough draft for that portion of the Third Draft of the Virginia Constitution. Having served this purpose, it was then altered, added to, and its paragraphs numbered in a different order so as to adapt it to a similar purpose in the Declaration of Independence. Even after Jefferson had drawn up the Declaration of Independence and had permitted John Adams to make a copy of it, at least one change was made in both the Declaration and in this first page of the First Draft. To be sure, the similarities between this part of the First Draft and the Declaration had been noted even during Jefferson’s lifetime: in 1825 he declared that “both having the same object, of justifying our separation from Great Britain, they used necessarily the same materials of justification: hence their similitude” (TJ to Augustus B. Woodward, 3 Apr. 1825). In the discussions of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence that occurred a few years before his death, Jefferson declared that he had “turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing” the Declaration and that it was not copied “from any particular and previous writing” (TJ to Madison, 30 Aug. 1823; to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825). Nevertheless, the evidence is conclusive that Jefferson did use the first page of the First Draft of his Virginia Constitution in drawing up the corresponding part of the Declaration. We are now justified in elevating this remarkable document to the status of a part of the composition draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Moreover, there can scarcely be any doubt that the Virginia Resolutions of 15 May provided at lea