le object of the present controversy; for should a bad government be instituted for us in future it had been as well to have accepted at first the bad one offered to us from beyond the water without the risk and expence of contest.” It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this statement about “the whole object” and its relation to Jefferson’s drafting of the proposed constitution. The feeling and purpose expressed here must be the basis for an understanding of Jefferson’s legal reforms in Virginia by which he sought to alter the aristocratic structure of society; of his misunderstood administration as governor; of his disappointment over the frame of government adopted by the Convention; of his efforts to reform the constitution of 1776 (see Notes on the State of Virginia, Query xiii; his “Fundamental Constitution” of 1783, and “Notes for a Constitution” in 1794). Jefferson, quite properly, always regarded the Constitution of 1776 as merely an act of legislature “subject to be changed by subsequent legislatures, possessing equal powers with themselves” and as an act which should be superseded and “rendered permanent by a power superior to that of the ordinary legislature”; that is, by the sovereign people.
When two of these three drafts were discovered about 1890, an effort was made to show that the constitutional ideas advanced in them were at variance with Jefferson’s later views, exhibiting in general a conservative position (W. C. Ford, “Jefferson’s Constitution for Virginia,” Nation, li , 107; Ford, n, 7–9). This interpretation has been subsequently but only partially refuted (D. R. Anderson, “Jefferson and the Va. Const.,” Amer. Hist. Rev., xxi [1915–1916], 750–4; Malone, Jefferson, I, 235–40). The documents here drawn up contain, indeed, most if not all of the leading principles to which Jefferson’s entire career was dedicated: the people as the source of authority; the protection of “public liberty” and of individual rights against authoritarian control; the widening of suffrage and an equalization 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 