The Virginia Constitution
The three drafts of Jefferson’s proposed bill outlining the “fundamental constitutions of Virginia,” here brought together for the first time, are so important in the light they cast upon Jefferson’s early ideas of government and upon the drafting of the Declaration of Independence that they require special comment and a particular form of presentation. Each of the three drafts printed below differs from the others. Only a meticulous collation of the numerous deletions, additions, variations, interlineations, and substitutions will establish the basis for a full understanding of the nature of the documents and of Jefferson’s constitutional thinking at this period. Each of the drafts is accompanied by detailed notes, descriptive and textual, but a general commentary on the chronology, relationships, and nature of these documents and their background is required.
This necessity is reinforced by the apparent fact that Jefferson regarded the drafting of fundamental plans or constitutions as “the whole object” at this period. All of his other major state papers up to this point—the Summary View, the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, even the Declaration of Independence—were topical or forensic in nature. Though each of these contained statements of his political theories, the drafting of a fundamental law was Jefferson’s first effort to make a concrete application of these theories and ideals.
On 10 May 1776, four days before Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia, Congress adopted John Adams’ resolution recommending that the colonies assume all the powers of government. On 15 May the Virginia Convention adopted its famous resolution calling for independence and appointed a committee to draft a plan of government. Jefferson, who had already given much thought to this urgent problem, wrote on 16 May to Thomas Nelson, delicately suggesting that the delegates in Congress be recalled to Virginia to assist in the work of framing a new government, which he described as “the whole 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 equalizat