st some of the additional charges against the king inserted on page 1 of the First Draft when Jefferson revised it to meet the purposes of the Declaration of Independence. “I expected,” Edmund Pendleton wrote to Jefferson on 22 July, “you had in the Preamble to our form of Government, exhausted the Subject of complaint against Geo. 3d. and was at a loss to discover what the Congress would do for one to their Declaration of Independance without copying, but find you have acquitted yourselves very well on that score.” The answer is that Jefferson not only copied from the First Draft of his constitution but also, in part, utilized the Resolutions adopted by the Virginia Convention of 15 May (see notes under Declaration of Independence).
It is not enough, however, merely to present the three Jefferson drafts and the text of the Constitution as finally adopted by the Convention. The extent of Jefferson’s contribution to that document cannot be fully gauged without an examination of some of the other texts that formed the antecedents of the Virginia Constitution. From the autumn of 1775 down through the final days of the Convention, various leaders in and out of Virginia contributed to the momentous discussion: John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, Meriwether Smith, George Mason, Carter Braxton, Patrick Henry, and others besides Jefferson are among those who wrote or are reputed to have written plans of government that may have been considered by the Convention of 1776. As Edmund Randolph, a member of the Convention, wrote in his MS History of Virginia: “A very large committee was nominated to prepare the proper instruments, and many projects of a bill of rights and constitution discovered the ardor for political notice, rather than a ripeness in political wisdom. That proposed by George Mason swallowed up all the rest, by fixing the grounds and plan, which after great discussion and correction, were finally ratified” (Randolph, “Essay,” VMHB description begins Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1893- description ends , xliv , 44). This welter of proposed drafts of constitutions, together with remembered statements of political leaders of that day and investigations of historians, makes the question of authorship of the Virginia Constitution a complex and difficult one. K. M. Rowland (Mason, I, 250ff.) makes the most extensive claim in support of Randolph’s statement that the plan proposed by Mason “swallowed up all the rest.” But C. R. Lingley (Transition in Virginia, 158–71) presents the best summary of the question of authorship and concludes: “The brevity of the records in regard to the plan has left the authorship of the document in obscurity and so has given rise to a controversy which in most respects is not useful. The truth probably is that Mason’s draft was more influential than the others.”
The fact is, however, that those documents still in existence, admittedly few in number, have never been precisely analyzed textually and chronologically. An analysis of them, involving a presentation of all of the texts and an examination of their various stages of emendation and amendment, cannot be undertaken here. Nevertheless, in order to fix as exactly as possible the extent of Jefferson’s contribution, it is necessary to describe briefly and to attempt to identify chronologically the salient plans other than his that are known to have been used or were available to the Convention. Those that antedated the final Constitution will be referred to in the notes by the designation here given each:
The Adams plan. John Adams, who had also advised John Penn of North Carolina and Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant of New Jersey about the framing of constitutions for those states, really drew up two plans for Virginia, the second an amplification of the first.
The first was set down in brief form in a letter to Richard Henry Lee, 15 Nov. 1775 (Adams, Works, iv, 185–7).
The second resulted from a conversation between Wythe and Adams in Philadelphia in Jan. 1776. Wythe requested Adams to reduce his ideas to writing, and Adams complied the 