s , 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 following day. Wythe communicated the result to his colleague Richard Henry Lee, who asked for and received Adams’ permission to publish (same, 191). The printed version was entitled Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies. In a Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1776 (same, 189–202). At one time, according to C. F. Adams (same, 191), this pamphlet was attributed to Jefferson, but the authorship by Adams is indisputable. It is an elaboration of the plan outlined for Richard Henry Lee in the preceding November. Lee sent copies of Thoughts on Government to Patrick Henry, Charles Lee, Robert Carter Nicholas, and perhaps to others (R. H. Lee, Letters, I, 179, 183, 184) and said that Adams’ “plan, with some variation, would in fact be nearly the form we have been used to.”
The Gazette plan. On 10 May, 1776, shortly after the Convention had assembled, a brief outline of a plan of government for the colony was published in Purdie’s Virginia Gazette. This may have been written by Richard Henry Lee, who sent a copy of Adams’ Thoughts on Government to Patrick Henry on 20 Apr. 1776, and added this comment: “The small scheme printed in hand bill I had written before I saw this work of Mr. Adams, and he agrees that the Council of State had better be a distinct body from the Upper House” (Henry, Henry, I, 381). The Gazette Plan makes the council separate, but in most other respects it follows the Adams Plan closely; indeed, it is probable that Lee’s “small scheme” was merely a rephrasing of the plan that Adams had given to him on 15 Nov. 1775, for both are alike in substance and in distinctive phraseology. It was the Adams letter of 15 Nov. that first employed, for each of the provisions, the distinctive beginning: “Let the House choose…,” “Let the governor …,” &c., a form employed in the Gazette Plan and in both the Braxton Plan and the Mason Plan discussed below. It is most likely, as William Wirt Henry suggests, that Richard Henry Lee modified the Adams Plan