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 and that Patrick Henry was responsible for placing this in the Virginia Gazette of 10 May (Henry, Henry, I, 418–20), though there is evidence, noted below, that Mason used it and may indeed have been responsible for it. No copy of the handbill enclosed in Lee’s letter of 20 Apr. has been found. It is important to note that Lee left Philadelphia on 13 June with Wythe in order to take part in the framing of the Constitution. “The desire of being here at the formation of our new Government brought me from Philadelphia. … I have been in this City a week [he presumably arrived, as did Wythe, June 23] where I had the pleasure to see our new plan of Government go on well. This day will put a finishing hand to it. Tis very much of the democratic kind” (R. H. Lee, Letters, I, 203, 207). The last statement may throw some light on Lee’s preference for the Adams Plan to that of Jefferson, since the Adams Plan was essentially what the colony had been used to and Jefferson’s was a radical departure. It suggests also that Lee may have been responsible for the inclusion of some features of the Adams Plan (see below) among amendments offered after the Committee Plan was submitted to the Convention. At any rate, though not a member of the Convention, Lee unquestionably had influence in and out of doors: “A fortnights stay here,” he wrote Samuel Adams on 6 July, “has enabled me to assist my Countrymen in finishing our form of Government” (R. H. Lee, Letters, I, 207).
The Braxton plan. In the spring of 1776 there appeared in Philadelphia, written in answer to Adams’ Thoughts on Government, a pamphlet entitled Address to the Convention of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia, on the Subject of Government in General, and Recommending a Particular Form to Their Consideration. By a Native of the Colony (Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1776; Force, Archives, 4th ser., vi, 748–54). This has been generally attributed to Carter Braxton. Its point of view was so aristocratic that Patrick Henry declared it “a silly thing … an affront and disgra