Editorial Note

Among the many reforms introduced during the exciting 1776 session of the Virginia House of Delegates was Jefferson’s plan for a thorough revision of the new state’s statutory code “corrected, in all it’s parts, with a single eye to reason, and the good of those for whose government it was framed” (Boyd, Papers of Jefferson description begins Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (18 vols. to date; Princeton, N. J., 1950——). description ends , II, 307). JM was an Orange County delegate at that historic first meeting of the newly designated House of Delegates, but he was not involved in Jefferson’s plan to create a Committee of Revisors charged with the arduous assignment of a reformation of the Commonwealth’s laws. By an act of the General Assembly, the task was first assigned to Jefferson, Thomas Ludwell Lee, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and George Wythe (JHDV description begins Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia; Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the City of Williamsburg. Beginning in 1780, the portion after the semicolon reads, Begun and Held in the Town of Richmond. In the County of Henrico. The journal for each session has its own title page and is individually paginated. The edition used is the one in which the journals for 1777–1786 are brought together in two volumes, with each journal published in Richmond in either 1827 or 1828 and often called the “Thomas W. White reprint.” description ends , Oct. 1776, p. 41). For a variety of reasons, the committee membership shrank and the work went slowly. Jefferson was impatient with the delays, but the committee which finally undertook the work consisted of the thirty-three-year-old lawyer and two other attorneys—Pendleton and Wythe. By 1779, the revisors had prepared at least 130 bills, although some had meanwhile become law because of wartime expediency. The bulk of the committee’s report had been turned over to Speaker Benjamin Harrison on 18 June 1779, but consideration was postponed until the next meeting of the Assembly. It was not until 1785 that action was systematically taken upon the greater proportion of the bills (Mays, Edmund Pendleton, II, 138–43, 158–61, 373 n. 55; Boyd, Papers of Jefferson description begins Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (18 vols. to date; Princeton, N. J., 1950——). description ends , II, 301–2, 306–665).

When JM returned to the General Assembly after an absence exceeding eight years he had pledged to Jefferson his personal exertions to end this inexcusable delay. Jefferson, the chief architect of the intended legal reform, was himself absent and soon would be in France. It remained for JM to construct the edifice as best he could. The present resolution represented the opening move. Disappointed that the Virginia Constitution of 1776 had never been submitted to the people for their acceptance or rejection, and that the movement for a new, popularly endorsed state constitution was finding only feeble support among the legislators, JM now proposed that the people might indirectly share in the process of bringing Virginia’s legal code in line with her republican aspirations. With Jefferson abroad, it became JM’s duty at the October 1785 session of the General Assembly to implement the revisors’ work. Considering the importance of the work, the time involved was not unusual.