MS (Vi: Third Virginia Convention, Loose Papers); probably in an unidentified hand in part, with the last eight names and numerical totals added by TJ, the dots and check marks being in TJ’s or another hand; undated, but assigned on basis of minutes of the Third Virginia Convention (see below); left margin partly torn away; with inverted and unrelated notation in the hand of John Tazewell, clerk of the Convention.

This is the only known manuscript in TJ’s hand deriving from his activities at the Third Virginia Convention in Richmond, where he stopped on 9 Aug. 1775 on his way home from service at the Continental Congress. He was reelected to Congress and served on several committees until obtaining leave on 16 Aug. to proceed to Monticello, but he tarried one day longer, for on 17 Aug. the Convention chose him along with fellow congressmen Benjamin Harrison and Richard Henry Lee and militia commander Patrick Henry, all presumably ineligible by virtue of their other responsibilities, to count the ballots for the eleven-man Committee of Safety established to govern the colony until the next Convention met. Since the Convention’s journal recorded only the names and votes of the winning eleven, this tally is significant as a comprehensive record of the balloting (William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, 7 vols. in 8 [Charlottesville, 1973–83], iii, 409, 418–19, 451, 456–7, 460–2).