"the laboring oar." In September he resigned the seat in Congress to which he had been re-elected, and on October 7 entered the Virginia house of delegates, the first legislature of the State convened under its new constitution. The day he took his seat a messenger from Congress arrived at Williamsburg, with the flattering invitation for him to join Franklin and Deane at Paris in a mission to seek aid from France and other European countries. Jefferson wanted very much to go. The attractions of the "capital city of the world," its music, art, letters, and science, appealed strongly to the refined tastes and insatiable mental curiosity of the young man of thirty-three. He considered the offer three days,

1 The Virginia constitution of 1776, with the noble bill of rights accompanying it, was drawn by George Mason. Jefferson was in Congress at the time and serving on several committees; but he found time to write the full draft of a constitution for Virginia, which he forwarded to the convention at Richmond by his friend George Wythe. It arrived on the very day that Mason's draft, after several weeks of debate, "inch by inch," was finally reported to the house, and the committee was unwilling, "from mere lassitude," as Jefferson says, to reopen the debates on the subject. However, they liked Jefferson's preamble so well that they "tacked it on the work of George Mason." Jefferson's draft was lost for a hundred years. It is published in full in P. L. Ford's edition of Jefferson's Writings (vol. II, pp. 7–30), and it is well worth study both as a foretaste of the legislation which Jefferson introduced into the house and as an illustration of his jealousy of the executive power. Jefferson thought that a new convention should have been convened with specified constituent powers for so serious a matter as framing a new State constitution. In view of the development of the doctrine of "States' rights" in the South, it is a fact of curious interest that a Virginia member, Ludwell Lee, proposed in 1776 that Congress should "prepare a uniform plan for the governments in America to be approved by the colonies" (States).

and then resolutely put the noble temptation behind him. He had put his hand to the plough to break up the hard and stubborn soil of generations of feudal privilege and aristocratic caste in his beloved "country" of Virginia; and having put his hand to the plough he would not turn back. "When I left Congress in 1776," he says in his Memoir, "it was in the persuasion that our whole code must be reviewed, adapted to our republican form of government, and corrected in all its parts, with a single eye to reason and the good of those for whose government it was framed."

On October 11 Jefferson was appointed on several important committees of the legislature, and the next day he obtained leave to introduce a "Bill to enable tenants in tail to convey their lands in fee simple." The bill was passed. "It was the first great blow at the aristocratic class in Virginia," which had been based on the transmission of undivided estates from one generation to the next. It had formed, says Jefferson, "a patrician order distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments," an order from which "the King habitually selected his counsellors of state." "To annul this privilege and instead of an aristocracy of wealth... to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its con

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ditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic." With entails went the allied institution of primogeniture. Pendleton, in behalf of the old families of Virginia, pleaded that the eldest son might have at least double the portion of the younger ones, but Jefferson was inexorable: not unless the eldest son needed a double portion of food, he said, or did a double portion of work!

The social revolution wrought by this legislation was complete. It threw every acre of land and every slave in Virginia into the economic current of exchange and put all heirs on an equality. The old Virginia families were attached to their estates with a religious devotion. "They had come chiefly from the country districts of England," says Shaler, "and their absorbing passion was the possession of land.” There is a story that John Randolph of Roanoke set his dogs on a man who came to ask the price of the estate. The thought of any of the beloved acres of Tuckahoe or Mount Vernon or Rosewell or Gunston Hall going into the hands of a stranger was like treason or profanation. The aristocrats of Virginia, among them some of his own kin on his mother's side, never forgave Jefferson for this

1 It is only an instance of the depreciatory tone in which certain historians still deal with Jefferson, when J. T. Morse cites this simple, straightforward statement as written in "Jefferson's grandiose, humanitarian, and self-laudatory vein." Humanitarian it may be -the more the credit !—but what there is grandiose or self-laudatory about it is hard to see,

legislation, put through the house by the influence of the democracy of the counties back of the tidewater. There were even those who, adding a Bourbon piety to a Bourbon pride, declared that the death of Jefferson's only son in infancy (1777) was a "judgment of God" upon him; and fifty years later, when Virginia was declining in economic prestige before the rising manufactures of the North, there were still belated Cassandras harping on the ruin to the State caused by Jefferson's abolition of entail and primogeniture.

It would take us far beyond the limits of this brief biography to give even the merest outline of the manifold activities of Jefferson in the new Virginia Legislature of 1776. In the opening month of October, for example, besides elaborating the laws on entails and descent, he served on committees dealing with naturalization laws, the definition of treason, the location of the capital, the encouragement of manufactures, the improvement of navigation, the organization of courts, the regulation of the militia, the refining of the currency. There were two of these October committees, however, on which Jefferson's work was so significant and lasting that we must devote a few pages to them-the standing committee "of religion," appointed October 11, and the committee, chosen in pursuance of Jefferson's bill of October 24, for the "revision of the laws."

Religion was in a parlous state in Virginia. The Episcopal Church was established by law, endowed with lands (glebes), and supported by taxes (tithes). Secure in their position, the clergy performed their Sunday duties in a proper and perfunctory fashion, paying little attention to either religion or charities during the week. They were, as some one remarked, "a gentleman's club." Against this inactivity,' says Jefferson, "the zeal and industry of the sectarian (especially the Baptist) preachers had an open and undisputed field; and by the time of the Revolution a majority of the inhabitants of the colony had become dissenters from the established church, but were still obliged to pay contributions to support the pastors of the minority." The legislature of 1776 was "crowded with petitions to abolish this spiritual tyranny." Jefferson wanted full religious liberty and a complete separation of church and state; but the powers of the establishment were too strong. If the majority of the inhabitants were dissenters, the majority of the legislature were churchmen. After a bitter fight of two months, all that the radicals could obtain was a repeal of the laws making heresy or absence from worship a crime and forcing dissenters to contribute to the support of the church. Jefferson kept up the fight, however, from session to session, until in the summer of 1779 the Anglican Church was disestablished. Another seven years passed before the man