The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (132 page)

Virginia's finest were not idle men. They worked hard at raising tobacco and, as the century went along, wheat and other grains. This hard work did not involve using their hands. A large number of slaves

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did the planting and cultivating and harvesting crops -- and carrying them to ships for transport to the European market. Not manual labor, but organizing and managing the labor of others was the task of the gentry.

The gentry also governed. They dominated government at every level, from county courts to the House of Burgesses and the Council. They did not have to force themselves on the lower orders. The franchise remained broad throughout the century, and the electorate chose able men. Lesser planters deferred to wealth and ability and apparently agreed that men with these qualifications should run things. The gentry agreed, of course, but they did not abuse the deference extended to themselves by the lower orders. They provided remarkably responsible government -not out of unalloyed nobility but out of a sense that their interests were essentially the same as those they governed. To a large extent they seem to have been right in this judgment. Everyone grew tobacco for the market, and everyone faced the same problems.

In a peculiar sense the existence of large numbers of black slaves may have helped induce the powerful to protect the liberties of poor whites. As Edmund S. Morgan, the historian, has told us, there was an affinity between slavery and freedom in Virginia. The horrors of the enslaved made the free sensitive to the blessings of liberty. The horrors did not persuade them, however, to free the slaves. Slaves were too valuable as a source of labor. And they were brutish -- "vicious, idle, and dissolute" if left to their own devices, just as the English poor were. Therefore they must be kept in slavery -- to provide labor and to prevent their committing outrages against whites and themselves. Long before the Revolution, Virginians had established the racist policies which perpetuated slavery. If these policies did not encourage coercive practices against slaves, they at least permitted them and gave them the approval of the law.
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Thus slavery encouraged white men to think of their liberties. It taught them that property was supremely important: property as ownership of the self, of land, and of others made one free. And among whites of all orders slavery established a kind of equality, an equality of free men who in large part lived from the labors of the enslaved.

In the crisis of the decade before independence, Virginia planters proved to others just how much they valued their liberties. During the year of independence they framed a constitution for the state.
As the

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first drafted in the new states, it exerted great influence elsewhere in America.

The fifth Virginia Convention drafted the constitution of 1776. The Convention was actually the old House of Burgesses under a new name, for it was elected by freeholders from the old constituencies. Four Conventions had preceded it as the government of Virginia. The first had met in August 1774 following the dissolution of the Burgesses the previous May by Governor Dunmore. The governor, a tough character with a nose for sedition, had acted in response to passage of a resolution in the House calling on all Virginians to express discontent at the Boston Port Bill by observing a day of fasting and prayer. In two years' time, of course, passing resolutions in favor of prayer no longer seemed enough. On June 12, 1776, the delegates issued a "Declaration of Rights," and on June 29 approved a new constitution for the commonwealth.

George Mason had a major part in the composition of both. Mason seems to have had no more use for oratory than did his old friend and neighbor George Washington. But he could write with a skill that Washington never attained. In the Convention he apparently did not speak much, but he made himself heard in the "Declaration of Rights."

The first article of the "Declaration" set its tone: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." In the fifteen articles that followed, the Convention established that sovereignty resided in the people, that government was the people's servant, and when it failed the majority had a right "to reform, alter or abolish it." The Convention also declared that there should be rotation in office, periodical elections, due process in criminal prosecutions; and that there should not be excessive bail, general warrants, and standing armies in time of peace. The "Declaration" stated Virginia's commitment to trial by jury, to a free press, and "to the free exercise of religion."
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With the approval of the "Declaration of Rights," the Convention proclaimed Virginia's faith in principles which it believed should define free government. The government established by the constitution which was approved a little more than two weeks later did not fully conform

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to these principles. The "Declaration" had located power in the people, but the people were not given the opportunity to ratify, or reject, the constitution of 1776. To be sure, there was little likelihood that they would have rejected the constitution, for except in the structure of government it proposed, it was not a "radical" document. And the shape of the government it devised is understandable. In the form the Convention gave the new government it expressed the disenchantment of the Revolution with executive power.

Ostensibly the structure expressed the American faith in balanced government, for the constitution required that "the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments, shall be separate and distinct, so that neither exercise the Powers properly belonging to the other." But in fact the constitution apportioned power in a way that assured the supremacy of the legislature, the General Assembly of Virginia. The Assembly, composed of a House of Delegates and a Senate, chose the governor annually by ballot of both houses. The governor could do little without the concurrence of a Council of State, eight men also chosen by the Assembly. Even when he acted with the Council he possessed limited force: he could not veto legislation nor could he nominate judges or other important officers of the government. The constitution also denied him authority to dissolve the Assembly or even to prorogue or adjourn it.
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Within the Assembly, the House of Delegates, the successor to the Burgesses, ran things. Each county elected two members while the Senate consisted of twenty-four men chosen every four years from electoral districts. Only the delegates could initiate legislation; the Senate might propose revisions except in money bills, which it had either to approve or reject as the House presented them.

The old colonial franchise was left untouched. Those with land would choose the rulers of Virginia. And, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, most of those rulers -- the delegates and the senators-would be chosen from the tidewater. The western part of the state which had always been under-represented would remain so.

Some men feel a persistent unease about the human condition. Thomas Jefferson was not of this sort, but in 1776 he feared that Virginia might allow the opportunities opened by the Revolution to escape.
He had

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returned to Philadelphia as a delegate to the Congress in May 1776, just as the Virginia Convention was about to frame a constitution. He was soon to write the Declaration of Independence, great work he recognized, and yet his mind remained fixed on Virginia. What he yearned to do was to have a voice in the production of a constitution for Virginia. Establishing a government, he said at this time, "is the whole object of the present controversy."
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Jefferson of course remained in Philadelphia to compose the "Declaration." But he wrote to members of the Virginia Convention and drafted several versions of a constitution for Virginia. His letters and his rough drafts tell us much about his ideas and help chart constitutional thought in the state.

Jefferson's constitutions resembled the one enacted in Virginia in several respects. The general frame of government was similar, but it was better balanced. The Senate, the executive, and the courts were all stronger. The Senate indeed in his first two drafts of a constitution was to be elected by the House and serve for life. The need for balance led Jefferson to this arrangement. As he explained to his friend Edmund Pendleton, he wanted "to get the wisest men chosen, and to make them perfectly independent when chosen." The people would be clearly represented in the lower house. Jefferson had a much broader conception of who composed "the people" than most men of his day -- he would extend the vote "to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country" -- but he did not think that good government was served by allowing them to choose both houses of the legislature. One house should be reserved to the wise. But how to discover them?
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Leaving the choice to the lower house appealed to him, because as he said, "a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom." Their first "secretion" is "usually crude and heterogeneous. But give to those so chosen by the people a second choice themselves, and they generally will chuse wise men."
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Pendleton did not agree, preferring instead to reserve the upper house for men of "great property" who would sit for life.
The disadvantage

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in giving their selection to the lower house lay in the dependence thereby created. So chosen, they would be "the mere creatures of that body and of course wholly unfit to correct their Errors or Allay casual heats which will at times arise in all large bodies." Jefferson did not disagree with all of this, but he did not share Pendleton's confidence in wealthy men -- "my observations," he observed, "do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth."

What he was convinced of was that the Virginia constitution had placed all the powers of government in the legislature. Five years after independence, he wrote that the concentration of those powers "in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government." It did not matter that many hands in the legislature would exercise these powers, for "173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one."
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