Draft Constitution for Virginia, Part X: Property, and its Implications

            Demonstrating once more that he held no cows to be sacred – at times even in the face of his own rational self-interest – Thomas Jefferson also included provisions in his draft constitution for Virginia that would have trifled with the ownership of what was likely the single-most coveted commodity in colonial America: land. In a society dominated by agriculture and economically dependent on its own ability to produce large quantities of certain high-value crops, arable land was widely viewed as the key to both economic well-being and individual self-sufficiency. Additionally, because the franchise in many colonies was qualified by property ownership (measured in acreage or tax value), owning a given quantity of land was also the gateway to political participation. The middling Virginia tobacco farmer and the yeoman homesteader in western Pennsylvania alike could thus trace whatever prosperity they enjoyed to their status as landowners, as could some of the wealthiest families in America whose vast plantations and agricultural estates were objects of pride and envy. Attempting to alter the manner by which property in 18^th century America was owned, distributed, sold, or inherited therefore entailed potentially effecting the lives and livelihoods of people from across a wide swath of different social and economic strata. Jefferson’s draft constitution for Virginia betrays an evident intent to do just that within the confines of his home country, to the end of addressing several of his own moral and philosophical concerns.

Before going any further, however, it would perhaps be wise to take a moment and lay out a little background. Though it would surely take more time than any of us have to spare to adequately explore the history of land ownership in colonial Virginia, a few key concepts and facts will hopefully suffice for the present discussion. It would do well to note, for instance, that within the boundaries occupied by the colony as of the turn of the 18^th century, Virginia (approx. 100,000 square miles) encompassed more land than the whole of Great Britain (approx. 94,000 square miles). Furthermore, whereas land in Britain was often wrapped up in feudal titles and monopolized by landlords, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone who didn't stand to inherit to hope of owning the earth over which they toiled, arable land in Virginia was both cheap and plentiful. For potential settlers this was – it has been abundantly recorded – an incredibly powerful incentive to migrate. Unfortunately for the average prospective migrant, however, land in Virginia was not simply “up for grabs.” The directors of the Virginia Company, who were solely responsible for administering the colony and disposing of its resources under a Royal Charter granted in 1607, set about capitalizing on the abundance of land and addressing the labour needs of plantation agriculture (i.e. tobacco) by putting in place what was known as the Headright system.

First authorized in 1618, this scheme approved the granting of a 50 acre parcel of land to every immigrant who paid their own way to Virginia, or to any investor who paid for their passage. New arrivals in the latter group were thereafter customarily required to sign articles of indenture for a period of five or seven years and work to clear and improve the land of their benefactor until their contract expired. Because of the relatively high cost of an Atlantic crossing, most immigrants brought to Virginia under the Headright system fell into this category. Unable to acquire land simply as a result of their arrival, they were forced instead to purchase homesteads further into the colonial interior – where conditions were less forgiving, Native raids were a common occurrence, and viable markets were very distant – once their term of service was up. Overall, however, the exchange of land for labour proved exceptionally beneficial for the financial health of the colony – and for its corporate masters in particular, land being so much cheaper than transportation fees. The system was, or course, not without its flaws. Potential investors and ship captains are known to have cooperated in claiming headrights for those who had paid their own way, or for more immigrants than had actually arrived in a given shipment. As a result of these abuses, as well as of the general preference the Headright system gave to those with wealth enough to subsidize the peopling of Virginia, land in the colony came to be concentrated through the 18^th century in a fairly small number of hands. All the same, headrights continued to be granted following the re-charter of Virginia as a Crown Colony in 1620, and in time became the foundation upon which the wealth of many of the colony’s most prominent families was built.

The society into which Thomas Jefferson was born in the 1740s was very much the product of these earlier immigration and land-distribution policies. Estates built up during the 17^th century had been passed down, subdivided, or enlarged, and the resulting class of large-scale landowners effectively dominated the social and political landscape. Seeking to fundamentally alter this rather rigid status quo, of which he was very much a beneficiary, the Sage of Monticello inserted into his 1776 draft constitution two specific clauses intended to address who owned land and what they were permitted to do with it. The first stated, following a sentence which declared that all forfeited or otherwise unaccounted for lands were to be appropriated by the state government, that,

Every person of full age neither owning nor having owned 50 acres of land, shall be entitled to an appropriation of 50 acres or to so much as shall make up what he owns or has owned 50 acres in full and absolute dominion. And no other person shall be capable of taking an appropriation.

While this perhaps doesn’t qualify as wealth redistribution, it certainly would have resulted in a fundamental reordering of Virginia’s economic and political status quo. Bearing in mind that the property qualification on the franchise that Jefferson described in his proposed constitution required the possession of only ¼ of an acre in town and 25 acres in the country, appropriations of the type described above would have potentially entitled any citizen who desired to claim their 50 acres the right to vote.

Furthermore, because Jefferson also declared in the same document that, “Every person so qualified to elect shall be capable of being elected,” the distribution of such parcels of land would likewise have resulted in a much greater percentage of Virginia’s population becoming eligible to serve in an office of state. The consequences of such an expansion – in terms of who could vote and be voted for – would doubtless have been considerable. Men customarily inclined by their circumstances towards deference to their social betters would have been permitted to exercise the same political rights upon the same terms as the wealthiest plantation owners. Those accustomed to public service as an accoutrement of their wealth may have consequently been forced to pay heed to the concerns of a much-enlarged voting public and thereafter cultivate their support via the promotion of certain policies or positions. This, combined with the potential influx of newly-landed men into the General Assembly, would inevitably have wrought significant change upon the nature of political discourse in Virginia, the issues most commonly discussed, and the social and economic perspectives in evidence. In all likelihood, this was what Jefferson intended.

As previously discussed, the Sage of Monticello often demonstrated in his writings an ardent desire to protect and promote the rights of the common citizen and ensure that government always fostered their ambitions rather than its own. Empowering the most responsive branch of Virginia’s General Assembly, as he attempted to do in his 1776 draft constitution, was one way to accomplish this. Rather than locate the seat of power in a singular, unelected governor, as had been the custom, it was instead to be distributed among the members of a lower house elected on a yearly basis. Because this in itself would have amounted to very little so long as the electorate itself and the slate of candidates remained unchanged, Jefferson also intended to ease the franchise qualification so that more Virginians could vote and receive the votes of others than ever before. His proposal to grant 50 acres to every citizen who desired it, or so much as to raise their lifetime total ownership to 50 acres, was very much in this same vein.

Even accepting that many potential claimants who owned land in excess of 25 acres but less than 50 would already have qualified for the franchise and to stand for office without any additional grants, there must also have existed – otherwise it would seem rather odd to even make the offer – a sizeable number of people living in Virginia who owned no land at all as of 1776. Their voices and perspectives were thus entirely unknown within the contemporary political scene, and their government almost completely ignorant of their needs, concerns, or convictions. These people – laborers, city-dwellers, and artisans, among others – would have been permitted to instantly join the political class by accepting a grant of land from the state, thus at a stroke vastly increase the ability of Virginia’s government to truly speak for the citizens it claimed to serve. In time, Jefferson likely hoped that these newly-landed individuals would abandon whatever instinct they possessed to defer to their social betters as land ownership and political participation became the norm rather than the exception. Able for the first time to engage in public service alongside the scions of some of Virginia’s wealthiest families, it no doubt seemed inevitable to the sage of Monticello that existing social barriers would gradually break down and give way to a far more egalitarian social structure than that which dominated the colonial era.

Granted, the distribution of land that Jefferson proposed in his draft constitution would not have altered the fact that certain families in Virginia were far wealthier than others. Nor would it have ameliorated all of the advantages, material and social alike, that said families enjoyed. But at the very least it would have served to narrow the gap between the “Haves” and “Have-Nots” in the Old Dominion, as well as potentially broaden the realm of public discourse and promote a stronger sense of political awareness among the general population. Being able to vote and stand for election where they hadn’t before, it’s likely that many Virginians would have been compelled to take a greater interest in the affairs of state that now formed a part of their responsibilities. The emergence of a new political class – of small-scale farmers, workers, and artisans of limited means or education – would accordingly seem to be a potential result of this expansion of the public sphere, though it’s hard to say if this was Jefferson’s intention.

In spite of his lifelong advocacy for the prerogatives of the common citizen, Thomas Jefferson’s opinion of the suitability of the average American to hold political office was decidedly mixed. Like many of his contemporaries among the Founding Generation, the Sage of Monticello nurtured the underlying assumption that public service was the preserve of a certain class of men – customarily defined by their education, character, and wealth – who were best suited them to the pressures and concerns of “great matters of state.” While he may have been willing to expand this criteria of suitability to more generally include those who owned land in their own right, in was only in later life that he began to support universal male suffrage as the basis of political participation. Though much of the rhetoric he deployed and many of the policies he endorsed did seem intent on actively empowering the average, uneducated, middling citizen, it nonetheless represents a potential misunderstanding of Jefferson to conclude from the above-quoted passage that he was unreservedly in favor of seeing butchers, shop-keepers, and frontier homesteaders striding about the halls of power. Or perhaps it might be fairer to say, in light of the property qualifications his draft constitution embraced, that he would have been willing to see the butcher or the shopkeeper take their place in the General Assembly, but only once they had proven their responsibility, independence, and investment in the community by becoming landowners.

Key to understanding this somewhat rigid attachment to property – and in turn the logic behind some of the provisions included in his draft constitution for Virginia –  is Jefferson’s conception of what constituted an ideal republican citizen, the importance of personal autonomy and independence, and the theoretical root of individual virtue. The ability of a republic to survive the tumults of popular rule while staving off corruption, Jefferson argued, lay in the virtue of the individual citizen, and in their willingness to hold their ministers to account and guard against the wanton abrogation of certain fundamental rights. This virtue could best be guaranteed only if those whose sovereignty was the basis of republican government – the voters – were free from trifling dependencies or attitudes of deference that might otherwise warp or distort their intentions. A shop-keeper in New York who owed money to a Boston merchant, say, or a tenant-famer in Virginia whose meagre prosperity was owed to the benevolence of his landlord were thus ill-suited, in Jefferson’s opinion, to exercise the political responsibilities the public sphere demanded of them. Only someone who owned the land from which they drew their livelihood could be trusted to enjoy the full and free exercise of their judgement. Furthermore, because the personal prosperity of a landowner was directly tied to their property, and because that property formed an immovable part of a larger community, it thus seemed quite clear to Jefferson that owning land demanded an individual take an interest in the political and economic well-being of the village, county, parish, district, or state in which they lived. Accordingly, Jefferson considered the planter, estate owner, and yeoman farmer (i.e. those who engaged in small-scale subsistence agriculture) to represent the ideal republican citizen, while the merchant, banker, and urban laborer (who possessed moveable property or no property) were fundamentally unsuitable.

By granting land to members of this latter group – not enough to turn them into wealthy planters, mind, but a sufficient amount to allow them to subsist by their own hand – Jefferson doubtless hoped to convert a large percentage of Virginia’s population into what he considered to be ideal republican citizens. Granting, of course, that this theory of republican citizenship was just that – a theory – thus making it difficult to say whether the land grants the Sage of Monticello enshrined in his proposed Virginia constitution would have exerted the effect he desired, the logic behind it certainly aligns with what would become the Jeffersonian ideology. Key to this pattern of political thought – whose heyday in the United States spanned from approximately 1800 to the mid-1820s – was the toweringly idealistic and maddeningly vague notion that America was destined to form, as Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1809, “An empire for liberty as [man] has never surveyed since the creation [.]” This empire, discussed at lengths in weeks past, was to be a community of conviction and principle rather than power, and its fundamental basis – its smallest, and yet most important constituent unit – was to be the meagre yeoman farmer whose property was (again, in theory) the foundation of his virtue, and who would have guarded against violations of the public good in the same breath that he defended the land upon which he lived. While it cannot be denied that there is a great deal more to the Jeffersonian ideal than the championing of the yeoman farmer, and that a great many years passed between the events of 1776 and the ascendancy of this ideal as a political force at the dawn of the 19^th century, there would at least appear to be a seed of the Jeffersonian link between land and citizenship in the above-quoted passage of the Sage of Monticello’s draft constitution for Virginia. Said draft constitution therefore potentially represents one of the first written expressions of a stream of political thought that would go on to redefine the culture and government of the United States at a crucial moment in its early history.