If there are aspects of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 draft
constitution for Virginia that appear similar to, if not quite the same as, the
government framed by the 1619 colonial charter, there are almost certainly good
reasons for it. Never a needless innovator, the Sage of Monticello likely felt
he had no reason to change what already worked; or, barring that, he maintained
certain existing structures or concepts because he felt some degree of
familiarity would aide his program’s acceptance among the general population.
If the abundant differences between the two are any indication, however, there
were also many things about the existing colonial government that Jefferson sought
to alter or remedy in his 1776 proposal. Some of the alterations to the
established formula that he offered appear rooted in republican philosophy,
while others seem to take their inspiration from recent history, general
pragmatism, or some form of populism. Regardless of what motivated the
innovations Jefferson brought to bear, however, it is the way he combined them
into a fundamental governing document that speaks to the unified social and
administrative rationale he hoped to imprint upon his home state.
But before any unified visions begin to reveal themselves, one
must first attempt to pick out and dissect the various elements of Jefferson’s
draft constitution that bespeak significant innovation. The first that leaps to
mind, perhaps because it represents the most important way his fellow
Virginians were going to interact with the government he proposed, is the
electoral franchise. The colonial charter of 1619 makes no mention of what
qualified a person to vote in the election of members of the House of
Burgesses. All that it states, with admirable concision and/or frustrating
ambiguity, is that the lower house of the General Assembly shall consist of,
“Two burgesses out of every town, hundred, or other particular plantation, to
be respectively chosen by the inhabitants [.]” In practice, every freeman in
the colony (being neither a slave nor an indentured servant, and excluding
women) almost certainly possessed the right to vote prior to 1670; after that
time only men who owned property enjoyed the use of the franchise. This
provision was briefly reversed in 1676 when devotees of the aforementioned
Nathanial Bacon took control of the House of Burgesses and restored the vote to
landless freemen, and then reapplied by the colonial elite once Bacon’s attempted
revolt had been soundly crushed. In 1684 a further refinement of electoral law
decreed that tenants possessing land under the terms of a lifetime lease also
enjoyed the right to vote, and in 1736 the House of Burgesses determined that
an individual needed to own at least 100 acres of unimproved land or 25 acres
of improved land for one year prior to an election to be eligible to vote.
By 1776 some form of property qualification had thus been
operating uninterrupted for almost exactly a century, and had left its mark on
the character of Virginia’s political culture. In spite of the fact that a
certain percentage of the colonial population were excluded from voting either
because of their legal or financial status, many Virginians in the latter 17th
century had come to think of their society as remarkably egalitarian. Unlike in
the Britain of their forebears, wherein the aristocracy, the Crown, and the
church between them controlled the largest share of arable land, the percentage
of Virginians who owned no property at all was relatively small. Though not an
altogether false assertion in the 1670s and 1680s, the perpetuation of this
view masked the increasingly divided nature of Virginia’s population in the
second half of the 18th century. Land ownership may have been the
norm in the late 17th century, when continued migration into the
colony was considered an economic priority, but natural population growth and
finite total acreage doubtless wrought their effects on the size of the
landless population.
In 1700, about 60,000 (Black and White) people lived in
Virginia, and altogether the colony claimed most of the land within the borders
of the modern state (about 40,000 square miles). In spite of this apparent
expanse of territory out of which future generations could carve homesteads for
themselves, settlement was sparse beyond a western frontier extending roughly south
from present-day Augusta County to Pittsylvania County. Consequently, only
about 26,500 square miles were available for unrestricted habitation as of
1776. To this statistic it must be added that by 1770 the population of
Virginia had expanded to just short of 450,000. Accepting that approximately
half this number represented the slave population, the number of White
residents in the colony, all at least potential voters, had still expanded
significantly in the seventy years since the dawn of the 18th
century unaccompanied by a commensurate growth in claimable territory. During
these seventy years, what land was available was doubtless steadily swallowed
up by new arrivals or the purchases of the wealthy, the latter resulting at
times in the creation and growth of large plantation estates worked by hundreds
of African slaves (thus accounting for their accompanying population growth).
Because the descendants of these landowners were quite often left without
property by the operation of inheritance laws based on primogeniture, and
because the total amount of free land to be claimed had been steadily
shrinking, it stands to reason that the percentage of the Virginia population
in 1776 that were landless but free had expanded as well, to a percentage of the
total somewhat higher than earlier generations might have imagined. This would
inevitably effect the operation of the franchise, creating an “underclass” of
sorts who were legally free but excluded from the political process.
Jefferson’s solution to this likely unintended political
segregation was not as radical as some of the other innovations he offered in
his draft constitution, though it surely would have wrought significant changes
on Virginia’s political culture. In a section of his draft constitution
concerned primarily with the operation of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson
decreed that,
All male
persons of full age and sane mind having a freehold estate in [on fourth of an
acre] of land in any town, or in [25] acres of land in the country, and all
persons resident in the colony who shall have paid scot and lot to government
the last [two years] shall have right to give their vote in the election of
their respective representatives.
For reference, “freehold” simply
refers to immovable property (land and any structures or vegetation on it) that
is owned for a period of time not determined or circumscribed by any contract
or agreement (such as a lease), while “scot and lot” was a tax on householders
originating in the medieval period that in some English jurisdictions entitled
the payee to vote in elections. By including a property qualification on the
franchise in his proposed plan for Virginia’s first state government, Jefferson
perhaps hoped to preserve an existing norm in another attempt not to upset the
applecart entirely amidst a generally radical program of reform. At the same
time, however, he did not propose to leave the established franchise laws
untouched or un-augmented. Indeed, his proposed constitution seemed intent on
simplifying and relaxing existing electoral regulations, to the benefit of the
(free) population of Virginia. Rather than having to possess 100 acres of
unimproved or 25 acres of improved land, in either case constituting a
significant personal expense, he intended to allow residents to vote with only
25 acres of (presumably) any sort of land in the country, or a fraction of that
(1/4 acre) in any town. And for those who possessed no land at all, he intended
for the payment of a householder tax to suffice as qualification for the
franchise. These deviations from established precedent, moderate and yet
substantive, were no doubt a function of both pragmatism and principle.
On one hand, Jefferson was doubtless aware that the growth of
Virginia’s population had both decreased the amount of purchasable land per
capita and increased the number of people living in large urban areas. For this
expanded urban population the purchase of the large tracts of landed defined by
existing franchise law was likely neither practical nor desirable, yet they
were essentially punished for not doing so by being excluded from the political
process. In 1776, amidst much spirited talk of rights, representation, and
responsibilities, this was likely seen as an increasingly untenable status quo.
At the same time, being throughout his career something of a populist, the Sage
of Monticello no doubt wished to increase the ability of the population of his
home state to participate in the proceedings of the government that most
affected their everyday lives. As the events of the 1760s and 1770s had
effectively proven, governments were most capable of descending into tyranny
when the people whose existence they were responsible for had little input into
how they functioned and even less ability to provide viable oversight. By
increasing the number of people to whom at least the legislature of Virginia
was directly responsible – by granting the electoral franchise to small
property-holders and tax-paying residents in towns – Jefferson no doubt hoped
to ensure that the administration of his native country never degenerated into
the parody of responsible, representative government that many contemporary
Americans believed the British Parliament had become.
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