nd extensive but superficial
knowledge; he was a strange combination of natural aristocrat and
theoretical democrat, of philosopher and practical politician. After
having been a student in the law office of George Wythe, and being
a friend of Patrick Henry, Jefferson early espoused the cause of
the Revolution, and it was his hand that drafted the Declaration
of Independence. He then resigned from Congress to assist in the
organization of government in his own State. For two years and a half he
served in the Virginia Assembly and brought about the repeal of the
law of entailment, the abolition of primogeniture, the recognition
of freedom of conscience, and the encouragement of education. He was
Governor of Virginia for two years and then, having declined reelection,
returned to Congress in 1783. There, among his other accomplishments,
as chairman of the committee, he reported the Treaty of Peace and, as
chairman of another committee, devised and persuaded Congress to adopt a
national system of coinage which in its essentials is still in use.

It is easy to criticize Jefferson and to pick flaws in the things that
he said as well as in the things that he did, but practically every
one admits that he was closely in touch with the course of events
and understood the temper of his contemporaries. In this period of
transition from the old order to the new, he seems to have expressed the
genius of American institutions better than almost any other man of his
generation. He possessed a quality that enabled him, in the Declaration
of Independence, to give voice to the hopes and aspirations of a rising
nationality and that enabled him in his own State to bring about so many
reforms.

Just how much actual influence Thomas Jefferson had in the framing
of the American land policy is not clear. Although the draft of the
committee report in 1784 is in Jefferson's handwriting, it is altogether
probable that more credit is to be given to Thomas Hutchins, the
Geographer of the United States, and to William Grayson of Virginia,
especially for the final form which the measure took; for Jefferson
retired from the chairmanship and had already gone to Europe when the
Land Ordinance was adopted by Congress in 1785. This ordinance has been
superseded by later enactments, to which references are usually made;
but the original ordinance is one of the great pieces of American
legislation, for it contained the fundamentals of the American land
sys