of
feudalism, aristocracy, and privilege. He succeeded in eliminating
primogeniture (the eldest child has greater inheritance rights than the
younger children) and entails (a person could place restrictions on the
use of his property in perpetuity). Both primogeniture and entail smacked
of inequality and alienation of rights by one generation against the
next. Although his Statute on Religious Freedom was not passed until
1786, each session after 1776 saw Jefferson successfully whittle down the
privileges of the once-established Anglican Church. From 1776 until 1778
Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton labored on a revision of the state law
code, but only a part of their code was adopted. A revised criminal code
was not fully enacted until the 1790's. Jefferson made little headway on
his plans for public education.

There is no evidence that Virginians were concerned that the convention
had written a constitution without their direct approval. The
Constitution of 1776 remained in effect until 1830. Virginians developed
great pride concerning the work of this revolutionary convention. Here a
group of the richest and best men in the colony had initiated revolution,
articulated a philosophy for revolution, and established a frame of
government which were to be widely imitated throughout the country and
adopted in part in France.

Out of this transformation of the English constitution into a government
for the Commonwealth of Virginia men like Jefferson, Henry, Mason, and
even the more conservative Bland and Pendleton had produced a truly
radical doctrine of popular sovereignty, an appeal to a higher law--the
law of nature and Nature's God, the replacement of virtual representation
with direct representation, and the substitution of a balance of
interests within the Virginia society for the old English theory of a
balanced government comprising crown, nobility, and commons in restraint
of each other.

In the words of historian Bailyn, they had worked "a substantial
alteration in the order of society as it was known" in 1775. They had
unloosened a "contagion of liberty" which could not be restrained.[37]
Ultimately Virginians and Americans came to believe the rhetoric of the
Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence when they read
the words "all men are created equal" to mean "all persons". If it is
something of an anomaly that the men who wrote these words were
slaveholders, it is no anomaly that these words c