as to be used completely
and fully for carrying down all our produce.

The Declaration of Independence.

I proposed the demolition of the Church establishment, and the freedom
of religion. It could only be done by degrees; to wit, the act of 1776,
c. 2. exempted dissenters from contributions to the Church, and left the
Church clergy to be supported by voluntary contributions of their own
sect; was continued from year to year, and made perpetual 1779, c. 36. I
prepared the act for religious freedom in 1777, as part of the revisal,
which was not reported to the Assembly till 1779, and that particular
law not passed till 1785, and then by the efforts of Mr. Madison.

The act putting an end to entails.

The act prohibiting the importation of slaves.

The act concerning citizens, and establishing the natural right of man
to expatriate himself at will.

The act changing the course of descents, and giving the inheritance to
all the children, &c. equally, I drew as part of the revisal.

The act for apportioning crimes and punishments, part of the same work,
I drew. When proposed to the Legislature by Mr. Madison, in 1785, it
failed by a single vote. G. K. Taylor afterwards, in 1796, proposed the
same subject; avoiding the adoption of any part of the diction of mine,
the text of which had been studiously drawn in the technical terms of
the law, so as to give no occasion for new questions by new expressions.
When I drew mine, public labor was thought the best punishment to be
substituted for death. But, while I was in France, I heard of a society
in England who had successfully introduced solitary confinement, and
saw the drawing of a prison at Lyons, in France, formed on the idea of
solitary confinement. And, being applied to by the Governor of Virginia
for the plan of a Capitol and Prison, I sent him the Lyons plan,
accompanying it with a drawing on a smaller scale, better adapted to our
use. This was in June, 1786. Mr. Taylor very judiciously adopted this
idea, (which had now been acted on in Philadelphia, probably from the
English model,) and substituted labor in confinement, to the public
labor proposed by the Committee of revisal; which themselves would have
done, had they been to act on the subject again. The public mind was
ripe for this in 1796, when Mr. Taylor proposed it, and ripened chiefly
by the experiment in Philadelphia; whereas, in 1785, when it had been
proposed to our Assembly, they were not quite ripe f