Key figures: George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, Fifth Virginia Convention delegates
Summary
The Virginia Constitution of 1776 was adopted unanimously by Virginia’s Fifth Revolutionary Convention at Williamsburg on June 29, 1776 — five days before the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4. The convention, which met from May 6 to July 5, 1776, and comprised roughly 130 delegates (two from each county along with borough and College of William and Mary representatives), had already instructed Virginia’s delegates in Congress on May 15 to propose independence and had adopted George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights on June 12. The form of government adopted on June 29 established the first permanent written constitution framed by an independent American state, replacing royal colonial administration with a fully republican structure.
George Mason was the principal drafter of the constitution, as he had been of the Declaration of Rights; his working draft supplied the major outlines and provisions of the government the convention approved. Thomas Jefferson, then serving as a delegate in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, sent a draft constitution of his own to Williamsburg, but it arrived too late to shape the framework of government. The convention did, however, adopt Jefferson’s lengthy preamble — a list of grievances against King George III closely resembling the indictment in the national Declaration of Independence he was then drafting — and prefixed it to the Virginia text as the document’s justification for severing royal authority.
The constitution created a bicameral legislature, the General Assembly, composed of a House of Delegates (two members elected annually from each county) and a new twenty-four-member Senate elected from twenty-four districts. Wary of concentrated executive power after the experience of royal governors, the delegates deliberately created a weak executive: the governor was chosen annually by joint ballot of both houses, held no veto, and could serve no more than three consecutive one-year terms. An eight-member Council of State (or Privy Council), also elected jointly by the two houses rather than appointed by the governor, advised the executive, and judges were likewise chosen by the legislature. Patrick Henry was elected the state’s first governor and took office on June 29, 1776. Suffrage was left to propertied white men on the existing colonial freehold basis, and the document was silent on slavery. Unlike later American charters, the constitution was promulgated by the convention itself and was never submitted to the voters for ratification.
Significance
The Virginia Constitution of 1776 was the first constitution adopted by an independent American commonwealth to establish a complete, permanent frame of republican government, and it became an influential model as other states wrote their own charters during the Revolution. Its pairing of an enumerated declaration of rights with a written plan of government set a structural template that the federal Constitution and Bill of Rights would later echo. At the same time, the document embodied the compromises of its authors: by vesting dominant power in a legislature apportioned by county and by restricting suffrage and officeholding to propertied men, it entrenched the political influence of Virginia’s landed gentry. Thomas Jefferson was among its sharpest early critics, faulting it for weak separation of powers, malapportionment that gave small tidewater counties weight equal to populous frontier ones, and its adoption without popular ratification — objections he pressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia and in unsuccessful efforts at revision. The 1776 frame nonetheless governed Virginia for more than half a century, until the constitutional convention of 1829–1830, and stands as a foundational experiment in translating revolutionary principles into a working republican state.
Sources
- Constitution of Virginia — Wikipedia
- The Virginia Constitution of 1776 — Colonial Williamsburg
- The Virginia Constitution of 1776 — Encyclopedia Virginia
- Constitution of Virginia; June 29, 1776 — The Avalon Project, Yale Law School