Republican Society.

After independence Virginia and the other states had to revise many of their laws, which had rested on the authority of the king. In Virginia Thomas Jefferson was assigned to rewrite the state's legal code. Jefferson was not content simply to remove vestiges of British rule; his revision aimed to destroy aristocratic privilege and any form of tyranny over the mind of man. Jefferson proposed particular laws to do this: one abolished primogeniture and entail, rules of inheritance which prevented large estates from being broken up and bequeathed to several children. This law, Jefferson said, "laid the axe to the roote of Psuedo-aristocracy." He was disappointed and frustrated that the assembly did not pass his more ambitious law on education, which would have created a statewide system of public grammar schools, elementary schools, academies, and a public college and state library...