Background.

The first actions by the Virginia House of Delegates after the Declaration of Independence were to prepare two significant pieces of legislation. One was a bill to eliminate fee tails, and the second was to appoint a committee of five to propose a general revision of the laws of the new commonwealth. Thomas Jefferson was assigned responsibility for the first, and he served on the committee of five, together with Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, Thomas Lee, and George Mason. The five met to decide how they would approach this task and determined that they would "take up the whole body of statutes and Virginia laws, to leave out everything obsolete or improper, insert what was wanting, and reduce the whole within as moderate a compass as it would bear, and to the plain language of common...