In a tumultuous season of revolutionary fervor, a Virginian took up a quill and parchment and committed words to paper that would echo across the thirteen North American British colonies and down through time, becoming one of the most imitated constitutional documents in American history.
It declared that all men are equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, among them life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But that man wasn’t Thomas Jefferson. And the document wasn’t the Declaration of Independence.
Before Jefferson wrote The Declaration, George Mason penned the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which, as contributor Daniel Dreisbach notes in our new entry, “informed the key language of equality and fundamental rights in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.” June 12 marks the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
In early May 1776, the Fifth Virginia Revolutionary Convention instructed delegates to the Second Continental Congress to declare independence from Britain and appointed a committee to prepare a declaration of humankind’s natural rights to guide efforts to form a new civil government.
Mason did the lion’s share of drafting this document, which declared:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
If the words sound familiar, it’s because Jefferson “refined and amplified” them in the Declaration of Independence, as Dreisbach writes.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights presaged the Declaration, and its contradictions, in other ways, too. In his initial draft, Mason wrote, “That all Men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural Rights.”
But that phrasing didn’t go over well with enslavers in Virginia and elsewhere as Mason’s draft was circulated around the colonies. After all, declaring that “all Men are born equally free and independent” and have “certain inherent natural Rights” would seem to include enslaved people as well and could be viewed as a direct challenge to slavery.
Instead, the enacted version of the Virginia Declaration of Rights changed “all Men are born equally free and independant” to “all men are by nature equally free and independent” and replaced “inherent natural rights” with “inherent rights” for those who “enter into a state of society.” This was an important qualification, because “inherent rights” could be viewed as more limited than “natural rights.” And by stipulating that enslaved people had not entered “a state of society”—meaning they were not part of the social compact of the new nation—civil authorities could justify depriving them of these rights. It was a calculated decision to ensure that enslaved people could not claim the supposedly universal rights recognized in the document.
But as with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Declaration of Rights would still reverberate and, as Dreisbach writes, compel “Virginians and people throughout the new nation to confront a contradiction and commence conversations and movements that would eventually culminate in the abolition of slavery and affirm the rights of all humanity.”
