Virginia Declaration of Rights

Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), the first written enumeration of the rights of citizens and the fundamental principles of government in the newly independent United States.In May 1776, the acting revolutionary government of Virginia officially dissolved the colony's former royal government and created a committee to draw up a declaration of rights and a constitution for the new state. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, passed on 12 June 1776, profoundly influenced other state declarations of rights and the federal Bill of Rights.

Drafted by George Mason (1725–1792), a wealthy planter and political leader, the declaration set forth principles such as popular sovereignty, the separation of powers, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, trial by jury, and security from unreasonable searches and unjust punishments. Most importantly, the declaration grounded these rights not in the traditional liberties of British citizens or in the common law, but in a conception of natural law and social contract. The first article stated “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,” including life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and safety.

While this language echoed that of John Locke and prefigured that of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, it was also designed to meet the exigencies of eighteenth‐century Virginia. The convention added the phrase “when they enter into a state of society” to insure that the promises of equality and right contained in the declaration did not apply to slaves, who were not considered party to a social contract reserved for politically enfranchised male citizens. Thus, in addition to establishing the supremacy of natural law and popular sovereignty in American political thought, the Virginia Declaration of Rights also foreshadowed the compromises on slavery embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution.
See also Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of.

Bibliography

Warren Billings , ‘That All Men Are Born Equally Free and Independent’: Virginians and the Origins of the Bill of Rights, in The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties, eds. Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski, 1992, pp. 335–69.
Jack N. Rakove , Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents, 1998.

Randolph Scully