Mindful of royal authority and disdainful of executive power, the constitution emasculated the power of the governor, leaving him a "mere phantom". Elected annually by the combined vote of the General Assembly for a maximum of three consecutive terms, the governor had no veto power and virtually no power of executive action. He could not act between legislative sessions without approval of an eight-man Council of State. This council was elected by the assembly "to assist in the administration of government". In truth, the council restrained the executive.
The virtual semi-autonomy of the county courts and the justices of the peace remained. A system of state courts was provided for, its judges also elected by the assembly. Property qualifications for voters and for office holders continued in force. No clergymen were permitted to hold state office.[36 ]
The constitution, then retained what had worked well in the past—the General Assembly and the county court system; granted to the House of Delegates the written powers it had claimed as the colonial House of Burgesses; eliminated the royally elected council, but retained the idea of an upper house composed of men of property; and totally restrained the governor. Thus, if one definition of a commonwealth is a government in which the legislature is supreme, then Virginia in 1776 was certainly a commonwealth. This constitution became a model for many other state governments, although most states benefited from the unfortunate experiences of governors Henry (1776-1779) and Jefferson (1779-1781) and gave their executives greater administrative latitude.
Jefferson had hastened back from Philadelphia to try to influence the writing of the constitution. He arrived too late to have much effect beyond appending to the constitution a preamble paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence. But many of his ideas were too "democratical". He feared the constitution did not have the force of true law, for it had been written by a convention not elected for that purpose by the people. Nor had the people voted directly on the constitution. Jefferson was even more concerned about the remaining vestiges of feudalism, aristocracy, and privilege. He succeeded in eliminating primogeniture (the eldest child has greater inheritance rights than the younger children) and entails (a person could place restrictions on the use of his property in perpetuity). Both primogeniture and entail smacked of inequality and alienation of rights by one generation against the next. Although his Statute on Religious Freedom was not passed until 1786, each session after 1776 saw Jefferson successfully whittle down the privileges of the once-established Anglican Church. From 1776 until 1778 Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton labored on a revision of the state law code, but only a part of their code was adopted. A revised criminal code was not fully enacted until the 1790's. Jefferson made little headway on his plans for public education.
There is no evidence that Virginians were concerned that the convention had written a constitution without their direct approval. The Constitution of 1776 remained in effect until 1830. Virginians developed great pride concerning the work of this revolutionary convention. Here a group of the richest and best men in the colony had initiated revolution, articulated a philosophy for revolution, and established a frame of government which were to be widely imitated throughout the country and adopted in part in France.
Out of this transformation of the English constitution into a government for the Commonwealth of Virginia men like Jefferson, Henry, Mason, and even the more conservative Bland and Pendleton had produced a truly radical doctrine of popular sovereignty, an appeal to a higher law—the law of nature and Nature's God, the replacement of virtual representation with direct representation, and the substitution of a balance of interests within the Virginia society for the old English theory of a balanced government comprising crown, nobility, and commons in restraint of each other.
In the words of historian Bailyn, they had worked "a substantial alteration in the order of society as it was known" in 1775. They had unloosened a "contagion of liberty" which could not be restrained.[37 ] Ultimately Virginians and Americans came to believe the rhetoric of the Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence when they read the words "all men are created equal" to mean "all persons". If it is something of an anomaly that the men who wrote these words were slaveholders, it is no anomaly that these words came to be accepted as "self-evident truths" when later generations applied these truths to the rights of man, regardless of race, creed, color, religion, or national origin. But that was a long way off. June-July 1776 was the beginning of a great experiment, not the finished product.
The British-Americans: The Virginia Loyalists
Jefferson was correct in stating that Virginians moved forward to war with greater unity and with fewer examples of Torism than any other colony. Robert Calhoon, historian of loyalism, notes Virginia Loyalists consisted "of a handful of Anglican clergymen, the members of a moribund Royal Council, and several hundred Scottish merchants, and were ... not a very formidable coalition." This confirms the much older view of Isaac Harrell who characterized Virginia loyalists as small in number, not more than a few thousand, whose activities after the departure of Governor Dunmore were limited. Only in the Norfolk area, the Hobbs Hole region of Middlesex County, in Accomac County on the Eastern Shore, and in the isolated frontier area along the Monongahela River, claimed jointly by Pennsylvania and Virginia, were there enough loyalists to even suggest a majority of the population. "Of the 2,500 claims filed with British government for loyalist property lost during the Revolution, only 140 were from Virginia." Most of these 140 claims were made by British natives living in Virginia at the outbreak of the war. Only 13 were Virginians.