Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia, and: Mr. Jefferson’s Women (review)

During the summer of 1816, Frederick County innkeeper and writer Samuel Kercheval solicited the assistance of his fellow Virginian, the former president Thomas Jefferson, in the on-again, off-again project of attempting to revise Virginia’s now forty-year-old state constitution. Among other things, Kercheval and his neighbors in the Shenandoah Valley hoped to alter the rules by which Virginia allotted seats in the state legislature. Apportionment had not kept up with population growth, and the Valley counties as well as the counties to the west found themselves severely underrepresented. Virginia’s most dynamic localities thus found their voices muffled in all manner of discussions about the future of their Commonwealth.

Jefferson was sympathetic to the western Virginians’ plight, as unequal representation in any legislature was deeply antithetical to the republican principles that he had held dear since the eve of the American Revolution. But the errors in Virginia’s constitution went deeper. Jefferson took the opportunity of his correspondence with Kercheval to opine on several problems he saw in the Commonwealth’s constitutional system. In the forty years since Americans had declared their independence and Virginians drafted their revolutionary constitution, understandings of republicanism had grown more sophisticated. In 1776, Jefferson noted, “the abuses of monarchy had so much filled the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchical.” In the intervening decades, Jefferson and others had come to understand that unequal representation in the legislature, as well as an executive and judiciary that were not responsible to the people, would render a polity republican in name, but something less than republican in practice. “Where then is our republicanism to be found?” he asked Kercheval rhetorically. “Not in our Constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people.” Through their powers of election, petition, and protest, Virginia’s citizens alone had kept the Commonwealth relatively free from corruption.¹

Virginians had thus been lucky, in that they had a populace innately committed to the principles of republicanism. But luck could run out. Thus Jefferson could support, albeit privately and passively, attempts to reform Virginia’s constitution. In the minds of western Virginians like Kercheval, luck had run out; they were not on equal footing with the Commonwealth’s eastern counties. As Susan Dunn recounts in Dominion of Memories, Kercheval’s lobbying and Jefferson’s commentary in 1816 were two of many mileposts on the path between Virginia’s revolutionary constitution of 1776 and the constitutional convention of 1829–1830. Jefferson and his friend and ally James Madison spent their political careers attempting to reform the political structure of Virginia—both called for a new state constitutional convention at various times from the late 1770s onward, and both put forward or supported legislation (such as those laws granting religious freedom or proposing publicly funded education) that sought to soften the revolutionary order’s rough edges and make the promise of republicanism open to all. But all these reforms had been piecemeal at best, and the call for constitutional reform went unheeded until three years after Jefferson’s death, with the calling of a constitutional convention in 1829. Although Jefferson had passed, Dunn tells her readers, the ideas he had put forward drove the program of reformers such as Philip Doddridge and William Campbell as they argued passionately and vociferously for a new apportionment of the legislature and an expansion of the franchise. The reformers were forced to parry with conservatives such as John Randolph of Roanoke and Littleton Tazewell, who were determined to keep the franchise limited to white, male property owners and also preserve a legislative apportionment that counted each slave as 3/5 of a person—a calculus that kept the Tidewater counties relatively overrepresented. As the convention drew to a close and...