Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 15

THE GERMAN ROOTS OF AMERICAN ORDER

that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors,
the wisest & most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it
stood before the 8th century?"23 Jefferson does not mention John
Locke or any other eighteenth-century author. He talks of returning to what he took to be the land tenure system of the early
Anglo-Saxon settlers of England, and he assumes this appeal will
be found convincing.
Jefferson and Pendleton soon worked together on legal issues
when they were elected to the committee for "A General Revisal
of the Laws" of Virginia with George Wythe, George Mason, and
Thomas Ludwell Lee. The full committee met in Fredericksburg
January 13, 1777, and agreed on principles and details. Mason's
notes (January 13, 1777), Jefferson's letters to George Wythe
(November 1, 1778) and Skelton Jones (July 28, 1809), and his
"Autobiography" are in basic agreement. (Slips in the "Autobiography" of 1821 can be corrected from the earlier sources.)
The current laws were to be shortened and rewritten in simpler
language, as Jefferson wrote to Wythe. "In its style I have aimed
at accuracy, brevity & simplicity. . . . Indeed I wished to exhibit a
sample of reformation in the barbarous style into which modern
statutes have degenerated from their ancient simplicity."24 Even
in style the distant past is superior to the modern.
Mason in 1777 and Jefferson in 1809 agree on another point.
Mason's notes begin, "The Common Law not to be meddled
with, except where Alterations are necessary."25 Jefferson echoes
this language in the letter to Skelton Jones: "We concluded not
to meddle with the common law, i.e. the law preceding the existence of the statutes, farther than to accommodate it to our new
principles & circumstances." After noting the need to revise "the
barbarous tautologies and redundancies which render the British
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Modern Age - Fall 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2015

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