Jefferson purchased vol. II and III from Pleasants as shown above, and later volumes as they were published but which form no part of the collection sold to Congress.

William Waller Hening, 1767-1828, Virginia lawyer and legal writer.

Mottled calf, marbled endpapers, green silk bookmark. Not initialled by Jefferson; the word passe ^d. written by him in the Catalogue list at the beginning beside such bills as were passed; the date on the title-page is divided by commas inserted in ink. With the Library of Congress 1815 bookplate.

A full account of this report is given by Jefferson in his autobiography. The Committee consisted of Jefferson himself, George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton. George Mason and Thomas L. Lee were also appointed but the former refused to serve and the latter died.

Jefferson’s account of this Revisal, as given on July 28, 1809, in a letter to Skelton Jones in reference to his continuation of Burk’s History reads as follows: “ . . . you ask what is the historian to do with the latter part of 1776. the whole of 77. & 78. & a part of 79? this is precisely the period which was occupied in the reformation of the laws to the new organisation & principles of our government. the committee was appointed in the latter part of 76. & reported in the spring or summer 79. at the first and only meeting of the whole committee (of 5. persons) the question was discussed whether we would attempt to reduce the whole body of the law into a code, the text of which should become the law of the land? we decided against that, because every word & phrase in the text would become a new subject of criticism & litigation until it’s sense should have been settled by numerous decisions, & that in the meantime the rights of property would be in the air. we concluded not to meddle with the common law, i.e. the law preceding the existence of the statutes, farther than to accomodate it to our new principles & circumstances, but to take up the whole body of statutes and Virginia laws, to leave out everything obsolete or improper, insert what was wanting, and reduce the whole within as moderate a compas as it would bear, and to the plain language of common sense, divested of the verbiage, the barbarous tautologies & redundancies which render the British statutes unintelligible. from this however were excepted the antient statutes, particularly those commented on by Lord Coke, the language of which is simple, & the meaning of every word so well settled by decisions as to make it safest not to change the words where the sense was to be retained. after settling our plan, Col ^o. Mason declined undertaking the execution of any part of it, as not being sufficiently read in the law. m ( ^~ r) Lee very soon afterwards died, & the work was distributed between m( ^~ r) Wythe, m( ^~ r) Pendleton & myself. to me was assinged [ sic -- Ed. ] the Common law (so far as we thought of altering it, & the Statutes down to the Reformation, or end of the reign of Elizabeth; to m ( ^~ r) Wythe the subsequent body of the statutes, & to m( ^~ r) Pendleton the Virginia laws. this distribution threw into my part the laws concerning crimes & punishments, the law of descents, & the laws concerning religion. after completing our work separately, we met (m ( ^~ r) W. m( ^~ r) P. & myself) in Williamsburg, and held a very long session, in which we went over the 1 ^st. & 2 ^d. parts in the order of time, weighing & correcting every word, & reducing them to the form in which they were afterwards reported. when we proceeded to the 3 ^d. part, we found that m ( ^~ r) Pendleton had not exactly seised the intentions of the committee, which were to reform the ”