the Congress should declare that these United colonies are and of
right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved
from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political
connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought
to be, totally dissolved....

This Virginia resolution was a declaration of independence. Read the
following day to cheering troops in Williamsburg, the resolution prompted
the troops to hoist the Continental Union flag and to drink toasts to
"the American Independent States", "the Grand Congress", and to "General
Washington".

At the same time the convention appointed a committee led by George Mason
to draw up a constitution and a declaration of rights for the people of
the new Commonwealth of Virginia. Mason's famous Declaration of Rights
was adopted on June 12, 1776, and the Constitution of Virginia was
adopted on June 28, 1776.

Virginia was a free and independent state. It would be seven long years,
however, before Great Britain accepted this as fact.

Part IV:

The Commonwealth of Virginia

Declaration of Rights

[Sidenote: "_We hold these truths to be self-evident...._"]

The two greatest documents of the Revolution came from the pens of
Virginians George Mason and Thomas Jefferson. Political scientist Clinton
Rossiter notes, "The declaration of rights in 1776 remain America's most
notable contribution to universal political thought. Through these
eloquent statements the rights-of-man political theory became political
reality."[33]

[33] Clinton, Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (Harcourt,
Brace: New York, 1953), 401.

As Richard Henry Lee rode north to Philadelphia with the Virginia
resolution for independence, George Mason of Fairfax, sat down with his
committee and drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Presented to
the Convention on May 27, 1776, the Declaration was adopted on June 12,
1776. It reads, in part:

A Declaration of Rights, made by the Representatives of the good
People of Virginia, assembled in full and free Convention, which
rights do pertain to them and their posterity as the basis and
foundation of government.

I. 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; namely, the enjoy