ion, would be qualified
to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with
intelligence their parts in self-government: and all this would be
effected, without the violation of a single natural right of any
one individual citizen. To these, too, might be added, as a further
security, the introduction of the trial by jury into the Chancery
courts, which have already ingulphed, and continue to ingulph, so great
a proportion of the jurisdiction over our property.

On the 1st of June, 1779, I was appointed Governor of the Commonwealth,
and retired from the legislature. Being elected, also, one of the
Visitors of William and Mary college, a self-electing body, I effected,
during my residence in Williamsburg that year, a change in the
organization of that institution, by abolishing the Grammar school,
and the two professorships of Divinity and Oriental languages, and
substituting a professorship of Law and Police, one of Anatomy,
Medicine, and Chemistry, and one of Modern Languages; and the charter
confining us to six professorships, We added the Law of Nature and
Nations, and the Fine Arts, to the duties of the Moral professor, and
Natural History to those of the professor of Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy.

Being now, as it were, identified with the Commonwealth itself, to write
my own history, during the two years of my administration, would be to
write the public history of that portion of the revolution within this
state. This has been done by others, and particularly by Mr. Girardin,
who wrote his Continuation of Burke's History of Virginia, while at
Milton in this neighborhood, had free access to all my papers while
composing it, and has given as faithful an account as I could myself.
For this portion, therefore, of my own life, I refer altogether to his
history. From a belief that, under the pressure of the invasion under
which we were then laboring, the public would have more confidence in a
military chief, and that the military commander, being invested with the
civil power also, both might be wielded with more energy, promptitude,
and effect for the defence of the state, I resigned the administration
at the end of my second year, and General Nelson was appointed to
succeed me.

Soon after my leaving Congress, in September, '76, to wit, on the last
day of that month, I had been appointed, with Dr. Franklin, to go to
France, as a Commissioner to negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce
with