Adoption of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1974

by Jack W. Clifton (1912—90)

Oil on canvas. Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, VA.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights was approved at Williamsburg on 12 June 1776.

Patrick Henry is standing, addressing the Fifth Virginia Convention. Seated at the Speaker’s chair is the president, Edmund Pendleton, and to his right is George Mason. On the far right is Thomas Jefferson, recognizable by his red hair.

There is some poetic license in this depiction. Jefferson was not actually at the Convention — he was in Philadelphia, serving as one of Virginia’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress. But he was alert to the events at Williamsburg and was drafting a constitution for Virginia — just before he was asked to write the Declaration of Independence.

As students of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau are always reminding us, the age of reason was really an age of sentiment. In this too, Washington was a man of his age. When he established the first general decoration in the American Army, the Purple Heart, it was not (as it became in the twentieth century) an award available to all soldiers wounded in the line of duty. Only privates and noncomissioned officers could win the original Badge of Military Merit, a cloth-shaped heart sewn over the man’s actual heart, which allowed him to pass all guards and sentinels which officers are permitted to do. The symbol was not of heart’s blood shed, but of virtue proceeding from the heart. Limiting the award to nonofficers was meant to indicate that great virtue can be shown regardless of rank — that in Washington’s words, the road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is thus open to all.

— Garry Wills

Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment (1984)