George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

The law defining citizenship will be elsewhere explained; the code in which Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton adapted the laws of Virginia to reason, the welfare of the whole people, and the republican form of government, was laid before the legislature. The law of descents abolished the rights of primogeniture, and distributed real as well as personal property, equally among brothers and sisters. The punishment of death was forbidden, except for treason and murder. A bill was brought in to organize schools in every county, at the expense of its inhabitants, in proportion to the general tax-rates; but in time of war, and in the scattered state of the inhabitants, it was not possible to introduce a thorough system of universal education.

The preamble to the bill for establishing religious freedom, drawn by Jefferson, expressed the ideas of America: ‘that belief depends not on will, but follows evidence; that God hath created the mind free; that temporal punishment or civil incapacitations only beget hypocrisy and meanness; that the impious endeavor of fallible legislators and rulers to impose their own opinions on others hath established and maintained false religions; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion destroys all religious liberty; that truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and ’