Word: williamsburg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chief architect of the Virginia constitution is a crotchety and reluctant statesman, an heir to a plantation of thousands of acres and many slaves, who yet is one of the most dogged champions of individual rights. His name: George Mason. Afflicted with gout, he rode into Williamsburg almost two weeks late, yet he was instantly installed as a member of the committee to draw up a declaration of rights. With typical impatience, he declared that he found the committee "according to custom overcharged with useless members" who could be expected to offer "a thousand ridiculous and impracticable proposals." Mason promptly...
Frustrated at not being able to take part in such debates, Virginia's Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia and wrote his own outline for a constitution, sending it back to Williamsburg with his mentor, Lawyer George Wythe. By the time Wythe got there, however, the many arguments over Mason's draft had finally been settled. Chairman Edmund Pendleton, a distinguished lawyer, said that the members "could not, from mere lassitude, have been induced to open the instrument again." But they did like Jefferson's preamble, which contains many of the same ideas that Jefferson has included...
...been in the making, a religious revolution has stirred Virginia, where many of the tax-supported Anglican clergy are known locally for their laziness, snobbery and even immorality. Indeed, many back-country Virginians never see an Anglican priest at all. Jarratt was shocked by the clerical convention in Williamsburg two years ago when his colleagues treated Christian doctrines with what he called "ridicule and profane burlesque...
...thrice-weekly issues right at press time. As is the custom in colonial newspapers, however, the momentous late news was simply inserted on a back page of the Post; readers who paid their two coppers for the paper had to read through earlier dispatches from London, Halifax, Williamsburg and New York before learning of the Declaration...
...number of New York papers plan to print the full Declaration this week, and the news will probably appear in Williamsburg's two rival Virginia Gazettes and Boston's New England Chronicle next week. Readers in Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia and New Jersey?where there are at present no newspapers published?will have to rely on whatever journals eventually arrive from other states. In some places, publishers are making up in patriotic zeal what they lack in timeliness. New York's John Holt, for instance, plans to print the text of the Declaration on a special page of this week...