"This committee of distinguished men met in Fredericksburg on the 13th day of February, 1777. Here various propositions were submitted and discussed--Mason, Wythe and Jefferson almost always agreeing and voting together, and Pendleton, of all, being the most unwilling to depart from the old conditions, except, to the astonishment of the committee, he proposed a new system, that all common law and equity jurisprudence, which had received the sanction of ages, should be abrogated--a new institute, after the model of Justinian or Bracton, should be reported, thus giving us what is called, in this day, a code law, which would have been set afloat, without a precedent to guide it, and to construe which, would have taken our courts from that time to this. "After this committee had agreed on measures and propositions, and the general outline of the system to be pursued, Mason and Lee, having given the other members the benefit of their advice, retired from further participation in its labors, because they were not lawyers, and left the work to be done by the other three members, who then divided it, and completed the arduous task in 1779. "There were four measures proposed by Jefferson before the full committee, then sitting in Fredericksburg, which were his especial pride, and these were the repeal of the laws of entail, the abolition of primogeniture, the establishment of a system of public education, and the act for the establishment of religious freedom. These four bills, he himself afterwards said, he 'considered as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient, or future, aristocracy, and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.' "To use his own language again, 'the repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families and preserve the soil of the country from being more and more absorbed in mortmain.' "Not only was the abolition of the laws of entail resisted by some of the best talent in Virginia, but when Jefferson proposed to abolish also the law of primogeniture--a relic of feudalism--there was strong opposition from the same sources--men who had risked fortunes and lives in the struggle for independence, but who were unwilling to join Jefferson in his attack upon institutions whose very age commanded veneration. One of the chief opponents of Jefferson was Edmund Pendleton, his friend, whose candor, great ability and benevolence in all these struggles won his admiration.