There were also other reasons for his desiring to go home. Jefferson had always understood that as a delegate to Congress his duty was not so much to make a record for himself as to voice the _sentiments of the people he represented and to carry out their instructions_.[48] He was much worried about his standing with the Virginia Convention and suspected that some members were trying to knife him in the back. The Convention had just proceeded to elect delegates for the next Congress. Harrison and Braxton had failed to be reappointed, and Jefferson was "next to the lag."--"It is a painful situation," he wrote to William Fleming, on July first, "to be 300 miles from one's county, and thereby opened to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence."[49] A week later, he wrote to Edmund Pendleton to decline his new appointment as a delegate to Congress: I am sorry that the situation of my domestic affairs, renders it indispensably necessary that I should solicit the substitution of some other person here in my room. The delicacy of the House will not require me to enter minutely into the private causes which render this necessary. I trust they will be satisfied. I would not urge it again, were it not unavoidable.[50] On July 8 he announced to R. H. Lee that he would return to Virginia after the eleventh of August. It was not until September 2 that, his successor having arrived, he considered himself as free to go. His final reason, possibly not the least important, is given by Jefferson himself in his "Autobiography": Our delegation had been renewed for the ensuing year, commencing August 11; but the new government was now organized, a meeting of the legislature was to be held in October, and I had been elected a member by my county. I knew that our legislation, under the regal government, had many vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work. I therefore retired from my seat in Congress on the 2d of September, resigned it and took my place in the Legislature of my State, on the 7th of October. "My state," wrote Jefferson in 1818, but in his letters to William Fleming he was speaking of Virginia as his "country", and at that time constantly referred to the colonies and not the United States.