The Virginia Declaration of Rights

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

The images below show the Virginia Declaration of Rights, as reported in the Virginia Gazette in June of 1776. (Notice that the small letter "s" at that time was sometimes printed with a font style that looks almost like the modern letter "f," depending on its placement in a word.)
The document, written primarily by George Mason, was adopted by Virginia leaders as the colony broke away from Great Britain. It contains many of the same ideas and phrases that Thomas Jefferson would use a few weeks later in the Declaration of Independence. The Virginia Declaration of Rights was also later a model for the U.S. Bill of Rights.

The document images are from the Library of Congress.
They have been resized for this page.

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