The Declaration of Independence, three years later, cited Britain’s interference with domestic law-making among the causes which impelled the colonies to separation, but it did not include interference with paper money among the more specific of them. The new sovereign state of Virgina observed a like distinction in October 1777 when she enacted a law derived from Parliament’s statute of 1764 but more drastic. It was “an act to prevent private persons from issuing bills of credit in the nature of paper currency.” After reciting that “divers persons have presumed, upon their own private security, to issue bills of credit or notes payable to the bearer, in the nature of paper currency, which may tend . . . to the great injury of the publick by increasing the quantity of money in circulation . . .,” the law subjected persons who issued such bills to a forfeiture of then times their amount. It did not merely forbid their being made a legal tender—which was all that Parliament had done in 1764—it forbade their being used at all. Virginia was brushing boldly against the common law right to borrow, which Parliament had not done, and evincing a grammar intent against paper money per se. There is the difference that Virginia was dealing with private action alone, but this was a difference of jurisdiction only, not of principle. Her stated purpose was to curb inflation. And in October 1785, after the war, she passed a new act “to prevent the circulation of private bank notes,” making it unlawful “for any person to offer in payment a private bank bill or note for money,” the penalty against being forfeiture of ten times the amount involved. This was at a time, as James Madison testified, when money was so scarce it was doubtful if taxes could be paid; and for that reason the year following, the Shays rebellion broke forth in Massachusetts. The new Virginia statute was prepared by George Wythe, who with Thomas Jefferson was one of the revisors appointed to survey the Parliamentary statutes ante-dating Independence and select those which it was expedient for the state to re-enact.