For two years and a half he served in the Virginia Assembly and brought about the repeal of the law of entailment, the abolition of primogeniture, the recognition of freedom of conscience, and the encouragement of education.

He was Governor of Virginia for two years and then, having declined reelection, returned to Congress in 1783.

There, among his other accomplishments, as chairman of the committee, he reported the Treaty of Peace and, as chairman of another committee, devised and persuaded Congress to adopt a national system of coinage which in its essentials is still in use.
It is easy to criticize Jefferson and to pick flaws in the things that he said as well as in the things that he did, but practically every one admits that he was closely in touch with the course of events and understood the temper of his contemporaries.

In this period of transition from the old order to the new, he seems to have expressed the genius of American institutions better than almost any other man of his generation.

He possessed a quality that enabled him, in the Declaration of Independence, to give voice to the hopes and aspirations of a rising nationality and that enabled him in his own State to bring about so many reforms.
Just how much actual influence Thomas Jefferson had in the framing of the American land policy is not clear.