legislation" was hidden by a "deceptive title." History Though compilations of Virginia legislation were published before the Code of 1819, these were organized by their date of enactment rather than by subject matter, and so lacked the integration of modern codes. The legislation of the Colony of Virginia was not even officially published for the first 175 years of its lawmaking history. Aside from original manuscript copies that were commonly misplaced or left to rot in county courthouses, information on new legislation was largely spread by word of mouth. Aside from a few collections printed in London, the first unofficial publication of Virginia laws was in 1733, when Virginia newspaper pioneer William Parks published A collection of all the acts of Assembly of Virginia. Official action was not taken until 1808, after Virginia became part of the United States, when the Virginia General Assembly tasked William Waller Hening with the publication of the state's laws. His thirteen volume Statutes at Large (1809–23) was not comprehensive due to the loss of many records, but included all the session laws Hening could find dating from 1619 to 1792, as well as royal charters. Many of these came from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson, who had preserved manuscript copies of legislation as early as 1734, and had offered to take on the task of publishing himself decades prior to Hening's work. The Code of 1819 The Code of 1819 was the first codification in Virginia that organized the statutory law by subject matter. On March 12, 1819, the Virginia General Assembly passed "An Act Providing for the re-publication of the Laws of this Commonwealth," and the resulting Code of 1819 entered into force on January 1, 1820. The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being A Collection of all such Acts of the General Assembly, of a Public and Permanent Nature as are now in Force contained 262 chapters arranged in 23 subject titles, and was published in two volumes by Thomas Ritchie, Printer to the Commonwealth. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, member of the Virginia House of Delegates member and later reporter for the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, was appointed superintendent over the publication by the March 12 Act. The General Assembly, which provided him with an eight-page list of which laws to codify and expressly told him to ignore the date of enactment and categorize them instead by subject. Leigh