George Mason

American politician

• Born: December 11, 1725
• Birthplace: Fairfax County, Virginia
• Died: October 7, 1792
• Place of death: Gunston Hall, Virginia

Author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Mason also had a major role in shaping the Virginia constitution of 1776 and the U.S. Constitution. He was a model proponent of individual and states’ rights, and of a limited federal government.

Early Life

George Mason was born on the family’s plantation along the Potomac River in Virginia. His father, the third George Mason, drowned in a ferry accident when Mason was ten years old. His mother, Ann Thomson Mason, then took the family to her dower plantation, Chopawamsic, south of the Occoquan River. Along with his mother, Mason’s uncle-in-law, lawyer John Mercer of Marlborough, became his coguardian. The small clergymen’s schools of the time afforded what formal education Mason received. Unlike many of the gentry’s sons, Mason never attended the College of William and Mary or studied in England. Making use of his uncle’s extensive library, however, Mason became learned in the law.

Mason married Ann Eilbeck on April 4, 1750. In the 1750’s, Gunston Hall, which still stands in Fairfax County, Virginia, was completed, with architect William Buckland responsible for the distinctive quality of the interior decoration.

Throughout his life, Mason was reluctant to enter into the limelight. Nevertheless, on occasion he accepted public office and exercised leadership in the community. Although losing in a race for a seat in the House of Burgesses in 1748, Mason was successful ten years later, serving as a burgess from 1758 to 1761. Like other gentry, he had long served as a justice of the peace and a vestryman. From 1749 to 1779, Mason was an active partner in the Ohio Company, although the efforts of the company to retain vast land holdings in the Ohio Valley came to naught. He also championed internal improvements and, along with George Washington, had a major role in founding a company for improvement of Potomac River navigation.

Mason became involved with the revolutionary movement, although staying mainly behind the scenes. His first published document was Scheme for Replevying Goods and Distress for Rent (1765), which carried a denunciation of slavery. During the Stamp Act crisis (1765-1766), he helped to prepare the text of an agreement adopted by an association formed in the colony to boycott trade with Great Britain. In 1766, he published in the London Public Ledger a long letter, signed “A Virginia Planter,” which was a reply to a memorial of London merchants, in which Mason made a distinction between legislation and taxation in reference to parliamentary authority. Mason also helped write the Virginia Resolutions of 1769, denouncing the Townshend duties, and he had a leading role at that time in the reforming of the colony’s nonimportation association. In 1773, Mason wrote Extracts from the Virginia Charters, in defense of Western land claims, which was used in defining boundaries in the Treaty of Paris of 1783.

Mason’s first wife died on March 9, 1773, and seven years later he married Sarah Brent. His reluctance to enter public life was owing in part to ill health; he suffered from gout and erysipelas. Nevertheless, Mason assumed leadership in his county with the coming of the resistance movement in 1774, in response to Parliament’s Coercive Acts. He wrote the celebrated Fairfax Resolves, which was accepted by both the Virginia Convention and the Continental Congress. He was also the author of the nonimportation resolves, endorsed by the Virginia House of Burgesses and which also formed the basis for the Continental Association established by the Continental Congress. Mason served in the Virginia Conventions of 1775-1776 and was a member of the colony’s Committee of Safety, which operated as an executive board to run the colony. Although adopting his father’s title of colonel, Mason eschewed any military participation. He did, however, help organize the Fairfax County independent company at the start of the war.

Life’s Work

George Mason’s early claim to fame rests on his drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights, passed by the Virginia Convention in the summer of 1776, and preparing a draft document, which, along with that of Thomas Jefferson, provided the content for the Virginia constitution. As a member of the House of Delegates (1777-1781), Mason had a key role in the assembly’s creation of a land office for the disposal of Western lands, and his plans formed the basis of the new United States policies governing the public domain. Also as a delegate, Mason was one of a committee of five who worked on a bill to disestablish religion in Virginia, becoming a legislative enactment in 1786. In 1785, Mason, at the Mount Vernon Conference, helped negotiate the agreement between Maryland and Virginia on the navigation of the Potomac.

Although preferring private to public happiness, Mason was persuaded, after several other appointees bowed out, to be a member of the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During the debates over the writing of the U.S. Constitution, Mason exercised an influence matched by few others. He delivered 139 speeches and left his mark, though not entirely to his liking, on every major issue that came before the convention. He had also been a major contributor to the Virginia Plan, whose general principles were adopted by the convention. Mason denounced slavery. A particular objection that he had to the Constitution was that the three-fifths compromise, regarding counting slaves for the purpose of representation, did not weigh equally with conferring on Congress strong powers in the regulation of commerce, which was part of the compromise and which gave an advantage to Northern economic interests.

Although Mason got much of what he wanted in the Constitution, such as an independent executive, he was disappointed in its overall tone. He feared that the new government would be a cross between a monarchy and a “tyrannical aristocracy.” Mason also objected to the authority bestowed on the Senate at the expense of the lower house (namely the Senate having a veto power over appropriations and in singly consenting to treaties, which became the law of the land), and he also feared that, without restrictions, the federal judiciary would encroach on the legal rights of the states. Most of all, Mason disparaged the absence of a bill of rights. Like many other anti-Federalists, however, Mason believed that the Constitution’s inadequacies could be remedied by a second convention. He was one of three of those present at the end of the convention who refused to sign the document. Shortly after the adjournment of the convention, Mason published, in broadside form, The Objections of the Hon. George Mason to the Proposed Federal Constitution (1787).

At the Virginia ratifying convention in Richmond, during June, 1788, Mason, along with Patrick Henry, James Monroe, and others, led the fight to deny ratification. They almost succeeded, but because of news of ratification by the ninth state, George Washington’s strong support of the Constitution, and other factors, the Constitution was narrowly approved, eighty-nine to seventy-nine.

With the ratification of the Bill of Rights, Mason became almost totally reconciled with the Constitution. He was especially pleased with the adoption of the Tenth Amendment, which guaranteed the residual powers of the states. If there were only two or three further amendments, Mason commented, he “could cheerfully put” his “Hand and Heart to the New Government.”

In the last years of his life, Mason was content to enjoy solitude and the domestic pleasures of a Virginia gentleman. On the public side, he showed more interest in the locating of the county courthouse than in Congress’s decision to place the national capital along the banks of the Potomac, whereby his lands in the area would greatly rise in value. Mason had no concern in serving in the new government. When Senator William Grayson died in 1790, Mason turned down an appointment proffered by Governor Edmund Randolph to fill the vacancy in the Senate, even though he would have as his colleague in the Senate his friend and staunch political ally Richard Henry Lee. Mason followed closely the course of the French Revolution, which he likely inspired, especially since his fourth son, John, a member of the commercial house of Fenwich and Mason in Bordeaux, was in that country from 1788 to 1791. George Mason died quietly at Gunston Hall on Sunday, October 7, 1792.

Significance

As a thinker rather than a publicist or politician, George Mason left a profound imprint upon the creation of constitutional government in America, and his views on the necessity of restricting governmental power so as not to infringe upon individual liberty have afforded a guide by which to interpret the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Mason is representative of the American Enlightenment because of his emphasis upon balance in government and the right of the individual to pursue private and public happiness. Following the role he had charted for himself, he advised his sons to prefer “the happiness and independence” of a “private station to the troubles and vexations of Public Business.”

Making his most important contributions when he was more than fifty years old, Mason was like a Cincinnatus, regarded for his wisdom and devotion to a virtuous republic. Next to James Madison, he had the clearest grasp among the Founding Fathers of the lessons of history and the need to create balanced government, with the assurance that power ultimately resided with the people. His Virginia Declaration of Rights served as a model for other states’ bills of rights and inspired the famous French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and the later United Nations Declaration of Rights. Finally, Mason’s views on American federalism would have influence on the later states’ rights philosophy and, with some distortion, upon the doctrines of nullification and secession.

Bibliography

Copeland, Pamela C., and Richard K. MacMaster. The Five George Masons: Patriots and Planters of Virginia and Maryland. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975. This book was intended to provide the board of regents of Gunston Hall with information on the material culture of Mason’s home as well as various facets of his life. Offers extensive genealogical discussion and provides information on plantation economy, civic and parish affairs, and family.

Elliot, Jonathan, comp. The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution . . . Together with the Journal of the Federal Convention. Rev. ed. 5 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1836-1845. Reprint. New York: Burt Franklin, 1965. Volume 3 presents the proceedings and debates of the Virginia Ratifying Convention held in Richmond on June 3-27, 1787. Includes reprints of Mason’s speeches.

Farrand, Max, ed. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. 1911. Reprint. 4 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937. Reproduces the notes on the debates and proceedings of the Constitutional Convention from all known sources. Mason’s role is clearly defined.

Johnson, George R., Jr., ed. The Will of the People: The Legacy of George Mason. Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1991. Several essayists examine the American ideal of popular sovereignty from its colonial and revolutionary origins to the present day.

Mason, John. The Recollections of John Mason: George Mason’s Son Remembers His Father and Life at Gunston Hall. Edited by Terry K. Dunn. Marshall, Va.: EPM, 2004. John Mason (1766-1849), one of George Mason’s eight children, wrote this memoir about his childhood.

Miller, Helen H. George Mason: Constitutionalist. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1938. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. A well-written general biography with emphasis both on Mason’s constitutional writing and on his family.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. George Mason: Gentleman Revolutionary. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. A full modern biography of special value because of the book’s interpretative quality. Provides an expansive history of the events and movements with which Mason was associated.

Rowland, Kate M. The Life of George Mason, 1725-1790, Including His Speeches, Public Papers, and Correspondence. Introduction by General Fitzhugh Lee. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. A thorough biography of Mason, interlaced profusely with selections from his writings and correspondence. A good perspective on the times; solid scholarship and readable. The author had access to family papers, many of which have since disappeared.

Rutland, Robert A. George Mason: Reluctant Statesman. Foreword by Dumas Malone. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1961. A brief survey by an authority on George Mason that serves as an introduction to a fuller study.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Papers of George Mason, 1752-1790. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. The complete extant writings and letters of Mason and correspondence from others. Also includes a ninety-page biographical and geographical glossary, an introduction, and a Mason chronology for each volume. Excellent annotations.