George Mason: “Objections to This Constitution of Government”

About the Author

Often known as the “forgotten Founder,” the Virginia planter and statesman George Mason was born on December 11, 1725, in Fairfax County, Virginia. Because his father died in a boating accident when young George was just ten years old, he spent considerable time with his uncle, John Mercer, a prominent Virginia lawyer, poring over his uncle's law books. Although he never attended college or sought political office, he was appointed to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758 and served until 1761.

Mason was an active opponent of the British Parliament's passage of the Stamp Act in March 1765. The Stamp Act required colonists to pay a tax on almost everything that was printed, including legal documents, pamphlets, and playing cards. By December he had devised a strategy to help colonials evade paying the taxes levied under the Stamp Act. The following June he wrote a letter to the Committee of Merchants in London that was published in the London Public Ledger. In addition, he also helped draft nonimportation measures as another method of avoiding taxation. With nonimportation agreements, the American colonies essentially declared a boycott of British goods.

In July 1774, Mason, with the help of George Washington, drafted the Fairfax County Resolves. In this document he outlined the actions Virginia would take after the British Parliament passed and began enforcing the Intolerable Acts to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party—the action taken by a crowd of Bostonians on December 16, 1773, when they dumped some forty-five tons of British tea from ships into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation. The Intolerable Acts, sometimes called the Coercive Acts, were a series of punitive measures the British Parliament passed in response and that many colonists regarded as infringements on their rights as British subjects. At this same time, Mason began serving on the Fairfax County Committee of Safety and headed up the local militia, the Fairfax Independent Company. In May 1775 he was appointed as a delegate to the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg. The following May, Mason was placed in charge of a committee to draft a bill of rights and a constitution for Virginia. The Virginia Convention passed the Virginia Declaration of Rights on June 12 and the Virginia constitution on June 29, 1776.

Citing poor health, Mason withdrew from politics in 1780 but returned in May 1787 when he was appointed as a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention. This body was charged with revising the Articles of Confederation, the 1781 document under which the American colonies were organized as a nation—the precursor to the Constitution—and that was passed by the Second Continental Congress. Although he was instrumental in forming the Constitution, Mason refused to sign the document, instead publishing a list of objections to it. He retired from politics again in 1790 because of declining health and died at his Virginia home, Gunston Hall, on October 7, 1792.