George Mason: Virginia Declaration of Rights

About the Author

George Mason was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1725 to George and Ann Mason. Mason's father died when Mason was just ten years old. Without a father, Mason spent much of his childhood with his uncle John Mercer, a lawyer, poring over his uncle's law books, including Giles Jacob's Every Man His Own Lawyer.

Never attending college, Mason instead became a wealthy planter and married Ann Eilbeck on April 4, 1750. Soon after, Mason built a new home, which he called Gunston Hall, on more than 5,000 acres of land situated on the Northern Neck of the Potomac River. Aside from an area filled with deer, most of the family's land was devoted to growing wheat, corn, and tobacco. Mason quickly became a respected businessman in the county and was sought out for legal advice as well. By his thirtieth birthday, Mason had begun serving as a justice of the peace for Fairfax County.

Devastated when his wife died in March 1773, Mason was brought out of his melancholy by the Boston Tea Party in December of that year. After he wrote the Fairfax Resolves in 1774, Mason was called on to accept a seat in the House of Burgesses. Though Mason refused the position, he did accept a post on the county's safety committee and was responsible for ferreting out local merchants who imported British goods. During this time, Mason also became the head of the local militia, the Fairfax Independent Company. He was also asked to be one of Virginia's delegates to the Continental Congress, but he denied this appointment as well.

He did, however, attend the Virginia Convention of 1776, filling the seat vacated by George Washington, who had resigned to become commander in chief of the Continental army. It was here that Mason drafted his Virginia Declaration of Rights. The historian Dumas Malone believes that

more than any other single American, except possibly Thomas Jefferson, whom in some sense he anticipated, George Mason may be regarded as the herald of the new era; and in our own age, when the rights of individual human beings are being challenged by totalitarianism around the world, men can still find inspiration in his noble words. (Rutland, 1961, p. x)

In April 1780, at fifty-four years old, Mason married Sarah Brent. Now a member of the Constitutional Convention charged with drafting the Constitution, Mason and two others had the dissenting vote. Mason especially wanted the new constitution to include a bill of rights. Others felt this unnecessary, since the proposed constitution would not repeal the documents of individual states. Mason refused to sign the newly drafted Constitution.

Returning to his home and suffering from ill health, Mason essentially retreated from politics, declining a seat in the Senate after the death of Senator William Grayson. Mason died at Gunston Hall on October 7, 1792.