George Mason: Virginia Declaration of Rights

Impact

Of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the British historian John Acton said:

It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State—ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers and hidden among Latin folios—burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. . . . In this way the politic hesitancy of European statesmanship was at last broken down; and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control. (pp. 55–56)

As soon as the Virginia Convention approved Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in June 1776, copies of the document were distributed up and down the seaboard. Five other colonies had composed similar documents by the end of the year. By 1780 eight more states had drafted documents declaring the individual rights of their citizens.

Many of the ideas found in Mason's text also made their way into Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. In 1791 the principles listed in Mason's document became the basis for the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Both the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights contain elements of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Mason biographer Rutland writes, “The Virginia Declaration of Rights expanded the conception of the personal rights of citizens as no other document before its adoption had done” (1955, p. 40).