George Mason
George Mason was an American planter, politician, Founding Father, and delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution. His writings, including substantial portions of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and his Objections to this Constitution of Government opposing ratification, have exercised a significant influence on American political thought and events. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason principally authored, served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights, of which he has been deemed a father.
Mason was born in 1725 in present-day Fairfax County, Virginia. His father drowned while crossing the Potomac River in 1735 when Mason was nine years old. His mother managed the family estates until he came of age. Mason married in 1750, built Gunston Hall, and lived the life of a country squire, supervising his lands, family, and slaves. He briefly served in the House of Burgesses and involved himself in community affairs, sometimes serving with his neighbor George Washington. As tensions grew between Great Britain and the North American colonies, Mason came to support the colonial side, using his knowledge and experience to help the revolutionary cause, finding ways to work around the Stamp Act 1765 and serving in the pro-independence Fourth Virginia Convention in 1775 and the Fifth Virginia Convention in 1776.
Mason prepared the first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and his words formed much of the text adopted by the final Revolutionary Virginia Convention. He also wrote a constitution for the state; Thomas Jefferson and others sought to have the convention adopt their ideas, but Mason's version was nonetheless adopted. During the American Revolutionary War, Mason was a member of the powerful House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly, but to the irritation of Washington and others, he refused to serve in the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, citing health and family commitments.
In 1787, Mason was named one of his state's delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, his only lengthy trip outside Virginia. Many clauses in the Constitution were influenced by Mason's input, but he ultimately did not sign the final version, citing the lack of a bill of rights among his most prominent objections. He also wanted an immediate end to the slave trade and a supermajority requirement for navigation acts, fearing that restrictions on shipping might harm Virginia. He failed to attain these objectives in Philadelphia and later at the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788. His prominent fight for a bill of rights led fellow Virginian James Madison to introduce the same during the First Congress in 1789; these amendments were ratified in 1791, a year before Mason died. Obscure after his death, Mason later came to be recognized in the 20th and 21st centuries for his contributions to Virginia and the early United States.
Early life and education
Mason was born in present-day Fairfax County, in the Colony of Virginia, in British America, on December 11, 1725. Mason's parents owned property in Dogue's Neck, Virginia, and a second property across the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, which had been inherited by his mother.Mason's great-grandfather George Mason I was a Cavalier who was born in 1629 in Pershore, Worcestershire, England. Militarily defeated in the English Civil War, Mason and other Cavaliers emigrated to the American colonies in the 1640s and 1650s. Mason I settled in present-day Stafford County, Virginia, where he was awarded land as a reward for bringing his family and servants to the Colony of Virginia, under headright, which awarded 50 acres for each person transported into the Colony. His son, George Mason II, was the first to move to what in 1742 became Fairfax County, then at the frontier between English and Native American controlled areas. George Mason III like his father and grandfather served in the House of Burgesses and also as county lieutenant. George Mason IV's mother, Ann Thomson Mason, was the daughter of a former Attorney General of Virginia who immigrated from England. A few years after his marriage to Ann, George Mason III moved his family to Stump Neck plantation in Charles County, relegating the Chopawamsic estate in Stafford County, Virginia, to a secondary residence.
Colonial Virginia at the time had few roads, and boats carried most commerce on Chesapeake Bay or its tributaries, including the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Most settlement took place near the rivers, through which planters could trade with the world. Colonial Virginia initially had few towns, since estates were largely self-sufficient and could obtain what they needed without the need to purchase locally. Even the capital, Williamsburg, had limited economic activity when the legislature was not in session. Local politics was dominated by large landowners, including the Masons. The Virginia economy rose and fell with tobacco, the main crop, which was raised mostly for export to Great Britain.
On March 5, 1735, when his son was only nine years old, George Mason III drowned when a storm capsized his boat while crossing the Potomac River between plantations. Soon after his death, his widow and children returned to Chopawamsic. At the time of his drowning, he owned in Stafford County alone.
In 1736, George Mason IV began his education with a Mr. Williams, who was hired to teach Mason for the price of of tobacco per annum. His studies began at his mother's house. But the following year, he boarded with a Mrs. Simpson in Maryland, and Williams continued as his teacher through 1739. By 1740, Mason was back at Chopawamsic, under the tutelage of a Dr. Bridges, likely Charles Bridges, who helped develop the British schools run by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and arrived in British America in 1731. Mason and his brother Thomson likely utilized John Francis Mercer's library, one of the largest in Virginia at the time. Conversations with Mercer and book-lovers who gathered around him could have continued his education informally.
Career
Fairfax County
The obligations and offices that came with being one of the largest local landowners descended on Mason as they had previously on his father and grandfather. In 1747, Mason was named to the Court of Fairfax County, Virginia, and was elected as a vestryman at Truro Parish, where he served between 1749 and 1785. He took a position among the officers of the Fairfax County militia, eventually rising to the rank of colonel.The county court heard civil and criminal cases, and also decided matters such as local taxes. Membership fell to most major landowners. Mason was a justice for much of the rest of his life, though he was excluded because of nonattendance at court from 1752 to 1764, and he resigned in 1789 when continued service meant swearing to uphold a constitution he could not support. Even while a member, he often did not attend. Joseph Horrell, in a journal article on Mason's court service, noted that he was often in poor health and lived the furthest of any of the major estateholders from the Fairfax County courthouse, whether at its original site near today's Tyson's Corner or later in newly founded Alexandria. Robert Rutland, editor of Mason's papers, considered court service a major influence on Mason's later thinking and writing, but Horrell denied it, writing that "if the Fairfax court provided a course for Mason's early training, he chiefly distinguished himself by skipping classes."
Alexandria was one of the towns founded or given corporate status in the mid-18th century in which Mason had interests; he purchased three of the original lots along King and Royal Streets and became a municipal trustee in 1754. He also served as a trustee of Dumfries, in Prince William County, and had business interests there and in Georgetown, on the Maryland side of the Potomac River in present-day Washington, D.C.
In 1748, he sought a seat in the House of Burgesses; the process was controlled by more senior members of the court and he was not then successful, but he later emerged victorious in 1758.
Gunston Hall
On April 4, 1750, Mason married Ann Eilbeck, only child of William and Sarah Eilbeck of Charles County, Maryland. The Masons and Eilbecks had adjacent lands in Maryland and had joined in real estate transactions; by his death in 1764, William Eilbeck was one of the wealthiest men in Charles County. At the time of his marriage, Mason was living at Dogue's Neck, possibly at Sycamore Point. George and Ann Mason had nine children who survived to adulthood. Ann Mason died in 1773; their marriage, judging by surviving accounts, was a happy one.Mason began to build his home, Gunston Hall, in or around 1755. The exterior, typical of local buildings of that time, was probably based on architectural books sent from Britain to America for the use of local builders; one of these craftsmen, perhaps William Waite or James Wren, constructed Gunston Hall. Mason was proud of the gardens, which still surround the house. There were outbuildings, including slave quarters, a schoolhouse, and kitchens, and beyond them four large plantations, forests, and the shops and other facilities that made Gunston Hall mostly self-sufficient.
Mason avoided overdependence on tobacco as a source of income by leasing much of his land holdings to tenant farmers, and he diversified his crops to grow wheat for export to the British West Indies as Virginia's economy sank because of tobacco overproduction in the 1760s and 1770s. Mason was a pioneer in the Virginia wine industry. Along with Thomas Jefferson, Mason and other Virginians subscribed to a scheme for growing wine grapes in America developed by Filippo Mazzei.
Mason greatly ultimately expanded the boundaries of Gunston Hall estate, so that it occupied all of Dogue's Neck, which became known as Mason's Neck. One project that Mason was involved in for most of his adult life was the Ohio Company, in which he invested in 1749 and became treasurer in 1752—an office he held forty years until his death in 1792. The Ohio Company had secured a royal grant for to be surveyed near the forks of the Ohio River in present-day Pittsburgh. The challenges of the French and Indian War, Revolutionary War, and competing claims from the Province of Pennsylvania eventually led to the collapse of the Ohio Company. Although the company failed, Mason acquired considerable western lands independently. His defense against the Pennsylvania claims, Selections from the Virginia Charters, written in 1772, originally intended to promote the Ohio Company's claims, was widely applauded as a defense of the rights of Americans against royal decrees.
Involvement with the Ohio Company also brought Mason into contact with many prominent Virginians, including George Washington, his Fairfax County neighbor. Mason and George Washington were friends for many years until they finally broke over their differences regarding the federal constitution. Peter R. Henriques, in a journal article on the relationship between Mason and Washington, suggests that Mason cultivated the friendship more than Washington. Mason sent many more letters and gifts and stayed more often at Washington's residence at Mount Vernon, though this might be explained in part by the fact that Mount Vernon was located on the road from Gunston Hall to Alexandria. Henriques suggests that as Mason was older, intellectually superior, and the owner of a flourishing plantation as Washington was struggling to establish Mount Vernon, it would not have been in the future president's character to seek a close relationship with Mason. Washington, however, had deep respect for Mason's intellectual abilities, and sought Mason's advice on several occasions, writing in 1777 when learning that Mason had taken charge of an issue before the General Assembly, "I know of no person better qualified ... than Colonel Mason, and shall be very happy to hear he has taken it in hand".
Despite his involvement in western real estate, Mason saw that land was being cleared and planted with tobacco faster than the market for it could expand, meaning that its price would drop even as more and more capital was tied up in land and slaves. Thus, although a major slaveholder, he opposed the slave system in Virginia. He believed that slave importation, together with the natural population increase, would result in a huge future slave population in Virginia; a system of leased lands, though not as profitable as slave labor, would have "little Trouble & Risque ".