George Mason: life, ideas and books

Life

George Mason was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1725 and lived at Gunston Hall, near Mount Vernon, where he was a neighbour of George Washington. He served as a justice of the county court, as a vestryman of Truro Parish from 1749 to 1785 and as treasurer of the Ohio Company. He sat in the House of Burgesses from 1758 to 1761 and in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1776 to 1781 and from 1786 to 1788.

He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and refused to sign the document. He died at Gunston Hall in 1792.

Ideas

Mason held that all people have equal natural rights, which government exists to protect, and that the people may alter or abolish a government that fails in that duty. He drafted the Fairfax Resolves in 1774, which opposed British measures against the colonies, and in 1776 he was the principal author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and of the Virginia Constitution. Thomas Jefferson paraphrased the opening article of the Declaration of Rights in the Declaration of Independence.

At the Constitutional Convention he argued for a written bill of rights and for stronger checks on the national government. He explained his refusal to sign in Objections to This Constitution of Government (1787), which opens with the complaint that there is no declaration of rights. He became an Anti-Federalist voice, and he warned of problems with the federal judiciary that the Eleventh Amendment later addressed. He opposed the slave trade and the spread of slavery, although he held slaves himself.

Major works

• Selections from the Virginia Charters (1772).
• The Fairfax Resolves (1774), largely his draft.
• The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776).
• The Virginia Constitution (1776).
• Objections to This Constitution of Government (1787).

Why conservatives read him

Mason is cited whenever conservatives talk about the origins of the Bill of Rights, and his Declaration of Rights is regarded as a model for it. The Virginia text was a basis for the first ten amendments, and James Madison drew on it when he drafted them in Congress. His reasoning appeals to readers who put individual rights, including the right to bear arms and freedom of conscience, at the centre of constitutional politics, and the debate he started over whether a limited government needs a written list of limits continues.

His wariness about concentrated power in a distant capital links him to the tradition of local self-government, and his arguments echo John Locke's doctrine of consent. He is less well known than Thomas Jefferson or Madison, in part because he refused to sign the Constitution and in part because he wrote little for publication, but his reputation has risen among historians and lawyers in recent decades.