George Mason

Virginia's Architect of Freedom

A few years ago during a service at Pohick church in Lorton, Virginia, which was attended by George Washington, George Mason, members of the Fairfax family and other notables, a group of re-enactors from Gunston Hall plantation, George Mason's home, visited the church on Mason's birthday. The gentleman playing a George Mason, a distant though not linear descendent of the great man, was asked after the service how he was enjoying his birthday week. "Well," he said, "the other day I was visiting the university which they named for me, and nobody knew who I was!" He was not amused.

Several years later, when the George Mason University basketball team made the final four at the NCAA basketball championships, a lot of people started wondering who George Mason was. Soon the staff at Gunston Hall began to get phone calls and messages requesting information about George Mason, and visits to Gunston hall increased notably for a time.

Although historians have long recognized the vital contributions made by George Mason to the creation of American democracy, he has in fact been a neglected figure in the annals of America. Although Mason was perhaps not the most likable sort, he never the less had a brilliant mind and contributed substantially to the cause of freedom and the shaping of the United States Constitution. An early advocate of religious freedom, he strongly influenced James Madison, who eventually brought the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom to fruition. In addition, many of the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence came from Mason. He is perhaps best known for refusing to sign the Constitution as a member of the Philadelphia convention in 1787, but his objections were later remedied when a Bill of Rights was added during the first Congress.

As a slave owner, Mason was intimately aware of the evils of the institution, though, like Washington and Jefferson, he was uncertain as to its future. Nevertheless, he foresaw a time when slavery might threaten the very existence of the nation he helped found. On August 22, 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, he said the following as part of a speech on the slave trade:

“Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of caused & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”

One need scarcely point out that a national calamity might well be a civil war.