![Too few Americans realize the vast debt we owe [George Mason]. His immortal Declaration of Rights in 1776 was one of the finest and loftiest creations ever struck from the mind of man. . . Quote by President Truman.](images/tmasonquote.jpg "Too few Americans realize the vast debt we owe [George Mason]. His immortal Declaration of Rights in 1776 was one of the finest and loftiest creations ever struck from the mind of man. . . Quote by President Truman.")
George Mason:Forgotten Father
His Influence
George Mason's historical importance is profound although not widely recognized. He provided much of the intellectual and legal foundation for the new nation created by the American Revolution. Early in the dispute with Britain, George Washington and other Virginia leaders turned to Mason's mind and his pen for “The Fairfax Resolves” and other agreements to boycott trade with England. Washington scholar Peter Henriques wrote that: “Undoubtedly Washington developed a deep and abiding respect for Mason's remarkable intellectual abilities.” He noted that Washington turned to him both for legal assistance for himself and his family in addition to the important 1769 Virginia nonimportation proposal. Later, of course, that friendship was famously splintered by Mason's refusal to sign the Constitution. 1
When the Continental Congress called on the colonies to create new constitutions, Virginia turned to George Mason. Although he was not a lawyer and primarily self-educated, Mason had studied the British constitution, English and colonial laws and the prevalent legal theories of the day. He wrote the draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, later modified by committee but mostly Mason's creation. This preface to the first Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia had an immense impact worldwide: “Virginia's Declaration of Rights would be an unprecedented political statement; nowhere in modern times had a government acknowledged such a concept as individual inalienable rights, let alone formalized it as a limitation on its own power.”2
The biographer of James Madison recognized the importance of the Declaration of Rights: “There is nothing more remarkable in the political annals of America than this paper. It has stood the rude test of every vicissitude.”3 Much of this praise was based on the influence this document had on other states, other nations and other key American documents. Robert Rutland, the Mason biographer who also assembled the definitive set of Mason papers, focused on the thoughts behind Mason's words: “George Mason was a producer of ideas who flourished at the time when leaders of the struggling former colonies were eager to experiment and to expand. Mason's ideas, placed on paper, drew the whole of the Revolution into focus. Soon they were read in Europe and drew the admiration of the men destined to guide France.”4 This was not simply an intellectual influence, as his very words became the basis of many other bills of rights, constitutions and even heavily influenced the Declaration of Independence:
That the name of George Mason should be acclaimed throughout the Republic whose birth pangs he shared, and indeed throughout the free world, will be agreed, I believe, by all American historians. He was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was adopted three weeks before the national Declaration of Independence; and in this, he charted the rights of human beings much more fully than Jefferson did in the immortal but necessarily compressed paragraph in the more famous document. Of the contemporary impact of Mason's declaration, there can be no possible question. Draftsmen in other states drew upon it when they framed similar documents or inserted similar safeguards of individual liberties in their new constitutions. Universal in its appeal, it directly affected the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789. In our own time it is echoed in the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.5
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and John Adams paid Mason the ultimate compliment by using his ideas. Franklin and Adams copied Mason's words from the Virginia Declaration of Rights almost verbatim into the Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts constitutions. Jefferson, writing just days after reading Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration, “. . . the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence was but a slight variant of the first three paragraphs of Mason's Declaration of Rights.”6
Many historians have noted the similarity in the wording of one of the most recognizable phrases of the Declaration of Independence to Mason's words. Mason wrote, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights . . . namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson wrote just a short time later, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with [certain] inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Continental Congress added the word certain and edited out the word inherent, but the similarity is unmistakable.7
1Peter R. Henriques, “An Uneven Friendship: The Relationship Between George Washington and George Mason,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97, no. 2 (April 1989): 186-7. See footnote on page 201 for reference to the famous comment by Washington in a letter of 1792 to Hamilton referring to Mason as his former, or “quondom friend,” misspelling the Latin quondam.
2Stephan A. Schwartz, “George Mason: Forgotten Founder, He Conceived the Bill of Rights,” Smithsonian Magazine 31, no. 2 (May 2000): 149. No actual inventory of George Mason's bookshelf remains. However, Gunston Hall Plantation [former] librarian Ben Brown, in an unpublished list in 2000, suggested what books might be likely to have been on Mason's bookshelf.
3William C. Rives, History of the Life and Times of James Madison, reprint (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 1:137.
4Robert A. Rutland, George Mason: Reluctant Statesman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961), xiv.
5Dumas Malone in the preface to Rutland, Reluctant Statesman, viii.
6Pittman in the preface to Marian Buckley Cox, Glimpse of Glory: George Mason of Gunston Hall (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1954), xii-xiv.
7See, for example, Irving Brant, James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 1:240-241, Carla R. Heymsfeld and Joan W. Lewis, George Mason: Father of the Bill of Rights (Alexandria, VA: The Patriotic Education Incorporated, 1991), 85, or Schwartz, 143-154.
A re-engineering of Quick Draw McFly (by permission.)
