George Mason, Forgotten Founder

352 Pages·2006·5.543 MB·English

by  Jeff Broadwater

george mason
forgotten founder
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george
m ason
Forgotten Founder
Jeff Broadwater
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
© 2006 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by April Leidig-Higgins
Set in Sabon by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
This book was published with the assistance of
the Fred W. Morrison Fund for Southern Studies
of the University of North Carolina Press.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Broadwater, Jeff. George Mason, forgotten founder /
Jeff Broadwater.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8078-3053-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8078-3053-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Mason, George, 1725 – 1792. 2. Statesmen —
United States — Biography. 3. Politicians —
Virginia — Biography. 4. United States — History
— Colonial period, ca. 1600 – 1775. 5. United States
— History — Revolution, 1775 – 1783. 6. United States —
History — Confederation, 1783 – 1789. 7. Virginia —
History — Colonial period, ca. 1600 – 1775. 8. Virginia
— History — 1775 – 1865. 9. United States. Constitution.
1st – 10th Amendments. 10. Constitutional history —
United States. I. Title.
e302.6.m45b76 2006
973.3092 – dc22 [b] 2006010729
10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
one
A Retreat of Heroes 1
two
Our All Is At Stake 29
three
The Fundamental Principle 55
four
The Most Important of All Subjects 77
five
Growing from Bad to Worse 101
six
Liberty and Independence 133
seven
One of the Best Politicians in America 157
eight
The Sanction of Their Names 181
nine
That Paper on the Table 209
ten
I Am Grown Old 239
Notes 255
Bibliography 307
Index 323
A section of illustrations follows page 132.
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P
reface
who was george mason? He has been called “an almost forgotten
man in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes.” Almost forgotten, but not
quite. A large state university bears his name; a postage stamp once bore
his likeness. The Colonial Dames of America maintain his home, and Gun-
ston Hall is open every day for inspection by schoolchildren and curious
tourists seeking a glimpse of something presumably important — something
virtually sacred — in America’s past. Mason’s statue has long stood on the
statehouse grounds in Richmond. In the Capitol Building in Washington,
D.C., his likeness hangs alongside those of history’s other great lawgivers,
among them Hammurabi, Moses, and Blackstone. In the spring of 2002
Mason attracted a fl urry of attention when the Wendy Ross statue of a
seated, accessible, avuncular Mason, with book in hand, was unveiled near
the National Mall.1
Biographical sketches appear occasionally in the popular media, and in
2001 a small press reprinted Helen Hill Miller’s George Mason: Constitu-
tionalist, which had fi rst appeared in 1938.2 Mason usually merits a passing
reference in the standard textbooks. They may mention his infl uence on
Thomas Jefferson, who adopted the second paragraph of the Declaration
of Independence from the Declaration of Rights that Mason had written as
a preamble to the Virginia Constitution of 1776. Mason’s insistence at the
Philadelphia Convention of 1787 that a bill of rights be appended to the
federal Constitution is routinely credited with initiating the movement that
culminated in the fi rst ten amendments. If he typically receives a respectful
hearing, his Anti-Federalist views have drawn scorn. One venerable text,
fi rst published in 1930 when few writers questioned the wisdom of the
Framers, attributed Mason’s refusal to sign the Constitution to “wounded
vanity” because some of his “pet projects were not adopted.”3
But what do we really know about him? Probably not much, and some
of what we think we know is probably wrong. A National Park Service
website explains that Mason refused to sign the Constitution because it
failed to abolish the foreign slave trade or to adequately protect individual
viii preface
liberty. The Park Service is about half right. Although Mason was a care-
ful student of what today would be called constitutional law, he was not a
lawyer. Although he opposed slavery in principle, he was not an abolition-
ist. Although he has a legitimate claim to be called the “Father of the Bill
of Rights,” he did not oppose ratifi cation of the United States Constitution
solely, or even primarily, because it lacked a bill of rights. While he is fre-
quently praised as a man of principle and integrity, which he was, he was
also human; he did on more than one occasion use his political infl uence to
advance his personal interests. And few of his contemporaries would have
described him as avuncular.
The small community of Mason sc holars has occasionally attempted to
explain its subject’s relative obscurity. His age has been identifi ed as one
culprit. Mason died in 1792, too soon to play a major role in the politics
of the new federal government. But Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and
Paul Revere rested claims to immortality on service to the nation that pre-
dated the political struggles of the 1790s. More persuasive is the notion
that Mason, because of his opposition to the Constitution, has often been
dismissed as a disgruntled loser, a type that does not fare well in the public
memory. Above all else, Anti-Federalism came to be seen — I think wrongly
— as almost entirely a move to restrict the expansion of federal power.
That notion, for purposes of Mason’s reputation, proved to be a two-edged
sword. Kate Mason Rowland’s sympathetic biography, which appeared in
1892, could laud Mason as the intellectual godfather of a generation of
unreconstructed Confederates. It was a fl eeting sort of fame. As states’
rights became increasingly identifi ed as a synonym for segregation, and as
attitudes toward segregation began to change, Mason’s alleged defense of
state sovereignty made him unlikely to appeal to a broad audience.
Attempts to blame the neglect of Mason on the historian’s preference
for more triumphal fi gures no longer seem convincing. Contemporary his-
torians are drawn to characters who lived outside the mainstream. Anti-
Federalism, in particular, has enjoyed a surge of respectability in recent
years. Conservatives can appreciate the Anti-Federalists’ suspicion of gov-
ernment. Libertarians can appreciate their demand for a bill of rights. Par-
tisans on the left can sympathize with their opposition to a Constitution
that seemed to launch an age in which the economic opportunities offered
by liberal capitalism produced increasing social and political inequality.4
We come closer to the truth when Mason’s relative obscurity is explained
by his own reluctance to seek the historical spotlight. Mason never sought
national offi ce. He never wrote his memoirs. He made no concerted effort,
as best as we can tell, to preserve his papers. Even more important is the
preface ix
elusive nature of Mason’s accomplishments. Before the American Revolu-
tion, Mason was a mentor to George Washington. Mason played a critical
role in the movement to use economic coercion to force a change in British
imperial policies in the decade before the Revolution. He took the lead in
drafting Virginia’s fi rst state constitution and its famous Declaration of
Rights, which infl uenced not only Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of
Independence but constitution writers ever since. Mason must rank among
the most effective delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention, and
ironically, during the ratifi cation debate, he became the Constitution’s most
intellectually formidable opponent. It is an impressive résumé, but Mason
remained one step away from the dramatic event or the single line — he
never said anything like “Give me liberty, or give me death” — that could
ensure certain immortality.5
Yet if, as John Adams once said, the real American Revolution took place
in the minds of the American people, George Mason deserves attention for
what he thought. The political scientist Clinton Rossiter once suggested,
“John Adams and George Mason might well ask their critics whether the
Massachusetts Constitution and the Virginia Declaration of Rights were
not among the world’s most memorable triumphs in applied political the-
ory.”6 The linkage to Adams is telling. Adams and Mason shared a similar
eighteenth-century republican faith. Despite their commitment to repre-
sentative democracy and civil liberties, they took a jaundiced view of un-
checked individualism, transient popular majorities, and the inherent virtue
of the marketplace. They feared government because they feared corruption
in the political process, and they worried about political corruption in large
part because they feared the people themselves could become corrupt. With
the triumph of classical liberalism in the 1800s, and its emphasis on indi-
vidual initiative unregulated by government action, American politicians
could echo republican strictures against the whims and excesses of arbi-
trary government, but few politicians would suggest that the marketplace,
or even the people themselves, could present a threat to democracy. As
Joseph Ellis has written in explaining our tendency to undervalue Adams,
“In the search for a usable past, too much in Adams was simply not us-
able.” Adams, Ellis explained, “represents a cluster of political principles
that do not fi t comfortably within the framework of our national political
mythology.”7 Mason can create a comparable discomfort. Adams at least
realized he might not get all the historical credit he thought he deserved.
“The history of the Revolution,” he once said, “will be one continued Lye
from one end to the other.”8
If John Adams can help illuminate Mason’s political philosophy by com-