A short life of the author
George Mason (11 December 1725 – 7 October 1792) was an American planter, political philosopher, and statesman whose Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) is one of the foundational documents of modern democratic governance. Written weeks before the Declaration of Independence, it proclaimed that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights” — language that Thomas Jefferson adapted for the Declaration of Independence, that James Madison drew upon for the Bill of Rights, that the Marquis de Lafayette echoed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and that Eleanor Roosevelt’s committee incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Life
Mason was born into the Virginia planter aristocracy — his family had held land along the Potomac since the seventeenth century. He inherited Gunston Hall, a plantation in Fairfax County, at the age of ten. He was largely self-educated, drawing on the library of his uncle John Mercer, a lawyer whose collection of over 1,500 volumes was one of the largest in the colony.
Unlike his contemporaries Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, Mason loathed public life. He was a private man who suffered from chronic gout and preferred the management of his plantation and the education of his nine children to the theatre of politics. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses but declined nearly every office offered to him. His public interventions, when they came, were devastating in their intellectual force and brevity.
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
In May 1776, the Virginia Convention met in Williamsburg to prepare for independence. Mason drafted a Declaration of Rights that was adopted on 12 June 1776 — three weeks before Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence on 4 July.
The document’s opening section established the principle that government derives its authority from the people and exists to secure their inherent rights — life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness and safety. It went on to guarantee freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to trial by jury, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and the subordination of military to civil power.
Mason’s Declaration was the first constitutional protection of individual rights in American history. Its influence was immediate and global: Jefferson borrowed its language for the Declaration of Independence; Madison used it as the framework for the federal Bill of Rights; and its principles were adopted by state constitutions across the new nation.
The Fairfax Resolves (1774)
Two years before the Declaration of Rights, Mason drafted the Fairfax Resolves — a set of resolutions adopted by Fairfax County that laid out the American colonies’ case against British taxation and commercial regulation. George Washington chaired the meeting; Mason wrote the document. The Resolves argued for colonial rights within the British constitutional framework but also articulated the principle that taxation without representation was an inherently illegitimate exercise of power. They were a significant step on the road to independence.
Opposition to the Constitution
Mason attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 as a Virginia delegate and participated actively in the debates. But when the final document was produced, he refused to sign it — one of only three delegates present who did so.
His objections were specific and principled. The Constitution lacked a bill of rights — a deficiency Mason considered fatal. It permitted the continuation of the slave trade for twenty years (Mason, despite being a slaveholder himself, called the trade “disgraceful to mankind” and wanted it abolished immediately). It gave the Senate too much power. It created a presidency that Mason feared could devolve into monarchy.
His Objections to the Constitution of Government formed by the Convention (1787) was widely circulated and became one of the key Anti-Federalist texts. His opposition was instrumental in securing the promise that a bill of rights would be added — which Madison fulfilled in 1791.
Critical Standing
Mason is the most important Founding Father whom most Americans cannot name. His Virginia Declaration of Rights is arguably the most influential single document in the history of individual liberties — more so than the Declaration of Independence, which is primarily a statement of collective sovereignty rather than individual rights. Yet Mason’s refusal to sign the Constitution, his dislike of public life, and his lack of a presidency or other high office have kept him in the shadow of more celebrated founders.
Historians have increasingly recognised his importance: Robert Rutland’s biography George Mason: Reluctant Statesman (1961) and Jeff Broadwater’s George Mason: Forgotten Founder (2006) have helped restore him to the centre of the founding narrative.
Collecting Mason
Mason’s writings were not published as books during his lifetime — they circulated as pamphlets, broadsides, and manuscript copies. Original printings of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) and the Fairfax Resolves (1774) are of the highest rarity and would bring six-figure sums at auction if they appeared. Manuscript letters by Mason are held primarily by institutional collections (the Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society) but occasionally appear at auction, bringing $10,000–$50,000 depending on content. The Papers of George Mason (University of North Carolina Press, 1970, 3 volumes) is the standard scholarly edition.