Uncovering the Story Of a Forgotten Founder

Books | Review of: George Mason, Forgotten Founder

By CARL ROLLYSON, Special to the Sun
November 29, 2006

So why is George Mason a forgotten founder? As Jeff Broadwater notes in his new biography, "George Mason" (University of North Carolina Press, 352 pages, $34.95), "during Mason's lifetime only Washington ranked higher in public esteem." An agile debater, Mason had a major impact on the Constitutional Convention. As principal author of Virginia's Declaration of Rights, his work served as a model for the Bill of Rights. Washington and Jefferson regarded him as indispensable to the revolutionary cause.

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The Granger Collection, New York

A colored 19th-century engraving of George Mason (1725-92). "Why is George Mason a forgotten founder?" asks Carl Rollyson.

And yet Mason has not been accorded a niche in the pantheon that includes his august admirers. Mr. Broadwater canvases the traditional explanations for Mason's eclipse: He died in 1792, "too soon to play a major role in the politics of the federal government." But so did Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere, the biographer reminds us. The argument that Mason's anti-federalist disagreements have not worn well is perhaps more persuasive. Even though he was influential in drafting the Constitution, in the end, he opposed it.

Mr. Broadwater seems correct, though, in suggesting a more important reason for Mason's "relative obscurity": He wanted it that way. He made no effort to preen for posterity. Indeed, he often had to be virtually dragged from home to play his role in the Revolution and in nation-making. He did not seek national office. He did not write his memoirs. Unlike Washington, he did not carry with him a sort of portable archive that testified to his importance. Unlike Jefferson, Mason did not regard himself as a symbolic figure, representing in his person a body of ideas and a new form of government.

Mr. Broadwater shrewdly links Mason to John Adams. Both men were stout defenders of civil liberties and representative democracy. Mason was the first American to enunciate in writing an American political philosophy: "[T]he fundamental Principle of the People's being governed by no Laws, to which they have not given their Consent, by Representative freely chosen by themselves."This was the American Revolution in a nutshell. The British Parliament could not dictate terms or taxes to Americans who thought of themselves as having, in effect, dominion status before there was such a thing as a British Commonwealth of Nations.

But like Adams, Mr. Broadwater points out, Mason feared the new republic could founder on "unchecked individualism, transient popular majorities, and the inherent virtue of the marketplace."Such forces were sure to lead to corruption — as they had in Great Britain — and to a demagogic chief executive. Mason opposed the Constitution, in part, because he thought it gave too many powers to a popularly elected chief executive. Washington as the obvious choice for the first president posed no problem for Mason, but who to trust thereafter? Mason walked away from the Constitution, in other words, because he did not feel it contained enough checks and balances. He thought, for example, that the federal judiciary had been made too independent and that even federal issues (with a few significant exceptions) should be settled in state courts.

In retrospect, Mason's fears may seem misguided. And yet from his perspective — looking at how the monarchy and Parliament had developed — Mason had a point. After the all, Parliament had refused to seat the Whig, John Wilkes, four times (so much for accepting the will of the people!), and the initial American faith that George III could be appealed to directly as a representative of all the people proved fallacious.

While Mason supported a national government with a written constitution, he opposed a heavily centralized government in whichWashington, D. C., would function like Westminster. And was he so wrong? Take, for example, the issue of slavery. Mason was appalled that such a nefarious institution had been acknowledged and accommodated in the Constitution. A slaveholder himself, Mason had evidently witnessed how owning other human beings corrupted and degraded their owners. He did not believe that blacks were equal to whites, but slavery and the slave trade were evils he could not condone. I can imagine what Mason would have said about the Dred Scott decision. Didn't it show that not only the legislative, but also the judicial branch, had been corrupted into upholding an immoral institution?

This question, however, turned back on Mason himself, befuddles Mr. Broadwater. If Mason so vehemently opposed slavery, why did he not free at least a few of his slaves, as Jefferson did, or free them all, as Washington did in his will? "Mason never seemed defensive about his glaring inconsistency," the biographer observes. "In all likelihood, Mason believed, or convinced himself, that he had no options." This last sentence seems to imply that Mason may have been blind to his own hypocrisy. At any rate, Mr. Broadwater concludes, "Mason must have shared the fears of Jefferson and countless other whites that whites and free blacks could not live together."

Beware of the "must haves" of history. In effect, the biographer does not know what his subject thought but is keen to have him think it anyway. Call Mason a hypocrite, if you will, but look at it this way: Mason did not see himself as a symbolic figure. He always made a point of saying he was being drawn away from his private life as a planter, father, and husband to engage in public affairs. He was one of the few Virginian aristocrats who kept his own books and made significant profit out of his tobacco farming and land holdings. He operated within the system he had inherited. He did not wring his hands over it. He owed his children a debt-free future and a reasonable run at prosperity.

To be sure, Mason wanted to abolish slavery, starting by omitting any mention of it in the U. S. Constitution. But any gesture he made as an individual was, to him, trifling — or so I interpret his character. He could not stop the virus of slavery by eradicating it on his own plantation. He argued, instead, for a corporate decision that his colleagues, North and South, were not prepared to make.

To see him as I have makes Mason more principled, not less. If for nothing else he should be remembered because he saw that the Constitution — a great document, no doubt — was also infected with the germ of evil that would spread, in time, to the entire body politic.

crollyson@nysun.com