George Mason the Namesake
George Mason (1725-1792) was a leading Virginia lawmaker, a founding father of the newly established republic of the United States, a member of an important American family that first came to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century and fathered of nine children who actively contributed in the history of the country, and was an enslaver of over one hundred people over the course of his life. These four aspects of Mason's life provide important insights to Mason and other leading plantation men from this important period.
There is significant set of scholarship that has emerged about George Mason since the publication of the Papers of George Mason, by the University of North Carolina Press in 1970. Importantly there is an expanding set of biographical scholarship on George Mason that offers insights into his life. These scholars document the important contributions of Mason to the governments and political landscape of the colonial, revolutionary, and years from the confederation through the first years of the new republic.[1] More specialized scholarship provides important nuanced understanding of George Mason as a leader as a justice in the Fairfax County Court who often missed sessions when he did not have business before the body as his complicated relationship with founders such as George Washington.[2] Other important works have focused on Mason’s legacy as a promoter of individual rights through their exploration of his Virginia Declaration of Rights and his advocacy for a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States.[3] Further there are important works that help us understand George Mason the patriarch of an important family and how that status situated his role as a leading member of the social and economic system in Virginia during the eighteenth century.[4]
Importantly there is a growing set of scholarship that has focused in on Mason’s contradictions over who would benefit from some of his broad claims to promote universal freedoms.
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[1] Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Robert Allen Rutland, George Mason, Reluctant Statesman (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1961); Pamela C. Copeland and Richard K. MacMaster, The Five George Masons: Patriots and Planters of Virginia and Maryland, Second edition (Fairfax, Virginia: Published with the Board of Regents of Gunston Hall by George Mason University Press, 2016). In recent years there has been several biographical works that are not from university presses that have been produced that are less useful yet are available. See for example John R. Vile, More than a Plea for a Declaration of Rights: The Constitutional and Political Thought of George Mason of Virginia (Clark, NJ: Talbot Publishing, 2019); William G. Hyland, George Mason: The Founding Father Who Gave Us the Bill of Rights (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2019).
[2] Joseph Horrell, “George Mason and the Fairfax Court,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 91, no. 4 (1983): 418–39; Peter R. Henriques, “An Uneven Friendship: The Relationship Between George Washington and George Mason,” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 97, no. 2 (March 1989): 185–204.
[3] Brent Tarter, “George Mason and the Conservation of Liberty,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 3 (1991): 279–304; Martin B. Cohen and Faculty Author Collection, eds., Federalism: The Legacy of George Mason, The George Mason Lectures 4 (Fairfax, Va: George Mason University Press, 1988); Robert P. Davidow and Faculty Author Collection, eds., Natural Rights and Natural Law: The Legacy of George Mason, George Mason Lectures (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1986); T. Daniel Shumate, ed., The First Amendment: The Legacy of George Mason, The George Mason Lectures (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1987).
[4] Most importantly see Lorri Glover, Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) who has best captured the essence of Mason’s ideas as to what it meant to be an elite in Virginia by helping us understand that he and other Virginia elites became founders of the new republic because they were fathers.