DOCUMENT: CLS-REBUILD · CLASSIFICATION: PUBLIC METHODOLOGY: SYMMETRIC · STATUS: ACTIVE
Who Sits at the Seat · Founder

George Mason

1725-1792 Founder Live

Author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights; refused to sign the Constitution for want of a bill of rights.

Ask George Mason a question

Answers come only from his own recorded words, with every quotation checked against its source.

Who he was

George Mason of Virginia drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776); his papers also include the Fairfax Resolves (1774).

A delegate to the Federal Convention, he refused to sign the Constitution for want of a bill of rights, set out his Objections to it in September 1787, and spoke against it in the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788.

He was a slaveholder; his will, as his biographer prints it, refers to "my negro man Jack." In the 1788 convention he called the slave trade "diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind," and in the same debate complained that the Constitution made no provision "for securing to the Southern States those they now possess."

Why he is at the Seat

Mason stands for the Anti-Federalist case that a constitution without a bill of rights was not safe. A question about rights should hear the delegate who refused to sign without them.

What we hold

Editions
  • Rowland, The Life of George Mason (2 vols., 1892), which prints his letters and papers inside the biography
  • His speeches in the Virginia ratifying convention (Elliot's Debates)
  • Library of Congress manuscript transcriptions
Size
About 25,000 words in standalone texts of his own. Most of the other 374,000 words are Rowland's biography; 22% of the indexed passages are Mason's own words. Word counts are whole files, so they include editors' headnotes and footnotes.
Coverage
21.8% of the 55 documents Founders Online catalogues as his. That catalogue is small, so this figure says little.

Known limits

  • His record survives largely inside a biography. Answers lean on Rowland's notes, which are always labelled as the biographer's words, not his.
  • His convention speeches are reporters' notes, not his own text. His remarks at the Federal Convention exist only as Madison's paraphrase and are not in his corpus.
  • There is no standalone public-domain edition; Rutland's Papers of George Mason (1970) is under copyright.

Questions he answers well

The questions his engine was tested on before it opened.

  • Did the proposed Constitution need a bill of rights?

Published answers

More in Prior Questions.