| George Mason must rank with John Adams
and James Madison as one of the three Founding Fathers who left their personal
imprint on the fundamental law of the United States. He was the principal author
of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which because of its early formation
greatly influenced other state constitutions framed during the Revolution and,
through them, the Federal Bill of Rights of 1791. Yet Mason was essentially a private person with very little inclination for public office or the ordinary operation of politics beyond the country level. His appearances in the Virginia colonial and state legislatures were relatively brief, and not until 1787 did he consent to represent his state at a continental or national congress or convention. Polities was never more than a means for Mason. He was at all times a man of public spirit, but politics was never a way of life, never for long his central concern. It took a revolution to pry him away from home and family at Gunston Hall, mobilize his skill and energy for constitutional construction, and transform him, in one brief moment of brilliant leadership, into a statesman whose work would endure to influence the lives and fortunes of those "millions yet unborn" of whom he and his generation of Americans spoke so frequently and thought so constantly. |