Scholarship
Scholars have long tried to reconcile the language of liberty used by many of the American founders that propelled and justified their revolution based on the defense of their rights with the hypocrisy evident from their continued practice of slaveholding. George Mason’s case is somewhat different. Historians often characterize George Mason as a forgotten or a reluctant founder; however, this is a somewhat misleading statement. In fact, his role as a founder seemed to be remembered and forgotten in cycles. He certainly never achieved the accolades of many of his contemporaries, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison. Part of this can be explained by the lack of effort by George Mason to collect his documentary legacy for the next generation. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison carefully collected their correspondence and carefully selected trusted family members to be “trustworthy stewards of their reputations.” Mason was interested first and foremost in protecting and enhancing his wealth. He seemed less interested in curating his public reputation as part of his legacy and emphasized the financial security of his family.[1]
In 1746, when George Mason IV came of age under the laws of primogeniture, he inherited his father’s entire estate. As the sole heir, Mason IV received arable land and several enslaved people, an endowment representing the accumulated wealth of three generations of Masons who profited from a New World plantation economy. In 1735, George Mason III drowned while crossing the Potomac River from one of his plantation sites to another other. His surviving inventories of the property in Charles County, Colony of Maryland, and Prince William County, Colony of Virginia listed sumptuary items like gold buttons, livestock, and the names of adults and children enslaved by the Mason family. An entry designating a feather bed and blanket, estimated at £ 3, appears above lines describing “One Negro man named Parus” priced at £ 20 and “One Negro boy named Job” valued at £ 10. The death of Mason IV’s father with no will makes it difficult to know how much property he inherited. Other period documentation reveals that in 1735 he possessed over 13,000 acres and held 32 people of African descent in bondage, half of whom were children under the age of sixteen; nine indentured white servants were also working for Mason III because they owed his family money.[2]
Virginia patriots were first and foremost Virginia patriarchs who sought to protect their communities by preserving their wealth, authority, and kinship. Typically, scholarship has focused on the ownership of real estate as the critical part to understanding this system. This was certainly an important part of the story, but it was slavery which secured the patriarch’s power. Slavery’s deep structural roots embedded Virginia’s historical families, such as the Masons, to the land all of which secured their status. Mason’s independence and liberty to be a businessman, and an intellectual was secured by the capital imbedded within black bodies. Their social and economic wherewithal relied on slavery. This is exemplified by Thomas Jefferson’s remembrance that his earliest memory was of being carried by horseback on a pillow at the age of three from his family’s Shadwell plantation their Tuckahoe plantation. As scholar Roger Wilkins observed from this first moment “to the moment he was lowered into the earth in a coffin made by” an enslaved person “Thomas Jefferson led a life cushioned by the subjugation of others.” George Mason also enslaved people throughout his entire lifetime. He and his children learned how to be plantation owners and enslavers from their experiences within the family. His identity as a patriarch made him the caretaker of their extended households. These responsibilities extended out into the community. Men like George Mason were responsible for establishing and maintaining order. Their wealth and family connections demanded that they serve their community through service in positions of authority. Patriarchs prepared their entire lives to be masters over their domains. Shirking these responsibilities places the social order which their lives and economic fortunes depended on at risk.[3]
[1] A good example of this was expressed in these essays written by William Freehling: William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77, no. 1 (February 1972): 81–93; William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” in The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12–33; Lorri Glover, Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 220; There are several biographical studies of George Mason, yet all seem to use the same flawed source pool which does not seriously engage with the Mason families lasting legacy of slavery. Kate Rowland Mason, the great-great-granddaughter to George Mason’s younger brother, Thompson Mason, served as the important catalyst to establish the legacy of George Mason’s documentary record in her two-volume biography and collection of Mason’s public papers. See Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725-1792: Including His Speeches, Public Papers, and Correspondence, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892). The interest in George Mason continued with an expanding set of scholars, including from the legal profession, who focused on the understanding of individual rights. This yielded edited papers project which began in 1963 and finished in 1970. Much of the recent scholarship related to George Mason IV relies on this critical three volume documentary collection titled, The Papers of George Mason, 1725-1792, compiled and edited by Robert Rutland. This impressive work remains the first stop for all researchers exploring questions about George Mason IV, his family, his extensive landed properties, and the enslaved people who made his life possible. The collection allowed for a host of new scholarship to emerge on George Mason, the “reluctant statesman” whose expertise on the property, the colonial charters and history, was renown throughout North America. In the years leading to the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, Mason’s reputation became solidified as both an active and selfless public servant who could not stand to be away from his beloved seat of family power at Gunston Hall.
[2] The important caveat which most scholars neglect to mention is that Ann Thomson Mason was entitled to a third of her husband’s estate for use during her life. To understand this idea, I relied on Linda E. Speth, “More Than Her ‘Thirds’: Wives and Widows in Colonial Virginia,” Women & History, no. 4 (September 1982): 5–41, George Mason I patented 900 acres in northern neck of Virginia based upon eighteen headright claims. Nell Marion Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623-1666. (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1963), 332; It should be clearly noted that these lists of personal property differed from the wealth distributed in the form of land or real estate. Prince William County, Will Book C, 49; Dunn Among His Slaves 165-166; Pamela C. Copeland and Richard K. MacMaster, The Five George Masons: Patriots and Planters of Virginia and Maryland, (Fairfax, Virginia: Published with the Board of Regents of Gunston Hall by George Mason University Press, 2016)73-74, also in The Five George Masons, Ann Mason owned at least ten slaves valued at £150, 82; Beth Mitchell, Beginning at a White Oak, 1977, 326-327; 1735 Inventory of George Mason III, Charles County Maryland and 1735 Inventory of George Mason III Prince William County, Virginia in Terry K. Dunn, Among His Slaves: George Mason, Slavery at Gunston Hall, and the Idealism of the American Revolution (Alexandria, VA: Commonwealth Books of Virginia, 2017), 165-166.
[3] Lorri Glover, Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3; Here is rely on many important works including Lorri Glover, Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1996). I am especially indebted to the work of Roger W. Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow the Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), see quote on 136.