George Mason

George Mason (1725-92), American statesman, born in Fairfax County, Virginia, into the planter aristocracy. Privately educated, he had a good knowledge of law and the classics. In 1758 he completed Gunston Hall on the Potomac, one of the grandest mansions in a state of great houses. A trustee of Alexandria and a county justice, in 1759 Mason was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and served at the Virginia Convention (July 1775), which armed the colony for the struggle with Great Britain. At the state's constitutional convention (1776), he drafted the historic Virginia Declaration of Rights and a large portion of the constitution itself.

Mason was a delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and helped to draft the Constitution. Vexed, however, at its centralization of power and its failure to limit slavery or include a bill of rights, he refused to sign it. Although he continued steadfast in his opposition to what he regarded as the document's weaknesses, he had the satisfaction of seeing the first ten amendments, based on his Virginia Declaration of Rights, added to the Constitution in 1791. He died at Gunston Hall, October 7, 1792.