George Mason and the Virginia Declaration of Rights

The Virginia Declaration of Rights that members of the Fifth and last of the Virginia Revolutionary Conventions unanimously adopted on June 12, 1776, was one of the two or three most important and influential state papers of the Revolutionary year 1776. George Mason (1725–1792) drafted the document, but the committee to whom he submitted it made some changes, and the convention delegates made a few other changes before they adopted it. One of the many treasures that the Library of Virginia preserves in Richmond is a copy that George Mason later made of the first draft that he presented to the committee in May of 1776. This copy of the draft Declaration of Rights has been in the Library since before the Civil War.¹

The Declaration of Rights enumerated the principles of representative government as Virginians and other Americans then understood them, beginning with the assertion “That all Men are by nature equally free and Independent and have certain inherent Rights of which when they enter into a state of Society they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their Posterity namely the enjoying of Life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and Safety.” The convention amended Mason’s original language and added “when they enter into a state of Society” so as to exclude Virginia’s enslaved population, which had not entered into or been allowed to enter the society for which the convention was declaring the rights of its constituent members.²

The fundamental principles of government included the sovereignty of the people; the right of revolution; that public offices are not hereditary; that people should elect their own representatives in regularly scheduled elections; separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers; no taxation without representation; that no person had a right to suspend the operation of the laws, as the king and royal governors had done during the colonial period; and declared that only a despotic government would restrain freedom of the press.

Several of the provisions had origins in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 or even so far back in time as the Magna Carta of 1215. They included that people had a right to jury trials in civil and criminal cases; that no person could be compelled to testify against himself in a criminal proceeding; prohibited excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishments, and the issuance of general warrants; and that the militia be under civilian control. The declaration also had sections that guaranteed that no separate government could be established within Virginia; “That no free Government or the Blessing of Liberty can be preserved to any People but by a firm adherence to Justice Moderation Temperance Frugality and Virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental Principles” (a provision that Patrick Henry apparently proposed); and the final provision, that Mason included, which was a paraphrase of the English Act of Toleration.

The final section incorporated an amendment that James Madison proposed and that the delegates adopted which transformed Mason’s original statement of religious toleration into an outright declaration of religious freedom:

“That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence, and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”

During the Revolutionary period, several other states borrowed or adapted language or provisions from the Virginia declaration for their own state declarations or bills of rights. James Madison drew on it and other documents when he drafted the constitutional amendments that he introduced in 1789 and that in 1791 became the American Bill of Rights. French revolutionaries also used it when they adopted their Déclaration des Droits de L’Homme et du Citoyen, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in 1789.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights of May 1776 and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of July 1776 have had a profoundly important influence in American history. That constitutions of government should contain such declarations was such an important component of the beliefs of the men of the Revolutionary generation that George Mason refused to sign the Constitution of the United States, even though he had been a member of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 that proposed it, in part because it did not include a declaration of rights. He then opposed ratification in the Virginia Convention of 1788.

Both declarations refer specifically to men. That word sometimes meant adult male human beings, but it also could mean people, generally. At the time of declaring independence and writing new state and national constitutions, people often talked and wrote about liberty, even though all the states initially retained slavery as a legal institution. The powerful and memorable language of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, in the Declaration of Rights, of religious liberty appealed to men and women who desired to enjoy their own full share of liberty. The two declarations, in effect, made a promise of an inclusive liberty.

The ideas imbedded in the Revolutionary language of liberty from 1776 were at the heart of the campaign of white American men during the decades after the American Revolution to allow all adult white men to vote. Those ideas powered the campaign to abolish slavery in the United States and to grant freedmen the right to vote afterward. The same ideas were at the center of the campaign to grant the vote to all American women early in the twentieth century and to extend the blessings of liberty to other Americans during the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements in the middle of the century.

George Mason’s contributions to the Revolutionary language of liberty are hard to overstate. His contemporary reputation was such that voters elected him to the House of Burgesses several times before the American Revolution, to the last three of the five conventions that transformed Virginia from a royal colony into an independent commonwealth between 1774 and 1776, to the House of Delegates during and after the Revolution, and to the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788. The General Assembly elected him to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the assembly also elected him to the United States Senate in 1790, but he chose to decline. One of the largest universities in Virginia bears his name. Mason is the subject of several recent biographies, and his surviving letters have been published in Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).³

The Library’s collection of George Mason Papers includes correspondence and other documents related to his work during the Virginia Convention of 1776 and his time in the House of Delegates. Records of the Fifth Virginia Convention that adopted the Declaration of Rights are available in the Library’s Virginia Revolutionary Conventions, 1774–1776, Digital Collection. The documents are transcribed and annotated in volume 7 of William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, The Road to Independence: A Documentary Record, 7 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1973–83).