Photo of the Day: Forgotten Founder

You’re looking at what I think may be the most approachable statue in our nation’s capital. I came across the George Mason Memorial by accident last November, when I was trying to reach the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. But I don’t think its subject, planter-patriot George Mason (1725-1792), would have minded in the least being in the shadow of the Tidal Basin monument to his fellow Virginian.

With no known painting from life existing of Mason, nobody knows how accurately this statue depicts the face and body of this all-but-forgotten major influence on the American Revolution and the early republic. But I can’t help but think that sculptor Wendy Ross has perfectly captured the personality that impressed virtually all who met him: friendly, engaged, but still, slightly removed from the world now visiting his doorstep. You have, after all, interrupted him in one of his favorite pursuits: reading in the garden that gave him a much-needed sense of tranquility. I photographed so much while down in Washington, but this particular image, I knew, was a necessity.

Mason’s vow to “risque the last Penny of my Fortune, and the last Drop of my Blood” for independence endeared him to younger patriots, including Washington, who saw him as a mentor, and Jefferson, who believed him to be "the wisest man of his generation." His most vibrant thought is echoed in this country’s seminal documents, notably this quote: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty…and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Sound familiar? Jefferson did a masterful job of editing that until he made the words sing in the Declaration of Independence. But, as historian Pauline Maier showed in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, it was Mason’s original words, in his May 1776 draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that were embodied in the initial state constitutions that sought to sum up the ideals of freedom that led them to separate from England. Moreover, his willingness to walk out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 over its refusal to include a Bill of Rights created unstoppable pressure that resulted in the eventual passage of the first 10 amendments.

The Virginia aristocrat embodied what we would nowadays call gravitas. Enormously adept at keeping his plantation profitable (a skill that would elude fellow Virginians Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe), he was treasurer of the Ohio Company, an organization that invested in land located in the Ohio River Valley, and an influential member of the vestry at Washington’s Truro Parish.

Philip Mazzei, an Italian doctor who met him in 1773, might have exaggerated somewhat in likening him to Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, or Newton. But when you trace the influences on the most influential men of the early republic, Mason’s name appears repeatedly on the short list.

The setting of Ross’s statue, dedicated in 2002, illustrates both why so many were drawn to Mason, and to an extent, why he repeatedly drew back. You might have caught him while he’s reading, but now he’ll be happy to explain why those two books to his left should matter to you. And yet…there’s something in reserve. He is, after all, leaning back.

So much conspired to keep Mason where he was, at his estate, Gunston Hall. The ingeniously landscaped grounds that he himself surveyed and laid out find their counterpart in the Tidal Basin memorial site I visited, which was created as a Victorian garden, then redesigned as a pansy garden in 1929.

The cane to Mason’s right at the memorial tips you off to something else that kept him largely stationary: his medical condition. Traveling from Virginia to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention might not sound like much to us, but to someone like Mason, who suffered increasingly from gout as the years went by, the experience was enormously painful.

Pain of an emotional kind also plagued Mason in the revolutionary period: His wife of two decades died while bearing him a child in 1773. The widower, distraught over losing a woman he had come to cherish, also now found himself, he said, playing the role not just of father but also mother to his children. (As it happened, nine managed to survive to adulthood.)

In the end, Mason shied away from heavier involvement with politics because he sensed how much it would cost. Nowhere was this borne home more forcefully than in Philadelphia in 1787. He was bothered not just by the lack of a bill of rights, but by accommodations made to the slave states. 

Despite owning numerous slaves himself, Mason disliked this system in which “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and he correctly predicted, “By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.” He could not have been more dismayed, then, when the convention ignored his advice to ban the slave trade immediately, as South Carolina and Georgia worked out a deal with the New England States that the institution would not be touched another 20 years.

Mason’s vehement disagreement on this and the lack of a bill of rights led him to reject a document he had worked to support until near the end of deliberations. It also drove a wedge between him and Washington that lasted through Mason’s death in 1792.

The original memorial for Mason had envisioned only a round bas relief in his honor, but Ross won out with her proposal for a full-figure representation. Mason did not found a country, like Washington, or even a political party, like Jefferson, and so the sculptor has not created a demigod of the American civic religion or even a man on horseback. But the representation here is unique: a patriot who comes off as someone you would love to spend the afternoon chatting away with, by which time you were bound to be infected by his love of ideas and his passion for liberty.

This Day in Constitutional History (Patrick Henry Demands a Bill of Rights)

June 16, 1788 – With approval of the new Constitution of the United States hanging in the balance, one of its most formidable opponents, Patrick Henry, exercised his considerable oratorical powers in denouncing it at the Virginia Ratification Convention as an assault on the rights of individuals and states. So potent was his criticism that one of his most strenuous objections—to the lack of a “bill of rights” in the Constitution—required immediate redress to secure passage.

At the same time, Henry’s opposition demonstrates one of the enduring factors in American political history: more often than not, it’s personality clashes, not ideological differences, that make for the most poisonous relationships. Think Bobby Kennedy and LBJ, FDR and Al Smith in the 1930s, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama today.

Henry vs. Jefferson and Madison: The Personal Becomes the Political

Henry’s chief adversary at the Virginia Ratification Convention was James Madison. As the great friend and chief political ally of Thomas Jefferson, Madison caught residual flak that would have normally hit the Sage of Monticello. As it happened, though both Henry and Jefferson voiced words that have been memorized ever since by schoolchildren (“Give me liberty or give me death!” and “All men are created equal”), they fell out during the American Revolution.

The young Jefferson listened enthralled to Henry’s speeches in the Virginia House of Burgesses, echoing comparing his utterances to Homer. The two men’s relationship, however, deteriorated late in the war, when the legislature, at former governor Henry’s strong urging, launched an inquiry into whether Jefferson had adequately prepared Virginia for the British invasion that year. Jefferson survived the inquiry, but his resentment—and Henry’s—lingered.

Three years later, a new cause for argument sprang up between Jefferson and Henry—now back as governor. The religiously devout Henry had called for a general tax assessment on all freeholders to support churches and schools, but Madison convinced the legislature to pass instead Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom.

Nearly a decade later, Jefferson paid a new, younger rival, Alexander Hamilton, the highest of inadvertent compliments by calling him “a host unto himself” who needed to be stopped. Madison paid a similar backhanded compliment by pushing Henry’s candidacy for governor.

You might be thinking this was a particularly kind way of thanking the great American patriot for his service to the cause. No such thing. What Madison was really after was to get Henry kicked upstairs, into an office where he could not sway legislators 24/7, as he used to do.

Henry and the Constitution: “I Smell a Rat”

When it came time for a constitutional convention, Madison could not ignore the state’s most popular vote-getter, so Henry was invited to attend as a delegate. Henry responded tersely, with another utterance that has become part of the American idiom: “I smell a rat.”

The “rat” in this case was the Constitution, designed to replace Articles of Confederation, the form of government used by the rebels after declaring independence. The war revealed its near-fatal weaknesses in multiple ways, and precious few people wanted it left intact. The more radical attendees at the convention wanted it scrapped; others, such as Henry, preferred to mend, rather than end, it.

By the end of May 1788, the Constitution’s proponents, the Federalists, had gained the approval of eight state ratifying conventions. The rest of the going, however, was by no means a sure thing. It took Rhode Island and North Carolina nearly two years to ratify, and even then they only did so after Congress agreed to send 12 amendments to the states for ratification. (Of course, only 10 ended up being approved in this original group.)

The battleground states became New Hampshire, Virginia and New York. Historians’ best guesses are that Federalists and Anti-Federalists were in a dead heat in New Hampshire and Virginia, while in New York the Federalists were outnumbered by more than two to one.

Because of the lack of speed of communication during that time, the Virginia delegates did not realize until several weeks later that New Hampshire had assured passage of the Constitution by the required nine states by voting affirmatively on June 21. I

n another sense, however, it didn’t matter. The new union could certainly survive without Rhode Island and might even make it without North Carolina. Without the two largest states of New York and Virginia, however, the new form of government would be dealt a crushing, maybe fatal, blow.

The Virginia Ratification Convention: Clash of Titans

The Federalists and Anti-Federalists fielded a host of future luminaries on each side. Arguing affirmatively with Madison for the Constitution were future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Marshall and Governor Edmund Randolph, later to become George Washington’s Attorney General and Secretary of State. Lining up behind Henry in opposition were George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights (who refused to sign the finished Constitution) and future President James Monroe.

Once again, Henry showed why he was a dangerous adversary in political battle. Even before he really got going, he already had the ratification convention in an uproar by refusing to abide by the delegates’ initial agreement to debate the document point by point. No, he insisted, it must be considered in totality.

Then Henry made it personal: Wasn’t Governor Randolph being “inconsistent” by refusing to sign the Constitution when he had the choice to do so in Philadelphia as a delegate?

Randolph’s response was about as effective as John Kerry’s claim, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” With eight states ratifying it and the country in crisis, why not close ranks, Randolph pleaded nervously? In the meantime, didn’t he deserve an apology from Henry for his “aspersions and his insinuations”?

The Old Spellbinder Works His Magic Again

Nothing doing. Somewhat stooped at six feet tall, wearing spectacles, Henry could still command attention when his blue eyes came alive. Jefferson might have been the inventor of the democratic engine and Madison its ace mechanic, but Henry was its Richard Petty.

Even before the orator said a word, noted Madison, a simple gesture of his could undo an hour’s work of his opponents. And when that confident voice rose, boomed and fell – well, let’s just say it was a far cry from Madison, who, on more than one occasion, according to an account of the proceedings, “spoke too low to be understood.” (After one particularly strenuous debate, Madison took to his bed for the following three days.)

Henry poured scorn on the Constitution for its centralized government that opened the way to dictatorship. Among other points, he charged that the Constitution:

* lacked adequate checks and balances
* gave the central government the power of direct taxation
* opened the central government to the possibility of tyrants.

In all, Henry spoke on 18 out of the 23 days at the ratification convention, comprising a quarter of all speeches recorded. On June 16 alone, four speeches took on different weaknesses he saw in the Constitution: the Army, the militia, the District of Columbia, and, most consequentially, the perils of a republic without a bill of rights:

“The officers of Congress may come upon you now, fortified with all with all the terrors of paramount federal authority. Excisemen may come in multitudes; for the limitation of their numbers no man knows. They may, unless the general government be restrained by a bill of rights, or some similar restriction, go into your cellars and rooms, and search, ransack, and measure, every thing you eat, drink, and wear.”

Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia vividly recounts Henry’s impact in a quote from delegate Hugh Grigsby, who noted that one of his fellow listeners “involuntarily felt his wrists to assure himself that the fetters were not already pressing his flesh. The gallery on which he was sitting seemed to become dark as a dudgeon.”

When the final vote came, Henry had lost, but by only an 89-79 margin. I would argue that his loss was the American people’s gain. To swing votes away from Henry, Madison had to agree to introduce a Bill of Rights at the first available opportunity in the new Congress.

Once More Into the Breach

Henry’s call for a second Constitutional Convention, to repair the mistakes made the first time, fell on deaf ears. With his health uncertain and his family obligations increasing, he needed to attend to clients who were willing to pay for his spellbinding oratory before jurors.

For a long time, Henry also saw no necessity to join a government whose form he opposed, so he turned down offers by George Washington to become a justice of the Supreme Court and secretary of state. However, though his sympathy for Federalism didn’t increase markedly, his antipathy for Jefferson and Madison did.

The French Revolution’s growing anti-clericalism (in Henry’s view, its atheistic tendencies) and the Democratic-Republicans’ defense of the regime lured the Virginian out of retirement. In a stance that represented something of a 180-degree turn in his previous thinking, he opposed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (created anonymously by Jefferson and Madison as means to interpose state authority against the Alien and Sedition Acts) as threats to the federal authority he had long feared.

Preceding Washington by more than a decade in his loathing for virtually all things Jeffersonian, Henry now proved amenable to the old general’s appeals to re-enter the political arena by running again for the Virginia state legislature as a Federalist. Henry’s stance alienated that not-inconsiderable portion of his old political base that now belonged to Jefferson and Madison, but he managed to win the election.

Yet the stress of the campaign broke his already fragile health, and like Washington he died in 1799—in this case, reconciled, if only by certain longstanding personal antagonisms, to a form of government on which he had once rained rhetorical thunderbolts. Tim Russert, may he rest in peace, had he been alive at the creation of the republic, would undoubtedly have read one of the Son of Thunder’s old soundbites and asked him to explain his current seeming inconsistency.

Don't Ask, "What Would Patrick Do?"

Patrick Henry’s battle over the Constitution illustrates the truth of the adage often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself—it rhymes.” In other words, certain present and past circumstances may seem similar, but their differences require our scrutiny.

Specifically, the issues raised by Henry about the role of the federal government remain as alive today as in his own time. The Bill of Rights that he advocated has helped immeasurably in protecting the rights of individuals, though it is an open question whether Henry would welcome federal courts’ growing willingness to apply the protections of amendments to the constitution to state as well as federal law.

Nevertheless, it’s dangerous to ask “What would Patrick (or George, or Thomas, or James) do?” Henry’s career vividly illustrates how personal differences can mix with purely ideological arguments, even ones, such as his with Madison and the Federalists, conducted at the highest intellectual levels. Though they prided themselves – and continue to be regarded as such by a grateful posterity—as the most rational of men, the Founding Fathers were also led inevitably, by the forces of pride and resentment, into political battles that neither they nor we could have foreseen by a cold, hard reading of their early speeches and actions.