The Virginia
Declaration
of Rights

George Mason is the least celebrated of the indispensable founders. He wrote the template that Jefferson used for the Declaration of Independence, the language Madison used for the Bill of Rights, and the argument that forced both documents to include protections they might otherwise have omitted. Then he refused to sign the Constitution. The Virginia Declaration of Rights is where his argument lives.

George Mason of Gunston Hall, Virginia, was a planter, lawyer, and constitutional theorist who consistently refused public office while consistently shaping public documents. He had drafted the Fairfax Resolves in 1774 - one of the earliest formal statements of colonial rights. In May 1776, the Virginia Convention assembled in Williamsburg to draft a constitution for the newly independent state. Mason arrived with a draft of a declaration of rights.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted by the Virginia Convention on June 12, 1776 - eleven days before the Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, and twenty-two days before the Declaration was published on July 4. It was the first document in American history to codify a comprehensive list of individual rights as the foundation of government. It drew explicitly on the English Bill of Rights (1689) and Magna Carta (1215) and translated both into the American republican context.

The document runs to sixteen sections covering the nature of government, the rights of accused persons, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, and the structure of republican government. Its direct descendants are visible throughout the American constitutional tradition. Section 8 establishes trial by jury and prohibits compelled self-incrimination - the 5th and 6th Amendments. Section 9 prohibits excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishment - the 8th Amendment, carried forward from the English Bill of Rights. Section 12 establishes freedom of the press. Section 16 protects the free exercise of religion.

Jefferson was in Philadelphia drafting the Declaration of Independence while Mason was in Williamsburg finalizing the Virginia Declaration. The Virginia Declaration was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12, 1776. Jefferson had access to it within days. The influence is direct and documented in the texts themselves.

Jefferson sharpened the language and added the theological grounding ("endowed by their Creator") and the political framework ("to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men"). But the structural argument - inherent rights that precede government and cannot be surrendered - came from Mason's draft. Jefferson acknowledged in 1825 that the Declaration was "an expression of the American mind," not an act of original invention. Mason had expressed a significant portion of that mind eleven days earlier.

When James Madison introduced his proposed amendments to the Constitution on June 8, 1789, he had the Virginia Declaration of Rights at his side. The connection is documented: Madison used the Virginia Declaration as the primary template for what became the American Bill of Rights. The free exercise of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, prohibition on excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment - all appear in Mason's 1776 document before they appear in Madison's 1789 proposals.

Madison's proposed amendment on religion read: "The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed." The language evolved through congressional revision into the First Amendment's religion clauses. The source of the argument is Section 16 of Mason's document.

George Mason attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia through the summer of 1787. He was one of the most active participants, speaking more than 136 times on the floor. On September 12, 1787, five days before the Convention concluded, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts moved to add a bill of rights to the Constitution. Mason seconded the motion. The Convention voted it down - ten states to zero, with one divided.

Mason wrote his objections in a document titled "Objections to This Constitution of Government," circulated after the Convention. The first objection was the absence of a declaration of rights. He wrote that a bill of rights would "at any time be obtained by the people from Congress." Without one, he would not sign.

Mason's refusal to sign, combined with Gerry's and Edmund Randolph's, created the political pressure that led to the promise of a bill of rights as the price of ratification. The promise was made during the ratification debates in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York - where opponents held enough votes to defeat the Constitution without it. Madison introduced the Bill of Rights amendments in June 1789 specifically to fulfill that promise. The Virginia Declaration Mason had written in 1776 was the foundation of the document he refused to sign in 1787 and the source of the amendments that were added to it in 1791.