| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jeff Broadwater. George Mason: Forgotten Founder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 329. $34.95.
"Forgotten founder" seems a bit harsh when applied to George Mason IV, whom American Revolutionary-era historians well know as the chief author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and constitution of 1776 and a leading Anti-Federalist in 1787–1788. He was also the proprietor of Gunston Hall, perhaps the most handsome and best-preserved example of the early Georgian style, a few miles and one Potomac inlet south of Mount Vernon. Until his opposition to the Constitution alienated him from the new Federalist elite, Mason was one of the most respected figures in Virginia politics, friends with his neighbors George Washington and Richard Henry Lee, legislative collaborator with Thomas Jefferson, and an intellect and orator whom James Madison admired. Recurring and painful gout, family cares, and badly concealed disdain for lesser legislative lights occupying the back benches often made it hard to get Mason to show up for business, but when he did attend the Virginia assembly, he was a powerful force.	1
Jeff Broadwater is right to think that Mason has never quite commanded the scholarly attention he deserves. Previous biographies have been more popular than scholarly, and longer on the details of family and houses that many Virginians love than on the intellectual and political sources of Mason's pronounced persona as a near ideal type of the classical republican and country Whig. His positions on slavery, suffrage, and social mobility reveal an independent, even progressive turn of mind. Widowed in 1773, with a numerous brood to look after, Mason's worries about the downward mobility of the landed aristocracy bespoke his own anxiety over his children's prospects.	. . .

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