George Mason was there first. In June 1776, as the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia debated whether to declare independence, back in Richmond Mason provided the justification for the break from Britain in the Virginia Declaration of Rights:
Section 3—Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; . . . And . . . when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.20
These ideas had been expressed before, by Algernon Sidney and John Locke, amongst others. The Declaration of Rights was a legislative act, however, and that was new.21
Word of Mason’s Declaration spread quickly throughout the state. Thomas Jefferson, at the Philadelphia Congress, learned of it and employed its theory of a right to self-determination in drafting the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson would also have noted the statement of individual rights in section 1 of the Virginia Declaration.
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 enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Jefferson’s draft dropped Mason’s reference to property rights, added a nod to the unnamed Creator and provided a different spelling for “inalienable,” but otherwise simply cleaned up Mason’s prose.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Style matters. The Declaration of Independence is deservedly remembered, the Virginia Declaration of Rights not, and not just because of the difference in political importance. Mason needed an editor, and got a superb one in Jefferson, who himself benefited from Benjamin Franklin’s pen. Nevertheless, the importance of Mason’s draft as the inspiration for the language of the Declaration of Independence can scarcely be minimized.22
Mason and Jefferson took their republicanism to the next level by seeking to subvert aristocratic institutions. Section 4 of Mason’s Virginia Declaration took aim at aristocracy’s claim of political preference.
No man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services; which, not being descendible, neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge to be hereditary.
Jefferson too sought to eradicate aristocratic privileges. After serving in the Continental Congress, he returned to Virginia, where he served in the House of Delegates. One of his first acts as a Virginia politician was to sponsor a bill to reform the state’s private laws, and he took particular aim at the system of primogeniture. This was a presumptive rule under which, if a person died without a will, all his property descended to his first-born son. The point was to preserve the integrity of family fortunes, and made an otherwise unappealing first-born son a very eligible bachelor in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Primogeniture was received in Virginia as part of its common law inheritance, even though it was much resented by younger sons such as Jefferson. Whether the rule really made a difference has been doubted, since a father could avoid it through an explicit devise in a will to his younger children.23 Nevertheless, default rules have an expressive effect, signaling what the state regards as a reasonable rule of succession, and it was this that Jefferson wished to change in 1776. What he sought, he later recalled, was a “republican” code of laws, one in which “every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy.”24
Mason was a wealthy planter from Virginia’s Northern Neck, and a confidante of Washington. Jefferson’s father owned a smaller farm, but his mother was a Randolph and he was related to many of the First Families of Virginia. How was it, then, that the two were so hostile to aristocracy? It’s not as though we’d think either of them to be democrats today. The right to vote was severely limited, and Virginia adopted universal suffrage only in 1851, when landowning qualifications were abolished. Even then, women could not vote, nor could Mason’s and Jefferson’s slaves, of course.
Voters could not elect governors either, since they were chosen by the legislators under the 1776 Virginia Constitution that Mason had drafted and for which Jefferson had signaled his approval. “It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people,” said Mason, “as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”25 Madison proposed the same thing in his Virginia Plan at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. Senators would be chosen by the House of Representatives, and Presidents would be chosen from Congress, which Madison described as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”26 The lower orders would take their places in the state legislatures, while “the purest and noblest characters” in society would occupy the more senior places in the federal government.27 That indeed was how the Framers thought that presidents would almost always be chosen, in the Constitution they gave us.28
All this would seem like an aristocratic form of government to us. But the Framers did not see themselves as aristocrats. They knew they would survive the filtration process, but they did not think their traits were heritable. Our own descendants, said George Mason, will in a short time be distributed “throughout the lowest classes of Society.”29 Those who wished well for their children would therefore want a constitution that worked for everyone, for the character and talents of one’s children were hidden behind a veil of ignorance.
In the fullness of time, the Framers’ constitution would become democratic. The president would come to be popularly chosen, and after the Seventeenth Amendment senators also would be elected by the people. The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration echoed the Declaration of Independence in its demand for equality for women,30 and the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence was the promissory note that Martin Luther King, Jr. presented for payment at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The Framers’ constitution was a sealed train, speeding through the night and emerging into the light on arrival.
The Invention of the American Dream
NOT ALL OF THE DELEGATES TO THE 1787 PHILADELPHIA Convention were the demigods Jefferson took them to be, and George Mason looked down on some of them with the aristocratic disdain of a Virginia planter.
You may have supposed they were an assemblage of great men. There is nothing less true. From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.1
That’s how people from other states have often seemed to Virginians. However, the delegates included sixteen lawyers, four judges, seven politicians, four planters, and two physicians.2 Twenty-nine of them had undergraduate degrees, nine from Princeton, four each from Yale and William and Mary, and three each from Harvard and King’s College (Columbia). Three had attended college in Great Britain, at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Glasgow. Six had been trained as lawyers at the Inns of Court in London.3 Half were on Mrs. John Jay’s dinner invitation list, the Social Register of the time.4 By any standard, most were the aristocrats of America.
Did they know that the document they signed would sound the death knell for their class? Very likely not. They could