George Mason: Reluctant Statesman

1. Heir to a Personal Dominion

C H A P T E R O N E Heir to a Personal Dominion MENTION the Northern Neck to a present-day Virginian and there will arise in his mind the image of a long, flat finger of land still predominantly rural, still carrying landmarks left behind by a plantation aristocracy, still retaining in names like Westmoreland , Northumberland, and Lancaster reminders of Englishmen who settled there and established tiny outposts of British enterprise and culture. Three centuries ago those outposts flourished and multiplied against a background of tobacco. The soil of this slender peninsula was rich, its air was good, and its flanking rivers were nearby highways to Mother England. Free of the swamplands and miasmatic "vapors" of watersheds farther to the south, the Northern Neck was a good place to settle down and build a home, to rear a family and make a fortune. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginians looked upon it as a hospitable wilderness and hoped to achieve those things. Once 3 4 GEORGE MASON: RELUCTANT STATESMAN there, they learned to live with and manipulate the cumbersome system by which the Neck slowly evolved from a proprietary dominion (by 1700 almost wholly controlled by the Fairfax family) into a pattern of plantations owned by aggressive, ambitious settlers . Absentee control by the Fairfaxes aided this transition. Entail , primogeniture, and artful techniques in speculation completed it and led to the accumulation of vast estates. "Headright" patents of land, which elsewhere divided huge tracts into small parcels, never caught hold on the Neck. Therefore the measure of a man became the number of square miles in his estate and the number of window panes in his mansion. The glass cost more than the land. Most prosperous were the planters. And among those fortunate few, more successful than most, were the ancestors of George Mason. By the time he was born in 1725 the Mason name had become synonymous with wealth and leadership, talent and taste. Between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers that flanked the Northern Neck there had sprung up an elite group of families. Their patriarchs were the leaders at the balls and the barbecues, the arbiters of justice in the courts. They owned the ferries, and they sat in the General Assembly. They were the Carters, the Lees, the Washingtons, the Masons. From the very beginning, these families imparted to the Northern Neck a tinge of aristocracy that obscured the New World roots of the region. With land the basis for their wealth, it was the English model of elegance that was constantly portrayed as their ideal. It was the one they knew best. Few residents of the Neck would have called themselves Americans. When they thought of it at all, they probably thought of themselves as English-Americans , or simply as Virginians. Born to the membership of gentlemen in this pleasant countryside , George Mason knew where to find the deer in its forests, the fish in its ponds and streams. Like the young colts he raced over HEIR TO A PERSONAL D O M I N I O N 5 the meadows toward a neighboring plantation, he was eager, exploratory , active, more active than he would ever again be, once his body had stopped growing and the yet-unsuspectedgout had taken hold. To other second- and third-generation gentry he made himself an amiable companion. There would be plenty of time for them to step forward as the leaders of their class. The pattern had already been fixed, and before them were notable examples of the pathway to affluence and power. Of these examples none was more impressive than that left by Robert ("King") Carter. When Carter died, in Mason's seventh year, he had acquired more than 200,000 acres of the Neck and had sat on the Governor's Council in Williamsburg. Men like Mason's father, and Augustine Washington, were either more modest or less speculative. They reasoned that between five and ten thousand acres would serve their needs temporarily. Their sons would discover such holdings adequate enough to launch them on their quest for the good life. And good life it was for those landholders at the top rung of the Northern Neck's social ladder. Douglas Southall Freeman found eight distinct classes in pre-Revolutionary Virginia, running from the gentry to the slaves, with those two ranks both "supposed to be of immutable station." Between them stood small farmers...