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5 1 } The Early Years When it came to colonial pedigree, the Masons of Virginia stood second to none. Masons served Virginia and the new nation in a variety of ways that brought honor on the family name. By the time Stevens Thomson Mason—or Tom, as he was familiarly called—was born in 1811, the family enjoyed an immense popularity in the Old Dominion. They were, in short, of patrician stock in what was still a frontier society. George Mason wrote the first constitution of Virginia, and it was to his colonial home of Gunston Hall on the Potomac River that liberty-minded men came to exchange radical ideas. Another Mason served as a member of the first Supreme Court of his state. In later years, Masons served in presidential cabinets and in the highest military positions. Stevens T. Mason’s grandfather, for whom he had been named, died in 1803, but not before he had served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He ably assisted General George Washington on his staff and established an atmosphere of learning and culture at Raspberry Plain, the family estate, in Loudoun County, Virginia, near Leesburg. The elder Stevens T. Mason packed a lot into his brief life of forty-two years; he also was a member of the Virginia state legislature and a U.S. senator from Virginia from 1794 until his death. A lawyer, he was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party. So the younger Stevens T. Mason, the future governor of Michigan, was born on October 27, 1811, into a family of social prominence. The Masons counted Andrew Jackson among their family friends, and that hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 paid a visit to the Mason home when Tom was just a lad. As the fates would have it, Old Hickory was destined to play an outsized role in the life and career of Stevens T. Mason. 6 the boy governor John Thomson Mason (1787–1850) was the eldest child of the elder Stevens Thomson Mason and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Armistead. Born at Raspberry Plain, John T. Mason was educated at Charlotte Hall Military Academy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and at William and Mary College in Williamsburg , Virginia. Episcopalian by religious preference, he married Elizabeth Moir, a native of Williamsburg, on February 9, 1809, in Williamsburg and settled down to practice law. What John T. Mason lacked in his ancestors’ leadership skills and dedication to public service was counterbalanced by his imagination and improvisation . He had a nose for business and a desire to get ahead. Virginia, where he normally would have been a man of influence, couldn’t contain him, however, when the West beckoned. Here money was to be made, opportunities might be cashed in, and a solid future could be staked out. The new country, not yet forty years old, was already looking to expand. Created in 1787, the Northwest Territory, an immense tract of land northwest of the Ohio River, was attracting settlers. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation. Native Americans, pushed off their seaboard lands and then across the Appalachians, were forced westward. But before the West could be settled, another war with Great Britain had to be fought; on the home front, the War of 1812 was turning out disastrously. The British pillaged Washington and put the White House to flames. Only eleventh-hour victories at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and in western Lake Erie by Oliver Hazard Perry saved the day for the Americans, with the result that the war ended in a kind of stalemate, with neither side able to claim outright victory. Still, the Americans had rallied to defend their new country, and the result was a newfound feeling of confidence. That spirit of confidence took expression in two significant ways. First, on the Fourth of July in 1817, construction began on the Erie Canal in New York State. One of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken, the 360mile artificial waterway linked Albany on the Hudson River with Buffalo on Lake Erie. As one historian notes, “Americans perceived the canal as an expression of faith in the potentials of a free society, a message of hope for a great young nation on the move.”1 The Erie Canal transformed America and greatly facilitated the Industrial Revolution. Goods, supplies, produce, and building materials of every kind were transported on this highway of...

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