Politics

1776 All-Stars: Why George Mason Is Extremely Underrated

I'm not saying that just because I teach at the university named after him.

Ilya Somin | From the July 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson, ChatGPT-5.4; Source images: Wikimedia)

This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason's top American Founders. Read more here.

George Mason was not the greatest, the most admirable, or the most influential of the Founding Fathers. But he made enormous contributions that are often underrated. And I'm not saying that just because I teach at the university named after him. Mason was the principal drafter of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became a key model for the other state constitutional bills of rights, and eventually for the federal Bill of Rights. Later, he was one of three members of the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the document. Afterward he opposed ratification. Not all his objections to the Constitution were sound, but several were compelling and prescient.

Mason was a prominent Virginia landowner and political leader. In the 1760s and 1770s, he helped lead opposition to Britain's increasingly oppressive trade restrictions, attacks on civil liberties, and other unjust policies. After war broke out in 1775, he advocated independence. In 1776, as a legislator in Virginia's House of Burgesses, Mason became the principal drafter of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first Virginia Constitution. The Virginia Declaration guaranteed........

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