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THE pantheon of American civil religion comprises any number of saints. Though their ranking, even their inclusion, is no matter of consensus, they have their shrines and their votaries. Serious obstacles stand in the way of efforts to historicize these saints. How can we render them historically authentic?
At the same time, the struggles in late eighteenth-century America--during and after the Revolution--over power and policy, over liberty and slavery, resonate to the late twentieth century. Conflict persists over the interpretation of long-ago events, in part because conflict persists over their meaning for the current generation. The quest or a usable past continues in the changing present.
The world of Thomas Jefferson has attracted a great deal of attention.(1) But lesser lights--if such they be--await scrutiny as well. This essay focuses on George Mason--a prominent tobacco planter; a leading Virginian before, during, and after the American Revolution; the man who drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776; and a man sometimes presented, rather than James Madison, as "father of the Bill of Rights." It concentrates on the events of 1787 and 1788. Confronting the entangled history of slavery and freedom for white and black Americans in an era of political revolution and nation building, and connecting with such broad, central questions of policy in the early republic as the powers of government and the limits on those powers, it seeks to sort out Mason's actions and beliefs with regard to slavery, the slave trade, states' rights, and the Bill of Rights.
This essay plays across a triangle of George Mason's words and actions, his interpreters to the historical profession, and his interpreters to the general public. It inquires into the varied roles of historians and of museum professionals, of textbooks and of university presses, in shaping Americans' "knowledge" of the past. Its materials include Mason's treatment in the gentle hands of the custodians of his plantation home, Gunston Hall.
One writer will serve to introduce George Mason and the literature on him. Unlike much of that literature, the following statements contain nothing demonstrably untrue. What they do is establish the case for Mason's historical importance, make it clear that he holds a place in the pantheon of American civil religion, and illustrate the reverence that...