George Mason, unalienable rights nut

Radley Balko has a great piece on George Mason the man and his eponymous University.The salient chunk:

Mason was never president. Nor did he sign the Constitution. But he was enormously influential in helping craft it. In fact, George Mason was probably early America's most eloquent defender of individual liberty. Principled and uncompromising, Mason was a man who loathed politics but understood the urgency of the times in which he lived, and engaged in politics to help ensure his new country put a premium on freedom.

Mason was an unabashed radical, perhaps the foremost defender of individual rights, localism, and critic of government among an already radical group of founding fathers, including Madison, Jefferson, and Paine.

While helping craft the Virginia state constitution in June 1776, Mason single-handedly wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the first universal declaration of individual rights in the colonies. It was Mason's belief, influenced by John Locke, that certain rights were unalienable, and so fundamental to a free society they should be expressly guaranteed in a state's governing document.

It was a principle that would later be tested, and would pit Mason against the more recognizable names in the American founding.

That happened in 1787, when Mason served as a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Held in eminent esteem by his fellow delegates, Mason played a critical role in drafting key parts of the U.S. Constitution. But he ultimately couldn't bring himself to sign it.

One of Mason's concerns was slavery. Though he was a man of the south, born into a slave-holding family, and himself a slave owner, Mason loathed the institution, and recognized the absurdity of a country founded on individual rights giving a de facto imprimatur to slavery in its founding and governing document.

Mason recognized the economic necessity of slavery, at least in the short term, but held hope that the practice could be abolished as soon as was feasible. The infamous three-fifths compromise reached by the delegates in Philadelphia left Mason bitter and disappointed. It remains a glaring blemish on an otherwise exquisite document. Had Mason's peers heeded his advice, America may well have been spared the bloodshed and anguish of the Civil War.

Mason's most adamant objection to the U.S. Constitution was its lack of an enumeration of rights similar to the list he'd written for Virginia. He fiercely advocated for the inclusion of such a list, but was badly outnumbered.

Some delegates felt a "Bill of Rights" was unnecessary. Others, like James Madison, feared that the enumeration of some rights might be interpreted by future generations to exclude rights not mentioned (in retrospect, both Madison and Mason were probably correct).

In the end, the Constitution was ratified without a Bill of Rights. George Mason not only declined to sign the document, he actively campaigned against its ratification, souring his relationship with the men he'd stood with through the revolution, including Washington, Madison and Jefferson.

Mason was vindicated in 1791, when the country amended the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights. Those ten amendments, authored by Madison, bore the unmistakable influence of Mason's own list from the Virginia constitution.