George Mason

George Mason was born in 1725 in Fairfax County, Virginia, into a family of wealthy planters. His father drowned when he was ten, and he was educated with the help of his uncle's large library. He managed Gunston Hall, his plantation on the Potomac River, which was worked by enslaved people, and served in local offices and briefly in the Virginia House of Burgesses. A neighbor and friend of George Washington, he wrote much of the Fairfax Resolves (1774), which protested British policies. In 1776 he was the principal author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which declared that all men are by nature equally free and independent and listed rights such as freedom of the press and of religion; it influenced the Declaration of Independence and later the Bill of Rights. He also helped write Virginia's first constitution. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 he was one of three delegates who refused to sign, objecting chiefly that it lacked a bill of rights. He died at Gunston Hall in 1792.

George Mason is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented; he championed religious toleration in Virginia's Declaration of Rights. Source: Wikipedia