George Mason: Reluctant Statesman

by Robert Allen Rutland

Book Overview

George Mason of Gunston Hall was a scholarly craftsman of government during America's crucial formative years. His Virginia Declaration of Rights provided a sense of purpose and direction to the rebellious colonies, and his vigorous insistence on the protection of personal liberties in the Constitution is reflected in the document's first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. Fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson said of Mason that he "was of the first...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807106968
• ISBN13: 9780807106969
• Release Date: April 1980
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.1" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

george mason reluctant statesman

the book was very informative and interesting we need more books available about our founding fathers....everyone seems to have forgotten about george washington,,who set us free from britian and made us what we are today...geo. mason is highly recommended...

Someone we all need to know better

In an era when Americans seem to be quickly losing touch with their own history, one of the greatest crimes of all is that the name of George Mason has faded into almost complete obscurity (if there weren't a university named after him in Virginia, how much worse would it be?).In his foreword to this brief book, Dumas Malone, the biographer of Jefferson, notes what a shame this is: 'More than any other single American, except possibly Thomas Jefferson, whom in some sense he anticipated, George Mason may be regarded as the herald of this new era [of declarations of rights]; and in our own age, when the rights of individual human beings are being challenged by totalitarianism around the world, men can still find inspiration in his noble words.'Biographies of Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (which inspired, among other things, the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen) are woefully few. Rutland's short book is a fine and easily digestible introduction to the man, his times, and his impact upon history. The value of that is hard to overstate.