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Admin
Forum Administrator
Saint Kitts and Nevis
114 Posts |
 Posted - 27 Oct 2001 : 21:17:14
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 George Mason: His stand against a Central Federal Government
Mason is relatively unknown among the Founding Fathers of America, but his intellect was renowned as one of the finest in the Colonies. In fact, Thomas Jefferson called Mason "the wisest man of his generation." Mason had very little formal education but was an avid reader of his father's extensive library, considered at the time to be the most extensive library in Virginia. Fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph added: "He was behind none of the sons of Virginia in knowledge of her history and interest. At a glance, he saw to the bottom of every proposition which affected her." James Madison praised Mason as "a powerful reasoner, a profound statesman, and a devoted republican."
This plantation owner and neighbor of George Washington was not well-known outside his native Virginia due to his extreme reluctance to become involved in politics. Mason had a distaste for committee work and a contempt for what he called the "babblers" who predominated in politics. In his will he advised his heirs to prefer "the happiness and independence [of] a private station to the troubles and vexations of public business unless the necessity of the times should engage them in public affairs." Where are the George Mason's of the new millenium?
Mason turned down appointments to both the Continental Congress and the U.S. Senate, but the needs of his turbulent times did cause him to leave home on two significant occasions. From 1775 to 1780, he served reluctantly in the Virginia House of Delegates, where he took a leading role in every aspect of formulating a new state government and almost single-handedly wrote the state constitution and the Declaration of Rights. The second occasion was in 1787, when Mason was persuaded to leave his native state to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Here he was one of the five most frequent speakers, arguing passionately for individual freedoms and against centralized governmental authority. His persistent objections ring no less true today, and his refusal to sign the final document helped bring attention to the need for a national Bill of Rights.
When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was called, Mason arrived on May 17 and had been in town less than two weeks when he wrote to his son that he had begun "to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city."
For once, Mason was impressed by his peers, writing that "America has certainly, upon this occasion, drawn forth her first characters." He was also impressed by the seriousness of the business at hand, noting that "the eyes of the united States are turned upon this assembly, . . . may God grant that we may be able to gratify them, by establishing a wise and just government."
Throughout the convention, Mason consistently spoke out in favor of the rights of individuals and the states as opposed to the federal government. He spoke out strongly against a ten square mile Federal district (Washington, DC) that ironically came to be located just a few miles from his home. Concerning the proposed District of Columbia, Mason said:
"This ten miles square may set at defiance the laws of the surrounding states and may . . . become the sanctuary of the blackest crimes! Here the federal courts are to sit . . . what sort of jury shall we have within the ten miles square? The immediate creatures of government!"
There are many today who would agree with those words spoken more than 200 years ago by perhaps one of America's finest advocates of Freedom and Liberty. Is there any doubt that Washington, DC, has become one of the highest crime cities in America? How odd that the current history books used in our public schools make little mention of George Mason. Is this due to the fact that Mason was an adamant Anti-Federalist and oppossed a large Central Government for the united States of America?
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He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore do greatly err. - Mark 12:27 |
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Manuel
Advanced Member
USA
762 Posts |
Posted - 28 Oct 2001 : 18:24:30
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Greetings,
Richard Henry Lee, an Anti-Federalist, denied that the American situation in the mid-1780's was as desperate as Madison and others claimed. There where problems, he conceded; the state legislators, "by making tender suspension and paper money laws, have given just cause of uneasiness to creditors... "It is natural for men," he complained, "who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure to tell us now is the crisis - now is the critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost." But he added, behind their talk of crisis the Federalists sought "to destroy ultimately the state governments and form one consolidated system."
Richard Henry Lee used fewer words in his Letters from the Federal Farmer: "Every man of reflection must see that the change now proposed is a transfer of power from the many to the few."
Perhaps more important than anything else in creating what Madison called "the uneasiness which produced the convention" was the "rebellion" in western Massachusetts led by a former Army captain, Daniel Shays, in autumn and winter of 1786. Mobs of hard pressed rural debtors sought to prevent the county courts from sitting. When they were ordered to disperse and declared outlaws, Shays's men then sought to capture federal arsenal. Shays and his farmer army were repulsed and then hunted down by a loyal militia financed by merchants' contributions and manned by college boys from
Boston.
As one American minister put it: "power abused ceases to be lawful authority and degenerates into tyranny. Liberty abused, or carried to excess, is licentiousness."
A leading Anti-Federalist pamphleteer in Pennsylvania was not above enlisting "the oracle" against the Federalist position: "When the legislative and executive powers, says Montesquieu, are united in the person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty." A similar note was struck at the Virginia ratification convention, where the abandonment of the separation of powers was cited again as an obvious indication of the Constitution's assault on cherished principles of freedom: "That the legislature, executive, and judicial powers should be separate and distinct, in all free governments, is a political fact...well established... every schoolboy in politics must be convinced of the propriety of the observation; and yet by the proposed plan, the legislative and executive powers are closely united."
- Excerpts above taken from "The Federalist: A Collection of Essays
"As agreed upon by the federal convention, September 17, 1787.
Today, over two hundred years have passed, and the same brood of vipers continue to loot, plunder and steal - Attorn-ers and their BARfly cohorts! They have turned the separation of powers and checks and balance into a National Bar where all "licensed" into their 'same hands group' will be drunken in their Franchise called "LOOTERS."
A Dios,
Manuel
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Edited by - Manuel on 28 Oct 2001 18:32:35 |
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