The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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George Mason and Rights Declared
In the context of the struggle with Parliament over rights—amidst calls in
the newspaper for overall liberty, and specifically for freedom of the press—Virginia
held a series of revolutionary conventions that led to the colony’s declaration of
independence from Britain. On May 15, 1776, convention president Edmund
Pendleton appointed a committee to form a plan of government and a Declaration
of Rights. This group eventually swelled to 36 members including George Mason,
Patrick Henry, James Madison, Edmund Randolph, Thomas Ludwell Lee, and
committee chairman Archibald Cary. Mason grumbled that the committee was
full of useless members likely to throw out a “thousand ridiculous and impractical
proposals, & of Course, a Plan form’d of hetrogenious, jarring & unintelligible
Ingredients.” Pendleton wrote to Jefferson, who was in Philadelphia at the
Continental Congress, that Mason seemed “to have the Ascendancy in the great
work” of creating the declaration and a new constitution. The statement of rights
that emerged from this committee is considered a landmark: “The Virginia
Declaration of Rights … was the first time in history that freedom of conscience
and of the press was guaranteed by a Constitution.” 84 Most important, perhaps, was
the originality of the precedent which it established: “Virginia’s Declaration of
Rights would be an unprecedented political statement; nowhere in modern times
had a government acknowledged such a concept as individual inalienable rights, let
alone formalized it as a limitation on its own power.” 85 While Mason’s principal
authorship of the landmark Declaration of Rights and the new state constitution
was not widely recognized at the time, both Madison and Randolph later confirmed
84 Daniel T. Shumate, The First Amendment: The Legacy of George Mason (Fairfax, VA:
George Mason University Press, 1985), 11-12.
85 Stephan A. Schwartz, “George Mason: Forgotten Founder, He Conceived the Bill of
Rights,” Smithsonian Magazine 31, no. 2 (May 2000): 149.