Delegates continue to arrive daily, but still not enough for a quorum. Today John Rutledge and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney came in from South Carolina. Pinckney’s second cousin, Charles, and Pierce Butler are expected any day, and will complete the South Carolina complement.
The entire Virginia delegation is now complete with the arrival of George Mason late this evening, accompanied by his son. They settled in at the Indian Queen, another popular and well-appointed inn owned by the entrepreneurial Mrs. House.
George Mason IV is, according to Thomas Jefferson, “the wisest man of his generation.” Patrick Henry considers him to be “the greatest statesman I ever knew,” while James Madison has said Mason “possesses the greatest talents for debate of any man I have ever seen or heard speak.”
Yet, for such glowing remarks about a supposed public figure, Mason is an intensely private person. Until now, he has never ventured beyond his beloved Virginia. Being fourth in the line of Virginia Masons, he inherited his father’s plantation as a young man and married Ann Eilbeck, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Charles County, Maryland. Together they began to construct the family home called Gunston Hall near the Potomac and raised nine children. After Ann’s death in 1777, he remarried three years later to provide a step-mother for his children. He is never happier than being with his family, managing the family plantation and supervising the never-ending construction of Gunston Hall to accommodate a continually growing family, a variety of relatives, and friends.
Mason and George Washington have been neighbors and friends for many years, but their political bonds deepened in July 1774 when Mason drafted the Fairfax Resolves. In consultation with Washington, Mason’s resolutions called for a boycott of imports and exports with Britain and a general convention of states to consider the preservation of Americans’ rights as Englishmen.
In 1776, Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the blueprint for the Declaration of Independence approved by the Continental Congress on July 4. “When any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes,” he wrote, “a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public will.”
At the same time, Mason busied himself drafting a constitution for the new “Commonwealth of Virginia.” Beginning with the Declaration of Rights, it was the first constitutional protection of individual rights in North America. It began by asserting “that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Mason is republican to the core and harbors a deep affinity for liberty but, notwithstanding his own language in the historic documents he drafted, “all men” does not extend to slaves, including his own. In this, Mason finds himself in a moral and philosophical dilemma. Moreover, he is very aware of these contradictory positions. “Slavery,” he has acknowledged, “is a slow poison which is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentleman here is born a petty tyrant…And in such an infernal school are to be educated our future legislators and rulers.”
Washington and Jefferson share Mason’s equivocation about slavery. In his recent “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson admits that, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
This week, Rutledge and Pinckney traveled from Charleston to Philadelphia together. Like Mason, they are slave owners, but they also practice law. Pinckney (usually addressed as General Pinckney) undoubtedly received the best formal education of all the delegates from any state. His father had been the colony’s agent in England where Charles completed his education at Westminster, Oxford, and the Middle Temple. During the War he served as aide-de-camp to Washington at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and eventually was captured by the British when Charleston surrendered. As a prisoner of war for nearly two years, often in close confinement, he exhibited exceptional leadership and patriotism, declaring, “If I had a vein that did not beat with the love of my country, I myself would open it. If I had a drop of blood that could flow dishonorable, I myself would let it out!”
Most of Pinckney’s property was confiscated by the British. However, his legal practice is doing well, and his rice plantation is flourishing. Physically, he is an imposing figure, intelligent, genial and an active member of the Society of the Cincinnati.
Like Pinckney, John Rutledge studied law at the Middle Temple in London and returned to Charleston where he developed a highly successful law practice. Although not born into a wealthy family, within fifteen years he owned five plantations and the slaves who worked them. He claims to dislike slavery and supports banning the African slave trade but has not manumitted his own slaves. Ironically, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, well-known abolitionists, are closely related to his wife, Elizabeth Grimke Rutledge.
Rutledge’s public service includes representing South Carolina at the Stamp Act Congress and later in the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, then serving as the first governor of his State from 1777 to 1782.
These three men will undoubtedly contribute significantly to this convention. The issue of slavery will undoubtedly be raised. Will they be able to compromise? If so, how?