Books, Arts & Manners: The Antifederalist

The Papers of George Mason 1725-1792 Edited by Robert A. Rutland University of North Carolina Press, 3 volumes, 1312 pp., $45

Apart from occasional half-hearted attempts to dragoon “The Father of the Bill of Rights” into the weird role of patron saint of the ACLU, none of the great lawgivers of the early Republic is so little known or revered in the twentieth century as Mason. The reasons for his eclipse are several. He eschewed office, particularly federal office. Already fifty when the Revolution began, he passed from the scene early, in 1792. His influence was greater in the wings than on center stage, so that much of his fame perished with his contemporaries. Worst of all, he was father to the lost cause of Antifederalism, a cause which stumbled in 1787 and which, after a deceptively successful holding action of threequarters of a century, went down not only to total defeat but to obloquy in 1865.

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Clyde Wilson

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The Papers of George Mason 1725-1792 Edited by Robert A. Rutland University of North Carolina Press, 3 volumes, 1312 pp., $45

Apart from occasional half-hearted attempts to dragoon “The Father of the Bill of Rights” into the weird role of patron saint of the ACLU, none of the great lawgivers of the early Republic is so little known or revered in the twentieth century as Mason. The reasons for his eclipse are several. He eschewed office, particularly federal office. Already fifty when the Revolution began, he passed from the scene early, in 1792. His influence was greater in the wings than on center stage, so that much of his fame perished with his contemporaries. Worst of all, he was father to the lost cause of Antifederalism, a cause which stumbled in 1787 and which, after a deceptively successful holding action of threequarters of a century, went down not only to total defeat but to obloquy in 1865.