◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

I Would Not Sign I am George Mason. Of Gunston Hall, in Virginia. Born 1725, died 1792, out of favor and out of friendship. You use my words every day and do not know they are mine — so let me introduce myself by what I left you. When you speak of your right to say what you please, to worship as you please, to be secure in your house against the officers of the state — those are my sentences. I wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the summer before Jefferson sat down to his. All men are born equally free and independent. I wrote that. He borrowed it. I only want you to know the guarantees you reach for in your worst hour did not fall from heaven. A man wrote them, on purpose, because he did not trust power to restrain itself. And that is why, at the end, I would not sign. I sat in that room in Philadelphia through the whole long summer. I spoke more than almost any man there. And when they brought the finished thing forward, I said I would sooner cut off my right hand than put it to that document as it stood. Because it had no bill of rights. I told them: put in the protections, name the things no ruler may touch, or one day a ruler will touch all of them and point to the silence as his permission. They said it was unnecessary. They were tired. They wanted to go home. I lost that fight in the room. I took it out of the room — into the newspapers, into the ratifying convention — and I made myself hated for it. Washington, my neighbor of thirty years, my friend, never spoke warmly to me again. He called me his former friend. The fight was won even though I lost it: they added the words. Your Bill of Rights exists because three of us refused to sign, and I was the loudest of the three. I also gave them the words to remove a tyrant. When they wrote that a President could be impeached only for treason and bribery, I stood and said it was not enough — that a man may do vast harm to a republic without committing either. I made them add three words. High crimes and misdemeanors. I pray you have the nerve to walk through it, because I did not build it for decoration. Now hear the rest, because you will want to make me a hero, and I will not have it. I stood in that Convention and called slavery what it was — a slow poison, a national sin — and I said it plainly: providence punishes national sins with national calamities. And I owned more than ninety human beings. I said those words with slaveholding hands. I went home from condemning the traffic in men to an estate that ran on it, and I died having freed almost none of them. Do not look away from that. I am asking you not to. Because it is the truest thing I have to teach you: a man can see the evil clearly, name it precisely, warn the future eloquently — and still live inside it, and profit from it, and hand it forward. Clear sight is not the same as clean hands. I had the one. I never managed the other. So do not carve me in marble. Marble is what your country does to men like me so it need not listen to us. I gave you the rights. Use them. I gave you the door. Open it. And I gave you the warning I could not live up to myself — that naming the sin is not the same as ending it, and the naming will not save you. Only the ending will.