On October 7, 1691, the charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay was issued.
Also on a seventh day of the tenth month, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which closed Indigenous lands in North America north and west of the Alleghenies to white settlements.
On October 7, 1792, George Mason — “The Father of the Bill of Rights” — died. He had drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and, at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, had insisted on the addition of articles to solidify state’s and individual rights within the new order.
George Mason (pictured) has been honored in numerous ways, including by the United States Postal Service with an 18¢ Great Americans series postage stamp; a bas-relief in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives as one of 23 honoring great lawmakers; and with an annual award named for him presented to a person who has made significant, lasting contribution to the practice of journalism in the Commonwealth, awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists, Virginia Pro Chapter.
On October 7, 2003, California Governor Gray Davis was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger voted into Davis’s previous gubernatorial spot.
1 reply on “George Mason”
I think that, were Mason reincarnated in the present, he would bemoan two retreats, and one failure to persuade.
His great failure to persuade was in that he wanted a hard deadline in the Constitution for an end to slavery as a condition of birth. Granted that, had such a deadline been in place, many states would have refused to join or seceded before the deadline went into effect. Still, what remained of the United States would have been better, and the shame of the states that accepted slavery would have been increased.
Mason retreated on the issue of prohibitting Federal issuance of irredeemable currency. He accepted that some emergency might warrant such action. We see the greater crisis that looms because that prohibition was forgone.
And Mason originally argued for [drumroll] term limits, but felt unable to meet the objection that too few people were qualified to be office-holders.