George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, helped shape the Constitutional Convention and then refused to sign the Constitution. This episode explores the forgotten architect of American liberty, a man who sacrificed his popularity and his friendship with George Washington for his principles.

We trace the early death of his father, his self-education and his drive for self-sufficiency at Gunston Hall, and how the Stamp Act pulled him into politics. We examine James Madison’s push from religious tolerance to religious liberty, Mason’s objections in Philadelphia, his fight against ratification in Virginia, and the profound contradiction of his slaveholding.

• How Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights influenced Jefferson and other states
• Why he insisted that money bills originate in the House of Representatives
• His fear that simple-majority trade laws would harm the agricultural South
• Condemning the slave trade while relying on the labor of hundreds of enslaved people
• How Madison drew on Mason’s work when drafting the Bill of Rights