George Mason, at age 50, wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights
in only about 6 weeks. This document lays out the rights of the
Virginian government and the rights of the people who live in Virginia.
George Mason presented it to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in
the middle of June 1776. All of the delegates loved what he had written
and voted to make it Virginia’s “Bill of Rights.” George Mason was one
of the first people to write down and explain the rights of individual
citizens, and so many other colonies wrote similar documents for the
people in their colonies too.
Thomas Jefferson considered George Mason to be one of “the wisest
m[e]n of his generation.” Jefferson at age 33 used George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights for much of the wording of the opening to the Declaration of Independence only a few weeks later. The Declaration of Independence
was the document that the Continental Congress signed on July 4, 1776
to declare independence from Great Britain to form the new country of
the United States of America.