George Mason

On June 12, 1776, the Virginia Convention formally adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights. In May 1776, the convention had formed a committee to draft a declaration of rights. George Mason was put in charge of composing the document, which outlined the rights of Virginians. Drawing on the 1689 English Bill of Rights (which, in tandem with the 1701 Act of Settlement, amounts to Britain’s “constitution”) and the views of such English Enlightenment social philosophers as John Locke, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was the first of its kind to fully define the rights of citizens and the relationship to their government and was the first colonial statement of individual rights. In addition, it essentially gave the colonists permission to declare independence from Great Britain.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights had an enormous influence. Not long after Virginia passed the document, five other colonies passed similar bills of rights. By the following year, eight additional states had composed similar documents declaring the rights of their citizens. By 1783 all of the states had some sort of bill of rights, and all were modeled extensively on the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Additionally, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson relied heavily on Mason’s Declaration of Rights. Indeed, much of the language in the Declaration of Independence was drawn from Mason’s document.

As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Mason argued for the inclusion of a bill of rights. Although the idea was defeated at the time, the tenets in Mason’s Declaration of Rights were eventually incorporated into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. In 1789 the Virginia Declaration of Rights also became the basis for France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In addition, the United Nations modeled its 1948 Declaration of Human Rights on Mason’s document.

Read the full text of the declaration

View a time line of related events

See essential quotes from the declaration

For immediate download: Expert analysis of the declaration by Nicole Mitchell