James Murray Mason

Mason was born on Analostan Island, now Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the District of Columbia. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (1818) and received a law degree from the College of William & Mary (1820).

He practiced law in Virginia, and was a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830 and a member of the House of Delegates. He was elected to the Twenty-fifth United States Congress in 1836 as a Jackson Democrat.

In 1847, he was elected to the Senate after the death of Isaac S. Pennybacker, and he was re-elected in 1850 and 1856. Mason famously read aloud the dying Senator John C. Calhoun's final speech to the Senate, on March 4, 1850, which warned of the likely breakup of the country if the North did not permanently accept the existence of slavery in the South, as well as its expansion into the Western territories. He also complained of Northern personal liberty laws, intended to help fugitive slaves: "Although the loss of property is felt, the loss of honor is felt still more."[3]

Mason was President pro tempore of the Senate in 1857.

Mason "championed the Southern political platform", "and slavery, another of the three themes that most affected his life, lay at the core of that political ideology."[4] (The other two themes were the secession of Virginia and the establishment of the Confederacy.)

Mason was not only a white supremacist—most white Southerners and many Northerners were—, he believed that negroes were "the great curse of the country". Giving Blacks the vote particularly offended him; it was, he thought, the rule of the mob and the "end of the republic."[5][6]^:260

He so believed in the beneficence of slavery that he did not support the colonization project that led to the founding of Liberia. Mason's solution to the "problem" of free blacks was returning them to slavery, which he believed was in their best interest. According to him, they were better off enslaved in the United States than they could possibly be in Africa.

He believed that slavery did not need to be established or require a law to make it legal; it had already been established by God, as recorded in the Bible. It already existed in Africa: "The negro is as much property in Africa as the bullock or the ox". His position was that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery anywhere, and certainly not in Kansas.[7] Slavery was a condition, not an institution, by which he meant that Americans were not enslaving Africans, they were merely purchasing them from other Africans that had already enslaved them.

Mason wrote the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, arguably the most hated and openly-evaded Federal legislation in U.S. history. The whole idea of using "popular sovereignty" as a means to expand slavery into the Western territories, starting with Kansas, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the violence of the Bleeding Kansas period, was hatched in Mason's Washington boarding house.[6]^:65 Mason also was the chair of the ad-hoc Senate committee that investigated John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and wrote its report, informally known as the Mason Report.[8] He believed that Brown had been put up to his raid by Northern abolitionists, and was disappointed when his committee, after six months of work, could not find any basis to dispute Brown's statement that it was his own idea.

Continuing the tradition of his mentor John C. Calhoun, whose last speech Mason read to the Senate when Calhoun was too sick to do so himself, Mason strongly believed states had the right to secede. Furthermore, the North's intolerance of their "peculiar institution", their "property rights" (the right to own human beings), left them no other choice than secession. He said he didn't need reasons to leave the Union, he needed a reason to stay in the Union.[4]^:101

Mason was strongly in favor of the South's "immediate, absolute, and eternal separation" if anti-slavery, Republican candidate John C. Frémont were elected president in 1856.[4]^:83

In 1861 he worked behind the scenes to enable Virginia's secession, remaining in the Senate because he could get information useful for the seceding states, a type of spy behind enemy lines.[4]^:100 He and Virginia's other Senator, Robert Hunter, told the commissioners of the new Confederate states that Virginia would join the secession if Jefferson Davis were elected president of a Southern confederacy, but not if it were pro-slavery Alabama Fire-Eater William L. Yancey, seen in Virginia as extreme. Davis was chosen as president three days later.[4]^:103

Mason disappears from Senate activities in March. He and other Southern senators were expelled from the Senate on July 11, 1861, by a vote of 32 to 10, because "they were engaged in a conspiracy for the destruction of the Union and Government, or, with full knowledge of said conspiracy, had failed to advise the Government of its progress or aid in its suppression."[9][10]

While he was traveling to his new post as Confederate envoy to Britain on the British mail steamer RMS Trent, the ship was stopped by USS San Jacinto on November 8, 1861. Mason and fellow Confederate diplomat John Slidell were confined in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, precipitating the Trent Affair, which threatened to bring Britain into open war with the United States.

The US public erupted with a huge display of triumphalism at this dramatic capture. Even the cool-headed Lincoln was swept along in the celebratory spirit, but when he and his cabinet studied the likely consequences of a war with Britain, their enthusiasm waned. After some careful diplomatic exchanges, they admitted that the capture was contrary to maritime law and that private citizens could not be classified as "enemy despatches." Slidell and Mason were released, and war was averted. The two diplomats set sail for England again on January 1, 1862.

Mason represented the Confederacy in England, bringing up Union blockades and unsuccessfully seeking diplomatic recognition for the Confederacy. After Britain issued its refusal in 1863, he moved to Paris, continuing his unsuccessful search for a nation that would recognize or assist the Confederacy. He was there until April 1865.[11]

First Selma mansion, Winchester, Virginia, destroyed in 1863

When the Union army took over Winchester in 1862, at first "Selma", Mason's house, was used for regimental offices.[12]^:67–68 (There are other houses named Selma in Eastville and Leesburg, Virginia.) The lower officers probably did not know who Mason was. But General Banks, formerly a congressman and then governor of Massachusetts, certainly knew. Learning of Mason's pro-slavery activism and his authorship of the hated Fugitive Slave Act, the soldiers, on their own initiative, set about destroying Selma. The roof came off first. Sometime later the walls were pulled down and everything burnable was chopped into firewood. They were so thorough that "from turret to foundation stone, not one stone remains upon another; the negro houses, the out-buildings [there was an ice house], the fences are all gone, and even the trees are many of them girdled".[13] According to Mason, the house was "obliterated".[5] He never lived in Winchester again.

From 1865 until 1868 Mason lived in exile in Canada. After sanctions on Confederate officials were lifted, he returned to the United States, and bought the Clarens Estate, on 26 acres (11 ha), today in Alexandria, Virginia. (In 2008 the house alone sold for over $8,000,000 (equivalent to $9,499,845 in 2019).)[6]^:258–259 He brought white servants from Canada, and went to some trouble to find others, as he did not want to hire any Blacks; he believed free Blacks to be "worse than worthless".[6]^:260 He died at Clarens in 1871, and was interred in the churchyard of Christ Church (Alexandria, Virginia).[1][2] His death was not noted by anyone outside his family.[6]^:264

James M. Mason, photograph by Mathew Brady

• List of United States Senators expelled or censured

• Young, Robert W. (1998). Senator James Murray Mason : defender of the old South. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 087049998X.
• Gewalt, Gerard W. (2015). Clashing Dynasties Charles Francis Adams and James Murray Mason in the Fiery Cauldron of the Civil War. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 9781519347916.

• "Mason, James Murray" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
• "Mason, James Murray" . The New Student's Reference Work . 1914.