George Mason Memorial

The George Mason Memorial is a memorial to George Mason in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It commemorates the contributions of George Mason, an important American Founder who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights and served as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Mason is often thought of as the "forgotten Founder." Mason, an Anti-Federalist, did not sign the United States Constitution because it did not abolish the slave trade and because he did not think it had necessary protection for the individual from the federal government. He was sometimes known as the "reluctant statesman," which was also the title of a biography written about him by Robert A. Rutland.