Research

Research and exploration are at the heart of the Center for Mason Legacies. The idea for the center itself came out of the Enslaved Children of George Mason research project, an Undergraduate Research Scholars Program of summer 2017.

That project led CML to investigate important social and cultural issues stretching far beyond the time of George Mason IV and his immediate descendants. You can explore some of these using the menu options at left.

George Mason IV is revered for writings that informed America's central ideas of liberty and citizenship, most famously his Virginia Declaration of Rights, which served as the basis for the Bill of Rights. His influence and accomplishments are among the legacies Mason IV bestowed on Virginia and the wider United States.

Yet scholars have for too long overlooked another of his direct and lasting legacies: his upholding of the system of slavery and its lasting generational effects. As the patriarch of extensive Virginia land and businesses augmented through blood ties and marriages, Mason IV and his children built their family's economic success on a foundation of inherited property that included enslaved people. As his descendants launched into society's top echelons, they became prominent civic leaders in their own right.

CML's expanding history of these generations of Masons—drawing on the papers of their Gunston Hall Plantation along with primary sources and other evidence found across Virginia and Maryland—help illuminate life experiences of enslaved people too rarely studied before. Our faculty and student researchers' reconstruction and chronicling of these lives, combining archival, digital and geospatial methods, have led to powerful new modes of scholarship into the lives of previously unseen communities that we now apply across the range of CML research.