who at sixty-two suffered from gout, stomach trouble, a hatred of political gatherings, and general irritability, believed in government that was close to home, where politicians were known to their neighbors and could be watched by their neighbors. The trip to Philadelphia was the farthest he had ever traveled from home. Before the Revolution he had consented to serve less than a year in Virginia’s House of Burgesses (he could not stand the “babblers,” he said), although he was often available to serve on local boards and committees. He detested the notion of professional politicians; he thought citizens should serve the public good from time to time but be forced to return repeatedly to private life. He was also the author of Virginia’s Bill of Rights, which was to become the basis for the Constitution’s first ten amendments. Mason hated the idea of a strong central government.

Before the other delegates signed the Constitution, they had to listen to Gerry and Randolph and Mason voice their dissents. Gerry listed a number of objections, but the greatest reservation to the Constitution in his mind was the power given Congress to make whatever laws it “may please to call necessary and proper.” With such powers given Congress, Gerry could not put his name to the document.

To Randolph’s way of thinking, “indefinite and dangerous power” had been given to the central government. He thought that the states ought to be allowed to amend the document in their ratifying conventions. This suggestion of his had been turned down, so he could not sign the Constitution.

As for Mason, he was dumbfounded that the Constitution contained no declaration of rights. He had offered to draw up one, based on the Bill of Rights he had written for Virginia, and he had been turned down. On that issue alone he was constrained to withhold his signature. But he had other objections as well. There were to be so few members in the House of Representatives—the democratic house of the Congress, the repository of the voice and will of the people—that “there is not the substance but the shadow only of representation...the laws will therefore be generally made by men little concerned in, and unacquainted with their effects and consequences.”

Altogether, said Mason, the Constitution was not a democratic instrument at all; it set up a government of the few to rule over the many and left the many with almost no means to alter the government. “This government will set out a moderate aristocracy: it is impossible at present to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.” Mason could not give his approval to this prospect.

Thus Gerry and Randolph and Mason earned for themselves a unique appellation in American history: they are the “non-signers,” the ones who didn’t go along, the ones who lost the chance

to have their names on one of the great documents of human history.

But of course they did not entirely escape being Founding Fathers. Whether they signed or not, their arguments were picked up by others not long after the convention adjourned. The state ratifying conventions took up George Mason’s cry for the Bill of Rights, and the states finally prevailed where Mason had not. Several years later, when it appeared that the balance in the government was shifting too greatly toward a central government, Jefferson and Madison took up the argument for local government. We hear the same arguments today—sometimes made dishonestly for the sake of some selfish privilege but often made out of a real understanding and love of liberty and democracy. The debate on the Constitution did not end in 1787. And the non-signers remain models for us in these continuing debates, exemplars of crusty, unassimilable individualism, of the right to pursue one’s own, individual way, to expect to have and enjoy the right of free, unfettered dissent.