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American politician (1798–1871)

James Murray Mason (November 3, 1798April 28, 1871) was an American lawyer, politician, and Confederate statesman. He served as senator from Virginia, having previously represented Frederick County, Virginia, in the Virginia House of Delegates. A grandson of George Mason, Mason strongly supported slavery as well as Virginia's secession as the American Civil War began. As chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1851 until his expulsion in 1861 for supporting the Confederate States of America, Mason took great interest in protecting American cotton exporters. As the Confederacy's leading diplomat, he traveled to Europe seeking support, but proved unable to get the United Kingdom to recognize the Confederacy as a country. As Mason sailed to England in November 1861, the U. S. Navy captured his ship and detained him, in what became known as the Trent Affair. Released after two months, Mason continued his voyage, and assisted Confederate purchases from Britain and Europe but failed to achieve their diplomatic involvement. As the war ended, Mason went into exile in Canada, but later returned to Alexandria, Virginia, where he died in 1871.

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

Following admission to the Virginia bar, Mason practiced law in Virginia, and also operated a plantation in Frederick County. Despite a sloppy and damaged census record, he may have owned 5 slaves in the 1830 census. In the 1850 federal census, Mason owned ten enslaved people, half of them children under ten years of age. In that year, he (or another man of similar name) also owned a 25 year old Black woman and her four children in nearby Rappahannock County. In the 1860 census, Mason owned a 49 year old Black man, 35 year old Black woman, and children aged 14, 13, 12, 10 and 3 years old. and he or another James M. Mason owned seven enslaved children (the oldest a 13 year old girl) in southern Culpeper County. Mason soon began his political career, well before his father's death, winning election several times as one of Frederick County's (part time) representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates. His first term began on December 4, 1826, alongside one term veteran James Ship, but only Ship won re election the following year. In 1828, Ship failed to win re election and Mason won the election to represent the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley together with William Castleman, Jr., and both won re election the following year. After veteran legislator Hierome L. Opie, one of the four joint delegates of Frederick and neighboring Jefferson County to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 1830, resigned, Mason took his place alongside John R. Cooke, congressman Alfred H. Powell and fellow delegate Thomas Griggs Jr. Although some had hoped that convention would limit slaveholder power, the resulting constitution only gave additional votes to western Virginians (including those in Frederick County and those counties which would secede and become West Virginia during the American Civil War), so Mason and Castleman were re elected and joined by William Wood for the 1830 1831 legislative session. In 1836, Congressman Edward Lucas of Shepherdstown (in what would become West Virginia decades later) announced his retirement. Voters in Virginia's 15th congressional district elected Mason as his successor in the Twenty fifth United States Congress. The Jackson Democrat only served a single term, succeeded by Lucas' brother William Lucas. In 1847, Virginia legislators elected Mason to the Senate after incumbent Isaac S. Pennybacker died in office, and Mason won re election 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. Mason 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." 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." (The other two themes were the secession of Virginia and the establishment of the Confederacy.) Mason was not only a white supremacist, 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." 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. 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.

Continuing the tradition of his mentor John C. Calhoun, whose last speech (1850) 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.

Mason became one of Virginia's representatives to the Provisional Confederate Congress from February 1861 through February 1862. However, his legislative duties were interrupted by a diplomatic assignment. While Mason sailed toward England as a 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 in Boston Harbor. The Trent Affair threatened to bring Britain into open war with the United States, despite triumphant rhetoric in the north. Even the cool headed Lincoln was swept along in the celebratory spirit, but enthusiasm waned when he and his cabinet studied the likely consequences of a war with Britain. After 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.