Editorial (Vol. I, No. II)

Liggio discusses George Mason and Daniel Morgan.

Leonard P. Liggio

Leonard Liggio was the Executive Vice President of Academics at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Distinguished Senior Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies, and a Research Professor at George Mason University’s School of Law.

F.A. Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) notes that the constitutions of the individual states between 1776 and 1787 “show more clearly than the final Constitution of the Union how much the limitation of all governmental power was the object of constitutionalism. This appears, above all, from the prominent position that was everywhere given to inviolable individual rights, which were listed either as part of these constitutional documents or as separate Bills of Rights.… The most famous of these Bills of Rights, that of Virginia, which was drafted and adopted before the Declaration of Independence and modeled on English and colonial precedents, largely served as the prototype not only for those of the other states but also for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 and, through that, for all similar European documents.” One source for Europeans was the Jefferson-​inspired Researches on the United States (1788; 1976) by Filippo Mazzei, which discussed the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

What impressed Hayek was the Founding Fathers’ oft-​repeated insistence that “…a frequent recurrency to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessing of liberty.” Here Hayek was quoting from the draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 1776), by George Mason.

George Mason (1725–1792) was featured as the cover portrait of our first issue. Mason epitomized the highest ideals of the Founding Fathers as expressed in the Bill of Rights. As a member of the Virginia Committee of Safety and Convention in 1775 and 1776, Mason drew up Virginia’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, which exerted a radical influence on American constitutional institutions.

Mason was serving in the Virginia House of Delegates (1776–1788) when he was appointed a member of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Since he was a strong advocate of gradual emancipation, he opposed legitimizing slavery in the Constitution as a bargaining point in the convention to obtain consensus on the Constitution. His radical republicanism condemned central government as a danger to individual freedom, and valued local government as a bulwark of freedom against centralized authority. He distrusted the strong powers granted the national government by the new Constitution and headed the opposition to its ratification in the Virginia convention. After ratification, Mason insisted on amendments which led to the Bill of Rights.

Hayek seconds Mason’s caution, by emphasizing how necessary the Bill of Rights was as a control on the powers of the government. “The danger so clearly seen at the time was guarded against by the careful proviso (in the Ninth Amendment) that ‘the enumeration of certain rights in this Constitution shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.’” A recent discussion of Mason’s significance appears in Bernard Schwartz, The Great Rights of Mankind (New York, Oxford University Press, 1977). This study supplements Roscoe Pound’s The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty (1957) and Bennett B. Patterson’s Forgotten Ninth Amendment (1955).

Daniel Morgan (1736–1802), the ‘Revolutionary Rifleman,’ dramatically confirms Von Clausewitz’s judgment that when an armed citizenry conducts it, “warfare introduces a means of defense peculiar to itself.” Morgan embodies the frontier spirit which is the foundation of American culture. His attitude to authority was typical of the American frontiersman.

Serving with the Virginia Rangers in the French and Indian War, Morgan learned the advantages of guerrilla tactics against regular troops. Rangers dressed in buckskin and moccasins, and armed with the Kentucky long-​rifle, were able to achieve mobility and accuracy of shooting unknown to regular armies. The long-​rifle was used by rangers to hit the regular troops whose muskets had a much shorter range; its deadly accuracy felled enemy officers, whose loss then created confusion in the ranks.

In 1775, Morgan headed Virginia’s first light infantry company raised for the American Revolution. Two years later he took command of a special corps of light infantry or rangers. This corps, known later as “Morgan’s Rangers,” played a crucial role in the American victory at the battles of Saratoga (September–October 1777). Saratoga was the military turning point in the American Revolution, and it showed that politically-​committed military forcus could be gathered from the countryside to fight successfully.

Later, during the southern campaign (1780–1781) Morgan raised the political awareness of patriots in the Carolinas and mobilized the militias there. This discouraged the Loyalists from joining the British. Once the militias were assembled, Morgan exhorted them to aid the cause of liberty by repelling the invading British. Morgan worked out and implemented important approaches to guerrilla tactics which led to the defeat of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. His greatness as a guerrilla tactician combined his political and military leadership of the American militias.

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