Stevens Thomson Mason

Colonel Stevens Thomson Mason (December 29, 1760May 10, 1803) was an American lawyer, military officer and planter who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Mason was also a delegate in the Virginia General Assembly and a Republican U.S. Senator from 1794 to 1803. Early and family life Mason was born to Thomson Mason (1733–1785); and his wife at Chopawamsic in Stafford County, Virginia. His ancestors had emigrated generations earlier and owned thousands of acres of land (some developed and farmed by enslaved labor) in Maryland and Virginia. His maternal great grandfather was an attorney and significant landowner in Maryland, and (his grandmother) Ann Eilbeck Mason was his only heir, and determined to provide for her younger sons (including Thomson Mason) by securing land and slaves. His uncle George Mason IV had inherited the Mason family estates by primogeniture in 1735 (though then underage, he took control upon reaching legal majority). His grandmother invested in real estate being developed along the Potomac River in Loudoun County, which by the time of her death may have exceeded the lands his uncle inherited by primogeniture. After education by private tutors as a boy, he and his brothers also had access to the library of his lawyer uncle John Mercer near Fredericksburg. Stevens T. Mason then traveled to Williamsburg, Virginia for higher education at the College of William & Mary, concentrating in legal studies. Officer, lawyer and planter Admitted to the Virginia bar, Mason began a private legal practice in Dumfries, Virginia in Prince William County. His uncle George Mason was one of his clients until his death in 1792. Especially after his father's 1785 death at the family's Raspberry Plain plantation in what had become Loudoun County, Mason operated farms using enslaved labor, as would his descendants. In the 1787 Virginia tax census, Stevens T. Mason owned 33 slaves over 16 years of age, as well as 38 slaves under age 18, 28 horses, 76 cattle, 4 wheeled vehicles and a stud horse. During the American Revolutionary War, as his uncle George served in the Virginia General Assembly and drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights as well as the first Virginia constitution and state seal, Stevens Mason served as an officer in the Continental Army and in the Virginia militia. By the Battle of Yorktown, he was a brigadier general in the Virginia militia as well as an aide to General George Washington.