John Young Mason

(Redirected from John Young Mason )

American politician and judge (1799–1859)

For other people with the same name, see John Mason (disambiguation) .

John Young Mason (April 18, 1799 – October 3, 1859) was an attorney, planter, judge and politician from Virginia. Mason served in the U.S. House of Representatives after serving in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly , then became the United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (1841-1843), but resigned that position to hold important executive and diplomatic offices in the administrations of Presidents John Tyler, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan before his death in Paris, France shortly before the American Civil War, including as the 16th and 18th United States Secretary of the Navy , the 18th Attorney General of the United States and United States Minister to France .

Early life and education

[(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Y._Mason&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Early life and education")
]

Mason was born on April 18, 1799, at "Homestead" plantation four miles northwest of Hicksford (now Emporia ), the county seat for Greensville County , Virginia . His mother was Frances Young, whose father was the deputy clerk of Isle of Wight County during the American Revolutionary War (and family members would serve as that county's clerks for 118 years, including successfully burying those important records during Tarleton's raids during the American Revolutionary War). His father, Edmund Mason (d.1849), was the second clerk of Greensville County (1807-1834) as well as represented the county in the Virginia House of Delegates (1802-1805, when John was a boy). His grandfather, Col. James Mason, served as a patriot during the American Revolutionary War but died before this boy's birth. These Southside Masons descended from Francis Mason, an Englishman who migrated to the Virginia colony's Hampton Roads area by the mid-1620s, and another Francis Mason began the family's political prominence by representing Surry County in the House of Burgesses in 1691-1692 (before the creation of Greensville and Southampton counties), although another prominent Mason family in Virginia would trace its ancestry to George Mason I who had emigrated to the Northern Neck of Virginia in the 1650s.

After a private education appropriate to his class, including at a neighborhood private school and possibly some home teaching using the family's library, Mason traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina , where he befriended James K. Polk (who graduated in 1818 and later became U.S. President). Mason received an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1816 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He then traveled to Connecticut to study law under the direction of Judge Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield Law School in 1819.

Career

[(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Y._Mason&action=edit&section=2 "Edit section: Career")
]

Planter and lawyer

[(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Y._Mason&action=edit&section=3 "Edit section: Planter and lawyer")
]

Mason was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1819 and began a private legal practice, first in Greensville County (1819 to 1821), then neighboring Southampton County, Virginia (1821 to 1831). During part of his terms as legislator representing Southampton County, Mason also served as the local prosecutor (commonwealth's attorney) for Greensville County (from 1827 to 1831). Mason also had other periods of mostly private practice in the late 1830s and late 1840s, as discussed below.

Shortly after his marriage, described below, Mason's parents gave him a 434 acre plantation in Greensville County, and he and his family would also sometimes live on his father's (and grandfather's) former "Homestead" plantation before Mason sold it back to his parents in 1826. Mason was also one of the founding trustees of the Union Academy of Sussex in 1835. This was because his primary residence after 1823 was Fortsville plantation in western Southampton County (on its border with Sussex County), previously operated by his father-in-law Lewis Fort (who died in 1826).

Mason continued to operate these plantations using overseers and enslaved labor. In 1831, Nat Turner's Rebellion occurred in his district, but was suppressed. Mason owned 39 male slaves and 48 female slaves in Southampton County in 1840 (among them one woman over 100 years old and another woman and man older than 55), among the 99 people in his household. A decade later, he owned 84 slaves in Southampton County, and an additional eleven slaves between ages 13 and 40 in Richmond, some of whom may have been leased to other individuals or corporations. A year after his death, Mason's estate continued to own 13 enslaved people in Greensville County, the oldest a 40 year old woman, and the youngest two 6 year old boys and a three year old girl.

Virginia state legislator and Constitutional convention delegate

[(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Y._Mason&action=edit&section=4 "Edit section: Virginia state legislator and Constitutional convention delegate")
]

One local historian of Southampton County considers this Jacksonian Democrat the most influential politician in that county for more than a decade. Southampton County voters elected Mason as one of their representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1823 (when both John C. Gray and Francis Williamson died before the session began), and re-elected him twice (so he served alongside first Henry Briggs then Carr Bowers). Thus, Mason served until 1826, when Edmund Ruffin resigned his Virginia Senate seat in order to hold a federal office, and Mason won the election to succeed him in the distri

…