Representative John Young Mason

John Young Mason (April 18, 1799 – October 3, 1859) was an American attorney, planter, judge, diplomat, and Jacksonian Democratic politician from Virginia who held prominent legislative, judicial, executive, and diplomatic posts in the antebellum United States. He served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly, represented Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms, sat as United States district judge for the Eastern District of Virginia from 1841 to 1843, and later held major federal offices under Presidents John Tyler, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. His national service included tenure 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, positions he held until his death in Paris shortly before the American Civil War.

Mason was born on April 18, 1799, at the “Homestead” plantation, about four miles northwest of Hicksford (now Emporia), then the county seat of Greensville County, Virginia. He was born into a well-established Southside Virginia family with deep roots in the colony and state. His mother, Frances Young Mason, was the daughter of a deputy clerk of Isle of Wight County during the American Revolutionary War; members of the Young family served as clerks of that county for 118 years and preserved its records by burying them during Tarleton’s raids. His father, Edmund Mason (d. 1849), served as the second clerk of Greensville County from 1807 to 1834 and represented the county in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1802 to 1805, when John was a boy. His grandfather, Colonel James Mason, had been a patriot officer in the Revolutionary War but died before John’s birth. The family descended from Francis Mason, an Englishman who had migrated to the Hampton Roads region by the mid‑1620s; a later Francis Mason represented Surry County in the House of Burgesses in 1691–1692. This Southside Mason line was distinct from the better-known Northern Neck Mason family descended from George Mason I, who emigrated to Virginia in the 1650s.

After receiving a private education appropriate to his class, including study at a neighborhood private school and likely additional instruction at home using the family library, Mason pursued formal higher education in the South and North. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he formed a friendship with fellow student James K. Polk, who graduated in 1818 and would later become President of the United States. Mason received an Artium Baccalaureus degree from the University of North Carolina in 1816. Seeking professional training in law, he then traveled to Connecticut and studied under Judge Tapping Reeve at the Litchfield Law School in 1819, one of the leading legal academies of the early republic.

Mason was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1819 and began practicing law in Greensville County from 1819 to 1821, before relocating his practice to neighboring Southampton County, where he practiced from 1821 to 1831. During part of his legislative service for Southampton County, he also served as commonwealth’s attorney (local prosecutor) for Greensville County from 1827 to 1831. His legal career was interspersed with periods of public office and private practice, including renewed private practice in the late 1830s and again in the late 1840s. Shortly after his marriage in 1821, his parents gave him a 434‑acre plantation in Greensville County, and he and his family at times resided at the “Homestead” plantation before he sold it back to his parents in 1826. His primary residence after 1823 became Fortsville plantation in western Southampton County, near the Sussex County line, a property built and previously operated by his father‑in‑law, Lewis Fort, who died in 1826. Mason operated Fortsville and other plantations through overseers and enslaved labor. Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 occurred in his district and was suppressed. Census records show that in 1840 he owned 39 enslaved men and 48 enslaved women in Southampton County, among 99 persons in his household, including one woman over 100 years old and another man and woman over 55. By 1850 he owned 84 enslaved people in Southampton County and an additional eleven enslaved persons between ages 13 and 40 in Richmond, some of whom may have been hired out. A year after his death, his estate still held 13 enslaved people in Greensville County, ranging in age from a 40‑year‑old woman to children as young as three. In addition to his legal and planting interests, Mason was one of the founding trustees of the Union Academy of Sussex in 1835, reflecting his engagement with local educational initiatives.

Mason’s political career began in the Virginia General Assembly and extended over several decades. Southampton County voters elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1823 to fill vacancies created by the deaths of John C. Gray and Francis Williamson before the session began, and re‑elected him twice, allowing him to serve until 1826 alongside colleagues including Henry Briggs and Carr Bowers. When Edmund Ruffin resigned his Virginia Senate seat to accept a federal office, Mason won election to succeed him in a district that included Southampton and Surry Counties, as well as Sussex, Prince George, and Isle of Wight Counties. He served in the Virginia Senate until late 1831, when he was succeeded by Francis E. Rives. Voters from a district comprising the same counties elected Mason as one of their four delegates to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830, where he served with James Trezvant, Augustine Claiborne, and John Urquart. The resulting constitution was overwhelmingly ratified by Virginia voters, including 259 of 261 voters in Sussex County. A local historian of Southampton County later described this Jacksonian Democrat as the most influential politician in the county for more than a decade. Mason again played a major role in constitutional revision when, in 1850, he represented a district consisting of Greensville, Southampton, Isle of Wight, Nansemond, Sussex, and Surry Counties at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850. There he was elected president of the convention after nomination by Robert Ridley and the support of fellow delegates, including John R. Chambliss and A. S. H. Burgess. Although the 1850 constitution adopted universal white male suffrage and explicitly accepted slavery and was ratified by a statewide vote of 75,748 to 11,060, Mason, Ridley, and Chambliss ultimately voted against it.

At the national level, Mason served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat from Virginia’s 2nd congressional district. He was first elected to the Twenty‑second Congress with 57.88 percent of the vote in 1831, defeating Independent candidate Richard Eppes. He was re‑elected to the Twenty‑third Congress in 1833 without opposition and again to the Twenty‑fourth Congress, serving from March 4, 1831, until his resignation on January 11, 1837. During the Twenty‑fourth Congress he was chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, placing him at the center of debates over U.S. relations with foreign powers during a formative period in American expansion and party politics. After leaving Congress, Mason resumed the practice of law in Hicksford, the county seat of Greensville County (now part of Emporia), where he practiced from 1837 to 1841.

On February 26, 1841, President Martin Van Buren nominated Mason to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to fill the vacancy created by the elevation of Judge Peter Vivian Daniel. The United States Senate confirmed him on March 2, 1841, and he received his commission on March 3, 1841. He served on the federal bench until March 23, 1844, when he resigned after accepting appointment to the President’s Cabinet. President John Tyler appointed him the 16th United States Secretary of the Navy, a post he held from March 14, 1844, to March 10, 1845. In that role he oversaw the Navy during a period of technological and organizational transition, including the early development of steam power and the expansion of American naval presence abroad. Under President James K. Polk, Mason served as the 18th Attorney General of the United States from March 11, 1845, to September 9, 1846, advising the administration on legal issues during the opening phase of the Mexican–American War and on questions of territorial expansion. Polk then returned him to the Navy Department as the 18th Secretary of the Navy, in which capacity he served from September 9, 1846, to March 7, 1849. During his second tenure as Secretary of the Navy, the service played a significant role in the Mexican–American War, including amphibious operations and the projection of American power in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. In 1847, the American Philosophical Society elected Mason to membership, recognizing his prominence in national affairs. After Polk’s term ended, Mason resumed the practice of law in Richmond, Virginia, from 1849 to 1854, while also serving as president of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850.

Mason’s diplomatic career began under President Franklin Pierce, who appointed him United States Minister to France in 1853. The Senate confirmed his appointment in the winter of 1853–1854, and he presented his credentials in Paris in January 1854. He served as minister under Pierce and continued in that post under President James Buchanan, who reappointed him, and he remained in Paris from January 22, 1854, until his death in 1859. During his mission he became associated with Emperor Napoleon III and was involved in one of the most controversial foreign policy episodes of the 1850s. In October 1854, at a meeting in Ostend, Belgium, Mason joined James Buchanan, then minister to the United Kingdom, and Pierre Soulé, minister to Spain, in drafting the Ostend Manifesto. The document urged that the United States attempt to purchase Cuba from Spain and suggested that, if Spain refused, the United States would be justified in taking the island by force if necessary. When the manifesto became public, it provoked intense opposition in the northern United States, where many critics viewed it as an attempt to expand a Caribbean slave empire and extend the power of slaveholding interests. Despite the controversy, Mason retained his post and continued to represent American interests in France until his death.

In his personal life, Mason married Mary Ann Fort (d. 1870) in 1821. She was the daughter of Lewis Fort, a prominent landowner whose family, unlike the Masons and Youngs, did not have a long tradition of political service. The couple made their home at Fortsville, the plantation house built by her father on a tract that straddled three counties. They had twelve children who survived infancy, several of whom played notable roles during and after the Civil War. Their son Lewis Fort Mason (born circa 1825) survived the conflict and became a schoolteacher in Southampton County. Their daughter Elizabeth Harris Mason (1830–1881) married Petersburg lawyer Roscoe Briggs Heath, who served as assistant adjutant general and chief of staff to Confederate General Joseph R. Anderson before resigning for health reasons and dying during the war; another daughter married Archer Anderson. Their son John Young Mason Jr. (1823–1862) also died in Virginia during the Civil War and during his mother’s lifetime. Another son, St. George Tucker Mason (1844–1874), enlisted in the 12th Virginia Infantry without his mother’s permission and later served in the 13th Virginia Cavalry, suffering several wounds but surviving the war. He was subsequently pardoned, graduated from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), and later returned to Europe, where he renounced his U.S. citizenship, became a French citizen, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and served in Algeria before dying of dysentery in what later became Saigon, Vietnam. Simon Blount Mason (1848–1925) also graduated from VMI after the war and became a merchant and railroad executive in Hanover County, Virginia.

Mason died in office as United States Minister to France on October 3, 1859, in Paris, then part of the French Empire. His death occurred less than two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. His remains were transported back to the United States and interred in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, a burial place for many of the state’s leading figures. His widow, Mary Ann Fort Mason, survived him until 1870, and several of their children lived well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fortsville plantation, near Grizzard in Sussex County, Virginia, where Mason had long resided and from which he managed his planting interests, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. In recognition of his service as Secretary of the Navy, two U.S. Navy destroyers have borne his name: USS Mason (DD‑191), in commission from 1920 to 1940, and USS Mason (DDG‑87), commissioned in 2003 and sharing the honor on that vessel with another distinguished naval officer of the same surname.