|
Senate Years of Service: 1847-1861 Party: Democrat
![](//bioguide.congress.gov/bioguide/photo/M/M000216.jpg) |
MASON, James Murray, a Representative and a Senator from Virginia; born on Analostan Island, Fairfax
County, Va. (now Theodore Roosevelt Island, Washington, D.C.), November 3, 1798; studied under
a private tutor and at an academy at Georgetown, D.C.; graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania at Philadelphia in 1818 and from the law department of William and Mary College at
Williamsburg in 1820; admitted to the bar and practiced in Winchester, Va., in 1820 and 1821;
delegate to the Virginia constitutional convention in 1829; member, State house of delegates
1826-1832, with the exception of 1827-1828; presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1832;
elected as a Jackson Democrat to the Twenty-fifth Congress (March 4, 1837-March 3, 1839);
elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1847 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of
Isaac S. Pennybacker; reelected in 1850 and 1856 and served from January 21, 1847, until March
28, 1861, when he withdrew; served as President pro tempore of the Senate during the Thirty-fourth
and Thirty-fifth Congresses; expelled from the Senate in 1861 for support of the rebellion; chairman,
Committee on Claims (Thirtieth Congress), Committee on the District of Columbia (Thirty-first
Congress), Committee on Foreign Relations (Thirty-second through Thirty-sixth Congresses),
Committee on Naval Affairs (Thirty-second Congress); delegate from Virginia to the Provisional
Congress of the Confederacy; appointed commissioner of the Confederacy to Great Britain and
France and while on his way to his post was taken from the British mail steamer Trent November 8,
1861, and confined in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor; released in January 1862; proceeded to
London and represented the Confederacy until its downfall in April 1865; resided in Canada after the
close of the war until 1868, when he returned to Virginia; died at Clarens, near the city of
Alexandria, Va, April 28, 1871; interment in Christ Church Episcopal Cemetery, Alexandria, Va.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Young, Robert W. Senator James Murray
Mason: Defender of the Old South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998; Bugg,
James L., Jr. The Political Career of James Murray Mason: The Legislative Phase. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Virginia, 1950.
|