History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/Charles Mason
CHARLES MASON was born in Onondaga County. New York, October 24, 1804. He was appointed a cadet in the West Point Military Academy where he graduated at the head of his class in 1829. Among his classmates were Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Leonidas Polk, afterwards leaders in the great Rebellion. Mr. Mason remained at West Point two years as an instructor in the Academy, then resigned and studied law in New York City where he began to practice his profession. He was for a time employed on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post. In 1837 he located at Burlington, then in Wisconsin Territory, where he had been appointed United States District Attorney. Upon the creation of Iowa Territory the following year, Mr. Mason was appointed by the President Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position which he held until Iowa became a State. The most important decision made during his term was one sustaining the right to freedom of a slave who had been brought by his master to the free Territory of Iowa. When the controversy arose between Iowa and Missouri over the boundary and was carried into the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Mason was appointed by Governor Hempstead to represent Iowa in the suit, where a decree was obtained in favor of Iowa. He was one of the commissioners to revise the laws of the State in 1848 and the result of the work was the Code of 1851. In 1853 Judge Mason was appointed by President Pierce Commissioner of Patents, and removed to Washington. In August, 1857, he resigned and returned to Iowa and in 1858 was elected a member of the first State Board of Education. In 1861 he was nominated for Governor by the Democratic State Convention but declined. In 1867 he was again nominated for Governor by the Democrats and was defeated in the election by Samuel Merrill the Republican candidate. In 1868 and again in 1872 he was a delegate to the National Democratic Conventions and in 1873 he made a voyage to Europe. He died on his farm near Burlington, February 25, 1882, at the age of seventy-eight. Judge Wright said of him: “As a man he was as much respected and esteemed as any of the early jurists and public men of our Territory and State.”