Portrait after the original, c. 1750, by John Hesselius.
John Hesselius (1728—78) of Annapolis, Maryland, painted the original about the time of Mason's marriage to his first wife, Ann Eilbeck in 1750. The painting was subsequently ruined, but not before three copies had been made made by Boudet about 60 years later.
The Virginia Historical Society (Richmond, VA) has a copy by L. Guillaume.
What ultimately convinced Americans that they must revolt in 1776 was not that they were naturally and inevitably republican, for if that were truly the case evolution, not revolution, would have been the eventual solution. Rather it was the pervasive fear that they were not predestined to be a virtuous and egalitarian people that in the last analysis drove them into revolution in 1776. It was this fear and not their confidence in the peculiarity of their character that made them so readily and so remarkably responsive to Thomas Paine’s warning that the time for independence was at hand and that delay would be disastrous. By 1776 it had become increasingly evident that if they were to remain the kind of people they wanted to be they must become free of Britain.