Later Life
He was in private legal practice from 1849 to 1854 and served as President of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1851 and from 1853, until his death in Paris, France in 1859, the U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to France. In this capacity he attracted attention by wearing at the court of Napoleon III a simple diplomatic uniform (for this he was rebuked by U.S. Secretary of State William L. Marcy, who had ordered American ministers to wear a plain civilian costume), and by joining with James Buchanan and Pierre Soulé, ministers to Great Britain and Spain respectively, in drawing up (October 1854) the famous Ostend Manifesto.
In politics he was a typical Virginian of the old school, a states rights Democrat, upholding slavery and hating abolitionism.
After his death in Paris, his remains were conveyed to the United States and interred in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.
USS Mason (DD-191) from 1920 to 1940, was named in honor of Secretary of the Navy John Y. Mason.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)