Gunston Hall was the plantation home of George Mason, the principal architect of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. That document served as a model for the first section of the Declaration of Independence and for the federal Bill of Rights. Earlier he had drafted Virginia's Non-Importation Resolutions of 1769 and the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, which defined the colonies' constitutional position in relation to Britain. He attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was a slave owner and opposed the section of the proposed document that allowed the slave trade to continue until 1808. Mason became an active opponent of the U.S. Constitution because he believed it vested too much poorly defined power in the national government.