John Dawson was born in 1762 in Virginia, United States. He was a son of the Rev. Musgrave Dawson, who was a bachelor of arts of Queen’s College, Oxford (1747), who later came to Virginia where he served Raleigh parish, Amelia County, and St. Mary’s parish, Caroline County. In 1757 he married Mary Waugh, who became the mother of John Dawson.
John Dawson, “Beau” as he was called because of his immaculate dress and courtly manners, graduated from Harvard at the age of twenty.
Dawson represented Spotsylvania County in the House of Delegates (1786-87, 1787 - 88, and 1789). He also represented, with James Monroe, the same county in the Virginia convention on ratification of the Federal Constitution. Here he was considered by Madison one of the leading opponents of the Federal Constitution. He made only one speech, in which he admitted serious defects in the Articles of Confederation and likewise the high motives of the members of the Philadelphia convention, but agreed that “by the adoption [of the Constitution] as it now stands, the liberties of America in general, the property of Virginia in particular, would be endangered. ” Nevertheless, he later referred to the Constitution as “the greatest of all good, ” and to the wilful violator of it, as “the greatest of all traitors. ”
Dawson was also a member of the Executive Council of Virginia, presidential elector in 1793, and bearer of the ratified convention of 1800 to France. He was a member of Congress continuously from 1797 to 1814.
During the war, as a voluntary aide to General Jacob Brown, he made a trip to the Great Lakes that led to an illness developing into tuberculosis, from which he died on March 30, 1814.
The personal property and land-tax books of Spotsylvania County (manuscript in the Virginia State Library) indicate that in 1810 he owned no slaves. His total tax bill on personalty and real estate was $2. 07.
Dawson believed in a "firm, federal, energetic government, ” but feared a “consolidated” government. He feared a union of executive and legislative departments, the probable high cost of running the government, the extent of the president’s treatymaking power, and the absence of a declaration of rights. Finally he feared the establishment of an army “whose only occupation would be idleness; whose only effort the introduction of vice and dissipation; and who would, at some future day, deprive us of our liberties . .. by the introduction of some military despot”.
As a Jeffersonian he opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts, favored the amendment of the Federalist Judiciary Act of 1801, proposed an amendment providing for the separate election of the president and vice-president, and several years before the War of 1812 advocated “the adoption of every measure, the object of which was to place our country in a complete state of defence”.
