The relationship between property and liberty in American political philosophy is complex and troubling in various ways — the same logic that made property ownership a measure of freedom was used to defend the property rights of slaveholders in their claim on enslaved people. But for Black Americans in the nineteenth century, the ability to own land and accumulate property was one of the few secure foundations on which freedom could be built in practical terms. Property was a hedge against dispossession. It was economic security. It was something that could be passed to children.
Mason’s purchase of Spring Street property in 1866 was, in this sense, a statement about the kind of freedom she was claiming: not merely the legal status of not being enslaved, but the material independence that would make that status durable across time and circumstance. The fact that she could not read the deed she signed, that she depended on others to manage the documentation of the transaction, did not diminish the substance of what she was doing. She was establishing herself in the city’s commercial landscape in a way that would generate returns.
The subsequent growth of her holdings and the wealth that resulted put her in a position to give. The philanthropy was not accidental or coincidental to the property strategy. The property generated the resources that the philanthropy deployed. The connection between the two parts of her post-emancipation life is not simply chronological — property first, philanthropy later — but structural: the property made the philanthropy possible at the scale at which she practiced it.