Talk:James M. Mason

Confederate envoy to Britain and France?
I thought Mason was the envoy to Britain, and Slidell was the envoy to France. Valetude (talk) 22:58, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Ditto
Here it is almost 4 yrs. later and the above Q still pends. The article is still essentially a stub&mdash;which is no complaint. It takes time for people to step fwd. and write these things. The complaint is, it's contradictory:

1. Para. 1 says Mason was the "appointed commissioner of the Confederacy to the U.K. and France." Later it repeats that he was an "envoy" to both. But all it says is that he arrived in England in 1862, where he represented the Confederacy "there." No more word about France. Did he go there too? To paraphrase the previous commenter, for which country/ies was he appointed?

2. And what was his official title? Should it be listed in the sidebar with his other positions?

Jimlue (talk) 01:36, 7 September 2020 (UTC)


 * His official title was Commissioner. See https://archive.org/details/correspondencewi00maso/mode/2up
 * I am myself opposed to putting any Confederate offices in the side bar.
 * I have not run across any reference to him setting foot in France or engaging in correspondence with any French officials. deisenbe (talk) 07:36, 22 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Correction—the followingvis from 11th ed. Brottanica: "Mason at once proceeded to London, where, however, he was unable to secure official recognition, and his commission to Great Britain was withdrawn late in 1863. He remained in Europe, spending most of his time at Paris and holding blank commissions which he was authorized to fill in at his discretion in case the presence of a Confederate commissioner should seem desirable at any particular European court. These commissions, however, he did not use." deisenbe (talk) 07:44, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Orphaned references in James Murray Mason
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of James Murray Mason's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Young": From Burning of Winchester Medical College:  From Presidency of James Buchanan:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 16:53, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

more work needed
I don't have access to the cited biography, but cleaned this up using other sources. I am somewhat concerned that an ancestry.com search shows this Mason as born in Winchester, Virginia (Frederick County) rather than Analostan Island (now connected to Arlington, Virginia) considerably downstream along the Potomac River.Jweaver28 (talk) 20:07, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Common name
Regarding the move of this page, James M. Mason (51%) and J. M. Mason (48%) are the only iterations of Mason's name that constitute over 5% of references to him on newspapers.com in Virginia. Star Garnet (talk) 05:22, 15 June 2023 (UTC)