University of Virginia Library

Thomas Mann Randolph, Governor,

Dec. 11, 1819-Dec. 11, 1822.

He was son of Thomas Mann Randolph, who had served in
the Committee of Safety during the American Revolution and
frequently in the Legislature. His mother was Anne Cary,
daughter of Col. Archibald Cary of "Ampthill," Chesterfield
County. He was born at "Tuckahoe," the family seat, in 1768,
studied at William and Mary College and the University of
Edinburgh and visited Paris in 1788, where Thomas Jefferson
was then residing as Minister from the United States, having
with him his daughter, Martha, whom Randolph married in
1790. He served in the House of Representatives from 1803
to 1807, and in the House of Delegates, 1819, 1823-24, 1824-25,
and was Governor from December 11, 1819, to December 11,
1822. In the War of 1812 he served first as Lieutenant Colonel
of the Light Corps on the Seaboard and afterwards on the
Canada line, where he figured as Colonel commanding the
Twentieth United States Infantry. He was very fond of botanical
studies, being probably the best informed man in Virginia
on these subjects during the time in which he lived. He died at
Monticello June 20, 1828, aged sixty years.

Mr. Randolph's administration was marked by the excitement
produced by John Marshall and the Supreme Court
of the United States in reexamining the decisions of the State
Supreme Court of Appeals through a writ of error. Mr. Randolph,
in his messages, and the Legislature, through its resolutions,
denounced the action of the Supreme Court of the United
States as in violation of the Eleventh Amendment, the very
object of which was to inhibit the dragging of a sovereign state
before any tribunal without its consent. Both the Governor
and the Legislature felt that such assumptions of power on the
part of the United States would promote sectionalism rather

than unionism. In these cases, McCulloch vs. the State of
Maryland and Cohen vs. Virginia, decided at this time, the
principles asserted by Marshall were the very principles urged
by Abraham Lincoln, a sectional President, in overturning the
self-determination of the South and bestowing upon the North
the government of the whole country.[100]

In his message December 23, 1821, Mr. Randolph gave the
aggregate of the militia of the Commonwealth—infantry, cavalry
and artillery—as 91,928 men. He also dwelt upon the
narrow spirit manifested in some parts of the Union in opposition
to religious freedom and said: "It is the glorious distinction
of Virginia to have first fully removed the main cause
of that frightful disorder of the public imagination, which has
appeared in all ages, in other countries and even in some of
these States during the short period of our history, which
confounds piety with cruelty and makes religion give sanction
to the most atrocious outrages against humanity."

By an act of the General Assembly, March 1, 1821, the State
ceded to the United States the lands and shoal at Old Point
Comfort and the Ripraps for fortifications. Old Point Comfort
had been the site of a fort since 1608—the earliest English
fort in the United States.

The close of his administration was marked by the death of
Spencer Roane, September 4, 1822, of the Supreme Court of
Appeals, the brave advocate of States Rights, and the rival of
John Marshall in the power of his intellect. Under the nomme
de plume of "Algernon Sidney" he had written a series of
very able letters against the decisions of the Supreme Court
of the United States, in which he showed the obvious tendency
was to give the North a monopoly of power and hasten the
conflict of sections, whose fundamental differences no decisions
of a court could remove. In this he showed a very
clear insight.