University of Virginia Library

NOTES.

Note A, page 279.—It would be matter of curious inquiry to ascertain
how it has come to pass that in proportion as we in Virginia have proscribed
or abandoned the cheerful exercises and amusements of our fathers,
we have become less amiable and moral as a people. When I was a young
man, no gentleman was ashamed of playing a game of billiards or of cards.
There was much less gaming then than now. Men then drank and played
in public, from a spirit of society, as well as the love for both inherent in
human nature. Publicity is the great restraint upon individuals as well as
government. The "hells" of London and the styes of Capreæ and the
Parc aux Cerfs attest this. Publicity represses excess, until the man is
sunk in the beast and every restraint of shame thrown off. Formerly,
friends had it in their power to restrain the votaries of chance or of the
bottle; but now their incurable ruin, in mind, body and estate, gives the
first notice of their devotion to play or drink. Solitary intoxication on
ardent spirits is the substitute for the wine table; and in some den of
thieves, some cellar or some garret, the unhappy youth is stripped of his
property, with no witness of the fairness of the game but his desperate
and profligate undoers.

In Virginia we are, and I trust shall ever be, alive to States rights. But
have the people no rights as against the Assembly? All oppression commences
under specious pretexts. I have wondered that no rural, or rather
rustic, Hampden has been found to withstand the petty tyranny which has
as good a right to take away his wife's looking-glass or frying pan as his
billiard table. By what authority is this thing done? Under color of
law, I know, but a law in the teeth of all the principles of free government.

The principle of what is called the dueling law—it ought to be called
the perjury law—is yet more detestable. I am no advocate of dueling;
but it may be put down by something worse. Bad as it is, it is better than
dirking and gouging; and they are hardly worse than calling names and
bandying insults, if so bad. The oath prescribed by the dueling law is in

the teeth of every principle of free government, of the act for establishing
religious freedom, and would justify any test, religious or political, even
an oath of belief in transubstatiation.

We were a merry-making, kind-hearted, hospitable people, fond of
"junketting" (as the old President of the Court of Appeals used to say);
and no one, as the men of Caroline county and Essex can testify, liked
"junketting" ("soberly," as Lady Grace says,) better than Edmund Pendleton.
Yes, the Mansfield of Virginia, whom he resembled in the polished
suavity of his manners, his unrivalled professional learning and
abilities, and the retention of his faculties unimpaired to a very advanced
old age. There is another splendid example of the same rare qualities in
the first judicial officer of the United States. Who is fonder of a game of
billiards, or any other innocent amusement, than the Chief Justice? Yes,
I regret, nay, deplore, the change from our old and innocent pastimes and
holidays to the present state of listless ennui or prowling rapacity. In
proportion as we have approached puritanical preciseness and gloomy
austerity, so have we retrograded in morals.

I do not indeed carry the matter quite so far as an acquaintance of mine,
who has a knack of "hitching into rhyme," and who, among other good
advice, says:

* * * * * * *

Note B, page 287.—After my arrival in Europe, I saw in the newspapers
Mr. Webster's toast, given, if I forget not, on the fourth of July—
"Henry Clay, the orator of the West," &c., &c. I quote from memory.
N. B.—Mr. Clay was then the rival and declared enemy of Mr. Adams.
Mr. Clay, in the debate on the Greek motion of Mr. Webster, and in the
affair of Mr. Ichabod Bartlett (a name of omen), was ostentatious in his declarations
of friendship and connection with Mr. Webster, whom he gratuitously
assumed to have been assailed by the said Ichabod! that he might
manifest his devotion to his new friend. I then looked upon Mr. Clay as

laying an anchor to windward and eastward, and in fact offering his blandishment
to New England in the person of Mr. Webster, while at the
same time he proclaimed his strength in that quarter as the ally of Mr.
Webster and the powerful party of which he is the leader and mouthpiece.
If the maxim be true, ars est celare artem, then there lives not a
less artful man upon earth than Mr. Clay. His system consists in soothing
by flattery, or bullying—these constitute his whole stock in trade—and
very often he applies both to the same person. The man of delicacy, to
whom his coarse adulation is fulsome, and the man of unshaken firmness,
when these two characteristics unite in the same person, cannot be operated
on by him.

Mr. Webster and the rival of Chilly McIntosh were put on the A. B.
Committee to run down Mr. Crawford. I too, though in Baltimore when
Mr. Floyd (my colleague) moved to raise that committee, was put upon
it. I was not then the political friend or supporter of Mr. Crawford. His
political principles, on the United States Bank and some other questions,
were to mine nearly, although not quite, as obnoxious as those of his
competitors. I never took sides with him until he was persecuted. Mr.
Macon and Mr. Floyd both know that, on my arrival from Baltimore, I
peremptorily declared that I would not serve on that committee. I believed
it to be (as it was) a snare for me—a snare from which I providentially
escaped. Mr. Webster's true character first developed itself to
me then, as at the time I told Mr. Tazewell. At the earnest persuasion of
Mr. Macon and entreaty of Mr. Floyd, I reluctantly agreed to serve. Mr.
Floyd being taken violently ill and confined to his bed, I abandoned my
seat in the committee and went abroad for health.

Note C, page 294.—A caterpillar comes to a fence; he crawls to the
bottom of the ditch and over the fence, some of his hundred feet always
in contact with the subject upon which he moves. A gallant horseman
at a flying leap clears both ditch and fence. "Stop!" says the caterpillar,
"you are too flighty, you want connection and continuity: it took me
an hour to get over; you can't be as sure as I am, who have never quitted
the subject, that you have overcome the difficulty and are fairly over the
fence." "Thou miserable reptile," replies our fox-hunter, "if, like you,
I crawled over the earth slowly and painfully, should I ever catch a fox, or
be anything more than a wretched caterpillar?" N. B.—He did not say,
"of the law."

Note D, page 297.—Some of the members of the Richmond Adams
Convention (I like to call things by their right names) have had, I am
told, the modesty to say that "it was the most august body that had assembled
since the Congress that declared independence!" The same declaration,
in the very same words, was made in the Senate, concerning
another "august body"—the Hartford Convention—by Mr. Otis, a member
of said "august body."

This moderate hyperbole, I suspect, must have come from some wiseacre
south of Appomattox, or of Roanoke, who was at once his own
constituent body and representative. I know many very worthy and respectable
members of the "august body"—two of them, in particular,
excellent and sensible men, my own good friends and constituents, whose
names, I own, surprised me when appended to such a manifesto. Others,
no doubt, are equally respectable. But what shall we say—not to the
Secretary—no, it is needless to say anything of him. His name, associated
with that of Chapman Johnson, must be grateful to that distinguished
luminary of the bar and of Virginia. In our part of the country we still
retain the old-fashioned prejudice against the three degrees of borrowing,
begging and stealing. We still believe, in Charlotte and Prince Edward,
that every honest man pays his just debts. If I were to go to Oakland
(where I hope soon to be), and were to steal one of my friend William R.
Johnson's plough horses, value perhaps sixty dollars, I should subject myself
to the penitentiary. But would he not rather be robbed of a work
horse than that any man should buy Medley or Sally Walker of him
for some thousands of dollars and never pay him. Suum cuique tribuito
is still held in respect with us; and we pay small deference to the opinions
of judges, even in the last resort, whose creditors cry aloud in vain for
justice against the dispensers of justice—a judge who finally and conclusively
determines between meum and tuum, who possesses nothing suum.
If we do have a convention, I trust that the corrective will be applied to
this and some other abuses of the only privileged class among us.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness
thrust upon them?" and this last has been the good luck of our political
Malvolio. Like Moliere's Mock Doctor, the Virginia Assembly (who
make towns without houses) have made him a judge in spite of himself—
Malgrè lui.

His worthy elder brother stumbled upon his office, as Falstaff says
Worcester did upon rebellion: "It lay in his way, and he found it."

Some men should bear in mind the advice of Junius to Sir William
Draper, and not attract the public attention to a character which will only
pass without censure when it passes without observation. Quædam causæ modestiam desiderunt. And this is true of the persons of certain would-be
leaders in the cause of Coalition, as it is of the cause itself. What business
have these "most forcible Feebles" in the van of election battles?
Who gave them the right or the power to call conventions, forsooth, and
excommunicate and anathematize their betters, in every point of view that
gives value to the character of man. Let them stick to their dull, heavy,
yet light, long-winded opinions in the Court of Appeals, where to our
sorrow and to our cost they may play "Sir Oracle"—where, when they
ope their lips no dog must bark—but what they say must be received as
law in the last resort—without appeal. No bill of exceptions can be tendered
to their honors. Yes, let them keep to their privileged sanctuary.—
For if these men, who are great by title and office only, shall attempt to
interfere between men at arms, let me tell them that their judicial astrology
will stand them in little stead: "There is no Royal road to the
Mathematics:" and these ex officio champions will fare like the delicate
patrician troops of Pompey at the battle of Pharsalia. The Tenth Legion
will aim at their faces—and our fair-weather knights must expect to meet
with cracked crowns and bloody noses, and to staunch them as they may.

"But have you no respect for the ermine?" Yes, as I have for the
lion's skin, but none at all for the ass beneath it. I was bred in a respect
for the ermine, for I lived when Pendleton, Blair and Wythe composed
the "High Court of Chancery" in Virginia. Yes, I respect the pure
ermine of justice, when it is worn as it ought to be—and as it is by the
illustrious judge who presides in the Supreme Court of the United States,
with modest dignity and unpretending grace. I was bred in a respect for
it approaching to religious reverence. But it is the unpolluted ermine
that I was taught to venerate. Daggled in the vile mire of an election—
reeking in the fumes of whiskey and tobacco—it is an object, not of reverence,
but of loathing and disgust. "A parson may not" (say the canons
of many churches) "use himself as a layman." And a judge is, so to
speak, a lay parson. He should keep himself, emphatically, "unspotted
from the world." A judge has political rights as well as a juror. God
forbid that I should deny or suppress their exercise. It is the mode of
exercise that I object to, as unbecoming, not to say indecent.

We have no faith, on the south side of James river, in the president

who called or him who presided over the Richmond Adams convention—
the successor, in form, of Pendleton and Spencer Roane. Lichas wielding
the club of Hercules. A man who does not endeavor to make up by
assiduity and study for the slenderness of his capacity and his utter want
of professional learning.

They were so heartily ashamed of their president or secretary, perhaps
of both, that their manifesto is sent forth to the world in a pamphlet,
unattested by the signature of either. It is without teste; and, notwithstanding
the caption, may be said to be anonymous. The want of such
signatures detracts nothing from its weight or value.

But let us see the honorable means resorted to by these High Priests of
Themis, to forward their unholy conspiracy against the South; Virginia
in particular. Without paying the ex-Presidents the respect of presuming
them to be observant of that reserve imposed upon them by their position,
and which, of all our Presidents, one only has violated—Mr. Adams,
senior; or of consulting them, the names of Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe
are ostentatiously stuck up at the head of their ticket. They knew
that these gentlemen could not, with any sense of propriety or decorum,
accept or decline the proffered honor, until officially notified of the proceedings
by the president of the Adams convention.

This notification was held back nearly one month by the president of
the Adams, alias "Anti-Jackson," convention (who, to our misfortune, is
also president of the High Court of Errors and Appeals), upon a pretext
at once frivolous and false. This trick of the highest judicial officer in
Virginia, played off to effect public opinion, and the Vermont and New
Hampshire elections especially, was worthy of a Newgate solicitor. It
was done to affect public opinion, and especially the New Hampshire
election. How short-sighted is fraud and falsehood and folly. They did
not reflect upon the reäction when the trick could be no longer concealed.

Mr. C. is as strong an instance of this as Shakespeare himself could have
adduced. Hardly a second rate lawyer at the county court bar of Amherst
and Buckingham, sheer accident made him governor of Virginia. Happening
then to be a member of the Assembly [when a very obnoxious
character was held up for the office]—possessing good temper and amiable
manners, and most respectable and powerful connections—the untying of

a member's shoe caused him to be pitched upon to keep out the only candidate.
With that exception, the office was going a begging. Conducting
himself most unexceptionally and inoffensively as governor, he had a
county,[21] and one of the finest, too, in the State, named after him, and was
advanced to the Court of Appeals, of which he bids fair to be president;
a court in which, if he had remained at the bar, he most probably would
never have obtained a brief.

My venerable friend, Mr. Macon, has more than once observed to me,
that, with the exception of North Carolina, no state, not even Virginia,
had named a county after or done honor to the president of the first Congress,
who, if he had lived, and the day had gone against us, would, with
another Virginian, have been singled out as the ringleaders of the REBELLION,
and made examples of, accordingly, in terrorem of all future offenders.

I have seen the Lord Chief Justice of the court of Common Pleas, Sir
William Draper Best and Sir John Bayley (both very infirm men) sit, day
after day, the one at Nisi Prius, and the other on the Crown side, from
nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, and despatch more business
in one day, than any of our courts in Virginia transact in a week. I
have seen a judge in Guildhall sitting in court with his teapot and bread
and butter before him, taking his breakfast while counsel were pleading,
that business might not be delayed. The judges in England (there are
but thirteen for that great kingdom, where each of three counties that I
could name contain more white people, and incomparably more wealth,
than our poor Old Dominion) work harder and are worse paid than any
other officers of that government.

How is it with us in Virginia? We find men anxious enough to get
the appointment—but are they (in the general) as anxious to discharge the
duties—to earn the salary as to draw it? There are, no doubt, and to my
personal knowledge, honorable exceptions; but are there not too many
instances in which very insufficient causes are laid hold on to excuse the
judge from holding his court, and for breaking it up and going home, to
the delay of justice and the harassment and expense of counsel, suitors
and witnesses? Is not this a crying evil? And if the tenure by which
judges hold in Virginia be changed, will it not be owing to their own negligence

and misconduct? In England, where two counties of the northern
circuit (York and Lancaster) contain more than two millions of inhabitants,
and vastly more wealth than the kingdom of Prussia, such neglect of
duty as occurs every day in Virginia would not be tolerated for one half
year. "To delay justice to no one," and "to be unwilling to change the
laws of England;" these are the oath and declaration of the ancient
Kings and Barons of England.[22] But we seem to be guided by maxims
the very reverse of these.

As to the laws, they are so often chopped and changed that we never
have time to find out what the existing law is—much less to have it settled
in the only way that it can be settled—by adjudication. Much of this evil
has proceeded from the Senate, at the instance of the author of the Richmond
Adams manifesto. I have seen Sir John Bayley try some six or
eight criminals in one day, that here would consume the time allotted for
one, or more than one, superior court. It is true there lawyers are only
admitted to crossexamine the witnesses, and are not suffered to take up a
day in frothy declamation to mislead the jury. But I can conceive of no
form of trial more fair than that in England; and the summing up of Sir

John Bayley (who is, indeed, counsel for the accused) is the most perfect
specimen of fairness and clearness and conciseness that I have ever heard
or can conceive. He never omits the most minute circumstance that makes
for or against the prisoner; and without showing the least bias either way,
he never fails to tell the jury that "if, upon the whole, they doubt, the
accused is entitled to the benefit of that doubt." I cannot go so far as an
Irish gentleman, whom I heard (humorously) say at Norwich assizes,
"that it must be a pleasure to be hanged by Sir John Bayley;" but I take
a pleasure, and a pride too, in here naming the honor that I received in
his acquaintance, and that of Lord Chief Justice Best, and the very kind
attentions and hospitality by which I was distinguished by both of them,
the last more especially.

The trials that I speak of were ordinary cases, civil and criminal; not
cases of libel and treason—of political law. In England, as in other countries,
not excepting Virginia, I fear that there is always a leaning on the
side of the bench to POWER, in whatever hands it may be placed.

Note E, page 300.—Mr. Madison (I speak it without the slightest disrespect
to that eminent man) is a still stronger case in point than Mr. Pitt.

Except Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Jay,[23] as Secretary of State, he had not
perhaps his equal in our country—his superior nowhere—a profound
thinker, a powerful reasoner, "with tongue or pen"—a great civilian, reminding
one of his prototype, John Selden; to whose "Mare clausum"
no man was better fitted than Mr. Madison to have opposed a Mare liberum.
Yet, advanced to the helm of affairs, how consummate his ignorance
of men, let his selections for great offices, civil and military, tell. I
will enumerate a few just as they occur to me, beginning with his cabinet.

Secretary of State—Robert Smith.

Secretary of the Treasury—George W. Campbell; also Minister to St.
Petersburg.

Secretary of War—Dr. Eustis.

Secretary of the Navy—Paul Hamilton and Benjamin W. Crowninshield,
the Master Slender—no, the Master Silence of Ministers of State.

Shakspeare himself could go no lower. It is the thorough base of human
nature. He seems to us to have drawn Robert Shallow, Esquire, and his
cousin Slender, as the comparative and superlative degree of fatuity; and
when we believe that he has sounded his lowest note, as if reveling in the
exuberance of his power, he produces Silence as the ne plus ultra of
inanity and imbecility. Mr. Madison has, in this one instance, outdone
Shakspeare himself—he gives us the real man whom the bard only drew.

Attorney General—Richard Rush; not being fit for Comptroller, he is
selected to preside over the treasury! and by the Richmond Adams Convention
for Vice President!

Commander in the Northwest—William Hull.

Commander in the Northeast—James Wilkinson and Wade Hampton.

Commander at Bladensburg—William Winder! assisted by "The Flying
Cabinent," as Wilkinson had the insolence to designate them in his
diagram of that famous rout. In this memorable disengagement the
Grand Role was played by Mr. Attorney General, "for that time only,"
without his hat. We have no "Master of the Rolls" in our country; but,
like the witty authors of the Rolliad, for Sir Lloyd Kenyon, we might take
as a motto for Mr. Rush, "Jouez bien votre role." And, verily, never did
political adventurer make more of his parts than this solemn gentleman
has done. Never were abilities so much below mediocrity so well rewarded;
no, not when Caligula's Horse was made Consul.

A few days ago I stumbled upon the following stanza of an unfinished
poem on the Glories and Worthies of our Administration:

These lines are the only article of the growth, produce or manufacture
of the country north of Patapsco, that I have knowingly used since the
Tariff bill passed. They are by a witty son of a witty sire—as Burns
sings, "a true gude fellow's get."

Note F, page 301.—Mr. Clay took his seat in the House of Representatives
in December, 1811; his first stride was from the door to the chair,
where he commenced to play the dictator: he fixed his eyes on the presidency,
and I, who had been twelve years in Congress, fixed mine upon

him, and have kept them there ever since. Sylla said that he saw many
a Marius in Cæsar. So I, who had heard Mr. Clay for the first time in
the Senate the year before, on the renewal of the charter of the Bank of
the United States, was persuaded that he would not keep the faith. Without
affecting an inferiority that I do not feel, I may be allowed to say, that
my position as the guardian of the constitution and country, against the
assaults of a man goaded and blinded by his ambition, would have placed
a dwarf on a level with a giant. He went to Europe, and returned a
changed man.

And not Mr. Clay only. Mr. Monroe, the stern Mr. Monroe, for whom
General Washington's administration was not Republican enough, comes
back after four years spent in Paris, Madrid, and London, to settle points
of etiquette and invent coat patterns for our foreign ministers, because,
forsooth, they are not Franklin's. (See Mr. Sergeant's speech.) So that,
like the king's fool, our envoys must have a party-colored coat to make up
for their want of sense and dignity.—"Motley is your only wear."

Note G, page 283.—With this venerable friend and sterling patriot, Mr.
Randolph believes that "the great body of the people of New England
are genuine Republicans, of steady and virtuous habits, unsurpassed by
any other people upon earth. But they are too often hoodwinked by the
priesthood and the press in the interest of the aristocracy.