University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI.

BLIFIL AND BLACK GEORGE.

So long as Mr. Monroe was in office, although
his administration, aided by the Supreme Court,
paid less regard to states' rights and leaned more
strongly to centralization than either the administrations
of Madison or Jefferson, Randolph
did not venture again upon systematic opposition.
He had learned a lesson: he would have
no more personal quarrels with Virginian Presidents,
and restrained his temper marvellously
well, but not because he liked Monroe's rule
better than that of Monroe's predecessors; far
from it! "The spirit of profession and devotion
to the court has increased beyond my most
sanguine anticipations," said he in 1819; "the
Emperor [Monroe] is master of the Senate, and
through that body commands the life and property
of every man in the republic. The person
who fills the office seems to be without a
friend. Not so the office itself." In 1820 one
of the President's friends made, on his behalf,
an advance to Randolph. "I said," writes
Randolph, February 26, 1820, "that he had invited

Garnett, as it were, out of my own apartment,
that year [1812], to dine with General
Moreau, Lewis, and Stanford, the only M. C.'s
that lodged there besides myself, and omitted
to ask me, who had a great desire to see Moreau;
that I lacqueyed the heels of no great
man; that I had a very good dinner at home."
Although fully warranted in feeling hatred for
Monroe, Randolph remained in harmony with
the administration until he was going to Europe,
in March, 1822, and issued, from "on board the
steamboat Nautilus, under weigh to the Amity"
packet, a letter to his constituents, expressing
the intention to stand again for Congress in
1823: —

Had Randolph's knowledge of history been
more accurate or his memory quicker than it
was, he would not here have fallen into the
blunder of insulting the President by a compliment.
To speak of the incubus Monroe as a
"new Mayor of the Palace" was nonsense, for,
of all men that ever lived, the Mayors of the
Palace were the most efficient rulers. What
Randolph doubtless meant was to brand Monroe
as "this new roi fainéant," this do-nothing
king Childerich, whose lieutenants, Calhoun,
Crawford, Adams, were contending for the succession.

Against Monroe Randolph did not care to
break his lance, even though Monroe was the
worst of all the Virginian traitors to states'
rights, and the most ungrateful for support and
encouragement in his days of disgrace. Not
Monroe, but Monroe's lieutenants were to be
denounced in advance. Randolph liked none of
them, but especially hated Calhoun and Clay,
then representatives of the ardent nationality
engendered by the war of 1812. Mr. Clay was
Speaker, and, with a temper as domineering
and a manner as dictatorial as that of Randolph

himself, he could not fail to rouse every jealous
and ugly demon in Randolph's nature, and
draw out all the exhaustless vituperation of his
tongue. The inevitable quarrel began during
the debate on the Missouri compromise, when
Randolph made a determined effort to drive
Clay from its support. They are said to have
met for consultation in a private interview,
after which they held no further relations even
of civility, and it is easy to imagine that the
language exchanged in such a dialogue may
have been such as neither might care to repeat.
In any case it is true that Clay, as Speaker,
rode ruthlessly over Randolph's opposition, and
jockeyed him out of his right to move a reconsideration
of the bill. The war between them
was henceforth as bitter as either party could
make it, and came within a hair's breadth of
costing Randolph his life.

Personal antipathies, jealousy, prejudice, and
the long train of Randolph's many vices had,
therefore, something to do with the certain hostility
towards Monroe's successor, for which he
was now preparing; but between his opposition
in 1825 and that in 1806 there was this difference:
in 1806 his quarrel was with old friends,
whom, on a mere divergence of opinion in regard
to details of policy, he had no right to betray;
in 1825 his quarrel was legitimate and

his policy sound, from his point of view. This
fact partially rehabilitated his reputation, and
made him again, to no small extent, an important
historical character. John Randolph stands
in history as the legitimate and natural precursor
of Calhoun. Randolph sketched out and
partly filled in the outlines of that political
scheme over which Calhoun labored so long,
and against which Clay strove successfully while
he lived, — the identification of slavery with
states' rights. All that was ablest and most
masterly, all except what was mere metaphysical
rubbish, in Calhoun's statesmanship had
been suggested by Randolph years before Calhoun
began his states' rights career.

Between the slave power and states' rights
there was no necessary connection. The slave
power, when in control, was a centralizing influence,
and all the most considerable encroachments
on states' rights were its acts. The
acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the
Embargo; the War of 1812; the Annexation
of Texas "by joint resolution;" the War with
Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of
President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the
Dred Scott decision, — all triumphs of the slave
power, — did far more than either tariffs or
internal improvements, which, in their origin,
were also southern measures, to destroy the

very memory of states' rights as they existed in
1789. Whenever a question arose of extending
or protecting slavery, the slave-holders became
friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous
weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery
in fact required centralization in order to maintain
and protect itself, but it required to control
the centralized machine; it needed despotic
principles of government, but it needed them
exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth,
states' rights were the protection of the free
States, and as a matter of fact, during the domination
of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed
to this protecting principle as often and
almost as loudly as South Carolina.

The doctrine of states' rights was in itself a
sound and true doctrine; as a starting point of
American history and constitutional law there
is no other which will bear a moment's examination;
it was as dear to New England as to
Virginia, and its prostitution to the base uses
of the slave power was one of those unfortunate
entanglements which so often perturb and mislead
history. This prostitution, begun by Randolph,
and only at a later time consummated
by Calhoun, was the task of a man who loudly
and pathetically declared himself a victim to
slavery, a hater of the detestable institution, an
ami des noirs; who asserted that all the misfortunes

of his life — and they had been neither
few nor inconsiderable — were light in the balance
when compared with the single misfortune
of having been born the master of slaves. It
was begun in the Missouri debate in 1819 and
1820, but unfortunately Randolph's speeches in
these sessions, although long and frequent, are
not reported, and his drift is evident only from
later expressions. His speech on internal improvements,
January 31, 1824, set forth with
admirable clearness the nature of this new
fusion of terrorism with lust for power, — the
birth-marks of all Randolph's brood. Struck
out like a spark by sharp contact with Clay's
nobler genius, this speech of Randolph's flashes
through the dull atmosphere of the time, until
it leaps at last across a gap of forty years and
seems to linger for a moment on the distant
horizon, as though consciously to reveal the
dark cloud of smoke and night in which slavery
was to be suffocated.

On the whole, subject to the chance of overlooking

some less famous effort, this speech, with
its companions at this session, may be fairly
taken as Randolph's masterpiece, and warrants
placing him in very high rank as a political
leader. Grant that it is wicked and mischievous
beyond all precedent even in his own mischievous
career; that its effect must be to
create the dangers which it foretold, and to
bring the slave power into the peril which it
helped to create: grant that it was in flagrant
contradiction to his speeches on the Louisiana
purchase, his St. Domingo vote, and his outcry
for an embargo; that it was inspired by hatred
of Clay; that it related to a scheme of internal
improvement which Mr. Jefferson himself had
invented, and upon which he had once looked
as upon the flower, the crown, the hope, and
aspiration of his whole political system; that it
was a deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to pervert
the old and honorable principle of states'
rights into a mere tool for the protection of
negro slavery, which Randolph professed to
think the worst of all earthly misfortunes;
that it assumed, with an arrogance beyond belief,
the settled purpose of the slave power to
strain the Constitution in its own interests, and
to block the government at its own will, —
grant all this and whatever more may be required,
still this speech is wonderfully striking
It startles, not merely by its own brightness,
although this is intense, but by the very darkness
which it makes visible.

Not content with laying down his new political
principle for the union of slave-holders behind
the barrier of state sovereignty, Randolph repeatedly
returned to it, as was his custom when
trying to impress a fear on men's minds. His
speeches on the tariff at this session of 1824,
considered as a mere extension of the speech on
internal improvements, are full of astonishingly
clever touches.

This is very clever, keen, terse, vivacious;
put in admirably simple and well-chosen English;
and the discursions and digressions of the
speaker were rather an advantage than a drawback
in these running debates. Much of Randolph's
best wit was in parentheses; many of
his boldest suggestions were scattered in short,
occasional comments. On the question of taxing
coarse woollens, such as negroes wear, he
thrust a little speech into the debate that was
like a dagger in the very bowels of the South:

On another occasion he is reported as saying
of the people of the North, "We do not govern
them by our black slaves, but by their own
white slaves;" and again, with an amount of
drastic effrontery which at that early day was
peculiar to himself, "We know what we are
doing. We of the South are united from the
Ohio to Florida, and we can always unite; but
you of the North are beginning to divide, and

you will divide. We have conquered you once,
and we can and will conquer you again. Aye,
sir, we will drive you to the wall, and when we
have you there once more we mean to keep
you there, and will nail you down like base
money."

What could be more effective than these alternate
appeals to the pride and the terrors of
a slave-owning oligarchy? Where among the
most venomous whispers of Iago can be found
an appeal to jealousy more infernal than some
of those which Randolph made to his southern
colleagues in the Senate?

After twisting this barb into the vitals of his
slave-owning friends, he went on to say:—

No man knew better how to play upon what
he called the "chord which, when touched, even
by the most delicate hand, vibrates to the heart
of every man in our country." He jarred it till
it ached. The southern people, far away from
the scene of his extravagances, felt the hand so
roughly striking their most sensitive nerve, and
responded by the admiration that a tortured animal
still shows for its master. They remembered
his bold prophecies and startling warnings,
his strong figures of speech, his homely
and terse language. Many now learned to love
him. His naturally irrepressible powers for
mischief-making were never so admirably developed.
He had at last got hold of a deep
principle, and invented a far-reaching scheme
of political action.

Circumstances favored him. The presidential

election of 1824 ended in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Clay controlled the result;
he preferred J. Q. Adams to General Jackson;
he caused Mr. Adams's election, and then, like
the man of honor and courage that he was, he
stood by the President he had made. Those
readers who care for the details of this affair
can find them in Mr. Parton's entertaining life
of Andrew Jackson; here need only be said that
Randolph saw his opportunity, and repeated
against Clay and Adams the tactics he had used
against Madison and Jefferson, but which he
now used with infinitely more reason and better
prospects of success. Randolph's opposition
to both the Adamses was legitimate; if
he hated this "American house of Stuart," as
he called it, he had good grounds for doing so;
if he dispised J. Q. Adams, and considered
him as mean a man for a Yankee as Mr. Madison
was for a Virginian, it was not for an instant
imagined or imaginable that either of the
Yankee Presidents ever entertained any other
feeling than contempt for him; they had no
possible intellectual relation with such a mind,
but were fully prepared for his enmity, expected
it, and were in accord with Mr. Jefferson's
opinion, in 1806, that it would be unfortunate
to be embarrassed with such a so-disant
friend. The warfare which Randolph at once
declared against the administration of J. Q.
Adams was not only inevitable; it was, from
many points of view, praiseworthy, for it
cannot be expected that any one who has sympathy
with Mr. Jefferson's theories of government
in 1801, unfashionable though they now
are, will applaud the theories of J. Q. Adams
in 1825. The two doctrines were, in outward
appearance, diametrically opposite; and although
that of Mr. Adams, in sound accord
with the practice if not with the theories of
Mr. Jefferson, seems to have won the day, and
though the powers of the general government
have been expanded beyond his utmost views,
it is not the business of a historian to deny that
there was, and still is, great force in the opposite
argument.

Mr. Adams, however, stood somewhat too
remote for serious injury, and his position was,
at best, too weak to warrant much alarm on
the part of Randolph and his friends. Not
Adams, but Clay, divided the South and broke,
by his immense popularity, the solid ranks
of the slave-holding, states'-rights democracy
which Randolph wished to organize. It was
against Clay that the bitterest effusions of
Randolph's gall were directed, and to crush the
Kentuckian was the object of all his tactics.
Mr. Clay was Secretary of State, and could not

reply to the attacks made upon him in Con
gress, but he retaliated as he best could, and
sustained a losing fight with courage and credit.

Meanwhile, Randolph, soured by what he
considered the neglect of his State, had not
shown that attention to his duties which is usually
expected of members. He was late in attending
Congress, made long absences, and even
declined to serve at all from 1817 to 1819.
Suddenly, on December 17, 1825, he was elected
to the Senate to fill a vacancy caused by the
appointment of James Barbour as Secretary of
War to Mr. Adams. This election was a curious
accident, for the true choice of the Virginian
legislature was undoubtedly Henry St.
George Tucker, Randolph's half-brother, and it
was only his forbearance that gave Randolph
a chance of success. The first vote stood:
Tucker, 65; Randolph, 63; Giles, 58; Floyd,
40. According to the rule of the House Floyd
was then dropped, and the second ballot stood:
Tucker, 87; Randolph, 79; Giles, 60. At each
ballot 226 votes were cast. Mr. Tucker had,
however, instructed his friends in no event to
allow his name to come in direct competition
with Randolph's, and accordingly when, on the
third ballot, the contest was narrowed down to
Tucker and Randolph, not only was the former
name withdrawn, but 42 members abstained

from voting at all. Randolph got 104 votes,
not even a majority of the legislature, although
Mr. Tucker's determination to withdraw, not
announced till after the votes were deposited,
was well known, and made the choice inevitable.

He took his seat immediately. Almost at
the same moment President J. Q. Adams sent
to the Senate nominations of two envoys to
the proposed Congress of American nations at
Panama. To this scheme of a great American
alliance Mr. Clay was enthusiastically attached,
but on its announcement every loose element
of opposition in the Senate drew together into
a new party, and Randolph once more found
himself, as in 1800, hand in hand with that
northern democracy which he had so many
years reviled. In the place of Aaron Burr,
New York was now led by Martin Van Buren,
whose gentle touch moulded into one shape
elements as discordant as Andrew Jackson
and John C. Calhoun, Nathaniel Macon and
Thomas H. Benton, John Randolph, James
Buchanan, and William B. Giles.

On January 15, 1826, Mr. Van Buren began
his campaign by moving to debate the President's
confidential message in public. Randolph
opposed the motion out of respect for
the President. He went back to the old stage
tricks of his opposition to Madison. He was

again descending to comedy. The scene was
arranged beforehand, and he affected respect
only in order that he might give more energy
to his vehemence of contempt. Mr. Clay defied
Van Buren's attack, and Randolph then gave
rein to all his bitterness. On February 27,
1826, he wrote in delight at his success:—

Intoxicated by the sense of old power returning
to his grasp, Randolph now lashed on
his own passions, until at length, in a speech
which exhausted the unrivalled resources of his
vocabulary in abusing the President and Secretary,
after attributing to them every form of political meanness, he said, "I was defeated,
horse, foot, and dragoons, — cut up and clean
broke down by the coalition of Blifil and Black

George, — by the combination, unheard of till
then, of the Puritan with the blackleg." Not
content with this, it is said that he went on
to call Mr. Clay's progenitors to account for
bringing into the world "this being, so brilliant
yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel
by moonlight, shined and stunk."

Not for this blackguard abuse, but for certain
insinuations against his truth, Mr. Clay called
him out. Randolph had not meant to fight;
his object was to break Clay's influence, not to
kill him; his hatred was of the head, not of the
heart; — but he could not refuse. Virginians
would not have tolerated this course even in him.
He had said to General Wilkinson in 1807, "I
cannot descend to your level;" but he could
not repeat it to Henry Clay without losing caste.
On April 8, 1826, they exchanged shots, and
Clay's second bullet pierced the folds of the
white flannel wrapper which Randolph, with
his usual eccentricity, wore on the field. Randolph
threw away his second fire, and thereupon
offered his hand, which Clay could not
refuse to accept.

As for the President, his only revenge was
one which went more directly to its aim than
Mr. Clay's bullet, and fairly repaid the allusion
to Blifil and Black George borrowed from
Lord Chatham. Mr. Adams applied to Randolph

the lines in which Ovid drew the picture
of Envy:—

With equal justice he might have applied more
of Ovid's verses:—

Thus Randolph organized the South. Calhoun
himself learned his lesson from the
speeches of this man, "who," said Mr. Vance
of Ohio, in the House of Representatives, on
January 29, 1828, "is entitled to more credit,
if it is right that this administration should go
down, for his efficiency in effecting that object
than any three men in this nation." "From the
moment he took his seat in the other branch of
the legislature, he became the great rallying officer
of the South." To array the whole slave-holding
influence behind the banner of states'
rights, and use centralization as the instrument
of slavery; alternately to take the aggressive
and the defensive, as circumstances should re

quire, without seeming to quit the fortress of
defence; to throw loaded dice at every cast, and
call, "Heads I win, tails you lose," at every
toss, — this was what Randolph aimed at, and
what he actually accomplished so far as his
means would allow. The administration of
Adams, a Puritan and an old federalist, who
had the strongest love for American nationality,
was precisely the influence needed to consolidate
the slave-holding interest. Randolph
converted Calhoun; after this conversion Clay
alone divided the slave power, and Clay was
to be crushed by fair means or foul. The campaign
succeeded. Clay was crushed, and the
slave power ruled supreme.