 | JOHN RANDOLPH. John Randolph |  |
I. JOHN RANDOLPH.
CHAPTER I.
YOUTH.
William, first American ancestor of the innumerable
Randolphs of Virginia, made his
appearance there at some time not precisely
known, but probably about the year 1660.
The books tell us neither whence he came,
who he was, why he emigrated, nor what were
his means; but "William Randolph, gentleman,
of Turkey Island," originally from Warwickshire,
or from Yorkshire, at all events
from England, unless it were from Scotland,
married Mary Isham, of Bermuda Hundred,
and by her had seven sons and two daughters,
whose descendants swarmed like bees in the
Virginian hive. Turkey Island, just above the
junction of the James with the Appomattox,
lies unnoticed by mankind except at long intervals
of a hundred years. In 1675, about
the time when William Randolph began his
prosperous career there, Nathaniel Bacon lived
estate. Bacon's famous rebellion broke
out in this year, and in 1706, according to the
records of Henrico County, Curles, after escheating
to the King, had come into the hands
of William Randolph's sons. The world's
attention, however, was not so actively drawn
to this group of tobacco plantations by Bacon's
rebellion as by Benedict Arnold's raid in
1781, and neither of these bloody and destructive
disturbances made the region nearly so
famous as it became on June 30, 1862, when
fifty thousand Northern troops, beaten, weary,
and disorganized, converged at Malvern Hill and
Turkey Island Bridge, and the next day fought
a battle which saved their army and perhaps
their cause, without a thought or a care for
the dust of forgotten Randolphs, on which they
were trampling in this cradle of the race. They
were not more indifferent than the family itself,
for long before this time the descendants of
William Randolph had grown up, multiplied,
accumulated great possessions in slaves and
land, then slowly waned in fortune, and at last
disappeared, until not an acre of land on the
James or the Appomattox was owned by a Randolph.
William's fourth son, Richard, who lived at
Curles, Nathaniel Bacon's confiscated plantation,
of John Rolfe and Pocahontas,
disposed by will, in 1742, of forty thousand
acres of the choicest lands on the James,
Appomattox, and Roanoke rivers, including
Matoax, about two miles west of Petersburg,
and Bizarre, a plantation some ninety miles
further up the Appomattox River. John, the
youngest son of this Richard of Curles, born in
1742, married in 1769 Frances Bland, daughter
of a neighbor who lived at Cawsons, on a
promontory near the mouth of the Appomattox,
looking north up the James River to Turkey
Island. Here on June 2, 1773, their youngest
child, John, was born.
In these last days of colonial history, the
Randolphs were numerous and powerful, a family
such as no one in Virginia would wish to
offend; for aristocracy always ran riot in this
atmosphere, and the Randolphs were as mad as
the maddest. There was even a Randolph of
Wilton, another of Chatsworth, as though they
meant to rival Pembrokes and Devonshires.
There was a knight in the family, old Sir John,
sixth son of William of Turkey Island, and
father of Peyton Randolph, who was afterwards
president of the American Congress. There
was a historian, perhaps the best the State has
yet produced, old William Stith. There were
of Burgesses, an innumerable list of blood relations
and a score of allied families, among the
rest that of Jefferson. Finally, the King's Attorney-General
was at this time a Randolph,
and took part with the crown against the colony.
The world upon which the latest Randolph
baby opened his eyes was, so far as his
horizon stretched, a world of cousins, a colonial
aristocracy all his own, supported by tobacco
plantations and negro labor, by colonial patronage
and royal favor, or, to do it justice, by
audacity, vigor, and mind.
This small cheerful world, which was in its
way a remarkable phenomenon, and produced
the greatest list of great names ever known
this side of the ocean, was about to suffer a
wreck the more fatal and hopeless because no
skill could avert it, and the dissolution was
so quiet and subtle that no one could protect
himself or secure his children. The boy was
born at the moment when the first shock was
at hand. His father died in 1775; his mother,
in 1778, married Mr. St. George Tucker, of Bermuda,
and meanwhile the country had plunged
into a war which in a single moment cut that
connection with England on which the old
Virginian society depended for its tastes, fashions,
theories, and above all for its aristocratic
of Independence proclaimed that America was
no longer to be English, but American; that is
to say, democratic and popular in all its parts,
—a fact equivalent to a sentence of death upon
old Virginian society, and foreboding dissolution
to the Randolphs and their pride, until
they should learn to master the new conditions
of American life. For passing through such a
mælstrom a century was not too short an allowance
of time, yet this small Randolph boy, not
a strong creature at best, was born just as the
downward plunge began, and every moment
made the outlook drearier and more awful.
On January 3, 1781, he was at Matoax with
his mother, who only five days before had been
confined. Suddenly it was said that the British
were coming. They soon appeared, under
the command of Brigadier-General Benedict
Arnold, and scared Virginia from Yorktown
to the mountains. They hunted the Governor
like a tired fox, and ran him out of his famous
mountain fastness at Monticello, breaking up
his government and mortifying him, until Mr.
Jefferson at last refused to reassume the office,
and passed his trust over to a stronger hand.
St. George Tucker at Matoax thought it time
to seek safer quarters, and hurried his wife,
with her little baby, afterwards the well-known
ninety miles up the Appomattox.
Here he left her and went to fight Cornwallis
at Guilford. Henceforward the little Randolphs
ran wild at Bizarre. Schooling they had
none, and discipline was never a part of Virginian
education. Mrs. Tucker, their mother,
was an affectionate and excellent woman; Mr.
Tucker a kind and admirable step-father; as
for the boy John Randolph, it is said that he
had a warm and amiable disposition, although
the only well-authenticated fact recorded about
his infancy is that before his fifth year he was
known to swoon in a mere fit of temper, and
could with difficulty be restored. The life of
boyhood in Virginia was not well fitted for
teaching self-control or mental discipline, qualities
which John Randolph never gained; but
in return for these the Virginian found other
advantages which made up for the loss of methodical
training. Every Virginian lad, especially
on such a remote plantation as Bizarre, lived in
a boy's paradise of indulgence: he fished and
shot; he rode like a young monkey, and his
memory was crammed with the genealogy of
every well-bred horse in the State; he grew up
among dogs and negroes, master equally of
both; he knew all about the prices of wheat,
tobacco, and slaves; he picked up much that
he backed his favorite bird at a cockingmain,
and looked on with keen interest at the
inevitable old-fashioned rough-and-tumble fight,
where the champions did not use, as now, the
knife or the pistol, but fixed their thumbs in
each other's eye sockets, and bit off each other's
noses and ears. All these accomplishments and
many others of a like character were familiar to
most young Virginians whose parents did not
send them early to Europe or to the North,
and, with the rest, a habit of drinking as freely
as they talked, and of talking as freely as the
utmost license of the English language would
allow. The climate was genial, the soil generous,
the life easy, but of careful mental training
there was not much even in the best days of
Virginia. Indeed, there was in Europe itself
little enough outside of a few universities, themselves
relics of the Middle Ages.
There was, however, another side to Virginian
life, which helped to civilize the young savages,
— the domestic and family relation; the
influence of father and mother, of women, of
such reading as the country-house offered, of
music, dancing, and the table. John Randolph
was born and bred among gentlefolk. Mr.
Tucker had refinement, and his wife, along with
many other excellent qualities, had two very
To inoculate the imagination of her son with
notions of family pride was an easy task, and
to show him how to support the dignity of his
name was a natural one. "Never part with
your land," was her solemn injunction, which
he did not forget; "keep your land, and your
land will keep you." This was the English
theory, and Randolph acted on it through life,
although it was becoming more and more evident,
with every passing year, that the best
thing to be done with Virginian land at the ruling
prices was to part with it. His passion for
land became at last sheer avarice, a quality so
rare in Virginia as to be a virtue, and he went
on accumulating plantation upon plantation
without paying his debts, while the land, worth
very little at best, was steadily becoming as
worthless as the leaves which every autumn
shook from its forests. Not an acre of the forty
thousand which his grandfather bequeathed
now belongs to a Randolph, but the Randolphs
or any one else might have bought back the
whole of it for a song at any time within half
a century.
Thus the boy took life awry from the start;
he sucked poison with his mother's milk. Not
so easy a task, however, was it for her to teach
him her other strong instinct; for, although
much as he loved any one, he was perverse in
childhood as in manhood, and that his mother
should try to make him religious seems to
have been reason enough for his becoming
a vehement deist. At what age he took this
bent is nowhere said; perhaps a little later,
when he went for a few months to school
at Williamsburg, the focus of Virginian deism.
At Bizarre he seems rather to have turned
towards story-books and works that appealed
to his imagination; the kind of reading he
would be apt to find in the cupboards of Virginian
houses, and such as a boy with fits of
moodiness and a lively imagination would be
likely to select. Thus he is said to have read,
before his eleventh year, the Arabian Nights,
Shakespeare, Homer, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,
Plutarch's Lives, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver,
Tom Jones. The chances are a thousand to one
that to this list may be added Peregrine Pickle,
the Newgate Calendar, Moll Flanders, and Roderick
Random. Whether Paradise Lost, or
Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela, were soon
added to the number, we are not told; but
it is quite safe to say that, among these old,
fascinating volumes, then found in every Virginian
country-place as in every English one,
Randolph never met with one or two books
farm-house, where the freer literature
would have been thought sinful and heathenish.
He never saw and never would have read the
Pilgrim's Progress or the Saint's Rest; he
would have recoiled from every form of Puritanism
and detested every affectation of sanctity.
The kind of literary diet on which the boy
thus fed was not the healthiest or best for a
nature like his; but it made the literary education
of many a man who passed through life,
looked on by his fellows as well read with no
wider range than this; and as Randolph had a
quick memory he used to the utmost what he
had thus gained. His cleverest illustrations
were taken from Shakespeare and Fielding. In
other literature he was well versed, according
to the standards of the day: he read his Gibbon,
Hume, and Burke; knew English history,
and was at home in the English peerage; but
it was to Shakespeare and Fielding that his imagination
naturally turned, and in this, as in
other things, he was a true Virginian, a son of
the soil and the time.
As he grew a few years older, and looked
about him on the world in which he was to play
a part, he saw little but a repetition of his own
surroundings. When the Revolutionary War
during the next five years he tried to pick
up an education. America was then a small,
straggling, exhausted country, without a government,
a nationality, a capital, or even a
town of thirty thousand inhabitants; a country
which had not the means of supplying such an
education as the young man wanted, however
earnestly he tried for it. His advantages were
wholly social, and it is not to be denied that
they were great. He had an immense family
connection, which gave him confidence and a
sense of power; from his birth surrounded by
a society in itself an education, he was accustomed
to the best that Virginia had, and Virginia
had much that was best on the continent.
He saw about him that Virginian gentry which
was the child of English squirarchy, and reproduced
the high breeding of Bolingbroke and Sir
Charles Grandison side by side with the coarseness
of Swift and Squire Western. The contrasts
were curious, in this provincial aristocracy,
between old-fashioned, overstrained affectations
of courtesy and culture and the rough
brutality of plantation habits. On one side
the Virginian might be as brutal as the roughest
cub that ever ran loose among the negro
cabins of a tobacco plantation; he might be
violent, tyrannical, vicious, cruel, and licentious
time trained to habits of good society, and
sincerely feeling that exaggerated deference
which it was usual to affect towards ladies; he
might be well read, fond of intelligent conversation,
consumed by ambition, or devoured
by self-esteem. His manners were deferential,
mild, and charming when at their best,
and intolerable when the spirit of arrogance
seized him. Nowhere could be found a school
of more genial and simpler courtesy than that
which produced the great men and women of
Virginia, but it had its dangers and affectations;
it was often provincial and sometimes
absurd.
John Randolph, the embodiment of all these
contrasts and peculiarities, was a type recognized
and understood by every Virginian. To
a New England man, on the contrary, the type
was unintelligible and monstrous. The New
Englander had his own code of bad manners,
and was less tolerant than the Virginian of
whatever varied from it. As the character
of Don Quixote was to Cervantes clearly a
natural and possible product of Spanish character,
so to the people of Virginia John Randolph
was a representative man, with qualities
exaggerated but genuine; and even these exaggerations
struck a chord of popular sympathy
failings; his genius was in some degree a
caricature of Virginian genius; and thus the
boy grew up to manhood, as pure a Virginian
Quixote as ever an American Cervantes could
have conceived.
In the summer of 1781 he had a few months'
schooling, and afterwards was again at school,
about one year, at Williamsburg, till the spring
of 1784, when his parents took him on a visit to
Bermuda, the home of his step-father's family.
In the autumn of 1787 he was sent to Princeton,
where he passed a few months; the next
year, being now fifteen, he went for a short time
to Columbia College, in New York. This was
all the schooling he ever had, and, excepting
perhaps a little Latin, it is not easy to say what
he learned. "I am an ignorant man, sir," was
his own statement. So he was, and so, for that
matter, are the most learned: but Randolph's
true ignorance was not want of book-learning;
he had quite as much knowledge of that kind
as he could profitably use in America, and his
mind was naturally an active one, could he only
have put it in sympathy with the movement of
his country. At this time of life, when the
ebullition of youth was still violent, he was curiously
torn by the struggle between conservative
and radical instincts. He read Voltaire,
in his opinions as any of them. The Christian
religion was hateful to him, as it was to Tom
Paine; he loved everything hostile to it. "Very
early in life," he wrote thirty years afterwards,
"I imbibed an absurd prejudice in favor of Mahometanism
and its votaries. The crescent had
a talismanic effect on my imagination, and I rejoiced
in all its triumphs over the cross (which
I despised), as I mourned over its defeats; and
Mahomet II. himself did not more exult than
I did when the crescent was planted on the
dome of St. Sophia, and the cathedral of the
Constantines was converted into a Turkish
mosque." This was radical enough to suit
Paine or Saint Just, but it was the mere intellectual
fashion of the day, as over-vehement
and unhealthy as its counterpart, the religious
spasms of his later life. His mind was always
controlled by his feelings; its antipathies were
stronger than its sympathy; it was restless and
uneasy, prone to contradiction and attached to
paradox. In such a character there is nothing
very new, for at least nine men out of ten,
whose intelligence is above the average, have
felt the same instincts: the impulse to contradict
is as familiar as dyspepsia or nervous excitability;
the passion for referring every comparison
to one's self is a primitive quality of mind
but what was to be expected when such a temperament,
exaggerated and unrestrained, full
of self-contradictions and stimulated by acute
reasoning powers, remarkable audacity and
quickness, violent and vindictive temper, and a
morbid constitution, was planted in a Virginian,
a slave-owner, a Randolph, just when the world
was bursting into fire and flame?
Of course, while at college, the young Randolph
had that necessary part of a Southern
gentleman's education in those days, a duel, but
there is no reason to suppose that he was given
to brawls, and in early life his temper was
rather affectionate than harsh. His friendships
were strong, and seem to have been permanent.
He was intelligent and proud, and may have
treated with contempt whatever he thought
mean or contemptible. He certainly did quarrel
with a Virginian fellow-student, and then
shot him, but no one can now say what excuse
or justification he may have had. His opponent's
temper in after life was quite as violent
as his own, and the quarrel itself rose from a
dispute over the mere pronunciation of a word.
In the year 1788 he was at college in New
York with his elder brother Richard, and we
get a glimpse of him in a letter to his stepfather,
dated on Christmas Day, 1788: —
"Be well assured, my dear sir, our expenses since
our arrival here have been enormous, and by far
greater than our estate, especially loaded as it is with
debt, can bear; however, I flatter myself, my dear
papa, that upon looking over the accounts you will find
that my share is by comparison trifling, and hope that
by the wise admonitions of so affectionate a parent,
and one who has our welfare and interest so much at
heart, we may be able to shun the rock of prodigality
upon which so many people continually split, and
by which the unhappy victim is reduced not only to
poverty, but also to despair and all the horrors attending
it."
This was unusual language for a Virginian
boy of fifteen! It would have been safe to
prophesy that the rock of prodigality was not
one of his dangers. Down to the last day of
his life he talked in the same strain, always
complaining of this old English indebtedness,
living with careful economy, but never willing
to pay his debt, and never able to resist the
temptation of buying land and slaves. The
letter goes on: —
"Brother Richard writes you that I am lazy. I
assure you, dear papa, he has been egregiously mistaken.
I attend every lecture that the class does.
Not one of the professors have ever found me dull
with my business, or even said that I was irregular.
. . . If brother Richard had written you that I did
in the dark; neither was it possible for me. We
lived in this large building without a soul in it but
ourselves, and it was so desolate and dreary that I
could not bear to be in it. I was always afraid that
some robber, of which we have a plenty, was coming
to kill me, after they made a draught on the house."
Nervous, excitable, loving warmly, hating
more warmly still, easily affected by fears,
whether of murderers or of poverty, lazy according
to his brother Richard, neither dull
nor irregular, but timid, according to his own
account, this letter represents him as he showed
himself to his parents, in rather an amiable
light. It closes with a suggestion of politics:
"Be so good, my dear sir, when it is convenient,
to send me the debate of the convention in
our State." He was too true a Virginian not
to oppose the new Constitution of the United
States which Patrick Henry and George Mason
had so vehemently resisted; but that Constitution
was now adopted, and was about to be set
in motion. From this moment a new school
was provided for the boy, far more interesting
to him than the lecture rooms of Columbia College;
a school which he attended with extraordinary
amusement and even fascination.
"I was at Federal Hall," said he once in a
speech to his constituents; "I saw Washington,
support the federal Constitution. The Constitution
was in its chrysalis state. I saw what
Washington did not see, but two other men in
Virginia saw it, — George Mason and Patrick
Henry, — the secret sting which lurked beneath
the gaudy pinions of the butterfly." Wiser
men than he, not only in Virginia, but elsewhere,
saw and dreaded the centralizing, overwhelming
powers of the new government, and
are not to be blamed for their fears. Without
boldly assuming that America was a country
to which old rules did not apply; that she stood
by herself, above law, it was impossible to look
without alarm at the tendency of the Constitution,
for history, from beginning to end, was
one long warning against the abuse of just such
powers. Were Randolph alive to-day he would
probably feel that his worst fears were realized.
From his point of view as a Virginian, a slave-owner,
a Randolph, it was true that, although
the Constitution was not a butterfly and did
not carry poison under its wings, — for only at
Roanoke could a butterfly be found with a
secret sting in such a part of its person, — it
did carry a fearful power for good or evil in
the tremendous sweep of its pinions and the
terrible grip of its claws.
Another little incident sharpened Randolph's
system. "I was in New York," said he nearly
forty years afterwards, "when John Adams
took his seat as Vice-President. I recollect —
for I was a school-boy at the time — attending
the lobby of Congress when I ought to have
been at school. I remember the manner in
which my brother was spurned by the coachman
of the then Vice-President for coming too
near the arms emblazoned on the scutcheon of
the vice-regal carriage. Perhaps I may have
some of this old animosity rankling in my
heart, . . . coming from a race who are known
never to forsake a friend or forgive a foe."
The world would be an uncomfortable residence
for elderly people, if they were to be objects
of life-long personal hatred to every boy over
whose head their coachman, without their
knowledge, had once snapped a whip, and
especially so if, as in this case, the feud were
carried down to the next generation. Of course
the sting did not lie in the coachman's whip.
Had the carriage been that of a Governor
of Virginia or a Lord Chancellor of England,
or had the coachman of his own old-fashioned
four-horse Virginian chariot been to blame,
John Randolph would never have given the
matter another thought; but that his brother,
a Virginian gentleman of ancient family and
of a Yankee school-master, who had neither
family, wealth, nor land, but was a mere shoot
of a psalm-singing democracy, and that this
man should lord it over Virginia and Virginians,
was maddening; and the sight of that
Massachusetts whip was portentous, terrible,
inexpressible, to the boy, like the mysterious
solitude of his great school-house, which drove
him out into the street in fear of robbery and
murder.
The Attorney-General of the new government
was a Randolph, — Edmund, son of John,
and grandson of Sir John, who was brother to
Richard of Curles, — and when, in 1790, the
seat of administration was transferred to Philadelphia,
John Randolph left Columbia College,
and went to Philadelphia to study law in the
Attorney-General's train. Here, excepting for
occasional visits to Virginia, and for interruption
by yellow fever, he remained until 1794, occupying
himself very much as he liked, so far as
is now to be learned. He was not pleased
with Mr. Edmund Randolph's theories in the
matter of teaching law. He studied systematically
no profession, neither law nor medicine,
although he associated with students of
both, and even attended lectures. He seems
to have enjoyed the life, as was natural, for
said he many years afterwards, "by fatal experience,
the fascinations of a town life, — how
they estrange the mind from its old habits and
attachments." This "fatal experience" was
probably a mere figure of speech; so far as can
be seen, his residence in New York and Philadelphia
was the most useful part of his youth,
and went far to broaden his mind. A few of
his letters at this period are extant, but they
tell little except that he was living with the
utmost economy and was deeply interested in
politics, taking, of course, a strongly anti-federalist
side.
In April, 1794, he returned to Virginia to assume
control of his property. In after years he
complained bitterly of having "been plundered
and oppressed during my nonage, and left to
enter upon life overwhelmed with a load of
debt which the profits of a nineteen years' minority
ought to have more than paid; and, ignorant
as I was, and even yet am, of business,
to grope my way without a clue through the
labyrinth of my father's affairs; and, brought
up among Quakers, an ardent ami des noirs, to
scuffle with negroes and overseers for something
like a pittance of rent and profit upon
my land and stock." He lived with his elder
brother Richard, who was now married, at Bizarre,
this generation as the town from which General
Grant dated his famous letter calling upon General
Lee for a surrender of the Confederate army
of northern Virginia. From here he could direct
the management of his own property at Roanoke,
some miles to the southward, while he enjoyed
the society at Bizarre and economized his
expenses.
Nothing further is recorded of his life until
in the spring of 1796 he visited his friend
Bryan in Georgia, and during a stay in Charleston
came under the notice of a bookseller, who
has recorded the impression he made: "A
tall, gawky-looking, flaxen-haired stripling, apparently
of the age from sixteen to eighteen,
with a complexion of a good parchment color,
beardless chin, and as much assumed self-confidence
as any two-footed animal I ever saw,"
in company with a gray-headed, florid-complexioned
old gentleman, whom he slapped on the
back and called Jack, — a certain Sir John Nesbit,
a Scotch baronet, with whom he had become
intimate, and whom he beat in a horse-race,
each riding his own horse. The bookseller at
once set him down as the most impudent youth
he had ever seen, but was struck by the sudden
animation which at moments lighted up
his usually dull and heavy face.
After his stay at Charleston, he went on to
his friend Bryan's in Georgia, where he proved
his convivial powers, as in South Carolina he
had proved his superiority in horse-racing.
"My eldest brother," wrote Bryan afterwards,
"still bears a friendly remembrance of the rum
ducking you gave him." This visit to Georgia
was destined to have great influence on his later
career. He found the State convulsed with
excitement over what was long famous as the
Yazoo fraud. The legislature of Georgia, in the
preceding year, had authorized the sale of four
immense tracts of land, supposed to embrace
twenty millions of acres, for five hundred thousand
dollars, to four land companies. It was
proved that, with one exception, every member
of the legislature who voted for this bill was
interested in the purchase. A more flagrant
case of wholesale legislative corruption had
never been known, and when the facts were
exposed the whole State rose in indignation
against it, elected a new legislature, annulled
the sale, expunged the act from the record,
and finally, by calling a convention, made the
expunging act itself a part of the state constitution.
With his natural vehemence of temper,
Randolph caught all the excitement of his
friends, and became a vehement anti-Yazoo man,
as it was called, for the rest of his life.
The visit to Georgia accomplished, he turned
homewards again, and was suddenly met by
the crushing news that his brother Richard was
dead. In every way this blow was a terrible
one. His brother had been his oldest and closest
companion. The widow and two children,
one of whom was deaf and dumb from birth,
and ultimately became insane, besides the
whole burden of the joint establishment, now
came under John Randolph's charge. "Then,"
to use his own words, "I had to unravel the
tangled skein of my poor brother's difficulties
and debts. His sudden and untimely death
threw upon my care, helpless as I was, his family,
whom I tenderly and passionately loved."
Richard's last years had been embittered by a
strange and terrible scandal, resulting in a family
feud, which John, with his usual vehemence,
made his own. These complications would
have been trying to any man, but to one of his
peculiar temper they were a source of infinite
depression and despair.
| JOHN RANDOLPH. John Randolph | |