University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II.

VIRGINIAN POLITICS.

Politics meanwhile were becoming more
and more violent. The negotiation of Jay's
treaty with England, which took place in 1794,
followed by its publication in June, 1795, and
the extraordinary behavior of France, threw the
country into a state of alarming excitement.
Randolph shared in the indignation of those
who thought the treaty a disgraceful one, and
there is a story, told on the authority of his
friends, that at a dinner, pending the ratification,
he gave as a toast, "George Washington,
— may he be damned!" and when the company
declined to drink it, he added, "if he signs
Jay's treaty." No one can fairly blame the
opposition to that treaty, which indeed challenged
opposition; and that Randolph should
have opposed it hotly, if he opposed it at all,
was only a part of his nature; but none the less
was it true that between his Anglican tastes
and his Gallican policy he was in a false position,
as he was also between his aristocratic
prejudices and his democratic theories, his deistical

doctrines and his conservative temperament,
his interests as a slave-owner and his
theories as an ami des noirs, and finally in the
entire delusion which possessed his mind that a
Virginian aristocracy could maintain itself in
alliance with a democratic polity.

Perhaps these flagrant inconsistencies might
have worked out ten years sooner to their natural
result, had not John Adams and New
England now stood at the head of the government.
If Randolph could wish no better fate
for his own countryman, Washington, than
that he might be damned, one may easily imagine
what were his feelings towards Washington's
successor, whose coachman had cracked
his whip over Richard Randolph. For thirty
years he never missed a chance to have his
fling at both the Adamses, father and son;
"the cub," he said, "is a greater bear than
the old one;" and although he spared no prominent
Virginian, neither Washington, Jefferson,
Madison, Monroe, nor Clay, yet the only persons
against whom his strain of invective was
at all seasons copious, continuous, and vehement
were the two New England Presidents.
To do him justice, there was every reason, in
his category of innate prejudices, for the antipathy
he felt; and especially in regard to the
administration of the elder Adams there was

ample ground for honest divergence of opinion.
For one moment in the career of that administration
the country was in real danger, and
opposition became almost a duty. When hostilities
with France broke out, and under their
cover the Alien and Sedition laws were passed,
backed by a large army, with the scarcely concealed
object of overawing threatened resistance
from Virginia, it was time that opposition
should be put in power, even though the opposition
had itself undertaken to nullify acts
of Congress and to prepare in secret an armed
rebellion against the national government.

Feeling ran high in Virginia during the year
1798. Mr. Madison had left Congress, but both
he and Mr. Jefferson, the Vice-President, were
busy in organizing their party for what was too
much like a dissolution of the Union. They
induced the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky
to assert the right of resistance to national
laws, and were privy to the preparations
making in Virginia for armed resistance; or if
they were not, it was because they chose to be
ignorant. Monroe was certainly privy to these
warlike preparations; for, in the year 1814,
Randolph attacked in debate the conscription
project recommended by Monroe, then Secretary
of War, and said, "Ask him what he
would have done, whilst Governor of Virginia,

and preparing to resist federal usurpation, had
such an attempt been made by Mr. Adams and
his ministers, especially in 1800! He can give
the answer." At a still later day, in January,
1817, Randolph explained the meaning of his
innuendo. "There is no longer," said he, "any
cause for concealing the fact that the grand
armory at Richmond was built to enable the
State of Virginia to resist by force the encroachments
of the then administration upon
her indisputable rights." Naturally Randolph
himself was in thorough sympathy with such
schemes, and it would be surprising if he and
the hot-headed young men of his stamp did
not drag their older chiefs into measures which
these would have gladly avoided.

Seizing this moment to enter political life,
with characteristic audacity he struck at once
for the highest office within his reach; at
the age of twenty-six, he announced himself a
candidate for Congress. Both parties were
keenly excited over the contest in Virginia, and
the federalists, with Washington at their head,
were greatly distressed and alarmed, for they
knew what was going on, and after opposing
to the utmost Mr. Madison's nullification resolutions,
straining every nerve to allay the excitement,
as a last resource they implored
their old opponent, Patrick Henry, to come

to their rescue. Unwillingly enough, for his
strength was rapidly failing, Henry consented.
Nothing in his life was nobler. The greatest
orator and truest patriot in Virginia, a sound
and consistent democrat, sprung from the people
and adored by them, this persistent and
energetic opponent of the Constitution, who
had denounced its over-swollen powers and its
"awful squint towards monarchy," now came
forward, not for office, nor to qualify or withdraw
anything he had ever said, but with his
last breath to warn the people of Virginia not
to raise their hand against the national government.
Washington himself, he said, would lead
an army to put them down. "Where is the
citizen of America who will dare lift his hand
against the father of his country? No! you
dare not do it! In such a parricidal attempt,
the steel would drop from your nerveless arm!"

In the light of subsequent history there is a
solemn and pathetic grandeur in this dying
appeal of the old revolutionary orator, by the
tavern porch of Charlotte, at the March court,
in 1799, — a grandeur partly due to its simplicity,
but more to its association with the
great revolutionary struggle which had gone
before, and with the awful judgment which
fell upon this doomed region sixty-five years
afterwards. There was, too, an element of

contrast in the composition; for when the old
man fell back, exhausted, and the great audience
stood silent with the conviction that
they had heard an immortal orator, who would
never speak again, make an appeal such as
defied reply, then it was that John Randolph's
tall, lean, youthful figure climbed upon the platform and stood up before the crowd.

What he said is not recorded, and would in
no case be very material. He himself, in 1817,
avowed in Congress the main burden of his address:
"I was asked if I justified the establishment
of the armory for the purpose of opposing
Mr. Adams's administration. I said I did; that
I could not conceive any case in which the people
could not be intrusted with arms; and that the
use of them to oppose oppressive measures was
in principle the same, whether those of the administration
of Lord North or that of Mr. Adams."
At this period Randolph did not talk
in the crisp, nervous, pointed language of his
after life, but used the heroic style which is still
to be seen in the writings of his friend, "the
greatest man I ever knew, John Thompson, the
immortal author of the letters of Curtius."
The speech could have been only a solemn defence
of states' rights; an appeal to state pride
and fear; an ad hominem attack on Patrick
Henry's consistency, and more or less effective

denunciation of federalists in general. What
he could not answer, and what must become
the more impressive through his own success,
was the splendor of a sentiment; history, past
and coming; the awe that surrounds a dying
prophet threatening a new doom deserved.

Vague tradition reports that Randolph spoke
for three hours and held his audience; he rarely
failed with a Virginian assembly, and in this
case his whole career depended on success.
Tradition further says that Patrick Henry remarked
to a by-stander, "I haven't seen the
little dog before, since he was at school; he
was a great atheist then;" and after the speech,
shaking hands with his opponent, he added,
"Young man, you call me father; then, my son,
I have something to say unto thee: Keep justice,
keep truth, — and you will live to think
differently."

Randolph never did live to think differently,
but ended as he began, trying to set bounds
against the power of the national government,
and to protect those bounds, if need be, by force.
Whether his opinions were wrong or right,
criminal or virtuous, is another matter, which
has an interest far deeper than his personality,
and more lasting than his fame; but at least
those opinions were at that time expressed with
the utmost clearness and emphasis, not by him,

but by the legislatures of more than one State;
and as he was not their author, so he is not to
be judged harshly for accepting or adhering to
them. Doubtless as time passed and circumstances
changed, Randolph figured as a political
Quixote in his championship of states' rights,
which became at the end his hobby, his mania;
he played tricks with it until his best friends
were weary and disgusted; but, so far as his
wayward life had a meaning or a moral purpose,
it lay in his strenuous effort to bar the
path of that spirit of despotism which in every
other age and land had perverted government
into a curse and a scourge. The doctrine of
states' rights was but a fragment of republican
dogma in 1800, and circumstances alone caused
it to be remembered when men forgot the
system of opinions of which it made a part;
isolated, degraded, defiled by an unnatural
union with the slave power, the doctrine became
at last a mere phrase, which had still a
meaning only to those who knew what Mr.
Jefferson and the republicans of America had
once believed; but to Randolph it was always
an inspired truth which purified and elevated
his whole existence; the faith of his youth, it
seemed to him to sanctify his age; the helmet
of this Virginian Quixote, — a helmet of Mambrino,
if one pleases, — it was in Quixote's eyes
a helmet all the same. What warranted such
enthusiasm in this threadbare formula of words?
Why should thousands on thousands of simpleminded,
honest, plain men have been willing to
die for a phrase?

The republican party, which assumed control
of the government in 1801, had taken great
pains to express its ideas so clearly that no
man could misconceive them. At the bottom
of its theories lay, as a foundation, the historical
fact that political power had, in all experience,
tended to grow at the expense of human
liberty. Every government tended towards
despotism; contained somewhere a supreme,
irresponsible, self-defined power called sovereignty,
which held human rights, if human
rights there were, at its mercy. Americans
believed that the liberties of this continent
depended on fixing a barrier against this supreme
central power called national sovereignty,
which, if left to grow unresisted, would repeat
here all the miserable experiences of Europe,
and, falling into the grasp of some group of
men, would be the centre of a military tyranny;
that, to resist the growth of this power,
it was necessary to withhold authority from
the government, and to administer it with the
utmost economy, because extravagance generates
corruption, and corruption generates despotism;

that the Executive must be held in
check; the popular branch of the legislature
strengthened, the Judiciary curbed, and the
general powers of government strictly construed;
but, above all, the States must be
supported in exercising all their reserved rights,
because, in the last resort, the States alone
could make head against a central sovereign at
Washington. These principles implied a policy
of peace abroad and of loose ties at home,
leaned rather towards a confederation than towards
a consolidated union, and placed the good
of the human race before the glory of a mere
nationality.

In the famous Virginia and Kentucky resolutions
of 1798, Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson set
forth these ideas with a care and an authority
which gave the two papers a character hardly
less decisive than that of the Constitution itself.
The hand which drafted the Declaration of Independence
drafted the Kentucky Resolutions;
the hand which had most share in framing the
Constitution of the United States framed that
gloss upon it which is known as the Virginia
Resolutions of 1798. Kentucky declared her
determination "tamely to submit to undelegated,
and consequently unlimited, powers in no
man or body of men on earth," and it warned
the government at Washington that acts of

undelegated power, "unless arrested on the
threshold, may tend to drive these States into
revolution and blood;" that submission to such
acts "would be to surrender the form of government
we have chosen, and to live under one
deriving its powers from its own will, and not
from our authority; and that the co-States, recurring
to their natural right in cases not made
federal, will concur in declaring these acts void
and of no force." While Kentucky used this
energetic language, dictated by Mr. Jefferson,
Virginia echoed her words with the emphasis
of a mathematical demonstration, and laid down
as a general principle of the constitutional
compact that, "in case of a deliberate, palpable,
and dangerous exercise of other powers not
granted by the said compact, the States, who
are the parties thereto, have the right, and are
in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the
progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within
their respective limits, the authorities, rights,
and liberties appertaining to them."

Whether this was good constitutional law
need not be discussed at present; at all events,
it was the doctrine of the republican party in
1800, the essence of republican principles, and
for many years the undisputed faith of a vast
majority of the American people. The principle
that the central government was a machine,

established by the people of the States for certain
purposes and no others, was itself equivalent
to a declaration that this machine could
lawfully do nothing but what it was expressly
empowered to do by the people of the States;
and who except the people of the States could
properly decide when the machine overstepped
its bounds? To make the Judiciary a final arbiter
was to make the machine master, for the
Judiciary was not only a part of the machine,
but its most irresponsible and dangerous part.
The class of lawyers, trained, as they were, in
the common law of England, could conceive of
no political system without a core of self-defined
sovereignty in the government, and the Judiciary
merely reflected the training of the bar.
Judiciary, Congress, and Executive, all parts
of one mechanism, could be restrained only by
the constant control of the people of the States.
There can be little doubt that this was the
opinion of Patrick Henry in 1800, as it was
of Randolph, Madison, and Jefferson; on no
other theory, as they believed, could there be
a guaranty for their liberties, and certain it is
that the opposite doctrine, which made the
central machine the measure of its own powers,
offered no guaranty to the citizen against any
stretch of authority by Congress, President, or
Judiciary, but in principle was merely the old
despotic sovereignty of Europe, more or less
disguised.

Not, therefore, in principle did Randolph differ
from Patrick Henry; it was in applying
the principle that their ideas clashed so rudely;
and this application always embarrassed the
subject of states' rights. That the central
government was a mere creature of the people
of the States, and that the people of those
States could unmake as they had made it, was
a fact unquestionable and unquestioned; but
it was one thing to claim that the people of
Virginia had a constitutional right to interpose
a protest against usurpations of power at Washington,
and it was another thing to claim that
they should support their protest by force.
Patrick Henry and Mr. Madison shrank from
this last appeal to arms, which John Randolph
boldly accepted; and, in his defence, it is but
fair to say that a right which has nowhere any
ultimate sanction of force is, in law, no right at
all.

With the correctness of the constitutional
theories which have perturbed the philosophy of
American politics it is needless to deal, for it
is not their correctness which is now in question
so much as the motives and acts of those
who believed in them. There is no reason to
doubt that Randolph honestly believed in all

the theories of his party; was deeply persuaded
of the corruption and wickedness inherent in
every government which defines its own powers;
and wished to make himself an embodiment
of purity in politics, apart from every influence
of power or person. For a generation
like our own, in whose ears the term of states'
rights has become hateful, owing to its perversion
in the interests of negro slavery, and in
whose eyes the comfortable doctrines of unlimited
national sovereignty shine with the glory
of a moral principle sanctified by the blood of
innumerable martyrs, these narrow and jealous
prejudices of Randolph and his friends sound
like systematized treason; but they were the
honest convictions of that generation which
framed and adopted the Constitution, and the
debates of the state conventions in 1788, of
Massachusetts as well as of New York and Virginia,
show that a great majority of the American
people shared the same fears of despotic
government. Time will show whether those
fears were well founded, but whether they
prove real or visionary, they were the essence
of republican politics, and Randolph, whatever
his faults may have been, and however absurdly
in practice his system might work, has a right
to such credit as honest convictions and love of
liberty may deserve.

On these ideas, advocated in their most extreme
form, he contested the field with Patrick
Henry, and carried with him the popular sympathies.
A few weeks later, Patrick Henry
was dead, and young "Jack Randle," as he was
called in Virginia, had secured a seat in Congress.

It would be folly to question the abilities of
a man who, at twenty-six, could hold his own
against such a champion, and win spurs so
gilded. The proof of his genius lies in his audacity,
in the boldness with which he commanded
success and controlled it. More than
any other southern man he felt the intense
self-confidence of the Virginian, as contrasted
with his northern rivals, a moral superiority
which became disastrous in the end from its
very strength; for the resistless force of northern
democracy lay not in its leaders or its political
organization, but in its social and industrial
momentum, and this was a force against which
mere individuality strove in vain. Randolph
knew Virginia, and knew how far he could
domineer over her by exaggerating her own
virtues and vices; but he did not so well
understand that the world could not be captured
off-hand, like a seat in Congress. His
intelligence told him the fact, but his ungovernable
temper seldom let him practice on it.

Meanwhile the crisis, which for a time had
threatened a catastrophe, was passing away;
thanks, not to the forbearance of Randolph or
his friends, but to the personal interference
of that old bear whom Randolph so cordially
hated, the President of the United States.
Fate, however, seemed bent upon making mischief
between these two men. In December,
1799, Randolph took his seat, cordially welcomed
by his party in the House, and within a
very short time showed his intention to challenge
a certain leadership in debate. He was in
the minority, but a minority led by Albert Gallatin
was not to be despised, when it contained
men like John Nicholas of Virginia, Samuel
Smith of Maryland, Edward Livingston of New
York, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, and
Joseph Nicholson of Maryland. Randolph was
admitted, as of right, into this little circle of
leaders, and plunged instantly into debate.
He had already addressed the House twice:
the first time on the census bill; the second on
a petition from free negroes in favor of emancipation,
an act of license which led him to hope
"that the conduct of the House would be so
decided as to deter the petitioners, or any persons
acting for them, from ever presenting one
of a similar nature hereafter;" and on January
9, 1800, he rose again, and spoke at some

length on a motion to reduce the army. The
speech, to say the least of it, was not happy:
its denunciation of standing armies was not
clever enough to enliven the staleness of the
idea, and its praise of the militia system lay
open to the same objection; but its temper was
fatal had the speech been equal to Pitt's best.
Speaking invariably of the army as "mercenaries"
and "hirelings," "loungers who live
upon the public," "who consume the fruits
of their honest industry under the pretext of
protecting them from a foreign yoke," he at last
added, "The people put no confidence in the
protection of a handful of ragamuffins." This
troubled even his friends, and the next day
he rose again to "exchange," as he expressed
it, the term ragamuffin. The same evening
he was at the theatre with his friends Macon,
Nicholson, Christie of Maryland, and others,
when two young marine officers came into the
box behind them, and made remarks, not to
Randolph, but at him: "Those ragamuffins
on the stage are black Virginia ragamuffins;"
"They march well for ragamuffins;"
"Our mercenaries would do better;" until at
length one of them crowded into the seat by
Randolph, and finally, at the end of the performance,
as he was leaving, his collar was violently
jerked from behind, and there was some
jostling on the stairs. The next morning Randolph
wrote a letter to the President, beginning,
—

Then, after saying in the same astonishing diction,
that he had been insulted by two young
marine officers, one of whom was named McKnight,
he concluded, —

To this wonderful piece of bombast the President
made no reply, but inclosed it in a very
brief message to the House of Representatives
as relating to a matter of privilege "which, in
my opinion, ought to be inquired into in the
House itself, if anywhere." "I have thought

proper to submit the whole letter and its tendencies
to your consideration, without any other
comments on its matter or style." The message
concluded by announcing that an investigation
had been ordered.

This reference to the House was very distasteful
to Randolph, and when a committee
of investigation was appointed he hesitated
to appear before it. He was still more annoyed
when the committee made its report, which
contained a sharp censure on himself for "deviating
from the forms of decorum customary
in official communications to the chief magistrate,"
and for demanding redress from the
Executive in a matter which respected the privileges
of the House, thereby derogating from
the rights of that body. In vain Randolph
protested that he had not written "Legislature,"
but "Legislator;" in vain he disavowed
the idea that a breach of privilege had taken
place, and declared that he had addressed the
President only in his military capacity; the
majority had him in a position where the
temptation to punish was irresistible, and he
was forced to endure the stripes.

Even Mr. Gallatin's skilful defence of him
was a little equivocal. "As I do not feel myself
possessed of sufficient courage," said he,
"to support the character of a reformer of received

customs, I shall not, when they are only
absurd, but harmless, pretend to deviate from
them, and I do not mean to change my manner
in order to assume that used by the gentleman;
but he certainly has a right to do it if he thinks
proper." One can hardly doubt that the experience
of being insulted in public, and censured
for it by Congress, though somewhat
sharp, did Randolph good. He was more cautious
for a long time afterwards; talked less
about ragamuffins and hirelings; went less out
of his way to challenge attention; and was
more amenable to good advice. Indeed, it
might be supposed from the index to the reported
debates that he did not again open his
mouth before the adjournment; but, on the
other hand, he has himself said that the best
speech he ever made was on the subject of the
Connecticut Reserve at this session, and the record
shows that on April 4, 1800, he did speak
on this subject, although his remarks were not
reported. In fact, he took an active share in
the public business.

His spirits seem to have been much depressed.
"I too am wretched," he wrote to his friend
Bryan, in the course of the winter. He says
that he meditated resigning his seat and going
to Europe. He seems to have been suffering
under a complication of trials, the mystery of

which his biographers had best not attempt to
penetrate, for his wails of despair, sometimes
genuine, but oftener the effect of an uncontrolled
temperament, tell nothing more than
that he was morbid and nervous. "My character,
like many other sublunary things, hath
lately undergone an almost total revolution."
No such change is apparent, but possibly he
was really suffering under some mental distress.
There is talk even of a love affair, but
it is very certain that no affair of the heart had
at any time a serious influence over his life.

Nothing, however, is more remarkable than
the solemnity with which he regarded himself.
It is curious that a man so quick in seeing the
weakness of others, and in later life so admirably
terse in diction and ideas, should have been
able to see nothing preposterous in his own magniloquence,
or could have gravely written a letter
such as that to the President; but he was
writing in a similar vein to his only very intimate
friend, Bryan, telling him that "the eagle
eye of friendship finds no difficulty in piercing
the veil which shrouds you;" that "you seek
in vain to fly from misery; it will accompany
you; it will rankle in that heart in whose cruel
wounds it rejoices to dwell." This was not the
tone of his friend, for Bryan had used language
which, if profane, was at least natural, and had

only said that he "was in a hell of a taking for
two or three days," on account of a love affair,
and was going to Europe in consequence. Bombast,
however, was a fault of the young Virginian
school. John Thompson, one of Randolph's
intimates, the author of Gracchus, Cassius, Curtius,
and Heaven knows how many more classical
effusions, wrote in the same stilted and
pseudo-Ciceronian sentences. This young man
died in 1799, only twenty-three years old; his
brother William was another of Randolph's
friends, and not a very safe one, for his habits
were bad even at twenty, and grew worse as he
went on. All these young men seem to have
lived on mock heroics. John Thompson, writing
to his brother in 1799, mentions that Randolph
is running for Congress: "He is a brilliant
and noble young man. He will be an object
of admiration and terror to the enemies of
liberty." William Thompson was, if possible,
still more in the clouds than his brother John;
his nonsense was something never imagined out
of a stage drama of Kotzebue. "Often do I exclaim,
Would that you and I were cast on some
desert island, there to live out the remainder of
our days unpolluted by the communication with
man!" In politics, in love, in friendship, all
was equally classic; every boyish scrape was a
Greek tragedy, and every stump speech a terror
to the enemies of liberty. To treat such effusions
in boys of twenty as serious is out of the
question, even though their ringleader was a
member of Congress; but they are interesting,
because they show how solemnly these young
reformers of 1800 believed in themselves and
in their reforms. The world's great age had
for them begun anew, and the golden years returned.
They were real Gracchi, Curtii, Cassii.

His little collision with the President, therefore,
was calculated to do Randolph good. He
had come to Washington, a devoted admirer of
the first Pitt, hoping, perhaps, to imitate that
terrible cornet of horse, and, unless likenesses
are very deceptive, he studied, too, the tone and
temper of the younger Pitt, the great orator of
the day, who had been prime minister at twenty-five,
and was still ruling the House of Commons,
as Randolph aspired to rule the House of
Representatives. The sharp check received at
the outset was a corrective to these ideas; it
made him no less ambitious to command, but it
taught him to curb his temper, to bide his time,
and not expose himself to ridicule.