University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER V

Randolph's District

It was thought by some, who had heard Randolph both
in Congress and on the hustings, that he particularly
excelled on the hustings[1] ; and, happily for us, Powhatan
Bouldin, a native of Charlotte County, was forehanded
enough, before the besom of time had swept away all of
Randolph's contemporaries in his old Congressional District,
to collect from some of the most prominent of them
a remarkably well-written series of recollections relating
to him. After reading these papers, we are at
no loss to know just what the Rev. James Waddell Alexander,
who was the pastor from 1826-1828 of the Presbyterian
Church at Charlotte Court House, meant when
he said that Randolph was the Magnus Apollo of
Southside Virginia. Indeed, the writer of these pages
can testify that, as late as his early manhood, the clang of
that silver bow was almost as real to the ear of his
generation as it had been to that of Randolph's. How far
Randolph is still the subject of popular conversation in
Charlotte County, he cannot affirm, but he knows that,
45 years ago, a group of lawyers could hardly gather about
a tavern table at Charlotte Court House, or a group of
planters assemble on its court green, without bearing
witness in their talk, in some way or other, to the ineffaceable
imprint made by Randolph upon the minds of those
who had seen and heard him. And never, too, did we

hear anyone, who had known or seen Randolph, even if
it were only an aged negro whom he had chided for blocking
his road, recall any words uttered by him without
attempting to imitate the tone of the high-pitched, epicene
voice which was the most remarkable of his physical
attributes. Forty-five years ago, enough time had elapsed
for the Southside Virginia Elijah, Patrick Henry, and his
chariot of fire to melt away from the sight of the populace
into what Prof. Tyndall calls "the infinite azure of the
past," but the mantle, that Henry dropped in his ascent
from his own shoulders upon those of Randolph, had too
recently fallen from the latter for Randolph not to be yet
a living presence. We cannot undertake to assert with our
fellow-countryman, Bouldin, that "Mr. Randolph was
perhaps the most impressive man that ever lived."[2]
Southside Virginia, after all, is but a small part of the entire
terrestrial globe, the canvass of universal history is very
densely peopled, and the assertion imposes entirely too
severe a strain upon the mental organs of memory
and comparison; but there can be no doubt that few
men have ever so completely enslaved the imagination
of a people as did Randolph that of the people
among whom he lived. They felt in him such a degree
of curious interest as they felt in no other man: "In
their views," as one of them has told us, Randolph
was "as prominent and necessary an object in our
human world as the sun in the solar system."[3] "All
the bastard wit of the country," Randolph once complained,
"has been fathered on me."[4] (a) Every word of
his speeches was followed by his constituents so intently
that some of them carried whole paragraphs from them in
their memories for years. His witticisms, his gibes, his
eloquent appeals, his pictorial imagery, his witty sayings
were in almost as general circulation among them as the
federal currency; and, if he had not been a man of genius,
with a training and faculties marvelously well adapted to
the office of hitting their local convictions, predilections,
and prejudices between wind and water, his landed and
social importance, his strange aspect, his erratic bearing,
his pride and violence were enough in themselves to have
made him an object of insatiable wonder to them. From
first to last, he exerted a fascinating spell over them. Once
only was this spell sufficiently weakened to cost him his
seat in the House; and then, without any recantation or
apology on his part, it soon reasserted its sway as if it had
never been dissolved. The idea that Randolph secured
his election to Congress, term after term, by bullying the
young men and cajoling the old men in his District, is too
shallow on its face to require serious refutation. He was
again and again elected to Congress because the electorate
that elected him was limited to a small, intelligent body of
freeholders, who admired his talents too much to be influenced
by secondary considerations of any kind affecting
his general popularity, and who wished to be represented
in Congress by a man so truly typical of their own sectional
and class interests and aims; and because, before
Randolph's mind became chronically deranged in the latter
years of his life and both his body and soul steeped in their
bitter misery, his rare social gifts made him a welcome
companion at every place of public resort and an honored
guest in every conspicuous home of his District. The
scope of the social activities, which brought these gifts
into play during the relatively vigorous years of a life
which, like that of Alexander Pope, was "one long disease,"
is fully disclosed by his Diary and letters. Like
all masterful public men, he asserted his will at times
imperiously, and more than once, under exceptional circumstances,
even brutally. It must be admitted too that,
under the viva voce mode of voting, which prevailed in
Virginia in Randolph's time, intimidation could be more
readily practiced at an election by an aggressive, overawing
nature than it could be in our day; (a) but the idea that
Randolph coerced and coaxed his way into Congress
biennially, with the exception of two terms, for some 30
years rests upon nothing more satisfactory than the
assertions of political or personal enmity, or the countryside
gossip which gave a sensational or exaggerated turn to
even the simplest things that such an original man as he
might do or say. No man, Randolph was in the habit
of declaring, ever had such constituents as he had had.
And the declaration was not far from the truth, when
tested by ordinary standards of popular attachment and
constancy; but it was still nearer the truth, when tested
by ordinary standards of popular curiosity and enthusiasm.
When the announcement had gone out in one of the
counties of Randolph's District that he would address the
People on the next County Court Day, the morning of
that day was sure to find the Court House green thronged
with a great mass of human beings, drained from all the
surrounding country, and tense with anxious expectancy
until the stir and murmur, which spring up in a crowd—
no man can ever tell how—just before what it awaits
breaks upon its vision, apprised even the dullest of them
that their political idol, the far-famed descendant of King
Powhatan and William Randolph of Turkey Island,
astride one of his fleet thoroughbreds, or behind one of his
sure-footed roadsters, with his favorite negro servant,
John, on horseback forty paces in his rear, was nearing the
spot; though still invisible to their straining sight, and
that he would soon be speaking to them in the shrill voice
distinguishable above the uproar of a thousand throats,
and yet so musical that it made music of the commonest
words. Once arrived, his coming was followed by a
surging movement of the multitude towards and around
him as if no man among them had ever seen him before,
and their eyes were cups to drink with. And, when conducted
by an escort of elderly retainers, he ascended the
rostrum, and removed his hat from his head, and made
his graceful bow, all business in the village was suspended,
its "stores" were closed, and proprietors, clerks, and customers
alike poured out of them pell-mell, and hurried
across the muddy or dusty highway to swell the auditory
already assembled about the speaker. Under such circumstances,
oratory became a fixed institution in the
habits of a community; not only a powerful agency of
popular education but of popular entertainment as well.
A speaker must have been an inert lump of clay, indeed,
not to have imbibed some additional inspiration on such
an occasion, and the memory of an audience must have
been like shifting sand not to have retained a lasting
impression of much that was said on it. Crowded centres
of population had their theatres, their concerts, their
lyceums, their many other sources of popular recreation
and enjoyment. The theatre, the lyceum of Virginia
was the court-green rostrum. Hence it was, along with
the free spirit of her people, and the proud position that
she had in the earlier stages of our national existence,
because of her preponderant wealth and population, that
the art of public speaking was so generally practiced, and
so highly prized, and early attained such a singular pitch
of perfection within her limits. "The Virginians are the
best orators I ever heard," was the conclusion that the
youthful William Ellery Channing, who was to acquire
fame as an orator himself, reached when he was writing
from Virginia to New England in 1799.[5] More remarkable
still, in his letters, the Rev. James Waddell Alexander,
who was as good a judge of eloquence as any man of his
time, says: "I have always considered this region of
Virginia [Southside Virginia] more favorable to the highest
popular eloquence than any other. There are twenty men
in this county [Charlotte] whose elocution is enviable."[6] Suffert in una civitate esse unum rhetorem, was a cynical
maxim that found little favor in Virginia. Towards the
end of his life, the homage shown Randolph by his constituents
became so eager at times as to irritate him. "I
am neither a lion nor a tiger," was his impatient rebuke
from the depths of his carriage, on one occasion, to a gaping
throng, which had collected about it, when he was leaving
the door of the tavern at Charlotte Court House.[7] In
1833, when his carriage came to a stop in front of the tavern
at Buckingham Court House, it was immediately surrounded
by a dense crowd, and the circumstance was so
annoying to him that when his servant was in the act of
opening the door of the carriage, so that he could issue
from it, he abruptly commanded him to let it remain
closed until the crowd should retire; adding that he was
no wild beast, intended for public exhibition.[8] To this
intense, not to say morbid, interest in Randolph, when he
was living, was due the fact that the popular memory in
his District remained such a rich treasury of information
in regard to him so many years after his death.

Randolph's Congressional District was composed of
Buckingham and Cumberland Counties, which are bounded
on the north by the James River; Charlotte County,
which is bounded on the south by the Staunton River, and
Prince Edward County, which lies between Charlotte
County and the two counties first named. From its
northernmost point of extension to its southernmost was
about 78 miles; and its total area was 2,159 square miles.[9]
With the exception of some level stretches here and there,
its surface is fretted by the last undulations of the Alleghanies
before they flatten out into the great coastal plain
of Tidewater Virginia; but only in Willis' mountain, the
lonely cone in Buckingham County, which teased the eye
of Jefferson at Monticello, forty miles away, with its optical

vagaries, Ferguson's mountain in the same county, and
several other less well-known elevations does this surface
assume a mountainous character. Aside from certain
sterile and desolate ridges in Buckingham County, and
some other more or less haggard tracts of country, the soil
of this territory readily responds to good treatment. In
Randolph's time, as today, a vast portion of it was covered
with woods, and it is most abundantly watered by many
copious streams; the James on its way to Turkey Island,
the home of William Randolph, and Cawsons, the birthplace
of John Randolph himself; the Staunton, on which
Roanoke was situated; the Appomattox, which flows by
Bizarre, Matoax, and Cawsons, the first three homes of
Randolph; Slate River, which rises in the southern part of
Buckingham County and empties into the James 63 miles
above Richmond; Willis' River, which rises in the southern
part of Buckingham County and joins the James 23 miles
below the mouth of Slate River;[10] and the Falling River,
which debouches into the Staunton hard by Red Hill, the
home of Patrick Henry. Smaller streams are Great
Guinea and Angle Creeks in Cumberland County; Buffaloe
Creek in Prince Edward County, on which Judith Randolph
owned a tract of land; and the Little Roanoke,
which was the western boundary of Randolph's Lower
Quarter at Roanoke; Cub Creek, near which was situated
Cub Creek Church that was one of the advance posts of
early Virginia Presbyterianism, and was at one time under
the charge of Dr. Archibald Alexander, and, at another,
of Dr. John Holt Rice; and Turnip Creek, which finds its
way into the Staunton across alluvial meadows, almost as
rich as the delta of the Mississippi, that were, after Randolph's
time, but, before the abolition of Southern slavery,
to become the basis of the Staunton Hill plantation, owned
and organized by Charles Bruce, the son of James Bruce, of
Halifax County, Va., one of Randolph's friends, which was
long a typical example in the South of what Industry and
Social Life, under the institution of Slavery, were at their
best. We are thus particular in mentioning these different
streams because almost all of them were associated with
the life of Randolph in some personal way or other, and
because the larger of them, before the construction of the
James River and Kanawha Canal and steam railroads,
performed a highly important function for the people in
Randolph's District in furnishing them with highways for
the exportation and importation of commodities. Moist
river and creek bottoms, enriched by the nitrogen and lime,
brought down by freshets from forest floors and limestone
ledges, were also things of no mean importance in communities,
too sparsely settled for intensive agriculture. The
James River was navigable by bateaux from Buckingham
County to Richmond; Willis' River (or canal rather it
should have been called), though it never leaves the two
counties of Buckingham and Cumberland in its course from
its fountains, in the southern part of Buckingham county,
to its point of junction with the James, would appear to
have been navigable by bateaux for a distance of sixty-five
miles from its mouth;[11] the Appomattox, a narrow, but
comparatively deep, stream, was navigable by bateaux
from Farmville to Petersburg, a distance of some eighty-eight
miles; and the Staunton was navigable by similar
craft from Roanoke to Weldon in North Carolina. The
significance that such streams had in the economic life of
Southside Virginia may be inferred, when the reader is told
that, at one time, the project was entertained of making a
navigable water course of even Buffaloe Creek, an insignificant
stream, in conjunction with the Little Roanoke,
and was abandoned only when an engineer had made a
survey, and reported that it was impracticable.[12] The
climate of Randolph's District, especially that of its southern
end, is considerably softer than the climate of Northern
Virginia. Randolph seems to have had no fondness for
flowers. Beyond his request that Dr. Dudley should
plant at Roanoke two common specimens of the flora of
Charlotte County, there is not a reference in his Diary or
letters to one, so far as we can recall. To him, therefore,
we cannot look for any of those tell-tale jottings about the
vernal return of bud or bloom, which in writings, fuller of
the sap of nature, disclose so much in regard to climate.
The fact is all the more remarkable, as, in both his Diary
and other journals, he kept an elaborate thermometrical
record of the weather for weeks at a time. We only know
that Randolph had no good opinion of the Southside
Virginia climate; notwithstanding the fact that it is certainly,
as compared with climates in similar latitudes,
notably free from rawness in winter and mugginess in
summer. In a letter to his niece, on one occasion, he
mentioned a recent fall of 14° in the thermometer, at
Roanoke, and said: "Such a climate may suit red men
but not white ones. Even for blacks, it is too cold in
winter. The sensible cold here far exceeds that of Siberia."[13]
In a subsequent letter to Francis Walker Gilmer,
he says: "Milton's description of Hell in the second book
is just suited to the climate" [of Roanoke];[14] and, in another
letter to Gilmer, favorably contrasting the constant heat
of Arabia and Guinea, bad as it was, with violent fluctuations
of temperature in "Massachusetts Bay," he observes:
"I am more and more convinced that this climate
will amply avenge upon the whites the cruel wrongs done
upon the red men."[15] After his return from Russia, in one
of his letters to Andrew Jackson, he said that he was turning
all his property into money as fast as he could that he
might escape the next year, if he should survive, from a
climate worse than that of Russia. "A climate where we
have a Greenland winter and an African summer in latitude
37° north—the latitude of Algiers."[16] And, when the
author was a boy, it was said in Charlotte County that
Randolph once declared that to live in such a climate as
that of Southside Virginia was like being in a great hammock,
swung backwards and forwards between the Torrid
and Arctic Zones. "This day must have emigrated from
the Northwest coast of Scotland," he once wrote to Dr.
Dudley, from Bowling Green, Virginia.[17] But Randolph,
the reader will remember, was a man without a skin; and
his health, besides, was so delicate that he was for that
reason too a poorer judge of temperature than the ordinary
individual.

Indeed, it is not to Randolph in any respect that we
should go for appreciation of the physical features of
Southside Virginia. He was not insensible to natural
beauty. Far from it. It is said that he once spent the
night upon the Peaks of Otter, in Bedford County, Virginia,
for the purpose of seeing the sunrise of the next
morning, and that when, with the return of dawn, the most
splendid object in the field of human vision rose above the
earth-rim in the glorious vesture of its first hour, and began
its ascent of the Heavens, he turned to his servant and
charged him "never from that time to believe anyone who
told him there was no God."[18] (a) The story is not improbable;
for we know from one of Randolph's journals
that he did visit the Peaks of Otter on Sept. 11, 1818,[19] and
the exhortation is quite in his vein; but the loneliness of
his life at Roanoke subdued his feelings too closely to its
own sombre cast to leave him much disposition to admire
its natural setting. The physical beauty of the country
south of the James, however, does not lack its votaries.
In his Famous Americans of Recent Times, James Parton
speaks of it as "an enchanting region," and says that "a

country better adapted to all good purposes of man, nor
one more pleasing to the eye, hardly exists on earth."[20]
But it must not be forgotten that he was writing shortly
after the Civil War—that mighty refracting mirror—and
he is praising the country partly for the purpose of more
effectively belittling its inhabitants; and it must be confessed,
too, that, if his praise was intended to apply to the
whole of the territory south of the James, it is not praise
but flattery; for, after the last ripples set up by the Alleghanies
die out in their eastward movement, much of the
face of the land becomes very flat, lifeless, and dreary, and,
some of it mere pine barrens. Limit Parton's tribute,
however, to the more highly-favored portions of Southside
Virginia, such, for instance, as the Valley of the Staunton,
from Brookneal in Campbell County to Roanoke, and it is
near enough the truth to pass muster creditably. The
broken territory in Southside Virginia is, naturally speaking,
truly a fair land; a land of bold hills, peaceful valleys,
and sylvan labyrinths, and of life-giving rivers, creeks, and
"branches"; a land where the fervor of a hot sun unites
with an abundant rainfall and a kindly soil to reward
every earnest effort of the husbandman. The only serious
blights upon it in Randolph's time were slavery and the
mosquito; the slavery which in 1831 produced the Nat
Turner insurrection that in the brief space of a few hours
resulted in the butchery of more than three score white
men, women, and children; and the mosquito which made
every mill-pond a community grievance. Through the
letters of Dr. James Waddell Alexander, we obtain some
very interesting glimpses of natural conditions in Charlotte
County during the latter years of Randolph's life.
On Feb. 16, 1827, he wrote to Dr. Hall, his Northern
correspondent: "The Crocus and Persian Iris are in
bloom and the frogs begin to sing, so that you may judge
of the difference of climate."[21] Of course, this was a precocious
season. And on March 13, 1827, he wrote to the
same person:

And how, indeed, like the breath of the Sweet South
stealing over a bank of violets, and bringing back the sensations
and emotions of youth to even the most palsied
consciousness, is this Springtide letter too:

The face of nature has changed but little in Charlotte
County since Randolph's death. So, for our purpose,
there is no reason why we should not also quote in this
connection from the Familiar Letters of Dr. Alexander,
written after Randolph's death. On March 10, 1842, he
wrote to Dr. Hall:

More than 10 years later, Dr. Alexander wrote on the
20th of April:

In a letter to the author, dated Oct. 12, 1919, William
Beebe, the brilliant naturalist of our own time, informs
him that, some years ago, he drew up a list of 76 different
species of birds which he had noted at the home in Charlotte
County, about 13 or so miles from Roanoke, of Mr.
Henry C. Rice, the son of Dr. Izard Rice, who left behind
him an interesting paper relating to Randolph. All of
these species were, doubtless, observed by Randolph at
Roanoke. In July, 1818, he wrote to Francis W. Gilmer:

A few years later, Randolph wrote to his niece: "I
assure you my shades are as cool, as free from dust, as
Bush Hill [the residence of Judge Coalter near Richmond];
and as for noises, I hear none but the warbling of the birds
and the barking of the squirrels around my windows."[27]

The population of Randolph's District in 1800, the year
after his first election to Congress, was 21,253 whites, 598
free blacks, and 24,251 slaves, or a total of 46,102 persons;
in 1830, the last census year before his death, it was 21,853
whites, 1283 free blacks, and 36,264 slaves, or a total
of 59,400 persons. Its density, therefore, for the 2,159
square miles over which it was diffused, was in 1800 about
22 persons to the square mile, and, in 1830, about 27. The
figures that we give also show that, during the 30 years
between 1800 and 1830, the rate of increase among the
whites was about 3%, among the free blacks about 114%,
and among the slaves about 49%. Ominous percentages

over which Randolph must have often brooded in his
hours of depression at Roanoke! Since his day, the population
in his District has undergone a sensible decline;
being less by 4,950 inhabitants in 1910 than it was in 1830,
80 years before—a fact due partly to the terrible industrial
stagnation, produced by a variety of special causes,
which prevailed in Virginia between 1820 and 1830; the
lure of the Virgin West, and the feverishly active cotton-fields
of the South Atlantic and Gulf States, during the
decades between 1830 and 1860; the havoc and derangement
occasioned by the Civil War, and the competition
with the rich lands of our own Western territory and of
foreign lands opened up by the steam car and the steamship;
but, above all, to the mildew of der Ewige Neger,
first as an ignorant, listless, and immoral slave, in one sense
wholly impotent, and yet powerful enough to assert his
influence over the very speech of his owner's children,
and, afterwards, as a freedman, free from his former master
but still enslaved to his former self. (a) Today, in this
region, the salutary transition from the old Plantation
System, with its slave or hired labor and other features,
to small tenant or proprietary holdings, which has been
going on steadily for many years, is at last complete, and
there is good reason to believe that, in process of time,
a new industrial and social organization, built up exclusively
around the principle of selfhelp, as all truly thrifty
and lasting social and industrial organizations are, instead
of that of feudal overlordship, noble and gracious in many
respects as its spirit was, will take the place of the one that
existed in Randolph's time, and even for a considerable
period after the Civil War; and that the territory, represented
by Randolph in Congress, will cease to wear the
look that it has worn for so many years of a sick stag
shedding its antlers or of a human being overtaken by the
decrepitude of age before he has attained his majority.

"The influence of slavery, united to the English character,

explains the manners and the social condition of the
Southern States."[28] The truth of this dictum of De
Tocqueville was aptly exemplified in Randolph's District.
The leading landowners of that part of Virginia, such as
the Randolphs, the Harrisons, the Skipwiths, and the
Carringtons, were merely English gentry modified by the
plantation. Edward Dillon and Dr. Thomas Robinson,
of Prince Edward County, two of Randolph's friends,
who were British-born, fitted into the social life of Southside
Virginia as smoothly as if they had been native Virginians.
Writing to Dr. Hall from England in 1857, Dr.
James Waddell Alexander said that the general look of the
English lords reminded him of Virginia gentlemen; quite
so, as far as manner was concerned; only the Virginia
gentlemen were not so neat in point of dress as most of
them.[29] The resemblance had been previously noted by
Randolph himself. In a letter to his niece, written in
England on May 27, 1822, he said: "The higher ranks,
a few despicable and despised fashionables excepted,
are as unpretending and plain as our old-fashioned Virginia
gentlemen whom they greatly resemble."[30] Mutatis
mutandis, the ambitions, tastes, and pastimes of the Virginia
gentleman in Southside Virginia, or any other portion
of slave-holding Virginia, were all those of the English
country gentleman. To own and manage a plantation,
well stocked with negroes and spirited horses, in the
heart of some leafy wilderness, to hand around the plate
in his roadside church on Sunday, as vestryman or elder,
to sit upon the bench of his county court, or to represent
his county in the State Legislature, or his District in Congress,
and, when not engrossed with these cares, to
fox-hunt, shoot quail or "partridges," as he called them,
and other game, frequent horse races, and dine with
his friends were the objects which he usually placed
before himself as promising a human being the highest
degree of gratification and happiness. In the breast of
every such Virginian, at the beginning of life, if he was
not so fortunate as to inherit, or expect to inherit, such a
plantation, was the resolve to realize his ideal of perfect
felicity by sooner or later buying one and spending the
remainder of his days on it in the enjoyment of the rural
pleasures, which are among the few human pleasures
that leave no bitter taste in the mouth. When his
object was attained, the life he led was certainly an
agreeable one; for it was even agreeable enough to make
John Mitchel, the Irish patriot, zealous as he was for
Irish freedom, sigh for a "good plantation well stocked
with fat, healthy negroes."[31]

The class, of which we speak, had its share of human
infirmities, of course, but it can be truly said of it that it
is not dependent upon its own commendation for a proper
acknowledgment of its conspicuous virtues. Referring
to the landed gentry of Virginia in 1789, Anburey says:

It was to this class that Randolph himself belonged;
and, while the stately tidewater opulence which Anburey
describes, was out of keeping with the simpler social conditions
and the more modest measure of individual wealth,
on the whole, which afterwards obtained in Randolph's

District in Randolph's time, it was not sufficiently so to
render the description altogether inapplicable to it. The
four counties, which constituted Randolph's District, were,
it should be remembered, settled after Tidewater Virginia,
and never became endowed with such a degree of wealth,
or permeated with such a degree of aristocratic pride, as
the riparian communities on the James. The whole
framework of their social organization, though essentially
the same, was distinctly barer and less pretentious, if, for
no other reason, because their struggle with primeval
nature came along later.

Anburey also noted that all Virginians were fond of
horses, from Thomas Mann Randolph, of Tuckahoe, who
built a stable for his favorite Shakspeare, with a recess
in it for the bed of the negro who kept watch over him day
and night,[33] to the humblest member of "the middling and
lower classes," who gratified his passion for horseflesh by
attending the "quarter races," which went on almost
unremittingly at the cross-roads tavern, or ordinary, as it
was called in Virginia—a name which Anburey thought
fully deserved.[34] That this fondness for horses still continued
to exist in Southside Virginia throughout Randolph's
life, we need no better proof than is to be found
in the assiduous attention which he gave to his own stud
at Roanoke, and the celebrity which his friend, Wm. R.
Johnson, the famous turfman, who resided at Oakland,
in Chesterfield County, acquired throughout the United
States. During Johnson's career, Petersburg, which was
but a few miles from Oakland, was one of the most popular
racing centers in the country. "In spite of the Virginian
love for dissipation, the taste for reading is commoner
there among men of the first class than in any other part
of America," declared the Duc de Liancourt at the close
of the Eighteenth Century. This statement anyone, who
has read the remarkable debates in the Virginia Constitutional

Convention of 1829-30, can readily credit. All
of the first library, accumulated by Randolph at Bizarre,
which appears to have been quite a valuable one, was
destroyed by fire[35] ; but, at his death, he had accumulated
at Roanoke one of the most valuable private libraries in
the United States. "I blush for my own people when I
compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous
confidence of a Virginian," wrote Wm. Ellery Channing
in 1799 from Richmond, when he was teaching in the
family of David Meade Randolph:

Generous words on the whole—all the more generous
because of the crust of prejudice through which they had
to break their way—that might well have elicited a responsive
tribute from some Southern pen to the sterling
virtues of the New England character. Laying aside all
invidious comparisons, the almost unmurmuring fortitude,
with which Virginia bore the load of restrictive fatuity,
imposed by Jefferson upon her industry, and the glow of
resentful patriotism, which, during the war of 1812, was
too much for even Randolph's prestige in his District,
would appear to bear out the general tenor of what
Channing says in one respect. Forty years later, William
Cullen Bryant, another New Englander, expressed the
opinion that "whatever may be the comparison in other
respects, the South certainly has the advantage over us
in point of manners."[37]

Of the upper-class Virginians, who resided in Randolph's
District and in other parts of Southside Virginia
adjacent to it, we obtain many pleasing views in his
journals and letters. It is a fact not usually realized that,
while the primary education of the general mass of the
Virginia people before the Civil War fell lamentably below
the standard at which Jefferson, with his catholic sympathies,
aimed, and Massachusetts actually attained,
academic and collegiate education was more common in
Virginia than in any other State of the Union.[40] After the
Revolution, young men in Southside Virginia, of the same
class as Randolph, were usually educated at William and
Mary, Princeton, and Hampden-Sidney College, in Prince
Edward County. To the latter institution, especially,
which has been maintained, at times, under circumstances
of extreme discouragement, the people of Southside
Virginia are deeply indebted. How true this is a brief
glance at the names of the many distinguished and useful
men who derived their intellectual nurture from its teaching
will clearly establish. After leaving college, Southside
Virginia contemporaries of Randolph, who occupied
the same social station as himself, settled down, some to
purely professional pursuits, but the majority wholly, or,
in connection with some other vocation, to the life of a
planter in the tranquil homes, scattered along the banks

of the James, the Appomattox and the Staunton, which
were, in most instances, the abodes of a strong religious
faith; of an unsullied domestic purity and fidelity; and of a
manly dignity and simplicity of bearing in all the ordinary
social relationships of life, and, as a rule, of a just sense of
responsibility too for the servile beings clustered about
them. These houses for the most part were flimsy and
plain, in comparison with the "magnificent" mansions in
eastern Virginia which excited the admiration of de
Chastellux,[41] (a); and the best of them would be regarded as
very modest dwellings in our time in point of scope and
design; and, in conveniences, according to modern standards,
they were almost wholly wanting. But it is land
and caste, and not necessarily splendid houses or a fat
purse, which make a true aristocracy, and, separated as
this class of landowners was, by the impassable gulf of
slavery, from the blacks, and by marked social distinctions,
based on education and similar principles, from the less
fortunate whites, they were a true aristocracy in spirit;
though too amenable to the bit of American constitutional
restraints ever to get out of friendly and sympathetic
touch with the poorer whites. So far as wealth was concerned,
their good fortune was mainly specious. Slave
labor was sadly deficient, of course, in intelligence, energy,
and zeal. In consequence, the life of the master was
likely to be one long, daily conflict with inefficiency and
wastefulness. If he was too lenient, nothing, or next to
nothing, was done; if he relied too far upon work extorted
by fear, he incurred the reprobation of his more conscientious
and easy-going neighbors. It was a saying of
Charles Bruce, of Charlotte County, who was the owner
of many slaves, that "slavery cheated the master with the
semblance of wealth." "A Virginia estate is plenty of
serfs, plenty of horses, but not a shilling"[42] Randolph
declared. During the industrial depression that existed
in Virginia between 1820 and 1840, he predicted that,
instead of the master advertising for the runaway slave,
the slave would soon be advertising for the runaway
master. There is a letter among the papers of Creed
Taylor from the widow of one of the Randolphs, requesting
him as her agent to discharge her debts when her tobacco
was sold, and "ask credit until harvest for 25 lbs. white
sugar."[43] The shortcomings of slave labor, the many
vicissitudes to which growing crops were subject, the
exacting spirit of hospitality, created by the free and easy
conditions of the old Virginia life, and, as the Virginia
planter thought, the tariff burdens, imposed upon agriculture
by protection, in the interest of the Northern
manufacturer, at times, reduced even such wealthy
planters as Randolph himself to straitened circumstances.
But, living as the Southside Virginia planter
did in the country, and blessed as he was with a genial
sun, and a kindly soil and numerous servants, maintainable
at small expense, and, in a position, too, as he was to
derive almost everything essential to human comfort or
convenience from his own property, in many respects, he
led a very care-free and delightful life. If he did not
have much ready money, he had most of the things for
which ready money is reasonably craved; if his dwelling
lacked many of the mechanical improvements and laborsaving
devices of modern times, the fact did not make
much difference when he had so many human mechanisms
about him to perform their functions. Writing to Dr.
Hall from Charlotte County on May 19, 1826, Dr.
James Waddell Alexander said:

Tested by the criteria of austerer societies, such profusion
may not bespeak very high standards of frugality
and thrift, but it at least furnishes abundant indications
of the animal comfort which, since the day, when Sully
hoped to see a chicken in the pot of every peasant, has
been the prime requirement of human happiness.

But it would be a grave mistake to think of Randolph's
District and its circumjacent territory as a region where
little or no thought was paid by anyone to prudential considerations.
Many of the Southside Virginians handled
little cash from year to year, but others were more fortunate;
and a certain amount of accumulation went on in
Southside Virginia, as it does in every other community,
where "gold, bright and yellow, hard and cold, heavy to
get and light to hold" is an object of desire. On March
22, 1814, Randolph wrote to Josiah Quincy from Richmond:
"Some of our people, particularly in my quarter
of the country, are rich."[45] Indeed, in the same letter, he
said that you could almost smell "the rum and cheese,
and loaf, lump and muscovado sugar" out of which some
mushroom fortunes had sprung. Some four years later,
he wrote to Key from Roanoke:

On May 19, 1826, writing to Dr. Hall from the vicinity
of Charlotte Court House, Dr. James Waddell Alexander
said: "This is a rich and fertile region, producing great
quantities of prime tobacco, and, of course, growing
wealthy."[47] James Bruce, who resided at Woodburn in
Halifax County, died in 1837 leaving a fortune of about
$2,000,000.00; a regal one for his day.[48] It was derived
from the profits of both trade and planting, and was
perhaps one of the few private fortunes in the United
States at that time which at all approximated those of
Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor. One of Randolph's
neighbors tells us that Randolph declared on one
occasion at Roanoke, in the year 1832, that the Nullification
crisis was so menacing that he would not take Mr.
Girard's or Mr. Bruce's bond for 18c.[49] It is comparatively
easy to see how Girard could have amassed his great fortune
in Commerce, in such a city as Philadelphia, or John
Jacob Astor his in the Fur Trade, but that James Bruce
should have acquired a fortune of about $2,000,000, in the
early part of the 19th century, in such a thinly settled,
wholly agrarian, country as that traversed by the Staunton
River, is a thing that some competent biographer might
well undertake to explain. If tradition may be believed,
sagacity, integrity, and an equable temper were the main
factors that entered into his success; but a highly-developed
instinct of prudence seems to have had something to
do with it too. "I am fond," he wrote on one occasion to
a correspondent, "of taking two securities to a bond."[50] (a)

Speaking of James Bruce, as he lived in the year 1827,
Dr. James Waddell Alexander says in one of his letters
to Dr. Hall:

And Dr. Alexander adds: "I also visited Gen. Edward
C. Carrington, who has a seat upon Dan River (which
with the Staunton forms the Roanoke). . . . He is a
scholar and a gentleman and has large possessions."
Berry Hill, the seat of General Carrington, was afterwards
purchased before the Civil War, by James C. Bruce, the
son of the James Bruce just mentioned, and the home
built by him is still standing; and, with its imposing
Doric front, flanking subsidiary structures and other
striking features, is one of the stateliest and handsomest
monuments of the Slave Era in the South. It and Staunton
Hill, the home of Charles Bruce, in Charlotte County,
built in 1848, are perhaps the most interesting relics in
Southside Virginia at the present time of that Era. The
display of silver in these two houses would compare favorably
with any in the United States today, except in the
very wealthiest homes; and the items of silver in the Berry
Hill collection even included silver bedroom wash basins
and toilet articles.[52] Another spacious and imposing
mansion in the region, in which Randolph resided, was
Prestwould, in Mecklenburg County, the home of Sir
Peyton Skipwith, the father of St. George Tucker's second
wife. Each of these three celebrated mansions stood out

in alto relievo from its primitive environment upon a background
of thousands of acres of land. The estate in
Amelia County, to which William B. Giles retired in 1815,
when sick and in political eclipse, is thus described by
D. R. Anderson in his biography of Giles:

"Rich," too, if Dr. James Waddell Alexander was not
wrong, was more than one branch of the Venable family
of Prince Edward County.[54] Banister Lodge, in Halifax
County, one of the Clark homes, where Randolph was
occasionally a guest; Ingleside, near Charlotte Court
House, built in 1810 by Col. Thomas Read; and Green
Hill, the home of the Pannills, in Campbell County, are
good specimens of the more substantial homes of the
Southside Virginia planter in Randolph's time.[55] But
houses like these were quite exceptional. As a general
thing, the homes in Randolph's District of even the most
prominent members of his class had nothing about them
to attract the eye either in point of magnitude or architectural
finish; though in the vicinity of Petersburg there
were "not a few very splendid mansions," if Dr. James
Waddell Alexander has not lauded them too highly.[56]
Indeed, some homes in Southside Virginia, that were the
seats of a refined and generous hospitality, would not now
be considered good enough, in respect to either size or
external pretensions, for the superintendent of one of our
city parks, or the lodge keeper of one of our opulent merchants.

The truth of what we say will be verified if the
reader will turn to the illustrations of Oakland, one of the
Cocke homes; Clifton, one of the Harrison homes, and
Union Hill, one of the Page homes, in Cumberland County;
and Bellmont, one of the Cary homes, in Buckingham
County, all seats of families of the very highest social
position, which appear in Lancaster's Historic Virginia
Homes and Churches[57] ; a memorable book that deserves
the frequent use and praise which it receives. It was not
the scale of these homes but the indwelling spirit, bred of
ancient family traditions and the genuine sense of superiority,
fostered by a highly stratified social order, which
made their inmates, however crude or cramped or commonplace
their surroundings, quasi-aristocrats.

As such, they had, generally speaking, the virtues which
belong to a quasi-aristocracy; a far better thing, at any
rate, than any legalized aristocracy; that is to say, pride
of character, a nice sense of honor, courage, freedom from
sordid passions and vulgar propensities, courtesy and
chivalrous deference for womanhood. And their healthful,
open-air pursuits and remoteness from the vanities
and dissipations of city life, if nothing else, saved them, to
a great extent, from the enervation and sensual indulgence
which are only too likely to accompany real privilege.
What their women were at their best, no reader of ours,
familiar with Dr. George W. Bagby's Old Virginia Gentleman,
or Thomas Nelson Page's inimitable In Ole Virginia,
can be at a loss to know. No one, we suppose,
seriously disputes the fact that the standard of female
delicacy and honor, to which the lives of these women
were adjusted, was quite as high as any that has ever
existed in any civilized society. In saying this, we weigh
every word, nay, every syllable as deliberately as John
Randolph would have spoken them. The simile of the
Southern poet, Daniel B. Lucas, "like violets our virgins

pure and tender," haunts the memory of the Virginian,
because it is so true to the rich measure of chastity and
unselfish affection which inspired it, and we need not go
further than John Randolph himself for a winning picture
of what the Virginia matron with her distaff was. Speaking
in Congress of domestic manufactures, he is reported
to have said:

And this it did in the case of Mrs. Tabb of Amelia
County.

And we know no verses at which John Quincy Adams,
who was an able and accomplished statesman, but whose
poetry, as a rule, was as purely mechanical as the rhythm
of a creaking saw, ever tried his uninspired hand which

are more readable than these hitherto unpublished ones,
dated Aug. 7, 1841, in which, in his old age, he honored
with his homage the beautiful presence and lovely spirit
of a daughter of Southside Virginia:

Next in the social scale, was the class of smaller landowners.
They differed from the larger landowners only
in that they owned less land, were possessed of less education,
and enjoyed less social standing; but they owned
enough land to entitle them to exercise the franchise, and

their political and material interests were identical with
those of their wealthier and more consequential neighbors.

Then came the landless whites. They were poor and
illiterate, but, as a rule, independent in spirit, brave, and
honest, and as jealous of female chastity as their social
superiors. These virtues they were all the more sedulous
to cultivate because they alone, aside from the color of
their skins, established any real distinction between them
and the negro. Their position was, in many respects, a
pathetic one. They had no land themselves; they shrank
from laboring side by side with the slaves of those who
had; and yet they lived in a community where agriculture
was for all practical purposes the sole breast of the State.
The result was that they were compelled to earn a more
or less precarious subsistence by turning their hands to
such uncertain tasks as they could. Since no one could
vote, who did not own 25 acres of land in the country,
or a city lot, they were without political power, and, for
that reason, as well as by reason of their poverty, were
regarded with derision by the negro as "po' white trash."
(a) In the same sentence, in which the Duc de Liancourt
speaks of the taste of the Virginians of the first class for
reading, he adds: "But the populace is perhaps more
ignorant there [Virginia] than elsewhere." It was certainly
very illiterate in Randolph's District, owing to the
want of a proper system of general public education; and
to him the barbarous vernacular of the unlettered portion
of his fellow-countrymen was always a source of amusement,
slightly dashed with derision. In his Diary, he
entered the following specimens of their syntax and
pronunciation, under the head "Virginiana." No
Southside Virginian at any rate can read them today
without realizing that Virginia, even under the instruction
of her present public schools, is as slow to abjure her
native speech as Patrick Henry thought an American
ought to be to "abjure his native victuals."

And so on.

Nor were barbarisms like these always confined to the
lower classes of the whites. "Whoever said `wuz' but you
and the Chief Justice," Randolph exclaimed impatiently
on one occasion to a slothful woman who had insisted that
"she wuz a-making" his coffee. He was referring, of
course, to John Marshall.[61]

Then came the free blacks. They occupied a position
as equivocal as that which produced the saying of the
Haitien blacks that a mulatto hates his father and despises
his mother. By the whites, though nominally free, he was
not allowed to vote, hold office, or testify against a white
man, and was accorded a far more limited measure of
social intercourse than the slave, with whom their relations
were often intimate and affectionate in the highest degree.
In other words, his freedom did not bring him any
closer to the superior race, though it sensibly separated

him from sympathetic communion with his own.
Under such circumstances, a free black found himself
greeted on every side by sullen brows and averted looks,
and he would have had more moral and intellectual
stamina than the white man himself, if he had not frequently
become more or less of a thief and a vagabond.
Speaking of the slaves, manumitted by Richard Randolph,
and relying upon a history of them, published by
a Col. Madison, Dr. James Waddell Alexander says:
"They have almost become extinct; those who remain are
wandering and drunken thieves, degraded below the level
of humanity and beyond the reach of gospel means."[62]

This description, we are satisfied, is gloomier than the
real facts warranted. During the Slave Era, it was hard
to get at the truth about the slaves; and the truth about
the free black was with still more difficulty, perhaps,
arrived at. The Charlotte County slaves, Dr. James
Waddell Alexander thought "unspeakably superior to the
Northern free blacks."[63]

And lastly came the slave. Theoretically, he was the
mere thrall of his master; his "ox, his ass, his anything,"
to use the words of Petruchio, with no legal right except
that of not being deprived of his life by his master by
downright murder. But, apart from his liability to sale
and lasting separation from all his family connections and
local ties, which was the capital reproach of slavery, his
lot in Southside Virginia was by no means a very harsh
one. On this point, nothing can be more valuable than
the testimony of Dr. James Waddell Alexander, who came
to Charlotte County with all the prepossessions of a
Northern man against slavery, and resided there for
several years in the very closest association with both
whites and blacks, and was subsequently in the habit of
returning on visits to the locality in which he had resided.

Shortly after reaching Virginia, in a letter to Dr. Hall
from Petersburg, he indulged in these interesting reflections:

When Dr. Alexander next passed through Petersburg,
on his way to Charlotte County, after a vacation at the
North for the recovery of his health which had been
seriously impaired by "a bilious fever," he was not quite
in the state of body or mind to see things exactly as he had
done on his first arrival in Virginia.

But, when he got back to Charlotte County, and to
what he called "the forests, the streams,

of Virginia"[66] ; he was soon the captive of the hamadryad
again, and again seeing things in his usual way, that is,
perhaps, just a little couleur de rose. Even on the abolition
question there then prevailed, he thought, a moderation
much in advance of the temper that he had witnessed less
than three years before.[67] This opinion was expressed
five years after the death of John Randolph. Some four
years later, he reached the interesting conclusion that a
gradual emancipation was that to which the interior
economy of the North-Southern States was tending, and
that which it would reach; that it was inevitable, and that
it was craved by thousands of the whites in Southside
Virginia.[68] Nor apparently did anything ever happen to
make him change his mind on this subject. Two years
afterwards, he communicated to Dr. Hall the statement of
some Virginian that the opinion was openly expressed
every day more and more in his part of Virginia that
slavery was a curse economically[69] ; and, upwards of ten
years later, and only six years before the beginning of the
Civil War, he penned these remarkable words:

Notwithstanding his sympathy with the trend of Virginian
sentiment in favor of emancipation, Dr. Alexander
did not favor immediate emancipation. In 1848, he wrote
to Dr. Hall:

The abolition agitation, it is also interesting to note,
Dr. Alexander held responsible for a most important
change in the legislation of Virginia in regard to the slave,
which was enacted after he had returned to the North.
Writing when on a visit to Charlotte County, he said:
"The law (thanks to the meddling of anti-slavery societies)
forbids schools and public teaching to read; it was not so
when I lived here."[72] These views, as is well known, were
also those of the Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston,
who spent three months, during the decade before the Civil
War, in the study of slavery in Georgia, South Carolina,
and Virginia; and, despite his original prepossessions
against it, on his return to Boston, gave this advice to the
North: "Hands off! the question is a domestic one best
settled by the South, and only delayed and hampered by
interference from without." The idea that the post-revolutionary
sentiment in Virginia, in favor of the abolition
of slavery, which was so earnestly shared by Washington,
Jefferson, Henry and Edmund Randolph, was a
mere spasm of eleutheria, is not maintainable. Never in
an abolition convention was the institution of slavery

more unsparingly denounced than it was in the Virginia
Legislature of 1831-32 by some of the most distinguished
Virginians of that time; and never was the sense of its
dangers, its evils, and its injustice so keen in Virginia as
it was when that Legislature all but succeeded in making
the proper provision for its gradual termination. Among
its opponents in Southside Virginia, were two of the ablest
Presidents that Hampden-Sidney College has ever had—
William Maxwell and John Holt Rice. Speaking of Maxwell
in 1827, Dr. James Waddell Alexander said:

On April 14, 1827, the Rev. Dr. John Holt Rice wrote to
the Rev. Dr. Archibald Alexander: "I have long had it
as an object, dearest to my heart, to get Virginia free from
Slavery"[74] ; and, in the same letter, reading the signs which
Dr. James Waddell Alexander was reading too, he said:
"There is a march of opinion on the subject which would,
if uninterrupted, at no distant date, annihilate this evil
[slavery] in Virginia. I have no doubt of it."[75] Still other
instructive and agreeable observations on the slave in
Charlotte County appear in Dr. James Waddell Alexander's

Familiar Letters. "In all this country," he wrote
from Ingleside in that county, "there is no sign or suspicion
of any suffering. I have renewed my acquaintance
with a large number of the old blacks, and have been
struck with the ease of their life."[76] These words were
written in 1855; but slavery in Charlotte County in that
year was not materially different from what it was 25 or
30 years before. If there was any cruelty practiced upon
the slave in that county, or if the slaves there harbored
any animosity towards their masters, the fact was not
brought to the attention of Dr. James Waddell Alexander:

In another letter, he declared:

"Mrs. —'s cook (emerita), Patty, she says, `is as
pious a woman, and a lady of as delicate sensibilities as I
ever saw; she is one of the very best friends I have in the

world.' "[79] Such a declaration brings home to us very
pointedly the affectionate intimacy which often existed
between the mistress and her servant under the patriarchal
slave conditions of Southside Virginia. The careless
levity with which servitude was accepted by the
younger blacks, at any rate, is amusingly brought out
by Dr. Alexander: "One of Mrs. LeGrand's black girls,
aet. 14, said more than once to my wife, with a face of
great importunity, `Miss Betsy do pray ax Missum to gi'
me to ye'."[80] In nothing was Dr. James Waddell Alexander
so much interested as in the religious improvement
of the blacks; and both in his Life of his father, the Rev.
Dr. Archibald Alexander, and in his Familiar Letters, he
imparts much valuable information on that point. The
names of black communicants at Cub Creek Church in
Charlotte County, he assures us in his Life of his father,
exceeded those of the whites, and were probably more
than 100[81] ; Dr. James Waddell Alexander also speaks of
a preacher named Skidmore, himself a slaveholder, who
had some thirty plantations under his charge, at one of
which he preached every evening to the blacks. His system
was to enroll the names of his hearers and to conduct
the meeting on the plan of a class meeting.[82] "I am much
affected by the negro singing," Dr. Alexander adds.
"There is a softness in their voices which penetrates me,
and in these meetings they all sing down to the infants."[83]
In another place, he speaks of the negro-singing at a
meeting as being true enough in tone to have satisfied
Haydn.[84] These remarks remind us of the profound
truth that Randolph uttered when he said that the negro
is musical but not poetical.[85]

Dr. James Waddell Alexander energetically strove both

by preaching and conversational exhortation to inspire
the slaves about him with a proper sense of religious
responsibility; and he appears to have taken a very favorable
view of their capacity for religious instruction. Some
of the negroes about Ingleside seemed to him to be as good
and experienced Christians as any white people of the
laboring class.[86] He even tells us that many of the negroes
around Charlotte Court House seemed to him to be genuine
saints.[87] That they were, however, we must say frankly,
we do not believe; if for no other reason because we
have never met with any white persons of that description.
Dr. James Waddell Alexander undoubtedly saw slavery
at its best in the refined and Christian community with
which he was connected, first, as a pastor, and then as a
visitor; and his Northern prejudices against it were
doubtless to some degree qualified by his Virginian descent
and Virginian wife, though he was but a mere child when
his father left Virginia, and he did not marry Elizabeth
C. Cabell, the daughter of Dr. Geo. Cabell, until he had
expressed the same ideas about the Virginia slave that he
expressed after marriage; but that the testimony of so
able and upright a man in regard to the real conditions of
the ante-bellum negro in Southside Virginia is entitled to
an uncommon degree of respect is too manifest to require
emphasis.

But it would be grave error to imagine that the whites
in Randolph's District did not differ materially from the
whites in Tidewater Virginia. What has been loosely
called the cavalier element in Virginia was well represented
in such families as the Randolphs, the Pages, and the
Harrisons, of Cumberland County, and the Carringtons,
of Cumberland and Charlotte Counties; but, in Cumberland
County, which included, until 1761, the territory,
now known as Buckingham County, and in Prince Edward

and Charlotte Counties there was, after the middle
of the 18th century, a large Presbyterian element which
gave a character of its own to the population of those
counties. Many years before the Revolution, they were
frequently visited by the great Presbyterian missionary
and preacher, Samuel Davies, of Delaware, who became
generally known as the Apostle of Virginia; and, about
1735, under the leadership of John Caldwell, the grandfather
of John C. Calhoun, Presbyterian settlements were
effected on Cub Creek, in Charlotte County, on Buffaloe
Creek, in Prince Edward County, and at Hat Creek and
Concord, in Campbell County. Later, the Cub Creek
Church, another Presbyterian Church, at Briery, in Prince
Edward County, and Hampden-Sidney Academy, afterwards
Hampden-Sidney College, established in Prince
Edward County in 1775 by the Presbytery of Hanover,
became leading centers of Presbyterian influence in the
United States. Among the remarkable men, who were
at one time or other Presidents of Hampden-Sidney, in its
early history, were Samuel Stanhope Smith, its first
president, a graduate of Princeton, who afterwards became
President of that institution; John Blair Smith, the
brother of Samuel Stanhope Smith and likewise a graduate
of Princeton, who afterwards became President of Union
College, New York; Dr. Archibald Alexander, who afterwards
became the first professor of Theology in the
Princeton Theological Seminary, and Dr. Moses Hoge,
whose eloquence was greatly admired by John Randolph.
(a) Among its professors, when Dr. Archibald Alexander
was its President, was Dr. John Holt Rice, a "truly great
and extraordinary man" in the opinion of Dr. Archibald
Alexander,[88] who was later offered the Presidency of
Princeton but declined it, and Dr. Conrad Speece, who
had "a great mind," in the opinion of Wm. Wirt.[89] During
the Presidency of Dr. Hoge, were laid the foundations
of the Union Theological Seminary, which, until its
removal, a few years ago, from Prince Edward County to
Richmond, was associated for so many years in the public
mind with Hampden-Sidney College. Under the headship
of Dr. Rice, this institution acquired as high a reputation
in the South as the Theological Seminary of Princeton
enjoyed in the North, and it would be difficult to exaggerate
the extent to which the able and devoted men, who
have been connected with it and Hampden-Sidney College
have moulded the minds and characters of the
people of Southside Virginia. The effect of the Calvinistic
ministers, who taught at the two institutions,
and of the different ministers, who filled the Presbyterian
pulpits of Cumberland, Prince Edward, and
Charlotte Counties after 1735, was to give to life in
those counties a soberer and more earnest aspect than
life usually wore among the more social and pleasure-loving
inhabitants of Tidewater Virginia. Every few
miles, along the woodland roads in Randolph's District,
stood some large, bare, quadrangular frame structure,
with no more pretensions to architectural beauty or grace
than a drygoods box, where Sunday after Sunday some
dutiful Presbyterian divine expounded the stern dogmas
of his creed, inculcated the purest and soundest principles
of morality, confirmed the faith of the careless and wavering,
and held up to the eyes of the penitent sinner the
atoning blood of Christ Jesus. All of these faithful men
were not Archibald Alexanders, or John Holt Rices, or
Moses Hoges; certainly not such a sublime melting orator
as the blind Presbyterian preacher, James Waddell, the
father-in-law of Dr. Archibald Alexander, whose eloquence
William Wirt has sketched in The British Spy with such
a telling pencil. Men like these are rare at any time and
anywhere; but far the greater portion of them were worthy
of the Scotch Calvinism which, in the person of its minister,
experienced no difficulty in reconciling the narrowest
income, the barest surroundings, and the plainest fare with
dignity of character and bearing, a lofty standard of morals
and deportment, profound learning, and the persuasive
accents which captivate unwilling hearts. If the author
were to take his reader to the humble edifice on Cub
Creek, where the crook of John Caldwell brought together
one of the first Presbyterian flocks in Southside Virginia,
he could scarcely believe that, in such a building, in such
a half-subdued wilderness, could such famous men as Dr.
Archibald Alexander and Dr. John Holt Rice have ever
pursued their sacred calling, and the incredulity of the
reader would be hardly less outspoken were the author to
take him a few miles west of Cub Creek Church to Roanoke
Church, another great four-square barn of later date
and tell him that here at times in his boyhood, when the
Roanoke Presbytery was holding its sessions, and every
hospitable home in the vicinity was honored by having
some clergyman billeted upon it, would be seen more than
one debater or orator such as Robert L. Dabney, or
Clement C. Vaughn, qualified to arrest and fix the attention
of any assemblage, however critical.

Almost from the beginning of its existence as a civilized
community, therefore, Randolph's District was Presbyterian
territory, and, under the influence, modified by
slavery, of course, as everything else within its limits was,
of the peculiar tenets and temperament of Presbyterianism.
In Randolph's time, there was no Episcopal rector
in Charlotte County,[90] and there was no Methodist Church
there until 1842[91] ; and, as there were no, or practically,
no Catholics, the only sects, except the Methodists, who
had some little strength here and there, to whom the
spiritual welfare of the people in Randolph's District was

committed, were the Presbyterians and the Baptists; and
the influence of the latter, though considerable, was not
determining. On the whole, the churches of these sects
discharged their trusts with fidelity and efficiency, and
were not only religious agencies but points about which
no small part of the social life of their members circled.
Indeed, Charles Bruce, the Charlotte County planter, to
whom we have several times referred, bearing in mind the
market reports and countryside gossip, of which they
were no mean centers of propagation, was once heard to
say that their communicants deserved no credit for
attending their services with such punctilious regularity
because they supplied these communicants with almost
their only sources of social recreation and business intelligence.
Be this as it may, the types of character, developed
by them, were often very different from those developed
by the Established Church, or even the Episcopal
Church, as afterwards more or less evangelized. At
times, great waves of religious enthusiasm, known as
revivals, would sweep over them, blowing up the dying
embers and bleaching ashes of sinking religious faith into
quickened life, rekindling the love and fear, to which
religion beyond any other human agency holds the keys,
and filling the breasts of the indifferent, the selfish, and the
depraved with tumultous feelings of mingled self-reproach
and hope which sometimes found expression even in
hysteria. And, at one time, there was an intestine controversy
between the Old School and New School Presbyterians
in Southside Virginia sufficiently bitter to cause
Dr. James Waddell Alexander to speak of it as "The Holy
War." In fact, he even said that it was "bellum plusquam
civile," and divided house against house and mother
against daughter.[92]

To realize how unlike, in some respects, the tone of
society in Southside Virginia in Randolph's day was from

that of the state of society, of which the Established
Episcopal Church in Tidewater Virginia was one of the
principal features, we need only turn to some of the particularly
conspicuous individuals, men and women, who
were the fruits of Presbyterianism in the former region.
One of the most conspicuous, Little Joe Morton, became
an inhabitant of Charlotte County, then a part of Lunenburg
County, so early that when he built his log cabin
near Little Roanoke Bridge, he did not have a neighbor
nearer than 30 miles to protect his wife and children, when
he was called away from home by his business as a surveyor.
It was he who was employed at times by the
Randolphs and others to look up lands in the country
about his rude abode for which it might be desirable for
them to secure patents. He is said to have been a bold
pioneer, a staunch hunter, and a skilful tracker and
rounder-up of wild horses, like those which gave Horse
Pen Creek in Charlotte County its name.[93] The manner,
in which this man became enlisted in the service of God,
is thus narrated in a brief memoir of him which appeared
in the Watchman and Observer for Feb. 18, 1847.

Another prominent figure, in the early history of Southside
Virginia Presbyterianism, was Col. Samuel Venable,
who was a graduate of Princeton, as were his three
brothers, Abraham, Richard, and Nathaniel, and many
another braw young Southside Virginian. Dr. Arcihbald
Alexander became acquainted with him in 1789, or 9
years after he had graduated at Princeton, and, during the
whole of his own life, was accustomed to speak of him as
the most remarkable instance of wisdom, matured by
experience and observation, that he had ever known;
indeed, in this respect, he is said to have been fond of
comparing him with Franklin.[95] He resided in Prince

Edward County, and was successful enough as a merchant,
to accumulate a large estate for his time. His wife was
the daughter of the elder Judge Paul Carrington, and is
said to have been a woman of uncommon vivacity, wit,
and power of sarcasm; and they had twelve children, all
of whom she lived to see married and converted.[96] In
1842, no less than 142 descendants of this pair were living.[97]

Not unlike one of those devout women, who ministered
to the comfort of the Apostles, was another individual
who has been portrayed for us with sharp distinctness by
her grateful contemporaries; that is Paulina Read, first
the wife of Edmund Read, and afterwards of the Rev.
Nash LeGrand, a Presbyterian minister. It was at her
home, "Retirement," about two miles from Charlotte
Court House, that Dr. Archibald Alexander resided for
three or four years, during his pastorate in Charlotte
County; and, thirty years afterwards, the same hospitable
and Christian roof sheltered Dr. James Waddell Alexander,
during his pastorate in the same county. Her plantation
was contiguous with Ingleside, the plantation of
Henry Carrington, which Dr. James Waddell Alexander
occasionally visited after his pastorate in Charlotte
County had ceased, and the two together contained about
6,000 acres of land, which seem to have been kept in a
well-tilled and highly productive condition.[98] In his Life
of Dr. Archibald Alexander, Dr. James Waddell Alexander
tells us that Mrs. LeGrand was widely known among
Christians of every name in Virginia, and that probably
no house in the land ever opened its doors to more ministers
of the Gospel; that, indeed, a whole Presbytery was
sometimes sheltered under her roof; and that her wealth
was largely dispensed in acts of charity. He further tells
us that though of a despondent turn as to her own spiritual

state, she was perpetually occupied with religious thoughts
and employment, and was a devoted hearer of the Word;
and that, when Dr. Archibald Alexander first came to
Charlotte County, having been recently brought to the
knowledge of the evangelical truth, she was full of zeal,
and unwearied in her endeavors to second all Gospel
labors.[99] And how constant were the principles by which
her conduct was governed may be inferred from what Dr.
James Waddell Alexander had to say of her long afterwards
in his Forty Years' Familiar Letters, when he was on
a visit to Charlotte County, after his return to Princeton:

Later, when the news of Mrs. LeGrand's death reached
him, Dr. James Waddell Alexander used these tender
words about her; not so tender, however, as to lose sight
of the tenebrous shadows in which their object had worked
out her salvation under the stern creed of Calvin:

Seven days later, in another letter to Dr. Hall, Dr.
James Waddell Alexander said:

In an earlier letter, Dr. James Waddell Alexander tells
us that Mrs. LeGrand lodged and boarded "a good Episcopalian
(a Connecticut man but 20 years in Virginia)
awaiting orders for his business among her slaves." "He
has this moment," he adds, "returned on foot, and
through a smart rain, from the overseer's house, two miles
off, where he instructed a group of 15 last night."[103]

Indeed, Southside Virginia Presbyterianism seems to
have even had its ascetic, a fact, happily, that has not
often clouded the spirit of the healthy-minded people of
that portion of Virginia. Referring in one of his letters to
Dr. Hall to a recent visit to Prince Edward County, Dr.
James Waddell Alexander says:

In his John Randolph, Henry Adams expresses the opinion
that one of the reasons why Randolph's constituents
were so patient with him was because "they were used to
coarseness that would have sickened a Connecticut peddler."[105]
Just how much coarseness it takes to sicken a
Connecticut, or any other, peddler, we confess ourselves
unable to decide. Not a little, we imagine, whether
peddlers engaged in peddling wooden nutmegs or other
wares. But, if what Adams meant to say was that the
society, of which Randolph was a part, was a peculiarly
coarse one, he simply did not state a fact. Social conditions
in Southside Virginia, during Randolph's time, had,
of course, their shortcomings. Judged by latter day
standards, they were marked by a certain degree of rawness
and rustic simplicity such as one would naturally
expect in communities which had but recently been
frontier settlements and had not fully taken on the character
of a complex and long-established civilization.

The gentry class had the defects of the virtues, as well
as the virtues, which inhere in an aristocratic, or quasiaristocratic,
society. The pride of this class was too quick
to take alarm at supposed insult or indignity, and manifested
itself at times, even when there was no such fancied
provocative, in a too imperious and overbearing spirit.
Jefferson was right when he said that the effect of slavery
was to foster a despotic spirit in the breast of the whites,
though the coloring that he gave to his statement was
perhaps too vivid. The courtesy of this class was sometimes
a little Grandisonian, and its courage ran out too
quickly into temerity. Its deference for women occasionally
made it difficult for a man to obtain justice where a
woman was his accuser. In many economic respects, too,
the ignorance and inefficiency of the slave, and, above all,
the extent to which his numbers and servility relieved the
members of this class of the necessity of doing many
things for themselves that it is well for every human being
to be under the necessity of doing for himself, reacted
unfavorably, to some extent, upon their morale; though
there was never a better school than the Southern plantation
for the development of leadership and the executive
faculty. The thriftless, shiftless mass of human beings,
with whom they had to deal, apart from its direct influence
over them in one way or another, could not but finally
make them more or less indifferent to proper industrial
standards of every kind.

Nor should any false sense of delicacy deter us from
admitting that the purity of conduct which was so conspicuous

among women of the gentry class, and, through
force of example, of the lower classes of whites as well,
in Southside Virginia, under the Slave Régime, was due
in some measure to the abundant opportunity that the
women of a servile and degraded race afforded the white
race for licentious intercourse. In the matter of sexual
purity, the white women of the South, under the Slave
Régime, unmarried and married, reached perhaps as high
a level of attainment as can ever be expected under any
social conditions, and, because of the influence naturally
exerted by the character of such women over their husbands,
as well as other conspiring influences, it is surprising
how rarely it was, though illustrations to the contrary
might be readily cited, that the Ishmaelitish Hagar came
between Sarah and her lord. (a) But, in the opinion of
the author, it cannot be truthfully declared that any
higher standard of sexual morality prevailed among young
unmarried white men under the Slave Régime in Southside
Virginia than among young unmarried men in other
portions of the United States; though he is yet to have any
convincing evidence brought to his attention showing that
the standard which prevailed among them was lower.

The manners of the less fortunate whites were in some
respects, of course, rude. In his John Randolph, Henry
Adams speaks of gouging as if it prevailed in Randolph's
youth in every country neighborhood in Virginia, whether
in the backwoods or otherwise. To begin with, the extent
of this frontier practice is grossly exaggerated by him.
But it was not until he published his history of the United
States that he brought out the fact, which he might have
been just and candid enough to have brought out in his
John Randolph, that, during the time that the practice
of gouging prevailed in Virginia, it also prevailed in
England.[107] Even Anburey, who formed an unfavorable
opinion in some regards of the lower orders of the white

population of Virginia, in 1789, states that the better class
of the two classes into which he divides them were hospitable,
generous, and friendly. In the judgment of the
author, no people with the same limited opportunities
were ever more liberally endowed with the rudimentary
virtues of true manhood than both classes. The Civil
War, if nothing else, demonstrated that. Backward in
many respects as they were, the humblest of them had a
natural dignity and independence of character, and a
fund of innate sympathy and good feeling, which, if they
did not distinguish him from the whites of the same stock
and class in other portions of the United States, distinguished
him very sharply indeed from individuals of the
same class in many foreign lands.

Fortunately for Southside Virginia Dr. James Waddell
Alexander and Dr. Archibald Alexander have both borne
testimony to what the people of Randolph's District were
under social conditions which placed within the reach of a
small pecuniary income a measure of material abundance
and comfort that even a considerable fortune now often
fails to secure, made good manners, moral worth, and
intellectual distinction, rather than the mere acquisition
of wealth, the passports to public respect and favor,
and left some time from the practical duties of life, now
too often devoted to the feverish pursuit of unwholesome
pleasures or excessive gain, for the cultivation of social
gifts, and the indulgence of the mellower and more cordial
impulses of the human heart.

The first view that the former Alexander had of Southside
Virginia was in Petersburg when he was on his way to
his new home at Charlotte Court House. After speaking
in a letter to Dr. Hall of the incessant round of social exactions
which he had been treading, "enlivened by the
peculiarly abundant good cheer of this bountiful land
and the copious flowing of rum toddy and the like refections,"
and of rides on a "high-blooded horse," in

company with fellow equestrians and a carriage load
of beauty and vivacity, and of corn bread and bacon,
oysters and hominy, daily dinners and unceasing conversation,
he uses these words:

And then, as now, the Virginian had his way of harmonizing
his social recreations with his religious duties.
"There are in my uncle's [Dr. Benjamin H. Rice] congregation
about 25 young men who profess religion, and are
more active in the cause than many ministers," Dr. Alexander
says in the same letter. "From this you may judge
what the people in general are." In the same letter, the
writer also says that "the number of agreeable and pious
ladies is remarkable," and the easy access to everybody's
house and heart more free than he had ever expected in
his fondest hopes. "A man who comes here," he adds
just a little reflectively, "must come with some equestrian
skill or expect to get his neck broken."[109]

On his return to "Retirement" after a considerable
sojourn at the North, for his health, and when he had resolved
to give up his charge in Charlotte County, Dr. Alexander

wrote to Dr. Hall: "I expect never to see so many
persons so rejoiced to meet with me as appeared at the
little church last Sunday. It is painful, indeed, to leave
friends so cordial and sincere, but I believe I am pursuing
the path of duty."[110] When he settled down in Trenton,
he wrote to Dr. Hall that, under the new circumstances,
he felt a greater stimulus to what might be called the
external or literary part of preparation than he had ever
experienced among his simpler flock in Virginia;[111] but, in a
later letter, he observed feelingly to the same correspondent
that he had once had experience with the wretchedness
of leaving an affectionate people and that the experiment
was one of which he craved no repetition.[112] Some
19 months afterwards, he wrote to Dr. Hall that he should
be unwilling to exchange Trenton for any pastoral charge
that he had ever seen, excepting only Charlotte Court
House, Va., which it would be sheer madness for him to
undertake with his atrabilious temperament.[113] The general
character of the whole country, which Dr. Archibald
Alexander made the seat of his labors, when he assumed
charge of Cub Creek and Briery Churches, is very accurately
stated in the biography of him written by Dr.
James Waddell Alexander:

There could be no doubt about the "hospitality and
genial warmth." On Oct. 19, 1838, writing to Dr. Hall
from Charlotte Court House, where he was paying a visit,
Dr. Alexander said:

And it would be a mistake to suppose that the upper
classes in this community at any rate lacked schools; for
on Feb. 23, 1842, Dr. Alexander wrote to Dr. Hall from
Charlotte Court House: "There are five schools in this
village; among these is Michael Osborne's lately erected
girls' school which has 26 already."[116] In 1836, Martin's
Gazetteer makes mention also of a female academy and two
elementary schools for boys at Marysville, the County
seat of Buckingham County; of another elementary school
at Cartersville in Cumberland County; of a female school
at Farmville in Prince Edward County, and of a male
academy and seminary at Prince Edward Court House in
Prince Edward County. The latter enjoyed a high reputation,
provided for a three-year course, had about 80
pupils, and was conducted by two principals and five
assistants. The former prepared youths for college.[117]

Besides the educational facilities afforded by these schools,
there were, of course, throughout Randolph's District,
those afforded by the ruder schools, known as the "Oldfield
Schools."

After preaching in 1789 in Charlotte and Prince Edward
Counties, Dr. Archibald Alexander referred to the people
in whose midst he had been as those "affectionate and
delightful people."[118] At times, when on one of his pastoral
rounds, the rites of hospitality would be pressed upon him
with such assiduous solicitude by his plainer parishioners
that he would find himself tied down for hours to a single
spot. Thus, on one occasion at old Mr. Redd's, on Bush
River, no heed whatever was paid to his assurance that he
did not come to dine, and everything was set in motion to
spread "an enormous dinner" before him; chickens were
chased in all directions, fires were kindled, the closets were
searched, and, in addition to the chickens, the mistress
and her maids were soon in the act of preparing a fat turkey
for the spit. Finally, when old Mr. Redd came in, he
would not permit himself to be seen until he had shaved
his beard and put on some clean clothes. On this occasion,
Dr. Archibald Alexander found that he had wasted a whole
day in visiting one family. So for this method of pastoral
visitation he adopted that of preaching in different parts
of his clerical pale in private houses; but this, too, he
found would not do; for so kind and hospitable were the
instincts of the householder that, with his invitation, sometimes
as many as 30 persons remained after the service to
dine. "The old Virginians," Dr. Alexander comments,
"never count the cost of dinners even when they give very
little for the support of the gospel."[119]

Such social characteristics as these may be vulnerable
from an economic point of view, and cannot be reconciled
with fastidious standards of elegance, but they certainly

do not betoken the kind of coarseness that is likely to
sicken anybody—Connecticut peddler or otherwise—
unless it be some such person as the devitalized American
who, wearied with the "sad satiety" of a life without
duties, and largely spent abroad in the pursuit of purely
artificial gratifications, sinks, with a withered cry, from a
jaded life into a rayless grave.

And it would be a misconception also to think of the
homes of the landed gentry in Southside Virginia in Randolph's
time as wholly hard and devoid of adornment.
The furniture at Prestwould was handsome enough to
excite the admiration of Lancaster when he was making his
circuit of the old Virginia mansion-houses.[120] And no little
attention seems to have been given to flowers by the
inmates of some of these homes. In one of his letters to
Dr. Hall, Dr. James Waddell Alexander speaks with enthusiasm
of "the ten million blossomings" of "the wide plantation,"
on which he then was, that were out together—
"peach, apricot, cherry, plum, crab and apple," inermixed
with the lilac, the almond, the pyrus japonica, corcoras
and hyacinths.[121] In another letter, he says: "I have just
been in Mrs. LeGrand's garden; which is faeryland. There
are blooming and perfuming at this moment, and by
wholesale, yellow jasmines, double peach hyacinths,
Siberian crab, tulip, violets, pansies, jonquils, etc."[122] And
this is the description that he gives of another garden near
Prestwould:

All this after telling us that, while in Mecklenburg
County, he saw eglantine and coral honeysuckle wild and
as "plenty as blackberries," and found the air of its
swamps oppressively loaded with the fragrance of the calycanthus.
But may not a native of Southside Virginia ask
whether the good doctor was not mistaken in supposing
that he inhaled the fragrance of the calycanthus outside
of Mrs. LeGrand's garden? Even after the Civil War, the
flower gardens at Ridgeway, the home of one of the
younger Paul Carringtons, Staunton Hill, the home of
Charles Bruce, and Windstone, the home of Edward
Winston Henry, one of the sons of Patrick Henry, all in
Charlotte County, still existed to give an idea of what the
gardens of Mrs. LeGrand and Abram Venable were.

And it was a manly race, too, with which the Alexanders
—father and son—came into contact!

And a boy took so early to his gun in Southside Virginia
that it was hard for him, after he became a man, to remember
how old he was when he shot his first "partridge" on
the wing, or first joined in the hue and cry of a fox-chase.

Nor can there be any doubt that law and order prevailed
to a remarkable extent in Randolph's District. In a
letter to Key from Roanoke, dated Feb. 9, 1818, he referred
to certain crimes of deep atrocity, which had been
perpetrated in the last two or three years in Charlotte
County, and adds: "This country seems to labor under a
judgment. It has been conspicuous for the order and
morality of the inhabitants, and such is the character I
hope yet."[126] Some eight years later, Dr. John Holt Rice
spoke in a letter to the Rev. Leonard Woods of the society
in Prince Edward County as bearing normally the character
of being the most orderly of any in the country.[127]
About the same time, Dr. James Waddell Alexander,
writing from "Retirement" to Dr. Hall, remarked: "It
is, moreover, (I speak of this county) a moral country; no
gambling, no dissipation or frolicking."[128] Many years
after Randolph's death, the same favorable testimony
might have been borne to the moral character of the
communities which made up his District. In 1867,
in his Defence of Virginia, the Rev. Robert L. Dabney,
who had long resided in Prince Edward County,
stated that, in the "orderly little county of Prince Edward,"
the criminal convictions of black persons had
averaged only one per year before the Civil War.[129] And
in 1907, J. Cullen Carrington, clerk of the Charlotte
County Court, could say in his Charlotte County Hand
Book of the County, with which he was so thoroughly
familiar:

If anything, now that the prohibition of intoxicating
liquors has been so overwhelmingly approved by the
people of Virginia, first, as a measure of State, and then
of National, policy, order and morality are more strongly
entrenched in the counties of Randolph's District than
they were even in his day.

Nowhere in the United States will there be found a
people freer from vice and dissipation, with a profounder
religious faith, or with a richer endowment of those
simple, manly, native virtues and kindly, cordial, social
impulses, which gave to the old Virginian society its
highest worth. It is not in the social or moral character
of the people of Randolph's District, either in his time or
ours, that any true reproach to them is to be found, but
only in the economic sequels of past conditions which still
exercise, to a considerable extent, a depressing effect upon
their energy and enterprise. The real criticism to which
that District is subject is not that it should not have
been better than it was in his time, but that it should not
be better in many respects today than it was then. "The
most painful thing in visiting this old slave-holding
country," wrote Dr. James Waddell Alexander to Dr.
Hall in 1840, "is to see, after 15 years' acquaintance, none
of those municipal and domestic improvements which
strike one in the North."[131] With our Northern brothers
still setting the example that they did when these words
were written, and with the rise of great industrial communities
south of Virginia, and the marked material
progress, which has been made in recent years by some
portions of Virginia, there is good reason to hope that the
counties, which were formerly in Randolph's District, may,
in a few more years of desquamation, exhibit some of the
"municipal and domestic improvements," the lack of

which Dr. Alexander deplored, and yet not be despoiled
of what remains of the characteristics of which he was such
an intelligent observer and such a loving interpreter.

With a few exceptions, all the people in Randolph's
District were engaged in tobacco planting, or in callings
directly or indirectly ancillary to it. There were four or
five lawyers grouped about each of its four county seats,
who led the kind of life that Randolph was so loth that
Tudor should lead. Here and there, was a doctor who
usually united the character of a physician with that of a
tobacco planter; and his life on the professional side was
not only a long struggle with disease but also with bad
roads and the caprices of a climate which Dr. James
Waddell Alexander found one summer "tropical-canicular,"[132]
and which, while usually blander in mid-winter
than more Northern climates, yet had its share too of ice,
sleet, and snow. (a) A Southside Virginia doctor, of the
best standing, has been revived for us in a feeling way by
Dr. George W. Bagby in his reminiscences of Dr. James
Dillon, of Prince Edward County.[133] At every village and
along the country roads, were to be seen the simple dwellings
of Presbyterian and Baptist ministers, who were generally
men of pious, worthy lives, and held in the highest
esteem, and often in the deepest affection, by their parishioners;
and, in portions of Randolph's District, there
were a few Methodist Ministers also. Not many, we
imagine; for it is said that when Randolph was asked to
allow the use of his name as a part of the proposed name
of Randolph-Macon College, and was told that the object
of the college was the education of young Methodists, he
replied in his sarcastic way, "Yes, you can use my name;
for, when educated, they will cease to be Methodists"[134]

—a fling which has but little point in our day when
the Methodist Church abounds in learned men, who,
aside from their general professional usefulness, do
more, perhaps, than the clergymen of any other denomination
to promote all those moral reforms which are
closely associated with political progress.

There were no towns in Randolph's District; unless
Farmville, in Prince Edward County, which was not
incorporated until 1832, and in 1836 contained only 800
inhabitants, could be called such.[135] Even in regard to it,
Isaac Carrington, a local wag, is said to have declared,
upon visiting it not long after Randolph's death, that he
had seen a good deal of the farm but very little of the
ville. The only other collections of human beings deserving
of mention were: Maysville, or Buckingham Court
House, in Buckingham County, with a population of 300
people; Diuguidsville, in the same county, with a population
of 132 people; New Canton, in the same county, with
a population of 50 people; Stonewall Mills, in the same
county, with a population of 20 people; Cartersville, in
Cumberland County, with a population of 300 people;
Ça Ira, in the same county, with a population of 210 people,
hardly enough to justify the expectation of progress
in which its name was born; Cumberland Court House, in
the same county, with a population of 90 people; Stoney
Point Mills, in the same county, with a population of 90
people; Prince Edward Court House, in Prince Edward
County, with a population of some 105 people; Marysville,
or Charlotte Court House, the county seat of Charlotte
County, with a population of 475 people, and Keysville,
in the same county, with a population of 70 people.

At these points, there was some little mercantile and
industrial activity in Randolph's time; perhaps, on the
whole, more than there is today, because of the extent to
which the transportation facilities connecting them with

larger foci of population and business have been since
improved upon, as well as because of the extent to which
the concentration of capital, highly organized machinery,
and the adoption of new inventions and labor-saving
processes in these latter places have superseded small
local stores and plants and individual handicraftsmen.
At Maysville, there were four mercantile stores, an apothecary
shop, three taverns, a tanner, two saddlers, two boot
and shoe manufacturers, a silversmith and watchmaker, a
milliner and mantua-maker, two wagon makers, two cabinet
makers, three tailors, one tinplate worker, and one miller;
at Diuguidsville, three general stores, two groceries, a
tavern, a tobacco warehouse, a tanner, a saddler, a wheelwright,
a blacksmith, a cabinet maker, a tailor, a bricklayer
and stone mason; and, in the neighborhood of Diuguidsville,
there were two extensive "manufacturing mills,"
and a grist and sawmill. At New Canton, there were three
mercantile stores, one tavern, a flour mill, a tan yard, and
a saddler. Four miles west of the village, was the Virginia
Flour Mills, apparently a plant of some little importance.
At Stonewall Mills, there were two mercantile stores, a
"manufacturing mill," a tailor, a shoemaker and a blacksmith.
In Buckingham County, taken as a whole, there
were seven "manufacturing flour mills," capable of grinding
from 200,000 to 250,000 bushels of wheat annually;
five wool-carding establishments; eight tan yards, and 40
grist mills. Slate was found in abundance on Slate River
within its limits, and there were gold mines within its
limits too, just profitable enough to cheat those who
worked them with what Dr. Johnson calls "the phantom
of hope." At Cartersville, there were five mercantile
stores, three groceries, a merchant mill, two builders of
threshing machines, two tan yards, a saddler, and a number
of mechanics, such as wheelwrights, plowmakers, blacksmiths,
shoemakers, etc.; at Ça Ira three mercantile stores,
two taverns, a tobacco warehouse, a flour mill, two tailors,
two wheelwrights, two blacksmiths, and two plowmakers;
at Cumberland Court House a mercantile store, two
taverns, a boot and shoe factory, a saddler, a tailor, and
various mechanics; and at Stoney Point Mills two mercantile
stores, a "large manufacturing mill," a wheelwright,
a blacksmith, a cooper, and a tailor. At Prince Edward
Court House there were, besides a number of "public and
private offices," a tan yard, a coach manufactory, and
various mechanics; at Sandy River Church a house of
entertainment, a mercantile store, and several mechanics;
and at Farmville, ten mercantile stores, two taverns, two
tobacco warehouses, five tobacco factories which employed
250 hands, a printing office, a boot and shoe factory,
a tan yard, two carpenters, a cabinet maker, two
blacksmith shops, a tailor, a wheelwright, a saddler, and
two milliners and mantua-makers. At Marysville there
were five mercantile stores, two well-kept taverns, three
boot and shoe factories, four wagon-makers' shops, each
of which employed eight or ten hands, a carriage maker,
two tailor shops, each of which employed a number of
hands, a tanner, three saddlers, three blacksmiths, a cabinet
maker, and several house carpenters and bricklayers;
and at Keysville a mercantile store, a tavern, a boot and
shoe factory, two wagon makers, employing many hands,
a wool-carding machine on an extensive scale, a cotton gin,
and two blacksmiths.

These different places afforded a considerable vent for
the agricultural products of the surrounding country. At
Diuguidsville, 800 to 1200 hogsheads of tobacco were
annually received; at Ça Ira, 300 to 500 hogsheads, and
at Farmville, 4,000 to 4,500. At Diuguidsville, 20,000
to 30,000 bushels of wheat were annually purchased.
Altogether, the flour mills of Buckingham County ground
from 250,000 to 350,000 bushels of wheat annually. The
mill at Cartersville ground from 20,000 to 30,000 bushels
annually, and the mill at Ça Ira 28,000 to 30,000 bushels.

The mills at these places were doubtless the larger mills
in Cumberland County.

All of these figures in relation to population and industrial
conditions are taken from Martin's Gazetteer, which
was published in 1836,[136] three years after Randolph's death,
and fully deserves the encomium of Prof. A. J. Morrison,
of Hampden-Sidney College, who, in his invaluable monograph
entitled The Beginnings of Public Education in
Virginia, 1776-1860, justly terms it a book of "extraordinary
value."[137]

Farmville, the Gazetteer pronounced, "one of the finest
towns in proportion to its size and commerce in Virginia."[138]

In addition to the little industrial centres, mentioned by
us, there were, of course, the blacksmith and wheelwright
shops which have always been found everywhere in Virginia
hard by the cross-roads "store"; and, on the largest
plantations, the landowner usually had his own corps of
negro artisans. Nor should it be forgotten that, until the
Civil War, the loom and the spinning wheel were common
objects in the dwelling-houses of the Southside Virginia
people. From this summary, the reader can easily infer
how little there was in the economic conditions of Randolph's
District to recommend a high protective tariff to
the favor of its people.

It was to the tobacco plant that the attention of Randolph's
constituents was mainly given. Many thousands
of barrels of corn were grown on the alluvial meadows of
the James, the Appomattox and the Staunton Rivers and
the other rivers, rivulets, creeks, and small water-courses,
with which Randolph's District was seamed; and some hay
was grown on these streams too. But the fierce and prolonged
heat of Southside Virginia, the thinness of much of
the uplands in that region, the dearth of lime in many of
its fields, its sparse population, its vast expanse of virgin

areas, and the lax industrial methods, born of its slave
labor, all conspired to discourage the intensive system of
cultivation by which its soil could have been readily made
to produce much larger crops of corn and of certain kinds
of hay. No little wheat, oats, and red clover, however,
were grown on the hills of the district, and here and there
on the large plantations were to be seen good flocks and
herds of grazing animals.

Mrs. LeGrand's estate ran from Charlotte Court House
southwards about 3 miles, with a much narrower width.
On the south and west, it was bounded by the Little Roanoke
and Randolph's Bushy Forest estate.[139] "Most of
the land," Dr. James Waddell Alexander wrote to Dr.
Hall, "is covered with thick forests intersected with many
roads. The most fertile portion is the flat land through
which the stream above mentioned runs. The central
part is in the highest state of cultivation."[140] In another
letter to Dr. Hall, he says that the wheat fields around
Charlotte Court House were often as much as 100 acres in
extent, and speaks of the large herds which gave a pastoral
effect to the landscape.[141] Of little moment, however, in
the lives of the people in Randolph's District as a whole, as
compared with tobacco, were cereals and livestock. The
protracted summer weather gave the plant a full opportunity
to mature; the boundless forests supplied an unlimited
quantity of fuel with which to cure it, and, when
it exhausted the fertility of one field, a fresh area, on which
it could be produced in quantity, could be readily reclaimed
in the form of "new grounds" from the woods.
In one of his letters to Dr. Hall, Dr. Alexander mentioned
the fact that $200.00 worth of tobacco had been raised on
one little island of less than two acres.[142] Moreover, the
habits formed by a thorough familiarity with tobacco

culture dated back to the earliest colonial history of Virginia.
All the world has heard of "King Cotton," but
"King Tobacco" was quite as despotic a potentate within
his narrower domain, and, in one form or another, the
Southside Virginian was his slave from one end of the
year to the other. Tobacco was rarely off his hands, or
out of his mouth. When he was not sowing its seed,
transplanting it, working it, priming it, suckering it, worming
it, cutting it, sheltering it or curing it, he was manipulating
it or marketing it. Often he was busy with one
crop of it before he had disposed of its predecessor. He
discussed it at the country store and before and after
service at the country church. At times, when it was
being cured, he literally slept with it; and he smoked and
chewed it as if he revelled in his servitude to it. He even
composed a new glossary of terms to fit its exactions.

The technical language of the planter was gibberish to
Dr. Alexander, but not to one to the manner born, like
Randolph. Writing to his niece from London on May 27,
1822, he said: "There were some noble pines at High

Leigh which a Virginian overseer would soon have down
for tobacco sticks."[144]

Southside Virginia, during Randolph's career, was a good
illustration of the economic peril which any community
runs in having all its eggs in one basket. Between 1799
and 1830, the price of tobacco underwent some extraordinary
fluctuations, and the prosperity of Southside
Virginia rose and fell with them. The period between
1799 and 1816 was signalized by a remarkable improvement
in the fortunes of its people. Upon this subject
there are some timely remarks in the "Discourse by Hugh
Blair Grigsby on the Lives and Characters of the Early
Presidents and Trustees of Hampden-Sidney College,"
delivered at the centenary of the founding of the college
on June 14, 1876. After saying that it was not until the
close of the War of 1812 that the first burst of sunshine
after the Revolutionary War descended upon Prince
Edward County and its vicinage, he adds these words:

But this advance of wealth must have been the increment
of the earlier years after 1812, for, confessedly, the
decade between 1820 and 1830 was one of such widespread
pecuniary depression in Virginia that, to some eyes, it
seemed as if the State was declining into a condition of
almost hopeless atrophy.[146] The year 1819 was a year of
general financial distress throughout the United States,
and the effects of this distress in Southside Virginia are
stated by Randolph in his pungent way in a letter written
by him to Captain West, his sea-captain friend, on April
30, 1828.

No one had a keener sense than Randolph of the fact
that the conduct of a plantation in Southside Virginia
went round and round in a circle like a horse hitched to
one of the revolving shafts which furnished the power for
threshing wheat at granaries on the larger plantations in
that region before the invention of the modern portable
threshing-machine. (a) "Farming in Virginia," he said,
"goes in a circle; the negroes raise the corn, the hogs eat
the corn, and the negroes eat the hogs, &c."[148]

When Randolph wrote to Josiah Quincy that, if he came
to Charlotte County, he would introduce him to a small
school of intelligent freeholders, he was not over-appraising
the character of his constituents. As a rule, they were

remarkably well informed about the public men, and intimately
conversant with the political issues, of their time;
indeed, it would have been better for them, if they had
imitated their fellow Democrats of the North, and not lost
sight of the fact that Congress was a great business instrumentality
as well as a theatre for oratorical displays and
the conflict of political theories. Morris Birkbeck, an
English traveler, visited Petersburg, Va., in 1817, and,
discussing the Virginians that he met there, he says:

The compliment is all the more significant, as it was
preceded by the averment that, while a Virginian planter
was a Republican in politics, and exhibited the high spirit
and independence of that character, he was a slave-holder,
irascible, and too often lax in morals; and was said to carry
a dirk about with him as a common appendage to the dress
of the planter in that part of Virginia. It is not unlikely
that some Southside planters did have such a weapon,
because we know that on one occasion Randolph wrote to
Theodore Dudley for a dirk which he had left behind him
at Roanoke.[150] A gentry, that was not too peaceful for the
duelling pistol, might well be contentious enough at times
for the dirk.

One more quotation from the agreeable letters of Dr.
James Waddell Alexander to Dr. Hall, and we shall be
prepared to lift the curtain again upon the figure of Randolph

as he appeared upon the court-green rostrum of
Southside Virginia.

What Dr. Alexander has to say about the drinking and
fighting, in which the court day described by him ended,
has not escaped, we are sure, the attention of the reader.
That such excesses were more or less limited to the saturnalia
of court day and to the rabble, we must infer from
the tribute paid by him to the moral character of the people
of Charlotte County, which we have already quoted,
and from the fact that, in one of his letters to Dr. Hall, he
also stated that temperance agitations were hardly necessary
in Charlotte County as the body of the people had
always been temperate.[152] The truth is that anyone who has

witnessed the tremendous strides made by temperance in
the matter of intoxicating liquors, within the 40 years preceding
the adoption of the 18th amendment to the Federal
Constitution, can easily decide how unfair it would be to
judge the habits of Randolph's day by those of even forty
years ago. We say nothing about fighting, because, wherever
there is excessive drinking, there will be fighting.
The companionship between the two is as close as that
which led Alexander Pope in his sententious way to affirm
that every liquorish mouth must have a lecherous tail.
In Randolph's time excessive drinking was common in
every part of our country. In his Advice to Connecticut
Folks, published in 1786, Noah Webster, Jr., says:

Webster computed that the people of Connecticut were
then spending £ 90,000 a year for rum—a sum somewhat
in excess of the expenses of the State Government. Judge
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar could recall the fact that in
1824, when he was eight years old, he and another boy
picnicked in the woods, and that his mother, a Connecticut
woman, gave them a bottle of punch to take with them.
He also remembered that, during his boyhood, when any
young child died at Concord, Massachusetts, "the pallbearers
were selected among the young boys, and a room
was set aside for them, in which a table was set with bottles
of rum, whiskey and gin, and each of the boys freely
partook."[153] And Josiah Quincy, Jr., is not picturing
Silenus and his purple faced crew, but the members of one
of the Blowing Clubs of Harvard in or about the year
1821, when he pens these words:

Everywhere in the United States, intoxicating liquors
have now been placed under the ban of the law, and
nowhere did the public opinion, which has brought about
this result assert itself sooner than in rural communities
in Virginia like Randolph's District. Indeed, in some of
them the general prohibitory measure, which Virginia
adopted in advance of the adoption of the 18th amendment
to the Federal Constitution, and that amendment
were merely declaratory of a condition which an irresistible
public sentiment had already decreed. While we are
dwelling upon a county court day in Charlotte County,
we might add that nothing could be more strikingly indicative
of the conservative character of the people of Randolph's
District than the infrequency of the changes that
have taken place in County Court Clerkships in it except
as the result of death or resignation. Cumberland
County was organized in 1748; Buckingham County in
1761; Prince Edward County in 1754, and Charlotte
County in 1765. The first three clerks of Cumberland
County—a father, son, and grandson,—held the office in
succession for 100 years; the first three clerks of Prince
Edward County held it for the same length of time; the
first four clerks of Charlotte County held it for 98 years,
and in 160 years Buckingham County has had but some
six clerks.