University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII

General Observations on Randolph as an Orator

Before passing from this branch of our subject, the
reader may pardon us for making a few observations of
our own on Randolph as an orator, suggested by close
familiarity with his printed words. First, let us say that
the reports of his Congressional speeches must, in many
instances, be far from accurate. Their fidelity, we know,
was frequently impeached by him. But what we are
mainly concerned about is their failure to justify the idea
which has come down to us that his chief weapons in
debate were the tomahawk and the scalping-knife. These
reports, as we have seen, reveal some witty thrusts, some
withering sarcasms, and some bitter personalities. We
say witty thrusts only because Randolph was rarely, if
ever, humorous; but we cannot see that he habitually so
far transcended the ordinary moderation of debate as to
be justly placed, as he has so often been, in the same
savage class as Powhatan or Opechancanough. Either
much of the acerbity of his Congressional speeches has
been sweetened by judicious revision, or the terrifying
effect, so often attributed to his eloquence, must have
been very much intensified by the rapt attention which he
usually commanded, his dramatic manner, and the peculiar
physical apparatus by which his rhetorical effects
were produced; that is to say: the tall skeleton figure, so
suggestive of Death and his dart; the strange voice, usually
as musical as a flute but as shrill at times, when rasped by

uncommon excitement, as that of a pigeon-hawk starting
off full-tilt after his panic-stricken quarry, and the lean,
javelin-like fore-finger, which Von Holst says was the terror
of all the little and sinful spirits in the House of Representatives.[1]
Extraordinary powers of sarcasm and invective
he unquestionably had, irrespective of these personal
characteristics, and they were sometimes, as in the Virginia
Convention of 1829-30, unwarrantably abused, to be
sure. But it is only fair to him to say that they were
generally wreaked upon depravity, cant, conceit or, incompetence.

Sawyer, as we have seen, speaks of Randolph's remarkable
powers of retribution as if they never pushed his usual
courtesy in debate aside unless called into play by some
real provocation. This idea, however, must be adopted
with very decided qualifications; as witness his general
attitude towards Henry Clay down to the time of his duel
with him, and afterwards, and his supercilious treatment
of Chapman Johnson in the Virginia Convention. (a)
But the idea is sufficiently supported by the facts to suggest
some modification of the traditional view of Randolph
as a mere malignant sagittarius.

His Blifil and Black George attack upon Clay was
matched by utterances of his equally severe. When
Richard Rush was appointed to the office of Secretary of
the Treasury, he said: "Never were abilities so much
below mediocrity so well rewarded; no, not when Caligula's
horse was made Consul."[2] It is not surprising that
Rush should have been stung by this remark into publishing
the essay on Randolph, signed "Julius," which for
black, undiluted bile hardly has its fellow. Dulcified a
little by an occasional compliment, it would have been a
truly telling satire.

Of an ambitious man, with little native ability, Randolph
said that his mind was like the lands at the headwaters

of the Monongahela; naturally poor and made still
poorer by excessive cultivation.[3]

In the book by Adlai E. Stevenson, entitled, Something
of Men I Have Known, we find this story about Randolph:

A similar story is told by W. H. Sparks:

Of Philip P. Barbour, who was a close reasoner, and his
brother James Barbour, who is supposed to have been too
much of a declaimer, Randolph once said that Phil. could
split a hair but that Jim could not hit a barn door.[6] But
this was not so pointed as the couplet which some wag
wrote upon the walls of the House:

Governor James H. Pleasants, Randolph asserted on
one occasion, was like some of his (Randolph's) blooded
horses: "too weak for the plow, and too slow for the turf."[8]
(a)

After the political tergiversation of Samuel Dexter, of
Massachusetts, Randolph termed him, "Mr. Ambi-Dexter."[9]

Never did a man have a cleverer gift of minting phrases
that passed into genera circulation.

Benjamin Hardin, of Kentucky, a vigorous but unpolished
speaker, was "a carving knife whetted on a brickbat."[10]

The wavering Edmund Randolph was "the chameleon
on the aspen, always trembling, always changing."[11]

Of Robert Wright and John Rea (Ray) he said that the
House exhibited two anomalies: "A Wright always wrong;
and a Ray without light."[12]

The politic and secretive Van Buren, Randolph said,
"rowed to his object with muffled oars."[13] (a)

Of a cautious statesman, he said that, under his direction,
the Ship of State might never take a prize, but it
would probably never become one.[14]

Benton's four-day speech, he observed, consumed one
day more than the French Revolution (of 1830).[15]

Yes, Thomas Ritchie (the distinguished editor of the
Richmond Enquirer) did have seven principles, but they
were the 5 loaves and the two fishes.[16]

"Clay's eye is on the Presidency; and my eye is on
him."[17]

Turning away from a lady who had been pouring her
sympathy with the struggling Greeks into his ear, Randolph
pointed to a group of ragged little negroes near the
steps of her home and exclaimed: "Madam, the Greeks
are at your door!"[18] —words that soon winged their way to
every part of the United States.

Referring to the naval strength of England, and to
Madison's pamphlet on neutral rights, he said: "Against
800 ships in commission we enter the lists with a three-shilling
pamphlet."[19]

Other epigrams of his were these: "The bad blood will
show in some part of the four-mile heat."[20]

"An English noble has but one son, all the rest are
bastards."[21]

"England is Elysium for the rich; Tartarus for the
poor."[22]

"I am an aristocrat; I love liberty, I hate equality."[23]

"Asking one of the States to surrender part of her sovereignty

is like asking a lady to surrender part of her
chastity."[24]

"New Orleans is the key to our strong-box."[25]

"The three degrees of comparison—begging, borrowing,
and stealing."[26]

"A rat hole will let in the ocean."[27]

"It is a turnstyle; it is in everybody's way but it stops
no one."[28]

"Poverty, that nurse of genius, though she sometimes
overlays it."[29]

"Dogmatism is puppyism matured";[30] —but is not this
older than Randolph?

"Stick to a friend a little in the wrong."[31]

"That most delicious of privileges—spending other
people's money."[32]

His violent prepossessions in favor of the Virginian viva
voce mode of voting hurried him into the assertion that the
ballot box was Pandora's box.[33]

"Denouncing me! That is strange. I never did him
a favor."[34]

"No man was ever satisfied to be half a king."[35]

The Northern Democrats with Southern principles were
"doughfaces"; another phrase which was soon on the tip
of every tongue in the country.[36]

Clever, too, was his saying: "There must be something
for the shilling gallery as well as the Pit."[37]

Turnbull's painting of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, in which the human leg has such inordinate

prominence, became known far and wide by the name that
he gave it: "shin-piece."[38]

A portion of the architecture of the Senate Chamber he
ridiculed as "corn stalk columns and corn-cob capitals."[39]

But, after all, Randolph's best epigram was this golden
sentence: "Life is not so important as the duties of life."[40]

A good pendant to it is that other pithy observation of
his: "We all know our duty better than we discharge it."
Nor should we overlook two other weighty utterances of
his, notable for their sententious conciseness, if for nothing
else: "Time is at once the most valuable and the most
perishable of all our possessions." "All of us have two
educations; one which we receive from others; another,
and the most valuable, which we give ourselves."

The stamp on his phrases was regarded with so much
popular favor that his mintage, it must be confessed, was
sometimes given a fictitious value. Rather overstrained
rhodomontade has always seemed to us to be his famous
vaunt that the Minute Men of Culpeper County, Virginia,
who acquitted themselves so gallantly during the American
Revolution "were raised in a minute, armed in a minute,
marched in a minute, fought in a minute, and vanquished
in a minute." It is hard to transform either the
organization, the march or the victory of a military force
into the "Cynthia of a minute."[41]

At times, Randolph's wit could even overcome the
surliness of a foreign tongue. Not so good as Dean
Swift's inimitable, "O Mantua nimium vicina Cremonae!"
when he saw a violin swept from a table by a lady's dress,
and yet not bad, was Randolph's rejoinder to Samuel W.
Dana in the House: "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes."

Some Congressional orators have excelled Randolph in

depth of research, in sweep of vision and sympathy, in
thoroughness of exposition, and in capacity for closely
knit and long-sustained trains of reasoning; but which one
of them has ever outshone him in those bright fields over
which the human spirit sparkles or flames in its kindling
moments? Ingenuity, Wit, Fancy, Imagination, Eloquence,
Intuitive Sagacity, and occasionally, a rare gift
of Vaticination light up the drab and commonplace
Congressional background of his speeches as the rays of
the sun reflected from some glassy or metallic surface are
sometimes seen to light up a sullen hillside. To read the
speeches of Randolph's earlier fellow Congressmen, which
for the most part are now as lifeless as burnt-out fuses,
and then to turn to one of his speeches is like what it formerly
was to sit in a theatre at night and to have all the
gas jets in it, from dome to pit, suddenly lifted up the
fraction of an inch higher. Whatever else Randolph may
be, he is to his present reader, as he was to his contemporary
auditor, always interesting. The moment he appears
before the curtain the orchestra strikes up and the movement
from beginning to end is allegro. He uttered
many immoderate and even some bigoted words, and
occasionally he uttered a shallow one, though nothing can
be truer than the claim so frequently made that robust
common sense was the real basis of his intellectual character.
The Reverend Dr. Conrad Speece, of Virginia, used
to say that he would rather hear the nonsense of John
Randolph than the sense of any other man; and even
Randolph's wit, to use a fine general definition of wit by
Alphonse Karr, was often only "reason armed." But,
when he rose to speak in the House, his hearers had no
inclination except to sit mute and to give themselves up to
a rhetorical spell which made them feel as if they were
listening to some unique being, whose classic eloquence,
freed from all pedantry by the breath of the dewy fields
and forests of the plantation and the fuller knowledge of
men and man's estate which comes from daily contact
with human beings and human affairs, had been formed
not in the ordinary school of Congressional declamation,
but in some school where the open face of Nature, the
agora and the Academy had each been a preceptress.
Randolph's speeches in Congress were frequently garnished
with apt quotations from Latin and English poetry
and allusions to such Homeric heroes as Nestor, Achilles,
and Hector; indeed with references to almost every province
of human learning, for his memory retained impressions
as faithfully as a baked tile. His diction, unstudied
as it was, though sometimes in his later years encumbered
with too many parentheses, was eminently scholarly, and
at times even lofty, and was always not only pure, nervous,
and correct, but finished almost ad unguem. No speech,
however impressive at the time, ever lives unless it is good
literature; and the charm of reading whatever Randolph
spoke or wrote is essentially a literary charm. But, so far
as we are aware, there is not the slightest evidence to show
that any member of Congress ever sincerely objected to
his speeches because they were accompanied by Latin or
English quotations, or on the ground that they were
scholastic in any respect. The attitude of Congress
towards them appears to have been that of the character
in "The Elder Brother" of Beaumont and Fletcher, who
said:

It enjoyed them and drank them in with keen eagerness,
perhaps because it approved Randolph's own saying that
it is a good plan to hitch up a colt with a dull horse. If
they had been the speeches of a pedant or a mere scholar,
this, of course, would not have been the case. Deliberative
assemblies, even those composed to a great extent of highly
educated men, soon tire of that kind of a speaker. But

Latin and English quotations, and the display of many
kinds of knowledge, of which the average Congressman
was ignorant, and really had no great need, did not give
a member of the House a distaste for Randolph's oratory
because these things he felt instinctively were but a part
of that almost preternatural facility with which Randolph
could for hours at a time, with as much ease as water runs
out of a cup, or the wind moves along its trackless pathway,
give utterance to a host of fresh pictorial thoughts,
expressed with too much consummate readiness and harmony
to leave the slightest doubt behind them as to the
ability of the speaker to carry, without difficulty, the
whole weight of his burden, however various. Randolph's
learning, like all the other elements which entered into his
liquid speech, was held in infusion too completely to have
a foreign flavor. (a) The truth is that his literary accomplishments
were, as they should have been, a merely subsidiary
feature of his character as an orator and a statesman;
and in this position they were kept, aside from still
more important features of that character, by his extraordinary
prominence as a wealthy land- and slave-holder,
his high social station, his familiarity with the world of
action, as well as of books, and the extent to which his
mind was saturated with reflections and illustrations
drawn from the great living volume of nature in Virginia.
To few men in the public life of England or of our own
country have instructive apothegms or wise maxims, proverbs,
and sayings derived from the collective wisdom of
humanity, expressing itself on the street and in the farmhouse,
been more serviceable in the propagation of their
ideas than they were to Randolph. They were but succinct
formulæ, for rules of conduct worked out by his
own practical intelligence, which rarely lost contact with
actuality.

One of the most attractive traits of his oratory was the
promptitude with which he seized upon some rural fact or

natural phenomenon for the purpose of giving point to
some conception or argument of his. An example of this
on the hustings is mentioned by the Rev. Wm. S. Lacy in
his Early Recollections of John Randolph.

Another story of the same sort is found in a letter from
Timothy Pickering to Rufus King: "John Randolph,"
he says, "observing my townsman, Crowninshield, quite
fierce for Gregg's Resolution, said to one of my friends in
the House that `he (Crowninshield) was like a hog swimming
over a river—who would cut his own throat.' "[43]

On another occasion, discussing the regular army, he
said: "If ever we are to have a respectable regular force,
we must, to use a phrase common in our new settled
country, `begin again from the stump.' "[44] In the economy
of such a country as Southside Virginia stumps were
a standing offense to proper tilth, and, left in the beds of
new-made roads, sometimes spiced travel with no little
risk; so it is natural that Randolph should have returned
to them a second time in debate. The road from the
Crimea to Byzantium had proved a "stumpy" one for

Russia, he said.[45] On another occasion, illustrating the
sense of impunity, he exclaimed:

The embargo without a time limitation was a "horse
medicine."[47] Who that ever witnessed the hit-or-miss,
kill-or-cure, methods of a rural veterinarian can be at
any loss to understand just what Randolph meant? The
amazing thing is that speeches so faultless in syntax and
expression, and so crowded with glistening similes and
metaphors and pointed, and, at times, poetical, phrases,
should have been thrown off by him wholly without verbal
preparation. In the course of a debate in the House, he
spoke of himself as accustomed to meditate much on his
opinions, and not at all on the language that conveyed
them;[48] and, in another debate, he declared that he had
never been able to make what was called "a regular
speech." (a) Everything appeared to undergo a kind of
"sea-change" in his mind; passing into it in some prosaic,
familiar form, and issuing from it in some vivid and highly
original one. "That simple rule," he once declared, in
regard to a parliamentary rule relating to the motion to
reconsider, "might satisfy the most lynx-eyed duenna
anxious to restrain the wanton excursions of debate."[49]

Or take this example: "But how cruel it is when the cup
of fruition is, as it were, at the lips of the panting expectant
for this House, for the Committee of Claims—that Rhadamanthan

Committee—to dash it from the parched lips of
these thirsty patriots!"[50]

Or take this example:

And when was any other Congressman ever known to
frame such a sentence as this:

The simplest, the most uninspiring, subject had a way
of picturing itself in boldly figurative language when
heated by his imagination: "The moment this bill becomes
a law," he announced on one occasion, "you will
hear the flap of the ominous wings of the Treasury pouncing
upon your table with projects of land tax, excise,
hearth tax, window tax."[53]

However diffuse and vagrant his discourse might be as
a whole, his individual sentences were usually concise
and sententious to an eminent degree, as when he said:
"You may cover whole skins of parchment with limitations
but power alone can limit power."[54]

When was the truth, of which we have almost lost sight
in this day of the initiative and referendum, more pointedly
stated than by Randolph?

And when was the difference between the scope of real
executive oversight on a large scale and that of narrow
routine training brought out more distinctly than it was in
these words directed against Crowninshield: (a)

Nor could political philosophy ever hope to be attired
in a more winning dress than it is in these words used by
Randolph in the Virginia Convention of 1829-30 on the
proposition to discard property as a principle to be taken
into account in fixing upon the proper basis for the suffrage:

The truth of what we have so far said about Randolph
as an orator is generally allowed; but it is often asserted
that his speeches were at times unduly prolix and digressive
and therefore deficient in the best quality of a good
speech; that is, relevancy to the point at issue; and not
infrequently these criticisms, as we have seen, assume the
form of a flat asseveration that Randolph's mind was
lacking in logical power.

In weighing the force of these views, a broad distinction
must be taken between Randolph in the earlier stages of
his political career and Randolph in its later. At no time
in his life were his speeches cast in the ordinary mould of
formal, standard logic; for, at no time in his life, it is believed,
did he rely upon anything but the vivida vis of his
own quick, fertile mind for the garb of his spoken words.
Even in his earlier speeches, there is often a lack in the
chain of his thoughts of that closely linked concatenation
which is found even in the efforts of commonplace but
more conventional speakers. In his finest speeches, such
as those on Gregg's Resolution, there are lacunæ, missing
stitches, here and there, and then passion, as in his Yazoo
speeches, is often so perfectly fused with argument that
argument appears to lose, to no little extent, its own
severe, sharply defined character. (b) But to assert that,
even when Randolph's mind was not in a shattered condition,
his speeches gave no evidence of real logical power,

is to disregard altogether the reports of his speeches in the
records of Congress. These reports will show that, at
times, he not only reasoned consecutively and most cogently
but, at times, most ingeniously and subtly. It was
an observation of Calhoun, one of the acutest of men, that
it was an error to suppose that Randolph was deficient
in reasoning capacity. Upon a single point, he said,
Randolph reasoned admirably; it was only when he came
to deal with a combination of points that his ratiocination
fell short[58] ; and there is some truth in this judgment; for
Randolph was endowed with what has been happily called
"a single-track mind." John Wickham also had something
to say on the subject:

Be this as it may, there was never a time in Randolph's
life, whether before his intellect became gravely susceptible
to derangement, or afterwards, when he did not possess,
to a remarkable degree, the faculty of reasoning
soundly by flashes of intuition; of reaching the correct
conclusion by a leap instead of by a step-ladder. Few
men, too, have equalled him in the faculty of condensing
laborious processes of argumentation into a pithy statement
or a felicitous figure of speech. On this subject,
there are some weighty sentences in The Party Leaders of
Joseph G. Baldwin, who lived near enough to Randolph's

time to make him little less than an original authority on
the subject of Randolph:

But, unquestionably, Randolph's latter day speeches,
even before his mental powers became permanently impaired,
were inferior in point of logical coherency to his
earlier ones. Brilliant and far-sighted as was his leading
speech on the tariff in 1824, in it can yet be observed
indications of the mental relaxation which, at times,
rendered his subsequent speeches so diffuse and rambling.
During his Senatorial career, his growing tendency towards
feverish loquacity and aimless wanderings, aggravated by
an indubitable access of positive mental infirmity, reached
its extreme limit, so far as Congress was concerned; and,
notwithstanding the gleams of wit, wisdom, and instructive
knowledge, by which even his longest and most multifarious
discourses in the Senate were relieved, and the
savage force, with which they sank their teeth at times,
into the flank of the Adams administration, his speeches
during his Senatorial career were serious impediments to
the orderly and dispatchful transaction of the public business,

and even had a decided effect in defeating his reelection
to the Senate. It will not do, however, to attach
too much importance to the fact that Randolph's speeches
in Congress were not always pertinent to the pending
subject of debate. He often used the text furnished by
it merely as a hook on which to hang his convictions about
current political issues. As a speech on Retrenchment
and Reform, his speech on that subject in the House is a
very irrelevant one, but, as an eulogy of Andrew Jackson,
and an attack on John Quincy Adams, it is a masterpiece.
Singular to say, to anyone, who is not familiar with the
peculiar manner in which the recurrences of Randolph's
dementia manifested themselves, his speeches in the Virginia
Convention of 1829-30 were not only brief but
conspicuously terse and pointed. They too are marked by
little or no studied reasoning; indeed by little reasoning of
any kind, but it must be borne in mind that his policy in
the Convention was not to open up or discuss any question
new or old, but simply to insist doggedly and scornfully
upon the strength of Sir Robert Walpole's maxim, quieta
non movere, that the existing constitution of Virginia
should undergo no substantial change. After the adjournment
of the Convention, Randolph never spoke in
any deliberative body again; and it will not do to test the
merits of his subsequent speeches on the hustings by the
standards prescribed by parliamentary oratory. In the
last stages of his political activity, even when he was in a
mental state to be taken seriously at all, he was not merely
an orator; he was a theatrical show, a circus as well.
Thousands of people thronged to hear him on court day,
not so much to be instructed as to be startled and entertained,
and the avidity, with which they devoured everything
that he said, reacted unfavorably upon his oratorical
gifts, already deeply affected by his general loss of mental
force and balance. He became arrogant, overbearing,
garrulous, extravagant, abusive, and resolved still to sit,
even if he no longer had the strength to stand, before the
footlights. Finally, we see Randolph at Buckingham
Court House, as Moseley described him—a decrepit, morose,
crack-brained old man, but little removed from the
stage of human existence when we are told by Jacques that
we are "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,"
or, as he described himself, "a poor, half-crazy, moonstruck
South-sider."[61] But, perhaps, we have engaged in
an unprofitable task in subjecting Randolph as an orator
to ordinary principles of criticism at all. His charm as a
speaker consisted largely in the fact that his elocution and
matter were both so peculiarly original as to render him
absolutely unique. There is no other orator with whom
we can compare him. He is the only member of his
species, and to him might be applied what the New
England countryman said of that other brilliant creature,
Rufus Choate. Contrasting Choate with Webster, he
said: "Webster is like everybody else, except that there is
more of him; but whoever saw anybody like Rufus
Choate?"