University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII

Randolph as a Statesman

Randolph's position as an orator is assured, but his
position as a statesman is by no means so certain. Indeed,
if he is judged by present standards of American statesmanship,
it is difficult for anyone except a student of history
to think of him as a statesman at all; so completely
lost beyond all possibility of redemption are most of the
causes for which he strove. There was nothing continental;
nothing truly national, about him. It will not do
to apply to him as a statesman our current tests—an
open-minded construction of the Federal Constitution;
devotion to the ideal of national unity; faith in our expanding
population, wealth and power; sensibility to the
military and naval needs, developed by the mutual propinquity
of all parts of the earth, brought about by the
steamship, the steam-car, and the aeroplane; the awakening
sense of international community, which is slowly
leading to the sober fulfillment of Tennyson's radiant
dream of the Parliament of Man and the Federation of
the World, and freedom from all the sectional and class
prepossessions and prejudices which do so much to cramp
and blur the outlook which should belong to the true
statesman. Tried by these tests, Randolph is not entitled
to the place which has been given him in the series of lives,
published by Houghton, Mifflin Co., under the title of
American Statesmen.

When construing the powers of the general government

under the Federal Constitution, he approached that
instrument in a spirit as nice and exacting as that of Shylock
when construing the words of his bond: "'Tis not
so nominated in the bond," was as far as he could be
induced to go. Members of the House of Representatives,
as we have seen, he deemed representatives of the States
and not of the nation. He denied the power of the Federal
Government to establish a national bank, or national
highways, or to enact an impost measure with any element
of protection in it. He was so jealous of any attempt on
its part to assert authority over the waters of the Potomac
River that even Jefferson was compelled to dismiss his
fine-spun refinements as "metaphysical." The act organizing
a provisional government for the colony of Virginia
in 1652 concluded: "God save the commonwealth of
England and this country of Virginia!"[1] Transpose the
members of this sentence and it not inaptly voices Randolph's
political allegiance. The State of Virginia, then
England, and then what he called, "the good old thirteen
United States,"[2] exclusive of Virginia, was perhaps the
order in which his local attachments ranged themselves.
(a) Except so far as the Southern States, other than
Virginia, were bound to Virginia by similar institutions
and pursuits, he seems to have cared as little about them
as he did about the Middle or Eastern States. In many
respects, his social characteristics and tastes were better
suited to England than to the crudity of our early national
existence. To him it was the maternal and a riper Virginia.
Indeed, near the close of his life, his disaffection
even with his native commonwealth was so strong that Dr.
Ethelbert Algernon Coleman, after visiting him at Roanoke,
made this entry in his unpublished diary, on Oct.
20, 1832: "From his continual abuse of this country and
its levelling principles, and from the exalted terms, in
which he speaks of England and its society and institutions,
one would certainly conclude him to be a tory."
These, however, were but the outgivings of a soul so sick
from both physical and mental causes as to be incapable
any longer of finding tranquillity and contentment anywhere.
It is true that even in healthier moments Randolph
often decried Virginia, but, in this respect, he
resembles Dr. Johnson, who disparaged Goldsmith himself
but would not allow anyone else to do so. The intense
sympathy which he usually manifested with the Irish in
their desire for a larger measure of political well-being, the
fond veneration which he entertained for the character of
Washington, the pride which he took in our Revolutionary
achievements, the satisfaction which he derived from the
popular as well as the aristocratic side of the old Virginia
civil polity, show that, after all, Virginia was more congenial
with his predilections than England, even though
he did exclaim at times that there never had and never
would be such a country as England, or such a boot-and-shoemaker
as Hoby, of London, or insisted that he was a
member of the Established Church of England. For nothing
can be beter avouched than his constant, fervid, and
impassioned affection for Virginia. "When I speak of
my country," he wrote to Key on Sept. 7, 1818, "I mean
the Commonwealth of Virginia."[3]

In another debate on the same subject, he even declared
that he had rather take the chance of war with the Holy
Alliance of Europe than lose one representative on the
floor of the House from Virginia.[5] On another occasion
he said:

Despite the appellation of "The Hannibal of the West"
which he gave to George Rogers Clark, and the expedition
of the two Virginians, William Clark and Meriwether
Lewis, which has been recently commemorated by a singularly

beautiful monument at Charlottesville, Randolph
regarded with no little distrust our westward expansion.

This pinched view of our national destiny was not due to
a lack of kindling imagination, for with that faculty he
was richly endowed; but to the fear of the menace to the
political supremacy of Virginia and what it guarded which
lurked in every westward extension of our national empire.
This comes out very clearly in what he prophetically said
on another occasion, when he was referring to the act by
which the Northwest Territory was ceded by Virginia to
the Union.

Indeed, to such a pitch was his alarm aroused by what
was taking place in the West, that he was ready to regret
one of the most creditable episodes in his entire career;
that is, the part he took in the acquisition of Louisiana.

Not only did Randolph pride himself upon not having
voted for but one amendment to the Federal Constitution,
but he declared that he had never voted in favor of the
admission of any state into the Union.[10] "The children of
the second marriage," he once declared, "should not
sweep away the whole estate."[11]

How hostile he was to most measures, looking to our
national defence, we have already seen. He began his
political career by terming our regular soldiery "rag-amuffins,"
and from that time to the end of his political
career, it was for him an object of fierce vituperation.
At one time, he seems to have recognized the fact that the
maintenance of a small regular army for such purposes as
the protection of New Orleans, the chastisement of the
Indians, or the repulse of Canadian incursions was necessary[12]
; but, beyond these limited purposes, the professional
soldier was anathema maranatha to him. In fact, he once
said that there was a time, and he wished he might live to
see it again, when the legislators of the country outnumbered
the rank and file of the army and the officers to
boot.[13] Once, alluding to the professional soldier, he even
poured out his scorn in words like these: "I do say that I
never see one of those useless drones in livery crawling on
the face of the earth that my gorge does not rise—that I do
not feel sick. I see no reason why we should not maintain
sturdy beggars in rags as well as beggars of another description

in tinsel."[14] His support of the navy, to say the
least, was very illiberal.[15] It is a gratification, however, to
realize that, in course of time, his eyes were opened to the
vital importance of a strong fleet to our safety. "Not that
he denied," he is reported as saying in the debate on
Commercial Intercourse in 1817, "that, if this country
was to be defended against a great maritime power, it
must be by a fleet; on that point he had not the slightest
doubt."[16] But again we must remind the reader that, in
his opposition to a considerable army and navy, Randolph
was probably the mouthpiece of a vast majority of his
fellow-countrymen. His power to express his feelings
with declamatory energy was simply superior to theirs.
Nor should it be forgotten that Randolph worked out for
himself what he conceived to be a good alternative system
of national defence for the United States. In season and
out of season, he insisted that every able-bodied man in
the land should be armed, and it was a part of his defensive
scheme also that our coasts should be defended by mobile
batteries. In one of his earlier speeches, he said:

Properly enlarged and extended, Randolph's idea of
arming the entire militia of the country was eminently
sound, and could readily have been developed into the

system of universal military training which, it is now
generally conceded, is the true military ideal for our
country; and, if his idea of flying coast-batteries is no
longer practicable, perhaps it is only because it has been
rendered obsolete by the tremendous power and range of
modern naval ordnance, which he could not well anticipate.
Nor can any of the convictions held by Randolph
in regard to the national defence be set down to a lack of
intrepidity or to mere besotted pacifism, such as was so
common in the United States on the eve of the recent
World War. His heart was a brave one, and never was
there a head in which less inane enthusiasm was lodged.
(a) As his stand with regard to Spanish encroachments
at the time of his break with the Jefferson administration
demonstrated, he was quick enough to fly at any cock that
trespassed upon our own barn-yard. His theory simply
was that the policy of non-entanglement with European
discord had come down to us as a wise tradition of policy;
that, happily for us, the Atlantic interposed a wide and
impassable fosse between us and the Old World; and that,
if we would only safe-guard our coasts with a well-armed
citizenry and proper trains of artillery, there would be no
occasion for our incurring the burden and peril of great
military and naval armaments. Europe was then really
3,000 miles away from us, and men and munitions of war
could be transported to our shores only in squads and
driblets. But, when the Leopard made the Chesapeake the
subject of its wanton outrage, Randolph, as we have seen,
flamed up into burning resentment. He was for vindicating
the violated honor of the country instanter, and,
afterwards reverting to the incident, he said: "We spoke
of war if reparation were denied, and I do trust in God that
Quebec would have been in ashes if Great Britain had
avowed the attack."[18] "It," he said, referring to the
language of Talleyrand, in opposing our boundary claims
in regard to Florida, "will ring in my ears with that of Mr.
Champagny, and with the thunder of the guns of the
Leopard, as long as I live."[19]

A strong spirit of international sympathy could hardly
have been expected of Randolph, because it is only since
his day that such a thing as a real international consciousness
can be said to have come into being. It was natural
that he should have felt in his time, as the wise statesmen
who preceded him had felt, that, the less we allowed
the concerns of our national life to become interlaced with
those of the jarring nations of Europe, the better. Randolph's
powers of observation and reflection were, of
course, hobbled by many more or less imperious predilections
and prejudices. He was a member of the ancient
landed aristocracy of Virginia, and he found it difficult in
many respects to rid himself of its social bias and peculiar
conceptions. Fee tails, primogeniture, and the freehold
suffrage were all hallowed by a certain sort of sanctity in
his eyes, and shut off from them that larger vision of universal
suffrage, universally educated, which is the ideal of
our own time; like the North Pole before Peary, often
despaired of but never renounced. Randolph was also
strongly swayed by sectional influences, but not to such
an extent as to prevent him from forming friendly personal
connections with more than one Northern member of
Congress. He found the same difficulty in understanding
the New England character that the New Englander
found in understanding the Virginian character, and no
greater, so far as we can see; forming our opinion from
hasty judgments about "Yankees," which we find here
and there, in his letters, and the reservations which such
men as Josiah Quincy and Elijah H. Mills, of Massachusetts,
preserved in their friendly social intercourse with
him. (a) He told Josiah Quincy on one occasion that he
never intended to set his foot on the farther bank of the

Hudson, but that if he did, Quincy's house was the first
that he would enter.[20] (a)

Randolph's failure to get along with the Northern Democrats
in the House during the Jefferson administration,
was largely responsible for his fall from leadership; and it
was only through the diplomatic brokerage of Van Buren,
"rowing to his object with muffled oars," that he was
brought into harmony with them again.

But, as a statesman, Randolph is to be judged by no such
latter-day tests. He was a public man of the early 19th,
and not of the 20th, century; and there are statesmen of lost
as well as of won causes. If, for no other reason, his position
as a statesman is secure, first, because he was the "unusual
phenomenon" of the House (to use a term borrowed
from John Adams),[22] during the brief dewy era of frugality,
retrenchment, and reform, and new-born Republican
principles which made Jefferson as nearly an universally
popular Messiah as the diversities of human convictions
and sympathies will ever permit any man to be; secondly,
because his searching common sense, eloquence and incorruptible
integrity, even in opposition, scotched many an
ill-digested and pernicious measure, and thirdly, because
he fully deserved the tribute paid to him by the resolutions,
adopted at Prince Edward Court House a few weeks
after his death, which ran in these words: "Resolved that
in his death, we deplore the loss of the most intelligent,

the most consistent, and the most intrepid, advocate of the
Rights and Sovereignty of the States."[23]

During the period when the sarcastic eloquence of
Randolph reigned pre-eminent over the deliberations of
the Federal Representatives (to borrow again from John
Adams)[24] he performed with conspicuous success all the
tasks imposed upon him as a statesman in the committee
room and in the conference chamber of the President.
Sawyer tells us that he was the confidential friend of
Jefferson from 1801 until his breach with him in 1806;
and, during this time, conducted himself as the priviledged
and almost exclusive champion of executive policy on the
floor of the House.[25] By Benton we are told that, whenever
Randolph arrived in Washington, at the beginning of
a session of Congress, he found awaiting him an invitation
from Jefferson to dine with him at the White House the
next day; so that they could fully discuss together the
business of the session. Many years after this period,
Randolph said on the floor of the House that, "when he
was intimate with the members of the Cabinet, he had
been let into their secrets, and, perhaps, too deeply into
them."[26] (a) George Tucker states that, as Chairman of
the Committee of Ways and Means, Randolph was "overbearing
and dictatorial with his associates—self-willed
and impracticable with the Executive."[27] The first of
these charges, so far as we are aware, is supported by no
evidence. We have already seen how eager Randolph's
colleagues on the Committee of Ways and Means were in
1806 to restore him to its Chairmanship. In one of his
letters to Jefferson, too, at any rate, he manifested, as the
reader has already learned, a keen desire to disabuse the
mind of Jefferson of the possible impression that he had
meant a reproach to him. Nor, so far as we are aware, is

there any evidence to support the charge made against
Randolph by Tucker that he did not have the business
habits, or knowledge of details, or powers of expounding
what was intricate or obscure, which his position in the
House sometimes required.[28] The Annals of Congress
show that he was very industrious and systematic in the
discharge of his duties, as Chairman of the Committee of
Ways and Means, or as chairman or member of other
committees, on which he served during the administration
of Jefferson. On one occasion, Samuel Smith, who had
been a business man of long experience and high standing,
before he became a member of the House, expressed his
astonishment at the readiness with which Randolph, as
Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, explained
an obscure and intricate matter.[29] Sawyer also
speaks of Randolph's promptitude, as Chairman of that
Committee, in making all the necessary explanations on
all points on which objections were raised from any quarter
of the House. In 1819, Randolph made unchallenged the
statement that, during the greater part of the administration
of Thomas Jefferson, the expenditures of the Government
had been generally within the appropriations, and
that no sum appropriated to one object had ever been
diverted to another.[30] But what could so conclusively
evince the merits of Randolph, as the Chairman of the
Committee of Ways and Means, as the marked reluctance
with which, as Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin
saw the man, who had been his right arm in protecting
the revenues of the country, displaced by a man who
shortly afterwards himself felt constrained to pay a compliment
to the transparent clearness with which Randolph
always presented any subject to which he might
address himself on the floor of the House?[31] (a) Nor will
the idea that Randolph's political career was wholly
devoid of constructive suggestions bear examination.
His recommendation, while he was Chairman of the Committee
of Ways and Means, of the House, that a public
printer be appointed to do the printing work of the Government
proved a beneficent reform when carried into
effect. To Randolph also Sawyer accredits "the substitution
under the appropriate heads of specific, instead of
general and indefinite, appropriations."[32] He also secured
the enactment of a standing appropriation of
$200,000 for arming the militia.[33]

Another notable reform suggested by him was the
abolition of flogging in the army. This subject is mentioned
in one of his letters to Andrew Jackson, in which he
endeavored to enlist the sympathy of Jackson in favor of
the abolition of the lash in the navy as well.

The Federal Sub-Treasury idea has been said to have
been conceived by Wm. Fitzhugh Gordon, of Virginia,
when a member of Congress from Virginia, during the
session of 1834-5,[35] but the idea would seem to have been
first formed by Randolph, though to Gordon is unquestionably
due the credit of first making it a matter of practical
moment. In a letter to Thomas H. Benton, dated Dec.
12, 1829, Randolph said:

If Randolph did not originate or sponsor more constructive
ideas than he did, it should be remembered that it
was partly, at any rate, because, for far the greater part of
his career, he sustained a relation of detachment from the
party agencies by which such ideas are usually originated
and carried into execution.

The principles, upon which the first administration of
Jefferson was conducted, are set forth by Randolph in his
speech in the House on Jan. 13, 1813.

"This Masked Monarchy—for such our Government
is," was one of his utterances and it well summed up his
general attitude towards the Federal authority.[38]

To all the Republican principles to which Randolph
pledged his early faith, he remained unswervingly faithful
during his entire political life, first of all, because he
earnestly believed in them, and had practised them when
he was the leader of the House; and secondly, because, after
he ceased to be the leader of the House, he was never again
cogently required by circumstances to reconcile political
abstractions with the despotic exigencies of political
administration.

In or out of office, however, Randolph, as a public man,
was governed by motives as pure and as disinterested as
any to which an American statesman has ever responded.
Morse, one of the last biographers of Jefferson, reaches the
conclusion that, in abandoning the Jefferson administration,
Randolph was influenced by thoroughly conscientious
motives. Indeed, he even thinks that Randolph
can be set down as a political purist[39] ; and his opinions are
in harmony with what was thought of Randolph by many
of his own contemporaries. "On all private claims, or
where his judgment was not warped by party spirit, he
voted without fear, favor, or affection," says Sawyer.[40]
And then Sawyer tells us, by way of illustration, how
Randolph, on one occasion, was lifted in a crippled condition
into the house of Philip Barton Key at Georgetown,
and spent about a month there under the tender care of
his family, and yet shortly afterwards, when Key's title to

a seat in the House was contested, rose in the House and,
after warmly expressing his obligations to Key for his
kindness, declared that he felt bound, under the circumstances,
to vote in favor of the contestant.[41]

One of the most valuable witnesses that we have to the
character of Randolph is Thomas H. Benton, who knew
him well. In his chapter in his Thirty Years' View, on
Randolph, he pays him this remarkable tribute:

If anything, Randolph was too independent in his bearing
with respect to office and its advantages. In a letter
to his stepfather, he expressed the opinion that a report
that some appointment was to be offered to him was
totally destitute of foundation, adding:

No member of Congress ever soiled his hands less with
the abuses of patronage. There is a trace of the old-fashioned
inflation of speech, which we find in some of his
early letters, in these comments in one of his letters to
Nicholson on executive patronage: "It is this monster
which threatens our destruction. . . . Will men prefer

the loaves and fishes of the hour to the glory of rejuvenating
their country or of restoring to our manners and
our language the nervous tone of independence."[44] He
had nothing but disdain, he said in a letter to Monroe, for
those "soi-disant" Republicans who panted for military
command and the emoluments of contracts.[45] In a later
letter to Nicholson, he replies to certain remarks of
Nicholson on the mode in which men were brought forward
to public notice by saying: "To me the tendency of
the power of appointment to office (no matter to what
individual it be trusted) to debauch the nation and
to create a low, dirty, time-serving spirit is a much more
serious evil."[46] The disinterested principles, which John
Taylor, of Caroline, championed, and the men who possessed
them, Randolph thought could not be too much
insisted on as the only bond of union among Republicans.[47]
Nor were these mere empty professions. As strict as his
code of political ethics was, he can be truly said to have
lived up to it as nearly as a man can ever be expected to
live up to a rigorous code of any sort; and it is a very
pleasant thing to anyone who detests spoils politics to
feel that, despite the fact that Randolph was almost
entirely cut off during the greater part of his political life,
by reason of his political independence, from the use of
political patronage, his standing with his constituents
remained essentially unimpaired. But he was fully cognizant
of its power under ordinary conditions. "I know,"
he said on one occasion, "that we can not give to those who
apply for offices equal to their expectations; and I also
know that with one bone I can call 500 dogs."[48]

It is the habit of most writers about Randolph to speak

of his severance from the Jefferson administration as if it
doomed him to entire political destruction; but the force
of this view is lost upon us. There were many chances
against Randolph ever reaching the Presidency under any
circumstances, and, after all, as great and lasting fame,
perhaps, can be acquired in the House of Representatives
as in the Presidential Cabinet. His fame would certainly
not have been greater, we imagine, if he had been Governor
of Virginia, and the only time that he ever really lost
reputation was when he was on his mission to Russia,
unless it were during his term as a Senator when he was
occasionally irresponsible. From the time that he ended
his connection with the Jefferson administration until he
declined re-election to the House in 1829, with the exception
of his temporary occultation during the War of 1812,
and the term that he declined in 1817, he had a seat in
Congress; and, even when he was in the Senate, notwithstanding
his run-down mental condition at times, he
exerted a powerful influence over the course of federal
legislation and the fate of the Adams administration.

It is true that Randolph did not have the party backing,
which often adds so much to the usefulness of a member
of the House. It could not be expected of him, he said in
1807, "that he should sink into that vile and supple thing,
an humble follower, a pliant tool of a majority and tacitly
disavow the principles for which he had contended two
years before."[49] Later, he spoke of himself as "a desultory
kind of partisan acting on his own impulses;[50] " and
still later as "a feeble isolated individual."[51] This language,
it is hardly necessary to say, was, in a measure,
conventional like his memorable words on another occasion,
when, apologizing for the extent to which he had
taxed the attention of the House, he said: "I ask its
patience, its pardon, and its pity."[52] Finally, his freedom

from formal allegiance to party sat upon him so naturally
that he spoke of it as carelessly and amiably as he did on
one occasion of the class of old bachelors of which he declared
that he was a most unfortunate member.[53] For
instance, in 1820, he disclaimed any intention of speaking
of the Monroe administration; "for he knew," he said,
"perhaps less of them than any man in the nation."[54]
And, on a later occasion, his nonchalance was still more
pronounced; for, in a debate on the contingent expenses
of the House, he is reported to have used these words:

Randolph jested in this way about his independence of
party because he could well afford to do so, with his
constituents so solidly arrayed behind him and so inalienably
devoted to him that even John Quincy Adams was

compelled to admit the fact to the extent of saying that
they seemed to be as much enamored with him as Titania
was with the ass' head of Bottom.[56]

But anyone who formed the opinion that, when Randolph
abjured party ties, he became, in the language of
the English ballad, a "lone and banished man," a mere
party outlaw, would be gravely at fault. After he severed
his connection with the Democratic Party, he not only hung
about its flanks, and, at times, threw its columns into
serious disorder, but, at times, he even induced its representatives
in the House to desert their own acknowledged
leaders and to fall in behind his dancing crest as it gallantly
rose and fell with the waves of parliamentary strife.
And, even after the standard of the Democratic Party had
passed into such masterful hands as those of Calhoun,
Clay, and Lowndes, and the patriotic impulses of the
country had become fervently enlisted in behalf of the
War of 1812, his influence was still great enough to muster
some 15 democratic votes in opposition to the declaration
of war. Subsequently, when the issue of State sovereignty
had become more and more prominent with the
crusade against Southern slavery, and tariff, internal
improvement, and other political issues had become more
and more drawn to it, like so many straws and leaves to
a whirlwind, he was soon recognized as the ablest and most
resourceful advocate of the State-Rights creed, which the
ingenious intellect of Calhoun afterwards made subtler
but, if anything, weaker.

The truth is that, throughout Randolph's political
career, after he had thrown aside the reins of party leadership
in the House, he was always so successful in almost
every great debate, in which he took part, in mustering a
considerable body of supporters behind him that his
influence nearly acquired the dignity of that of an organized
third party.

We have already said enough to convey to the mind of
the reader the fact that jealousy of power in all its forms
was the index to his political life; jealousy of the Executive;
jealousy of the Judiciary; jealousy even of "King
Numbers" himself. If he was not jealous of the Legislature,
it was only because he deemed its power, if anything,
too effectively counterpoised by that of the Executive and
Judiciary. He did, however, have a marked contempt,
half serious, half humorous, for the itch of legislation
which loads up the American Statute Book with so many
crude and superfluous laws. On this subject, he is thus
reported as speaking on one occasion in the House:

On another occasion, the general bias with which Randolph
approached every exercise of governmental authority,
found expression in these terse and felicitous words:
"Ours is not a government of confidence. It is a government
of diffidence and of suspicion, and it is only by being
suspicious that it can remain a free government."[58]

Even his devotion to State Sovereignty and his hostility
to professional soldiers and excise-men were but manifestations
of the same intense dread of perverted power. In
one of his letters to his friend Edward Booker, he said:

Except, he added, the Mediterranean Fund which was
a fund created for a limited time and a specific object.

In the case of regular soldiers and excise-men, his
impatience with governmental restraints sometimes escaped
in such surcharged phrases as to take him for the
time being out of the sphere of responsible statesmanship;
as, when urged by his maxim that a standing army is the
death by which all republics have died,[60] he defined a
regular soldier as a slave who sells himself to be shot at
for 6 pence a day[61] ; or, as when his morbid antipathy to
Executive intrusion into personal privacy caused him to
denounce an excise-man as "a hell hound of tyranny."[62] (a)

In passing judgment upon such extreme language as
these last words, we must remember that Randolph's
political education, as boy and man, ran back to the first
struggle between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists,
and that abomination of excise taxes as well as standing
armies was one of the conspicuous features of the political
thought and feelings of that time.

As for the principle of State Sovereignty, we must also
remember that, for many years of our earlier political history,
it was as ardently cherished by the Northern as the
Southern States of the Union. Henry Adams, in his John
Randolph, goes so far as to say that the right of a State to
interpose in the case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous
exercise by the Federal Government of powers, not

granted to it by the Federal Constitution (the very language
of James Madison in the Virginia Resolutions of
1798), was "for many years the undisputed faith of a vast
majority of the American people."[63] Nor was John Randolph
more of a rhapsodist in hymning the glory of Virginia
than Josiah Quincy was in hymning that of Massachusetts;
(a) but the difference between Randolph and
most of his State-Rights contemporaries is that he was
always prepared to defend his State-Rights convictions
with force. Such was his position during the period of
the Alien and Sedition Laws, which he once called the
Reign of Terror, when, if his belief was well-founded,
Virginia went so far as to establish an armory for the
purpose of resisting, if necessary, Federalist tyranny.
Such, too, was his position when he said of the Tariff Bill
of 1824:

And such, finally, was his position, when Andrew Jackson
threatened to invade South Carolina as Abraham
Lincoln afterwards actually invaded Virginia.

If the mortal duel between the North and the South had
to take place, his idea was to engage the former in it while
the wind and the sun were not so much in her favor.

Of all the episodes in Randolph's political career, the

one most open to attack is his opposition to the War of
1812; but, when the unreasoning impulses of national
pride are stifled, it may well be asked in our time whether
this opposition was not as wise as that which he asserted
so vigorously to the series of restrictive measures which
had no practical effect except that of manacling our hands
behind our back while our enemies were beating us in the
face.

The policy of the United States before the War of 1812
should have been, as Randolph contended: to eschew, as
long as possible, any active alliance with either France or
England, and especially all fraudulent evasions of obligations
imposed upon us by our neutrality, but, in case we
had to turn to one side or the other, to escape the crossed
swords that were playing in deadly carte and tierce above
our heads, to take our place beside the English democracy
rather than beside the military despotism of Napoleon,
which, if his plans had not miscarried at Boulogne, might
well have left to the United States, as Randolph said at
the time, nothing but the poor privilege of Ulysses—that
of being the last to be devoured. If we had to become a
belligerent, the events which led up to the War of 1812
pointed as unmistakably to the wisdom of an entente between
the United States and Great Britain as did the
events, which led up to the recent World War, when
another monster was seeking to set up another Moloch.
Great Britain did not have the general feeling of respect
and good will for the United States then that she had on
the eve of the great World War; that is true enough. Nor
did the American people, as a whole, have as much good
feeling for England then as they have now. These facts,
of course, made the situation much less tractable than it
would otherwise have been; but, if the War of the American
Revolution had not been so recent, and American
gratitude to France for the service, rendered by her to us
in that war, and the influence of the French Revolution

upon the temper of our people had not been so strong, it is
unlikely that the conduct of England to the United States,
before our declaration of war in 1812, would have been
attended by the arrogant outrages and the vexatious pretensions
which urged on the war. As it was, when our
declaration was made, the British Government had disavowed
the Chesapeake outrage, the impressment of our
seamen, which was our real grievance against England,
had sunk almost out of sight, and the obnoxious Orders of
Council, which had also been a just cause of national
resentment on our part had been actually revoked, though
not to our knowledge. Under such circumstances, with
a little more patience for the desperate necessities of England
in her struggle not only for her own preservation, but
for that of human freedom everywhere, including the
United States; in other words, with just a little more
reflection, deliberation, and delay we might have wholly
averted a war which might well be a source of almost
unmixed regret to both England and us if it had not
brought about the establishment of the undefended
boundary line between Canada and the United States,
which is now the surest pledge of peace between the latter
countries. We should either have declared war against
England earlier, or not at all; and that Randolph should
have had such a clear insight into the larger significance
of the contest between England and France, which provoked
the War of 1812, and should have asserted his
repugnance to that war so fearlessly, are among the things,
we think, that vindicate most strikingly his sagacity and
foresight as a statesman. Nor could there be a better
illustration of the rapidity with which his own constituents,
who rejected him in 1813, awoke, as the result of
bitter disillusionment, to the wisdom of his counsels, than
the fact that they forced him from his retirement and
re-elected him to Congress in 1815.

But, in no respect, was Randolph a truer statesman

than in his aversion to the institution of negro slavery.
The slave traffic he simply abhorred; and there is little room
for doubt that, if he could have freed all the negro slaves
in Virginia under proper conditions he would have freed
them. On one occasion, he wrote to Wm. Leigh from
Europe, asking him to remember him, in the kindest
manner, to all his slaves and added, that he wished that
he could, by a word, make them all white.[65] It was no
misconceived enthusiasm which inspired the abolitionist
poet, John G. Whittier, to write his melodious lines on
Randolph. And Randolph's hostility to slavery was not
only founded upon genuine humanitarian impulses, but
upon a clear statesmanlike sense of the blighting effect
exerted by slavery upon the economic welfare of Virginia.
"Suppose," he once said, "instead of ceding her Northwestern
Territory to Congress, Virginia had at the peace
of 1783 driven every negro and mulatto, bond or free,
across the Ohio; would she now, think you, be less populous
or powerful than she is at present?"[66] The report,
which he rendered in 1803, as the Chairman of a Committee
appointed to consider a memorial, which had come up
to the House from Indiana, praying for the temporary
exemption of that territory from the anti-slavery prohibition
in the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787,
is one of the most notable productions of his pen. It
summed up the conclusions of the Committee in these
words:

It is true that Randolph did not often give public
expression to his disapproval of slavery, and, as we shall
see, Nancy Randolph once taunted him with what she
supposed to be the inconsistency between his avowals of
enmity to it in private and his reticence on the subject in
public. There were many reasons, of course, besides
mere selfish timidity, based on deference for a formidable
body of public opinion, why he should not have been more
outspoken, as a public representative, than he was in the
announcement of his anti-slavery convictions. Much
besides the institution of slavery was involved in the long
sectional conflict between the North and the South, and
not a little is to be lost by too frank admissions in political
as well as other contests. Moreover, Randolph was kept
entirely too busy throughout his political life in insisting
upon the constitutional guarantees which the Federal
Constitution had thrown around slave property, and in
guarding the peace of the South against external attack,
to have much time left for promoting the emancipation
of the negro in Virginia. Nothing, however, could furnish
a more convincing proof of the extent, to which the movement
of the forces making for emancipation in Virginia,
was retarded by outside interference, than the fact that
Randolph never wavered in his intent to emancipate all
his own slaves, though almost incessantly kept provoked
to the highest pitch in his later years by encroachments

on what he deemed to be the constitutional rights of the
South.

The fragmentary Reminiscences of the Rev. John T.
Clark, an Episcopal Rector of Halifax County, who knew
Randolph well, is a document of the highest value as testimony
to the nature of Randolph's views respecting
slavery:

So far as we know, the only support that Randolph ever
gave to the plans of the African Colonization Society was
to attend and address a public meeting held under its
auspices in the City of Washington on December 21, 1816,
at which Henry Clay presided and spoke with his usual
force and fervor. In this address Randolph said that,
with a view to securing the support of all the citizens of
the United States, it ought to be made known that the
colonization scheme tended to secure the property of every
master to, in, and over his slayes; that it was a notorious
fact that the free negroes were regarded by every slave-owner
as one of the greatest sources of the insecurity and
unprofitableness of slave property; that they excited
discontent among their fellow-beings; that they acted as
channels of communication, not only between different
slaves, but between slaves of different districts; and that
they were the depositories of stolen goods and the promoters
of mischief. Apart then from those higher and
nobler motives which had already been so well presented,
the slave-owner, Randolph declared, was in a worldly
sense interested in throwing this population out of the
bosom of the people. He further said that, if a place for
colonizing the free negroes and a mode for transporting

them there could be provided, there were hundreds, nay
thousands, of citizens who would, by manumitting their
slaves, relieve themselves from the cares attendant upon
their possession.[69]

It is manifest that the object of these observations was
to soothe the misgivings of the slaveholder about the new
movement into quiescence; and it is equally manifest, we
think, that the countenance given to it by Randolph was
quite guarded. It was impossible, we should say, for
such a practical mind as his to have reposed much confidence
at any time in such a visionary enterprise as that of
the African Colonization Society.

However this may be, in 1826 he even refused to present
a petition of the Society to the Senate, although
entreated to do so by Francis Scott Key. His reasons for
the refusal were fully presented to Chief Justice Marshall,
and, afterwards, when he was reporting his conversation
with the Chief Justice to Dr. Brockenbrough, he did so in
the following narrative form:

The real reproach to Randolph in his relations to
slavery is that he should not have had more sympathy
with the powerful movement in the Virginia Legislature
of 1832 which failed in the House to carry a proposition
looking to the gradual abolition of slavery in Virginia by
only 15 votes.[71] This was just after the Nat Turner insurrection
in Southampton County had taken place.
Then he had a better opportunity than he ever had on any
other occasion in his life to deal a shattering blow at the
institution which he cordially disliked in his heart. But,
if we can judge from a very imperfect report of his last
speech at Charlotte Court House, he was not in accord
with the movement; for here is what he said:

Very different was the grave, measured language in
which he had communicated to Nicholson, many years
before, the facts connected with the servile insurrection
headed by the negro, Gabriel.

Josiah Quincy, the son of the eminent Federalist of the
same name, once asked Randolph who was the greatest
orator that he had ever heard; expecting that he would
answer "Patrick Henry." But, to his surprise, the reply
was: "A slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was
the auction block."[74] Between his repugnance to slavery,
and his jealous hostility to all efforts to abolish it ab extra,
Randolph was often visited with misconstruction. "I
have," he is reported as declaring on one occasion, "no
hesitation in saying slavery is a curse to the master. I
have been held up, as any man will be, who speaks his
mind fairly and boldly, as a blackish sort of a white and a
whitish sort of a black—as an advocate for slavery in the
abstract."[75] And that, on the whole, there was a lack of
coherence in the enunciation of his public views about
slavery, cannot be denied.