University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER X

Conclusion

In conclusion, we cannot refrain from dwelling for a
moment upon the profound change which has taken place
since Randolph's death in the District, so long and so
conspicuously represented by him in Congress. The face
of nature in it has, it is true, undergone but little alteration.
The willow-fringed Staunton still flows by Roanoke,
through silent solitudes for the most part, to Clarksville,
where it receives the waters of the Dan, hurrying to
their tryst with its own current. The general appearance
of the country between the James and the Roanoke is
still that of a single vast forest, invaded at intervals by
the axe and the plow, and traversed here and there by
common dirt roads, half lost to sight in its leafy recesses.
All species of wild game are not as abundant in this region
as when Randolph jotted down his bags of partridges and
woodcock, and the number of Dido's last litter in the
Diary; but even such a shy thing as the wild turkey still
haunts its glades and plant patches, and, in at least one
of its streams, within recent years, the beaver, that curious
artisan of the primæval wilderness, has been known to
rear its rude structures. In the absence of a diversified
industry, the people of Randolph's former District still
believe, as Randolph believed, that their best resource is
the tobacco plant.

But, in all political and social respects, how radically
transformed has this region become since 1833! The

freehold suffrage, but for which Randolph's career would
hardly have been possible, was abolished by the adoption
of the Virginia State Constitution of 1850, and was succeeded
by the universal white suffrage, which he so deeply
distrusted. After the Civil War, under circumstances,
which would have seemed to him the complete fulfillment
of his worst forebodings of federal tyranny, this suffrage
was so enlarged as to include first black as well as white
men, and then both white and black women. To Randolph
the extension of the suffrage to the negro and the
female sex would have been, it is safe to say, only less
monstrous than its extension to his horse, Gracchus, or to
his dog, Carlo. The landed gentry, which controlled the
county governments in his District, and imparted vivid
life and color to the character of the latter, has passed
away, with its frank, engaging, generous, and spirited
manners; its love of the horse, the hound, and the gun; its
numerous servants, its profuse tables, its doors that, like
those of Timon of Athens, "were ne'er acquainted with
their wards." A few weeks ago, the author left the
house in Charlotte County, which was once the home of
one of the wealthiest slave owners of Virginia; then teeming
with servants and lavishly blest with all the essentials
of abundant and joyous living; but now a mere vacant,
deserted anachronism; and, as he looked back from a
lower level on its lonely towers and battlements, his
imagination experienced no difficulty in picturing it as
some huge marine fossil left stranded upon its high seat
by the recession of some prehistoric sea.

Thousands of steady, moral, God-fearing inhabitants
reside in the four counties which Randolph represented,
and, in many respects, they are better qualified than the
members of the class, of which we have been speaking,
would be to bring about the industrial change, which is
steadily giving a wholly new aspect to parts of the face
of North Carolina, and is bound, sooner or later, to make

its influence generally felt in all Southside Virginia. But
in point of social characteristics and tastes, these individuals
are, as a rule, far removed from the inmates of the
country seats in Charlotte, Prince Edward, Buckingham,
and Cumberland Counties, which were so often visited
by Randolph in the early part of the 19th century. Yet
the renown of Randolph, the most famous Virginian ever
born below the James, will unquestionably continue to be
one of the most cherished possessions, not only of the
people of his former District, but of all Virginia; for,
despite the sharp social distinctions of the past, the people
of Virginia, as geographically limited to-day, are, and
always have been, a highly homogeneous one. We make
the prediction that we do, not because Virginia is disposed
to place Randolph upon a pedestal of such exalted prominence
as has been sometimes affirmed by bigoted writers.
When she came to fill the niggard space in Statuary Hall
at the National Capitol, tendered to her rich abundance,
she did not turn to any Virginian, of whom it can be said,
as it can be truthfully said, in a limited sense, of him, that
he was exclusively hers, but to Washington and Lee, of
whom one would but mock her, if he were to say that they
were hers only. In the future, doubtless, with the exception
of the fame of Jefferson, the most illustrious exemplar,
perhaps, of the democratic movement, which has been the
most permanent and irresistible movement in human
history, the fame of no native Virginian is so likely to be
lasting as that of Washington and Marshall, who, lifted
by their serene balance of character and breadth of view
and sympathy above the sectional jealousies and discords
of their age, always kept their eyes steadily fixed upon no
vision less splendid than that of One People and One
Destiny, to which the stride of great events, since the
conclusion of the Civil War has happily brought every
portion of the United States.

But Virginia cannot forget that there was another time

in her history when the wisest and best man, within her
borders, might well have doubted whether his paramount
allegiance was to her or to the ill-defined union created
by the Federal Constitution; indeed, when an overwhelming
majority of her people, influenced by the inexorable
course of events, decided that question, though most
reluctantly, in favor of her sovereignty, and gave all that
men can honorably give—Peace, Wealth, and Life—to
make their decision good. Remembering these things,
Virginia will always hold John Randolph of Roanoke in
grateful remembrance; retaining ineffaceably in her memory
in the future, as in the past, the recollection of his
unique presence; his unfaltering intrepidity; his bitter
sorrows and misfortunes; his brilliant rhetorical, literary,
and social gifts; his searching flashes of prescience and
reasoning; his high public motives; his scorn for the muckworms
and scavengers of prostituted politics, and, above
all, his unceasing constancy in the maintenance of what
his native State conceived that her honor and interests
required. Nor, now that the veil has been completely
withdrawn from his private life, will Virginia fail to bear
in mind, too, his heart far more sensitive, after all, despite
a morbidly high-strung nature and tragic intervals of
mental aberration, to the tenderest impulses of human
love and pity than to those of human passion, arrogance,
and hatred.

And more and more, in the future, it can be confidently
predicted, will it be realized by every part of the United
States that, with respect to Randolph also, it may be said
that it is upon the poet, after all, that the true gift of
divination has been bestowed: