University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER I

Birth and Ancestry

John Randolph of Roanoke was born at Cawsons, in
Prince George County, Virginia, the home of his maternal
grandfather, Theodorick Bland, Senior, on June 2, 1773.[1]
If evidence, unsupported by original testimony, may be
trusted, the house in which he was born might well have
been classed with those colonial mansions in Tidewater
Virginia, which excited the admiration of even such a
foreign observer as the Marquis de Chastellux.[2] It
contained, it is said, not less than thirty apartments,[3]
and was set off by grounds adorned with shrubbery, serpentine
walks and other artificial embellishments.[4] However
this may be, it is no longer standing either to confirm or to
gainsay the conspicuous character ascribed to it; for many
years after it had ceased to be the property of the Blands
it suffered the fate which has reduced to ashes so many
storied houses in the region of open, screenless fireplaces
and careless negro servants which stretched from the
James River to the North Carolina boundary.[5] (a)

As the tradition goes, the master of the place, at the

time of the conflagration, was seated at dinner with a large
company of guests when a servant entered the room and
announced that the building was on fire. The intelligence
was received by the well-bred host with unruffled composure,
and, pausing only long enough to order the flames to
be put out, he begged his friends not to be disturbed by a
matter to which his servants would give their prompt
attention. But, in this instance, as in many others under
the old Virginia slave conditions, it was much easier for the
master to pass on a thing ceremoniously or otherwise to
his black household than to have it effectively done after
it had been passed on. For a time the wine continued
to circulate but not so fast as the fire, and the result was
that the whole convivial gathering soon found itself
bundled out of doors by smoke and heat.[6]

But the mansion was seated on the east bank of the
Appomattox River, near the point where this stream pours
its waters into the James, and on a high plateau which
overlooked the glistening expanse formed by the blended
currents of the two rivers; and this site still remains to
evidence the rare privilege enjoyed by the inmates of
Cawsons in an outlook which took in, with a single grasp
of the vision, Shirley, the ancient seat of the stately and
profuse hospitality dispensed by the Carters, Bermuda
Hundred and its shipping, City Point and some other
prominent land objects, and, above all, the sheet of water
just mentioned, which John Randolph himself, as we shall
presently see, in one of his letters to Josiah Quincy termed,
and justly termed, "noble."[7] Proofs are not wanting in
the life of Randolph that he was keenly alive to the grandeur
and beauty of the physical universe, and it was in
keeping with the imaginative and emotional organization
of mind and heart, which afterwards led the world to
pronounce him, whatever else he might be, a man of

genius, that his birth should have had such a congenial
local origin.

And there are few birthplaces in the United States, it
may be added, invested in so high a degree with the
interest that attaches to an historical environment. The
locality, of which Cawsons was a feature, belongs to the
territory that Lyon Gardiner Tyler has aptly termed The
Cradle of the Republic.[8] Thirty miles or so across the
James, are the ruins of Jamestown, the first permanent
roof-tree established by Anglo-Saxon institutions and
manners within the present limits of the United States.
At practically the same distance, is Williamsburg, the
Colonial Capital of Virginia, and the heart of the Society,
so often honestly misconceived and so often dishonestly
misrepresented, which, despite the ignoble sloth, the
frivolous dissipation and the depraved self-indulgence
attributed to it by those who either do not love it or
do not understand it, contrived somehow to achieve
the monstrous paradox of producing what even Henry
Adams, one of its harshest critics, admits to be "the
greatest list of great names ever known this side of
the ocean."[9] On the north side of the James above
Jamestown is Malvern Hill where Lafayette encamped
shortly before the capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown,
which itself is only forty miles or so from the site of Cawsons,
and where McClellan, driven to the water's edge,
succeeded, by a desperate exertion of deadly energy, in
shaking himself free from his pursuers. A little higher up
stream are Curles' Neck, where the masterful rebel,
Nathaniel Bacon, Junior, the 1676 precursor of 1776,
resided, and the Dutch Gap Canal where General Benjamin
F. Butler, during the closing hours of the Civil War,
"bottled himself up," as Grant, in his pithy way, phrased
it. Immediately under the eye of Cawsons, as we have

seen, is City Point, where General Phillips disembarked
when, with the aid of the traitor, Arnold, he proceeded to
harry the bowels of Virginia with sword and torch, and
where Grant had his headquarters when the State-Rights
cause, of which Randolph had been the ever-faithful
Abdiel, had become hopelessly involved in the coils of its
inexorable fate. Richmond, the capital of the Southern
Confederacy and for four bloody years of fratricidal strife
the invincible citadel of the State-Rights conception of
the Federal Constitution, is only about twenty miles off.
Petersburg, where the Army of Northern Virginia, assailed
by the fury of Talbot's three attendants, "lean famine,
quartering steel and climbing fire," made its last real
stand, is only about ten or twelve miles off. Manifestly,
whether we look backward or forward from the date of
Randolph's birth, the spot where, to use his own sad words,
he was "ushered into this world of woe,"[10] was part of a
background as vivid and significant as any that the history
of the New World—once new, but now also growing
old and ashen in its turn—can afford.

Just how John Randolph came to be born at Cawsons
instead of at the home of his parents, which was at Bizarre,
near Farmville, on the Appomattox River, in Cumberland
County, about eighty-eight miles above Petersburg, and
not far from the scene of the surrender at Appomattox, we
do not know. Perhaps, on the eve of his birth, his mother
was drawn there by the natural impulse which so often,
under such circumstances, impels a wife, who is as "ladies
like to be who love their lords" (to borrow a delicate
paraphrase employed by him in one of his letters to his
cousin, Theodore Dudley),[11] to seek the parental roof.
Or, perhaps, she was influenced by the desire at such an
anxious time to be as near as possible to her brother, Dr.
Theodorick Bland, Junior, who had acquired his medical

education abroad and was living at Kippax, or Farmingdale,
in Prince George County. If the latter surmise is
well founded, in gratifying this desire she was really inviting
additional, instead of averting existing, risks, we
should say, in the light of a letter from Dr. Bland to her,
dated August 29, 1771, in which he tells her exactly what
should be done to cure her husband of "a bilious remittent,
something of the inflammatory kind which, had he
been bled once pretty plentifully in the beginning, would
have intermitted perfectly." The lancet, "glyzters,"
"manna," and cream of tartar, ipecac, "chameemile" tea,
cupping or leeching, rhubarb, vitriolated tartar, barley
water, gum arabic, "huskey jockey," penny-royal water,
blisters, "barke" and immersions of the patient up to his
armpits, in a tub of warm water with vinegar in it, make
up, with some other forbidding recommendations, the
restorative treatment that the doctor believed to be indicated
by the facts in the case.[12] His leading thought
evidently was to expedite the exit of the disease by opening
up as many active channels of egress for it as possible.
The father of John Randolph survived both his malady
and his doctor on this occasion, but he certainly could not
say of himself as his famous son is reported to have long
afterwards said of one of his favorite servants, when he
was informed that this servant had died too unexpectedly
for a doctor to reach him before his death: "Then he
had every chance for life!"[13] It is only fair, however,
to note that Dr. Bland did advise the use of "barke,"
which, in the refined form of quinine, is what a physician
would administer at the present time for a "bilious
remittent."

We are told that John Randolph was frequently at Cawsons
with his mother during his early childhood[14] ; but,

so far as we are aware, he never revisited the place but once
after he became of age. This was in 1814 when the melancholy
sensations which we all feel on finding ourselves after
many years of absence again amidst the early scenes,
which, as Byron says of the "school-boy spot" of our
youth, "we ne'er forget though there we are forgot," were,
in his case, intensified both by the inveterate prepossessions
which he ever entertained in favor of the Old Unreformed
Virginia and the rebuff to which he had recently been
subjected at the polls in his Congressional District.

Then, after a word about Robert Bolling, the founder
of the Bolling family in Virginia, and the armorial bearings
and epitaph on his tombstone, the writer goes on:

Of the same tenor was a letter written by Randolph to
Francis Scott Key two days earlier in which he further
said:

It is obvious from Randolph's letter to Quincy that the
house at Cawsons was still standing in 1814, and it is
somewhat significant that he says nothing about its size or
the character of the grounds around it. And especially is
this so because in a letter written by him on Feb. 9, 1832,
to some unknown correspondent he spoke of one of the
ancestral homes of the Randolphs in Virginia as a "noble
mansion"[17] ; which it doubtless had been. It is quite
possible, therefore, that the scale of the Cawsons home and
the grounds about it has been somewhat magnified by
tradition more majorum Virginianorum.

The lineage of John Randolph was such as well to inspire
the personal and family pride which was such a deeply
rooted characteristic of his. On the paternal side he
was descended from the celebrated William Randolph,
"Gentleman,"[18] of Warwickshire, a nephew by the half-blood
of Thomas Randolph, the poet, whom rare Ben
Jonson is said to have adopted, among the young poets
whom he called his "sons." He emigrated to Virginia
about 1673, when he was about twenty-four years old, and
lived long enough before his death, some thirty-seven or
eight years later, to become clerk and speaker of the House
of Burgesses, Attorney-General, and one of the founders

and trustees of William and Mary College; to say nothing
of his zealous efforts to promote the civilization of the
Indians. He was also an extraordinarily successful planter
and ship-owner, erected a splendid mansion at Turkey
Island, and died leaving a large fortune, for his time, to
his children. While the lofty dome of the mansion lasted,
it was one of the conspicuous beacons by which the James
River navigator directed his course, and its structure was
so elaborate and splendid that we are even asked to believe
that a man served out the entire term of his apprenticeship
to the trade of a carpenter in one of its rooms. The children
of William Randolph and Mary Isham, his wife, the
daughter of Henry and Catherine Isham of Bermuda
Hundred, were nine in number, seven sons and two daughters,[19]
and in process of time the descendants of their
children spread over Southside Virginia almost as thickly
as young pines sown by the winds do over one of its broom
sedge fields, and intermarried so freely with each other as
to be humorously likened, along with other Virginia families,
to a tangle of fishhooks, so closely interlocked that it is
impossible to pick up one without drawing three or four
after it. Whether originating in the feeling that nothing
was good enough for a Randolph except a Randolph or not,
imbreeding went on to such an extent among the descendants
of William Randolph that the Rev. Philip Slaughter
could say, for instance, in the second edition of his History
of Bristol Parish in 1879, that the children of Dr. Robert
C. Randolph, of Haymarket, Clarke County, Virginia,
had in their veins the united blood streams of five of the
seven sons of William Randolph.[20] When the Randolphs

[ILLUSTRATION]

MARY ISHAM, WIFE OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH OF TURKEY ISLAND

From the original in the collection of Edward Carrington Mayo, Richmond, Va.

did marry outside of the circle of their own kindred, it was
with such gentle families as the Lees, the Blands, the Flemings,
the Bollings, the Beverleys, the Harrisons, the
Carters, the Skipwiths, the Fitzhughs, the Grymeses, the
Burwells, the Pages, the Carys, the Wormleys, the Nelsons,
the Berkeleys, the Lightfoots, the Spotswoods and
the Cockes.[21] By the close of the American Revolution,
they formed so innumerable and powerful a clan that the
Marquis de Chastellux was able to comment upon them
as follows:

But it must not be supposed that until the Civil War, when
the Randolphs and all the other old Virginia families were
reduced to a common footing of impoverishment, every
branch of the Randolph family continued to be thrifty
and affluent. That would be asking too much of the tides
of human destiny. That the Randolph connection came
to have its full share of the scapegraces and spendthrifts
who are engendered in the womb of every family, we need
not go further than the letters of John Randolph himself to
certify. In one to his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter, when
dwelling upon the thriftlessness of certain of his Randolph,
Bland, and Bolling contemporaries, he complains:

The children of William Randolph were: 1. William of
Turkey Island, who married Elizabeth Beverley; 2.
Thomas of Tuckahoe, who married Miss Fleming; 3. Isham
of Dungeness, who married Jane Rodgers; 4. Richard of
Curles, who married Jane Bolling; 5. Sir John Randolph, of
Tazewell Hall, Williamsburg, who married Susan Beverley,
a sister of his brother William's wife; 6. Henry, who never
married; 7. Edward, who married a Miss Groves; 8. Mary,
who married William Stith, and 9. Elizabeth, who married
Richard Bland.[24]

And by the names of these other estates whole groups of
prolific Randolphs became collectively known. "They
are so numerous," declares Thomas Anburey in his Travels
through the Interior Parts of America, published in 1789,
"that they are obliged like the clans of Scotland to be distinguished
by their places of residence."[26] But it is not the
high official and social position of William Randolph, nor
his ripe masses of mottled tobacco leaves, nor his inbound
and outbound ships, but the intellectual distinction attained
by so many of the seed of his robust loins which
renders him by far the most noteworthy præpositus in
American history. In the illustrious Adams family of
Massachusetts, which has given birth to two Presidents
(and they a father and son), talent and public usefulness
have run from generation to generation as surely as a

covenant in a skillful lawyer's deed. But eminent as the
posterity of President John Adams, the father of President
John Quincy Adams, have been, they are, when compared
with the posterity of the original master of Turkey Island,
"but as the marigold at the sun's eye"; to go back for a
standard of comparison to the age of William Randolph's
poetic half-uncle, Thomas Randolph. From William
Randolph all these persons derive their descent; three
famous as only truly great men are famous; others not so
famous but certain of a lasting celebrity, and still others
not celebrated yet entitled to honorable remembrance:
Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Robert E. Lee;
Sir John Randolph, just named as one of the sons of William
Randolph, King's Attorney General and Speaker of
the House of Burgesses; Peyton Randolph, one of Sir
John's sons, King's Attorney General and President of the
first Congress; John Randolph, his brother, King's Attorney
General; Edmund Randolph, son of John Randolph,
Governor of Virginia, Attorney General and Secretary of
State of the United States; Thomas Mann Randolph, Senior,
member of the House of Burgesses and of the Virginia
Constitutional Convention of 1776; Thomas Mann Randolph,
Junior, Governor of Virginia and member of the
House of Representatives; Thomas Jefferson Randolph,
son of Thomas Mann Randolph, Junior, author of The
Life and Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and member
of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1851-1852,
and at one time Rector of the University of Virginia;
George Wythe Randolph, son of Thomas Jefferson Randolph,
Secretary of War of the Southern Confederacy;
Sarah Nicholas Randolph, his sister, author of The
Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson; Thomas Jefferson Coolidge,
Minister to France; Beverley Randolph, Governor of
Virginia; John Randolph of Roanoke, member of the
House of Representatives and of the United States Senate
and Minister to Russia; Alfred M. Randolph, Bishop of
Southern Virginia; Innes Randolph, author of the vigorous
poems, "John Marshall" and "I am a Good Old Rebel";
William Stith, the Historian of Virginia; Richard Bland,
"the Virginia Antiquary," member of Congress in 1774
and author of The Inquiry into the Rights of the American
Colonies; Colonel Theodorick Bland, Junior, the gallant
Revolutionary officer, for three years a member of the Old
Congress and afterwards a member of the first House of
Representatives under the Federal Constitution, and also
a member of the Virginia Convention of 1788 which
adopted that instrument; Hugh Nelson, member of the
House of Representatives, and Minister to France;
General Henry (Light Horse Harry) Lee, the father of
Robert E. Lee, the celebrated Revolutionary Commander,
member of the Old Congress, the House of Representatives,
and the Virginia Convention of 1788, Governor of
Virginia, and author of Memoirs of the Southern Campaigns;
Charles Lee, Attorney General of the United
States; Henry Lee, author of The Campaign of 1781 in the
Carolinas and other writings; General George Washington
Custis Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, General in the Army of
Northern Virginia and the successor of his father in the
Presidency of Washington College (now Washington and
Lee University); William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of
Robert E. Lee, General in the Army of Northern Virginia,
and member of the House of Representatives (a); Fitzhugh
Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee, cavalry commander in
the Army of Northern Virginia, and Governor of Virginia;
Thomas Nelson Page, author of In Ole Virginia, and other
productions, and Ambassador to Italy during the World
War; James Pleasants, United States Senator and Governor
of Virginia; Henry St. George Tucker, President of
the Virginia Court of Appeals and professor of law at the
University of Virginia; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, professor
of law at William and Mary College, and author of
George Balcombe, pronounced by Edgar Allan Poe in his
Marginalia "the best American novel," and also of The
Partisan Leader; John Randolph Tucker, Attorney General
of Virginia and member of the House of Representatives;
Henry St. George Tucker, his son, member of the
House of Representatives; Beverley D. Tucker, Bishop of
Southern Virginia; William J. Dawson, member of the
House of Representatives, and Roger A. Pryor, member of
the House of Representatives, General in the Confederate
army and Justice of the Supreme Court of New York.
Other notable descendants of William Randolph are
William Munford, the translator of the Iliad; George
Wythe Munford, his son, author of The Two Parsons; and
for years the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia;
John Hampden Pleasants, the editor of The Richmond
Whig; David Hunter Tucker, an eminent physician and
author of a manual on obstetrics; St. George Tucker,
author of Hansford, A Tale of Bacon's Rebellion; Sidney
Smith Lee, brother of Robert E. Lee, Captain in the
United States and Confederate Navies; Commodore Beverley
Kennon, of the United States Navy, and Beverley
Kennon, his son, Captain in the United States and Confederate
navies and Colonel in the army of the Khedive
of Egypt. Of the powerful Douglas family a proud distich
declared:

With the restriction to one surname modified so as to
include the same blood under other surnames, these lines
might aptly be applied to America and the Randolphs.

Nor (a) was Sir John Randolph the only son of William
Randolph who rose to public prominence in Colonial
Virginia. William Randolph, the younger, was at one
time or another, a County Justice, a County Clerk, clerk
and member of the House of Burgesses, and a member of
the Council; Isham, a member of the House of Burgesses,

Adjutant General of the Colony, and its agent for the
transaction of its business with England; and Richard, a
Colonel of Militia, County Justice, a member of the House
of Burgesses, and the Treasurer of the Colony.[27] This
Richard (Richard Randolph of Curles), was the paternal
grandfather of John Randolph of Roanoke. He resided at
Curles Neck, and his first wife was Jane Bolling, who was
the daughter of John Bolling, of Cobbs, in Chesterfield
County, "a great Indian trader,"[28] who was the son of
Robert Bolling of Kippax, who was the husband of Jane
Rolfe, who was the daughter of Thomas Rolfe, who was the
son of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, who was the daughter
of Powhatan, the Indian King, from whose fell vengeance
Captain John Smith was saved by her intercession.[29] (b)
Richard Randolph, of Curles, was the father of three daughters
and four sons; Richard, Ryland, Brett, and John,
the father of John Randolph of Roanoke.[30] He would
seem to have made a considerable addition to his patrimony;
for his son Ryland erected a pillar in his memory
at Turkey Island which stated that its foundations
had been laid in the calamitous year, 1771, when all the
great rivers of that country had been swept by inundations
never before experienced, which had changed the face of
nature and left traces of their violence that would remain
for ages; and that it had been raised to the memory of the
first Richard and Jane Randolph of Curles, to whose
parental affection, industry, and economy the son was
indebted for tenderness in infancy, a good education in
youth, and ample fortune at mature age. These words
were copied by John Randolph of Roanoke in his manuscript
diary which we have enjoyed the great privilege of
examining, and, influenced either by his general disfavor

[ILLUSTRATION]

POCAHONTAS

From a copy of the original at Berton Rectory, Norfolk, England,
by W. L. Sheppard, Va. State Library.

for the Will Wimbles of the Randolph connection, or by
the particular fact that his own estate had come to him,
encumbered by a mortgage, which his father had given of
his entire property, real and personal, except his favorite
body servant, Syphax, as security for the payment of a debt
which this brother had contracted to the Hanburys, the
great Virginia merchants of London,[31] he placed an asterisk
opposite to the words "ample fortune," and appended to it
this vicious jab: "which he squandered to the last shilling."

Richard Randolph, of Curles, died in England on December
17, 1748, in the fifty-eighth year of his age[32] ;
leaving, it is said, forty thousand acres of land (a) in
Virginia, including some of the choicest alluvium in the
valleys of the James, the Appomattox, and the Staunton or
Roanoke,[33] and a will[34] by which he strove to make a clear
and equitable distribution of his estate between his wife
and the other members of his family. The paper was executed
on November 18, 1747, and, as the present County of
Charlotte, in which John Randolph of Roanoke resided
during the greater part of his adult life, was then a part of
Lunenburg County, it is interesting to note that, among its
provisions, was one empowering his executors to close
certain contracts into which he had entered with various
purchasers for the sale of portions of his located but unpatented
lands, and of his unlocated lands in Lunenburg
County at the rate of five pounds, current money, for
every hundred acres of low grounds, and of three pounds,
twelve shillings, and six pence for every hundred acres of
high ground. It is also interesting to note, as giving us
some insight into the extent of this great planter's operations,
that he mentions in his will several "parcels of
tobacco shiped which may not arrive," i.e., in England,
"and near one hundred hogsheads in the hands of Mr.
Hanbury, of London, not accounted for, besides upwards

of fifty hogsheads shiped him by the Montague." But the
provisions of the will, with which we are most directly
concerned, are those by which he gave to his son, Ryland,
all his land "at the fork of Appomattox River, situate on
both sides the said River in the counties of Goochland and
Amelia," now in the counties of Cumberland and Prince
Edward, and to his son, John, all his land "on both sides
Stanton or Roanoak River in Lunenburg County" (now
in Charlotte and Halifax Counties), and all his stocks of
cattle, sheep, hogs, horses and mares which should be on
said lands and plantations, when John arrived at lawful
age, together with an equitable share of his slaves, including
by name Indian John and Essex. The lands on both
sides of the Appomattox devised to Ryland, or a part of
them, afterwards became the property of his brother,
John, and, during the ownership of the latter and his
family successors at any rate, if not before, bore the
name "Bizarre." And the lands on the south side of the
Staunton River devised to John would seem to have been
either absorbed by the settlement of his father's estate or
to have been voluntarily alienated by John subsequently;
for no mention is made of them in his will. But Roanoke,
the estate from which John Randolph of Roanoke derived
his suffix, was the land, or part of the land, on the north
side of the Staunton River devised to his father by Richard
Randolph, of Curles (a).

Of John, the father of John Randolph of Roanoke, we
know little, aside from the dates of his birth, marriage, and
death, except that, at the commencement of the American
Revolution, he united with Theodorick Bland, Senior, his
father-in-law, and Theodorick Bland, Junior, his brother-in-law,
in the sale of forty negroes for the purpose of raising
a fund with which to purchase powder to replace that
abstracted by Lord Dunmore from the magazine at Williamsburg,[35]
that he made a journey to Canada when Albany

was but a frontier post[36] ; and that he left a will[37]
which reveals an intense love for his wife, a bitter hatred
of the elder Judge Paul Carrington, of Charlotte County,
and an estimate of the supreme value of a good education
which did him infinite honor. He was born on June 29,
1742, old style, and died at Matoax on October 28, 1775.[38]
As he died before John Randolph of Roanoke was three
years old, the latter cannot be said to have ever really
known him. But the pulsations of family pride and affection
beat strongly in the bosom of the son, and there was
ever a more or less romantic glow about the feelings with
which he regarded any object endeared to him by family
attachment or friendship. One of his biographers tells us,
on what authority we do not know, that he always wore a
miniature of his father in his bosom.[39] But we do know
that, in one of his letters to his young cousin, Theodore
Dudley, he requested him to send him, among other things,
his "father's picture,"[40] and, when he was dying, he had
his shirt slit with a knife and a large gold stud inserted in
it which had belonged to his father; so that he might die
with this stud on his breast.[41] We also learn from a letter
that he wrote to Nathan Loughborough a few months before
his death, that the names of three of his geldings,
Sharard, Snip, and Aranoka, had been borne by his father's
curricle horses, "of which," the writer said, "he kept one
relay."[42] His Diary also discloses the fact that among his
cherished possessions were certain items of plate and other
small articles which had been owned by his father.

It is to the will of the elder John Randolph, however,
that we must look for his true character. It was evidently
an intense and ardent one. No less than seven times in the
will does he refer to his wife as his "loveing wife." After

devising Bizarre to his eldest son Richard, he devises to his
second son, Theodorick, all the tract of land lying on the
Staunton River below the mouth of the Little Roanoke in
Charlotte County subject to the condition that he should
not part with it in any manner to one Paul Carrington,
then living on or near Little Roanoke, who had cheated his
brother Ryland out of £570 in a bargain for 310 acres of
low grounds on the opposite side of Little Roanoke, or to
any of his children. "My reason," the bitter testator
adds, "for giveing this land on such a condition is that to
this day I feel and my children may feel the vilany of that
Paul Carrington." The testator then devises to his son,
John, all his tract of land on Staunton River in Charlotte
County, "joining to Paul Carrington land," subject to the
same vengeful condition. These Parthian arrows shot
from the grave at the reputation of Judge Carrington were
sine ictu, for like unsmutched snow, if the last word can
ever be said about any man, was the character of the owner
of "Mulberry Hill," hard by Roanoke, who, after having
been a member of the House of Burgesses, of the first and
second Virginia State Committees of Safety, and of the
different Virginia Revolutionary Conventions, a member
of the Virginia House of Delegates, and a judge of the
first General Court and of the Court of Appeals under the
State Constitution of 1776, and, after having, throughout
his life, been held in the very highest degree of public
esteem for integrity and unselfishness, resigned his seat on
the bench with these memorable words: "Having served
my country for forty-two years without intermission—
twenty-nine of those years devoted to the Judiciary Department—and
being now in the seventy-fifth year of my
age, I think it time for me to retire from public business
to the exalted station of a private citizen."[43] The true
quality of Judge Paul Carrington, Sr., may well be inferred
from the fact that, though the eldest son of his father,

[ILLUSTRATION]

COAT OF ARMS OF THE RANDOLPHS

As used by John Randolph on his bookplates.

before the passage of the Act which abolished primogeniture
in Virginia, he generously admitted each of his
brothers and sisters to an equal share in his father's
intestate estate.[44] "My father," said John Randolph of
Roanoke in a letter to Francis Scott Key, "left for some
reason of his own this old family adage (nil admirari) and
adopted fari quae sentias [say what you think] for his
motto."[45] It is safe to assume that the elder John Randolph
was simply a slave to the spirit of his heady motto when
he broke out into his fit of posthumous ire against one of
the purest and best of men. Very different is the flash of
self-revelation found in that part of his will which dealt
with the education of his children: "My will and desire is
. . . also," he said, "that my children be educated in the
best manner without regard to expence as far as their fortunes
may allow, even to the last shilling . . . and that
neither of them be brought up without learning either
trade or profession."

On the maternal side, too, the ancestry of John Randolph
of Roanoke enjoyed an uncommon degree of social
and political prestige; for his mother was a Bland, namely,
Frances Bland, the daughter of Theodorick Bland, Senior,
of Cawsons, who was the son of Richard Bland of Jordan's
Point, in Prince George County, who was the son of Theodorick
Bland of Westover, in Charles City County, the
paragon of American colonial homes.[46] This last Theodorick
Bland married Anne, the daughter of Richard Bennett, the
colonial Governor of Virginia, and now lies buried at
Westover between his two friends, William Perry and
Walter Aston. "He was," declares Charles Campbell,
"one of the King's Council for Virginia and was both in
fortune and understanding inferior to no person of his time
in the country."[47] The second wife of Richard Bland of

Jordan's Point, the son of Theodorick Bland of Westover,
was Elizabeth Randolph, the daughter of William Randolph,
the original proprietor of Turkey Island.[48] The
mother of John Randolph of Roanoke, therefore, as well
as his father, was a descendant of the founder of the Randolph
family in Virginia; and she and her husband were
second cousins. Indeed, the several genealogies of the
elder John Randolph and his wife were still more closely
interlaced, because they were both descendants of Robert
Bolling too. But, unlike her husband, she was not a
descendant of Pocahontas, as her derivation from Robert
Bolling was not referable to his marriage with his first
wife, Jane Rolfe, but to his marriage with his second wife,
Anne Stith.[49] When John Randolph was in England in
1822, he made a point of inspecting the monuments of the
Bland family in the parish church at Kippax, the seat of
the English Blands, and he records in his Diary, along
with many other details relating to the English Blands, the
fact that the armorial bearings on them were the same as
those on the tombstone of his maternal grandfather's
grandfather in Westover Churchyard.[50] Sperate et vivite
fortes, a very different motto from the cynical Nil admirari
of the Randolphs or the rash Fari quae sentias of the elder
John Randolph was the family motto of the Blands, and
it well accorded with the bold, sanguine spirit of more than
one of the Virginia Blands.[51] Giles Bland, of Berkeley,
known as "the Rebel" from his participation in Bacon's
Rebellion, which brought him to the gallows, was the
nephew of Theodorick Bland of Westover. "He was,"
says Charles Campbell, "a man of talents, education,
courage, and haughty bearing."[52] Richard Bland, the son
of Theodorick Bland of Westover, "The Virginia Antiquary,"
and Revolutionary patriot, was pronounced by
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Wirt, "the most
learned and logical man of those who took prominent lead
in public affairs," and, though a most ungraceful speaker,
profound in Constitutional lore.[53] Indeed, Jefferson
thought that there was more sound matter in his Inquiry
than in the celebrated Farmer's Letters of Jonathan
Dickinson. In a letter to Andrew Jackson, John
Randolph of Roanoke expressed the opinion that Theodorick
Bland of Cawsons, the brother of this Richard Bland,
"was a very superior man" to him.[54] But it is the poet or
the moralist, and not the biographer, who has to do with

Of all the male members of the Bland Family of Virginia,
however, the most interesting is Colonel, or Doctor, Theodorick
Bland, the brother-in-law of the elder John Randolph,
of whom we have already said a word. In the letter
to Andrew Jackson just mentioned, John Randolph of
Roanoke says that his command of the guard which kept
watch over the British prisoners at Charlottesville nearly
ruined him, "for he was proud and magnificent," and in
his Travels Thomas Anburey, who was a British officer
and one of these prisoners, gives us two decidedly fresh
and vivid little sketches of this side of the Colonel's
character. The following is the first:

All the same, the Colonel and his tatterdemalions were on
the agreeable side of the prison dead-line, which was
something that Anburey could not say of himself. The
other sketch thrown off by Anburey is this:

This is a good story well told, but it loses a little of its
point when we turn to another book of American travels,
that of the Marquis de Chastellux, who informs us that in
1781 he called on Col. Bland in Philadelphia, and then
adds without the slightest criticism of his French: "He
is a tall, handsome man who has been in the West Indies,
where he acquired French."[57] Light Horse Harry Lee, too,
imputes the failure of Washington to cross the Brandywine
and to strike at Knyphausen to misleading intelligence
brought him by Col. Bland, who, he says, was "never
intended for the Department of Military Intelligence."[58]
And for some reason or other, which is not very clear,
Madison thought the Colonel eccentric.[59] But, even after
full allowance is made for all contemporary detraction,
whether by one of his prisoners or otherwise, he is a highly
striking and attractive figure in the movements of his time.
Even Anburey, in addition to his general tribute to his
politeness to the British officers in his custody, admits
that, in franking his letters for him, Col. Bland "behaved
with true politeness and liberality of sentiment,"[60] (a) and,
in the same breath, in which he questions his fitness for
the Department of Military Intelligence, the Commander
of Lee's Legion testifies that Colonel Bland was "noble,
sensible, honorable and amiable."[61] In connection with
his visit to him in Philadelphia, the Marquis de Chastellux
says: "He is said to be a good soldier but at present serves
his country and serves it well in Congress."[62]

The Bland Papers, a valuable fascicle of printed letters
which Charles Campbell made up from originals that he

had plucked from ruin and oblivion at Cawsons, will always
preserve the memory of Colonel Bland, even were
nothing else to do so. By this book we are informed that
he was sent out at an early age by his parents to England
to be educated, was for a time at school in that country,
and afterwards studied medicine at Edinburgh.[63] With
his medical fellow-students there from Virginia, he united
in a petition to the Council and the House of Burgesses of
Virginia, asking them to require all persons in Virginia,
who might desire to practice medicine, to secure a license
before doing so.[64] We get a glimpse of the institutions and
manners of Colonial Virginia in a letter from Edinburgh
in which he asked his father to send over a negro boy to
him to serve as his valet; a request which was complied
with.[65] Slavery was indefensible, except in the light of
what someone has happily termed "historical charity,"
and, if there was no other way of getting rid of what Lord
John Russell called "that fatal gift of the poisoned garment,"
it is better that it should even have been torn from
the back of the South as it was, carrying blood and deep-seated
tissue along with it as it went, than that it should
have continued to work the torment and madness that it
did; but there is no denying the fact that it interposed only
too soft a protective pad between human ease and convenience
and the pettier pricks of existence.

The unbroken transmission from age to age of human
affection is also touchingly illustrated in a letter from
young Bland's father to him, in which the former warns
him not to return home without first letting his parents
know that he was coming lest the shock of his unexpected
arrival might be more than his dear mother could stand.[66]
The apprehension was reasonable enough, for the boy had
been beyond sea nearly ten years.[67] But when young Bland
did come home it was with a soul soon to be unreservedly

committed to the cause of the country that he was at all
times prepared to defend with a "fluent and correct" pen,
which, "if sometimes too florid or diffuse," was at other
times "wanting neither in energy of thought nor in elegance
of diction,"[68] or with a sword which was none the
less keen because he had to hesitate for want of the French
word for scabbard. After reading pretty much all that has
been written by, to, or about him, including his loving
letters to his "Dear Patsy," née Martha Daingerfield, who
survived him long enough to undergo two more hymeneal
changes of name, we can readily believe the writer who
in terms similar to Lee's tells us that in character "he was
virtuous and enlightened, of exemplary purity of manners
and integrity of conduct, estimable for his private worth
and respectable for his public services." The same person
tells us that "he was tall (in his latter days corpulent),
and of a noble countenance"; and that "his manners were
marked by ease, dignity, and wellbred repose."[69]

It only remains for us to add that Colonel Bland sometimes
wrote verses, and that once at least he turned a neat
little literary conceit; dignified, however, by a sincere and
sturdy patriotism. Writing to a mercantile house at
Bristol, England, on the eve of the American Revolution,
he said: "You will therefore excuse my not complying with
your request to assist Captain Aselby in his loading. I
should have vested the small proceeds in goods, but the
present political disputes between these colonies and the
mother country, which threaten us with a deprivation of
our liberties and everything that is dear to us, forbid such a
step, and induce us to exert every nerve to imitate the
silk worm and spin from our own bowels, although the web
should be our winding sheet."[70] We have been the more
particular to sketch Colonel Bland at full length because
by his will the elder John Randolph appointed him, together

with Dr. Thomas Bland, Colonel John Banister
and Mrs. Randolph, his wife, the guardian of his children;
adding that it was his desire that Dr. Thomas Bland, and,
in case of his death, Colonel Banister should have the
whole care of his children's education. "I would not,"
he said, "trouble Colo. Bland with them, relying on their
taking his advice in everything." It is plain that what the
testator withheld from Colonel Bland did him as much
honor as what he conferred.

Two other sisters of Colonel Bland besides Frances, the
mother of John Randolph of Roanoke, whom he called
his "tawny" sister, require mention.[71] One, Elizabeth,
married Colonel John Banister, of Battersea, the son of
John Banister, the eminent botanist, who came over from
England to Virginia towards the close of the seventeenth
century, and, while engaged in his favorite pursuit, was
killed by falling from a rock near the Falls of the Roanoke
River.[72] A plant, known as the Banisteria, perpetuates his
name,[73] and it is pleasant to think that in an age of mythological
changes this lover of nature might well have been
transformed by some benignant divinity into such a river
as the Banister of Halifax County, with which his botanical
excursions probably made him entirely familiar. Colonel
Banister was a member of the Virginia Constitutional
Convention of 1776, a cavalry officer of the Revolution,
and a member of the Old Congress from 1778 to 1779. As
a man he is said to have been "amiable and upright in
private life" and "patriotic and enlightened" in his public
life, and as a writer "always clear, correct, and easy," and
"sometimes vigorous and eloquent."[74]

The second of the two sisters of Colonel Bland, to whom
we are referring, Anna, married General Thomas Eaton of
Roanoke River, North Carolina, and had a daughter,
Anna, who married Guilford Dudley of North Carolina,[75]

afterwards of Tennessee, whose son, Dr. Theodore Dudley,
established an imperishable claim upon the gratitude of
all, who love good English, by publishing, under the title
of Letters to a Young Relative, the letters written to him by
John Randolph of Roanoke.

Theodorick Bland, Senior, of Cawsons never acquired
the same degree of public reputation as his brother Richard
Bland of Jordan's Point, or his son, Colonel Theodorick
Bland; but he did win a sufficiently assured position in the
public confidence to be, at one time or another, Lieutenant
of his county, the Clerk of his county, and a member of
the House of Burgesses.[76]

Of the childhood of his daughter, Frances, the mother of
John Randolph of Roanoke, we know nothing, but of her
life, after she became the wife of the elder John Randolph,
we know not a little; and what we know warrants us in
saying that she was both in mind and person one of the
most remarkable women of her time. She was born on
Sept. 24, 1752, was married to the elder John Randolph
on Mar. 9, 1769, and died at Matoax on Jan. 18, 1788,
after having become the wife of her second husband, St.
George Tucker, a native of Bermuda, on Sept. 23, 1778.[77]
She was therefore married to her first husband when she
was sixteen years of age, and lived but thirty-five years.
There is every reason to believe that her second marriage
was an entirely happy one, and so must have been the first,
violent as the elder John Randolph would seem to have
been, to have justified him in describing her seven times in
his will as "his loveing wife," and to have caused her to
refer to her widowhood in her prayer-book as her "unhappy
widowhood."[78] John Randolph of Roanoke was but
fourteen years old when she died, but he never ceased to
cherish a passionate devotion to her memory, which over
and over again found tender or fervid expression in his
conversation and letters.

On a later occasion, he wrote to a friend as follows:

Among his recollections of his mother were the lectures
that she read to her children from Hogarth's History of
Frank Goodchild and Tom Idle, doubtless the standard
prig and reprobate held up to the imitation and scorn
respectively of Southside Virginia boys in her day; and
to her precepts and the Progress of Cruelty he believed that
he owed the horror which he had always felt at cruelty to
dumb creatures.[81] We are startled for a moment when he
writes to his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter:

Imagine an intellectual commerce between a mother and a
youthful son in the year 1921 based upon Humphrey
Clinker! In a letter to John Randolph Bryan, written
from London on December 28, 1830, he states with the
emphasis of grateful pride that his mother had the virtue
of economy in perfection,[83] and the same sentiment impelled
him to say in the letter to his nephew, Tudor, just mentioned:
"My mother had been a faithful executrix of my
father's will; a faithful steward of the effects committed to
her charge in trust for her children. She left clear accounts
and money (not a small sum) in hand." Young as
he was when she died, she had, we may well imagine, already
observed in his moral and mental organization the
promise of future eloquence, because he said long afterwards
when he had become one of the most renowned of
American orators: "My mother once expressed a wish to
me that I might one day or other be as great a speaker as
Jerman Baker or Edmund Randolph! That gave the bent
to my disposition."[84] Late in life, when his soul was enveloped
in the folds of one of those hours of deep dejection,
during which he was to his childhood what Cowper, when
his heart breathed its black despair into The Castaway,
was to Cowper, when his eyes were fondly fixed upon the
picture of the mother's face which he had not known except
in infancy, he wrote these words to a friend: "I am a fatalist;
I am all but friendless; only one human being ever knew
me. She only knew me."[85] (a) But it is in a letter, dated
March 13, 1824,[86] to his friend Francis W. Gilmer, whose
own rare literary gifts always elicited a due return from
Randolph, that his love of his mother kindled with an exalted
enthusiasm. Speaking of his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter,
whom he warmly admired and deeply loved, he said:

And the striking tribute from the hand of the Buchanan
mentioned in this letter (a) is abundantly corroborated by
other contemporary testimony. In his Seven Decades of
the Union, Henry A. Wise tells us that Benjamin Watkins
Leigh, a man only less brilliant than John Randolph of
Roanoke himself, once said to him that it was the joy of
his boyhood to sit at the knee of Needler Robinson, his
Scotch teacher, and to listen to his conversations with his

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE MARRIAGE OF POCAHONTAS AND JOHN ROLFE

father and the mother of John Randolph, who then lived
at Matoax; that "the world thought her son spake as
never man spake," but that she could charm a bird out of
the tree by the music of her tongue."[87]

Nor should we pass over the judgment of Mrs. Randolph
expressed by her niece, Mrs. Guilford Dudley. "She was,"
Mrs. Dudley said, "a woman not only of superior personal
attractions but excelled all others of her day in strength of
intellect, for which she was so justly celebrated."[88] A portrait
of this lovely and gifted woman, for the testimony
which we have just brought forward shows indubitably
that such she was, is owned by one of her descendants the
Rev. R. B. Grinnan, of Norfolk, Virginia.

By her first marriage Mrs. Randolph left three children,
—all sons,—whose names we give in the order of their
birth: Richard Randolph, Theodorick Bland Randolph
and John Randolph of Roanoke; by her second marriage, in
addition to two children who died under age, she left two
sons, Henry St. George Tucker and Nathaniel Beverley
Tucker, to whom we have already alluded in connection
with the original William Randolph of Turkey Island,
and a daughter, Anne Frances Bland (or Fanny) Tucker.
The last named became the wife of Judge John Coalter,
of the Virginia Court of Appeals, and was the mother of
Elizabeth T. Coalter, who married John Randolph Bryan,
of Eagle Point, Gloucester County, Virginia, the godson
and namesake of John Randolph of Roanoke,[89] and thus
became the ancestress of the Bryans, of Richmond and
Petersburg, and the Grinnans, of Richmond and Norfolk.

Mrs. Randolph is buried at Matoax, as was her first
husband. The inscription on his tombstone describes him
as "armiger," and adds, after stating the date of his death
and age: "Non ossibus urna nec mens virtutibus absit."
(Liberally: Let not a tomb be wanting to his body, or
memory to his virtues.) The inscription on her tombstone

ejaculates in the mournful words of Horace, somewhat
condensed: "Francescae Tucker Blandae, conjugio St.
Georgii Tucker, quis desiderio sit modus." (Liberally translated:
When shall we cease to mourn for Frances Bland
Tucker, wife of St. George Tucker?)

The first husband reclaims the companionship but the
second retains the inscription. The elegiac gravity of
these two inscriptions is relieved by a sprightly one on a
neighboring tombstone which, in the true spirit of Virginia
gallantry, declares of the spinster under it: "Quam sprevit
Hymen, Pollux Phoebusque coluere." (Whom Hymen
despised Pollux and Apollo courted.[90] )

Many years after his mother had been interred at this
spot, John Randolph of Roanoke, in sending his condolences
to his brother, Judge Henry St. George Tucker,
upon the death of his eldest son, breaks out into these
impassioned words:

What man or woman is there who has not at sometime or
other, in the not less feeling though less eloquent measure
of his own cruel and bewildering grief, looked out half
blindly upon a chaos like that hinted in these words?

Such was the remarkable ancestry that took John Randolph
of Roanoke back to the wigwam of King Powhatan
and the bridal wreath of Pocahontas, to the Elizabethan
Randolphs, to the monuments and armorial bearings, with
which death mocks human pride in Kippax Church, in
Yorkshire, and to Bolling Hall, also in Yorkshire.[92]