University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II

Childhood

By his will, the elder John Randolph devised and bequeathed
to Mrs. Randolph, for life, his Matoax estate,
which consisted of 1305 acres on the Appomattox River,
in Chesterfield County, Virginia, twenty working hands,
to be selected by her, four plow-boys, and all his house
servants, male and female. The testator also provided
that his executors should furnish her with horses, cattle,
hogs, sheep, oxen, plows, wagons, carts, and utensils of
husbandry, of every kind, and with provisions, of every
sort, raised on his estate, that she might fail to raise.
Moreover, he bequeathed to her all his household furniture,
linen, glass, plate, china, carriages, harness, carriage-horses,
mares and riding horses; and his watch.[1] Nothing
more was needed to beatify existence for a Virginian of
that day.

No incident in the life of John Randolph before the
death of his father has been recorded for us. Quite naturally,
his earliest recollections were those engraved upon his
memory by wounded pride, and, worst of all, by pride
wounded by physical invasions of his morbidly acute sense
of personal inviolability. In a letter to his niece, Elizabeth
T. Coalter, he said: "I remember getting severely thrashed
by my poor brother Theodorick in attempting to rescue
from his torments a black kitten, to which he was acting
the part of Jack Ketch. This was during our mother's

widowhood."[2] The remembrance of another chastisement
inflicted upon him in his childhood is disclosed by
the remarkable letter from him to his nephew, Tudor
Randolph, dated Dec. 13, 1813, which has already been
several times mentioned by us, and which is simply invaluable
because of its chronological and other autobiographical
details relating to his early life. "In the autumn of
the year 1775," he said, "my mother married St. George
Tucker. From that day, there was a change in my situation.
The first blow I ever received was from the hand of
this man, and not a week after his union with my mother."[3]
This letter was written when the writer had been permanently
estranged from his stepfather, and no one thoroughly
familiar with the amiable and kindly character of St.
George Tucker, the almost idolatrous reverence and affection
with which he was regarded by his stepson for many
years, and the atrabilious feelings that brooding resentment
always produced in Randolph, can doubt that the
blow in this case must have been a very slight one indeed,
and not a whit harder than its recipient deserved. That
John Randolph, even as a very young child, may well have
required such a moderate measure of discipline we can
readily understand. Speaking of his sensitive and irritable
nature, when a full-grown man, Benjamin Watkins
Leigh once said of him: "He was like a man without a
skin."[4] This was not precisely his plight as Randolph
himself represented it to be, but not far from it. "There
is no accounting for difference of skins in different animals,
human or brute," he asserted in a letter on Jan. 31,
1826. "Mine I believe to be more tender than many infants,
of a month old. Indeed I have remarked in myself
from my earliest recollection a delicacy or effeminacy of
complexion that but for a spice of the devil in my temper

[ILLUSTRATION]

RICHARD RANDOLPH OF CURLES

John Randolph's Grandfather.

From portrait in Bolling Collection, Virginia Historical Society.

would have consigned me to the distaff or the needle."[5]
A child with such a skin and temper must have been a
trying little fellow at times. Indeed, we know, from a
statement made by Randolph's cousin, Mrs. Guilford
Dudley, that, before he was four years old, he once
swooned away in a fit of passion and was restored to consciousness
only with difficulty.[6]

As the boy grew older, he found himself in a very agreeable
world. Matoax was only two miles from Petersburg,
a town of considerable importance, in a social as well as
commercial sense, and along or near the banks of the Appomattox
River were scattered such well-known country
places as Battersea, Mayfield, Burlington, Mansfield,
Olive Hill, Violet Hill, and Roslin; homes truly typical, in
some instances, at any rate, in their day of the simple,
manly, cordial, and hospitable life which the Virginians of
Randolph's time and of still later times led, and which Dr.
George W. Bagby has portrayed with such surpassing
pathos and beauty in his Old Virginia Gentleman.

It is said that, during her widowhood, Mrs. Randolph,
to secure some relief from her loneliness, spent most of the
year under the roof of her father at Cawsons, and that
John was a great favorite with its entire household, and
especially with his grandfather whom he subsequently
extolled so highly in his letter to Andrew Jackson, and his
cousin Anna Eaton, afterwards Mrs. Guilford Dudley[7] ;
and it is certain that, even after the second marriage of
Mrs. Randolph, an intimate intercourse still continued to
be maintained between the Matoax and Cawsons households.
In a letter written by Theodorick E. Randolph,
John's brother, to his stepfather from Princeton, he sends
his love to his Uncle and Aunt Bland and the Banisters at
Battersea.[8] And, in a letter from Columbia College to his
stepfather the same correspondent sends his love to "all

our" friends at Battersea, Cawsons and Mr. Buchanan's.[9]
A peculiar intimacy existed between John and one of the
younger Banisters, and, in a letter to his niece, Elizabeth
Tucker Coalter, dated Feb. 20, 1822, he furnishes us with
some interesting evidence of his familiar footing, when a
boy, with his Banister kin. "Do you know," he asks her,
"a ballad that used to be sung to me, when I was a child,
by a mulatto servant girl of my Cousin Patsy Banister,
called Patience, about a rich suitor offering `his lands so
broad' and his golden store to a girl of spirit whose reply
was somehow thus?

Perhaps, old Aggy, who was my dear and honored mother's
hand-maiden in 1769, when my father led her a spotless
and blushing virgin to the altar, can remember it. I pry'
thee get me that ballad. I can give you the tune."[10] What
could be more, to use one of Randolph's own phrases, à la
Virginienne than the figures which this delightful scrap of
retrospection brings before us; the "sassy" yellow girl
disdainfully tossing her head, and yet but partly smothering
the amorous glow behind her half-closed lids as she
sings, the aged retainer, of whom we shall hear more anon,
handed down from mother to daughter, and from daughter
to granddaughter, and cherished not only for the sake of
her own dog-like fidelity and simple virtues, but for the
sake of the sacred dead, whose tire-woman she first was,
and the old slave-holder, for even at forty-eight John Randolph
was an old man in everything but years, still carrying
in his memory, the words, and in his heart, the melody,
of the bye-gone plantation ditty, unheard by his material

ear, except perhaps when hummed by himself, for upwards
of forty winters.

Another utterance of John Randolph, this time an oral
one reported by Jacob Harvey, a British fellow-voyager of
his in 1822, takes us back to the annual trading ship which
performed an office of such vital importance in the domestic
economy of Colonial Virginia.

The touch of caricature about this version of what Randolph
actually said is manifest enough. But the report is
sufficiently true to the character of Randolph and to his
political convictions in 1822 to make us feel that what he
really said has been recalled with substantial fidelity.

The education of John Randolph took him away from

Matoax so often, and for such long periods, that only a
part after all of his childhood and boyhood was spent there;
but his association with it, in one way or another, was close
enough to inspire him with a deep-seated attachment to
the spot. The original drawings in the National Gallery
at London, which make up the inimitable "Marriage à la
Mode" of Hogarth, and "some glorious Claudes, the only
real landscape painter," in the same gallery, brought back
promptly to his memory the engravings from the drawings
and those from Claude's "Morning" and "Evening" which
hung in the dining-room and parlor respectively at Matoax.
But his good taste was not too far suborned by the
tender grace of a day that was dead to keep him from
exclaiming in his letter to his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter,
about the engravings of the Hogarth drawings: "Oh, how
unequal is the graver to give the full conception and execution
of the pencil!"[12] In the year 1820, he paid a visit to
Matoax, and the ruin wrought by fire and vandalism
created such a distressing impression upon his mind that
four years later he wrote to his niece as follows: "I went
to Matoax for the last time four years ago. I cannot repeat
the trial. If they had left the trees, the noble trees,
and beautiful shrubs, I could have borne the destruction of
the houses and gardens and orchard. These could have
been replaced, but now . . . "[13] Matoax must have worn
a truly desolate appearance for his graphic pen to have
confessed its impotence by a blank. Some five years later,
he reverts to Matoax in these words: "From my earliest
childhood I have delighted in the groves and solitudes of
poor old Matoax. I now recall several of my favourite
seats where I used to ruminate, `chewing the cud of sweet
and bitter fancies,' all bitter now."[14] Less than three years
before his death, he wrote to his friend, Thomas A. Morton,

[ILLUSTRATION]

JANE BOLLING, WIFE OF RICHARD RANDOLPH OF CURLES

John Randolph's Grandmother.

From portrait in Bolling Collection, Virginia Historical Society.

from London, stating that he had provided for a
leaden coffin for himself, feeling, as he did, an inexpressible
desire to lie by the side of his dear mother and honored
father at old Matoax.[15] About three weeks later, influenced,
perhaps, by the fact that the Commonwealth, to
which he had been so unfalteringly loyal, had refused
to renew his commission as a United States Senator, or to
bestow upon him the same generous measure of recognition,
in other respects, as his constant constituents in his Congressional
District had done, as well as by the general
despondency, which overspread his last years, he employs
this language in writing from London to his namesake,
John Randolph Bryan, who had then become the husband
of his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter:

If Randolph had not been writing to two persons, with
whom he was as intimate as he was with the rise and fall
of his own chest, and had not been as careless always of his
exquisitely worded letters as if they were but the perishable
accents of his lips, we should say that there was a touch of
affectation about this letter. But such was not the case.
It was but the language of a man whose thoughts, under

the influence of strong feeling, clothed themselves with
poetic forms as unconsciously as a scarlet tanager, hatched
out in one of his trees at Roanoke, took on its coat of jet
and flame.

In 1778, when Mrs. Randolph was married for the
second time, the Revolutionary War was ablaze; and, in
1781, it found its way to her very door-sill. In January of
that year, at the approach of the traitorous Arnold, the
people of Southside Virginia felt as the Roman populace
did when it saw the face of the false Sextus in the ranks of
their invading foes:

But, mixed with the sensations of hatred and disgust inspired
by the coming of Arnold, was also, of course, the
panic which is always aroused in a civilian population by
an hostile invasion. On Jan. 3, 1781, he landed at Westover
with a considerable body of men, and began his destructive
march to Richmond. As soon as the news of his
landing had reached Matoax, St. George Tucker made
hasty preparations to remove his family, and such of his
personal effects as he could, to a place of safety; and so
rapidly were these preparations consummated that, on the
succeeding morning, he and his family, and several of Mrs.
Randolph's slaves, were actually on their mid-winter journey.
Few things that the mutations of human life bring
around to us are more pitiable than the lot of a refugee
in time of war; driven out as he is, from house and
home, and exposed to all the rude hardships and discomforts

of a purely primitive state of existence, in some respects
barer than that of a prehistoric cave-dweller. But,
fortunately for St. George Tucker and his family, they
were not, as is the case with so many refugees under
similar circumstances, mere aimless and despairing wanderers,
for their destination was Bizarre, then the property
of Richard Randolph, the son of the elder John Randolph,
and an established and comfortable habitation.

Some knowledge of the circumstances, which attended
the exodus of the fugitives from Matoax, has been bequeathed
to us by John Randolph Tucker, one of the
grandsons of St. George Tucker, who doubtless derived his
account from trustworthy family tradition. Only five
days before the flight commenced, Mrs. Tucker had given
birth to her son, Henry St. George Tucker, the father of
John Randolph Tucker. "The first time I ever saw that
gentleman," John Randolph once said in a speech, "we
were trying to get out of the way of the British." It
certainly seems incompatible with our present domestic
ideas that the sight of a new-born baby should have been
so long withheld from his seven-year-old brother. When
the family moved off from Matoax, St. George Tucker was
the outrider and general escort; Mrs. Tucker and her infant,
and doubtless her daughter, Fanny, too, who was but
little over two years of age, were in a chariot driven by
Daddy Syphax, who, like the portrait of little Oliver that
Charles Surface insisted upon retaining at his auction of
the family portraits, had been the only item of property
which the elder John Randolph had been unwilling to
bring under his blanket mortgage to the Hanburys; and
John was mounted on a horse for the first time, and was
committed, as were his brothers, Richard and Theodorick,
to the care of Essex, another slave.[17] It is hard to realize
that there ever was an occasion on which John Randolph

was mounted for the first time; so passionately addicted
was he afterwards to every pastime or excitement that
horse-flesh can afford. We are apt to think of him as
General Pleasonton, the Union cavalry officer during the
Civil War, thought of the Confederate cavalry officer,
Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, when he said, in the presence of a
friend of the author, that the latter was the best cavalry
officer that had ever been foaled. Years after the hegira
from Matoax, John Randolph wrote to a sea-captain
friend: "But to me a horse is what a ship is to you."[18]

Of the journey between Matoax and Bizarre we know
nothing more except that the party was accorded an hospitable
reception at one stage of its progress at Wintopoke
(or Winterpock), the home of Benjamin Ward, Junior, the
father of Maria Ward, who was subsequently to exert such
a marked influence over the life of John Randolph.[19]

After reaching Bizarre, St. George Tucker retraced his
steps for the purpose of rendering such aid as he could to
Theodorick Bland, Senior, at Cawsons, and to provide, as
far as possible, for the security of the property which he
had left behind him at Matoax. Afterwards, as a militia
major in the brigade of General Robert Lawson, he participated
on March 15th in the battle of Guilford Court
House, of which he wrote to Mrs. Tucker an interesting
and valuable narrative. Later he returned to Bizarre,
and, after spending a brief time with his family, took part
as a lieutenant-colonel, under the command of Lafayette,
in the siege of Yorktown where he was slightly wounded.[20]
In a letter, written during the last years of his life from
Warminster, Nelson County, Virginia, he recalled an incident
belonging to this period, of which he was an eye

witness, and which has the value that appertains to everything
that brings a divinity like Washington down to the
earth in the likeness of men. After stating how he had
hastened to meet that great man and six or eight general
officers, including Count Rochambeau, who accompanied
him, when he was approaching the "old city" of Williamsburg,
and how the General had recognized him, given him
his hand and introduced him to the Count and his companions,
he says:

Of the manner in which Mrs. Tucker and her children
passed their time at Bizarre, we know nothing. John
doubtless followed up his first horseback ride with many
others there, and if, as is stated by one of his biographers,
he had already formed at Matoax a predilection for
angling,[22] (a) it is fair to infer that under the oversight of
Essex he may have tried his young hand on some of the
"flat-backs" and "nigger-knockers" which doubtless
peopled then, as they did long afterwards, during the life
of Dr. George W. Bagby, as we know from his Fishing in
the Appomattox, the waters of the Appomattox River on
the Bizarre estate. The fact, however, has been brought
to our attention that, while Mrs. Tucker and her children
remained at Bizarre, they paid a visit of some duration to
Roanoke. It is said that as late as 1810, when John Randolph
became a permanent resident at Roanoke, there

were none but negroes on the Roanoke plantation,[23] and
we take it for granted that this was true also during the
visit of Mrs. Tucker. And we can likewise, we suppose,
safely assume that the house occupied by her and her
children and a Mrs. Hartston, who accompanied her, was
the oldest of the two rude dwellings which afterwards
constituted the home of John Randolph at Roanoke.

It was during this visit to Roanoke doubtless that the
well-known incident mentioned by Hugh A. Garland, one
of John Randolph's biographers, occurred. We quote his
words:

We are so fortunate as to have obtained access to a
manuscript letter from the hand of each of the three sons
of the elder John Randolph written at Bizarre after Mrs.
Tucker's return from Roanoke. The letters of Richard
and Theodorick are dated July 9, 1781, and John's July
10, respectively. All three were written to St. George
Tucker, and were probably composed at or about the
same time because of some special opportunity for transmission.
At the time that they were penned, Richard
was eleven years old; Theodorick ten, and John eight;
and there is certainly very little in them, from any point
of view, to justify the notions of Henry Adams, in his
John Randolph, that these three boys ran wild at Bizarre,
and that discipline was never a part of Virginian education.[25]
In point of tone, syntax and form, they will compare

quite favorably, we think, with most letters written
by boys of the same ages at the present time in Virginia
or elsewhere. Richard's letter is too long for transcription
in its entirety. The other two letters we shall give in full.

Theodorick's letter was as follows:

And this was John's letter:

The reader may judge for himself how far the writers of
these sweet, ingenuous letters, so full of hyacinthine freshness
and filial love and deference, were, as Henry Adams
supposes all boys brought up on a Virginia plantation to
have been at heart, "young savages."[27]

Speaking of the sojourn of the Randolphs and Tuckers
at Bizarre, in connection with his slurs on the old Virginia
life, Adams also says of the Randolph boys at Bizarre:
"Schooling they had none."[28] Well, hardly! They had
just fled with their parents to a distant asylum from the
face of that which has never had much respect for school
routine—war, and were living in a thinly settled neighborhood,
liable to be over-run by Tarleton and his fierce
troopers at any time, and from which almost every man
capable of bearing arms, whether learned or simple, had
been drawn off to battle with the invader. But all three
of the letters show upon their face that even, under such
unfriendly circumstances, discipline and a cheerful spirit of

obedience still remained features of this very Virginian
household, and that the disposition was not wanting on the
part of any one of the three boys, not even Theodorick,
always a lethargic scholar, to second the earnest desire of
St. George Tucker, so highly creditable to him, that the
education of his stepsons should suffer as little as possible
from the distractions of the time. Richard was evidently
doing his best to perform the office of a Latinist for John,
and, perhaps, for Theodorick too. And it is not to be forgotten
that, if the Mrs. Hartston, of whom John speaks,
did not discharge some of the duties of a teacher to the
lads, aside from Latin, their mother, who had been their
earliest teacher, was at hand to do it. John's letter is also
valuable in demonstrating that it is not true that at Matoax
the boys had never had any tutor except their clever
mother or St. George Tucker, who was a man of fine scholastic
acquirements, and gave, as there is written evidence
to show, all the time that he could to the task of instructing
the Randolphs.[29] The idea is distinctively negatived by
John's reference to Mr. Hearn. After his marriage to Mrs.
Randolph, St. George Tucker evidently bore duly in mind
what the elder John Randolph had said in his will about
the education of his children and his last shilling. As
early after his marriage as July 20, 1779, he wrote to
Colonel Bland from Matoax in these words:

It was the misfortune of poor Theodorick from the first
to the last stage of his brief career to come in at times for a
shake of the head like this and, towards the end, for still
more pronounced gestures of disapproval. But, after
having read everything that has been said to his prejudice
and a considerable number of his letters, we are bound to
say that, in our judgment, he was a youth who might just
as readily, with a slight turn of circumstances, have gone
right as wrong, and who, while he may at times have deserved
a whipping at the hands of his teacher, was far
from ever meriting a dunce-cap. There are unmistakable
tokens of good feeling and affection in his letters, and they
indicate an intelligent rather than a Bœotian head.

Even under the conditions that surrounded him at
Bizarre, the interest of St. George Tucker in the education
of his stepsons did not undergo any abatement. On May
23, 1781, he wrote to Colonel Bland: "Lose no opportunity
of procuring a tutor for the boys, for the exigency
is greater than you can imagine."[31] This letter was followed
up by another on the same subject, written on July
17 in the same year from Richmond,[32] and, on September
21 of the same year, St. George Tucker was not so absorbed
by the events which were leading up to the momentous
capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown four weeks later
as not to find time to write from Williamsburg as follows:

One of the severest tests, to which a human being can be
subjected, is that of winning from a stepson the full measure
of filial devotion. And this St. George Tucker seems
to have won from the young Randolphs by a general course
of conduct, of which his solicitude about their proper
education was but a single proof. "I remember to have
heard a brother of mine," said Daniel Call, the Virginia
Law Reporter, "who married a niece of Mrs. Randolph
of Curles, and was thus occasionally thrown into circles,
where he sometimes met the Matoax family, once say
that `Mr. Tucker must be the best father-in-law in the
world, or his stepchildren would not be so fond of
him.' "[34]

It is impossible, we hardly need affirm, to pass from the
anxiety evinced by the elder John Randolph in his will
about the education of his children, and the correspondence
between St. George Tucker and Colonel Bland on the
subject, without feeling that, while the quasi-aristocratic
structure of the old Virginia society was such as to create
indifference to universal education, it was uncommonly
sensitive to the need for a thorough intellectual training
on the part of those of its members upon whom its higher
responsibilities were imposed.

And from what source did Henry Adams derive his
notion that discipline was never a part of a Virginian
education? It will not do, of course, to found a generalization
on a single example. Even if it is admitted that
such an intensely original, not to say unique, character as
Randolph's lends color to the idea, we should not forget
Washington, Jefferson, John Marshall, Robert E. Lee, and
other Virginians, well known to fame, who were as remarkable
for their sobriety and self-control as for their personal
force. What Robert E. Lee, the son of the famous General,
says of his father is as true of Virginia fathers as it is
of fathers of the same race everywhere.

If the discipline which these words picture differs from
that with which Henry Adams was familiar in the history
of his own rigid though dutiful ancestors, it was only in the
fact that it was too much interfused with the spirit of
natural freedom and love to be exactly the same. The
writer of these pages was born and bred about fifteen miles
from Roanoke, and his recollection is that of a household
in which his parents, affectionate as they were, did not
hesitate to visit him, as a child and boy, with just punishment,
physical or otherwise, whenever it was really needed;
indeed, did not balk at delegating the corrective rod to his
tutor under their own roof.

Virginia a region without discipline! It was the chosen
seat of

Speaking of the Old Field Schools of his youth in Bedford
County, Virginia, which is but a short ride from Charlotte
County, the Hon. John Goode, who was born in the
year 1829, says in his Recollections of a Lifetime: "In those
days, the teacher made free use of the rod and the strictest
discipline was observed." And he tells a story at the
same time which brings out the fact that even the girls in
these schools did not always escape flagellation.[36] Dr.
John Herbert Claiborne, born in the year 1828, in describing
the town of Petersburg, which was only two miles
from Matoax, as it was in the decade between 1850 and
1860, says:

In relation to one of these male schools, of which Charles
Campbell, the talented historian of Virginia was the
master, Dr. Claiborne remarks:

John E. Massey, the invincible stump-speaker, commonly
known as "Parson" Massey, who was born in 1819 and
reared in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, also bears similar
testimony in that delightful book, The Autobiography
of John E. Massey. "The `rod' was an important adjunct
to the teacher's work. It was usually installed in a conspicuous
place as `Prime Minister,' but it exercised the
functions of all departments of government—legislative,
judicial and executive, and was emphatically the `Minister
of War.' "[39] So, long after the date when John Randolph
was at school, the magisterial rod in the schools of Virginia
was still green and flourishing. But to satisfy himself
that, if John Randolph was self-willed and ill-regulated,
it was not because of any lack of punishment at school,
Henry Adams need not have gone further than the school
life of Randolph himself. Chastisement was such a conspicuous

feature of this school life that, in his letters,
Randolph not only lets us know in English that he was
castigated, but in Greek that Littleton Waller Tazewell,
too, his school companion, was τυπτώ;δ.[40]