University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III

Youth

When nine years old, John Randolph, together with his
brothers, Richard and Theodorick, was sent to Walker
Maury's school. Maury and St. George Tucker had been
fellow-collegians at William and Mary,[1] and his school
was situated at Burlington, about a mile east of the present
village of Barboursville, in Orange County, Virginia. The
house, in which Randolph had his room, is still standing,
or was but a few years ago. It was a rude structure and
sounds, in consequence, were so readily transmitted from
one room in it to another that he is said to have attempted
to shut them out from his apartment by daubing the cracks
in its flimsy walls with clay.[2] At Maury's school, Randolph
was miserably unhappy. This is made certain not
only by his letter of Dec. 13, 1813, to Tudor, but by one of
his agreeable letters to Francis W. Gilmer who was a
product of the red lands of the neighboring county of
Albemarle, Virginia.

The place is depicted in still darker tints in the letter to
Tudor.

The conditions of every sort about Burlington were unquestionably
cruder than any to which Randolph had ever
been previously accustomed in the lower country of Virginia;
but they were nothing like so bad, we suspect, as he
represented them to be, and his estimate of Maury should
be read side by side with St. George Tucker's already recalled

by us. Indeed, this whole letter to Tudor, while
perhaps the most important of all Randolph's letters to
his biographer, was written in a mood like that which some
ten years later led him to tell his niece, Elizabeth T. Coalter,
that her letters constituted his almost only resource
against the dark spirit that persecuted him.[5] Here and
there, it is Randolph at his very worst, marked as it is in
places by a cold, settled malignity of feeling towards certain
individuals and an apparent desire to inoculate his
nephew with the virus of his own personal prejudices and
enmities. It would seem as if the retrospective character
of the letter served to stir up the bile of every rancorous or
morbid episode or incident in his past life, and a drop of
gall is mixed with almost every drop of ink that his pen
expended on it.

In the winter of 1783-4, if the memory of John Randolph
is not at fault, he was transferred with Walker Maury and
his school to Williamsburg, where Maury had been invited
to establish a grammar school in connection with William
and Mary College.[6] Only in this grammar school were
Latin and Greek taught there.[7] Here began the boyish
friendship between Randolph and Littleton Waller Tazewell
which ripened into the devoted and lasting attachment
that is one of the most winning features of the former's
life.

Then, after mentioning the fact that John Randolph was
subsequently taken away from the school to Bermuda,
Tazewell continues:

If Randolph is to be believed, Walker Maury might well
have applied this Latin truth to himself after his removal
to Williamsburg. When his school was shifted from
Orange County to that town, his rod was shifted along
with it, and many a sour jest must have been wrung from
his pupils by the inhuman use to which it was put in the
inculcation of the Humanities. Hugh Blair Grigsby (a),
a man whose historical labors are as precious to a Virginian
as those of Jared Sparks in a wider field are to an American,
informs us that he heard Tazewell say that Randolph
was very idle at school and that he was flogged regularly
every Monday morning and two or three times during the
week.[9] This hardly harmonizes with Randolph's own
statement in a letter to Elizabeth T. Coalter, dated Jan.
19, 1828, in which he says: "By the way I sent you a
translation for which at school I should have been reproved,
if not chastised, but, as I never incurred either
disgrace (about my book), I will make amends now by a
frank confession of my fault."[10] Grigsby's recollection did
not fail him as to the whippings, though it is only prudent

to remember that the human memory sometimes has a
way of multiplying a single impression, as time goes on,
but it probably failed him as to what Tazewell said of their
cause, if he really means to connect the idling with the
whippings; for Randolph was a strictly truthful and accurate
man. But one thing is certain. If Tazewell had made
such assertions in Randolph's presence, Randolph assuredly
would have fixed upon him the character of a fellow-sufferer.
During his last years, in a letter to Tazewell, he
made a reference to Maury County, Tennessee, and then,
suddenly realizing the significance of the name, added:
"Ominous name to us!"[11] And, in another letter to Tazewell,
which belongs to the same period, he said, in regard
to one of Tazewell's friends: "I believe he is almost as
much attached to you as he would have been, had he
known you man and boy for more than forty years, and
been τυπτώδ with you by Walker Maury A. D. 17831786."[12]
If, when Randolph left Williamsburg for Bermuda,
he had been an idler, it must have been partly
because he had been such an incessant reader of good
books out of school; for it was during the previous years of
his life that he laid the foundations of a knowledge of the
English classics, so searching and thorough that their
language became as much the habitual veneer of his conversation
and speeches as Scriptural phrases were of
Bunyan's writings. This is what he had to say on the
subject himself in a letter to his young cousin, Theodore
Dudley, dated Feb. 16, 1817.

I think you have never read Chaucer. Indeed, I have sometimes
blamed myself for not cultivating your imagination when
you were young. It is a dangerous quality, however, for the
possessor. But, if from my life were to be taken the pleasure
derived from that faculty, very little would remain. Shakespeare
and Milton and Chaucer and Spenser and Plutarch and
The Arabian Night's Entertainments and Don Quixote and Gil
Blas and Tom Jones and Gulliver and Robinsoe Crusoe `and
the tale of Troy divine' have made up more than half of my
worldly enjoyment. To these ought to be added Ovid's
Metamorphoses, Ariosto, Dryden, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Southerne, Otway, Congreve, Pope's Rape and Eloisa, Addison,
Young, Thomson, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Collins, Sheridan,
Cowper, Byron, Æsop, La Fontaine, Voltaire (Charles XII,
Mahomed and Zaire) Rousseau (C. Julie), Schiller, Madame de
Staël, but above all Burke. One of the first books I ever read
was Voltaire's Charles XII. About the same time, 1780-1, I
read the Spectator, & used to steal away to the closet containing
them. The letters from his correspondents were my favourites.
I read Humphrey Clinker also; that is Win's and Tabby's
letters with great delight; for I could spell at that age pretty
correctly. Reynard the Fox came next I think; then Tales of
the Genii and Arabian Nights. This last and Shakespeare were
my idols. I had read them with Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Quintus
Curtius, Plutarch, Pope's Homer, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver,
Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, and Thomson's Seasons before I
was eleven years of age; also Goldsmith's Roman History, 2
vols. 8vo., and an old history of Braddock's War. When
not eight years old, I used to sing an old ballad of his
defeat:

In commenting on the youthful reading of Randolph,
Henry Adams observes:

Again, we have a striking illustration of the very limited
familiarity, to say the least, of this writer with the society
against which he so often inveighs in terms of reckless
detraction. Either he did not know, or forgot, that Southside
Virginia, under the influence of Samuel Davies, of
Delaware, who seemed, as one said of him on seeing him
pass through a court-yard, "an embassador of some
mighty king,"[15] and who was as great as he looked, and
other Presbyterian missionaries, only less famous, early
became one of the strongholds in America of the Presbyterianism
which in Scotland was so partial to the Pilgrim's
Progress as to justify Macaulay in declaring in his essay
on Southey's edition of that work that, in the wildest parts
of Scotland, the Pilgrim's Progress was the delight of the

peasantry. The only complete eighteenth century edition
of all Bunyan's works, including the Pilgrim's Progress,
that the present writer has ever seen, has, for some seventy
years or so, been in the possession of his family at the home
about fifteen miles from Roanoke, of which he has already
spoken. In one of his letters from Roanoke to his friend,
Dr. John Brockenbrough, dated Sept. 25, 1818, John
Randolph mentions the fact that he had taken up a few
days before at an "ordinary" the life of John Bunyan,
which he had never read previously, and that he had found
an exact coincidence in feelings and opinions of Bunyan
and himself on certain matters of religious conviction.[16]
Among the books that he advised his niece to read, was the
Pilgrim's Progress[17] ; and we have seen a list, in his own
handwriting, now owned by Wm. Leigh, of Houston, Virginia,
of the books in his library at Roanoke; and the
Pilgrim's Progress was one of them. Indeed, his knowledge
of Bunyan was not confined to the Pilgrim's Progress. In
one letter to his niece he wrote: "Robinson Crusoe and
Bunyan are admirable"[18] ; in another (the one in which he
advised her to read the Pilgrim's Progress) along with the
Whole Duty of Man, Tillotson, Barrow, Jeremy Taylor, and
Chalmers (whom he thought too florid) he commended
to her attention not only the Pilgrim's Progress but Bunyan's
Holy War also.[19] As to Baxter's Saints' Everlasting
Rest, if it was never read by Randolph, it was only because
it was not the readable masterpiece that the Pilgrim's
Progress was. In a letter to the Society in London for
Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, dated
Mar., 1755, Samuel Davies says that to some of the many
houses in Virginia which lacked good books he had distributed,
in addition to other works, Baxter's Call, etc.[20] ;
and in his Sketches of Virginia, the Rev. Wm. Henry Foote
states that he had scarcely ever visited a family, the heads
or fathers of which belonged to Davies' congregation, in
which he did not find books or remnants of books, such,
among others, as Baxter's Call to the Unconverted and
Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest[21] ; and all, he adds, were
studied with a care and attention which greatly promoted
the improvement of the public. The idea, therefore, that
Randolph, in his early life or otherwise, never saw and
would have placed on his Index Expurgatorius, if he had,
the Pilgrim's Progress and the Saints' Everlasting Rest
is pure assumption, foreign to the spirit of religious tolerance,
which has, from a very early period, been one of the
most salient as well as ingratiating characteristics of Southside
Virginia, and to the breadth of intellectual sympathy
which, barring a few merely literary idiosyncrasies, rendered
any English classic acceptable to Randolph.

What John Randolph says in his letter of Dec. 13, 1813,
to Tudor about his visit to Bermuda is well worth transcribing:

If the "rule" of St. George Tucker in 1784 was "austere,"
it did not, we can only repeat, leave behind it impressions
upon the mind of John Randolph painful and permanent
enough to prevent the intercourse between St. George
Tucker and him during many subsequent years from being
intimate and affectionate in the highest degree. The "old
Mr. Tucker," mentioned in this letter, was the father of
Henry Tucker, who became the President of His Majesty's
Council and Commander-in-Chief in Bermuda; Thomas
Tudor Tucker, who migrated to South Carolina before the
American Revolution, and became a member of both the
Old and New Congresses, and subsequently, for many
years, Treasurer of the United States; Nathaniel, the
author of The Bermudian and other poems, including the
beginnings of an epic in twelve books on the American
Revolution, of which he was a zealous partisan, that now
lie mixed with much other poetic sentiment, of the same
kind, at the bottom of the River of Time; and St. George
Tucker, Randolph's stepfather. Henry had a son, Henry
St. George, who was actually convicted of an attempted
rape in the earlier part of his career, and yet afterwards
became a distinguished figure in the Financial Administration
of India, and Chairman of the Court of Directors of
the East India Company. He, in turn, was the father of
Charlotte Maria Tucker, better known as A. L. O. E.

(A Lady of England), who was celebrated in her day as a
writer of children's books and an enlightened missionary
in India.[23]

St. George Tucker was born on July 10, 1752, the same
year in which Frances Bland was born. In a letter to the
Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap of Boston, he stated that his
family had been established in Bermuda from the first
settlement of the Island; that he was born at the very spot
which Captain John Smith mentions under the name of the
Overplus; that his mother still resided there; and that his
eldest brother, upon her decease, would probably do the
like.[24] This spot, thus commemorated by the real Romulus
of Virginia, who would have been clubbed to death but
for the intervention of Pocahontas, was, therefore, the
spot where Randolph, one of her descendants, lived during
his sojourn of eighteen months at Bermuda. In a manuscript
book, kept by St. George Tucker, are these lines:

True enough! No Virginian of his own day or ours
will question that proud vaunt.

About 1770 St. George Tucker came to Virginia, and,
after pursuing first an academic, and then a legal, course of
study at William and Mary, settled down to the practice
of law in Williamsburg. His grandson, John Randolph
Tucker, is our authority for the statement that, when the

American Revolution broke out, he conducted a secret
expedition to Bermuda which was so successful as to secure
and bring back to America a large quantity of military
stores that helped to eke out Washington's scanty resources
at the siege of Boston. Later, he became the
secretary and aide-de-camp of General Thomas Nelson,
and still later, as we have seen, he took part in the Battle
of Guilford Court House and in the siege of Yorktown and
the military movements which immediately preceded it.
After the close of the Revolution, he resided at Matoax
until the death of Randolph's mother in 1788. In that
year, he returned to Williamsburg, and became a Judge
of the General Court of Virginia, and a professor of law at
William and Mary. The latter appointment meant something
more than such an appointment ordinarily does; for
he succeeded the learned and upright lawyer, scholar, and
statesman, Chancellor George Wythe, to whose virtues
and talents Jefferson has paid such a glowing tribute[25] ;
and who lived long enough to have Henry Clay for his
amanuensis. Subsequently, he was appointed one of the
Revisers of the Virginia Statutes, and, with James Madison
and Edmund Randolph, was a delegate to the Annapolis
Convention of 1786 which proved to be the fœtus of the
Federal Convention of 1787. In 1803, upon the death of
Edmund Pendleton, he was made the President Judge of
the Court of Appeals of Virginia. To have had Edmund
Pendleton as well as George Wythe as a predecessor in
office, was an honor that could have been accorded in Virginia
at that time to no one but a man of eminent talents;
and such, in sober truth, was St. George Tucker, as his
judicial opinions, his Dissertation on Slavery, his letters
to Dr. Jeremy Belknap on the same subject, and his edition
of Blackstone's Commentaries show. In 1811, he
resigned his seat on the Bench of the Court of Appeals of
Virginia, and, in 1813, he was appointed by President
Madison Judge of the District Court of the United States
for Virginia. This position, too, he resigned, being compelled
to do so by ill health, and the rest of his life was
spent in retirement at Warminster, in Nelson County,
Virginia, where he died on Nov. 10, 1827.[26] Edgewood,
near Warminster was the home of Joseph C. Cabell, the
friend and collaborator in the creation of the University
of Virginia of Jefferson; and a man believed by Virginians
to have needed only a seat in the Executive or Legislative
councils of the nation to have left behind him something
more than the great local reputation which his long, distinguished
and fruitful service in the Virginia State Legislature
earned for him.[27] After the death of St. George
Tucker, Cabell spoke of him in a letter in terms as reverential
as "that great and venerable man"; language into
which a man of such solid parts and character would never
have been hurried by mere personal affection or postmortem
extravagance.[28] The connection between Cabell
and St. George Tucker originated in the fact that Cabell
was the husband of Mary W. Carter (a), the daughter of
St. George Tucker's second wife, Lelia S. Carter, by a
former husband. Mrs. Carter was the daughter of Sir
Peyton Skipwith, Baronet, and was married first to George
Carter of Corotoman, on the Rappahannock River, and
subsequently, on Oct. 8, 1791, some three years after the
death of Randolph's mother, to St. George Tucker.[29]
They are both buried at Warminster. "This excellent
lady," the prayer book of the first Mrs. Tucker curiously
enough is made to certify, "survived her husband nearly
ten years, having lived a pattern of every Christian Virtue
and lady-like excellence."[30] A considerable amount of
verse written by St. George Tucker is still in existence; but
it is given to few lawyers to win the favor of both Themis
and the Heavenly Muse. The best poetical performance of
his, so far as our knowledge of his metrical productions go,
are the lines entitled "Resignation." They read as follows:

Good, sweet, home-made raspberry cordial these lines
have long been deemed by the American reader. They are
certainly more wholesome, whether equally inspiring or
not, than the bubbling, sparkling wine of many worse men
who were better poets!

A fitting conclusion for this sketch of St. George Tucker
may be found in John P. Kennedy's Life of Wm. Wirt:
"The Judge," he says, "was distinguished for his scholastic
acquirements, his taste and wit, and was greatly endeared
to the society of his friends by a warm-hearted, impulsive
nature which gave a peculiar strength to his attachments."[32]

Apart from the library at "old Mr. Tucker's," there is
good reason to believe that Randolph's visit to Bermuda
was a profitable one to him. After his return to the United
States, he wrote to one of his young Bermuda friends:
"I am glad to hear that Mr. Ewing [his Bermuda tutor]
has so increased his school. He is a very worthy man and
has great abilities."[33] This same letter indicates that, while
Randolph was among the Bermudians, a delightfully
simple, refined and hospitable people then as now, he
both freely bestowed and received friendship and affection.

Later on, this letter says:

In another letter to Jack, he sends his love to his sister
Fanny, who was on a visit to Bermuda at the time, to the
different members of Jack's family, and to his other friends
—"Too numerous to particularize," he adds.[34] Since the
Tuckers have always been a family of the best social
standing in Bermuda, young Randolph, whilst there, was
admitted not only to the agreeable intercourse which their
own family circle, itself, held out to him, but also to the
society of their friends. Whatever he may have been
at Maury's school, when embittered by homesickness,

rude surroundings and class jealousy, and whatever he
may have become in the course of his adult life, after
sorrow, disease and disappointment had been his portion,
the correspondence, to which we are referring, makes it
perfectly clear that in Bermuda he found himself surrounded
by thoroughly congenial conditions, and was
simply a bright, cordial, healthy-minded boy. Nor can
we doubt that a boy so instinct with poetry, so richly
gifted with imagination, must have faced the landscapes of
that island paradise with something of the fresh, rapt
surprise which caused Miranda—she of that other "stillvext
Bermoothes," built up from the azure depths of the
Great Poet's eye in fine frenzy rolling, to exclaim when she
first saw the "brave form" of radiant manhood, "What
is't? A Spirit?" "I have been all my life," he said at a
later day, "the creature of impulse, the sport of chance,
the victim of my own uncontrolled and uncontrollable sensations;
of a poetic temperament. I admire and pity all
who possess this temperament."[35] Possessing it as he did,
can we doubt that, young as he was, his nature must have
been kindled, and the fountains of his future eloquence fed,
by the Bermuda Islands, where "eternal spring enamels
everything," their remote and lonely situation, "in the
ocean's bosom unespied," in those vast wastes of hurricane-
and once buccaneer-haunted waters, their glorious
fringes of green, blue, and purple seas, their lovely bays
and coves, their coral foundations, their marvellously
diversified surface, their tide-laved grottoes, their cedars,
clustering in little groves, or leading the eye down between
green walls to the ubiquitous ocean, and exhaling delicious
fragrance which the winds waft across the waves to the
approaching ship, their frostless clime, their perennial
bloom, their fish that vie in color with their flowers, their
stately palm trunks, their whimsical mangrove copses,
their tropical fruits, their snowy houses, and all those other
visual objects that make Bermuda so entrancing to both
our outward and our inward vision. Indeed, that Randolph's
mind was profoundly affected by what he saw in
Bermuda we may well infer from a letter which he wrote
to Elizabeth T. Coalter in 1828.

With the return of Randolph to the United States, we
take up again his letter to Tudor of Dec. 13, 1813.

The acrid words in this letter with respect to the second
Mrs. Tucker must have been due to some trivial circumstance
which arrested Randolph's attention only slightly
at the time, but afterwards operated retroactively with
morbid force upon his mind, when fermenting with its
resentments against St. George Tucker. The first mention
that he makes of this lady is in a letter from Philadelphia
to his youthful friend Henry Rutledge, who had
been a fellow-collegian of his at Columbia.

The writer, of course, was mistaken in supposing that Mrs.
Carter was childless. In addition to her daughter, who
married Joseph C. Cabell, she had a son, Charles Carter,
who became a physician.[39] From this time on until the
breach with St. George Tucker, Randolph, in his letters to
his stepfather, sent quite frequently cordial, and sometimes
affectionate, messages to Mrs. Tucker. Then, perhaps,
in ruminating over the wrongs, of which he accused
St. George Tucker, he may have remembered that, when
he first greeted her, after her second marriage, she had
failed for the moment to respond to an effusive outflow of
affection which she was not expecting from a mere stepson

of her husband, but which would have appeared natural
enough to her, if she had only been fully aware of the
intimate and affectionate relationship which existed at
that time between Randolph and his stepfather. And with
this as a starting point, it was not a difficult thing after
the alienation from St. George Tucker, for a disposition
like Randolph's, when thoroughly dominated by distorting
reflections and emotions, to magnify petty manifestations
of impatience on the part of Mrs. Tucker into shrewish
outbursts. All this, to be sure, is mere speculation; but it,
at any rate, illustrates well enough for our purpose the
peculiar psychology which Randolph brought to any
matter involved in one of his personal enmities. Randolph's
Diary also contains this entry written sometime
after the year 1815. "Went to Wmsburg in July (1792),
and for the first time saw my stepfather's new wife. What
a successor to my mother!" Fortunately, the amiable
character of this Mrs. Tucker is almost as well established
as that of the first. Many years after the death of St.
George Tucker the hand of some Tucker, sprung from his
first union, entered the striking tribute to the virtues of
the second Mrs. Tucker which we have already quoted in
the Frances Bland prayer book—the same prayer book
which, in recording the death of Frances Bland Tucker,
describes her as "that most amiable and beloved of
women."[40] There is evidence that she was held in tender
affection by Mrs. John Randolph Bryan [Elizabeth T.
Coalter]; and by John Randolph Bryan himself, who admired
and loved Randolph living, and admired, loved, and
defended him dead, and knew a lady from a person, who
was not one, as well as Randolph did, the second Mrs.
Tucker has been pronounced "a lady who had few equals
and no superiors in this or any other country."[41]

The only written evidence that we can find bearing

upon the accusation of embezzlement against Dr. Witherspoon,
made in the letter to Tudor, is a letter from Theodorick
Bland Randolph, written to St. George Tucker
from New York, and dated Jan. 18, 1790. It says:

As John and Theodorick left Princeton in 1787, the delay
in the payment of this balance, taken in connection with
Randolph's unpleasant recollections of Princeton, is quite
enough to explain his statement about the good doctor;
who, however, does not seem to have been guilty of any
offence worse than that of a little academic inattention to
business. Randolph's charge of embezzlement against
Edmund Randolph, whom he disliked, is, we do not doubt,
equally ill-founded. When Attorney General and Secretary
of State of the United States, Edmund Randolph,
with his small salaries and the cessation of the handsome
professional income which his learning and skill as a lawyer
always commanded, when he was actively engaged in
private practice, was at times seriously pinched for money,
and his integrity was assailed by one of the basest partisan
conspiracies in American History; but he was a man of
honor, and, in devoting many years of his life, after he
came to be connected with the National Government, to
the liquidation of an onerous debt incurred while he was in
office, for which he was only technically responsible, he
made sacrifices for his honor such as not many public men
have ever made. Few handsomer tributes have been paid
to the character of anyone than that paid by Jefferson to

the character of Edmund Randolph, whose lack of decision
disgusted him very much at times, and whose understanding
he, by no means, rated very highly.[43] "His
narrative [Edmund Randolph's vindication of himself
against the Fauchet insinuations of corruption]," he said,
"is so straight and plain that even those who did not know
him will acquit him of the charge of bribery. Those who
knew him had done it from the first."[44] (a) Randolph's
charge against Edmund Randolph is that the funds entrusted
to him by St. George Tucker for Randolph's use
were not faithfully applied. As the arrangement involved
a discretionary trust and an accounting, and trusts and
accountings involve no little chance for disagreement between
the parties, especially when one of them is a high-tempered
youth, and, as Randolph was not in the habit of
shading his words very nicely, when expressing his opinion
of a man for whom he entertained an aversion, we
should want to know something more about this transaction
before passing judgment upon it.

The charges of religious skepticism and profanity, made
by the letter to Tudor against St. George Tucker and his
friends, including James Innes and Beverley Randolph,
were probably not altogether unfounded. Randolph, as
we have said, never told untruths; small things simply
loomed large sometimes through the fog of his prejudices
and hatreds. At the close of the eighteenth century, the
form of religious infidelity known as French Infidelity,
because of its origin in the writings of Voltaire and other
French skeptics, was very common throughout the
United States, including Williamsburg; and it is not unlikely
that St. George Tucker uttered some other oaths
besides the judicial ones which he took on the occasions
when he was elevated to the bench; for, while all gentlemen
in the eighteenth century did not swear like "our army in

Flanders," most of them, we imagine, swore a little at
times. If either his skepticism or his profanity, however,
had been very pronounced, it is hardly probable that he
would have occupied such high judicial positions, or would
have enjoyed such a high judicial reputation as he did.
In the main, in any view of the case, Randolph, we suspect,
caught his attack of infidelity not from St. George
Tucker but from the same tainted air from which the
Judge caught his, if he ever had a well-developed attack at
all. The James Innes mentioned in the letter to Tudor
was the Innes to whom Patrick Henry paid his memorable
tribute in the Virginia Convention of 1788, when he said:
"That gentleman is endowed with great eloquence, splendid,
magnificent and sufficient to shake the human mind."[45]
And the Beverley Randolph, mentioned in the letter,
was the Beverley Randolph who was one of the Governors
of Virginia, and of whom after the battle of Guilford Court
House St. George Tucker, who also bore himself gallantly
in that battle, wrote to his wife, "He was himself. I need
say no more."[46]

Theodorick Randolph yielded altogether, and John
Randolph temporarily, not to the bad and brutal habits,
bred by contact with negroes, and the cockfighting,
gouging, and other vicious practices, which Henry Adams
assumes to have been more or less inseparable from Virginia
plantation life in the latter part of the eighteenth
century,[47] but, singular to say, to the immemorial urban
vices which lurked in two towns beyond the confines of
Virginia.

In view of the strictures in the letter from John Randolph
to Tudor on Theodorick's conduct when at Columbia,
it is but fair to the boy's memory to say that the letters
which he wrote at this time to his stepfather bring him
before us in an attractive way. "When we get into college,"

he wrote to St. George Tucker from Princeton, "I
shall study very hard, not only to be the best scholar in
the class but to give you and Mama all the pleasure in my
power. We are all in high expectations of seeing you next
spring."[48] And the letter concludes, "Kiss sister for me
and tell her I am very much obliged to her for the letter
she wrote us. Give my love to Miss Maria, Henry, Tudor,
and saucy Beverley." In a subsequent letter, written from
Columbia, he is outspokenly chapfallen over the refusal of
his stepfather to allow John and himself to come home for a
fortnight's or three weeks' vacation; but he has the manly
grace to add, notwithstanding the fact that all his things
had even been packed up for the journey: "But I submit,
if not cheerfully, willingly, because I am sure that you
know what is best for us better than we do ourselves; and
that you would deny us nothing which would not be prejudicial
to us."[49] And he mentions in the same letter that
he had sent some books to St. George Tucker's children by
Captain Seargeant's sloop. In another letter, written
some ten months later from New York, he says:

In another letter, written two or three months later from
New York, he refers to a report "very much to his discredit"

(to use his words), which had reached the ears of
Judge Tucker, and was said to have obtained a wide circulation
in Virginia. Without denying the report, he
contents himself with a renewed expression of his desire to
enter upon his medical education at Philadelphia, and
reveals again the affectionate disposition which displays
itself in all his letters in the words: "Give my love to
brother Richd who has never thought it worth his while
to write to me since my departure. Kiss all the children
for me."[51] The last letter in the series, written on the eve
of his return to Virginia to die, discloses the fact that it was
the intention of Judge Tucker to send him to Edinburgh
for a medical education.[52] And in this connection, we
might add, that, if John Randolph deemed Theodorick,
when they were in New York, dissipated, a letter from
John to his stepfather, dated New York, Dec. 25, 1788,
which is interesting enough to be quoted in full, shows that
his brother Richard, who had previously left Columbia
and returned to Virginia, deemed John lazy. This letter
is as follows:

What John Randolph, then a boy of but fifteen years of
age, who was, however, destined only some five years later
in a duel to plant nonchalantly in the body of an antagonist
a bullet which he carried to his grave, has to say in this
letter about debt and the loneliness of the great building,
in which he and Theodorick lodged, has been accepted by
Henry Adams as indicative of a nature "easily affected by
fears, whether of murderers or of poverty."[54] There are
few boys of fifteen, we imagine, however brave, who would
not feel a little uncomfortable at times at night, when
house-breaking was rife, at finding himself all alone except
for the companionship of a brother, very little older than

himself, in a great, dreary, desolate barn of a building from
which all the ordinary sights and sounds of school activity
had fled with the setting in of a school vacation. A little
nervousness under such circumstances, especially when
avowed with manly frankness, might well exist without
justifying the belief that it was the manifestation of a
general lack of firmness or hardihood. Nor should the
fact be overlooked that, in this letter, John Randolph was
defending himself to his stepfather from the charge of
laziness made against him by his brother, and that, in doing
so, he might naturally enough have been a little too eager
to vindicate his industry at the expense of his self-possession.
But, really, to defend the courage of John Randolph,
youth or man, is like defending the chastity of Lucretia or
the ascetic constancy of St. Simeon Stylites. If his heart
did fail him on any occasion, when he was a lad of fifteen,
to such an extent as to constitute a serious reproach to his
firmness of character, the incident is exceptional enough
to be classed with the circumstances which once led him
when older to recall the fact that so intrepid a soldier as
Mark Antony had run away at Actium.[55] Even after due
allowance is made for the infirmities of his time, and the
imperious nature of the duelling code, to which he unqualifiedly
subscribed, there is much in the bitter personal
feuds into which he was drawn, in the course of his
combative career, largely by the promptings of his own
ill-regulated passions, that calls for severe condemnation;
but, as we shall abundantly see, Randolph was,
to borrow a homely phrase from the people among whom
he lived, and by whom it was considered almost as honorable
to violate any injunction of the Decalogue as
to show the white feather, "pluck to the backbone."
Of him it can be said, in the words of Emerson, as truly
as of any public man in the history of the United
States,

There are other sources besides the letter to Tudor from
which information about the life of Randolph at Princeton
can be obtained—for example, a letter from him preserved
by Garland:

It is words like these that caused Moncure D. Conway to
assert in his work on Edmund Randolph that Randolph
hated intensely everyone who tried to instruct him[57] ; but
this is not a fact. The high respect, in which he held
Ewing, his Bermuda tutor, has already been brought to
the attention of the reader. And, in this very letter, in
addition to what he wrote to Tudor about Cochrane, he
comments upon his retirement from Columbia in these emphatic

words: "Next to the loss of my mother and my
being sent to Walker Maury's school (and one other that
I shall not name) this was the greatest misfortune of my
life." And a misfortune it truly was, for in this letter, too,
he exclaims: "Never did higher literary ambition burn in
human bosom!" (than in his own); and a little later in it
he reveals in the following words the extent to which
Cochrane acquired over him the ascendancy of a true
schoolmaster; that is of one of those rare teachers, compounded
of firmness, justice, and sympathy, who, to use
the language of Kent in Lear, have that in their countenances
which we would fain (partly from respect, and partly
from affection) call "master": "We read Demosthenes
together, and I used to cry for indignation at the success
of Philip's arts and arms over the liberties of Greece."
But Randolph did not cease to read Demosthenes when
Cochrane left Columbia; for on April 28, 1789, he wrote to
his Bermuda friend Jack: "I at present am studying Algebra,
Cicero de Officiis and Orations, Lucian, Xenophon,
and Demosthenes."[58]

The truth is that John Randolph was much more likely
to be right than wrong in the exercise of his judgment
about his teachers. He was not only quick but precise in
his mental operations and early acquired a general fund
of knowledge which only some thoroughly trained master,
like Cochrane, could afford to belittle. Throughout his
life, where his outlook was not blurred by prejudice or
personal hostility, he exhibited a remarkable capacity for
appraising human ability at its true value. At a time
when Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry was considered a literary
masterpiece by thousands of Americans, he pronounced it
"a wretched piece of fustian," as to a great degree it was.[59]
His admiration was never wasted on second-rate or third-rate
men, however showy or self-assertive. He entertained

a marked admiration for Alexander Hamilton,[60]
John Marshall,[61] and Rufus King,[62] though they were all
Federalists; no man had a higher opinion of the talents of
Albert Gallatin,[63] William H. Crawford,[64] and William Pinkney[65]
; and he recognized instinctively the ability of Martin
Van Buren[66] and Levi Woodbury[67] even before the general
public fully did. A clever bank teller does not distinguish
genuine from counterfeit coin more certainly than Randolph
did a real from a spurious reputation. His caustic
observations on the oratorical exercises at Princeton and
the deficiencies of some of his teachers smack a little of
conceit and arrogance, but, on the whole, they were not
far from the truth we venture to say.

The discouragements, which Randolph had to contend
with in acquiring an education, he sums up in a pointed
manner in a letter to Theodore Dudley:

Expressions like the last have been eagerly seized upon by
partisan writers to disparage Randolph's general attainments;
nevertheless they were not only quite remarkable
but were as readily at his command as the currency in his
pocket. To the loss of Cochrane and to the interference
of Theodorick's dissipated habits with his studies he
ascribed elsewhere than in the letter to Tudor the declining
interest in his scholastic duties which came over him before
he left New York.

Indeed, as the letter to Tudor shows, according to his own
candid confession, Randolph, to use his very words,
gradually fell into the habits and way of life of his unfortunate
brother. These in his case, according to the same
confession, if anything, became worse, when Theodorick
had taken his wasted constitution back to Virginia and

Randolph had found himself alone in Philadelphia after
the removal of the Federal Government from New York
to that City in 1790.

It is certain that Randolph, when in Philadelphia, to some
extent practised the vice of gambling.

Finally, however, we are happy to say, the only effect of
this gambling catastrophe was to confirm the hatred of
debt which the British encumbrance on Randolph's estate
so early implanted in him. There is a winning mixture of
pleasantry and grave self-reproach in an early letter from
him to his stepfather, in which he touches upon this subject.
After thanking St. George Tucker for a remittance,
he says:

And we are reminded of Franklin and his whistle by what
Randolph also had to say of debt in a retrospective letter
to Theodore Dudley and Tudor.

What a pity it is, as Coleridge so finely says in his Table
Talk, that human experience should be like the stern light
of a ship that illuminates nothing but the track over which
the ship has passed! It is to be hoped that the gambling
debt, mentioned in the letter from St. George Tucker, was
incurred before a letter from Randolph to Henry M. Rutledge

was written, in which the writer, like many a contrite
young fellow before him, moralizes the next morning as
follows:

When in Philadelphia, Randolph is said to have attended
lectures on anatomy and physiology,[75] and traces of
these lectures are observable, we think, in his speeches
and writings (a). A favorite saying of his was that of
the renowned Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, that
calomel was the Samson of medicines.[76]

To the study of law, while he was at Philadelphia, Randolph
evidently, as he himself admits in his letter to Tudor,
paid very little attention. There is a flicker of interest in
the subject in one of his letters to Henry M. Rutledge,
written in his eighteenth year.[77] After informing Rutledge
that a court of law was to determine whether he was to be
a man of small or opulent fortune, he says that he had
resolved to set himself above the reach of poverty by the
acquirement of a lucrative profession, and had begun to
prepare himself for entering on the study of the law by
reading closely and with attention the authors that had
been recommended to him. But the feebleness of the
impulse is betrayed by the statement which immediately

follows: "If I am ever necessitated to pursue the practice
of the law, I shall give it over as soon as I shall have acquired
a sufficiency to support me genteelly in my native
country." Some six years later, the force of the impulse
was entirely spent, for, after telling Rutledge in a letter
that he had been deprived by the sentence of the Federal
Court of more than half of his fortune, though still not
without a competence, he adds:

To realize how true this was, one has but to read the manuscript
diary for the years 1791 and 1792, of Richard N.
Venable, a lawyer of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, who
was engaged in the perambulatory practice of the law in
Pittsylvania, Halifax, Charlotte, Prince Edward, and other
Southside Virginia counties. He could as well have dispensed
with a copy of the Statutes of Virginia as with a
horse, and his office was as often under the flaps of his
saddle-bags as under a roof. But, even if Randolph had
formed a stronger intention of studying and practicing
law than he did, he might well have been discouraged by
the extraordinary plan of study which Edmund Randolph
prescribed for him. To have pursued it would have been
not unlike taking such a long running start for the purpose
of leaping over a fence as to be all out of breath when the
fence is reached.

Hugh Blair Grigsby has given us a detailed and highly
interesting description of Randolph's library,[79] and these
comments made by Randolph on June 30, 1795, on the flyleaf

of his Hume's Treatise of Human Nature are enough
to assure us that he had as poor an opinion of Edmund
Randolph as a teacher as he did of some of his other
teachers. "I was," these remarks say, "sent to Philadelphia
in the year 1790 to study law with the then Attorney
General of the United States [Edmund Randolph].
This book was the first he put into my hands, telling me
that he had planned a system of study for me and wished
me to go through a course of metaphysical reasoning.
After I returned the book, he gave me Shakespeare to read;
then Beattie on Truth. After that Kames' Elements of
Criticism, and fifthly Gillies' History of Greece. What an
admirable system of study! What a complete course of
metaphysics! Risum teneatis?"[80] (Can you restrain your
laughter?) No, we must say, we cannot.

In one of his youthful letters to Rutledge, Randolph
said: "I prefer a private to a public life: and domestic
pleasures to the dazzling (tho. delusive) honors of public
esteem."[81] Some five years later, he wrote to the same
friend in these words:

which, at that time, of course, was the cause of the French
Jacobins. This indifference to politics, and this acknowledgment
of personal obscurity were not insincere or
affected, for, contrary to the prevalent impression, the

triumphant entrance of Randolph into public life was not
due, as we shall presently see, simply to his own bold
initiative and confident audacity. But he was, so to
speak, a congenital politician, and all the circumstances,
surrounding the period during which he was in New York
and Philadelphia, before he attained his majority, tended
to confirm his native predilection and fitness for political
life (a). The manuscript reminiscences of Littleton Waller
Tazewell, from which we have already quoted make this
clear:

A remarkable achievement, indeed, was this for a lad of
sixteen; but one that would make more impression upon
the mind if attention were not diverted from it for a moment
by astonishment that Tazewell could assign such a
rank to Innes as a speaker, eloquent from all accounts as
Innes was, when Patrick Henry, whose tribute to Innes
makes him better known than anything that he himself
ever said or did, was still alive (a). The only testimony
that has come down to us from Randolph in regard to the
inauguration of Washington is the well-known statement,
which was made on the subject in one of his speeches to his
constituents: "I saw Washington," he said, "but could not
hear him take the oath to support the Federal Constitution.
The Constitution was in its chrysalis state. I saw what
Washington did not see; but two other men in Virginia saw
it—George Mason and Patrick Henry—the poison under
its wings."[84] The loss of the letter about the inauguration
of Washington is too stale for us to shed many tears over it
now, but we are lucky enough to be able to offer our readers

a modest substitute for it in the form of a letter in
which Randolph describes the joy and hubbub in the City
of New York, at the time a town of about 33,000 inhabitants,
over the adoption of the Federal Constitution:

We need not go further than the correspondence between
Randolph and his stepfather to ascertain how keen and
vigilant the former's interest in politics was during the last
year that he was in Philadelphia. On Jan. 26, 1794, he
wrote to St. George Tucker as follows:

Four days later, he had worked himself up into such a
tense condition of mind over the tardiness of some of the
Southern representatives in taking their seats that he
wrote to his stepfather in these words:

A few weeks later, he communicates to St. George Tucker
the yeas and nays by which the eligibility of Gallatin to a

seat in the Senate had been decided adversely to him.
Then follow these observations, showing how deeply the
interest of the fledgling politician was enlisted in the question:

The personal influences, by which Randolph's political
opinions were moulded, were exclusively anti-Federalist,
and were of such an extraordinary stamp as to indoctrinate
him from the very beginning with an extreme jealousy
of Federal authority, and an immutable fealty to the
dogma of state sovereignty. "You know I was an Anti-Federalist
when hardly breeched," he wrote on one occasion
to Josiah Quincy.[89] Among the members of the Virginia
Convention of 1788, was Randolph's uncle, Col.
Theodorick Bland, who was a steadfast opponent of the

ratification by that Convention of the Federal Constitution.
He was also a member of the first Congress under
the Federal Constitution, which, springing into existence,
ere our sickly national youth had yet attained a beard, was
not able to secure a quorum for weeks after the time appointed
for its organization by the Constitution. The
political bias of Colonel Bland was also that of Thomas
Tudor Tucker, the brother of St. George Tucker, and likewise
a member of the First Congress. For him, Randolph
seems to have always entertained feelings of the profoundest
respect and affection. "I have received a long, long
letter from that best of men, Dr. Tucker," he wrote on one
occasion to his stepfather. "And such a letter! I declare
to you, my dear father, that I am unable to describe the
veneration and love in which I hold that unequalled man."[90]

When the first congress opened, the only two members
present from the South were Alexander White, from Virginia,
and this gentleman from South Carolina. The sole
reason why Patrick Henry was not a member of the first
Senate of the United States was because, with that utter
indifference to the most exalted offices, which he exhibited
in the latter part of his life, he did not care to be; but he
was at pains to see to it that the first two members of the
Federal Senate from Virginia were anti-Federalist in their
leanings, William Grayson and Richard Henry Lee. Indeed,
a majority of all of the members of both houses of
the first Congress from Virginia were adherents of Patrick
Henry and George Mason,[91] and shared the views about the
consolidating tendencies of the Federal Constitution to
which those two men had given such powerful expression
in the Virginia Convention of 1788. St. George Tucker,
too, to whom Randolph remained passionately attached
until about the year 1805, was a State-Rights partisan of
the straitest sect. Among Randolph's companions, while

he was in Philadelphia, were John W. Eppes, who was
afterwards to become one of Jefferson's sons-in-law, a
conspicuous member of Congress, and the only antagonist
who was ever able to deprive Randolph of his seat in the
House of Representatives even for a brief season; Thomas
Marshall, the brother of the Chief Justice, and Robert
Rose, who subsequently married the sister of James
Madison[92] ; and it can hardly be questioned that Randolph
and these associates of his, scions as they all were of good
Virginia stocks, must, in a town of only some twenty-eight
thousand inhabitants, as Philadelphia then was, have been
brought into familiar contact with the leading anti-Federalist
members of Congress from Virginia. An indication of the
intimate intercourse that we can fairly infer Randolph to
have had at this time with prominent members of Congress
is to be found in a letter, written by him from New York
to St. George Tucker, in which he states that Theodorick
and himself were under very great obligations to the President
of Congress, who, on learning from Col. Carrington
who they were, had sent them an invitation each week to
dine with him. The same letter acknowledges similar
obligations to "Mr. Grason," and it assures St. George
Tucker that such attentions are "a very acceptable thing
to college boys."[93] And so they are, as many a fresh young
heart and eager appetite have testified since that day.
While in New York and Philadelphia, Randolph was
drawn back to Virginia, as the letter to Tudor narrates, in
1788, 1790, and 1792; and a letter from him to his Bermuda
friend, Jack, also discloses the fact that he was in Virginia
in 1789; for, in that letter, he writes to Jack from Williamsburg
that, since his last letter, he had been to a thousand
different places, and had traveled almost as many miles.

Horse and man were already coalescing into the centaur
that they afterwards became.

In a letter to his niece, Randolph once said:

The brother that Randolph had in mind, when penning
these words, was Richard Randolph; but the circumstances,
which led him to link up a propensity to satire
with the downfall of Richard, are unknown to us. All we
know of Richard, aside from the catastrophe alluded to by
Randolph, is of a nature to inspire us with marked respect
for both his character and intellect. The tendency of the
human mind to find in some obscure brother, or other contemporary
of a distinguished man, mental powers, superior
to his, asserted itself quite noticeably in Richard's
case; but, even after this fringe of exaggeration has been
pushed aside, enough still remains to assure us that he was

distinctly endowed with far more than ordinary parts.
In the letter to the Richmond Enquirer, in which Henry St.
George Tucker, a man who was too long an eminent judge
to indulge in fulsome praise even in regard to a brother, defended
the reputation of his father from the attack made
upon it in one of John Randolph's wills, he says of Richard:
"He was four years elder than John, was bred to the bar
and equally distinguished for his manly and decisive character,
for his generous and noble and affectionate temper,
for his commanding and extraordinary talents and for his
extensive and useful acquirements."[96] And the writer
might have added for his susceptibility to romantic affection
and kindling enthusiasm. He had an even more
liberal share of fastidious purism than that which helped
to arrest the full development of John Randolph as a successful
politician; and the high-flown sentimental cast of
his character emerges very prominently in his letters to
Judge Tucker:

And in these sentences Richard rises to an even higher
level of affection:

With respect to a simple contract debt which was not
technically binding at that time under the laws of Virginia
upon the lands devised by the elder John Randolph to his
sons, Richard wrote to Judge Tucker these unselfish words:

But it is as an ami des noirs, a zealot in the cause of emancipation,
that Richard Randolph gave the best-known proof
of his disinterestedness of character. By his will, he provided
for the manumission of all his negroes; some two
hundred in number, and for the distribution by his wife
between the heads of families among them, in proportion
to the number of their children and their respective merits,
of four hundred acres of land. The preamble, by which
these provisions are preceded, foams like the lips of a
Pythoness with an abomination of slavery that mounts
up almost to a sort of ecstasy:

No abolitionist that we can recall, in urging the emancipation
of other people's negroes, ever pronounced a more
withering anathema upon the institution of slavery than
this testator did in freeing his own. Nor was this all.
Having glutted his indignation in that long and involved
series of denunciatory recitals, he adds that he humbly
begs the forgiveness of his slaves for the manifold injuries
that he had too often inhumanly, unjustly, and mercilessly
inflicted on them. By the succeeding provisions of the
will, Richard devised and bequeathed his entire estate to
his wife Judith, and made her his executrix, but he further
provided that, if she did not survive him, he appointed, as
his executors, his "father-in-law," St. George Tucker, his
brother, John Randolph, his friends, Ryland Randolph,
Brett Randolph, Creed Taylor, John Thompson, Alexander
Campbell, Daniel Call, "and the most virtuous and
incorruptible of mankind, and (next to my father-inlaw)
my greatest benefactor, George Wythe, Chancellor of
Virginia, the brightest ornament of human nature."

After Richard's death, the free negro settlement, contemplated

by his will—Israel Hill it was called—was duly
established; but it became, for the most part, a mere nest
of lazzaroni,[101] and, during the great sectional debate over
slavery, was frequently pointed to by pro-slavery extremists
as an example of the impolicy of emancipation. Self-governing
negro commonwealths, like Hayti and Liberia,
to be sure, have made very little of themselves, but the
failure, before the Civil War, of a community of liberated
Virginian blacks, no longer subject to the same corporeal
and moral discipline as slaves, and yet still subject to some
of the worst disabilities of the slave status, to acquire a
creditable standing in point of thrift and morality should
not be charged up too hastily to native short-comings.

Such was the man whose reputation in 1792, some three
years before his will was executed, became enmeshed in
one of the most distressing scandals that has ever been
known in the history of Virginia—a scandal which was all
the more painful because of the singularly high standard of
female chastity, apart from the commerce of lewd white
men and negro women, which was common enough, that
prevailed during the existence of slavery in Southside
Virginia. If social intercourse between the sexes there was
exceptionally easy and cordial, and attended by an unusual
amount of gallantry and coquetry, it was because
minor relaxations of formality could be safely tolerated
where fundamental reservations in regard to female
honor were guarded by such relentless principles of private
retribution.

For some time prior to 1792, Ann Cary Randolph, better
known as Nancy Randolph, had been living with her sister,
Judith Randolph, the cousin and wife of Richard Randolph,
in the latter's home at Bizarre.[102] Judith and Nancy
were the daughters of Thomas Mann Randolph, of Tuckahoe,

in Goochland County, Virginia, who was a descendant
of the original William Randolph, of Turkey Island,
through his son, Thomas[103] ; and, to escape family discord,
for which we have no reason to believe that she had been
responsible, Nancy had been compelled to leave her
father's house.[104]

On Monday, Oct. 1, 1792, Richard and Judith Randolph,
Nancy, a Mrs. John Randolph, and a Mr. Archibald
Randolph, one of Nancy's lovers, arrived at the home
of Randolph Harrison, Glenlyvar, in Cumberland County,
before dinner. They came as his guests. Soon after
dinner, Nancy, who before it had already complained of
being very unwell, went upstairs to her room and did not
come down again that day. The second floor of the house,
on which her room was, contained two rooms, an outer
room connecting directly with the staircase, which led up
to it, and an inner room, communicating with the staircase
only through the outer room. The inner room was the
one to which Nancy repaired after dinner, and that night
the outer room was occupied by Richard Randolph and his
wife. At a late hour in the night, Randolph Harrison and
his wife, who were sleeping on the floor below, were awakened
by loud screams, which they thought at first were
Judith's but which, as they were presently told, were
really Nancy's. These screams were followed by an application
to the Harrisons for laudanum, which was sent,
and Mrs. Harrison then ascended to the outer room and
found Judith sitting up in bed. She was asked by Mrs.
Harrison what was the matter with Nancy, and replied
that she did not know, but conjectured that she was
suffering from an attack of hysterics to which she was subject.
An attack of colic, Judith thought, could hardly

make her scream so. After receiving this statement, Mrs.
Harrison went to the door between the two rooms with a
lighted candle in her hand, but found it fastened by a bolt.
This, however, she reflected was because the spring-catch
on it was broken, and it could only be kept shut by being
bolted. She knocked and the door was instantly opened,
but she was immediately asked by both Richard Randolph
and Nancy, when the candle shone on Nancy's eyes, not
to bring it into the room as Nancy had been taking laudanum,
was in great pain, and could not bear the light from
it. Mrs. Harrison then put the candle down outside the
door, and entered the room, where, in addition to Richard
Randolph and Nancy, were a negro girl of about fifteen
years of age and a child of about seven years of age named
Virginia. Here she remained for some time in conversation
until Nancy had become easier, when she excused herself
on the plea that a sick child of hers required her attention,
and returned to her own room downstairs. She and her
husband then went to bed again, but afterwards, while not
completely awake or, if fully awake, not very attentive,
heard some person come downstairs whom they supposed
to be Richard Randolph from the weight of his steps on the
stairway, and in a short time heard the same person (as
they supposed) return upstairs. They thought that
Richard had come down to send for a physician for Nancy.

But why pursue the wretched story from this point in
such minute detail? It is sufficient to say that the next
day Mrs. Harrison noted bloodstains on the stairs, leading
up to the second floor of the house, and on the pillow-case
on the bed where Nancy still lay with the blankets drawn
closely around her. But even then Mrs. Harrison did not
suspect the truth until a negro woman told her that Nancy
had had a miscarriage; and later, after the bed had been
vacated, she noted stains on its mattress too, along with
indications of an effort to wash them out. Some days after
Nancy took to her bed, a report came to the ears of Randolph

Harrison from the negroes about Glenlyvar that a
fœtus had been deposited on a pile of shingles between
two logs, and some six or seven weeks later he observed a
place answering the description with a shingle on it, which
appeared to have been stained.

Among the most salient facts of the case were those
which bear upon the deportment of the three principal
figures in this squalid tragedy at or about the time of its
occurrence. So far as the testimony of persons outside of
the Bizarre household went, unbroken harmony had
existed between its members before the arrival of the party
from Bizarre at Glenlyvar. When Mrs. Harrison went
upstairs to the second floor at her home, she did not observe
in Judith the alarm and confusion which was to be
expected, if Judith had supposed that her sister was about
to be delivered of a child, or the resentment which would
naturally spring up in her mind from suspecting that her
husband was its father. Judith only appeared uneasy
over Nancy's illness. Nancy's behavior after the event,
so long as she was at Glenlyvar, remained the same as
usual. At the end of the week, she, Richard, and Judith
returned to Bizarre, and she immediately resumed her
habit of riding on horseback. When Mr. and Mrs. Randolph
Harrison visited Bizarre, about three weeks after
the departure of Richard, Judith, and Nancy from Glenlyvar,
the behavior of Richard and Judith to each other was,
Randolph Harrison thought, not different from what it
ordinarily was, except that he conceived Richard to be
somewhat crusty. To Mrs. Harrison there appeared to
be entire harmony between the two. Another Mrs. Harrison,
who saw Judith just before she left Glenlyvar, stated
that she had never seen a more cheerful countenance.
Pride of character, dexterous management on the whole,
and absolutely perfect self-possession, but for the screams
extorted from Nancy by intolerable pain, shaped the
entire conduct of that remarkable trio, who thus found

themselves suddenly confronted, in the home of one of the
most conspicuous gentlemen and landowners of Cumberland
County, by one of the most fearful emergencies
which it is possible for the human mind to imagine; but
this assumes, of course, that Judith Randolph was cognizant
of what was going on in the inner room and of
what was taken downstairs. But this she repeatedly and
positively denied.

What had happened at Glenlyvar was soon, naturally
enough, carried far and wide by the tongue of rumor, and
the final result was that, at a court held for Cumberland
County on the 29th day of April, 1793, Richard Randolph,
who had been refused bail and stood committed, and
charged with feloniously murdering a child, said to be
born of Nancy Randolph (we are quoting the words of
the court minutes), was brought to the bar of the court in
the custody of the sheriff and there denied the fact before
the following "Gentlemen Justices," by whom he was examined:
Mayo Carrington, Thomas Nash, William Macon,
Nelson Patterson, John Holman, Ben Allen, Joseph Carrington,
Henry Skipwith, Joseph Michaux, Anderson Cocke,
Cary Harrison, Walter Warfield, Benjamin Wilson, Codrington
Carrington, Archer Allen and Nathaniel Carrington.[105]
(a) Any Virginian, familiar with the social standing
of these individuals, drawn for the most part at any rate,
as Virginia Magistrates then generally were, from the ranks
of the landed aristocracy, and recollecting that the lives of
two Randolphs were involved in this examination, might
well be reminded of the person who said of a certain highbred
individual that he felt sure that God would think
twice before damning one of that quality. To these sixteen
Magistrates the facts that we have stated were duly
presented, and there was a considerable amount of testimony
besides to show that more than one sharp-sighted

eye had observed, before the visit to Glenlyvar, that Richard
Randolph was indulging in fond familiarities with
Nancy that even the natural, heartfelt manners of Southside
Virginia could not ignore, and that she was manifestly
enceinte. But much of this testimony is of too prurient
a nature to bear repetition in this place. Among the
witnesses, pathetically enough, was Archibald Randolph,
who testified that for some 18 months he had suspected
that Richard Randolph and Nancy were too fond of each
other, but that he had afterwards entirely relinquished
this suspicion; and Peyton Harrison, who testified that,
upon being told by a servant that there had been a miscarriage
at Glenlyvar, he had felt bound by his friendship
for Archibald Randolph to inform him of it. Peyton
Harrison was followed by John Randolph, the subject of
this work, who testified that his deceased brother, Theodorick,
had imparted to him in Philadelphia the fact that
he was engaged to Nancy; that he was at Bizarre for sometime
before the pending examination, and had been informed
by Richard and Judith that Nancy was in low
spirits because of Theodorick's death, and that he must
not mention him to her, but that he had once mentioned
him, and that she had burst into tears. Theodorick died
of February 14, 1792,[106] and the significance of these statements
will become more patent hereafter when we reproduce
in a later chapter of this book the extraordinary
correspondence on the subject of the Glenlyvar incident
between John Randolph and Nancy, which took place in
1814-1815. John Randolph also testified that the most
perfect harmony existed in the Bizarre family circle, and
that he had noted how much fonder Judith was of Nancy
than of any of her other relations. But Richard Randolph
could not be put upon the stand because he was himself the
accused; nor could Nancy because she was not bound to
incriminate herself; no negro who knew anything about the
miscarriage or saw the birth at the woodpile was competent,
under the existing laws of Virginia, to testify at all[107] ;
and Randolph Harrison, when he was told of the birth
having been seen there, was too good a friend of the Bizarre
household, and too cautious a man, to take any
prompt steps to verify the statement. In other words,
there was nothing to connect the screams in the inner room
at Glenlyvar, or the steps on the stairway leading down
from it, with the bloody object which had been deposited
at the woodpile. Besides, there was no evidence to show
that there had ever been a living child at all. Consequently
there was nothing for the sixteen Magistrates to
do except to find Richard not guilty of the felony wherewith
he stood charged and to dismiss him from custody.

Patrick Henry, John Marshall (afterwards Chief Justice
of the United States), and Alexander Campbell were
Richard Randolph's advocates at the trial.[108] The eloquence
of Henry! the logic of Marshall! not often have
there been such yoke-mates. And Alexander Campbell
too, who was the same Campbell, that was contingently
appointed by Richard to be one of his executors, was also a
leading lawyer of his time in Virginia. William Wirt
Henry, the able and scholarly grandson of Patrick Henry
and his biographer, is our authority for the statement that,
when a messenger first came to Patrick Henry, who was
then residing on the Staunton River, at Long Island, in
Campbell County, from Richard Randolph, at the time a
prisoner in the Cumberland County jail, and delivered to
him a letter from Richard offering him a fee of 250 guineas
to defend him, Henry declined the fee, being unwell and
averse to taking the long journey from Long Island to
Cumberland Court House; but that, when the messenger
returned some days later with the offer of a fee of
500 guineas, he accepted the employment, after consulting

with his wife Dolly.[109] In connection with Mrs. Carter
Page, one of the witnesses in the case and the daughter of
Col. Archibald Cary, the Speaker of the Virginia Senate,
who, in 1776, had threatened to plant his dagger in Henry's
heart, should he accept the office of Dictator, the same
biographer recalls an incident which quite pointedly illustrates
the dramatic quality of an orator who, perhaps, has
to his credit as vivid a mass of contemporary panegyrics as
any orator that has ever lived; Demosthenes, Cicero,
Chatham, and Mirabeau not excepted.

That there should be no report extant beyond the court
minutes, still of record at Cumberland Court House, of
the proceedings at the trial of Richard Randolph is a
matter for regret, or it may be for gratification. Copious
notes, however, of the evidence adduced in the case were
drawn up by John Marshall, and copied by John Randolph,
and it is upon these notes and the court minutes that the
above narrative is mainly based; for the most part upon
their very words. The notes were dated Williamsburg,
June 28, 1793, and their concluding sentences demonstrate

that, as late as that day, the fact was still not entirely
established that Nancy had been delivered of a child, or
an abortion, on the fateful night of Oct. 1, 1792. They
read as follows:

At a later day, as we shall see, the fact that there had been
a birth or miscarriage at Glenlyvar was established. But
it was quite a long time before the matter passed into the
domain of certainty, and this fact must be duly taken into
consideration by the reader as we go on.

Contrary to the impression that we should otherwise
entertain, Marshall's notes distinctly state that Nancy
too was tried before the Magistrates. They also state
that at her trial Judith Randolph deposed that she was
kept awake the whole night by Nancy's illness; that, excessively
fatigued, and feeling unwell, she had, but a short
time before Mrs. Harrison came up to the second floor,
aroused her husband, and requested him to go into Nancy's
room and drop some laudanum for her; that he at first expressed
some reluctance, saying that Nancy had the
hysterics and would soon be easy, but that on a repetition
of her request he got up and, without putting on his coat,
went into the inner room; that a child could not have been
born or been carried out of the inner room without her
knowledge; that she was confident that no such event
happened, and that Richard did not go down stairs until
after daybreak. This testimony upon the part of Judith
coincides substantially with statements which she had

previously made in a letter to St. George Tucker, dated
Matoax, April 21, 1793, that she had written at his instance
without the knowledge of her husband and sent to
St. George Tucker by the hand of John Randolph, in the
vain hope that it might put an end to the ugly rumors
about Richard then abroad. The letter was given to the
public by Tucker, accompanied by a communication from
himself, dated May 5, 1793, in which he declared that
Judith's conduct to her sister and her husband during the
eight weeks, which they had spent together under his roof,
in the months of January, February, and March, 1793, had
been sufficient to have convinced the most hardened
skeptic in the universe that the letter, and another of
minor importance from Judith to her sister, Eliza Pleasants,
which was given to the public along with it, contained
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth.[112] In the letter to Tucker, after stating that the
circumstances surrounding the visit to Glenlyvar had
made no impression upon her mind at the time, and had
entirely escaped her memory, and that Nancy's illness had
appeared to her only a trifling complaint of the stomach,
Judith expressly asserts that there was no way of issuing
from Nancy's room at Glenlyvar without passing immediately
by her [Judith's] bed, and that what was said
to have happened at Glenlyvar could not possibly have
taken place without her knowledge, as the two rooms were
so situated that the most trifling noise in one could be
distinctly heard in the other. The letter also asserts
that, aside from things which were remembered but for a
few moments, the most perfect cordiality had ever subsisted
between Nancy and herself, and that nothing had
ever passed between Nancy and Richard that could have
created suspicion in the most jealous mind. Richard, too,
had a word to say before the trial, which, so far as we
know, is the only written statement that he ever made
relating to the subject. We refer to a letter from him to
St. George Tucker, dated Tuckahoe, March 14, 1793,
which makes manifest the extent to which the affair at
Glenlyvar had become the subject of general discussion,
the bitterness of feeling which it had stirred up in the
Randolph connection, and the state of almost frantic
misery to which it had reduced Richard Randolph:

In a letter written to John Randolph in 1815, Nancy
stated that when the verdict of the Magistrates, at the
close of the Richard Randolph trial, was announced, it
was greeted with shouts of exultation by the audience in

the court room. If so, the shouts indicated a radically
different state of public opinion from that which had
previously existed in Cumberland County and is so
poignantly reflected in this letter.

If it is true that before the Glenlyvar mishap nothing
beyond a passing tiff had disturbed the sisterly intercourse
between Nancy and Judith, this could not be said after
the trial. Upon that point we have some testimony in the
Diary of John Randolph in the form of a memorandum in
regard to his movements in 1792 and 1793, after he had
recovered from his attack of scarlet fever at Richmond:

So, apparently, John Randolph was at Bizarre on the
noche triste, and, when Richard Randolph issued from the
Glenlyvar mansion, the sky was clear, the air eager and
nipping, and the fields, that stretched away from the
woodpile, hoar with a heavy mantle of frost. And so,
too, apparently, unless John Randolph left Bizarre before
the return of Nancy, Richard, and Judith from Glenlyvar,
no hint was given to him by any of the three of what had
happened there, though, when he reached Battersea,

before the month of October, 1792, had expired, Robert
Banister had been already apprised of it by rumor or
otherwise. This was the Robert Banister who had been
held up by St. George Tucker as an inspiring example to
his stepsons. He and John Randolph were on terms of
very close intimacy until his early death. "As for Banister,"
he wrote to Theodore Dudley on Feb. 5, 1822, "he
was as a brother from infancy; I could not go amiss in
him."[114]

The excerpt which we have just taken from the Diary of
Randolph has a value also as furnishing another early
illustration of the restless horsemanship which made him
as much at home in a saddle as in a chair.

The kindly generous temper of Southside Virginia
society, notwithstanding the stern measure of purity which
it exacted of women of the dominant race, was remarkably
exemplified in the case of Nancy Randolph. The
magnanimous conclusion which John Marshall, a man
whose long union with his invalid wife was a lovely idyll
of marital tenderness and devotion, reached in his notes on
the trial has been placed before the reader. And nothing
could have been nobler or sounder than the recommendation
which the affectionate nature of Jefferson, who had
fainted and lain for a time as one dead under the shock of
his dear wife's death,[115] made to his daughter, Martha
Jefferson Randolph, the wife of Thomas Mann Randolph,
Jr., Nancy's brother, with respect to the proper treatment
of Nancy in the hour of her humiliation:

It is things of this sort that, almost as much as his remarkable
tact and sagacity, gave Jefferson his enormous influence
as a party leader over the hearts of men. And
other persons of the highest social standing and of irreproachable
repute in point of character and conduct, such
as Judge and Mrs. Peter Johnston, of Prince Edward
County, the parents of General Joseph E. Johnston, the
Confederate commander, and Mr. and Mrs. Creed Taylor
who resided at Needham, in Cumberland County, in the
immediate vicinity of Bizarre, were prompt to do what
they could to make Nancy feel that it still lay in her power
to recover her lost credit. Nor could anything have been
more admirable, than the assiduity with which St. George
Tucker strove to shield her by recognition and sympathy
from the extreme penalties of the terrible situation in
which she had involved herself; and, after Tucker's death,
Joseph C. Cabell wrote to her that he had ever up to the
close of his life spoken of her "in terms of the greatest
tenderness and affection"; and that she "partook of a
large share of his sympathy and regard."[117] Of course,
there were some who were only too glad to pour vinegar
instead of oil into her wounds, for, as the letter from
Richard Randolph to Judge Tucker, which we have

mentioned, renders obvious enough, one effect of the scandal
was to envenom still more the internecine feud which
had previously existed in the bosom of the Randolph
connection. "If," Nancy wrote to Joseph C. Cabell on
May 30, 1828, "it is the spotless character of William
Cabell which Jack Randolph has assailed, I will come
forward to show how corrupt that branch of the Randolph
family has always been." "Fortunate indeed is it for
mankind," she continued, "that the wisdom and mercy of
God determined it should soon be extinct."[118] Twice in
her letters, written after the Glenlyvar catastrophe, she
speaks of herself as if she were the victim of party rage.[119]
Among the persons, if we may believe Nancy, who cherished
the strongest resentment against her, were Gabriella
Harvie (or Randolph), whose second husband was Dr.
John Brockenbrough, Mrs. David Randolph, and Mrs.
Peyton Randolph.[120]

With the exception of the savage letter which she wrote
to John Randolph in 1815, the only unpublished letters
from the hand of Nancy which have come under our eye
in their original or in a copied form are those written
during the period immediately succeeding the catastrophe
to Mary Johnston, the wife of Judge Peter Johnston, and
Mr. and Mrs. Creed Taylor, those written in the latter
part of her life to Joseph C. Cabell, and a brief note or so
of the same period to William B. Giles. The letters to
Joseph C. Cabell, which boil over at times with hatred
of John Randolph, are couched in simple, direct English.
But such is not the case with her letters to Mary Johnston.
The latter are so artificial and stilted in manner as to
suggest a close familiarity with the later novels of Frances
Burney especially, and with English novels of the eighteenth

century generally. Indeed, we cannot but think,
after reading these letters, that addiction to Tom Jones
and Clarissa Harlowe had not a little to do with the train
of events which ended in Glenlyvar. In one letter, undated,
to Mary Johnston she writes: "I have contracted
an acquaintance with that luminary Miss Wheelen. She
possesses the most fascinating urbanity of demeanor.
. . . Mrs. Wickham, I think transcendently beautiful.
Her manners too are vastly attractive."[121] Her way of
assuring Mrs. Johnston that she was not unmindful of
the generous impulse which had led her to hold out a
supporting hand to her was to say: "I feel an irrepressible
inclination to unfold my heart since the soothing fact
was ascertained of my not being proscribed from the
delightful influence of your urbanity."[122] In the same
letter, she refers in these terms to an invitation which she
had received from the Symeses, after the death of her
father, to become their guest:

But the most remarkable of all these silken terms and
taffeta phrases are the following to the same correspondent:
"When a girl I was captivated by an uncommon device on
a compartment of a little vase. A modest violet immersed
in leaves; the motto, `I must be sought' (it was in
French which language I have lost in the vortex of persecution)."[123]
On another occasion, she is so dispirited that

she says: "For the first time Randolph Harrison's
vivacity has failed in its attempts to reanimate me."[124]
This Randolph Harrison, of course, was the master of
Glenlyvar. And yet, after all this grandiloquence, in one
of her letters to Mary Johnston she contrives to say:
"There is a degree of oppression which reduces the mind
to its native simplicity."[125] But there is a suggestion of
pathos as well as humor about this letter, too; for it
frankly confesses the fact that Nancy had not been certain
that the Johnstons might not rebuff her if she made
advances to them. It mentions the fact that Mrs. Johnston's
"mama" had kindly assured the writer that Mrs.
Johnston's sister would have visited her when she was in
Albermarle, if this sister had not been away from home at
the time. "After this assurance," Nancy says, "there
cannot exist any reluctance [on the part of the Johnstons]
to an intercourse with me."

The letters from Nancy to Mr. and Mrs. Creed Taylor
(Sally Taylor) are of no real importance. They do show,
however, that this couple did not allow her misfortune to
affect the intimate relations which had existed between
them and her. "My ever dear Sally," are terms in which
she addresses Mrs. Taylor in one of the letters[126] ; and
because, perhaps, of the extent of the intimacy they are all
comparatively free from the pretentious extravagance of
the letters to Mary Johnston.

In his letter to Tudor, John Randolph does not mention
the cause which cut short his connection with William
and Mary College in 1792-93. It was a duel in which he
became involved with Robert Barraud Taylor, who was
afterwards a leading Virginia federalist, a spirited figure
in the War of 1812, and an eminent advocate and orator.
If Taylor did not win the same degree of distinction at the

Norfolk bar as Littleton Waller Tazewell, he won enough
to be considered a close competitor of the latter for
professional leadership.[127] (a) It seems to have been his
fate in his political career to have been associated with
"minorities, things under cloud," to use Emerson's phrase.
The path to political preferment in Virginia rarely led
through the fields of federalism. And then, when Taylor
found himself a member of the Virginia Constitutional
Convention of 1829, he broke with his slave-holding
constituents on the issue of white "manhood" suffrage
which he favored, and resigned his seat.[128] The letter
which he addressed to the Convention in doing so not only
betokens a high degree of sincerity and independence of
character, but a rare capacity for elegant and pointed
composition. In person, he is said to have been very
handsome and impressive, and when we are told by Hugh
Blair Grigsby that even in manhood his "Southern blood
coursed in torrents of fire through his veins," though he
was "at times in the highest degree self-poised and calm,"[129]
we do not see very well how he and John Randolph could
have been at William and Mary together without sooner or
later facing each other in a duel of some kind. But
Taylor was the challenger, as the Randolph Reminiscences
of Littleton Waller Tazewell certify.

The origin of this duel is somewhat obscure. Lemuel
Sawyer, one of Randolph's biographers, who was in
Congress with him for sixteen years, gives this account of
the matter:

This is the John Randolph who is thought by Henry
Adams to have been easily affected by his fears. But
there is a story to the effect that the duel arose from a
dispute over a question of pronunciation. When we recollect
that John Randolph, as a man, was always an
obstinate stickler for correct orthoepy and even on his
death-bed was unwilling that the word omnipotent should
be uttered in his presence with the accent on the wrong
syllable, the story seems not improbable. According to
this report, many years after the duel, Randolph met
Taylor and promptly said: "Robert, it was pronounced

so"; whereupon Taylor as promptly replied with an emphatic
denial.[132] One of the worst infirmities of the duel
was that it settled nothing, and this story is, at least, a
good illustration of that truth. John Randolph not only
became completely reconciled to Taylor, but, in a letter
to Tazewell, said of him: "He is a noble-hearted fellow
and I love him."[133]