John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833 a biography based largely on new material |
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| II. |
| III. |
| IV. | CHAPTER IV |
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| IX. |
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| XI. |
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| XIII. |
| XIV. |
 | CHAPTER IV John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833 |  |
CHAPTER IV
Early Manhood
Let us turn again to Randolph's letter to Tudor.[1]
"In June (1794), I came of age. The crop of the year was
entirely destroyed and also that of — by the floods. My
guardian showed me no accounts and paid me nothing for the
profits of my estate, during a minority of —teen years, and I
found myself overwhelmed with overseers' and blacksmiths' and
sheriffs' claims of several years' standing. This necessitated
the sale of Matoax urged by your father. I made his house (at
his request) my home and lived the life of a mere lounger. The
society of your father, the conversation and company of John
Thompson (for I was half my time in Petersburg) did not wake
my literary ambition. I rode about from one race field to
another, and, whilst at Newmarket races, my closest friend
(your father excepted), Henry Middleton Rutledge (son of E.
R. and nephew of the celebrated John R. of S. C.), called at
Bizarre on his way to Charleston and, not finding me at home,
left a letter informing me of his intended voyage to Europe.
I knew Rutledge in New York. We were at college together,
and I burned with desire to see him once more. My guardian
had always frowned upon my wish to travel, and now I had
not the means of indulging the inclination to any extent. I
borrowed, however, as much money as would defray the expense
of my journey and, in June, 1796, went to Charleston,
leaving you an infant in the cradle, and thence to Savannah to
see Bryan. I returned in May, and a few weeks afterwards
(whilst I lay [ill] of bilious fever at Petersburg), your father,
was in the most strange and mysterious manner
snatched away from me about a week after he had reached his
own house. He left considerable debts of his own, produced
(as I have before explained to you), and my father's whole
estate was under mortgage for debt. Unpractised in business,
ignorant of the value of property, I made a compromise with
the creditors [and] saved much of the estate that must otherwise
have been sacrificed. On you and St. George [Richard
Randolph's oldest son, John St. George] my affections and
hopes centred, and in you I had the sweetest companions and
the most dutiful children. In 1799, chance threw me into
public life. The rest you probably know."
The price paid for Matoax was three thousand pounds
sterling.[2]
On reaching his majority, it was natural enough that
Randolph should settle down at Bizarre. He was familiar
with the place, Roanoke, his own estate, was only some
forty miles away in Charlotte County, he was unmarried,
and he fervidly admired and loved his brother Richard.
Besides, the only other community in which he might
have been disposed to take up his residence, Williamsburg,
the home of St. George Tucker, had become highly
obnoxious to him because of the censure with which its
people had visited him on account of the duel. This fact
comes out in a letter written by him to St. George Tucker
on the eve of his final return from Philadelphia to Virginia.
"I will now my dear sir," he said, "touch upon that part of
your letter, dated New Year's day, which relates to my studying
in Williamsburg. I have found my conduct and character,
during my residence in that place, canvassed in so ungenerous
and malicious a manner that, were it not the residence of
yourself and your beloved family, I never would set foot in it
again; but, if you wish me to return, I will conquer my aversion
to the place (I ought to have said its inhabitants) as far as
which it may afford."[3]
When John Randolph settled down at Bizarre in 1794,
its household consisted of the following persons: Mr. and
Mrs. Richard Randolph and Nancy; and for a time his
cousin, Mrs. Guilford Dudley, and her family also found
a shelter from adversity under Richard's roof.[4]
(a) While
residing at Bizarre, before he became a member of Congress,
Randolph seems to have lived as much in his saddle
as out of it; and the following memorandum from his
hand evidences the extraordinary mobility of which he
gives us a hint in his letter to Tudor:
November, 1795
Monday 30, Bizarre to D. Meades.
December
Tuesday 1, Capt. Murrays.
3, Richmond.
Wednesday 9, Petersburg.
Thursday 17, Left Petersburg to Genito.
Friday 18, To F. Archers and D. Meades.
Saturday 19, D. Meades to Bizarre; received letter from Rutledge.
Sunday 20, Roanoke.
Sunday 27, From Roanoke to Bizarre.
Tuesday 29, to Roanoke.
Thursday 31, to Bizarre.
January, '96, New Year's day at Bizarre.
Saturday 2, to Major Eggleston's.
Sunday 3, Col. Botts.
Monday 4, Petersburg.
Friday 15, At Genito Bridge.
| Saturday 16, at D. Meades. | rain.[5] |
| Sunday 17, at D. Meades. |
All in about six weeks, and in two of the most inclement
months of Winter! From Dec. 27 to Dec. 31 alone he
covered an aggregate distance of 120 miles. Between
just what race-tracks he coursed backwards and forwards
on horseback we do not know. He was quite frequently
at Williamsburg; and there was doubtless still a track
there. And the race-track at Petersburg was probably
even more of a magnet to him than his brilliant young
friend, John Thompson, of that town, whose untimely
death at the age of twenty-two elicited from him a memorandum
in which he stated, among other things: "He
was the author of Gracchus, Cassius, Curtius, written on
the subject of American politics. Speak they for him."[6]
This exclamation does not seem quite so rhetorical when
we recall the fact that Albert G. Beveridge, in his recent
life of John Marshall, says of Thompson: "John Thompson,
of Petersburg, was one of the most brilliant young
men that even Virginia ever produced."[7]
(a) But
Randolph had too much pride of character to be sullied
by the vices of the race-track. His interest in racing was
that of a gentleman, not of a gambler; as the following
letter to St. George Tucker evinces:
"We have all had our fill of racing and dust for these three
days past. I have been much distressed by the very unseasonable
weather and by the volumes of dust which assail one from
every direction. Our very worthy friend, Mrs. Buchanan, has
just recovered from a pretty smart and regular fit of the gout.
She is, of course, well. If report does not lie greatly, the Blacklegs
have had a very fine harvest during the Races, independent
of the regular channels of supply which I am told they have
but little attended to. They have been employing their talents
to great advantage in plucking a young pigeon who ranks very
high among the would-be nobility of our country, and who
shines forth, a very luminous constellation in the horizon of the
fashionable world. The contempt with which I am inspired by
which I feel at the sight of men who rob without fear of detection
or punishment, and who prowl about every public place
for plunder with the most unblushing effrontery; assuming the
airs of gentlemen and exchanging familiar salutations with
men of honour."[8]
One happy result of Randolph's equestrian activity was
the extension that it gave to his list of acquaintances.
Among the persons with whom he was brought into familiar
intercourse at this period, was John Wickham, who
was afterwards one of the counsel at the trial of Aaron
Burr, and not only left behind him a reputation for
forensic talents as high, or almost as high, as any ever won
in Virginia, but was distinguished by such tactful and
polished manners that Thomas Moore, the poet, is said
to have declared that he would grace any court in Europe.[9]
Mr. Wickham was the agent of the British creditors who
held the mortgage on the estates of Richard and John
Randolph, and one consequence of the friendship, that
sprang up between him and John Randolph, was a new
arrangement, which the gratitude of Randolph never forgot,
under which the payment of the debt was provided
for upon terms more indulgent to the debtors.
Garland, in writing his life of Randolph, was so fortunate
as to obtain many details relating to Randolph at
this period from Mrs. Dudley. She entertained a bitter
feeling of dislike for him in the latter part of his life; but
her statements made about him to Garland do not appear
to have been tinged by it. She says that he was never
long in one place, and that he seemed to have no systematic
habits of study, but was yet able, after a careless
survey of the pages of a book, to tell what was in it better
than persons who had studied it. According to her
condition. When she was under the Bizarre roof, she
never waked in the night without hearing him moving
about his chamber which was just below hers, and sometimes
he would stride across the floor, exclaiming: "Macbeth
hath murdered Sleep! Macbeth hath murdered
Sleep!" She had even known him to have his horse
saddled in the dead of the night and to ride over the
Bizarre plantation with loaded pistols.[10] This insomnia,
which hovered over his pillow, throughout his life, was
especially aggravated after the death of his brother
Richard on June 14, 1796,[11] but was powerless to subdue
the deep, underlying strain of increased tenderness for the
living—almost the only evidence of compassion that
Death ever betrays—which runs through this letter from
him to St. George Tucker:
"We have hoped for your consolatory society, my father;
but we are doomed to disappointment. May we indulge the
idea of seeing you and any of the dear children. If you do
come, pray bring Harry with you. I have nobody to unburthen
myself to. In silence, are all my sorrows and, in the solitude
of the night, indulged. 'Twere more than childish weakness
to be unable to preserve some fortitude in the presence of
those whom I am bound by every tie to comfort and protect.
I am stupefied. Judy is not well; nor are my dear little orphan
nephews. Nancy is complaining. With regard to myself,
I am tolerably well; but find it scarcely possible to sleep.
I go to bed but can not sleep. I turn and toss about, and,
altho' it is now late at night, I do assure you that I have not
been even in a doze since the night before last; nor am I at
all sleepy. 'Tis very strange I do not feel at all unwell but have
as little propensity to sleep at night as I ever had at dinner
time. Present us all to Mrs. Tucker and Fanny. Would to
Heaven that she could come and see us. Never has she crossed
the threshold of a brother's door who loved her so tenderly.
that, as soon as I can, I will write to her. I am obliged both
for my dear Judy's and my sake to leave home in a day or two.
I dread leaving her alone. God bless you my father, my ever
beloved friend. Whilst this heart has motion, it shall ever feel
for you the liveliest affection."[12]
Jove has a careless laugh for lover's perjuries, but no
smile bitter or sardonic enough for the reproach of falsity
which the sad vicissitudes of family concord drew down
upon this vow.
Desertion by living friends made the loss of Richard still
more sensible. From an early day after the adoption of
the Federal Constitution, the opening up to settlement of
virgin lands in the South Atlantic Gulf States and the
West set up streams of emigration from Virginia. "Our
much valued friends, Brett, and Ryland, Randolph,"
Randolph wrote to Judge Tucker, a week or so after the
letter that we have just transcribed,
"are soon to leave this part of the world; Mr. Taylor, one of the
most worthy men in the world, whose friendly attentions to
this family will ever command their grateful remembrance,
proposes removing to Tennessee. These three families have
long constituted the whole of the society of that of Bizarre.
We shall then be soon deprived of all intercourse with the
World. The Island of Juan Fernandez will not be more retired
than this spot."[13]
Mr. Taylor [Creed Taylor], however, changed his mind
and remained at Needham; to create still another claim
upon the gratitude of John Randolph.
In January, 1798, Randolph's outlook had undergone
little improvement. In that month, he wrote to St.
George Tucker that want of spirits was among his misfortunes.
"I am so altered in that particular," he said,
fund of hilarity which I once possessed—flown never I fear
to return."[14]
Nancy's letters to Mary Johnston, before she left
Bizarre forever, are flecked with disaffection and discontent
and leave us little reason to doubt that she had but scant
good will for Judith. She seems to have thought her
sister tyrannical in temper and inclined to impose an
unreasonable degree of drudgery upon her. Just what
grounds there were for this belief, it is now impossible to
say. Those disclosed by the letters are of a nature, under
the circumstances, to admit readily of a satisfactory
explanation. In one letter, Nancy says: "My presence
now operates, like a reproachful conscience, on a sister,
and for that I am treated as a culprit. It is the crisis of
affairs; the last paroxysm of tyrannic power, exulting
over patient endurance."[15]
In another letter, written
after the close of the precise period with which we are
dealing, dated Bizarre, Feb. 21, 1805, the year in which
she apparently left that place for good, Nancy refers to
an offer of marriage which she had received at some
time or other from some source, and then uses this
language:
"My mind can not be shackled. Yet my person has willingly
resigned itself to various species of real drudgery. Many
fevers have I contracted by exertions to which my physical
force was incompetent. Months in succession have been devoted
to the needle (for Judy who cherishes not a latent spark
of affection for me) when my intellects absolutely languished
for a little indulgence."[16]
In the same letter, she asks for the loan of Caleb Williams
and the poems of Collins. The latter, she said, she had
hand that there never was an interval of leisure for her
transcripts. Bread, Judith might well have felt, should
be sweeter earned than doled. The real trouble, we
suspect, was that Nancy was thinking too much of St.
James Park and Ranelagh not to find needle-work on
the banks of the Appomattox oppressively dull.
The circumstances, surrounding the trial at Cumberland
Court House, and the death of his brother, Richard, sank
with the searing force of hot iron into Randolph's memory.
Thirty years after the latter event, he could command
his emotions only long enough to pen this brief note to
his brother, Henry St. George Tucker: "Our poor
brother, Richard, was born 1770. He would have been
fifty-six years old on the 9th of this month. I can no
more. J. R. of R."[17]
An interesting interlude in the life of Randolph, between
the time he became of age and his first candidacy for
Congress, was a visit that he paid to South Carolina and
Georgia in the year 1796. This visit was made in response
to the solicitations of his friend, Henry M. Rutledge,
whose home was in South Carolina, and of Joseph Bryan,
whose home was in Georgia. In the latter part of 1795,
Rutledge had stopped at Bizarre on his way home from
the North; but Randolph was absent at the time. The
consequence was a letter, in which Randolph wrote to
Rutledge as follows:
"In the anticipation of seeing you is every other idea absorbed.
In ten days or a fortnight, I shall commence my progress
towards Charleston. No child was ever more impatient
than I am of this delay. Adieu, my very dear Henry. Believe
me with a sincerity, which you will never have reason to question,
your friend. If there is any other term more expressive of
a pure affection between man and man, supply it."[18]
Bryan was as cordial as Rutledge in urging Randolph to
make the journey, which, in that day of boggy roads,
bridgeless streams, rude inns, and giant trees tottering in
decay to their fall along the densely canopied roadsides,
was no slight undertaking.
"You will find me on the seacoast," Bryan wrote, "and, as you
bribe me with a pipe, I can promise in return the best Spanish
segars and the best of liquors, good horses, deer hunting in
perfection, good companions; that is to say, not merely bottle
crackers Jack, but good sound, well informed Democrats."[19]
How Randolph fared on his horseback ride to Charleston
we do not know. The first glimpse that we get of him
after his departure from Bizarre is in the Reminiscences of
the Last Sixty-five Years of E. S. Thomas.
"On a bright sunny morning, early in February, 1796," this
writer says, "might have been seen entering my bookstore in
Charleston, S. C., a fine-looking, florid complexioned, old
gentleman, with hair white as snow, which, contrasted with
his own complexion, showed him to have been a free liver or
bon-vivant of the first order. Along with him, was a tall,
gawky-looking, flaxen-haired stripling, apparently of the age
from 16 to 18, with a complexion of a good parchment color,
beardless chin, and as much assumed self-consequence as any
two-footed animal I ever saw. This was John Randolph. I
handed him from the shelves volume after volume which he
tumbled carelessly over and handed back again. At length,
he hit upon something that struck his fancy; my eye happened
to be fixed upon his face at the moment; and never did I witness
so sudden, so perfect, a change of the human countenance.
That which before was dull and heavy, in a moment,
became animated and flushed with the brightest beams of
intellect. He stepped up to the old grey-headed gentleman,
and, giving him a thundering slap on the shoulder, said: `Jack,
look at this!' I was young then, but I never can forget the
thought that rushed upon my mind at the moment, which was
to Charleston to attend the races. There was then living in
Charleston a Scotch baronet, by the name of Sir John Nesbit,
with his younger brother, Alexander, of the ancient house of
Nesbits, of Dean Hall, some 15 miles from Edinburgh. Sir
John was a very handsome man, and as `gallant [a] gay Lothario'
as could be found in the City. He and Randolph became
intimate; which led to a banter between them for a race
in which each was to ride his own horse. The race came off
during the same week and Randolph won; some of the ladies
exclaiming at the time: `though Randolph had won the race,
Sir John had won their hearts.' This was not so much to be
wondered at when you contrasted the elegant form and graceful
style of riding of the Baronet with the uncouth and awkward
manner of his competitor."[20]
Our knowledge of the manner in which Randolph passed
his time in Georgia is very meagre, but that his stay there
was attended by some little convivial competition we
may infer from a letter written by Bryan to him after his
return to Virginia, in which the former says: "My eldest
brother still bears a friendly remembrance of the rum
ducking you gave him."[21]
A letter, which Randolph wrote to Rutledge from
Columbia, South Carolina, on his return journey, gives us
an insight into some of the hardships that he must have
experienced during his long ride from Bizarre to Georgia
and from Georgia back to Bizarre.
"I have just time, my friend," he said, "to inform you that
I am thus far on my journey, without having met with any
untoward circumstances, except being obliged to go without
either food or bed at a Major Hall's near the Walnut. Luckily,
I had a good bearskin, and, with that and my surtout (at the
same time comforting myself with the reflection that many a
better man had lodged much worse), made a bed not entirely
bugs, fleas and filth."[22]
Luckily, his good horse held out to the end; but barely so,
however, for Randolph wrote to St. George Tucker: "The
faithful Jacobin died the day after he got home of the
Carolina distemper, after having carried his master a long
journey of 1800 miles."[23]
Randolph began life on a
Jacobin, a name suggested to him by the Gallic furor of
the time, and it was a Radical that he threatened to mount
at the close of his career, when Andrew Jackson had issued
the proclamation against Nullification, which he, for one,
was ready to meet with "man and steel, the soldier and
his sword," instead of dialectical subtleties.[24]
In a letter,
written some 13 years later to Joseph H. Nicholson of
Maryland, with whom he had served for a time in Congress,
Randolph recalled the fact that he had faced the
"deserts of Carolina" in mid-winter.[25]
But a letter which
he wrote to Rutledge from Bizarre, after his return from
the South, bears testimony to the fact that his sojourn in
Charleston, at any rate, had been a delightful one.
"You wish me in your absence to visit Charleston to view it
with your eyes," he said, "I sincerely wish it were in my power
to comply with the first part of your request; there would be no
necessity for observing the second, since you yourself are not
more partial to that charming place than I am. Have I not
every reason to be so? Have I not received the most friendly
and flattering attentions from your friends, whom I now with
pride and pleasure rank among the number of my own. If you
have not heard lately from them, it will give you pleasure to be
informed that they were well a few weeks ago. This information
I obtained from a gentleman who left Charleston since the
races, and of whom I made very particular enquiries. He also
fellows, and elegant equipages was unusually brilliant; that
our friend, Genl Washington's horse, Shark, won the jockey
club purse and a sweep-stakes of 400 guineas each. Mr. Alston
and Col. Hampton were his competitors in this last race; and
that Fenwick's Commerce won the city purse. I relate these
things because I know by experience how interesting the most
trifling particulars concerning our country are when we are
divided from it by great distance."[26]
| CHAPTER IV John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833 | |