University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER V

Congressional Career, Début and Period of Leadership

There is little in the letters written by John Randolph,
during the period of five years immediately preceding his
first candidacy for Congress that manifests any unusual
interest in politics.

In several, however, he does reveal the fact that he, too,
like most of his friends, in Southside Virginia, had become
badly afflicted with the Gallomania of the time. One of
these letters, for instance, is dated "19 Florial, 4th year,
7th May, 1796, O. S."[1] ; another "24 June, 21 of Indep; 6
Messidor, 5 of Fr. Rep."; and still another "30 Janr'y,
22d Indepen., II, Pluviose, 6th year."[2] The Sansculotte
successor of the classic Saturnus, God of the Strong Hours
and the Swift Course of Time, had ushered in the Golden
Age, only pausing now and then long enough to devour a
few of his own children; and to Randolph and his fellow-enthusiasts
it seemed natural enough that to him should be
surrendered the office of naming the months of the year.
"Mr." Taylor, "Mr." Johnston, and "Mr." Randolph
went entirely out of vogue as forms of epistolary address,
and were succeeded by "Citizen" Taylor, "Citizen"
Johnston, and "Citizen" Randolph. Thus, in a letter
addressed to "Citizen" Taylor, Needham, we find Richard
Randolph even writing to Creed Taylor as follows:
"Dear Citizen: I am obliged to apply to your neighbourly

assistance for a small supply of spirituous liquor of
any sort you may have," and then, after a reference to
"Citizen" Ryland, concluding: "Your Fellow-citizen
and Friend."[3] A later letter from Richard to Taylor in
the same jargon establishes the fact that his request had
been honored with a supply of whiskey, and that the substantial
equivalent of this whiskey, in both quality and
quantity, had been duly returned. But the most important
letter that John Randolph ever wrote in terms borrowed
from the French language of Equality and Fraternity was
the following to Creed Taylor, which leaves us no reason
to doubt that his first candidacy for Congress was not the
bold, spectacular thing that it has frequently been represented
to have been, but had its origin in the patronage of
an eminent lawyer and influential politician, (a) and
would have been abandoned without the least hesitation if
this patronage had been withdrawn.

Randolph had not yet added to his signature the appendage
"of Roanoke" which was subsequently to become as
much a part of his name as if it too had been conferred
upon him at the baptismal font. (a)

Many years after the date of this letter he again
acknowledged the agency of Creed Taylor in opening up a
political career for him. It was in a letter to Dr. John
Brockenbrough.

Abraham B. Venable was the predecessor of Dr.
Brockenbrough as President of the Bank of Virginia, and
was a member of the House of Representatives from 179199.[5]

When Randolph became a Democratic candidate
for Congress in 1799 from the District composed of
Charlotte, Prince Edward, Cumberland, and Buckingham
Counties, and undertook to answer Patrick Henry at
Charlotte Court House, Virginia, on March County Court

day in that year, he had never made a public speech, and
Henry enjoyed a renown as an orator which on that day
drew to the court green and its environs almost every white
man in Prince Edward and Charlotte Counties who was
not sick, halt, or blind; even emptying Hampden Sidney
College in Prince Edward County, twelve or fifteen miles
away, of its professors and students.[6] Like the hurrying
waters of Turnip, Cub, and Horsepen Creeks, and of
Ward's Fork, and the Little Roanoke, on their way to
the Staunton, were the streams of human beings, made
up of the contributions of innumerable roads and woodland
paths, which poured in gigs, on horseback, and on foot
into the little village for the purpose of hearing a man
whose fame exercised an ascendancy over their admiration
and reverence second, if second at all, only to that of
Washington. Red Hill, Henry's home, was some twenty
miles distant from the Court House, and, in his infirm
condition, he had been prudent enough to spend the night
before court-day at the house of a friend, three miles away
from the Court House[7] ; (a) so as to refresh his body by a
brief interval of rest for the exertions of the next day.
More than one writer has told the history of the events
which followed when Henry, after declining the highest
federal offices in the gift of Washington, appeared at his
request at Charlotte Court House as a candidate for a seat
in the Virginia Senate, where it was thought by Washington
that the orator's marvelous tongue could do much to
allay the disaffection excited by the Alien and Sedition
Laws and to counteract the separatist tendencies of the
Virginia Resolutions of 1798; how Henry descended from
his carriage at the Court House, and was surrounded and
followed about by the people as if they sought to touch
the hem of his garment and to feel the thrill of some
miraculous communication from it; how feelingly, in the
deep religious humility which was a part of his character,
he turned to a Baptist minister, whose piety, affronted
by this extraordinary homage, had broken out into the
reproach, "Mr. Henry is not a God," and exclaimed:
"No, no, indeed, my friend, I am but a poor worm of the
dust—as fleeting and unsubstantial as the shadow of the
cloud that flies over your fields and is remembered no
more"; how he began his address in a voice slightly
cracked and tremulous from physical weakness but, as he
proceeded, underwent again something of the old transfiguration
of aspect, and spoke again with something of
the old dithyrambic and dramatic power; and how, when a
drunken man cried out that he would dare to lift his hand
against Washington, he rose aloft in all his former majesty
and in a voice most solemn and penetrating declared:
"No, you durst not do it. In such a parricidal attempt,
the steel would drop from your nerveless arm."[8] In
recalling this last incident, we quote the exact language of
Dr. Archibald Alexander, afterwards the first professor
of the Princeton Theological Seminary, who was one of
Henry's auditors, and who seems to have been among the
few persons who ever heard Henry at his best without a
total surrender of the critical faculty. "Mr. Henry," he
said, "came to the place with difficulty, and was plainly
destitute of his wonted vigour and commanding power.
The speech was nevertheless a noble effort, such as could
have proceeded from none but a patriotic heart."[9] This
is a very different description of Henry's appeal from that
of John Miller, of South Carolina, a young student of
Hampden Sidney College, who also heard it, and brought
away from it impressions which portray Henry very much
as he was before "sad mortality" had "o'er-swayed"
the commanding power of which Dr. Alexander speaks[10] ;
or from the exclamation at the close of the speech, which is
ascribed to the Rev. John Holt Rice, of Hampden Sidney,
a very able and sober-minded man: "The sun has set in
all his glory"[11] ; or from the hysterical laudations of
biographers who have preferred myth to history, and, disdaining
the trammels of contemporary testimony, have
exhausted every form of encomiastic extravagance in
depicting Henry's last appearance upon the hustings.
But Dr. Alexander, who has freely confessed the overmastering
influence exercised by Henry over his own
mind on other occasions, and who has told us that "the
power of his eloquence was felt equally by the learned and
the unlearned,"[12] has, we suspect, given us the most trustworthy
account that has come down to us of the real
nature of Henry's last speech. Indeed, but for him the
greater part of the evidence, bearing upon the Henry-Randolph
debate, would hardly rise above the dignity of
prehistoric fables or Chinese ancestor-idolatry. "The
first time that I ever dreamed of speaking in public,"
Randolph told Francis Scott Key, "was on the eve of my
election in March 1799, when I opposed myself (fearful
odds) to Patrick Henry."[13] The odds seemed all the more
appalling to him, it is fair to infer, because in his numerous
horseback rides over the face of Southside Virginia he
must have frequently heard Henry plead before juries,
and he had certainly heard him not only at the Richard
Randolph trial but in the famous British Debtor's Cause at
Richmond which was argued a few days after that trial—a
cause in which he and Richard were personally interested
by reason of the British incumbrance on their own estate.[14]
His recollections of Henry in this case were fortunately
preserved for us by James W. Bouldin, a citizen of Charlotte
County, and appear in the following form in William
Wirt Henry's Life of Patrick Henry:

Indeed, throughout Randolph's life, the eloquence of
Henry was a theme with which his conversation often

glowed. "He was Shakespeare and Garrick combined,"
was one of his utterances.[16] (a) It might sound preposterously
tumid, had it not issued from the mouth of a rigorous,
not to say fastidious, critic whose geese were rarely
swans, and had not Dr. Alexander in his remarkable analysis
of Henry's attributes as an orator said, after giving the
first place to "the greatness of his emotion and passion,"
that he never indulged "in an expression that was not
instantly accepted as nature itself," and could not have
achieved his oratorical triumphs but for "a matchless
perfection of the organs of expression, including the entire
apparatus of voice, intonation, pause, gesture, attitude,
and indescribable play of countenance."[17] Referring on
one occasion in the House of Representatives to a Bill,
providing for the state-wide election of Presidential
electors, which had been carried in the Virginia House of
Delegates by a Democratic majority of only five votes,
Randolph exclaimed: "Had Patrick Henry lived, and
taken his seat in the Assembly, that law would never have
passed. In that case, the electoral votes of Virginia
would have been divided and Mr. Jefferson lost his election!
Five votes! Mr. Chairman! Patrick Henry was
good for five times five votes doubled in that body."[18]
Even the careless sayings, such as "misfortune toughens
manhood,"[19] of a man, not more justly entitled to fame
because of his eloquence than because of his profound
wisdom in regard to everything that relates to the proper
conduct of our individual lives, or to the lasting happiness
of commonwealths, was often on Randolph's tongue.
And it is to a paper drawn up by his hand, shortly after
the joint discussion at Charlotte Court House, and
placed under the eye of William Wirt, when he was writing
the life of Henry, that we are indebted for an abstract of
what Henry really uttered on that occasion.[20]

The audacity in the début of John Randolph did not
consist in the fact that he became a candidate, but in the
fact that, becoming a candidate, he did not shrink from
facing such an antagonist as Patrick Henry. To residents
of Charlotte County who knew Randolph simply as a
restless young devotee of the stubble-field and the racetrack,
that thought no more of galloping over the forty
mile stretch between Bizarre and Roanoke than a wild
pigeon would of passing between the same points in the air,
such a competition seemed unimaginable. "Mr. Taylor,"
Col. Read, the Clerk of the Charlotte County Court,
asked of Creed Taylor, "Don't you or Peter Johnston
mean to appear for that young man today?" "Never
mind," replied Randolph's sponsor, who had lived too near
Bizarre not to be sure of his man, and was such a bigoted
Democrat that he did not scruple, during the delivery of
Henry's speech, to keep up, in the hearing of Dr. Archibald
Alexander and others, a strain of caustic comment on
it, and even to declare that the old man was in his dotage,
"He can take care of himself."[21] And there can be no
doubt that Randolph did take care of himself. All that
Dr. Alexander has to say on the subject, aside from his
statement that, when Randolph rose, Henry retired from
the scene, after requesting a friend to report to him anything
which might require an answer, is this: "Randolph
began by saying that he had admired that man more than
any on whom the sun had shone but that now he was constrained
to differ from him toto coelo. But Randolph was
suffering with the hoarseness of a cold and could scarcely
utter an audible sentence."[22] This is but a dry, jejune
chronicle, indeed, when compared with the fictitious

Randolph, who is pictured by Garland as standing in silence
some moments before he began his exordium, "his
lips quivering, his eye swimming in tears,"[23] and is
credited by him with a long speech which, after occupying
some seven or eight pages of his work, is dismissed with
these naïve observations: "We do not pretend, reader,
to give you the language of John Randolph on this occasion;
nor are we certain even that the thoughts are his."[24]
A speech, which is not avouched as authentic either as
respects words or thoughts, is, of course, not entitled to
much consideration at the hands of a biographer who does
not belong to the legendary age of American history. Nor
need we linger long upon what Garland has to say about
Henry's "sinking orb" and Randolph's "youthful
beams"[25] ; for the chariot of the Sun is never more likely
to be fatal to an ambitious Phaëton than when harnessed
in the service of rhetorical imagery. So much of Garland's
account of the discussion is purely imaginary that
we even hesitate to accept his statement, for which no
authority is cited, that Dr. Hoge heard Randolph out and
turned away repeating the lines from the Deserted Village:

And in the face of Dr. Alexander's statement that, after
closing, Henry entirely withdrew from the spot where the
discussion took place and did not return,[27] we find it difficult
to believe, in the absence of specific testimony to that
effect, that Henry sat through Randolph's speech, and at
its end took him by the hand and said: "Young man, you
call me father; then my son I have somewhat to say unto
thee (holding both his hands)—keep justice, keep truth and
you will live to think differently"; or that Henry turned

to some by-stander and said: "I haven't seen the little
dog before since he was at school; he was a great atheist
then."[28] The statement of Garland that Henry and
Randolph dined together after the debate is more probable,
because where there was no unquestionably valid excuse,
it would have been an impolitic thing for a candidate for
public office, after courting the favor of the populace, not
to have dined democratically with the leading spirits of
the occasion at the Court House tavern. Along with
what Dr. Alexander has to say about Randolph's speech,
we should also bear in mind that, in his valuable Reminiscences
of the Home Life of John Randolph of Roanoke,
Powhatan Bouldin tells us that he had read a certificate
from Col. Clem Carrington, one of the most prominent
citizens of Charlotte County in his day, in regard to what
Henry actually said in his speech about the Alien and Sedition
Bills and other political questions, in which Col.
Carrington stated that Randolph "was not much attended
to."[29] Col. Clem Carrington, however, was the Federalist
aspirant for the seat in Congress that Randolph was
seeking, and there were, therefore, both partisan and
personal reasons why his judgment about the reception
accorded to Randolph's speech by the concourse at Charlotte
Court House should not be accepted without some
degree of reserve.

If Randolph was suffering from such a severe cold that
he could scarcely utter an audible sentence, as Dr. Alexander
says, and was not much attended to, as Col. Carrington
says, it is hard to believe that he could have spoken
three hours, as Garland, relying doubtless wholly upon
tradition, declares that he did,[30] or that he could have
achieved a signal oratorical triumph. He was laboring
under vocal distress, the thing of all others most dispiriting
to a speaker; he had never before made a public address;

knowledge of his talents was limited to his friends and
acquaintances; and he spoke under the shadow of a transcendent
reputation. Under such circumstances, it may
well have been that his first introduction to the public
was not accompanied by any especial éclat. But there is
good reason to believe that, if he did not come off on this
occasion cum magna laude, he came off at least cum laude.
Tradition is a dubious witness but a certain amount of
truth is usually mingled even with the ambiguas voces that
it scatters as it goes, and the traditions are all to the effect
that Randolph acquitted himself handsomely in his reply
to Henry. Besides, his first speech of any length in Congress
was so unmistakably marked by the "full throated
ease" of a born orator, and his ascent to the highest
levels of parliamentary fame was so amazingly rapid from
the very beginning that it would be strange, indeed, if
there had been no presage in his Charlotte Court House
speech of his remarkable future as a speaker. Moreover,
if it is true that when he began to speak an Irishman
exclaimed: "Tut! tut! It won't do, its nothing but the
bating of an old tin pan after hearing a fine church organ"
—a story which we derive from a singularly untruthful
and inflated article by E. H. Cummins in the second
American edition of the New Edinburgh Encyclopedia,
published in 1817[31] —it is equally true that, as he proceeded,
he extorted a homely but none the less significant compliment
from another illiterate auditor. The story of this
compliment was derived from Dr. John Holt Rice, a witness
as unexceptionable as Dr. Alexander himself, who was
also present at the debate, by the author of a Memoir of
Dr. Rice mentioned in the Virginia Historical Register
who tells it in this fashion:

Earlier sentences in this Memoir are even more significant.
"He [Dr. Rice]," says the writer, "was of course greatly
pleased with both orators; though he paid his special
homage, as he told me, to the setting rather than the rising
sun." The publication of the Clodpole story in this
Memoir, it is only fair to say, drew out a letter from a
correspondent of the Register in Charlotte County who
asserted that he had heard Col. Clem Carrington "declare
again and again that Randolph spoke very little and
mainly to the purport that as Henry was once so he was
then."[32] And our résumé of the testimony in regard to
Randolph's speech would be incomplete were it to omit
an important statement made by Daniel B. Lucas, the
distinguished Virginia lawyer, and the author, among
other poems, of the beautiful lines entitled, "In the Land
where we were Dreaming," in an address delivered by him
before the Literary Societies of Hampden-Sidney College
on June 13, 1883.

On the whole, despite the muffling effect of a bad cold
and the other untoward agencies which made the footlights
seem dimmer than they really were, while Randolph was
speaking, the feelings of Clodpole, we suspect, were about
the feelings of all who had curiosity enough to listen to
Randolph after Henry had ceased. Even in his decline,
there was no such orator as Henry; but in time the young
man too would be a conspicuous figure in public life. In
addition to his federalist opponent, Col. Clem Carrington,
Randolph had an opponent in Powhatan Bolling, a fellowRepublican.
He was related to Randolph, and was as
sensitive as he to any encroachment upon his personal
self-respect, if we may form our judgment about the
matter from what Garland says of him in connection with
the Henry-Randolph debate:

Like the scarlet coat of the hunter, bursting suddenly
upon our sight in the greenwood, is this incident to the
imagination engaged in reconstructing the spirit of the old
Virginia Past.

In the month of April, succeeding the discussion at Charlotte
Court House, Patrick Henry and Randolph were
both elected; Henry to the Virginia Senate and Randolph
to the House of Representatives; but Henry died before
he could take his seat. In a letter to his niece, Randolph,
musing long afterwards over his first candidacy for Congress,
has this to say of it:

But who does not remember Benedict's excuse that, when
he said that he would die a bachelor, he did not think that
he would live till he were married? At the time of his
election, Randolph was under twenty-five years of age,
the minimum age prescribed by the Federal Constitution
for a member of the lower House of Congress; but he became
twenty-five before he was sworn in. When Congress
convened, and he appeared for the purpose of taking his
oath of office, the clerk of the House, or perhaps the
Speaker, Theodore Sedgwick, was struck with his juvenile

appearance, and asked him whether he was old enough to
be eligible. "Ask (or go ask) my constituents," was
the curt reply which has been so often repeated.[36]

The first session of the Sixth Congress was held at
Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 1799, during the Presidency of
John Adams. Among the members of the Senate, while
this Congress lasted, were John Langdon, of New Hampshire,
Wilson Cary Nicholas, of Virginia, and Gouverneur
Morris, of New York; and, among the members of the
House of Representatives, were Joseph B. Varnum, of
Massachusetts, Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, Edward
Livingston, of New York, Andrew Gregg, Albert Gallatin,
and John Smilie, of Pennsylvania, Joseph H. Nicholson,
Samuel Smith, and Gabriel Christie of Maryland, John
Marshall and John Nicholas, of Virginia, Willis Alston,
Nathaniel Macon, and Richard Stanford, of North Carolina,
Robert Goodloe Harper and Thomas Sumter, of
South Carolina, and William Henry Harrison, the Representative
of the Territory of the United States Northwest
of the River Ohio.[37] The House was under the control of
the Federalists, and, after one ineffectual ballot, this
control was asserted by the election of Theodore Sedgwick,
of Massachusetts, as Speaker.[38] The first appearance
of Randolph in debate was on Dec. 30, 1799, on a
motion by John Nicholas to strike out the words in a Bill
providing for the census of 1800, which conferred upon the
Secretary of State supervisory authority over the marshals
and territorial secretaries who were to take it. As
reported, Randolph's speech is very brief, but it is pointed
and breathes the spirit of unfaltering self-confidence. The
motion was lost.[39] Randolph's next appearance was on
Jan. 2, 1800, in connection with the petition of Absalom

Jones and others, free men of color of the City and County
of Philadelphia, or rather of the good Quakers who were
behind them, asking among other things for "the adoption
of such measures as shall in due course emancipate
the whole of their brethren from their present situation."[40]
Again he is reported as speaking briefly, but as before with
no inflection of uncertainty. He hoped, he said, that the
conduct of the House would be so decided as to deter the
petitioners, or any persons acting for them, from ever
presenting any petition of a similar nature thereafter.
The Constitution had put it out of the power of the House
to do anything in regard to the one before them, and he
therefore trusted that the occasion would be the last on
which the interests and feelings of the Southern States
would be put in jeopardy by similar applications.[41] He
lived long enough, of course, to realize what a cheat the
hope was; and it would serve no good purpose to track the
petition through the mazes of parliamentary procedure,
in which it became involved, until it was finally disposed
of by one of the compromises which were so common so
long as members of Congress from anti-slavery communities
struggled to reconcile their aversion to human bondage
with their legal obligations under the Federal Constitution.[42]
A day or so later, a resolution offered by John
Nicholas, looking to the reduction of the regular army,
gave Randolph his first real opportunity to display the
peculiar powers of speech which from that time on commanded
the unflagging attention of the House of Representatives.[43]
It received his earnest—indeed vehement
and uncompromising—support; for jealousy of standing
armies was always a feature of the general jealousy of
arbitrary power which was the governing principle of his
political life; and this settled fear of military despotism,
it is only fair to him to remember, had been handed down
to him from our English ancestors, had become one of the
constitutional maxims of American civil polity, and was
almost universally shared by his democratic fellow-statesmen.
Indeed, disastrously as it has again and again kept
us back from a proper state of preparedness for war,
vigorously as it has been counteracted by the recent world-conflict,
and the profound change worked by that conflict
in our former sense of geographical remoteness, it is still a
potent force to be reckoned with. Even in the last years
of the Eighteenth Century, there were a few men, like
Washington, wise enough to recognize the truth that, except
under wholly extraordinary conditions, one sword
does tend to keep another in its scabbard; and that a nation
which does not habitually strive to arm itself adequately
against foreign invasion is as fatuous as an ordinary
householder who does not take the proper precautions
against fire and thieves. Especially laudable was the robust,
sagacious attitude which John Adams, a man whose
failings were but little more than skin-deep, but whose
virtues were a part of the very marrow of his bones, always
maintained on this subject. But, as a rule, these
men were like the voice of the cuckoo in June, heard but
not regarded, and they were readily cried down by the
short-sighted politicians who met their appeals with
scoffs, pleas of economy and the time-honored tenet that
a standing army is a menace to the liberties of a free
people.

Better illustrations than the two speeches of Randolph on
this occasion of what Shakespeare calls "the rattling tongue
of saucy and audacious eloquence," it would be hard to
imagine. They are free from the digressions and parentheses
which characterized his later speeches; though wanting
in their power of terse, concentrated, and vivid expression.
Orderly in structure and pat to the point, they flow along
with a brisk and smooth movement that no unpracticed
speaker could ever hope to emulate, unless possessed of the

same natural gift of eloquence. That the first of the two
speeches was an incisive one is evidenced by the frequent
references to it made by succeeding speakers. And Randolph's
diction, when delivering this speech, must have
sounded very precise and finished to the ear; for, alluding
to the use of the word "squeeze" at one point in it, Harrison
Gray Otis said: "I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, to hear
that gentleman make use of the word `squeeze' when applied
to taxation. It was the only inelegant word which
escaped him."[44] The burden of the speech may be divined
from the following passage:

But the passages in this speech, which were destined to
bring down serious trouble on Randolph's head, were
these:

The next day, Randolph rose again, and disclaiming the
intention of receding from any opinions, which he had
expressed the day before, he said, however, that there was
one term used by him which (as no notice had been
taken of it) he would exchange; "It was `ragamuffin.' "
And, having recalled this opprobrious word, he gave himself
over to another outburst of spirited declamation. The
term, he declared, had been extorted from him by the
character and appearance of the recruits in his country;
men the most abject and worthless of the community; and
yet to the protection of these men they were told to confide
their liberties and independence. "Sir," he added, "we
revolt from the idea. We hold those blessings in contempt
of their protection. We hold them in defiance of all force,
foreign or domestic; we hold them, sir, by the tenure of
that valor which obtained them."[47] The use of the word
"ragamuffins" was resented almost as soon as uttered by
two officers of the Marine Corps, a Captain James McKnight

and a Lieutenant Michael Reynolds. During the
evening of the day, succeeding the day on which it was
spoken, they came into the box at the Chestnut Street
playhouse, to which Randolph and a party of friends had
gone for the purpose of witnessing The Stranger and its
after-piece Bluebeard, and deliberately conspired to insult
him.

In another place, Randolph tells us that, until his coat was
twitched, he ignored the provocations with which he had
been visited, but that he, thereupon, demanded who it
was that had committed the act and, receiving no answer,
denounced the person guilty of it, whoever he might be,
as a puppy.[49] Other witnesses said as a "damned puppy."
His pride was too deeply wounded to allow the incident to
end there. The very next day he addressed a letter to
President Adams, narrating the indignities which he had
suffered and closing in these words:

The tone of this letter was undoubtedly a little saucy;
not so much so, however, that, mutatis mutandis, Jefferson
might not have read it with a good-natured smile or Lincoln
with a guffaw, followed by an unctuous jest. Adams,
however, had the keenest kind of a nose for the slightest
whiff of disrespect, and was surrounded in Timothy Pickering,
Oliver Wolcott, James McHenry, and Benjamin Stoddert
by cabinet councilors who were grave and partisan
enough to advise him that, in their opinion, the public
interest required that the contemptuous language in Randolph's
letter should be publicly censured, and to express
the apprehension that, if such addresses to the Chief
Magistrate of the nation remained unnoticed, a precedent
would be established which would perforce destroy the
"ancient, respectable, and urbane usages" of America.
Accordingly, the day after Adams received this advice
from these gentlemen above their formal signatures, he
sent Randolph's letter to the House of Representatives
with a message stating that, as it related to the privileges
of the House, which ought, in his opinion, to be
inquired into in the House itself, if anywhere, he had
thought it proper to submit the whole letter and its tendencies

to their consideration without any other comment
on its matter or style.[50] The message and the letter were
read, and, despite jurisdictional and other objections by
Randolph and his disclaimer of a wish that the House
should take measures for his protection, they were referred
to a select committee, composed of seven members,
headed by Chauncey Goodrich, one of the leading Federalists
in the House.[51] This committee collected a considerable
amount of testimony bearing upon the occurrences at
the playhouse, including a letter addressed to it by Randolph,
and palpably untruthful statements made by Captain
McKnight and Lieutenant Reynolds; and shortly
afterwards it rendered a report to the House, expressing
its regret that a member of the House should have conceived
himself justified in deviating from the forms of
decorum, customary in official communications to the
Chief Magistrate of the United States, deprecating Randolph's
complaint to the President as derogatory to the
rights of the House, and declaring that, as some of the
circumstances, which seemed to him and others indicative
of premeditated insult, had been satisfactorily explained,
and some were of a nature too equivocal to warrant reprehension
and punishment, the Committee was of the opinion
that sufficient cause had not been shown for the
interference of the House on the ground of a breach of its
privileges.

The report was accompanied by two Resolutions: one
voicing the respectful sense entertained by the House of
the regard which the President had shown for its rights
and privileges, and the other asserting that sufficient cause
did not appear for the interposition of the House on the
ground of a breach of its privileges.[52] The House agreed
to the first Resolution, and, after a vain effort on the part
of a minority of its members to amend the second so as to
make it declare that the conduct of McKnight and Reynolds

deserved reprehension, the second was amended by
the insertion in it of a clause imputing indiscretion and
impropriety to the two officers; whereupon it was rejected
altogether[53] ; but not until what has been called the percussion
and repercussion of debate had left both Randolph's
supporters and enemies in a state of shockless exhaustion;
for the debate, which followed the submission of the report
to the House, elicited speeches from many of its members,
including some of its strongest, such as James A. Bayard,
Albert Gallatin, Robert Goodloe Harper, and Joseph H.
Nicholson. Indeed, the discussion fell but little below the
dignity of a field debate of the very first rank. All that
lawyers can do to refine and explain away ugly facts or to
perplex the human mind with artful doubts and uncertainties
was done in this case by Bayard and his able coadjutors,
who, true to the robust partisanship of the Federalists
of that time, were determined to uphold, at all
costs, the action of the President, and to rebuke the young
parliamentary upstart who had addressed him in such froward
language. And Joseph H. Nicholson and his able
coadjutors, on the other hand, did not overlook in their
arguments any point favorable to their friend and fellowRepublican,
Randolph, who himself, in a brief but cogent
speech, assailed with telling force that part of the report
which charged him with conduct derogatory to the rights
and privileges of the House. The wide currency obtained
by the terms "mercenary" and "ragamuffin," which Randolph
had applied to the regular soldier, was reflected in a
statement made by Bayard that "the words in question
had derived so much importance from the use the gentleman
had made of them that they had become the common
cant of every tavern and street in the town."[54] And that
Randolph might have been drawn into consequences even
more serious than those of naked insult appears in the
statement of Gabriel Christie, in the course of the debate,
that he had heard some military officers say that officers
ought to be picked out one by one from the army to engage
Randolph in duels until he was killed.[55]

John Marshall did not participate in the discussion, and
he separated himself from his extreme Federalist associates
to the extent of supporting the amendment to the second
Resolution affirming that the conduct of McKnight and
Reynolds had been indiscreet and improper[56] ; but, if he
had been invested with the judicial duty of passing upon
the facts of the case, it is not difficult to imagine what he
would have said. He would have pronounced the use of
the words "mercenary" and "ragamuffin" by Randolph
intemperate beyond the extreme limits of parliamentary
license; he would have condemned Randolph's letter to
the President as bumptious and wanting in the proper
measure of ceremonious respect to the dignity of his high
office; and, brushing aside partisan bias, sophistry, and
special pleading, he would have found that McKnight and
Reynolds did deliberately insult Randolph by echoing his
words in various contumelious forms, crowding and
jostling him and pulling at his coat, and only made their
offenses against the freedom of debate and the public peace
worse by trying to shield themselves behind statements
marked, if not by downright lying, at least by gross equivocation
and dishonest suppression of the truth. But, as
it was, Randolph issued from the episode as buoyant and
unharmed as a cork from the splash of a waterfall. His
fluent, bright speech, the universal interest aroused by its
strictures on the regular soldiery, no favorite of the American
yeoman or laborer, the action of the President, the
prolonged debate, all served to direct the tongues and eyes
of the public towards him; and his representative character,
when he uttered his inflammatory epithets, and
when he was insulted for uttering them, and the disregard
shown by a partisan majority, set in motion by the Chief

Magistrate of the nation, to convincing proofs of McKnight's
and Reynolds' misconduct, held him up to the
sympathy of the American public as the victim of military
brutality and of executive and parliamentary tyranny.
The effect of the entire flurry was to accelerate
most effectively the maturity of his public reputation.

So far from being intimidated by the report of the
Committee, Randolph, on the second day after it had been
read and ordered to lie on the table for future discussion,
offered a proposition in the form of an amendment to a
pending Bill, providing for the discharge of supernumerary
officers of the army.[57] The Nicholas Resolution, looking
to the reduction of the regular army, was defeated after
Randolph had delivered his second speech in its support[58] ;
and this amendment shared its fate.[59]

During the remainder of the first session of the 6th Congress,
Randolph spoke quite frequently, and on a considerable
variety of topics; but, unfortunately, his speeches
have either not been reported at all or only imperfectly.
That such should be the case is all the more to be regretted
in view of the fact that, in one of his letters to Francis
Scott Key, he expressed the opinion that the best speech
that he ever made was one that he delivered at this period
of his legislative service on the Bill to accept for the United
States cession of jurisdiction over the territory west of
the State of Pennsylvania, commonly called the Western
Reserve of Connecticut.[60] (a). Often unreported in the
early stages of his parliamentary career, as was true of his
fellow debaters also, later he complained that the mangled
limbs of Medea's children were as much like the living
creations as the disjecta membra of his speeches resembled
what he really did say.[61] (b) In some instances, during the
first session of the 6th Congress, the legislative action of

Randolph was shaped by the overstrained scruples or the
ostentatious spirit of independence which youthful legislators
in "their salad days," when "green in judgment,"
not infrequently exhibit. He opposed, for instance, a
resolution requesting the President to present to Captain
Thomas Truxton a gold medal, emblematic of the action
between the United States frigate Constellation of 58
guns and the French ship-of-war La Vengeur of 54 guns,
only to find that there were but three other members of
the House, John G. Jackson, Matthew Lyon, and Thomas
Sumter, hardy enough to stand up and take with him the
merciless drubbing which eighty-seven members of the
House promptly administered to him.[62] He wished to
be satisfied, he said, that the conduct of the gallant captain,
in forcing an action with a ship of such superior force as
La Vengeur, was not rash; especially when our Commissioners
were in the capital of France at the time seeking
peace.[63] On another occasion, he opposed a bill for erecting
a mausoleum in honor of George Washington in the
City of Washington, and again went down into the dust
of discomfiture under circumstances hardly less ignominious
than in the case of the Truxton Resolution.[64] It is at
least to be hoped that in opposing the Washington Mausoleum
proposition he was not actuated by the partisan
motives of which he was suspected a few years before,
when he is said to have offered at a dinner the toast:
"George Washington, may he be damned!" and to have
rescued himself from the critical situation which followed
it either prepense or under the spur of the emergency by
adding: "If he signs Jay's treaty."[65] But whatever may
have been his feelings about Washington in that tempestuous
time, subsequently he over and over again used striking
language about Washington fully in keeping with the
admiration and reverence universally felt for him by mankind.
The Bill for the mausoleum was revived at the
beginning of the 2d session of the 6th Congress, and was
then opposed by Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, in
one of the most thoroughly characteristic speeches ever
delivered by that cross-roads philosopher and statesman,
whose career is a striking illustration of the limited extent
to which provincial narrowness and rustic simplicity detract
from the just influence in American public life of
homespun wisdom, natural dignity, and the elementary
virtues of courage, truthfulness, and honesty.[66] (a) A
resolution for reducing the second regiment of artillery to
three battalions gave Randolph his opening at the 2nd
session of the 6th Congress for a neat thrust. Answering
Rutledge, of South Carolina, who had said that he did not
desire to drag the militia from the plough and the enjoyments
of domestic felicity to carry them to the seacoast,
there to confine them for long periods in forts under the
pretence of a miserable economy, Randolph is reported as
saying that the House had been told by a gentleman from
South Carolina that, from tenderness to the militia, he
would dispense with their services, but that this was a
mistaken tenderness which he, Randolph, did not wish to
manifest nor the militia themselves to receive. In a
similar strain of affected tenderness, he declared, a Roman
Emperor had excused a Roman Senate from the exercise
of their legislative duties, and had informed them that,
from a regard to their ease, he would pass laws for them;
and that Senate had abjectly returned their thanks to the
Emperor for his kindness to them; but that the speaker
hoped that no similar proposition would be made to the
House, nor similar answer be returned by them.[67]

In November, 1800, the Presidential election under the
Federal Constitution, as it then stood, was thrown into
the House of Representatives by the fact that Jefferson
and Burr had received the highest and an equal number

of votes at the polls; and it became its duty, voting by
States, with one vote for each State, to decide which of the
two should be President. Technically speaking, one had no
better title to the office than the other, but probably every
vote cast for Burr had been cast for him as a candidate for
the Vice Presidency merely. Then ensued the Federalist
intrigues in behalf of Burr, the revolutionary suggestions
and the fruitless ballotings which wound the public mind
up to the highest point of anxious tension, and would perhaps
have resulted in civil tumult and bloodshed, had the
real intent of the voters been set aside. During this interval
of perilous suspense, Randolph, by a series of brief
notes, kept St. George Tucker fully advised as to how
things were swaying in the balances of Libra at Washington;
which had then become the capital of the nation.

On Feb. 11, 1801, he wrote:

And, on Feb. 12th, Randolph wrote that the House had
just taken its nineteenth ballot, and that on every ballot
the result had invariably been the same. They continued
to ballot, he said, with an intermission of an hour between
ballots, and he found some satisfaction in the fact that the
rule for making the sittings of the House permanent did
not seem to be so agreeable as formerly to the Federalist
members. There would be no election, he thought. On
Feb. 14, he wrote that the balloting had been going on for

thirty-one hours, and finally on Feb. 17th that, on the
thirty-sixth ballot, ten states had voted for Jefferson and
four (all New England States) for Burr; that Delaware
and South Carolina had cast blanks; that the four Maryland
Burrites had likewise cast blanks, and that Morris
of Vermont (a Federalist) had left his seat.[68] The detested,
the beloved draftsman of the Declaration of Independence,
therefore, was the President-elect of the United States;
Randolph's kinsman, the man of all others, under whose
party leadership, as kindly and sympathetic as it was firm
and skillful, Randolph's political fortunes should have
prospered not only brilliantly but durably. And under the
Federal Constitution, as it then stood, Aaron Burr, who
was to occupy a place in American History, next in point
of extreme abasement to that of Benedict Arnold, its
Abaddon, and angel of the bottomless pit, was the Vice
President elect.

When the first session of the Seventh Congress began on
Dec. 7, 1801, the Democrats were in complete control of
the House of Representatives. Its initial act was to elect
Nathaniel Macon its Speaker[69] ; and the next day it adopted
a resolution appointing a standing committee of Ways and
Means

Of this highly important committee, Randolph, who had
been re-elected to the House, was made Chairman[71] —a
remarkable acknowledgment by the House of the impression
which a young man but 28 years of age had made during
two years of service on his Congressional associates and the

general public. Almost from the time of this appointment,
and not precisely from it only because of some jealous
reluctance on the part of some of his Democratic colleagues
to acknowledge his superiority, is to be dated a record
of parliamentary leadership which lasted approximately
five years only, but was as brilliant and masterly, while it
lasted, as any known to the history of Congress. Indeed, to
find any ascent to such a position so rapidly achieved and
so firmly maintained, while it continued, we should perhaps
have to turn to the life of the younger Pitt. One of
Randolph's first suggestions was that a public printer
should be appointed to do all the printing required by the
work of the House.[72] The next time that he rose it was for
the purpose of opposing an amendment by Macon to a
bill for the apportionment of Representatives among the
several states, making the ratio of Congressional representation
one member for every thirty thousand, instead of
for every thirty-three thousand, persons, in each state.
The amendment gave him an opportunity to denounce as
heretical and improper the doctrine avowed in the debate
that the House was composed of representatives of the
people instead of the states in proportion to their numbers.[73]
In his view, as he expressed it, members of the
House were not the representatives of the aggregate of the
people of the United States in their national capacity, but
of the people of the states in their respective sovereign
capacities.[74] On Jan. 4, 1802, among other resolutions, he
submitted to the House one declaring that it was expedient
to inquire whether any and what changes should be
made in the judicial establishment of the United States.[75]
Later in the session, the Resolution assumed the form of a
bill for the repeal of the Act for the alteration and enlargement
of the Federal Judicial System, which the Federalists
had passed in the early part of 1801 for the purpose of
erecting a solid breakwater against the flood of radical
innovations which they believed would be released by the
election to the Presidency of the great man, who had been
the sleepless and powerful antagonist of their oligarchical
prepossessions and centralizing policies, and who was disposed
to set no limit to the capacity of Truth to take care
of Error, or to his faith in the righteous instincts and the
ultimate good judgment of the common mass of the American
people.

Another motive at the back of the Federalist Judiciary
Act of 1801 was the desire of the Federalists to create as
much patronage as possible in the form of judicial appointments
for the leading adherents of a party which was about
to be deprived of the spoil of political ascendancy; and so
eager was this desire that John Adams kept his pen drudging
at the task of making appointments until nine o'clock[77]
in the evening before the inauguration of Jefferson; or, as
the baffled Republicans would have it, until midnight.
When the repealing bill came up for discussion, it was the
subject of an earnest and protracted debate in which the
thunders of all the heavy field-pieces of the House were
heard. On the Republican side, William Branch Giles (a)
of Virginia delivered an able speech; on the Federalist
side James A. Bayard, the Federalist leader of the House,
answered him in such an effective manner as to excite the
enthusiastic admiration of John Adams.[78] Bayard in turn
was answered by John Randolph in quite a lengthy speech,

which contained some pungent and pithy observations.
Its opening words affect a tone of humility, but nevertheless
they illustrate abundantly the spirit of easy assurance
in which he was prepared, even at the age of twenty-eight,
to confront any hostile champion; albeit his height might
be six cubits and a span and the staff of his spear like a
weaver's beam.

The Judiciary Act of 1801 was in itself a timely and
truly beneficial measure, and there can be no doubt that in
concocting and enacting it many of the Federalist members
of Congress sincerely believed with Bayard that in the
hands of the Democrats the Federal Constitution would
become "the instrument of wild and dark destruction,"[80]
and felt that nothing should be left undone to deprive such
a terrible instrument of its murderous edge; but to a great

extent, too, the Act was but the offspring of the usual
eagerness of a defeated party to preserve as much salvage
as possible out of the general wreck of its possessions and
hopes; and this fact was rendered all the more squalid by
the indecorous race which John Adams had run with the
clock almost down to the last moment of his official existence
for the purpose of depriving the incoming party of
every shred of patronage under the Act.

In other words, John Adams beat the devil around the
constitutional provision by appointing existing judges to
newly created judicial offices under the Act, and then filling
the offices thus vacated with members of Congress
who were disqualified by the Constitution from holding
the newly created ones. Of course, it was not in the nature
of Randolph to eschew the kind of comment which conduct
like this invited. After repelling what he conceived
to be misrepresentations by Bayard of what Giles had
actually said, and casting a penetrating glance or so in his
intuitive way into some of the principal topics developed
by the debate, he met the suggestion that the repeal of the
Judiciary Law of 1801 would be a hazardous precedent in
this fashion:

This was acrimonious enough, but not so exasperating as
what Randolph also said a little later in the same speech:

The reader, however, would be very much deceived,
were he to form the idea that Randolph's activities during
the sessions of 1801-03 were limited to a few clever
speeches. It is not too much to say that, during these
sessions, he was the working member of the House, and its
most influential member in every respect. As Chairman
of the Ways and Means Committee, he was indefatigably
diligent in the discharge of his duties; and by reason
partly of the great importance of this committee, and
partly of the personal prestige and leadership which its

headship carried along with it at that time, he had the
management of most of the weightier measures which
received the attention of the House during the existence
of the seventh Congress; such as the Annual Appropriation
Bills,[84] the bill to provide for the collection of the
arrearages of the direct tax,[85] the bill to repeal the internal
taxes,[86] the bill to provide for the redemption of the whole
debt of the United States,[87] the bill fixing the Military
Peace Establishment of the United States,[88] and the bill
modifying the Act enabling the people of the Eastern
division of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio to
form a constitution and a state government.[89] We find
him on a single day, Dec. 17, 1802, moving both an inquiry
as to whether any alterations were necessary in the legislation
imposing duties on tonnage and imports,[90] and a
request that the President cause to be laid before the
House such papers as were in the possession of the
Department of State touching violations by Spain of her
treaty obligations with respect to the navigation of the
Mississippi.[91]

Some interesting references to the Randolph of this
period are found in the letters of William Plumer, who
became a Federalist member of the Senate from New
Hampshire in December, 1802. Writing to Nicholas
Emery in January, 1803, he says:

Under the same date, in a letter to Jeremiah Mason,
Plumer repeated his statement that Randolph had more
talent than any other member of the Democratic party.
"But they [the Democrats]," he declared, "are unwilling to
own a leader who has the appearance of a beardless boy
more than of a full grown-man."[93] In a later letter, one
written to his son on Feb. 22, 1803, Plumer is not so brief.
After noting the fact that the members of the House sat
with their hats on—an usage which was not abandoned
until many years afterwards—he gives us these interesting
particulars about Randolph:

But not more than Randolph disliked his.

The Plumer of 1803 differed very widely from the Randolph
of that year, but the Plumer of 1804 was not so far
removed, after all, from the separatist Randolph of the
Missouri Compromise and Nullification periods. On Jan.
19, 1804, actuated by the disunion sentiment, which was
then so rife in New England, he wrote to Oliver Peabody:
"We have no part in Jefferson and no inheritance in Virginia.
Shall we return to our homes, sit under our own
vines and fig trees and be separate from slaveholders?"[95]

Apparently in the succeeding March he had answered this
question entirely to his own satisfaction; for, in that
month, he wrote to Jeremiah Smith: "I fondly hope I
shall live to see the righteous separated from the wicked
by a geographical line."[96]

Randolph was re-elected in 1803, and the first session
of the 8th Congress began on Oct. 17, 1803.[97] Among the
new members, were John W. Eppes and Thomas Mann
Randolph, of Virginia, Jefferson's sons-in-law, with both of
whom Randolph was soon to be at daggers-drawn; and
Joseph Clay, of Pennsylvania, who was to become one of
his intimate friends.[98] Again Nathaniel Macon was elected
Speaker,[99] and this time not Samuel Smith, of Maryland,
as at the beginning of the 7th Congress,[100] but Randolph
was placed at the head of the Committee which was,
jointly with such committee as the Senate might appoint
for the same purpose, to notify the President that the two
Houses were ready for business.[101] And again Randolph
was made Chairman of the Committee on Ways and
Means, and was given, as one of his associates, Joseph Clay,
and, as another, his friend Joseph H. Nicholson,[102] who had
also been a member of the Committee during the 7th
Congress.[103]

One of the first acts of the House was to make Randolph
chairman of a special committee appointed by it for the
purpose of considering the part of the President's message
which dealt with the urgent maritime questions that were
then threatening a clash between the United States and
foreign nations.[104]

The next day the office devolved upon him of offering
a resolution expressing the feeling with which the House
had received the announcement of the death of a man

whose bias in favor of State Sovereignty and jealousy of
delegated authority were hardly less decided than his
own—that is Samuel Adams. The brief but pointed and
happy remarks of Randolph on this occasion, when read in
the spirit of the common sacrifices which all parts of our
country made in the American Revolution, and again in
the World War, are well calculated to dull the sensibility
of every true American heart to the rancor of the long
period of fraternal misconception and discord with which
Randolph's career was coeval, and to make it still more
feelingly responsive to the reunited aims and hopes of
the present hour:

The management in the House of Representatives of the
treaty by which the United States acquired Louisiana
from France was largely confided to Randolph; for to the
Committee of Ways and Means, of which he was Chairman,
was referred so much of the treaty as related to the
purchase price, and to a special committee, of which he was
likewise chairman, so much of the messages of the President
on the subject of the purchase as related to the occupation
of the Louisiana Territory and the establishment
over it of a Provisional Government.[106] So long as the

treaty was under consideration in the House, Randolph
was its untiring and resourceful defender. And the
speeches, in which he met the objections to its constitutionality
and expediency, were among the best that he
delivered as a member of the 8th Congress. Not the least
of their effective features were the sallies in which he
twitted his Federalist opponents with the contrast between
the warmth, with which they had championed the Jay
Treaty, and our national interest in the navigation of the
Mississippi, and the carping spirit which they brought to
the consideration of a convention that, at a small cost,
made to our national domain an addition of enormous
magnitude and incalculable value.[107] Instinct with good
sense, too, are the views expressed by Randolph during the
same Congress in regard to the proper compensation of the
higher officers of the Federal Government. The occasion
for their utterance was a bill, fixing the salaries of these
officers.[108] Speaking on a proposition of Mr. Leib, of Pennsylvania,
to make the salary of the Secretary of State
thirty-five hundred dollars, instead of five thousand
dollars, he used these weighty words:

The amendment to the Federal Constitution, requiring
Presidential Electors to name the persons voted for as
President and Vice-President, respectively, received his
cordial support.

But it is in connection with the Yazoo Fraud and the
impeachment of Judge Samuel Chase that the figure of
Randolph dilates to its amplest proportions during the 8th
Congress. To the Yazoo Fraud his attention had been
directed even before he became a member of Congress; for,
when he was in Georgia on the visit to his friend Joseph
Bryan, of which we have spoken, the whole State was rocking
with excitement over the iniquity of this monstrous
fraud, and manifesting its loathing for the miscreants, who
had perpetrated it, in a manner which communicated to
Randolph the full contagion of its passionate violence.

Briefly, the history of the Yazoo Fraud is this: on Jan.
7, 1795, the Georgia Legislature passed a law, directing
the Governor of Georgia to convey in fee simple, on behalf

of the State, to the individuals, who composed the four
companies, known as the Georgia Company, the Georgia
Mississippi Company, the Tennessee Company, and the
Upper Mississippi Company, as tenants in common, more
than thirty-five millions of acres of land in the fertile
territory, lying between the western boundary of the
present State of Georgia and the Mississippi River; all for
the sum of five hundred thousand dollars, or at the price
of less than one and one-half cents an acre.[111] This land
was about to become even more valuable than it would
otherwise have been because of the tremendous impetus
that the invention of the cotton gin by Whitney had just
given to cotton culture. The purchase price was duly
paid and the land was duly deeded. The only defence
that could have been urged, under any circumstances, in
palliation of such an improvident transaction, was that
Georgia was then a State of only some fifty thousand
inhabitants, for the most part very indigent and unable
to bear any public burdens; that the State Treasury was
empty; that the militia, which had been engaged in protecting
the State against the Indians, was unpaid and
clamorous; and that the currency of the State had depreciated
to such an extent as to be almost worthless. Moreover,
the land was occupied by Indians whose titles had
never been extinguished. But the sale was actually consummated
under such circumstances as to deprive these
considerations of all weight. In a short time, the fact
transpired that every member but one of the majority by
which the measure had been enacted had been bribed
by gifts of money or shares in the purchasing companies
to enact it.[112] Among the persons connected with the cession
as lobbyists were Nathaniel Pendleton, a federal
judge, William Smith, judge of the Superior Court of
Georgia, and General James Gunn, United States Senator
from Georgia.[113] Among the many non-residents of
Georgia, who were also interested in the passage of the
bill in one way or another, were Wade Hampton, one of
the great slave and land owners of South Carolina, and
James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, Associate Justice of the
United States Supreme Court, who had, for many years,
been an active speculator in Indian lands; and who, with
the consummation of the cession, became the owner of
shares amounting to three-quarters of a million of acres
of the territory ceded.[114] When the truth concerning the
nefarious grant became fully known to the People of
Georgia, they were aroused to the highest pitch of fury.
One of the first persons to awake indignantly to its true
character was William H. Crawford, a native of Virginia,
who was then a school teacher at Augusta, but afterwards
became famous in the history of the country as United
States Senator, Minister to France, Secretary of the
Treasury, and candidate for the Presidency.[115] Only the
intercession of the members of the Legislature, who had
voted against the bill, saved the malefactors, who had
voted for it, from lynching.[116] From the mansions of
wealthy planters and the cabins of squalid crackers alike
ascended one universal roar of execration. Meetings were
held all over the State for the purpose of voicing the popular
rage; Senator Gunn was repeatedly burnt in effigy;
and every Grand Jury in the State except two presented
the passage of the law as a grievance. The final result of
the commotion was the election of a new legislature which
declared the flagitious measure to be null and void, and
provided that all "records, documents, and deeds," connected
with the fraud, should be "expunged from the face
and indexes of the books of record of the State," and that
the enrolled law itself should be publicly burnt "in order
that no trace of so unconstitutional, vile, and fraudulent a
transaction other than the infamy attached to it" by
the repeal itself should remain in the public offices of the
State.[117] These provisions were duly carried into effect.
All the records relating to the grant were cut out of the
books in which they were bound up, a fire was kindled in
front of the State House, and, in the presence of the members
of both Houses of the Legislature, the enrolled bill,
after being ceremoniously examined by the President of
the Senate and the Speaker of the Lower House, was
delivered by the Speaker to the Clerk of the Lower
House, who read its title aloud and handed it to the Messenger
of the Lower House who in turn consigned it to the
flames with the exclamation: "God save the State! And
long preserve her rights! And may every attempt to injure
them perish as these corrupt acts now do!"[118] Indeed,
it is said that, inspired by the conceit that the work of
destruction should be effected by nothing less than fire
from an avenging heaven, James Jackson, who had surrendered
his seat in the United States Senate for the purpose
of becoming a member of the Georgia Legislature and
leading the movement for the cancellation of the Yazoo
grant, applied a sun glass to the fagots with which the
bill was to be reduced to ashes.[119]

But the indignation of the people of Georgia was not
more fleet-footed than the avarice of the grantees. On the
same day that the Georgia Legislature enacted the law,
which sought to annul the Yazoo grant, the Georgia Company
deeded away eleven million acres of its holdings.[120]
A single sale netted the Yazoo adventurers almost a million

dollars.[121] Three of the companies, to which the grant
had been made, opened an office in Boston,[122] and their
advent in that city was followed by a period of feverish
speculation which was destined to bring home to more
than one speculator the truth of Banquo's saying that "the
earth hath bubbles as the water has." In Boston, even
watchmakers, hair-dressers, and mechanics dabbled in
Yazoo lands. Nowhere in the United States were the
purchases from the Yazoo companies so numerous as in
New England and the Middle States; but there was probably
no State in the Union in which portions of the ceded
territory were not disposed of by the original adventurers.
Some of the earlier purchasers were, doubtless, innocent
purchasers in a legal as well as moral sense, but other
vendees must have been entirely cognizant of the fraud.
When the news reached New England that the Georgia
Legislature had passed an Act attempting to annul the
Yazoo grant, it was received with widespread consternation,
but soon a large number of the New England purchasers
organized the New England-Mississippi Company
for the purpose of protecting their interests, and obtained
a legal opinion from Alexander Hamilton that the annulment,
attempted by the Georgia Legislature, violated the
prohibition of the Federal Constitution against the impairment
of contracts.[123] Later, the State of Georgia ceded
its rights over the Yazoo territory to the United States
for one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
subject to the conditions that the National Government
should extinguish all Indian titles to the territory, settle
the British and Spanish claims affecting it, reserve five
million acres for the purpose of quieting all other demands,
and ultimately admit the territory as a State into the
Union. In the prosecution of the steps, by which this
result was reached, the National Government was represented
by a commission, composed of three members of
Jefferson's cabinet, James Madison, Secretary of State,
Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, and Levi
Lincoln, Attorney General. Subsequently, the commission
was directed by law to investigate and report upon
the claims of individuals and companies to the lands, and
this action of Congress was immediately followed by an
eager and resolute effort upon the part of the purchasers,
especially the New England purchasers, of the lands, to
induce Congress to apply a part of the five-million-acre
reservation to their respective claims. Their efforts were
not unsuccessful. The commission reported that the interest
of the United States, the tranquillity of those who might
thereafter inhabit the Yazoo territory, and various equitable
considerations, which might be urged in favor of
most of the existing claimants, rendered it expedient to
enter into a compromise on reasonable terms[124] ; and this
report brought about the introduction of a measure into
Congress to carry the recommendations of the commission
into execution, which, however, though pertinaciously
pressed in one form or another by every powerful influence
that can be enlisted in behalf of selfish legislation, and
though finally reinforced by the celebrated opinion of
Chief Justice Marshall in the case of Fletcher vs. Peck,[125]
holding that the rescinding act of the Georgia Legislature
impaired a contract and was therefore unconstitutional
and void, could never secure the complete legislative
assent of Congress so long as John Randolph remained a
member of that body (a).

At the head of the lobby maintained at Washington by
the New England-Mississippi Company, was no less a
person than Gideon Granger, the Postmaster General of
the United States, who had participated in the land

schemes, connected with the controversy over the Connecticut
Western Reserve; and was now charged by Randolph
with using his office to procure legislation favorable
to his client. So zealous was Granger that he did not even
hesitate to appear upon the floor of the House and openly
to solicit votes in favor of such legislation—an indecent
proceeding of which Randolph took full advantage in his
philippics. From the very beginning, and at every stage
of the effort to obtain the assent of Congress to the recommendations
of the Commissioners, Randolph assailed
it with a fierce and supple energy which made him far
more than a match for all his antagonists combined. In
reading the following words, we almost feel as if it was his
lot in the Yazoo debates to denounce wickedness as colossal
as that of the worst Roman proconsuls:

But the most striking of all Randolph's speeches on the
Yazoo question, which have come down to us, were two
which he delivered in support of a proviso, moved by Mr.
Clark of Virginia, declaring that no part of the five-million-acre
reserve should go to compensate the claimants under
the Act of Georgia passed in 1795.[127] It is not too much
to say that to find speeches equal to these it would be
necessary to limit our selection to utterances which, by
reason of their lofty sentiments, and vivid rhetorical form,
have become parliamentary classics.

Then, after referring to executive and legislative action,
which, he contended, also put the memorialists upon notice
of the fraud, Randolph went on:

Then, like a true lawyer, coming back with a bound to a
clinching point in his case, Randolph broke out into these
questions:

And then, to change our simile, like some lithe and powerful
denizen of the jungle, Randolph, with a single leap,
sank his fangs deeply into Granger's throat:

In his second speech, in support of Clark's proviso,
Randolph was, if anything, still bitterer. In this first
speech, he chastised the Yazoo claimants with whips;
now he chastised them with scorpions; nor did he fail to
lay his lash heavily across the back of the Committee on
Claims, which had brought in a report favorable to the
claimants,[132] to which the proviso had been offered as an
amendment:

In weighing the full significance of these speeches, it
should be remembered that they were delivered before the
Supreme Court of the United States, speaking through
Chief Justice Marshall, had decided that the repealing
act passed by the Georgia Legislature was unconstitutional,

and declared obiter that it might well be doubted
whether it was competent for the courts to set aside legislation
on the ground that it was begotten by corrupt inducements.
The case, therefore, was one in which the
attitude of the individual member of the House of Representatives
towards the recommendations of the Committee
on Claims was free to be determined mainly by the extent
to which he was able to respond to the purest and highest
motives to legislative action. In reading the attacks made
by Randolph on the Yazoo grant, it is impossible not to
feel the glow of his kindling imagination and fine moral
passion; but, along with it, is communicated to the reader
the inevitable reflection that, constituted as is the perplexing
web of conflicting facts and considerations, in
which most questions of justice and expediency are entangled,
constricted as is the freedom of the parliamentary
leader in dealing with ideal conceptions and standards
of duty by the pressure of practical necessities and importunities,
it was impossible for a man to continue to be the
master of the House of Representatives, who unfalteringly
opposed a compromise in a dubious controversy, approved
by a Commission, composed of three members of the Presidential
Cabinet (to say nothing of the fact that two of
them were such able and upright men as James Madison
and Albert Gallatin), held up to scorn the House Committee
on Claims, because it reached the same conclusion
as they, and ignored the fact that the Yazoo claimants had
not only won the general support of the Federalist members
of the House but that of some of the most influential
members of his own party; and that the whole tendency
of his speeches was to affix a stigma to every man who
countenanced the compromise in any manner or degree.
As has been said in kindred terms of similar conduct in
relation to war, the conduct of Randolph in this instance
was magnificent; but it was not Political Leadership.
Under the circumstances, the fiery invective that he exhaled
against the Yazoo conspirators and the Committee
on Claims could not fail to scorch the garments and to
irritate the skin of the President, Madison, and Gallatin,
as well as of some of the leading Democratic members of
the House from the Middle States and New England, and
of many other powerful individuals, whom no person,
aspiring to the leadership of his party in the House, could
afford lightly to affront. After the debate on the Clark
proviso, the loss of leadership in the House by Randolph
was, in our opinion, simply a question of time. Gideon
Granger, of course, was enraged by the assaults upon him,
and openly declared that he or Randolph must fall. He
was understood to mean that he would challenge Randolph
to a duel, and someone remarked that the latter would not
be backward in answering a call of that sort. "No,"
replied Granger, "not in that way. I mean as a public
man—as a political character." After the adjournment of
the 8th Congress, he made a tour of the New England
States for the purpose of organizing a party to pull down
Randolph. His efforts were attended with a considerable
degree of success, and Barnabas Bidwell, of Massachusetts,
was the person upon whom the malcontents agreed to
confer the mantle of leadership in their movement.[134]

But the intrepid stand taken by Randolph against the
Yazoo claimants made a profound impression upon the
general popular mind, which was well expressed by one of
the leading journals of the time.

Especially in Virginia, was Randolph's course rewarded
with marked approbation.

By the Richmond Enquirer, edited by the celebrated
Thomas Ritchie, the Yazoo fraud and compromise were
denounced as a "stupendous scheme of plunder."[136] And
in a private conversation with John Quincy Adams
William B. Giles told him that "Mr. Jefferson himself
would lose an election in Virginia, if he was known to
favor" the compromise.[137]

If it is true, as the elder Charles Francis Adams thought,
that the Virginia school of statesmanship was too abstract
in its attitude towards public issues, it cannot be denied
that the Yazoo debates suggest a nice question as to
whether such a turn of mind is not fully as venial as
that of being too practical.[138]

The impeachment of Samuel Chase, in which Randolph
was the Chief Manager on behalf of the House of Representatives,
was, like the impeachment of John Pickering,
Judge of the District Court for the District of New Hampshire,
in which he was also a Manager, during the same
Congress,[139] one of the ebullitions of the angry feud between
the Federalists and the Democrats, which, though inflamed
at the time by violent prejudices of many sorts, is traced
by a fair-minded and patriotic reader to-day with no feeling
but one of gratification that, in the formative period of our
national history, the centripetal force of Federalism should
have found an effective countercheck in the centrifugal
force of democracy; and the centrifugal force of democracy
an equally effective countercheck in the centripetal force
of Federalism. But that the Pickering and Chase impeachments

were only parts of a deliberate and systematic plan
to oust John Marshall and his associates from the bench
of the Supreme Court of the United States, is an idea much
more readily stated upon the strength of Federalist animosities
and suspicions than proved. Certainly, if such a
plan ever existed, Randolph was not privy to it, so far as
Marshall was concerned; for, repeatedly, as one of the
Managers of the Chase impeachment, he took occasion to
express the profound admiration which he entertained—
as a matter of fact, until the last hour of his life—for the
truly great and good man whose normal mind and kind
generous heart never experienced any difficulty in making
the proper allowances for Randolph's mental and moral
infirmities.[140]

The Chase trial, of course, lacked the ancient setting,
the ceremonious dignity and splendor and the vast volume
of accusatory wrong-doing and misery which belonged to
the impeachment of Warren Hastings. But, under the
stimulus of factious passions and the general feelings
aroused by the spectacle of a venerable signer of the
Declaration of Independence, and an Associate Justice of
the highest court in the land arraigned before the Federal
Senate upon charges, involving everything except life
itself that a human being should hold dear, even the simple
Republican conditions that surrounded the Chase trial
assumed a highly impressive aspect. To Samuel H. Smith,
one of the reporters, who took down the proceedings in the
case, we are indebted for a detailed description of the
manner in which they were staged. The Senate chamber
was fitted up in a style of appropriate elegance; benches,
covered with crimson on each side, and in a line with the
chair of the presiding officer, were assigned to the members
of the Senate; on the right, and in front of the chair, was
a box set apart for the Managers; and on the left was a
similar box for the use of Judge Chase and his counsel and

chairs for the use of such friends of his as he might wish to
have admitted to the chamber. The residue of the floor
was occupied by chairs for the accommodation of the
members of the House of Representatives and by boxes
for the reception of foreign ministers and civil and military
officers of the United States. On the right and left of the
chair, at the ends of the benches, assigned to the members
of the Court, were boxes for the stenographers. The permanent
gallery was thrown open to the public indiscriminately.
Below this gallery, and above the floor of the
House, was erected another gallery fitted up with peculiar
elegance, which was intended primarily for the use of the
ladies; but this feature of the arrangement was at an early
period of the trial abandoned; it having been found impracticable
to keep the sexes from commingling. At each
end of the new gallery, were boxes reserved for the ladies
attached to the families of public characters. The preservation
of order was entrusted to the Marshal of the District
of Columbia and his deputies.[141]

From day to day, the proceedings were followed with
intense interest by an audience, largely composed of ladies
dressed in the height of fashion, which gathered in the
chamber in a dense throng on the day when the final vote
was taken on the Articles of Impeachment, under circumstances
of the utmost solemnity, and listened to the poll
of the Senators with the profoundest interest and anxiety.

Over the proceedings presided the Vice-President Aaron
Burr, whose conspicuous station, regular features, and
elegant person would have made him an object of universal
curiosity, even if he had not been credited with
many bonnes fortunes, and had not recently killed Alexander
Hamilton in a duel—an act for which he still stood
indicated in two States. His conduct, after the beginning
of the trial, though he excited some resentment by testily
scolding members of the Senate for not holding longer

sessions or for walking between him and the Managers, or
for munching apples or cake during the trial,[142] was distinguished
by ability and impartiality. When Judge
Chase first appeared in the case, Burr, who was declared
by a newspaper of the day to have conducted the trial
with "the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but with
the rigor of a devil,"[143] insisted upon the English rule which
denied a prisoner the privilege of sitting when on trial,
and ordered a chair, which the Sergeant-at-arms had
brought forward for Judge Chase's comfort, to be taken
away; but, upon the Judge's request, he recalled his command
and allowed him to be seated.[144] "We are, indeed,
fallen on evil times," groaned Senator Plumer. "The high
office of President is filled by an infidel, that of Vice-President
by a murderer."[145]

The figure, however, upon which all eyes were fixed was,
of course, that of Judge Chase himself. More than six
feet in height, with a large head whitened by the lapse of
sixty-one years, a broad, brownish red face, wide, thick
shoulders, and a trunk overnourished by generous living,
he easily filled any eye that might be bent upon him[146] ;
and, around him, and prepared to defend him with every
resource, known to professional learning, ingenuity, and
eloquence was a group of most remarkable lawyers;
Joseph Hopkinson, of Pennsylvania, whose fame should be
shifted from such a dubious prop as the authorship of
Hail Columbia to his eminent professional standing;
Philip Barton Key, of Maryland, a lawyer worthy of a
high place even in the history of that nursing-mother of
great lawyers; Robert Goodloe Harper (a), a native of
Virginia, who, as a member of the House of Representatives
from South Carolina, and of the United States

Senate from Maryland became one of the most prominent
public men of his time, and was also one of the leaders of
the Maryland Bar; Charles Lee, of Virginia, the Attorney
General of the United States under the administration of
President Adams (a), and Luther Martin, a slovenly, coarse,
drunken man, and, at times, a very prolix and tedious
speaker,[147] but, in amplitude of professional knowledge, in
legal acumen, and in the combination of knock-down and
drag-out characteristics of mind and temper which made
up the masterful trial lawyer of the early bellicose, gladiatorial
type, so conspicuous that, when stricken by paralysis
in the old age, which he reached in defiance of every law
prescribed by physical health, the General Assembly of
Maryland imposed a tax of five dollars upon every member
of the Maryland Bar for his support.[148] To meet this cluster
of celebrated lawyers, the House of Representatives put
forward seven Managers; John Randolph, who was not a
practising lawyer at all, and had hardly studied law long
enough to learn the difference between a contract and a
tort; Cæsar A. Rodney, of Delaware; Joseph H. Nicholson,
of Maryland; Peter Early, of Georgia; John Boyle, of
Kentucky; Christopher Clark, of Virginia; and G. W.
Campbell, of Tennessee[149] ; lawyers, it is true, and, in some
instances, lawyers not without repute; but, in the aggregate,
wholly outmatched by the antagonists whom they
were elected to confront. The articles under which Judge
Chase was impeached were eight in number, and resolved
themselves into the charges that he had withheld legal
rights from John Fries, when the latter was tried for treason
on account of his part in the Whiskey Insurrection, to
which he was entitled; that he had in different respects
been guilty of partiality, intemperance, injustice, and oppression
in connection with the trial of James Thompson
Callender, when accused of libelling John Adams; and
that his relations to Grand Juries, first at Newcastle, Delaware,
and later at Baltimore, had been marked by political
partisanship.[150]

A majority of the Senators found Judge Chase "guilty"
under three of the eight articles; under one article he was
unanimously found "not guilty," and under the remaining
four articles he was found "not guilty" by a majority of
two in one instance, and of twenty-six in another and of
fourteen in each of two other instances. Under no article,
therefore, was he found "guilty" by a two-thirds vote of
the Senators present, as required by the Federal Constitution.
Hence Burr was compelled to declare that
Samuel Chase, Esquire, stood acquitted of all the articles
exhibited by the House of Representatives against
him.[151]

That Judge Chase richly deserved conviction under
more than one of the articles we entertain no doubt, and
the majority might well have gone further and found him
guilty on one or more articles in addition to the three
under which they did find him "guilty." The testimony
adduced before the Senate shows that he was an unfeeling,
bigoted partisan, without any proper sense of
judicial impartiality or decorum (a); and the admissions
in his answer, and the observations of his Federalist contemporaries
show also that, when the proceedings against
him commenced, neither he nor his party friends had much
confidence in the strength of his defenses. Plumer, Bayard,
and Pickering[152] all anticipated his conviction, though
professing to rest their forebodings on other grounds than
his guilt.

That Judge Chase was not convicted, was due to the
fact that the thick and thin Federalists in the Senate were
as blindly determined to find him "not guilty" as most of
the Democrats in the Senate were determined to find him
"guilty"; to the fact that the more scrupulous and fair-minded
Federalists in the Senate saw in his impeachment
an intent to revolutionize the entire Supreme Court; and
to the fact that enough Democratic Senators, to save him
from conviction, cherished the conscientious belief that it
was better to tolerate the misconduct of a single learned
and able Judge, and aged Revolutionary patriot, into
which, no matter how indecorous or partisan, no ingredient
of corruption had entered, than by his conviction to spread
abroad yet more widely the radical spirit which was
undermining in the popular breast the old conservative
sentiment of respect for the judicial office.

The views that we have expressed in regard to the
weight of the evidence in the Chase trial have been formed
notwithstanding the fact that we do not hesitate to say
that, in our judgment, any impeachment that would really
have led to the removal of Chief Justice Marshall, and have
arrested the powerful series of judicial opinions from his
pen, which did so much to invigorate all the organs of
Federal authority, and to promote our national unity,
would have been a thing to be deplored fully as much as
if there had been a successful consummation of the Conway
Cabal against the leadership of Washington during the
Revolutionary War.

Randolph was the real Democratic protagonist in the

Chase impeachment. Of his first speech, John Quincy
Adams says in his Memoirs only that Mr. Randolph,
Chairman of the Managers, in a speech of about an hour
and a half, opened the cause on the part of the House in
support of the eight Articles.[154] Of Randolph's second
speech, however, when his feelings had been worked up to
the highest point by the heated controversy over the
Articles, not one of which evoked from his intensely partisan
nature any response but that of "not guilty," he gives
this highly colored description:

Of the first speech Dr. Manasseh Cutler, a member of the
House at the time, remarks in his diary, "Randolph made
his speech, nothing great. Closed with much spitefulness"[156]
; and, in a letter to the Rev. Dr. Dana, he termed
the speech a "feeble" one.[157] Of the second speech Dr.
Cutler remarks in his diary: "Then Randolph began, and
spoke about 3½ hours—an outrageous, infuriated declamation
which might have done honor to Marat or Robespierre."[158]
Of the second speech Plumer, at the time a
member of the Senate, wrote to his wife: "His (Randolph's)
speech was devoid of argument, method, or consistency,
but was replete with invective and even vulgarity

. . . I never heard him deliver such a weak, feeble,
and deranged harangue."[159] To say the least, these comments
should be received with a high degree of caution.
Cutler, Plumer, and Adams all had the habit of invective
as badly as Randolph himself. The only difference was
that in them it lacked the artistic form and piquant flavor
which he gave it. Cutler and Plumer were bigoted Federalists;
and Adams was no better at this time; and all
three had quite as little use for a Virginian as Randolph
had, or professed to have, for a New Englander. Fully
possessed of the idea that the infidel Jefferson and his
Democratic canaille contemplated nothing less than the
removal of all the members of the Supreme Court and the
general desecration of the Bench, their minds, under the
influence of the stirring spectacle that they had witnessed
every day during the trial, and of the inflammatory appeals
of Judge Chase's advocates, had become wrought
up to the highest point of excitement. It is noticeable
that in his Memoirs Adams passes no censorious judgment
on Randolph's first speech. Who that is familiar with the
sour eructations of his Memoirs can doubt that he would
have done so had it not been a good one? It is noticeable
also that Cutler has nothing in his diary, at any rate, to
say of this speech except that it was "nothing great"; and
that Plumer had nothing to say of it at all. It is enough
for us to affirm that the speech, even as reported, can take
care of itself. Better speeches have been delivered by
other famous orators; many better speeches were delivered
by Randolph himself in his career. Lemuel Sawyer,
who was, however, by no means an unqualified admirer
even of Randolph's public character, tells us that
"it was not considered the best of his forensic efforts."[160]
As it was but an opening speech in a trial, a kind of speech
which imposes distinct limitations upon the highest manifestations
of eloquence, it could hardly be such; but that
it was a clear, concise, and pointed statement of what the
Managers intended to prove, no one who has read it, and
has had enough professional experience to know what the
function of an opening speech is, can deny.

How far Adams was justified in imputing extreme irrelevancy
and lack of order, coherence, and logic to Randolph's
second speech, we really have no means of determining. As
reported by Samuel H. Smith and his fellow-stenographer,
it occupies only about thirty crown-octavo pages in twelve
point type. Whether the speech consumed in its delivery
about three and a half hours, as Cutler states, or only two
and a half, as Adams states, it must not be fully reported;
for even the most deliberate speaker would not take two
and a half hours to deliver a speech of such brief length as
the printed version of this one. Nor can we see that the
speech, even as reported, merits such condemnation as
Adams deals out to it. It certainly is not distinguished
by the directness, the logical texture, the orderly arrangement
and the high-pitched but unbrokenly sustained
rhythm of the Yazoo speeches, for instance. At times its
voice (so to speak) cracks, but it is illumined here and
there by more than one of Randolph's very best mental
characteristics. One, his remarkable faculty for lighting
up an obscure subject with a single flash, is startlingly
illustrated by what he said in reply to the contention of
Judge Chase's counsel that Judge Chase was not impeachable
for any cause that was not indictable—a contention
on which the entire legal argument in the case
largely turned.

The fact that Randolph shed tears while delivering the
closing speech in the Chase case is also evidenced by a
letter from Dr. Cutler to Dr. Torrey.

The prudence of not inclining the ear too quickly to
what such uncompromising Federalists as Plumer or Dr.
Cutler had to say about Randolph in connection with the
Chase trial is strongly confirmed, we might add, by what
Plumer had to say about him as soon as Randolph became
alienated from the majority of his party. In his Register
Plumer refers to this break, which apparently augured so

well for the Federalists, and, alluding to one of the speeches
delivered by Randolph on Gregg's Non-Importation
Resolution, he writes to an unknown correspondent in this
manner: "The attention of crowded galleries was fixed
upon him. The Senators left their chamber to listen to his
eloquence. I heard him for nearly two hours with very
great pleasure. He is certainly a man of very great talents,
and by far the best speaker in the House."[163] (a).
John Quincy Adams, for whom Ezekiel Webster, the brother
of Daniel, once said that even his political adherents
could not entertain one kind personal feeling, unless they
disembowelled themselves, like a trussed turkey, of all that
was human nature within them, felt for John Randolph
a hatred which was nothing less than a form of mental
gangrene.[164] Randolph, he said, was the image of a great
man stamped upon base metal.[165] On another occasion, he
likened Randolph's eloquence to that of Hogarth's Gin
Lane and Beer Alley.[166] And, on the same occasion, he
applied to him two lines from Ovid; the latter of which
would not have lost its point if it had been given a retroverted
direction:

But even Adams was compelled to admit in the end,
though a little later Daniel Webster would have saved him
the necessity of doing so, that there was no one from the
Free States in the House able to contend on equal terms
with either John Randolph or Henry Clay.[168] And yet,

suggestively enough, when considered in connection with
what he said of Randolph's second speech in the Chase
trial, a few weeks later he describes Randolph as having
just made a speech which, as usual, had neither beginning,
middle, nor end, and issued from a mind in which egotism,
Virginian aristocracy, slave-scourging, liberty, religion,
literature, science, wit, fancy, generous feelings, and
malignant passions constituted a chaos from which nothing
orderly could ever flow. Twenty yards of tape-worm,
Adams said, had come from him but there was an endless
length left within. However, though he was a mere
visitor to the House on this occasion, Adams records in
his Memoirs the fact that he listened to Randolph between
three and four hours, which he would hardly have done if
Randolph's eloquence had been a mere vermifuge.[169]

One passage in Randolph's first speech in the Chase
trial was destined to become a standing feature of declamation
exercises at American academies. This was its conclusion
in which he referred to the precipitancy of Judge
Chase in passing upon a point of law in the case of John
Fries, who was sentenced to death, when tried before Judge
Chase, but was pardoned by President Adams.

Nor should we fail to recall the sonorous and impressive
words with which Randolph made his last appeal to the
Senate:

The whole truth about Randolph's part in the Chase
trial, however, cannot be told by any honest biographer

without the admission that, to say the least, it added little
or nothing to the reputation which he had acquired during
the Sixth and Seventh Congresses and the earlier portion
of the Eighth. To begin with, the impeachment failed,
and who does not remember the lines of Emerson:

Then, the discredit of defeat had to be endured almost
entirely by Randolph alone. It was at the direct instigation
of a letter from Jefferson to Joseph H. Nicholson that
the impeachment proceedings were commenced. After a
political harangue by Judge Chase to a Grand Jury at
Baltimore, which was subsequently made the basis of one
of the articles of impeachment, Jefferson wrote to Nicholson:
"Ought this seditious and official attack on the
principles of our Constitution and on the proceedings of a
state to go unpunished? And to whom so pointedly as
yourself will the public look for the necessary measures?"
But that circumspect politician was careful to add: "For
myself it is better that I should not interfere"[172] ; and,
acting under the advice of Macon, Nicholson, for fear
that he might be charged with coveting Judge Chase's
shoes, passed on the lead in the case to Randolph, who
was not easily perturbed by fears of any sort.[173] The consequence
was that, when the impeachment failed, Jefferson
had nothing to do but to keep his lips closed, and
Nicholson had only a subaltern's share of the catastrophe
to bear; while Randolph had to face the plenary responsibility
which always attaches to the commander-in-chief
in a disastrous enterprise. And the necessity certainly
could not have been rendered any the less painful or prejudicial

to him by the fact, which he must have known, that
at least one member of Jefferson's cabinet, who had his eye
upon the Presidency, found no little satisfaction in the
blighting effect that the miscarriage of the Chase impeachment
was likely to have upon the opening bud of Randolph's
presidential promise. We know from the Memoirs
of John Quincy Adams that, after the verdict in the Chase
case, Madison took little pains to conceal his amusement
over the chagrin of the Managers.[174]

Moreover, with his usual clear-sightedness, Joseph G.
Baldwin, in his admirable essay on Randolph, appraises
very correctly the worth of Randolph's first and second
speeches in the Chase trial when he says that his efforts in
it, "though good specimens of oratory and rhetoric, were
rather a foil than a match to the trained forensic skill,
legal learning, and rough but strong logical powers of
Luther Martin."[175] The questions, involved in the argument
in the case, were in a large measure purely legal
questions, to which no one could hope to address himself
with distinguished success, unless qualified for the task by
the highest degree of technical knowledge and special
training. Burke said that lawyers failed in Parliament
because they brought to it nothing but the rinsings of
their empty bottles. If Randolph can be justly said to
have failed in point of forensic efficiency in the Chase
case, it was because he brought to it nothing but the rinsings
of his empty parliamentary bottles; which, under the
cricumstances, was all that he or any other member of
the House, who was not a lawyer by profession, could bring
to it. The eight articles of impeachment were written by
his own hand, and they were drawn up with a degree of
transparent clearness and pointed brevity which any
lawyer, however eminent or skillful, might have envied.
But this was mainly a matter of literary composition,
calling for nothing more than the exercise of native and

acquired gifts of expression which Randolph possessed in a
remarkable degree. His opening speech, too, as we have
said, was an excellent one; but the office of delivering this
called for no qualifications essentially different in kind
from those requisite for his statements as Chairman of the
Committee on Ways and Means of the House. The
searching test, however, of Randolph's ability to cope with
his professional antagonists, to whom the discussion of
legal questions was as familiar as the untying of their
garters, arose when he came to his concluding speech on
behalf of the Managers, in which, in addition to summing
up and dissecting the evidence, he was expected, among
other things, to contend that Judge Chase erred at the
trial of James Thompson Callender at Richmond in excluding
the evidence of John Taylor of Caroline because he
could not prove the truth of the whole of one of the charges
in the indictment, although the charge embraced more
than one fact,[176] and also in awarding a capias against Callender
instead of ordering the clerk to issue a summons.[177]
In his last speech, Randolph fell below the standard of his
professional antagonists as Fox or Sheridan, neither of
whom were lawyers, might have done, or as Martin, or
Harper, if they had not been lawyers, might have done.
When he entered upon this speech, he was in a low state of
health, partly the result of habitual indisposition, and
partly the result of the excessive labors which his delicate
frame had undergone during the second session of the
Eighth Congress. On this account, he had more than once
been compelled to be absent while the trial was going on;
and, doubtless, to the nervous, overwrought condition,
in which he issued from the exciting Yazoo debates to take
his place at the head of the Managers, are to be attributed
the symptoms of physical disturbance which marked,
though not to the exaggerated extent pictured by Adams,
his second speech. Singularly deliberate and self-possessed
as a speaker, if a great volume of contemporary testimony
to that effect is to be believed, no other explanation
is tenable. But, apart from his normal state of health,
poor at its best, Randolph brought to this second speech
in the Chase case pretty much everything that he had to
bring to such a case; fresh, crisp ideas, happy images,
blistering invective, quick strokes of instinctive intelligence,
and polished declamation. But law and legal methods
of statement and reasoning, in other words the things
most essential to the proper presentation of his case, he
did not bring, because he did not have them to bring. To
use a coarse saying, he was not fighting on his own dunghill;
and Hopkinson, Key, Harper, and Martin were. If
he failed, it was as Luther Martin failed in the Federal
Convention of 1787, when brought into contrast with men
like James Madison, who had given to great questions of
public policy, and to broad constitutional principles, the
same special study that Martin had given to ordinary
principles of civil and criminal law, or as he would have
failed if he had sought to rival Randolph in the debate
over Gregg's Non-Importation Resolution or in the debates
over the Missouri Compromise. There is a world of
shrewd justice in the question put by Charles Lamb to
someone who criticised Smollett's continuation of Hume's
History of England. Well, what if Hume had attempted
to continue Humphrey Clinker? Luther Martin and
Robert Goodloe Harper were great lawyers; Randolph
was a great parliamentary and popular orator. If they
won any decisive triumph over him in the Chase case, it
was a fleeting one, when measured by its relations to the
sum of Randolph's achievements, and to the extent of his
fame in his own and our time. A few brief biographical
sketches suffice to satisfy such special interest as is felt
about them, masters of their noble calling in their day
as they were; but the universal interest felt in Randolph
by his contemporaries, and the widespread interest felt in
him long after his death and now, have been attested by
every trumpet that Fame presses to her lips; history,
biography, tradition, song, the brush of the painter, the
pencil of the caricaturist, the death mask of the sculptor.
Of all the men who directly participated in the Chase
trial his shade is almost the only one that can proudly
say: "Volito vivus per ora hominum." Nor should we
omit to mention the fact that one of the remarkable lawyers,
who represented Chase during his trial, Joseph Hopkinson,
is known to have once expressed the opinion that
Randolph should have been bred to the bar.[178] "Were
we," says Sawyer, "to select any portion of his (Randolph's)
legislative career as the most brilliant, one in
which his faculties were in their fullest vigor, and his influence
the most powerful, we should refer to the . . .
sessions of 1804-05."[179] Whether our selection would fall
upon the same sessions or not, it is unnecessary to say;
but it is certain that, besides testimony of a more direct
nature to the shining talents exhibited by Randolph during
those sessions, we have convincing evidence of the place
that he held in the eye of the House in the numerous
references made to him in debate during those sessions by
friend and foe. A proof of the admiration and cordial
affection entertained for him by his most faithful adherents
in Congress is found in the declaration of Cæsar A.
Rodney on one occasion that it was both his pride and
pleasure to act with him.[180]

Again and again, reluctant acknowledgments of his rare
gifts were made by his opponents in debate. During the
Yazoo discussion, one of his Virginia colleagues, John G.
Jackson, who approved the Yazoo Compromise, and had
no good blood for him, declared disconsolately that Randolph's
influence in the House was equal to the rapacity
of the speculator [Granger] whose gigantic grasp he had

described.[181] On the other hand, the following extract from
an attack on him by Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, during
the Yazoo discussion, is a good illustration of the extent to
which the unhappy sectional jealousies between the North
and the South, which began so early and lasted so long,
were inflamed by the general feeling, on the part of the
Democratic masses of New England, that the structure of
Southern society was essentially aristocratic, and that the
institution of slavery bestowed too much ease and luxury
upon the beati possidentes of its creation not to justify a
little acrid discontent on their part with their own less
favored lot under more equal conditions beneath a harsher
sky and on a more sterile soil. After repelling the insinuation
that Granger (a) had bribed him with postal contracts,
Lyon said:

But even Lyon had to admit, as soon as he caught his
breath, after this diatribe, that Randolph's fortune, leisure,

and genius had enabled him to obtain a great share of the
wisdom of the schools.[183]

The acquittal of Judge Chase was a stinging disappointment
to both Randolph and Nicholson. The former relieved
his pent-up feelings by promptly proposing in the
House an amendment to the Federal Constitution, authorizing
the President to remove a Federal judge on the joint
address of both Houses of Congress[184] ; and the latter by
promptly proposing an amendment to the Federal Constitution
empowering State Legislatures to recall United
States Senators at their pleasure.[185] (a) But even the
result of the Chase impeachment could not seriously
qualify the supreme gratification with which Randolph in
after years reverted to Jefferson's first administration and
to the position that he had occupied in connection with it.
To him those four years were always a kind of Saturnian
age when the army and navy were diminished and the
insolence of the military hireling kept safely within
bounds; when the reduction of national taxation and the
reduction of the national debt went hand in hand; when
true Democratic thrift, frugality, simplicity, justice, and
liberty prevailed; and when a vast stretch of country,
almost large enough to sate the territorial lust of Alexander
or Cæsar, was purchased for a song from a conqueror even
greedier of dominion than they.

"Never was there an administration," he said in a note to
his well-known speech in 1828 on Retrenchment and
Reform, "more brilliant than that of Mr. Jefferson up to
this period. We were indeed in the `full tide of successful
experiment!' Taxes repealed; the public debt amply
provided for, both principal and interest; sinecures abolished;
Louisiana acquired; public confidence unbounded."[186]

1 Reg. of Debates, v. 4, Part 1, 1170.