University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII

Congressional Career Continued. In Opposition

During the recess of the Ninth Congress, Randolph
remained so agitated by the tempestuous scenes through
which he had passed, that he wrote to Nicholson from
Bizarre that he longed for its second session so that he
might again face "the monster of detraction."[1] A month
later, in another letter to the same correspondent, he said
that persons were not wanting outside of his district who
were very willing to lend a helping hand to pull him down,
and that he had been told that one of them—William B.
Giles—had been very violent, and had even descended to
unworthy means, of which he had deemed him incapable.[2]
For this conduct, Giles had to drain a bitter cup of atonement.
And, in the same letter, Randolph mentions the
fact that Granger had been inquiring whether Creed
Taylor—the lawyer who had launched Randolph upon his
first candidacy for Congress—could not be brought forward
to oppose him.

When Congress reconvened on Dec. 1, 1806, Randolph
did not appear until some twenty minutes after the House
had decided to adhere to its usual practice of filling the
places on the Committee of Ways and Means by the
appointment of the Speaker. Its hesitation was due to an
effort to bring about the election of the members of the
Committee by ballot, which was prompted by the desire

of some of Randolph's enemies to exclude him from it.[3]
Under the circumstances, Macon's nice scruples would not
permit him to appoint Randolph to it—a result so distressing
to the feelings of Macon, who ardently admired and
loved Randolph, that he wrote to Nicholson the next day
that in consequence of it he had spent a sleepless night.[4]
There were two men on the Committee, however, Joseph
Clay, of Pennsylvania, and James M. Garnett, of Virginia,
who admired and loved Randolph as much, perhaps, as
Macon did; and, by their unselfish spirit of self-sacrifice,
Randolph was restored to the Chairmanship of the Committee
a few days after his exclusion from it. First, by an
order of the House, Garnett was excused from serving on
it and Randolph appointed in his place[5] ; and, a few days
later, Clay, whose name came first on the Committee, as
originally appointed, arose and announced that, under an
existing rule of the House, the member first named on
Committees was Chairman unless another member was
chosen by the Committee, and that he was instructed to
say, that, pursuant to this rule, the Committee of Ways
and Means had appointed John Randolph its Chairman.[6]

Generally speaking, the proceedings during the second
session of the Ninth Congress were such as signally to vindicate,
in many respects, the course of Randolph and his
friends during its first session. "The doings here," Macon
wrote to Nicholson, "will hereby convince every candid
man in the world that the Republicans of the Old School
were not wrong last winter. Give truth fair play and it
will prevail."[7] To begin with, there was no response in the
President's Annual Message to the war-drum that Crowninshield
and the other members of his group had beat so
loudly at the last session.

And, after the Annual Message had been read, recantations
of conclusions, reached by the Jeffersonian majority in the
House at the last session, followed each other so rapidly
that more than one of Jefferson's stoutest champions might
well have asked what all the pother had been about. One
bill, which received the assent of the House, provided for the
suspension, in the discretion of the President, of the Non-Importation
Act passed at the last session,[9] and another
abolished the duty on salt.[10] And there were still other
penitential measures to afford Randolph the opportunity,
of which he was quick to avail himself, to remind his
former adversaries how senseless had been the cry of
"mad dog" which they had raised against him at the last
session.[11] If he had been less disposed to chew the cud of
past resentments, and had been a little more conciliatory
and judicious in word and manner, it hardly admits of
doubt that he could have reacquired his former position
of recognized leadership in spite of the smouldering animosity
with which members of the House, like Sloan and
Jackson, regarded him, and that there would have been
more rejoicing in administration circles over the one lamb
that had been lost and afterwards found than over the
ninety and nine that had not gone astray. All that was
asked of him was that he should pay some moderate regard
to the ordinary rules of party discipline, keep his

squeamish scruples within reasonable bounds, and support
James Madison for the Presidential successorship. To
no one was this more apparent than to Randolph himself.

Notwithstanding the bold suggestion made by Jefferson
in his annual message that Federal surpluses should be
applied to the great purposes of the public education,
roads, rivers, canals and such other objects of public
importance as it might be thought proper to add to the
constitutional enumeration of Federal powers, including
the establishment of a national university, it looked for a
time as if Randolph might yet realize his dream of a commonwealth
founded on the old unsophisticated Republican
principles. More than once the desire to placate him
seemed to be stronger even than the wishes of the President.
Marked tenderness was shown to his views about
the army and navy; he decisively defeated the effort to
suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the case of Burr's
accomplices, Bollman and Swartwout,[12] and a majority of
the House united with him in cutting down appropriations
and refusing to fortify New York. The attitude of
the majority towards this last proposition would be too
fatuous for belief if it were not rendered more intelligible
by the pacifist simpletons and knaves who did so much to
enervate our national energies on the eve of the recent
World War. "When the enemy comes, let them take our
towns, and let us retire into the country," was the suggestion
of Mr. Nelson, of Maryland.[13] The fact that our
commercial towns were defenceless was supposed by Mr.

Holland, of North Carolina, to be our only safety[14] ; and,
bearing in mind one of the perverted trains of reasoning
pursued by the latter day pacifists, of whom we have just
spoken, the atavism of most human ideas comes home to
us afresh when we read that Mr. Eppes, of Virginia, the
President's son-in-law, declared that the principle laid
down by a preceding speaker [Mr. Mumford, of New York]
that, to preserve peace, we ought to be prepared for war,
was the very principle which was the source of all the
miseries of Europe.[15] John Randolph, himself, contended
that, no matter how well fortified New York might be, an
invading army could land above the City, and cut off its
intercourse with the country, and that fortifications at
New York, therefore, would simply be a gracious gift to the
enemy. It is not surprising that puerilities like these
should have been set down by members of the House from
the New England and the Middle States either to the lack
of a sober, practical training or to a narrow, sectional bias.
And Randolph's capacity for effective ridicule was never
turned to a worse purpose than when he imparted additional
irritation to the feelings of these members by declaring
that he suspected that the only effectual plan for
defending New York was that proposed on a former day
by Mr. Elmer of New York; that is to say, to stop up the
channel leading to its harbor. This, Randolph said, would
undoubtedly be an adequate defense, and the learned
gentleman who suggested it must, he added, be a disciple
of the learned Dr. Last who had an infallible recipe for
curing corns on the human toes; namely, cutting the toes
off.[16]

But all efforts to lure and impound the estray proved
entirely unsuccessful. Throughout the second session of
the Ninth Congress, Randolph, though he frequently participated
in its dabates, continued to sustain a relation of
complete aloofness to Jefferson. He once declared that he

was sprung from a race who were known never to forsake a
friend or to forgive a foe.[17] In the language of his reply to
Smilie, during the debate over Burr's conspiracy at this
session, at the preceding session he had had the finger of
scorn pointed at him and the cry of "mad dog" and "political
defection" raised against him[18] ; and he was as slow
as King Powhatan himself was, under similar, though less
artificial, conditions, to exchange the tomahawk for the
calumet. Several times, during the second session of the
Ninth Congress, he said things sufficiently rasping to bring
the red hue of anger again to the faces of Smilie, Sloan and
Jackson. In one of the discussions over the duty on salt,
he mentioned that the House Bill repealing it was passed
on the recommendation of the President, but recollecting
himself, he instantly added: "Not that that consideration
had any influence on my vote."[19] Wounds received by him
never, and wounds inflicted by him, seldom, fully healed,
and it is impossible too to go over the debates during the
second session of the Ninth Congress without having the
impression corroborated that, quite apart from his retaliatory
spirit, Randolph, except when he was rallying a downcast
opposition, was constitutionally unfitted for any
leadership in a parliamentary sense other than the kind
which is taken but not given; and that kind of leadership
is always highly precarious. "Leave the President alone,"
was the advice to him of his friend, Joseph Bryan, shortly
after the close of the first session of the Ninth Congress,[20]
and this was the wise counsel that the same friend gave
him just before Congress reconvened in the succeeding
December.

If Randolph had been capable of taking this advice, he
might in time have regained his lost ground. But to leave
the President alone and to exhibit a little complaisance
were the very things that he was incapable of doing. He
could not even leave the Senate alone, for, in the course of
the debates over the duty on salt, he resented some changes
made by it in the House Bill repealing this duty in these
sarcastic terms; after ignoring entirely Macon's effort to
halt him when he had first uttered the words, "Their High
Mightinesses, the Senate":

Randolph was too proud, too aspiring, too conscious of
intellectual power himself readily to give the pledge of
fealty a second time to even such an amiable master as
Jefferson, and complaisance was something that he was
entirely too stiffly sincere to manifest when he did not
really feel it.

Besides, it is but fair to him to remember, in this connection,
too, that he was wholly out of touch with the
influences, partly selfish and partly fatalistic, which were
gradually transforming the Old Republicanism first into
Federalism and then into something still more advanced;
that his chief aims were to protect the reserved rights of

the States by a strict construction of the Federal Constitution,
to rebuke every unwarranted exercise of Executive
authority, and to make the Federal Government the
simple, frugal and honest agency for the promotion of the
popular welfare and happiness, which the Republican
party before its accession to power had contended that it
should be; and that there was no more reason why Madison,
with his recommendation of the Yazoo compromise,
his early Federalist leanings and his lack of virile, stirring
force should be more agreeable to him as a candidate for
the Presidency in 1807 than he had been in 1806. And it
will soon be seen also that, for some time, Randolph, who,
in 1805, at any rate, it is safe to say, had more political
influence in Virginia than any other Virginian except
Jefferson—Madison and Monroe not excepted—had assumed
the character of a political manager, and was
planning, with the aid of such uncorrupted Republicans
as John Taylor of Caroline, and Littleton Waller Tazewell,
to elect Monroe to the Presidency, and to bring the Federal
Government back to the contracted orbit from which
it had wandered. The most important discussion, developed
by the second session of the Ninth Congress, was
over the bill to prohibit the importation of slaves into the
United States after Dec. 31, 1807. It is highly interesting
because it demonstrated not only how increasingly intolerant
of slavery the Free States, and especially Pennsylvania,
with its Quaker leaven, were becoming, but how little
comparatively the slave-owners of the South Atlantic
States shared the generous impulses in favor of emancipation
which had colored public opinion in Virginia so deeply
immediately after the Revolution, and was again to do so
still more deeply in 1831.

Whether a crime or not, the idea that slavery was not an
evil was one to which it was impossible for Randolph to
subscribe; and, while the debate on the main question
involved in the bill was pending, he preserved a notable
reticence; but when a bill relating to the same subject came
down from the Senate, with a provision in it prohibiting
the coastwise domestic slave-trade in vessels of less burden
than forty tons, he, who was for so many years,
where Southern rights under the Federal Constitution
were menaced, to be "the lonely warder on the hill," attacked
it with all his wonted force as an infraction of
private rights of property.

He further declared prophetically that, if ever the time of
disunion between the States should arise, the line of severance
would be between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding
states.[24] And almost as significant were the
words which he used a little later in the same debate:

After the adjournment of the second session of the Ninth
Congress in March, 1807, Randolph was appointed by
Chief Justice Marshall the foreman of the grand jury that
indicted Aaron Burr for treason. It was not formed until
Burr had successfully objected to changes which had been
made by the marshal in the original panel after he had
summoned the twenty-four freeholders required by law to
constitute it.[26] His next step was to challenge some of the
remaining grand jurors "for favor"; that is to say, for
prejudice or an unfriendly bias against him. One of his
challenges was to Senator William Branch Giles,[27] because
merely upon the strength of the documents, which had accompanied
Jefferson's special message to Congress in regard
to Burr's conspiracy, Giles had favored the suspension
of the writ of habeas corpus. Burr knew also, of
course, that Jefferson was the master spirit behind the
prosecution, and that Giles was on terms of close intimacy
with him. Giles promptly admitted the truth of Burr's
statements, and offered to withdraw, and was allowed to
do so, though denying that he cherished any personal
resentment against the accused; and claiming that he
could do justice as a grand juror. Burr, in turn, took particular
pains to disavow any animosity towards Giles;
not forgetting doubtless that, after the death of Hamilton,
Giles had drawn a petition to the Governor of New Jersey,
praying the discontinuance of the prosecution against Burr
for murder, and had induced nearly all the Republican
members of the Senate to sign it.[28] Burr also challenged
Wilson Cary Nicholas, and, when asked by him on what
grounds, replied because Nicholas was his bitter personal
enemy.[29] The exception was well taken. Nicholas was, if
anything, more intimate with Jefferson than Giles; had
been a member of the House of Representatives, when the

Federalist plot to make Burr President was hatched; had
done everything in his power to bring about the election
of Clinton instead of Burr to the Vice-Presidency; and now
admitted that his suspicions had been strongly excited by
Burr's western journey.[30] Joseph Eggleston, another juror,
asked to be excused because he had declared his belief in
Burr's guilt, but admitted, when questioned by Chief
Justice Marshall, that he could do justice in the case.
Burr declared that he would leave the question entirely to
the Chief Justice. "The industry which has been used
through this country (Virginia) to prejudice my cause," he
said, "leaves me very little chance indeed of an impartial
jury."[31] When Randolph was appointed foreman, he
quickly asked to be excused because of his "strong prepossession."
"Really," commented Burr, "I am afraid we
shall not be able to find any man without this prepossession."
But Marshall announced that a man must not
only have formed but declared an opinion to be excused
from serving on the jury; and Randolph was duly sworn
as foreman.[32] Burr probably thought that Randolph's
"strong prepossession" against him would be more than
counterbalanced by his strong prepossession against Jefferson.
So far as we are aware no grand jury composed of so
many conspicuous citizens has ever been organized in the
United States (a). Its personnel was as follows: John
Randolph, Jr., Joseph Eggleston, Joseph C. Cabell, Littleton
Waller Tazewell, Robert Barraud Taylor, James
Pleasants, John Brockenbrough, William Daniel, James
M. Garnett, John Mercer, Edward Pegram, Munford
Beverly, John Ambler, Thomas Harrison, Alexander
Shephard and James Barbour. It is a striking proof of the
high standing, which Randolph enjoyed in Virginia at this
time, that he should have been selected as the foreman of
such a grand jury by the Chief Justice, whose rigid impartiality throughout the trial was so blamelessly maintained
that both prosecution and defense were at one time
or another disgruntled with him. If personal considerations
entered into the matter, the act of Marshall was
natural enough, for he had already had good reason to
realize the high esteem in which his powerful intellect and
personal virtues were held by Randolph. All things considered,
Randolph was as favorably situated as any man
in Virginia at that time of equal prominence could well be
to do Burr justice. On the one hand, his relations with
Jefferson were strained, and, on the other hand, he had,
as he had admitted, a "strong prepossession" as to Burr's
guilt. While never a rabid anti-Burrite, his general views
about Burr had long been such as to make his mind a
congenial host for this prepossession. In his letter to
Nicholson of Jan. 1, 1801, as the reader has already learned,
he said that his own decided preference of Jefferson was in
no wise a want of esteem for his colleague; but, from this
time on, his occasional comments on Burr were of a very
different character. Some three years later, he wrote to
Littleton Waller Tazewell that Burr's general reputation
for address, ingenuity, eloquence, enterprise and firmness,
together with the éclat, which he had acquired in the New
York election of 1800, had inspired him with a high esteem
for his political character; but that a closer inspection (as
was too often the case)
had diminished, and finally extinguished
his confidence in him; and that he now considered
him as committed to the Federal party.[33] In the same
year, the tragic death of Hamilton at the hands of Burr
drew out from Randolph, in a letter to Nicholson, these
most graphic observations:

Once in a letter to Nicholson,[35] and once in a letter to
Monroe,[36] Randolph, who dearly loved a scandalous on dit,
mentions the gossip which found in Hamilton's aversion to
Burr another case for the application of the police injunction,
Cherchez la femme! In later letters than any of these,
Randolph refers to the rumors which had reached the east
from time to time about Burr's mysterious movements in
the western country.[37] Some gentlemen from that quarter,
Randolph wrote to Monroe, treated the alleged conspiracy
as a matter of ridicule, but, from a variety of circumstances,
"above all, from the known character of the man,"
there was too much reason, Randolph thought, to believe
it to be real and serious. A later letter from Randolph to
Monroe discloses the belief on Randolph's part that Burr
was endeavoring to detach the western country from the
Union, with the aid of Spanish money, and also his suspicion
that Burr might have made overtures to Great
Britain too.[38] Within less than three months after the date
of this letter, Cataline, to use the name so often reproachfully
applied to Burr, was on his way under guard to
Richmond, the capital of the State, which he detested so
cordially, where his misfortunes were to excite a measure
of generous compassion that has rarely been lavished upon
a less deserving object. Writing to Nicholson from Bizarre,
Randolph said:

From the Diary, which places our finger on so many of
the silent yet vital pulsations of Randolph's life, we learn
just how he reached Richmond (a), in answer to the summons
which had doubtless been issued for him as a member
of the Grand Jury panel. It contains this entry under the
date of May 23, 1807: "Theodore [his cousin Theodore
Dudley] and myself rode down in a day (the 21st), I on
Brunette, he on the grey gelding, by Dare Devil; Johnny
[his black body servant] and Tudor [his nephew] in the
chair. Burr's trial." From Bizarre to Richmond, as the
crow flies, is between fifty and sixty miles we should say.
But, after Randolph had arrived at Richmond and had
been made foreman of the Burr Grand Jury, there was no
final action that the jury could take until James Wilkinson,
the principal witness for the prosecution, who was
coming up from Louisiana to Virginia by sea, could appear
before it and testify. While awaiting Wilkinson, he became
almost impatient enough to exclaim, as George Hay,

one of the lawyers who prosecuted Burr is said to have
done after he had become worn out with the interminable
wrangle of the case: "Would that I could only hang upon a
gate and have a little negro to swing me to and fro all
day."[40]

Three days later, he wrote to Monroe that the Grand Jury
had been detained ever since the 22d for the coming of
Wilkinson, who, it was confidently said by some, might be
expected with the Greek kalends, and not before. "There
are, I am told," he said, "upwards of forty witnesses in
town; one of whom (General Jackson of Tennessee) does
not scruple to say that W. [Wilkinson] is a pensioner of Spain
to his knowledge, and that he will not dare to show his
face here."[42] Washington Irving, who had come down to
Richmond to report the proceedings of the trial for a New
York newspaper, wrote to Mrs. Hoffman that the Grand
Jury had been dismissed for five or six days so "that they
might go home, see their wives, get their clothes washed
and flog their negroes."[43] Not until June 17th, did Wilkinson
appear at Richmond, but when the fat, corrupt and
perfidious braggart and informer strode into the court
room, attired in the showy uniform of the Commanding
General of the American Army, Irving wrote to James K.
Paulding that Wilkinson strutted into court and . . .
stood for a moment swelling like a turkey cock.[44] The same

captivating writer has given us a description of the manner
in which the intrepid adventurer confronted the fellow-conspirator,
who had betrayed him. Burr ignored him
until the Chief Justice directed the clerk to swear General
Wilkinson. Then Burr, at the sound of the name, turned
his head, looked Wilkinson full in the face with one of his
piercing regards, swept his eye over his whole person from
head to foot as if to scan its dimensions, and then coolly
resumed his former position, and went on conversing with
his counsel as tranquilly as ever.[45] Highly characteristic
was the account which Wilkinson gave to Jefferson of the
same incident:

After other witnesses had testified before the Grand
Jury, Wilkinson appeared before it, and testified too; and,
in doing so, he produced the famous despatch in cipher in
which Burr had assured him that he would be second to
him only in his enterprise, and grandiosely declared that
the gods invited them to glory and fortune; and that it
remained to be seen whether they deserved the boon.
By Sawyer we are told that the key with which Wilkinson
deciphered the despatch seemed unintelligible to all of the
jurors except Randolph, who mastered it at once and explained
it to the comprehension of the others.[47] The story

is not improbable, for his insight was very rapid, and
Henry Adams, not without reason, has pronounced him to
have been possessed of a true bloodhound instinct.[48] The
delivery of Wilkinson's testimony consumed four days.
After he had been testifying for two, Washington Irving
wrote to Paulding: "Wilkinson is now before the Grand
Jury, and has such a mighty mass of words to deliver himself
of that he claims at least two days more to discharge
the wondrous cargo."[49] Two days later, Randolph wrote to
Nicholson that the Grand Jury had found bills for treason
and misdemeanor against both Burr and Herman Blennerhassett,
his dupe (Una voce), and that the next day it had
presented Jonathan Dayton, Ex-Senator John Smith of
Ohio, Comfort Tyler, Israel Smith of New York, and Davis
Floyd of Indiana too for treason.[50] When this letter was
written, Wilkinson, despite his long palaver, had all but
been indicted himself; seven out of the sixteen grand
Jurors, fourteen of whom were Republicans, having voted
in favor of indictment.[51] According to Sawyer, indictment
was suggested by Randolph.[52] Be this as it may, Wilkinson's
escape filled him with intense regret and disgust;
partly because he justly believed Wilkinson, as almost all
of the grand Jurors did, to be an arrant scoundrel, and
partly because he was eager to rebuke the countenance
which Jefferson was compelled by his desire to convict
Burr to give to such a valuable state's evidence. In
the letter to Nicholson from which we have just quoted,
Randolph said:

In a subsequent letter to Nicholson, Randolph returns to
the subject with unabated virulence: "W. is the most
finished scoundrel that ever lived; a ream of paper would not
contain all the proofs; but what of that? He is `the man
whom the King delights to honor.' "[54] Randolph then
brings to the attention of Nicholson certain alterations
which had been made in the cipher despatch by Wilkinson,
and adds:

And, if the reader is not wearied with all this objurgation,
we might refer also to a later letter from Randolph to
Nicholson, in which he says that he had been informed that
Wirt had never been imposed upon by Wilkinson, and that
Hay had admitted to him, with his own lips, that he had
been, and had represented Wilkinson as the most artful
scoundrel in existence. And Randolph then ends this
letter by dubbing Wilkinson as "the Spanish pensioner";
which in fact it is now known that he was.[55] In still another
letter to Nicholson, Randolph told him that, after the
Grand Jury had returned to Wilkinson the papers which
he had submitted to it, Wilkinson, whose busy active
genius had to have employment, went to work upon them,
erasing, interlining, etc., and then swore that they were
identically the same papers which he had handed to the

Grand Jury; but that Littleton Waller Tazewell, who, with
several other members of the Grand Jury, had taken a
copy of the papers, had been called in and had convicted
Wilkinson of forgery and perjury. And then, after mentioning
a flagrant instance in which Wilkinson's testimony
before the Burr petit jury had flatly contradicted his testimony
before the Grand Jury, Randolph informs Nicholson
confidentially that Hay had told him that, when Daniel
Clark, who had been deeply implicated in Burr's schemes,
came on to Richmond during the trial, Wilkinson approached
Hay within a few minutes after Clark's arrival,
terrified beyond description, and declared that Clark
could ruin him.[56]

There is a kind of shame-faced satisfaction to be found
in the fact that the general disrepute in which Wilkinson
was held resulted during the Burr trial in a personal attack
upon him by Samuel Swartwout, one of Burr's accomplices,
who was at the time a young man of twenty-four.
Meeting Wilkinson at Richmond, he yielded to a
sudden paroxysm of disgust and rage and shouldered him
into the middle of the street—an insult which Wilkinson
submissively swallowed. As likely as not the outrage was
instigated by Andrew Jackson, who had come on to Richmond
to be present at the Burr trial, and had conducted
himself in such a spirit of reckless partisanship as to draw
down upon his head, before it had terminated, the harsh
judgment to which one of his contemporaries afterwards
referred in these words: "As I was crossing the Court
House Green, I heard a great noise of haranguing at some
distance off. Inquiring what it was, I was told it was a
great blackguard from Tennessee, one Andrew Jackson,
making a speech for Burr and damning Jefferson as a persecutor."[57]
At any rate, Jackson was "wild with delight"
when he was told of the indignity to which Wilkinson had

been subjected by Swartwout. After the trial ended,
Swartwout challenged Wilkinson to a duel, but again the
other cock would not fight. Wilkinson contented himself
with magniloquently announcing that "he held no correspondence
with traitors or conspirators"; whereupon
Swartwout posted him in the press as guilty of treachery,
perjury, forgery and cowardice.[58] Swartwout's apparent
frankness created a highly favorable impression upon the
Grand Jury when he appeared before it and positively
denied that he had ever made to Wilkinson the revelations
to which Wilkinson had testified. But even then the
youthful adherent of Burr, who was afterwards, as the
Collector of the Port of New York, to rob the Federal
Government of some million and a quarter dollars, was
probably a fit subject for the application of the legal
maxim, Noscitur ex sociis.

Randolph was again elected to Congress in 1807, and,
when the Tenth Congress convened on Oct. 26, 1807,
Joseph B. Varnum, of Massachusetts, was elected Speaker
in the place of Macon.[59] Two days later, Varnum appointed
George W. Campbell, of Tennessee, whom Randolph
termed on one occasion "That Prince of Prigs and
Puppies,"[60] to the Chairmanship of the Committee of Ways
and Means, of which Randolph had so long been the incumbent.
Among the other members appointed by the
Speaker were Smilie, Eppes, and Willis Alston. The new
Speaker, in the opinion of Josiah Quincy, was "one of the
most obsequious tools of the administration, elected
through the influence of Jefferson, who courted with the
most extreme assiduity the leaders of the democracy of
Massachusetts."[61] "He was just capable," Quincy further
said, "of going through the routine of the office—an au-

tomaton ready to move in any direction the magician who
pulled the strings jerked him." To Quincy, too, we owe
the following story about him in connection with his habit
of writing letters, while members of the House were supposed
to be appealing to his reasoning powers and passions:

According to an important memorandum in Randolph's
Diary, he had good reason to believe that his deposition
from the Chairmanship of the Committee of Ways and
Means had been desired by Jefferson at the beginning of
the second session of the Ninth Congress. The memorandum
is in these words:

The first sitting of the Tenth Congress was marked by a
painful incident. When a third ballot was about to be
taken for the election of a Clerk of the House, Randolph
arose and objected to the election of Nicholas B. Van
Zandt, who had led his rivals on the two preceding ballots,
on the ground that, during a secret sitting, at the first
session of the Ninth Congress, when Van Zandt was the
chief assistant of the Clerk of the House, he and the other
assistants of that officer had posted themselves at the door
of the House gallery, where every word uttered on the
floor of the House could be distinctly heard. Before he
reached his lodgings at Georgetown, after the adjournment
on this occasion, some of the words used by him during
the sitting, Randolph declared, had been repeated to
him.[63] At the conclusion of Randolph's remarks, a letter
was read from Van Zandt in which he asked for an opportunity
to repel this charge of eavesdropping, but, by a
decisive vote, the request was denied; and, on the third
ballot, he lost a large number of the votes which had been
cast for him on the preceding ballots; and another individual
was elected.

The idea has been thrown out by Sawyer and adopted
by Henry Adams that Randolph was biased against Van
Zandt from the fact that the latter was a protégé of Mrs.
Madison.[64] If John Quincy Adams was properly informed,
he was also a relation of the Vice-President, George Clinton,
of New York,[65] to whom Randolph was very partial.

Aside from the mere insinuation of Sawyer, there is no
evidence, so far as we know, that Randolph, in objecting
to the election of Van Zandt, was influenced by anything
except what he actually made the foundation of the objection.
The fact that Van Zandt's application for a hearing
was so peremptorily refused by the House, and the fact
that John Quincy Adams sets him down in his Memoirs
as a worthless character,[66] should, together with the facts
stated by Randolph himself, be duly taken into account,
as well as the long, dignified and positive affidavit in which
Van Zandt denied the accusation made against him by
Randolph.[67]

So far as Randolph is concerned, the earlier debates of
the Tenth Congress are particularly significant in showing
that it would be a gross error to infer from his hostility to
standing armies, the Spanish Purchase, the Gregg Resolution,
the Non-Importation Law and the War of 1812 that
he was a pacifist. In 1807, he had as poor an opinion of
our professional soldiers as when he had been called
sharply to task by the Federalists for terming them "rag-a-muffins."
"Was there," he is reported as asking on one
occasion, "no difference between freemen, possessed of
information and property, and wretches picked up in the
streets [and] educated in ale-houses, such as composed
their standing army?"[68] And, filled with a sense of national
humiliation, as well as national resentment, by the
helplessness of the Chesapeake under the broadsides of the
Leopard, a mental condition to which his intimacy with
Stephen Decatur perhaps largely contributed, he so far
forgot himself on another occasion as to say that our regular
navy had for years proved a mere moth in the public
purse.[69] Nor did he hesitate to voice his lack of faith in the
gunboats which Jefferson's inventive mind was so eager
that the American Navy should spawn in great numbers.

And, referring to outrages, committed upon our national
dignity by the British men-of-war, that hovered about our
coasts, he also asserted that it was found that, with all the
navy of the United States and all their gunboats into the
bargain, they could not maintain their authority within
their own jurisdiction, and yet they were called upon to
build more—something in the style of the physician in the
comedy who prescribed bleeding, and, although, at every
operation, the patient was visibly worse, had no resource
but in a repetition of it.[71] But, while condemning these
various instrumentalities of national defense, he was tireless
and outspoken to the last degree in urging that the
whole body of our citizenry, capable of bearing arms,
should be thoroughly armed, and that trains of artillery,
capable of being shifted rapidly from one of our endangered
seaports to another, should be relied upon for the
purpose of repelling foreign invasion[72] instead of coast
fortifications, which he seems to have feared might, like
broken dykes in Holland, keep the sea in instead of out.
"No discipline," he truly affirmed, "could make soldiers
of men who mustered with canes and cornstalks,"[73] and
our experience, during the American Revolution, might
have told him that no discipline could make soldiers of
men who were soldiers only in the sense that they were
armed with something better than canes and cornstalks.
But it should be remembered that many a day of bitter
experience was yet to elapse, and that human invention

was yet to swing Europe and America alongside of each
other, like two death-laden, grappling men-of-war, before
other Americans besides Randolph could be made to believe
that hardy and efficient soldiers cannot be grown
over night. Sound or unsound, his military ideas were
enforced with all his vivid phrasing. "All the parchment
in their archives," he is reported to have said, "was of less
force than a single musket in maintaining the liberties of
the citizen."[74] Another utterance of his, suggested by Jefferson's
gunboat crotchet, was that he wished to see the
nation armed and protected, not by a provision of sugar
and salt but of men and iron.[75] And again he is reported
as saying:

Stern to the verge of rashness was his language immediately
after the outrage upon the Chesapeake. He thought
that, on the capture of the Chesapeake, Congress ought
to have been immediately convened and our Ministers at
London instantly recalled, after having made an explicit
and peremptory demand for redress—and that redress too
to be by a British Envoy dispatched to the United States
for the especial purpose; that, Congress being convened,
the nation should have been put into a posture of defence,
while waiting a reasonable time to receive redress by an
Envoy; and that, redress being refused, instant retaliation
should have been taken on the offending party. He
would have invaded Canada and Nova Scotia, and made a
descent on Jamaica, he also said; but he would have seized

upon Canada and Nova Scotia, not with a view to their
incorporation into our system of government but as
pledges to be retained against a future pacification until
we had obtained ample redress for our wrongs.[77] And, as
usual, he succeeded in giving an highly original form to his
ideas:

He was to live to hear her knock, not with the light tap of
solicitation, but with the iron knuckles of destructive
wrath.

A proper companion-piece to these military views of
Randolph is the highly eloquent speech in which he urged
upon the country a proper provision for the veterans of
the Revolutionary War.

The hard words that Randolph had been in the habit of
using about Wilkinson resulted in a challenge to a duel.
On Dec. 24, 1807, Wilkinson wrote to Randolph that he
understood that several expressions had escaped Randolph
in their nature personal and highly injurious to his reputation;
that Randolph had avowed the opinion that he was
a rogue; had charged him with the disposition to commit
murder to prevent the disclosure of his sinister designs;
and had stigmatized in his person the entire American
army. And the letter concluded with these words:

To this letter Randolph replied as follows:

Six days later, Randolph produced on the floor of the
House documents tending to convict Wilkinson of having
been a pensioner of the Spanish Crown, and on them based
a resolution requesting the President to cause an inquiry
to be instituted into his conduct.[82] Afterwards, in a speech
in the House, relating to the same matter, Randolph not
only referred to Wilkinson as a person, of whom he had
been compelled on his oath to say that he believed him to
be guilty of misprision of treason, but as a person whom he
believed, upon the very best evidence, to have been guilty
six or eight years before of peculation.[83] In a later speech,
Randolph said that the motion before the Burr Grand
Jury to present Wilkinson for misprision of treason had
failed merely because the overt act, on which it was
founded, had been laid in Ohio, and not in Virginia, and
for another purely technical reason. He did not hear,
however, he declared, a single member of the Grand Jury
express any other opinion than his own as respects the
moral guilt of the accused.[84] It remains for us to say further
that, after receiving Randolph's reply to his first
letter, Wilkinson did not let the matter rest there. In a
rejoinder, he appealed to Randolph to embrace the
alternative still within his reach and to rise to the level of a
gentleman,[85] and even said in addition: "The first idea,
suggested by your letter in response to mine, was the chastisement
of my cane, from which the sacred respect I owe
to the station you occupy in the councils of the nation
alone protected you." Not content with this, Wilkinson

also posted Randolph throughout the District of Columbia
in handbills containing these words: "Hector unmasked:
In justice to my character, I denounce John Randolph,
M. C., to the world as a prevaricating, base, calumniating
scoundrel, poltroon and coward."[86] This episode in the
life of Randolph is mentioned by Henry Adams in support
of his statement that Randolph never pressed a quarrel to
the end or resented an insult further than to repel it.[87]
If recalled at all for any such purpose, it should have been
recalled in support of a statement that Randolph was a
craven; one, of course, that no one, not bereft of reason,
could well make. The very biographer, Sawyer, who
quotes the handbill in full in his pages was in Congress
with Randolph for sixteen years, and was keenly alive to
all his infirmities and foibles; and yet he tells us: "He
[Randolph] possessed courage in a high degree."[88] Indeed,
it is hard to understand to just what measure of personal
courage our New England fellow-craftsmen in the biographical
walk desire to hold Randolph. Speaking of a
correspondence between Randolph and Daniel Webster,
in which Randolph, at any rate, thought that he saw the
possibility of a duel, Henry Cabot Lodge says, in his life
of Webster, published in the same biographical series as
Henry Adams' John Randolph, "Randolph, however,
would have challenged anybody or anything from Henry
Clay to a field-mouse if the fancy happened to strike him."[89]
In declining to accept Wilkinson's challenge, Randolph
was actuated by such obvious motives, arising out of his
public relations to the Burr Trial, that it is fairly questionable
whether Wilkinson, who had but recently not only
declined Swartwout's challenge, but had tamely permitted
himself to be jostled into the street by Swartwout, would
have sent a challenge to Randolph at all, if he had not felt
sure that these motives would operate just as they did.
Besides, Wilkinson, himself a fellow-conspirator of Burr,
had declined to fight Swartwout because the latter was a
fellow-conspirator of Burr. What reason had he to believe
that Randolph, an honest man and no conspirator at all,
would not decline to fight him, who was generally believed
to have been a fellow-conspirator of Burr, or, in plain
terms, a traitor, and would have been so pronounced by
the Burr Grand Jury of which Randolph was foreman, but
for a technicality? It is a mistake to suppose, if any well-informed
person does, that the duelling code imposed the
obligation upon a man to fight anyone who chose to challenge
him. That code was a strict, and, in some respects, a
highly artificial and technical, one; not less rigorous in its
reservations than in its mandates; and it required no gentleman
to accept a challenge from any individual whose social
standing was manifestly plebeian, or whose moral repute
was despicably bad. We may laugh at such niceties now,
as we may laugh at the distinctions which once prevailed
between noble and churl; but there was a time when they
might be as significant of life and death as the subtlest
theological shadings ever were. It is true that Wilkinson
wore the epaulet of an American General; and that ought
to have meant no little in both a social and moral sense;
but, in his case, it can be truly said that it meant nothing
but increased opportunity for profitable treachery, insolent
tyranny, extravagance, and waste. In the general
estimation, he was a corrupt, boastful pretender who had
disgraced his profession by his venality and perfidy. By
Winfield Scott he was deemed an "unprincipled imbecile."[90]
To Randolph's friend Bryan, whose forms of speech were
more idiomatic, he was "that stinkpot"[91] ; and such thousands
of other Americans both thought and felt him to be,
and his standing with posterity is even worse than it was
with his contemporaries, though it knows nothing about
him that was not at least strongly suspected by them.
Enumerating the Brigadier Generals of the American
Army in 1812, McMaster says: "At the head of the list
of Brigadier Generals stood the name of James Wilkinson,
the most infamous man then wearing the uniform of
the United States."[92] (a) That under no circumstances,
public, or otherwise, could Randolph have properly considered
himself answerable to a challenge from such a
worthless and odious character as this, is too plain we
think to warrant further words. He might as well have
challenged Matthew Lyon for saying, in the course of the
Yazoo debates, in his blackguard way, that he had a face
like that of a monkey. Certainly Randolph could not
have accepted a challenge from Wilkinson without violating
the carefully qualified principles of conduct which he
was to lay down a few years later in a letter to Theodore
Dudley:

In December, 1807, Great Britain and France, in their
furious endeavors to ham-string each other, had, by their
orders in council and decrees, done everything in their
power to interdict totally commercial intercourse between
the United States and each other. But, in spite of all their

tyrannous and lawless proclamations, a large amount of
our carrying-trade still continued to slip between their
outstretched palms, and to contribute to the sum of our
national wealth. Pending this state of things, Jefferson,
too prone to peace to counsel a declaration of war against
both Great Britain and France, or either, and too conscious
of the humiliating nature of the existing situation to
leave American commerce alone to arm and take care of
itself, as it best could, as John Randolph[94] and John Adams
advised, sent a message to Congress recommending to its
consideration "an inhibition of the departure" of American
vessels from the ports of the United States. The
message referred to the great and increasing dangers, with
which our vessels, our seamen, and our merchandise were
threatened on the high seas and elsewhere by the belligerent
European Powers and declared that it was of "the
greatest importance to keep in safety those essential
resources." On the strength of this message, Randolph
moved an embargo on all shipping belonging to citizens of
the United States which was then, or should thereafter
arrive, in our ports. This was on Dec. 18, 1807. Two days
later, the House laid this resolution aside and took up a
Senate bill which provided for a general and permanent
embargo. This bill, the supplementary bills in aid of its
purposes which followed it, the bill which sought to suspend
it, and the non-importation bill, prohibiting all commercial
intercourse with Great Britain into which it
finally trickled out, were all warmly opposed by Randolph
with every resource that practical sagacity, a lively imagination,
pointed wit, and an inexhaustible capacity for
prompt and sparkling expression can furnish to a speaker.
Indeed, of Randolph throughout the Tenth Session of
Congress might well be said what Henry Adams has said
of him when comparing him with the other participants in
one of the debates of that session: "With all John Randolph's
waywardness and extravagance, he alone shone
among this mass of mediocrities, and, like the water
snakes in Coleridge's silent ocean, his every track was a
flash of golden fire."[95] By Henry Adams, however, Randolph
has been criticized for opposing the Senate Embargo
Bill, after offering a resolution himself looking to an embargo.[96]
And Sawyer has ascribed his supposed change of
front to "jealousy of another's success in carrying through
so important a measure" as the Senate bill.[97] But it must
be remembered that the long debate, which took place
over the Senate bill, was entirely in secret session, and
that it is improbable that Randolph would have executed
such an abrupt volte-face as is imputed to him without
giving reasons therefor in the debate that, if known to us,
might impart a wholly different aspect to the matter.
We do know that in a letter to Nicholson he said:

The main circumstance, to which his words refer, was,
doubtless, the fact that the Presidential Message, on
which his resolution was founded, suggested an embargo,
which, as the Message indicated on its face, was to be
employed, not for the purpose of bringing Great Britain
and France to their knees by inflicting pecuniary loss upon
them, but merely for the purpose of securing the safety of
our vessels, seamen, and merchandise; whereas the embargo,
contemplated by the Senate bill, was a general one,
unlimited in point of time and space. To realize how
material such a difference was to Randolph we need not go
further than Henry Adams himself, who tells us that he

argued against the constitutionality of the embargo in a
speech, never reported, which turned upon the distinction
between regulating commerce and destroying it.[99] In his
private conduct, especially in later life, and, perhaps, even
at moments when his actions could not be justly referred
to mental disturbance, Randolph was at times wayward
and capricious. But, contrasted with the fixed principles
by which his political conduct was habitually governed,
his occasional changes of conviction, assuming that there
were any worthy of serious mention, are as of little real
moment as the swayings with wind and tide of a firmly
anchored vessel. Anything more merciless than the showers
of bright-feathered and occasionally poison-tipped
arrows that Randolph discharged at one after the other
of Jefferson's restrictive measures, it would be difficult
to conceive. Nor are his speeches on the subject more
remarkable for their pungency and vivid imagery than for
that vigorous common sense, that strong grasp upon
primal realities, which took him out of the mere category
of brilliant orators and placed him in the higher category
of statesmen. And in few, if any, of his other speeches
can we find better illustrations of his faculty for reaching
striking conclusions without the aid of formal argumentative
processes—like the lightning which is so eager and
swift to attain its goal as to be lost at times to the eye in
its transit. The fatuity of the embargo, the idea that there
was nothing for the insulted dignity of American commerce
to do except like an affronted Japanese to commit
hari kari, came in for his unsparing ridicule. What he
said is thus reported:

Equally bitter was this stroke:

Another neat example in the same speech of the same kind
of keen-edged raillery was this:

The embargo, we now know, of course, deserved all the
condemnation that it provoked. We disputed with
Great Britain about her practice of impressing our seamen,
and, under the operation of the embargo, our seamen were
compelled to leave their country altogether and to enlist
in the British Navy or merchant marine. We differed
with Great Britain about our carrying-trade from the

West Indies to Europe, but, by shutting up all our ships
in our own ports, we surrendered to her the whole commerce
of the world, and that under conditions too that
necessarily worked in her favor a large reduction in the
wages of seamen. The British West Indies long verged
upon ruin, and, year after year, petitioned Parliament,
complaining that they were undersold by the colonies of
France, whose produce was transported abroad in neutral
bottoms, chiefly American, free of war risks and charges;
but the United States did for them more than their own
government would do. By wholly withdrawing from commerce,
we conferred upon them the monopoly of supplying
Europe with colonial produce, and upon Great Britain
the monopoly of carrying it. The effect of the embargo
was to furnish rogues with the opportunity of getting rich
at the expense of honest men by encouraging smuggling
and similar clandestine and unlawful practices, and by
inducing capital, which, but for the embargo, would have
sought employment in commerce, to go into the profiteering
business of buying up vast quantities of domestic
commodities, of the first importance to human wants,
from distressed farmers or other owners who could not
find a market for them abroad as usual; engrossing them;
and imposing them later upon the necessities of the people
at enormous percentages of profit. Aside from the direct
pecuniary loss inflicted upon the people of the United
States by forbidding them to sail the seas and cutting them
off from all foreign vents for the products of their industry,
long after the rotting ships of New England had been
liberated from the silent wharves, to which they had been
moored by the embargo, and, long after the Southern
planter had again found a market for his grain and tobacco,
the demoralizing and depraving habits, bred by the speculative
lawlessness and rapacity, born of the embargo, were
bound to make their influence still felt in the life of the
country. Such was the field, with more or less latitude,
over which Randolph, in some instances, in our very words,
ranged in his speeches on the embargo and its affiliated
measures during the Tenth Congress; and, with such easy
power, did he do it that, in following him on one occasion
after he had made a speech, which consumed hours in its
delivery, Mr. Love, of Virginia, no friend of his, said: "I
rise under circumstances of extreme discouragement to
address you, Sir, while the sound of a voice which never
fails to interest in a superior degree still vibrates on my
ear."[103] With the Tenth Congress, Jefferson's second term
as President came to an end, and Randolph was not slow
to compare it with his first. "Without the slightest disposition
to create unpleasant sensations, to go back upon
the footsteps of the last four years," he said:

The embargo, he was to say on another occasion, "like
Achilles' wrath, was the source of our Iliad of Woes."[105]

Before passing from the Tenth Congress, it will be well
to communicate to the reader the impression made by
Randolph upon Edward Hooper, a native of Connecticut,
who saw him for the first time in the month of December,

1808, in the House, and portrayed him as he presented
himself to him immediately afterwards in his diary. (a)

James Madison was inaugurated President on March 4,
1809, after Randolph and his friends had vainly striven
to bring about the nomination and election of James Monroe.
Just when the movement to put Monroe forward as
a candidate for the Presidency first got under way, is not
clear. On April 7, 1808, in a speech in the House, Randolph
stated that, when Madison told him that a sum of
money would have to be paid by the United States to
France, he was on perfectly amicable terms with him;
indeed, terms as intimate as could well exist between persons
so unequal in point of age and standing.[107] But the
movement to make Monroe President certainly began as
early as March, 1806; for, on March 24th, of that year,
Timothy Pickering wrote to Rufus King that Nicholson,
who was in sympathy with the movement, had lately
pronounced Monroe in the House as second to no one in
the United States; and, in the same letter, he indulged in
some little speculation as to how Monroe's cabinet would
be made up in case of his election.

Whatever may have been the date of the actual beginning
of the movement, from the time that Randolph
broke with the Jefferson administration until Jefferson
dismissed the subject of the Presidency from his correspondence
and intercourse with Monroe, there was an

eager rivalry between Randolph and Jefferson for the
confidence of Monroe. Indeed, during a part of this time,
Monroe might well have been cartooned with Randolph
at one of his ears, practising on his vanity and kindling his
jealousy of Madison and distrust of Jefferson, and, with
Jefferson at his other ear, belittling Randolph's political
influence and pleadingly asking, in the words of Burns'
Auld Lang Syne:

The attention of the reader has already been called to the
prompt steps taken by Jefferson to keep Monroe from
being seduced by the secession of Randolph and his adherents.
And these efforts were succeeded by more than
one letter, in which he employed every available expedient
for the purpose of smoothing out Monroe's ruffled feelings
and wheedling him back into full coöperation and sympathy
with Madison and himself. This was by no means
an easy task. First, there was Monroe's dissatisfaction at
having William Pinkney sent over to assist him in securing
the objects of his English Mission to overcome; then there
was the rude shock to Monroe of having the treaty negotiated
by Pinkney and himself with England rejected by
Jefferson without any reference of its provisions to the
Senate at all; then there was the effect produced on Monroe's
mind by the artful suggestions of his adherents that,
though his prestige in Virginia was undiminished, Jefferson
was scheming, and using the influence of his high
office, to make Madison President, and that the intrigue
to accomplish this purpose had not scrupled even to withhold
Monroe's London dispatches from publicity after
they had reached Washington, and to keep Monroe in
England until it should be too late for him to return to
the United States with any reasonable expectation of
being able to compete successfully with Madison as a

Presidential candidate for the popular favor. But for
generous affection, as well as tactful finesse, the conciliatory
letters from Jefferson to Monroe have rarely been
surpassed, and were altogether worthy of a man who
never allowed his affection and respect for Monroe to deter
him from running the risk of deeply wounding the latter's
pride when public duty left him no other honorable alternative;
but, who, though the most popular and powerful
individual in the United States, was ready to go to almost
any manly lengths to allay the suspicions and soothe the
lacerated feelings of an old friend who was once told by
him that he was one of those men who are born to serve
the public (a), and of whom he frequently said that if his
soul were turned inside out not a spot would be found on
it.[109] What it cost Jefferson to write such letters, we can
understand, when we recollect that Madison was his
Secretary of State, and justly entitled, by reason of both
his superior abilities and seniority, to precedence over
Monroe as a Presidential candidate; and that his admiration
and affection for Madison once led him to pay this
remarkable tribute to him: "From three and thirty years
trial, I can say conscientiously that I do not know in the
world a man of purer integrity, more dispassionate, disinterested
and devoted to genuine Republicanism; nor could
I in the whole scope of America and Europe point out an
abler head."[110] Under the circumstances, Jefferson might
well have frankly espoused the cause of Madison, as a
Presidential candidate, and there can be no doubt that
Madison's election to the Presidency was consonant with
his wishes; but he settled down to a state of neutrality, as
between the two rivals, which seems to have been maintained
inviolate to the end. He could not make both
President, and he was unwilling actively to cast the weight
of his influence into the scales against either. There is
good cause to believe, however, that neither Madison, who
was by no means very popular in Virginia, nor Monroe, a
dull man, of whom the most that can be said is that he was
a man of firm and upright character and sound judgment,
would ever have been President but for Jefferson's friendship
for them. When Randolph was already grooming
Monroe for the Presidential track, Jefferson wrote to the
latter:

The next year, Jefferson wrote to Monroe that the government
of New Orleans was the second office in point of
importance in the United States, and that he was still in
hopes that Monroe would accept it.[112] A few months later,
he warned Monroe against the efforts which the Federal
papers were wickedly making to sow tares between Monroe
and him, as if he were lending a hand to measures unfriendly
to any views that their country might entertain
respecting him.[113] But the most interesting letter in this
series is one in which Jefferson used these words, so true
to his faithful, loving nature:

To nothing is Carlyle's image of a pitcher, full of Egyptian
vipers, each trying to raise its head above the other, more
applicable than to the struggles of rival politicians; and
fortunate, indeed, would it be if they could be oftener
softened by such affectionate and healing words as
these!

But Randolph did not permit Jefferson to sport all alone
with Amaryllis in the shade. While Jefferson was warning
Monroe against Randolph, the latter was breathing
doubts respecting the good will and good faith of Jefferson
and Madison into Monroe's mind. Nor did this course of
conduct originate merely in the desire on Randolph's
part to revenge himself on the leaders of the Republican
majority and to rehabilitate his own political fortunes by
alienating Monroe from them and making him President
instead of Madison. There is every reason to believe that,
almost from the very beginning of his political career, he
had cherished a peculiarly strong respect for Monroe's
character and capacity, which subsequently ripened into
genuine affection when St. George Randolph, Randolph's
deaf and dumb nephew, was placed by his uncle at school
in England, and was the recipient of much kindness at the
hands of Monroe and his family in that country. As early
as the contest in the House over the first election of Jefferson
to the Presidency, we find Randolph keeping Monroe
apprised of the daily results of the balloting,[115] and expressing
the highest esteem for Monroe's character, "public
and private." Two years afterwards, he referred on the
floor of the House to Monroe as "that able and eminent
man, that faithful and illustrious public servant."[116] Some
four years later, he wrote to Gallatin that he regretted
exceedingly Jefferson's resolution to retire, and almost as
much the premature announcement of that determination;
but that, if he were sure that Monroe would succeed

him, his regret would be very much diminished.[117] By
February, 1806, his hostility to Madison had become
sufficiently urgent for him to write to his friend, Cæsar
A. Rodney:

But, for more than a year before this letter was written,
and when he was on cordial terms with all the members
of Jefferson's administration, including Madison, Randolph
had been on a footing of hearty friendship with
Monroe. Speaking of his unhappy nephew, in a letter to
Monroe, dated July 20, 1804, he said:

Shortly afterwards, St. George was sent over to England,
and, from that time on, Randolph's letters to Monroe are
replete with expressions of tender compassion for him and
fervent gratitude to Monroe and his family for their kindness
to him, which are enough in themselves to dispel the
erroneous idea, only too common, that Randolph was a
mere gall-sac.

We have made a point of bringing out clearly the high
respect and friendly regard in which Randolph held Monroe,
before he broke with the Jefferson administration and
began to shout Yazoo! at Madison, and the debt of personal
gratitude, which he owed to him, because otherwise,
perhaps, inferences unfavorable to his sincerity might be
drawn from the rather stilted and fulsome language, in
which, at times, in his subsequent letters to Monroe, he
expressed his admiration and friendship for him, and
considerable color be given to the claim that, in instigating
Monroe to become a candidate for the Presidency,
he was simply using him as a tool for his own selfish purposes.
The Tertium Quids, as he and the old Republicans
like him who dropped away from Jefferson and his Democratic
majority came to be known, included such distinguished
Virginia Republicans as John Taylor of Caroline
and Littleton Waller Tazewell, as well as himself, and Monroe
was their choice too for the Presidency, to say nothing
of leading Republicans in other States. The supporters
of Monroe for the Presidency, as one of the letters from
Jefferson to him cited above reveals, were by no means
limited to the adherents or friends of Randolph. Monroe
had been a Revolutionary soldier, a member of Congress, a
governor of Virginia and a foreign minister, and enjoyed an
excellent reputation for firmness and probity of character,
public spirit and good judgment. Moreover, he was reputed
and professed to be in sympathy with the orthodox
Republican principles of which Randolph was so tenacious.
He was as acceptable, as a candidate, to Randolph's
intimate friends, Macon, Nicholson, Clay and Bryan, as
to Randolph himself, and was, besides, as we have seen,
a personal friend of Randolph and a benefactor of his
nephew. Under these circumstances, it was entirely natural
that, when Randolph quarreled with Jefferson, and
made up his mind to combat the election of Madison to the
Presidency, his selection for the office should have been

Monroe, and that enthusiasm for his candidate, who, it
should likewise be recalled, was much older than himself,
should have occasionally assumed the form of somewhat
tumid praise and deference.

On March 20, 1806, he wrote to Monroe, who was then
in London, endeavoring to negotiate a treaty between the
United States and Great Britain, as follows:

The next letter from Randolph to Monroe was written the
day after the adjournment of the House on April 21, 1806;
under circumstances which he pronounced in this same
letter to have been the most extraordinary that he had
ever witnessed:

Appended to the letter, was this intense postscript:
"I have read with deep attention your last confidential
communication and thank you for it from my soul: the
contents (it is superfluous I hope to say) have not been
and shall not be communicated to any human being."

In a third letter to Monroe, dated July 3, 1806, after
giving as one of his reasons for not writing very frequently,

"perhaps too often," the fact that the fear that his letters
might fall into improper hands restricted him to mere
common-place topics, he says:

In his next letter to Monroe, the fervor of the attachment,
which Randolph avows in this letter, becomes
still more animated, but is by no means too impetuous
and unreflecting to beget some artful sentences. He

first acknowledges the receipt of a letter from Monroe, and
then breaks out into this extraordinary panegyric:

This was certainly, to use a Virginia expression, laying it on
with a trowel. Then the letter proceeds more soberly:

The letter later gives the assurance that Monroe's communications
were held under the most guarded seal of
confidence and that the writer's most intimate friends had
no cause to believe that the correspondence between him
and Monroe related to anything except to Randolph's
poor unfortunate boy who had found (the letter said)
another father in Monroe.[124]

Just why Randolph should have thought the union
between Madison and Dolly Madison, his celebrated wife,
an unfortunate matrimonial connexion, he does not tell us;
but this letter supplies us with a timely occasion for
mentioning the fact that six months earlier John Quincy
Adams had entered in his diary the fact that he had just
been told by James A. Bayard that, in a conversation,
which he had had with Mrs. Madison, the evening before,
about the Presidency, she had spoken very slightingly
of Monroe.[125] In a letter to Monroe, dated Jan. 2, 1807,
Randolph says:

A reference in the same letter to St. George leads
Randolph to add: "The name of this dear unfortunate
boy gives new force to the sense of my obligations to you.
But Heaven and your own heart will repay you although
I never can."

No circumstance, he assured Monroe in another letter,
afforded him so high a gratification as he received from his
letters.[127] Still another letter to Monroe, dated May 30,
1807, and written from Richmond, during the Burr trial,
discloses the fact that Randolph was then pretty despondent
about the outlook for his friend in Virginia; though
there had been a time when he thought that the State was
safe for him.

This letter ends with an assurance of "the most unalterable
esteem and affection."

By Dec. 24, 1807, Monroe was again in the United
States, and, on that day, Randolph wrote a letter to him
which proves that he thought it best for Monroe's Presidential
prospects that the liaison between the two should
not be brought to the public attention.

In the succeeding March, Randolph returns to the same
subject. After speaking of "the attachment," which he
felt for Monroe, independent of "the esteem and reverence,"
which he had long borne towards him, he said:

A higher proof, however, of Randolph's esteem and
reverence for Monroe than his abstinence from unreserved
intercourse with him was the favorable estimate which he
places in this letter upon the hapless treaty negotiated by
Monroe and Pinkney in England and summarily suppressed
by Jefferson. In a previous letter, he had
designedly passed his hand over a very raw and sensitive
surface when he wrote to Monroe in these words: "I

never had a doubt that clamour would be raised against
the treaty, be it what it might. My reasons for this
opinion I will give when we meet. They are particular as
well as general. Prepare yourself to be surprised at some
things which you will hear."[131] Now he wrote to Monroe
that he was convinced that the treaty was not merely the
best that could be obtained, after the opportunity of concluding
one with Mr. Fox had been lost by the delay of the
extraordinary mission, but that in itself it was highly
beneficial to the United States; and Randolph then quite
justly condemns the conduct of the Jefferson administration
for insisting that our demands for reparation, on
account of the attack on the Chesapeake should not be
separated from our other demands for redress upon Great
Britain; "thus shutting with its own hands the door to any
honorable reparation of that unprecedented outrage."[132]

The idea that Randolph was moved wholly by personal
motives in screwing Monroe up to the point of aspiring
to the Presidency is also negatived by his attitude towards
the latter after it had become plain that Madison was as
good as elected. For instance, the letter to Monroe just
cited by us, in which Randolph spoke of the esteem and
reverence that he had long felt for him, was written after
a Congressional caucus at Washington and Legislative
caucuses at Richmond had clearly shown that his friend
had gone hopelessly lame in the Presidential race. On Jan.
21, 1808, the respective friends of Madison and Monroe
in the Virginia Legislature had separately assembled;
Madison's at the Bell Tavern, and Monroe's at the Capitol,
in Richmond, and the preponderance of numbers in
favor of Madison was so overwhelming as to leave no
reasonable doubt as to what the sentiment of Virginia was;
and, without the favorable suffrage of his own State,
Monroe, of course, could not expect to make any headway

beyond its limits. All the 134 persons, who attended the
Madison caucus, cast their ballots for Madison; of the 60
persons who attended the other caucus, 50 cast their
ballots for Monroe and 10 for Madison. Two days afterwards,
the Congressional caucus was held, and, of the 89
votes cast at it, 83 were cast in favor of Madison; the
remaining six being divided equally between Monroe and
George Clinton.[133] But what more decisive disproof could
there be of the idea that Monroe was a mere tool, employed
by Randolph for his own selfish purposes, than
these generous words which Randolph wrote to Monroe
after the actual election of Madison?

As addiction to public life kept Monroe almost always
impecunious, Randolph's offer to pledge his credit for
his benefit was by no means a mere Castilian flourish. A
week later, Randolph adds this postscript to another letter
to Monroe: "Every expression of respect (and affection,
if she and you will pardon the liberty) to Mrs. Monroe."[135]

Our next letter from Randolph to Monroe is dated
about a year and a half later than this one. Monroe was
then living in Albemarle County, Va., and Randolph
writes to him that he expects to avail himself of his kind
invitation, and proposes to come over from Buckingham
Court to see him, and that Randolph's nephew [Tudor
Randolph] would probably accompany him.[136] (a) And

then appears on the face of the letter this ominous speck:
"We have various political reports here; some of them
connected with yourself, to which I have paid no
attention." A few months later, and the speck had
become a threatening cloud, and had overspread the
entire relationship between the two men. Monroe had
been a candidate for a seat in the Virginia Legislature,
had given the requisite assurances of fealty to the majority
faction in the Republican party, had been elected, and
was on the way for a second time to the Governorship of
Virginia, which was then filled by the Legislature. A
little later, a thoroughly expurgated Old Republican, he
was to become Madison's Secretary of State, and his
successor in the Presidency, and the upholder of policies,
as remote from the Old Republican creed as the Arctic
circle is from the Antarctic.

As soon as this letter was received by Monroe, he dispatched
his son-in-law, George Hay, post-haste to Randolph,
but with no result except to elicit this second
letter from Randolph:

This letter was followed by a splutter of defensive or
explanatory letters from Monroe. If Randolph had been
a mere self-seeking politician, or a mere changeful chameleon,
he might well have kept his feelings to himself and
trusted to the intercession of Monroe to bring him back
into party favor, as the intercession of Jefferson had doubtless
brought Monroe himself. (a) But such a course was as
utterly repugnant to his proud, independent spirit and to
his incorruptible fidelity to his political creed as a state of
mean-spirited dependence was to his kinsman, Kidder

Randolph, who once declared, when speaking of a newly
married man, who had billeted his wife and himself upon
his friends, whilst his own house was under construction,
that he would rather live in a tobacco hogshead with an
outside chimney to it than as that man did.[139]

Monroe next emerges in the life of Randolph in this
entry which the latter made a few days later in his Diary

under the date of Mar. 16, 1811: "Hay calls and requests
me to see M., who wants to talk on private business. I go
to the — house. Long Interview." (a) With this
interview, all truly friendly intercourse between the two
men appears to have ended forever, though, under the date
of Dec. 20, 1821, the Memoirs of John Quincy Adams
contain this entry:

In the meantime, we do not lack evidence as to the full
effect left upon the mind of Randolph by the return of
Monroe to the comfortable precincts of party orthodoxy.
Under date of Jan. 12, 1811, he made this entry in his
Diary: "Richmond, Monroe, Traitor," and, in another
entry, relating to the visit that he paid to Monroe's home
in Albermarle County in 1810, after the words: "To Mr.
Monroe's," is inserted in a different ink, and evidently at
a later date than the original entry, the damning word:
"Judas." (b) In the Diary also, is this memorandum, so
true to the pettier side of human malevolence: "M-n-r-e
said to Jno. Mercer and Gen. Minor in the upper parlour
of the Edlumvian Inn, Fredericksburg, that Mr. Jefferson
was as great a hypocrite as any in the U. S. except
Tim: Pickering." Referring to the part that Randolph
took in relation to the Presidency in 1808, Henry Adams
assigns his course solely to the desire for revenge. "Monroe,"
he says, "was one tool and Clinton another; both
equally used by Randolph not to forward his own views of
public good but to pull down Mr. Madison"; and he calls
attention to the fact that, while Randolph was writing
to Nicholson of Monroe, "Our friend gains ground very fast

at home," he mentioned in the same letter the belief of his
friend Clay that Pennsylvania, "Duane non obstante,"
would be decidedly for Clinton, and added: "If the
V. P.'s interest should be best, our electors (in case we
succeed) will not hazard everything by a division."[142]
Adams also recalls another somewhat later letter, in which
Randolph urged Nicholson to go to the Eastern Shore of
Maryland in the interest of George Clinton and do everything
in his power "to promote the cause."[143] If these
letters show anything, they show that Randolph was not
so much interested in individual candidates for the
Presidency as "in the cause"; or in other words his own
view of the public good; and that, in his opinion, the best
way to promote that was to back Monroe and Clinton
respectively in the States where each had the best chance
of making real headway, and finally to stake "the cause"
on the one of the two who had the most electors to his
credit. The only person that could object to this program,
it seems to us, was one who did not have "the cause" so
much at heart as himself; and to anyone, who is familiar
with the intense convictions entertained by such Old
Republicans as Randolph, John Taylor of Caroline, and
Littleton Waller Tazewell, in regard to the political issues
of the time, the claim that "the cause," which Randolph
had in mind, was a mere project of personal revenge hardly
deserves consideration. In every respect, in our opinion,
the relations, which Randolph bore to Monroe, until the
rupture between them, were honorable to both his mind
and heart, and, if open to criticism at all, only on the score
that Randolph took too vindictive a view of an ordinary
case of political tergiversation, accelerated by inveterate
partiality for public life and pecuniary dependence on it.
(a) It is true that there seems to be something quite
overstrained about the compliments with which he at
times plied Monroe in his letters; as if his vision had been
beguiled by the herb, the juice of which,

But it is noticeable that the same hyperbole marks
Randolph's allusions to Monroe in his letters to other
persons. For instance, in a letter to Nicholson, he said:

The action of the Congressional caucus in nominating
Madison for the Presidency was repudiated by the friends
of Monroe and George Clinton. A formal protest, signed
by 17 members of Congress, the most conspicuous of whom
were John Randolph, Samuel Smith, of Maryland, David
R. Williams, of South Carolina, James M. Garnett, of Virginia,
Joseph Clay, of Pennsylvania, and Gurdon S. Mumford
and George Clinton, Jr., of New York, was published.
It denied the regularity of the recent caucus, presented
reasons why no preceding Presidential caucus should be
accepted as creating a binding precedent for such an
assemblage, and condemned all such caucuses on principle
as contrary to the Republican creed; indeed as operating a
virtual transfer of the election of President from the people
to a handful of political managers. A danger of more
than ordinary magnitude too, the protesters thought, was
to be found in the facility with which the influence of the
President might be exerted over any meeting of individuals

held at the seat of the National Government. And James
Madison himself was denounced to the world in the paper
with a degree of abusive license which reminds us of the
famous saying of Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, provoked by
the marvelous transfigurations that our public men undergo
when rendered by death no longer objects of rivalry or
jealousy, that a statesman is a dead politician. "We are
perhaps on the eve of a war with one of the great powers of
Europe," the protesters declared,

When the Presidential election took place in November,
1808, one set of electors was presented to the voters of

Virginia in the interest of Madison and another in the
interest of Monroe. Outside of Virginia, Monroe seems to
have had but little popular support. Nicholson wrote
to him that his return from England was anxiously wished
for by many who were desirous of putting him in nomination
for the Presidency, but that his own expectations
on the subject were not over-sanguine,[146] and nothing ever
occurred to give a brighter tinge to these expectations.
The Republicans, beyond the limits of Virginia, had become
restive under the Virginia supremacy; and there was
to be a time when even John Randolph was to express the
hope that he had seen the last of the Virginia Presidents,
because they had done mischief enough.[147] In Virginia, however,
at this time, Monroe had a real party in Randolph
and his friends. Randolph, it is true, no longer had the
political standing in that State which he had had before
he broke with the Jefferson administration. Then he was,
to use a hackneyed expression, "the coming man," and
there was no bow of promise in the opinion of his Virginia
admirers too radiant to span his future. Even the miscarriage
of the Chase trial had not sensibly diminished his
prestige in Virginia. In reading the newspaper comments
in that State on his refusal at different stages of his early
career to surrender his individul discretion to the direction
of his party superiors, an indulgent disposition to refer
his conduct to nothing worse than excessive scrupulosity
is quite noticeable; and, even when Randolph had finally
turned his back upon the Jefferson administration, his
prestige in Virginia, whatever may have been the case
elsewhere, was still too great for any Virginian to dismiss
his defiance as a mere brutum fulmen. To the Virginians
it signified a real schism; one that might have been the
precursor of a general bouleversement, if the leader whose
supremacy was challenged by Randolph had not been the
omnipotent Zeus that he was. More than once before
Madison received the vote of Virginia for the Presidency,
was the influence of Randolph over the minds of its
people unmistakably demonstrated. Not for a considerable
time, after he had hurled his fierce vale at the Jefferson
administration, could Thomas Ritchie, the editor of
The Richmond Enquirer and one of the most powerful
retainers of that administration, make up his mind to lay
aside the tone of cautious reticence which had previously
run through all his observations upon Randolph's political
insurgency. During the latter part of December, 1806,
and the middle of January, 1807, various propositions
came up in the Virginia Legislature which put the popularity
of the foreign policy of the administration to the test,
and it is impossible to note the fate of these propositions
without being struck with the conclusive testimony that
they bear, in some instances, to the extraordinary standing
which Randolph was able to maintain in Virginia in spite
of the fact that at the last Presidential election even the
obdurate heart of New England had melted like soft wax
under Jefferson's blandishments.[148] For instance, as late
as Jan. 13, 1807, a proposition to approve the policy of the
administration was approved by a vote of only 102 to 63
in the House of Delegates; and two days later the same
proposition was rejected in the Virginia Senate by a vote
of 15 to 5. With the latter part of 1807, began in The
Richmond Enquirer an interchange of paper missiles
between the adherents of Madison and Monroe to which a
reader can turn even now with the expectation of some
pleasure and instruction, and, when he does, it will not
take him long to see that Randolph, rather than Monroe,
was the yeast in the ferment. And this time the pseudonyms
of the writers were not borrowed simply from the
"gliding ghosts" of ancient Rome, but also from Grecian
and aboriginal sources besides. "Phocion," one of
Randolph's enemies, and "Anti-Phocion," one of his defenders,
in four papers each kept up a kind of antiphonal
duel with each other.[149] "Pericles," "Publicola," and
"Harmodius" covered "Phocion" with their shields.[150]
"Plain Observer," "American," and just-minded "Aristides"
engaged on the same side.[151] On Aug. 5, 1808, "Tell"
addressed to the freeholders of Randolph's Congressional
district an appeal asking them to reject him at the next
election; and, on Nov. 18, 1808, Thomas Ritchie himself,
one of the truly great editors of our national history, gave
his reasons why Randolph should not be re-elected.
Among the writers, who came to the aid of "Anti-Phocion,"
were A. B., supposed to be George Hay, "Powhatan,"
supposed to be Benjamin Watkins Leigh or William Leigh,
"Scourge," and "Opechancanough," supposed to be the
same person as "Powhatan."[152] "Protester," who answered
"One of the People," who was thought to be William
Wirt, was thought to be Randolph himself, but was not (a).
But the best, perhaps, of all the fagots, that fed the fire
of the Madison-Monroe contest in Virginia, were these
clever lines on John Randolph:

"The machine" was too much for the "highbrows";
to use the slang of our own time. When the ballots were
counted, it was apparent enough that the minority
Republicans had been simply beating the air. The whole
vote cast for the Madison electors was 13,876; for the
Monroe electors, 3,308. The only counties carried by
Monroe were Loudoun, Harrison, Wood, Hardy, Berkeley,
Princess Anne, Warwick, Northampton, and Accomac,
though he did carry Norfolk Borough besides; and these
were nearly all Federalist strongholds.

And now let us return for a few moments to William B.
Giles, who was one of Madison's energetic and efficient
supporters in the contest. In the same letter to Nicholson,
in which Randolph said that Giles was helping to pull him
down, he also said: "I am told that he (Giles) has shown
a letter, which I wrote him in full confidence during the
winter, to my prejudice. `Where dwelleth honor?' "[154]
And he was not the man to be stirred deeply enough to ask
such a question as this and to do nothing more. The
feelings, aroused in him by Giles' breach of confidence,
became still angrier, as the struggle between the majority
and the minority Republicans grew more intense, and
finally culminated in an interview, of which Benjamin
Watkins Leigh has left an account, dated Petersburg,

Aug. 4, 1807. In this paper, Leigh says that at Richmond,
in the previous May, Randolph had obtained from Giles,
and shewn to him a copy of the letter from Randolph to
Giles, which was the subject of the breach of confidence;
and that, later in the day, Randolph had come to him at
the capitol, and requested him to accompany him to
Giles' lodgings, in order that he might be present while he
propounded some questions to Giles about the letter;
which Leigh did. After these questions had been
pointedly addressed to Giles by Randolph, and had been
answered, the former, with great mildness, observed that he
was happy in the opportunity that had been afforded to
him to satisfy Randolph of the propriety of his own
motives and conduct; that, though he had never regarded
the letter as a confidential one, he had shewn it only to a
few gentlemen, whom he considered Randolph's personal
and political friends; and that, in showing it, he had been
actuated merely by the motives which had often induced
him to shew, and sometimes even to read, in a court yard,
letters containing political information. He further said
that, whatever political differences had lately arisen, he
had always spoken and thought of Randolph with undiminished
personal respect and esteem.

Here Randolph interrupted with the exclamation that
all this was nothing to the purpose; that Giles had written
him a letter stuffed with professions of friendship, to which
in a moment of warmth, of hurry, and of confidence, he
had returned an answer, containing sentiments which
indeed he had often publicly expressed, but which were
presented to Giles in the unconsidered language of private
correspondence; and that Giles had exposed that answer
to the misconceptions, and of course to the misrepresentations,
of others, for whom it never was intended. Then,
after giving further expression to his feelings in a strain
of severe and pointed reproach, he concluded by declaring
that, to expose a private letter, to betray the unsuspecting

and unguarded confidence of friendship, as he conceived
Giles had done, was a most dishonorable and base dereliction
of every principle, which regulated the intercourse
of gentlemen.

At this, Giles said that he wished to hear no more
language of that kind; that he would consider the conduct
proper on his part, and that Randolph might perhaps hear
from him; whereupon Randolph bid him good morning,
and left the room. Returning, however, he told Giles that
he would certainly have demanded an explanation of him
at Washington, during the preceding winter, had not his
own feelings warned him, that the state of decrepitude, in
which he saw Giles, should withhold him from inflicting
on him the chastisement which he meditated, and which
Giles' conduct justly deserved.

To this no reply was made by Giles, and Randolph
immediately retired; leaving Leigh behind with Giles, who
had requested Leigh to remain with him when Randolph
first left the room. Then, upon being told by Leigh that
he should certainly have deemed such a letter a confidential
one, Giles declared that he was willing (if Randolph
pleased) to submit the matter to Leigh and any other gentleman,
and to abide by the results of their deliberations
on the subject; and he requested Leigh to interpose his
good offices, so far as to state this fact to Randolph. This
request was complied with, but Randolph immediately
and decisively rejected the suggestion, declaring that he
would submit his feelings to the arbitrament of no gentlemen,
however impartial and respectable.

This rebuff was followed by an effort upon the part of
Leigh, who "anticipated extremities," and Major Eggleston,
who had been called in as Giles' friend, to bring about
an adjustment of the difficulty upon these terms: Giles
was to acknowledge that he had acted improperly and
unguardedly in showing Randolph's letter, though without
any hostile motive, and that Randolph had cause to

complain, and was to declare that he was sorry for what
had happened; provided that Randolph would pledge
himself, after receiving this message, to retract the harsh
expressions that he had addressed to Giles. The proposition
was submitted to Randolph, but he rejected it as
he had done the other, averring his fixed determination to
submit to the arbitrament of no person whatever; and
saying that, if Giles chose to make an apology, he must
do so without any pledge from him that he would pursue
any particular ulterior course.[155] (a)

This, too, we suppose, was one of the episodes in Randolph's
life which led Henry Adams to assert that Randolph
never pressed a quarrel to the end, or resented an insult
further than was necessary to repel it.[156] Deprived of its
malicious innuendo, the statement is one that we should
be glad to make ourselves, if we could only make it truthfully,
but we could not. In the same connection, Adams
says that Randolph was notorious for threatening to use
his weapons on every occasion of a tavern quarrel, but that
at such times he was probably excited by drink, and that,
when quite himself, he never used them, if it was possible
to avoid it. But, pray, when was Randolph ever engaged
in a tavern quarrel?

An amusing feature of Leigh's narrative is found in the
fact that Major Eggleston was a Magistrate, but did not
hesitate to relieve Leigh of all embarrassment, when the
latter first took up the subject of the altercation with him,
by assuring Leigh that he would never act in his official
capacity on any information that he might give him. So
long as the social superstition, on which the duel rested,
survived, the jurisdiction, with which the Court of Honor
was clothed by public opinion, was paramount to the
authority of any court created by the laws.

Randolph was re-elected to Congress in 1809; Tell and

Ritchie notwithstanding; but he did not return to Washington
until March 11, 1810. On March 22, he moved
the resolution that the military and naval establishments
ought to be reduced.

Randolph was right. In eight years, Washington had
spent $11,250,000 on the army and navy; in four, John
Adams had spent $18,000,000, and, after reducing this
amount to $8,600,000, during his first four years, Jefferson,
during his second four, had brought the total up from that
amount to $16,000,000, and nearly to the limit reached by
John Adams flagrante bello.[158] And what was there to show
for such an expenditure? A demoralized army, led by
Wilkinson, a general who would have belonged wholly
to the province of burlesque if his treason had not kept him
partly out of it; a navy of impotent gunboats, and the
sword, which should have been the terror of the enemy,
suicidally turned, pursuant to the timorous and stupid
counsels of a false policy of commercial restriction, against
the heart of its own master.

In the beginning, Randolph's proposition was received
with an extraordinary measure of approval by the House.
Without a dissenting voice, it resolved in committee of the
whole that the military and naval establishments ought to
be reduced,[159] and the next day by a vote of 60 to 31 this

resolution was formally adopted by the House[160] ; but, later,
when bills were reported by Randolph and Smilie for the
purpose of carrying the resolution into effect, the House,
yielding doubtless under external pressure, or the solicitations
of patronage, to one of those sudden spasms of
regurgitation, to which all legislative assemblies are
subject at times, went back practically upon everything to
which it had given its approval a few days before. However,
the end of the session came before the discussion of
the subject had entirely ceased.

A more barren session of Congress there has rarely been.
Perhaps, it would have been livelier if Randolph had not
been detained at Roanoke so long.

This session, however, was enlivened by one of Randolph's
sallies. On April 2, 1810, he offered a resolution
that the existing act interdicting commercial intercourse,
etc., ought to be immediately repealed; and to this resolution
Mr. Montgomery, of Maryland, offered a high-sounding
amendment in the following words: "And
that provision ought to be made by law for maintaining
the rights, honor and independence of the United States
against the edicts of Great Britain and France."[162] On a
motion to postpone action on the amendment until the
next day, Randolph said:

On the whole, Randolph's course in this Congress was
sufficiently significant to draw from Henry Adams this
observation upon it:

If the debates of the 11th Congress were rather dull,
Randolph did not permit his personal relations with the
members of the House to suffer that reproach; for it was
during the second session of this Congress that he caned
Willis Alston and barely escaped a duel with Eppes. His
Diary shows that, at this session, he did not reach Washington
from Roanoke until Jan. 23, 1811; nor does it
indicate that he had been detained at Roanoke by sickness
or any other special cause, unless it was the attention
required from him by the partition between Judith
Randolph and himself of his brother Theodorick's lands
on the Little Roanoke.

There had long been an ugly feud between Alston and
himself which had begun with a violent eruption as far
back as 1804. This incident, and along with it the later one,
which resulted in the caning, is thus narrated by Sawyer:

There is also an account of the first of these two
incidents in a letter from Dr. Manasseh Cutler to Capt.
Poole, dated Feb. 13, 1804, in which the writer refers to it
as "in a very strict sense a square fight between the all
important head-man of the party [the Republican party]
and another who ranks as his second or perhaps third
lieutenant," and tells us that Randolph, not content with
dashing the wine in Alston's face, broke the wine-glass
itself over Alston's head.[166]

Randolph's own version of the second incident was
given in a letter to Nicholson written five days after it
occurred:

The reference to the collision in Randolph's Diary is
very brief: "Wed. 23 [1811] to Washington. Cane
Alston. J. Clay and Kidder R. [Randolph] present."

But not so brief are Randolph's comments in a letter to
James M. Garnett on a communication to The Spirit of
'76, dated Georgetown, Aug. 14, 1812, which was apparently
written by Garnett. The communication states
that there had appeared in The Democratic Press, a paper
published in Philadelphia by Binns, an infamous calumny
against Mr. John Randolph, purporting to be an extract
from a Washington letter charging Randolph, in direct
terms, with receiving British gold and with having been
seen a short time before riding in the British Minister's
carriage; and that Binns had had the impudence to send a
copy of the article to Randolph, as if he expected that
Randolph would descend so low as to reply to it, but that
the only notice that Randolph gave to it was to write to a
lawyer of his acquaintance in Philadelphia, requesting

him immediately to demand the author, and, if Binns did
not give him up, to sue Binns; and that Binns, stipulating
that no other than legal redress should be resorted to, had
given up the Hon. Willis Alston. In his comments,
Randolph declares that the communication had passed
over one material fact. As soon, he said, as the inquiry
was set on foot by Mr. Dallas at his instance, Binns asked
for time to get an answer from his "honorable correspondent,"
and that several letters passed between Binns and
Alston, before the latter would consent to have his name
given up even with the stipulation de baculo; but that,
Alston's heart forsaking him for fear that Randolph might
not adhere to the terms of his arrangement with Binns, he
had left Washington the day that Binns' letter giving up
his name had left Philadelphia.[168]

A few days after Randolph applied his cane to Alston's
head, he and Eppes were drawn into a colloquy, in the
course of which Eppes charged him with delaying action on
a bill for the purpose of defeating it, and was "given the
lie" by him in reply. A challenge was forthwith indited
by Eppes and handed to Richard M. Johnson, a member
of the House from Kentucky, who delivered it to Randolph.
Each principal then entered upon a course of
practice for the purpose of perfecting his aim. Randolph
engaged the services of a Baltimore surgeon, Dr. Gibson,
and, under the drilling of a first-rate shot, practiced two
hours daily in the woods on the turnpike northeast of the
Capitol. Eppes selected Gen. Wilkinson as his instructor,
and, in a few days, though previously altogether unaccustomed
to handling a pistol, became a first-rate
marksman. We give these circumstances in the words
in which they are given to us by Sawyer who was one of
Eppes' friends. Sawyer further tells us that, while the
duel was impending, Wilkinson called on him, and informed
him of the rapid proficiency that Eppes was

acquiring in the use of the pistol, but was decided in his
opinion that the duel would not come off.

Fortunately, the insinuation which lurks in these words
is conclusively refuted by a letter from Wm. H. Crawford,
the friend to whom Sawyer refers, to Randolph,
dated March 28, 1811, in which Crawford states that
steps were taken by the friends of the principals without
their knowledge to effect an accommodation of the
difficulty; that the terms, upon which they agreed that it
should be settled, were reduced to writing; and that the
paper showed on its face that the first and most important
suggestion, looking to its adjustment, was made by
Richard M. Johnson, who, after stating that he was
determined not to stand upon etiquette, and that the
challenge might be considered as withdrawn, outlined a
plan of reconciliation which, with a slight alteration by
Eppes, "relating to the veracity of each," was accepted by
the principals. The agreement provided that Randolph
should declare that, in saying that the opinion of Eppes
was untrue, he intended only to repel the insinuation that
he understood to have been made by ascribing to him a

motive which he had disclaimed, and that Eppes should
declare that he did not intend to ascribe to Randolph any
motive that the latter had disclaimed. And so, with the
usual hair-triggered refinements, which were as much a
part of the duel as the hair-triggered pistols, the matter
ended.[170]

For the value of Crawford as a witness, we need not go
further than the remarkable tribute paid to him by
Albert Gallatin. "One man at last appeared who filled
my expectations. This man was Mr. Crawford, who
united to a powerful mind a most correct judgment and an
inflexible integrity."[171] (a)

Sawyer also states that, on the occasion of his clash
with Eppes, Randolph came into the House after a hearty
dinner which was well diluted with the homely stimulus
of whiskey[172] —one of those charges, which are much more
easily made than disproved, and, when made, should have
behind them at least the moral standing of a scrupulously
accurate author; which Sawyer was flagrantly not. The
truth is that, if Randolph ever exhibited the least anxiety
about the outcome of the Eppes challenge, he was singularly
successful in disguising it. According to Sawyer
himself, immediately after receiving the challenge, he
retired from the House for the purpose of making his
arrangements for the meeting; and on his return, being
informed by the Speaker, when he was about to enter
again into the discussion, out of which the quarrel had
arisen, that the House had ordered the previous question
and thereby cut off all further debate, he fell into a furious
passion, and declared that the House had disgraced
itself.[173] Nor could anything be cooler than the contemporaneous
entries which Randolph made about the matter
in his Diary, in one of which it is manifest that his

mind was far more elated by the last proof that his favorite
Fidget had given of her bottom than depressed by
the prospect of the approaching duel:

No! once let Randolph be satisfied that his antagonist
was a gentleman, and the hazards of a duel sat upon him
as lightly as any of the other hazards of public life. The
only element of calculation that entered into his conduct
with respect to his personal controversies was the one
created by his desire to select the proper vindicatory
instrument that the case called for. If the object of his
resentment was a Wilkinson, the pillory of public scorn
and a criminal investigation answered his purpose; if an
Alston, a glass of wine or a cane; if a Robert Barraud
Taylor, a Thomas Mann Randolph, or a John W. Eppes
he resorted to his duelling pistols.

Randolph was elected to the 12th Congress and it
proved to be a highly important Congress both to the
people of the United States generally, and to him particularly;
for it was by this Congress that the War of 1812
was finally declared, and it was during its sessions that
Randolph, by reason of his opposition to that war,
incurred the popular resentment which brought about his
defeat at the next Congressional election in 1813. The
first effect of the Congressional election of 1811 was to
introduce into the House a notable group of young, able,

and spirited men: Henry Clay, of Kentucky; John Caldwell
Calhoun and William Lowndes, of South Carolina,
and Felix Grundy, of Tennessee, who were disgusted with
the half-hearted measures employed by Jefferson and
Madison for the enforcement of our rights on the ocean,
and resolved, together with Peter B. Porter, of New York,
Langdon Cheves, of South Carolina, and Richard M.
Johnson, of Kentucky, who had been members of the
House during the 11th Congress, come what might,
fearlessly to assert the strong instincts of national pride
and indignation, which, after so many years of indignity
and injury, were stirring in the breasts of their constituents.
None of these young men had attained the age of
40, they were free from the spell of the old English traditions,
and all of them became useful and distinguished
members of Congress. Nothing perhaps but delicate
health and an early death prevented one of them—
Lowndes—from being one of the most conspicuous figures
in our political history. It was his scholarly character
which led Randolph to declare on one occasion in later
years that he had not heard three words of good English
spoken in the House since Lowndes' death. It was of
Lowndes too that he once said, when the former was
stating the case of an adversary with his usual clearness
and fairness: "He will never be able to answer himself."[174]
Clay and Calhoun, of course, with Daniel Webster, whose
name was soon to be associated imperishably with theirs,
constitute a classical trilogy of parliamentary talents
which apparently can no more be reproduced any longer
in the womb of our national genius than if they were so
many Elizabethan dramatists of the highest rank. The
shining pre-eminence as an orator, which Randolph
enjoyed in the House between 1799 and 1811, was unquestionably,
to some extent, due to the mediocrity of his
fellow-Congressmen. There is nothing like a dull background
for bringing out the lustre of a bright object.
With the exception of Gallatin, Marshall, Bayard, Giles,
and Quincy, there was really no man in the House during
that interval of time whose gifts could be reasonably
measured with his. But now he had to contend with
more than one man even better fitted than he, in many
respects, to sway the faculties and emotions of a deliberative
assembly; and no one was quicker than he to realize
just what the advent of Clay and Calhoun in the House,
and the new-born spirit of nationality, of which they were
the exponents, meant. A few months, after the opening of
the 12th Congress, he said to a friend: "They have entered
this House with their eye on the Presidency, and mark my
words, Sir, we shall have war before the end of the session."[175]

The "war" Republicans controlled the organization
of the House, when it was called together by Madison on
Nov. 4, 1811.[176] Macon might well have been their choice
for Speaker, as he was again in good party standing, and
was ready to fall in with their plans; but he was ignored,
and Henry Clay, the boldest and most zealous member
of the faction, was elected Speaker, though he was a new
member of the House and only 34 years of age.[177] On the
next day, the House received a message from the President
stating that Great Britain, instead of repealing its obnoxious
orders in council, had, at a moment, when such action
was least expected, put them into more rigorous execution;
that indemnity and redress for other wrongs had continued
to be withheld by her, and that our coasts and the
mouths of our harbors had again witnessed scenes not less
derogatory to the dearest of our national rights than
vexatious to the regular course of our trade.

Clay promptly proceeded to organize and man the
committees of the House in such a manner as to give full
control of the situation to the War Party in the House.
One Select Committee was formed to consider so much of
the Message as related to our foreign relations; another
so much of it as related to Military Affairs, and another
so much of it as related to Naval Affairs. Of these three
Committees, Porter, David R. Williams, whose manly
spirit had been thoroughly exasperated by the faltering
foreign policy of Jefferson, and Cheves, were respectively
made Chairmen. Among the persons appointed on the
Standing Committees of Ways and Means, were Cheves
and Johnson.[179]

A few days later, Porter as Chairman of the Select
Committee on Foreign Relations presented a report to the
House, declaring that the period had arrived, when, in the
opinion of the Committee, it was the sacred duty of
Congress to call forth the patriotism and resources of the
country, and recommending that an increase of 10,000
men be added to the regular army, that 50,000 volunteers
be levied, that all the war vessels not in actual service and
worthy of repair be fitted out for service, and that merchant
vessels be armed.[180]

This report was followed by an animated debate in which
Porter and Grundy were among the leading speakers, and,
in reply to them, Randolph delivered a speech so replete
with graphic and eloquent passages as to become one of
the commonplaces of our school readers and declamation
platforms[181] :

Later, came one of the appeals to the sectional jealousy
of the South upon which Randolph was to practice with
such consummate skill in the subsequent stages of
his career:

Equally artful was Randolph's appeal to those fears
which were to become as responsive as an Æolian harp.
On the danger arising to the South from its black population
he said that he would touch as tenderly as possible;
it was with reluctance that he touched on this subject at
all; but, in cases of great emergency, the state physician

must not be deterred by a sickly, hysterical humanity,
from probing the wound of his patient; he must not be
withheld by a fastidious and mistaken humanity from
representing his true situation to his friends, or even to the
sick man himself, where the occasion called for it.

And this was the manner in which Randolph repelled
the accusation that the course of men, like himself, was
determined by mere subserviency to Great Britain:

A more effective counter-irritant for such a speech as
this than Calhoun's admirable reply to it has rarely been
applied. In one of its most striking passages, he said
of our maritime rights:

After the delivery of his remarkable speech, to which we
have just referred, Randolph never relaxed his efforts to
avert war so long as the Twelfth Congress lasted. By
both direct and dilatory methods, he perseveringly combated
every legislative step in the House that tended to
it; and, even after Madison had signed on June 8, 1812, the
Act of Congress, which declared that a state of war existed,
he did not cease to manifest his intense aversion to the
conflict that followed. On one occasion, he arraigned a
proposition to increase the regular army in terms so vivid
that we half overlook their extravagance.[183] On another
occasion, he even offered a resolution authorizing the President
in his discretion to employ the regular army when
not in actual service in the construction of roads, canals,
and other works of public utility.[184] And on still another
occasion, his highly wrought feelings found voice in these
passionate and pathetic words:

All this was before war was declared, and, a few weeks
before that event too, Randolph, stung by the refusal of
the House, pursuant to a ruling of Henry Clay, as Speaker,
which had been preceded by a considerable amount of
vacillation on Clay's part, to consider a resolution, offered
by him, which declared that, under the existing circumstances,
it was inexpedient to resort to a war with Great
Britain, addressed this spirited letter to his constituents[186] :

Henry Clay, on the other hand, stung by the criticism
of his ruling, resorted to the unusual expedient of defending
it in the columns of the National Intelligencer, where
Randolph followed him up with a crisp, pointed reply in
quite his best vein.[187] From that time on, until the two
men came to face each other on the duelling field, Randolph
was to the high-strung Clay very much what one of
the sylvan horse-flies that haunted the woodland roads of
Virginia was to one of Randolph's mettlesome thoroughbreds.
(a)