University of Virginia Library

"You will perceive by the enclosed letter, in case the fact
shall have failed to reach you through any other channel, that
the enemies whom it has been my lot to make in the discharge
of the duties of the station, to which I had been called by the

public suffrage, seem unwilling to allow me even the repose
of that retirement, to which, after many baffled efforts, they
have succeeded in persuading my late constituents to consign
me. I shall not stop to enquire how far such a proceeding be
honorable, or even politic, as it regards the views of those, who
have allowed themselves to adopt it; although the people, with
whom it was once my pride to be connected, must have undergone
some strange metamorphosis, not less rapid and disastrous
than that which our unhappy country has experienced
within the same period of time, if there be one among them
that does not see through the motives of those who would
entreat them to turn their eyes from the general calamity and
shame, and the shameless authors of them, to the faults and
indiscretions, real or imputed, of an old, dismissed public
servant, whose chief offence in the eyes of his accusers is that,
foreseeing mischief, he labored to avert it. Nine years have
now elapsed since he raised his voice against the commencement
of a system of measures, which, although artfully disguised,
were calculated, as he believed, to produce what we
have all seen, and are fated long to feel. Had they, who derided
what they were then pleased to term his `mournful vaticinations,
the reveries of a heated and disordered imagination,'
confided less in their own air-built theories, and taken warning
ere it was too late, they might be riding on `the full tide of
successful experiment,' instead of clinging with instinctive and
convulsive grasp to the wreck, which themselves have made of
public credit, of national honor, of peace, happiness and security,
and of faith among men. The very bonds, not only of
union between these states, but of society itself are loosened,
and we seem `approaching towards that awful dissolution, the
issue of which it is not given to human foresight to scan.' In
the virtue, the moderation, the fortitude of the People is
(under God) our last resource. Let them ever bear in mind
that from their present institutions there is no transition but to
military despotism; and that there is none more easy. Anarchy
is the chrysalis state of despotism; and to that state have the
measures of this government long tended, amidst professions,
such as we have heard in France and seen the effects of, of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. None but the people can forge
their own chains; and to flatter the people and delude them by
promises never meant to be performed is the stale but successful
practice of the demagogue, as of the seducer in private
life.—`Give me only a helve for my axe,' said the woodman in
the fable to the tall and stately trees, that spread their proud
heads and raised their unlopped arms to the air of heaven.
`Give me an Army,' says the wily politican. It is only to fight
the English, to maintain `Free trade and sailors' rights'; and,
dazzled by the `pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious
war,' heedless of the miseries that lurk beneath its splendor,
the People have said Amen! Of these the heavy debts and
grinding taxes, that follow in its train, are, perhaps, the least.
Disease and vice, in new unheard-of forms, spread from the
camp throughout society. Not a village, not a neighborhood,
hardly a family escapes the infection. The searching miseries
of war penetrate even into the hovel of the shivering negro
whose tattered blanket and short allowance of salt bear witness
to the glories of that administration under which his
master is content to live. His master, no doubt some `Southern
Nabob,' some `Haughty Grandee of Virginia,' the very
idea of whose existence disturbs the repose of over-tender consciences,
is revelling in luxury which the necessary wants of
his wretched bondsmen are stinted to supply. Such is the
stuff that dreams are made of! The master, consumed by
cares, from which even the miserable African is free, accustomed
to the decent comforts of life, is racking his brain for
ways and means to satisfy the demands of the taxgatherer.
You see the struggle between his pride and his necessity. That
ancient relic of better times, on which he bends his vacant eye,
must go. It is, itself, the object of a new tax. He can no longer
afford to keep it. Moreover, he must find a substitute for his
youngest boy called into service. His eldest son has perished
in the tentless camp, the bloodless but fatal fields of the fenny
country; and even for the cherished resemblance of this favorite
child he must pay tribute to Caesar. The tear that starts
into his eye, as he adds this item to the inventory of exaction,
would serve but to excite a philosophic smile in the `Grimm'
Idol (see the diplomatic Baron's correspondence) of the Levee
and its heartless worshippers.

"Such is the condition of the better and more enviable classes
of society. There is more than one beneath it. A husband, the
sole support of a wife and helpless children; a son, the only
stay and comfort of a widowed mother, you have the outline;
fill up the picture; for you can do it with a master's hand. We
shall then see the patch-work of the cradle and the particolored
rags of squalid poverty fluttering amidst the ensigns
and standards which some cadet for military promotion lays at
the feet of our President's lady, on his knees. If, at the price
of all this suffering, could be brought back the tone of public
sentiment, `that felt a stain like a wound,' it might be even
cheaply purchased; but Othello's occupation's gone. War is
now a business of calculation, by which a bankrupt, become
contractor, may poison your yeomanry at so much a head,
and in two years time subscribe as many hundred thousand
dollars `to the loan'; thus riveting upon the survivors of those
whom he has murdered a clear perpetual annuity of twelve
thousand a year. This is not all. The professions, to which,
for the most part, our finest young men had devoted themselves,
having deserted them, just as they were beginning to
get forward in life, and upon the faith of their prospects had
acquired families; they will have no other resource but a commission
in the army. Their poverty but not their will consents;
and even this motive will soon learn to assume the garb of
patriotism, of public spirit. In a little while, men of all parties
will insensibly slide into the support of the Cabal at Washington;
will be seen dangling in the ante-chamber of the Secretary
of War; dancing attendance for a commission. They, whose
opposition to the men in power has been conspicuous, will, for
a while, feebly adhere to their old principles; at the same time
studiously avoiding every occasion that may call for the assertion
of them. But a few months will render them, in the main,
very good courtiers; while the younger aspirants after military
fame, having no shackles upon them, will be at once thorough
Janissaries.

"We shall be divided into two great but very unequal classes;
those who pay taxes, and those who receive the proceeds of
them. Into the first of these classes, I and mine and all that
I love, with a few exceptions, must fall; you, my good friend,

among the rest. I was not born into this order of things, and
I never will consent, voluntarily, to become the vassal of a
privileged order of military and monied men, by whom, as by
a swarm of locusts, the produce of my land is to be devoured,
and its possessor consigned to indigence and scorn. He who
will not assert his place in society deserves to be trampled
under foot. `Will you not then defend the country?' Will
I defend myself?' it might as well be asked. Yes, with my last
shilling, with my heart's blood. But you know that this
federal army is so far from being raised for our defence that we
are obliged to defend it; such portions of it at least as for decency's
sake are permitted to remain among us, and even to
march to the assistance of our defenceless sister state of Maryland.
You know that its object is to provoke in Canada retaliation
on the shores and waters of the Chesapeake; that it is a
great engine of patronage; that the entrance into the rooms of
the Palace leads no longer through the Department of State,
but through the avenues of the War Office. No man admires
more than I do the gallantry displayed by our officers and
soldiers during the last campaign in Upper Canada. But I
cannot consent, in my admiration of individuals (some of
whom are of my personal and particular acquaintance) to
lose sight of those principles of civil liberty, in which I was
bred, and in which I mean to die. Of the navy it is unnecessary
to speak. The simple record of its deeds is its best eulogism;
and its most gallant exploits have been recorded with a
modesty that . . . our admiration of the valor by which they
have been achieved.

"The course of measures, to which during seven years I had
opposed myself in Congress, drew, in the session of 1811-12,
to that catastrophe, which I felt it to be my duty to arrest by
the best efforts of my understanding. In the exercise of this
high constitutional duty—at once a duty and a right—I was
arbitrarily silenced on the floor of an assembly calling itself
deliberative [and] abusing the once venerated name of an
American Congress. Then was the time, as I thought and
still do think, for the members of the Opposition to have
quitted their seats, and to have abandoned an infuriated conclave
to the misrule of their own mad passions; instead of

lending by their presence the countenance of deliberation to
an assembly that had ceased to be deliberative. Gentlemen,
whose opinions I hold in the utmost deference, thought otherwise.
To resign my commission into the hands of those from
whom I had received it, was the next step that occurred to me.
But I immediately perceived that this act of political suicide
would at once gratify my oppressors and injure my constituents
who would be thereby deprived of a vote on the great
question of war which was soon to come before Congress. My
part was taken to remain at my post and calmly await the
consequences; leaving the responsibility to those who `had
rushed in where angels might fear to tread.'

"Had I been counsel to the meanest and vilest felon that
ever disgraced humanity, I had been heard, as matter of right,
before any court in the Union; but I was deputed by more than
two thousand freeholders to vindicate their rights at the bar of
the House of Representatives. I was silenced, not even on
the stale plea of urgency, for there was no business before the
House, but by the sic volo of one tyro on the floor and the sic
jubeo of another in the chair. Stat pro ratione voluntas. Can
we wonder at the depth of misery and shame into which our
country is sunk `when such as these presume to lay their hands
upon the ark of her magnificent and awful cause'? Such as
these? Yes, such as in comparison with whom even these are
`Solomons in Council and Samsons in the field.'

"To my constituents I made my appeal. The war was declared,
the Election supervened, and they disavowed me. In
that decision I acquiesced as it became me to do. Good cause
as I had to believe that the small apparent majority which had
been obtained against me was procured by unfair devices, I
moved for no new trial. Without any affected change of my
manners, I used none of the means practised by the most honorable
men to extend their popularity. I was satisfied with
having stood an eight years' siege against the whole power and
patronage of Government and the incessant roar of the artillery
of the press exclusively devoted to administration. To
fall in such a cause was no mean glory. I well knew that it
was neither by the prowess nor by the friends of mine adversary
that I had been beaten down. I returned nothing loth to the

superintendence of my own affairs (too long neglected) with a
clear conscience and clean hands. Business calling me to
Prince Edward, July court, I was solicited by a most respectable
and numerous body of freeholders of that enlightened
county to become a candidate at the ensuing election; friends
who had supported me through the good and evil report of
fourteen stormy years; towards whom my heart yearned; to
whom it was painful in the extreme to deny any thing in my
power to grant. My answer was given publicly that there
might be no room for misconception or misrepresentation.
By that answer, I still abide. It is not I am persuaded yet
forgot. I wish it could have been reduced to writing at the
time. It would have saved you the trouble of this long and
tedious piece of egotism. But, as I am the subject, I know not
how to write upon it without mention of myself. Misrepresentations
having gone abroad with respect to subsequent declarations
which have been imputed to me, I address myself to you
as a freeholder of the district, possessing its general confidence,
and particularly that of your native county. The precautionary
slanders of those out of the district, who have so long taken
us into their unholy keeping, would have led me to infer, in the
absence of more direct evidence, the existence of a disposition
on the part of my late constituents to renew the connexion
which so long subsisted between us, and which was dissolved
by no act of mine. Since I began this letter, I have been requested
in writing by more than one respectable freeholder to
state explicitly whether or not `if the people choose to elect
me, I will serve them.' At all times, I should conceive it my
duty so to do; but, in the present situation of affairs, nothing
short of imperious necessity should withhold my services from
the country in any shape that they might be thought useful.

"It were uncandid, however, not to apprize you that my
capacity to be of public service is materially impaired. I have
heretofore trod the path of public duty, fearless of consequences;
secure of that confidence which furnished at once the
motive and the means of exertion. Are you not afraid that,
when I should seize some state-felon by the throat and drag
him to the bar of public justice, I shall be throwing many a
homeward look, doubtful of your support? Respect for the

opinions, even for the prejudices of his constituents, a common
interest and common feeling with them, are essential to
the character of a fit and faithful representative of the People.
But none can be more unfit, and, in fact, unfaithful than he
who is ever trembling for his influence at home, and, in the
general wreck of the state, is alive only to the risk of his own
paltry popularity. And this, too, when there is not a single
office in the gift of government worth the acceptance of any
man of generous ambition or true pride of character. Subject
me to what imputations it may, I deliberately assert such to be
my opinion. To say nothing of subalterns, the present incumbent
has rendered the Presidential velvet not worth the wearing.
Alas, poor man! 'Tis lined with thorns for him.

"Amidst all our mortifications and distresses, we have one
consolation left; that events in Europe have changed the character
of this war; that we are no longer spilling our blood and
pouring out our treasure to rivet the chains of a foreign usurper
upon the Christian Commonwealth.

"We have another in the manner in which the war has been
waged by our enemy, who, envious of the glory of Hull's
proclamation, and the burning of York and Newark, has, in
his own person, furnished us with a companion in disgrace.
To you, among others of my friends, I have often expressed my
regret, that the father of political philosophy and his illustrious
pupil could not have lived to see the salvation of Europe rescued
by the unerring foresight of the one and the unshaken
constancy of the other from the vilest bondage ever yet imposed
upon man. I figured to myself this awful political patriarch
pouring forth his ejaculations and chanting his Nunc
Dimittis in a strain far different from the reverend Hugh Peters
and his disciples of the old Jewry. Short-sighted creature that
I am, I now rejoice, for his sake, that he has not lived to see
England the sole champion of Jacobinism in Europe; to witness
the disgrace of her arms, yet more in victory than defeat. The
laurels of Trafalgar and Roncesvalles, surpassing in renown the
Paladins of Charlemagne, have been tarnished by men bearing
British commissions and boasting that they were pupils of
Nelson and Wellington. What would that man `of ancient
character and of modern genius' say to the exploits of his soi-

[ILLUSTRATION]

JOHN RANDOLPH

From the copy of the portrait by J. Wood.

Reproduced in Garland's Life.

disant companions in arms at Hampton and Craney-Island
and Alexandria and Tappahannock? I can figure to myself
nothing so wounding to the noble spirit of such a man (it is a
nobility of which the patent is from God) as an unvarnished
tale of these and some other transactions of the British forces
in the Chesapeake. When I heard that the fleet was passing
up the Potomac, the first thought that struck me was that the
enemy would land at Mount Vernon; that they would take the
body of Washington (it is public property and derelict, scarcely
covered by a sort of roof-house on the shore) and transport it
to Westminster Abbey; that it would be interred with Marlborough
and Chatham (not the commander-in-chief at Walcheren);
and that a magnificent monument would announce
to future ages that `there lay the remains of the Founder of the
Independence of a Nation that had neither valor to defend his
ashes, nor gratitude to afford them a tomb.' Little did I dream
that the invaders were more worthily employed in diving into
cellars and climbing into garrets after a few hogsheads of
inferior tobacco and some barrels of our flour. I sincerely ask
their pardon for the gross mistake which I committed respecting
their character and rejoice that none of their sable allies
had apprised them that beneath the outer shell of wood there
is a leaden coffin. The black cloth, all that has not been
stripped off by pious pilgrims, as evidence of their devotion, is
so decayed by damps as not to tempt the cupidity even of the
coloured friends of our invaders. It is equally fortunate that
it never occurred to some Trinculo of the fleet that the corpse
of Washington, like their own Nelson, `festering in his shroud,'
might be turned to as good account in London as a `painted
fish,' and that `not a holiday fool in England but would give a
piece of silver.' It may not be unnecessary to apprize those
accomplished scholars and even some of their superiors at
home that this is not the language of an American libel but of a
dramatic writer who flourished under an English Queen, the
glory of whose reign and the sagacity of whose ministers we
are barbarous enough to think not eclipsed by those of the
Prince Regent.

"We must sometimes try to force a smile through our griefs,
and I confess it does grieve me to the heart to think that the

demon who now haunts the Isle of Elba may (illegible) in
the success of one favorite part of his great project—that the
seeds of eternal discord are sown between the two great families
of the Anglo-Saxon race. England may rest assured that
she will find in this nation no contemptible rival, when we shall
shake off the present incubus, and that it is not for her, with
more than one-third of her subjects excommunicated and
exasperated against her, to talk, or to think of, dissolving our
union. She counts upon the imbecility of the men at the head
of our affairs. They stand like criminals at the foot of the
gallows, and, should the reprieve of peace happily arrive, will
lose in the joy of their deliverance all sense of the disgrace of
their situation.

"I am with very sincere respect and regard, dear sir, your
obedient Servant,[1]

"He feared, if a writ were to issue against that old party,
as had been facetiously said in another body of our valiant
army, it would be impossible for a constable with a search warrant
to find it. There must be a return of non est inventus.
Death, resignation, and desertion had thinned their ranks.
They had disappeared. New men and new doctrines had
succeeded."[3]

"What!" said Mr. Randolph, "Increase our standing army
in time of peace on the suggestion that we are to go on a crusade

in South America? Do I not understand the gentleman?
(The Speaker here intimated a negative to this question.)
I am sorry I do not. I labor under two great misfortunes; one
is that I can never understand the honorable Speaker; the
other is that he can never understand me."[10]

"The proposal to establish this great bank," he said, "is
but a crutch, and, so far as I understand it, it is a broken one;
it will tend instead of remedying the evil to aggravate it. The
evil of the times is a spirit engendered in this republic, fatal to
Republican principles; fatal to Republican virtue; a spirit to
live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of
profusion; in other words, the spirit of Cataline himself, alieni
avidus sui profusus; a spirit of expediency not only in public
but in private life; the system of Diddler in the farce, living
any way and well; wearing an expensive coat and drinking the
finest wines at anybody's expense. This bank, I imagine, Sir,
(I am far from ascribing to the gentleman from South Carolina
[Mr. Calhoun] any such views) is to a certain extent a
modification of the same system. Connected as it is to be with
the Government, whenever it goes into operation, a scene will
be exhibited on the great theatre of the United States at which
I shudder. If we mean to transmit our institutions unimpaired
to posterity; if some now living wish to continue to live under
the same institutions by which they are now ruled, and, with
all its evils, real or imaginary, I presume no man will question
that we live under the easiest government on the globe, we
must put bounds to the spirit which seeks wealth by every
path but the plain and regular path of honest industry and
honest fame. . . .

"Let us not disguise the fact, Sir. We think we are living
in the better times of the Republic. We deceive ourselves;
we are almost in the days of Sylla and Marius; yes, we have
almost got down to the time of Jugurtha. It is unpleasant to
put oneself in array against a great leading interest in a community,
be they a knot of land speculators, paper jobbers, or
what not; but, Sir, every man you meet in this House or out of
it with some rare exceptions, which only serve to prove the
rule, is either a stockholder, president, cashier, clerk, or doorkeeper,
runner, engraver, paper-maker or mechanic in some
other way to a bank. The gentleman from Pennsylvania may
dismiss his fears for the State banks with their one hundred and
seventy millions of paper on eighty-two millions of capital.
However great the evil of their conduct may be, who is to bell
the cat? Who is to take the bull by the horns? You might

as well attack Gibraltar with a pocket pistol as to attempt to
punish them. There are very few who dare to speak truth to
this mammoth. The banks are so linked together with the business
of the world that there are very few men exempt from their
influence. The true secret is, the banks are creditors as well as
debtors; and, if we were merely debtors to them for the paper
in our pockets, they would soon, like Morris & Nicholson, go
to jail (figuratively speaking) for having issued more paper
than they were able to pay when presented to them. A man
has their note for $50.00, perhaps, in his pocket, for which he
wants fifty Spanish milled dollars; but they have his note
for five thousand in their possession and laugh at his demand.
. . .

"The stuff uttered on all hands, and absolutely got by rote
by the haberdasher's boys behind the counters in the shops,
that the paper now in circulation will buy anything you want
as well as gold and silver, is answered by saying that you want
to buy silver with it. The present mode of banking goes to
demoralize society; it is as much swindling to issue notes with
intent not to pay as it is burglary to break open a house. If
they are unable to pay, the banks are bankrupts; if able to
pay, and will not, they are fraudulent bankrupts; but a man
might as well go to Constantinople to preach Christianity as
to get up here and preach against the banks. . . . To pass
this bill will be like getting rid of the rats by setting fire to the
house. Whether any other remedy can be devised I will not
undertake to pronounce. The banks have lost all shame and
exemplify a beautiful and very just observation of one of the
finest writers that men banded together in a common cause will
collectively do that at which every individual of the combination
would spurn. This observation has been applied to the
enormities committed and connived at by the British East
India Company; and will equally apply to the modern system
of banking and still more to the spirit of party. . . .

"As to establishing this bank to prevent a variation in
the rate of exchange of bank paper, you might as well expect
to prevent a variation of the wind; you might as
well pass an act of Congress (for which if it would be of
any good I should certainly vote) to prevent the northwest

wind from blowing in our teeth as we go from the House to
our lodgings."[13]

"I am the holder of no stock whatever except livestock, and
had determined never to own any, but, if this bill passes, I
will not only be a stockholder to the utmost of my power, but
will advise every man, over whom I have any influence, to do
the same; because it is the creation of a great privileged order
of the most hateful kind to my feelings, and because I would
rather be the master than the slave. If I must have a master,
let him be one with epaulets, something that I can fear and
respect, something that I can look up to, but not a master with
a quill behind his ear."[14]

"I am sorry to say, because I should be the last man in the
world to disturb the repose of a venerable man, to whom I
wish a quiet end of his honorable life, that all the difficulties
under which we have labored, and now labor on this subject
[the respective powers of the National and State Governments],
have grown out of a fatal admission by one of the late Presidents
of the United States, an admission which runs counter
to the tenor of his whole political life, and is expressly contradicted
by one of the most luminous and able state papers that
ever was written, an admission which gave a sanction to the
principle that this Government had the power to charter the
present colossal bank of the United States. Sir, that act and
one other which I will not name bring forcibly home to my
mind a train of melancholy reflections on the miserable state
of our mortal being:

Such is the state of the case, Sir. It is miserable to think of it,
and we have nothing left to us but to weep over it."[15]

"But the gentleman from New York and some others, who
have spoken on this occasion, say, What! shall we be startled
by a shadow? Shall we recoil from taking a power clearly
within—(what?)—our reach? Shall we not clutch the sceptre,
the air-drawn sceptre that invites our hand because of the fears
and alarms of the gentleman from Virginia?

"Sir, if I cannot give reason to the Committee, they shall
at least have authority. Thomas Jefferson then in the vigor
of his intellect was one of the persons who denied the existence
of such powers. James Madison was another. He, in that
masterly and unrivalled report in the Legislature of Virginia,
which is worthy to be the textbook of every American statesman,
has settled this question. For me to attempt to add
anything to the arguments of that paper would be to attempt
to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on
the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow;
in every aspect of it wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Neither will I hold up my farthing rushlight to the blaze of
that meridian sun. But, Sir, I cannot but deplore, my heart
aches when I think of it, that the hand which erected that
monument of political wisdom should have signed the act to
incorporate the present Bank of the United States."[16]

"What," Randolph asked, "do the principles about which
such a contest is maintained amount to but a system of bounties
to manufacturers, in order to encourage them to do that
which, if it be advantageous to do at all, they will do of course
for their own sakes; a largess to men to exercise their own customary
callings for their own emolument; and Government
devising plans and bestowing premiums out of the pockets of
the hard working cultivator of the soil to mould the productive
labor of the country into a thousand fantastic shapes; barring
up all the time, for that perverted purpose, the great, deep,
rich stream of our prosperous industry. Such a case, Sir, I
agree with the honorable gentleman cannot be fairly brought
before this House. It eventuates in this: whether you, as a
planter, will consent to be taxed in order to hire another man

to go to work in a shoemaker's shop, or to set up a spinning
jenny. For my part, I will not agree to it, even though they
should by way of return agree to be taxed to help us to plant
tobacco; much less will I agree to pay all and receive nothing
for it. No, I will buy where I can get manufactures cheapest;
I will not agree to lay a duty on the cultivators of the soil to
encourage exotic manufactures; because after all we should
only get much worse things at a much higher price, and we,
the cultivators of the country, would in the end pay for all.
Why do not gentlemen ask us to grant a bounty for the encouragement
of making flour? The reason is too plain for me
to repeat it; then why pay a man much more than the value
for it to work up our own cotton into clothing, when, by selling
my raw material, I can get my clothing much better and
cheaper from Dacca.

"Sir, I am convinced that it would be impolitic as well as
unjust to aggravate the burdens of the People for the purpose
of favoring the manufacturers; for this Government created
and gave power to Congress to regulate commerce and equalize
duties on the whole of the United States, and not to lay a
duty but with a steady eye to revenue. With my good will,
Sir, there should be none but an ad valorem duty on all articles
which would prevent the possibility of one interest in the
country being sacrificed by the management of taxation to
another. What is there in those objects of the honorable
gentleman's solicitude to give them a claim to be supported by
the earnings of the others? The agriculturists bear the whole
brunt of the war and taxation and remain poor while the others
run in the ring of pleasure and fatten upon them. The agriculturists
not only pay all but fight all while the others run. The
manufacturer is the citizen of no place or any place. The agriculturist
has his property, his lands, his all, his household gods
to defend; and [is] like that meek drudge, the Ox, who does the
labor and plows the ground, and then, for his reward, takes the
refuse of the farmyard, the blighted blades and the mouldy
straw and the mildewed shocks of corn for his support; while
the commercial speculators live in opulence, whirling in coaches
and indulging in palaces; to use the words of Dr. Johnson,
coaches which fly like meteors and palaces which rise like

exhalations. Even without your aid, the agriculturists are no
match for them. Alert, vigilant, enterprising and active, the
manufacturing interest are collected in masses and ready to
associate at a moment's warning for any purpose of general
interest to their body. Do but ring the firebell, and you can
assemble all the manufacturing interests of Philadelphia in
fifteen minutes. Nay, for matter of that, they are always
assembled; they are always on the Rialto, and Shylock and
Antonio meet there every day as friends, and compare notes,
and lay plans and possess in trick and intelligence what, in the
goodness of God to them, the others can never possess. It is
the choicest bounty to the ox that he cannot play the fox or the
tiger; so it is to one of the body of agriculturists that he cannot
skip into a coffee-house and shave a note with one hand while
with the other he signs a petition to Congress portraying the
wrongs and grievances and sufferings he endures, and begging
them to relieve him; yet to relieve him out of the pockets of
those whose labors have fed and enriched, and whose valor has
defended, him. The cultivators, the patient drudges of the
other orders of society, are now waiting for your resolution;
for on you it depends whether they shall be left further unhurt
or be, like those in Europe, reduced gradatim and subjected to
another squeeze from the hard grasp of power. Sir, I have
done."[17]

"He expressed a wish that some other gentleman had undertaken
the business; but, as no one had thought proper to
awaken the House to a sense of their concern in it, or to point
the finger of scorn at it, he would take upon him the office to
do it, and to call upon the House to put a stop to proceedings
at that moment carried on under their very noses; proceedings
that were a crying sin before God and man; a practice which
he said was not surpassed for abomination in any part of the

earth; for in no part of it, not even excepting the rivers on the
coast of Africa, was there so great and so infamous a slave
market as in the metropolis; in the very seat of government of
this nation which prided itself on freedom. Before he proceeded
further, he fenced himself in against all suspicion of
unduly interfering in the very delicate subject of the relation
between the slave and his owner; and to that end, he reminded
the House that, where a bill was brought in some years before
to prevent the prosecution of the African slave trade, he had
voted against it, because it professed a principle against which
it was the duty of every man of the Southern or slave-holding
States to set his face; for it assumed a prerogative to interfere
in the right of property between the master and his slave. On
account of that opposition, he had been calumniously and
falsely held up as one of the advocates of the most nefarious,
the most disgraceful and most infernal traffic that had ever
stained the annals of the human race. Upon another occasion,
too, when a member of that House had taken upon him the lien
between slave and master, he had raised his voice against it.
He had never directly or indirectly acquiesced in the weak and
wailing plans of those who by way of relieving the unfortunate
African would throw the States into danger; he would never
weaken the form of the contract between the owner and his
slave; and he would never deny that the citizens of other States,
coming into the slaveholding States, might exercise the right of
ownership over the slaves they might purchase; but it was not
necessary to that exercise that this city should be made a
depot of slaves who were bought either from cruel masters or
kidnapped; and, of those who were kidnapped, he said there
were two kinds; slaves stolen from their masters and free persons
stolen, he might say, from themselves. It was not necessary
that we should have here in the very streets of our new
metropolis a depot for this nefarious traffic, in comparison with
which the traffic from Africa to Charleston or Jamaica was
mercy; was virtue. Indeed, there could be no comparison
rationally instituted between taking those savages from their
native wilds and tearing the civilized, informed negro, habituated
to cultivated life, from his master, his friend, his wife,
his children or his parents."

"Mr. Randolph expressed his regret," the report says, "that
the Honorable gentleman seemed disposed to decline the task,
and offered himself to take his share in the enterprise. The
object of the resolution, he said, was a more coercive police.
He knew that the demands for cotton, tobacco, and, latterly,
for sugar created a demand for slaves, and they had a description
of people here, like those described by Mungo Park, (only
that they are not so humane or honest), white traders, who
made this their depot, and sold human beings; and, to verify
this charge, and show the audacious villainy of their proceedings,
he dwelt upon these words of an advertisement of a sale
of negroes: `No objection to traders bidding.' The increase
in the price was the temptation for which their base, hard-hearted
masters sold out of their families the negroes who had
been raised among them. That very day he had heard a
horrible fact from a respectable gentleman, as he came to the
House, which he would relate. A poor negro, by hard work and
saving of his allowances, had laid by money enough to buy the
freedom of his wife and child, and had paid it from time to
time into the hands of his master; but the poor fellow died.
The transaction was an affair of honor with the master, and,
the day after the poor fellow's death, the woman and child were
sold. One fact like this spoke volumes. He repeated that, if
the honorable chairman of the Committee of the District of
Columbia, refused to take upon him the inquiry into this rank

offence, he (Mr. Randolph) would himself be among these
people."[19]

"Was it wonderful," he asked, "that they should be considered
by the people at large in the light of day laborers who
worked here for something less than a dollar an hour; for something
more perhaps than you have to pay a man for sawing
wood! He promised with a solemn assurance of his sincerity
in the declaration that his opinion was now, and always had
been, that the members of this and the other branch of the
Government ought to receive no pay at all. . . . But, if
the members were to receive pay, he would have them paid
like gentlemen; because members of Congress ought to be
gentlemen. They ought to be, and he trusted they were in
principle; not merely in their exterior but in their high sense of
honor in a character which scorns, which spurns, to do that
which is mean and base."[23]

"What man can live here on $5,000 a year! He may breathe
on it, but who can keep a family, rent a house, furnish it and
keep an equipage, give and receive entertainments on that
annual amount? A five penny bit would be just as adequate
to that purpose; both being notoriously incompetent. A
man so situated may have no patrimonial estate; he may be
suae fortunae faber—have sprung from the Lord knows where,
and be without resources. If he lives as he ought in his station,
the imputation is that he wants money, and must have it; and
that he has the means of coming at it directly or indirectly.
If he had no other object, he said, in increasing the compensation
of the members, if he could thereby compel the State
governments to rescue their officers from the situation in which
they were placed, he would do it. We have a right, said, he
to go into the market and bid against them. When we want a
lawyer in an important case, do we go to him who will do our
business for fifteen shillings or to the Emmets, the Tazewells,
the Pinkneys, the Wickhams? When our personal interest is
concerned, we apply to master-workmen, not to those who will
job for us at $6.00 per day."[24]

"As he had not been bred an idolater to worship the rising
sun, now that the President had no longer power or patronage
to bestow, now that `his orb was sinking temperately to the
west,' even he would not be deterred from saying of him that he
was a great man; for such he unquestionably was in some respects;
and he sincerely wished him all happiness in his retirement;
as sincerely as he wished it for himself."[25]

"It is enough that I do not feel myself bound at all times and
under any circumstances to accept from any man who shall
choose to risk his own life an invitation of this sort, although
I shall be always prepared to repel in a suitable manner the
aggression of any man who may presume upon such a refusal."[26]

"Here," he wrote to a friend on Dec. 21, 1819, "I find myself
isolé almost as entirely as at Roanoke, for the quiet of
which (although I left it without a desire ever to see it again)
I have sometimes panted, or rather to escape from the scenes
around me. Once the object of proscription, I am become one
of indifference to all around me; and, in this respect, I am in
no wise worse off than the rest; for, from all that I can see and
learn, there are no two persons here that care a single straw
for one another. My reception is best by the Old Jacobins
enragés; next by the Federalists, who have abjured their
heresies and reconciled themselves to the true Catholic Church;

worst of all by the old minority men, white-washed into courtiers."[32]

"The spirit of profession and devotion to the court has increased
beyond my most sanguine expectations," wrote Randolph
to Dr. Brockenbrough on Dec. 30, 1819. "The die is
cast; the Emperor is master of the Senate, and, through that

body, commands the life and property of every man in the
Republic! The person who fills the office seems to be almost
without a friend. Not so the office itself."[33]