JOHN RANDOLPH

[1773-1833]

Jot

PHILIP ALEXANDER BRUCE

OHN RANDOLPH of Roanoke was born in King George County, Virginia, June 2, 1773. He was fourth in descent from William Randolph, who, emigrating to the colony in the previous century, accumulated a handsome fortune and founded a family of extraordinary distinction. John Randolph traced straight back to Pocahontas, a fact of which he never ceased to boast. "I am sprung from a race," he once exclaimed in Congress, "who were never known to forget a friend or forgive a foe." His early years were passed at two of the most interesting mansions then standing in Virginia, namely, Cawsons and Matoax. When Randolph was only two and a half years old, his father died, but his place was supplied by the accomplished St. George Tucker, a native of Bermuda, whom Mrs. Randolph married early in her widowhood. Mrs. Tucker, who died in 1788, lived long enough to impress herself deeply on the heart of her celebrated son. She was a woman of great personal beauty and charm, of vigorous intellect and sprightly wit. "She alone knew me," he often exclaimed in after life; and with deep feeling he would add, "The lessons taught me by my dear and revered mother at her knee have been of more value to me than all I have learned from my preceptors and compeers."

There was something in the spirit of Randolph's early years that recalls Byron's vehement youth; for instance, he is known to have swooned away in a passion before he was four years of age. Like Byron, too, he evinced, in his boyhood, no desire to take part in athletic sports, or strenuous open-air diversions. Almost from the time he first learned to read, he was in the daily habit of passing many hours in the closet at Matoax where the books were kept. Here, like Dickens at the same age, he devoured every English classic intelligible to a precocious boy. The Matoax library contained a full collection of the English novelists and essayists, and also translations of numerous French and Spanish histories and romances. Before he had reached his twelfth year he had read, until he knew by heart, 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Gulliver,' 'Tom Jones,' 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' Thomson's 'Seasons,' Shakespeare, 'The Arabian Nights,' Voltaire's 'Charles the Twelfth,' 'Don Quixote,' 'Gil Blas,' 'Orlando

Furioso,' and Plutarch. So lasting was their impression on his memory that his aptest illustrations for his great speeches were invariably drawn from these classical works.

When Arnold invaded Virginia, Mrs. Tucker retired, with her children, to Bizarre, the family estate, situated near Farmville. It was while there, on this occasion, that Randolph for the first time visited the plantation at Roanoke which he had inherited from his father, and which was always to be associated with his name. As he and his mother rode over the property, she gave him advice which he never forgot. "When you get to be a man," said she, "you must not sell your land; keep your land, and your land will keep you." Throughout his long life he never ceased to commend the law of primogeniture, or to admire aristocracy resting upon landed possessions.

Coming of age in 1794, Randolph assumed charge of his extensive landed estate; but it required many years of economical management to clear it of its share of the heavy debt left by his father. Matoax having been sold to reduce this debt, he took up his residence at Bizarre, the home of his brother Richard. Richard was reputed to be the most promising young man in Virginia, but his brilliant prospects were soon blasted by his involvement in a strange and obscure scandal, which proved fatal to his sensitive spirit. When he died, Randolph bravely took on himself all the responsibilities of the family head, but how deeply he was affected at the time was revealed in his conduct. A visitor at Bizarre who occupied the room below his testified that she never waked in the night that she did not hear him moving about, sometimes striding across the floor, and exclaiming "Macbeth hath murdered sleep"; and she also stated that at midnight, ordering his horse to be saddled, he would career over the plantation with a loaded pistol in his hand-an incident that again reminds us of Byron's passionate and ungovernable youth.

It was in full harmony with the custom of that day that a young man like Randolph, of conspicuous talents, and possessing a large fortune and a powerful family connection, should, soon after his majority, offer himself for public office. But the ordinary course With

was first to become a candidate for the State Legislature. characteristic audacity and self-confidence, Randolph announced his candidacy for Congress, a step all the bolder because he would have to ascend the hustings as the opponent of Patrick Henry, the most renowned of orators.

It was only recently that the famous Resolutions of 1798 had been passed by the Virginia Legislature as a protest against the Alien and Sedition Acts. These Resolutions had the emphatic approval of Randolph, as a follower of Jefferson and Madison. Henry,

whose speech came first, declared that the General Assembly, in adopting the Resolutions, had gone beyond its powers. What right had a State Legislature to pass on a national statute? Randolph sarcastically twitted his great antagonist with inconsistency. Were not these very Acts that "squinting towards monarchy" which the old orator had denounced in the Constitutional Convention? Was he not the last man who should come forward to apologize for courses which he had so loudly prophesied and had so vehemently sought to render impossible?

Randolph was elected. True to his political faith, his first act in Congress was to oppose a bill authorizing the increase of the standing army. Having, during the debate, stigmatized the regulars as "ragamuffins," he was jostled in the theater by a party of officers to show their resentment of the opprobrious epithet. He promptly complained to the President of the insult. The slighting notice which Adams took of the crimination only served to inflame further the anger aroused by the incident among Randolph's party associates, and to confirm their belief that the Federalist Administration was using every opportunity, great or small, to strengthen the power of the Central Government at the expense of the power of the States.

But the hour of Federalism had struck. When Jefferson was chosen President, Randolph's reputation was so high that he was appointed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the most important in the House, which made him the spokesman of the new Administration and also of the Republican party in that body, and one of the most influential public men of the country. All the measures touching the acquisition of Louisiana, or its government after its purchase, were matured in this committee; and to Randolph is largely due the success marking the history of that great transaction from its beginning to its conclusion.

It was during this Administration that he was appointed manager of the proceedings in impeachment of Judge Chase, of the Supreme Court, who had been guilty of misconduct in his office. But Chase was acquitted, a fact which shook Randolph's influence with Jefferson and his Cabinet. That influence was further diminished by his bold opposition to the New England Company's assertion of ownership in an enormous tract of the Yazoo region, on the ground that they had purchased, without notice, the titles of the original fraudulent grantees. Madison and Gallatin had reported favorably to the company's claim; and it was also pressed by the company's chairman, Gideon Granger, the Postmaster-general. In the teeth of this powerful combination, Randolph denounced the Yazoo fraud in terms such as he alone could frame.

Nor was he fully in sympathy with some of the other measures

which the President, or members of his Cabinet, approved. Jefferson, for instance, suggested the use of force in retaliation for British impressment of American sailors; Randolph urged negotiation first; and should that fail, an embargo. Finally, largely through his advocacy, a limited non-importation bill, directed against British manufacturers, was passed. When, the following year, the embargo was proposed, he objected to it because he considered some of its provisions unwise; but it became a law, with all the consequences he had foreseen and deprecated.

Randolph disapproved of the War of 1812-'15. Before hostilities. broke out, he opposed every step tending to widen the breach between England and America; and he always held that with a little forbearance peace might have been maintained. How disinterested he was in thus firmly breasting the wave of popular passion was shown by his defeat for Congress in 1815. The war had hardly ended, however, when he was urged to again become a candidate for Congress. His canvass resulted in his opponent's defeat, but his own triumph aroused in him no emotion of exultation. "I am a stricken deer," he wrote despondently, "and feel disposed to leave the herd."

The Republican party, founded by Jefferson, was still in office, but the purity of the original States' Rights doctrines had been profoundly modified by the demoralization of power through the defection of the Northern Democrats and the assaults of the Supreme Court. Randolph remained stanchly loyal to the party's original principles because he saw that in those principles, as they were enunciated at first, rested the only hope of safety for the South and its institutions within the Union. Not only did he oppose the reëstablishment of the United States Bank and the increase in the tariff rates as confirming dangerous precedents, and imposing hardships on the Southern States, but he threw himself with all the vehemence of his ardent spirit into the sectional conflict raised by the debates over the proposed Missouri Compromise. Had his advice been followed, the South would have been saved from the unspeakable calamities which overwhelmed her forty-five years later, for she would either have seceded in 1820, when secession was practicable, or she would then have secured a hold on the territories which could never have been loosened by the South or the North.

In 1822, Randolph spent the summer in England, a country which he knew in every aspect through books. All the local allusions by the great English writers-Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, Byron and their compeers-were at his tongue's end. His sympathy with English life had from the start been assured by the similarity of that life in essential with life in Virginia, by the identity of spirit. of English and Virginia family traditions, and by the substantial ho

mogeneity of the two peoples. In London he met all who were most distinguished dined with Miss Edgeworth, whom he flattered by his minute knowledge of her works, joked with Thomas Moore under the gallery of the House of Commons, and received extraordinary courtesies from prominent members of the nobility.

His antagonism to Clay on all the burning questions of that timethe war with Great Britain, the tariff laws, the Act for Internal Improvements aroused in him a keen antipathy toward that statesman, which culminated in the most celebrated philippic in American history. Clay, as soon as Adams appointed him Secretary of State, had been charged with corruption. Randolph seized upon this groundless assertion to vent his spleen against both men, whom he greatly detested. "I was defeated horse, foot and dragoon," he exclaimed in the House in his most sarcastic tones, "cut up and clean broke down by the coalition of Blifil and Black George-by the combination unheard of till then, of the Puritan and the blackleg."

Clay promptly challenged him. The night before the duel came off the seconds found Randolph absorbed in Milton, and before he would permit them to speak of their errand he read aloud some of the noblest passages of that poet. On the field next day he fired his pistol into the air, after receiving his antagonist's bullet in his coat.

In 1826 Randolph occupied a seat in the Senate, but was defeated for reelection by John Tyler. The following year his faithful district again returned him to Congress, where he became, as before, the leader of the opposition. But his health was now shattered, and at the end of his term, March, 1829, he decided to withdraw from public life. Without his knowledge and against his real wishes, he was soon chosen to be a member of the Convention of 1829-'30, of which he proved to be the most conspicuous personality, whether for brilliancy or eccentricity. Only a short time before he took his seat in the Convention, he had been appointed by Jackson to be Minister to Russia, a position which he held only for a year.

In the spring of 1832 his mind gave way, but after a few weeks his faculties suddenly recovered their strength. His interest in politics at once returned. He deeply resented Jackson's threat at this time to send ships and troops to Charleston to suppress the nullifiers. Expecting war, he publicly declared his determination to have his frail body buckled on his favorite horse, and to fight for the South to the last ditch. Lifted into his carriage, he traveled from county to county, everywhere calling on the people to support their brethren in Carolina.

Randolph now decided to visit England as the last hope of alleviating his maladies. On arriving in Philadelphia, he was too ill to embark. A physician was summoned. "How long have you been