John Randolph of Roanoke

10. Of Roanoke

10 Of Roanoke still through each change of fortune strange Racked erve, and brain all burning, his loving faith in Mother-land Knew never shade of turning. Congress repealed the Embargo Act three days prior to Madison’s inauguration . Jefferson’s “least bad” policy had nearly destroyed the nation’s economy . Exports from new England had dropped by 75 percent, those from the south by 85 percent. shipbuilding had declined by two-thirds, and farm prices plummeted by half.1 Thirty thousand unemployed sailors wandered the streets of port cities, drinking, carousing, and cursing Thomas Jefferson . The embargo had not threatened Madison’s victory, but it was obvious that its continuation was not in the best interest of the new administration. Randolph supported the repeal of “the most fatal measure that ever happened to this country.”2 he grimly noted that the repeal was “defended and eulogized on positions admitted on all hands to be indisputably true, but which it was criminal in me to advance three years ago.”3 he hoped the Congress would not replace it with another measure. “[Let] us, for God’s sake,” he pleaded, “sing a requiem to the ashes of the embargo; let not our successors have to take up the doleful ditty where we left off.”4 he proposed that merchants should “arm in defense of their lawful trade, against French decrees, British orders of Council, and anything else of a similar stamp.”5 if the armed merchant ship was attacked on the open sea, “you then throw the onus” on the belligerent nation. it was not to be that simple. Congress replaced the Embargo Act with the non-intercourse Act, reopening trade with all nations except England and France. in the event one of those two nations revoked its offending policy , the president was given authority to restore trade with that nation. This amalgamation of trade and restraint, of carrot and stick, Randolph wrote, 134 of Roanoke 135 was a “most lame and impotent conclusion.”6 ill and disgusted, he departed for Bizarre. Randolph’s chronically bad health was at a new low. he was “racked with pain and never for two hours together free from some affection” of his “stomach and bowels.”7 he suffered from “rheumatism and erratic gout” and “a most distressing and obstinate complaint—chronic diarrhea.”8 he was “laid up with sciatic, lumbago, and a defluxion on my head . . . [and] extreme pain [in] my breast.”9 he treated himself with a variety of concoctions, including liberal doses of opium, but worried that there “is nothing left for the medicine to operate upon.”10 Randolph sought relief by hunting partridges, woodcocks, and ploven, but this normally relaxing venture came within a spark of being fatal. Reloading his gun, Randolph poured gunpowder on a still burning charge. The resulting explosion burned his hand, but fortunately did no more. “What so many patriotic personages have, for years, been labouring to accomplish is at last effected, although not precisely in the way they have aimed at,” Randolph dryly noted. “i have been blown up.”11 Though Randolph injected some callous humor into his recounting of this accident, his spirits were as low as his health.12 “i am alone and out of the world—buried alive,” he wrote to James Garnett.13 he spent night after sleepless night in pain or drug-induced stupor. Many more such nights of agony, he wrote, would “deprive me of my senses.”14 his eccentricities took on a darker hue. “Life is, indeed, for the most part, to me, a burden,” he confessed .15 his burden was acerbated by the “vexations and vulgar details to which a southern planter must, in some degree, attend, or encounter certain ruin.”16 in successive seasons, Roanoke endured a drought “so severe . . . [that] the corn was scarcely visible,” followed by waves of heavy rain that destroyed the tobacco crop.17 Wheat prices dropped so low it was cost-prohibitive to send a wagon of goods to the market.18 “Thank God,” Randolph wrote about his business affairs, “i am indifferent or philosophical enough, if you please, not to fret about it.”19 Plantation issues were as irksome as the weather. “i have been involved in a disagreeable dispute with a rascal of an overseer (an irishman),” he wrote to Garnett, “who threatened to bludgeon me and then swore the peace against me.” normally not one to shy away from a fight, Randolph soothed over the matter when the overseer...