John Randolph of Roanoke

Prologue

Prologue John Randolph of Roanoke defied indifference. There had never been seen a man quite like him—so eloquent and so acerbic, so shrewd and so troubled. A man as facile with words as he was handy with a pistol. An “object of admiration and terror,” John Randolph both attracted and repelled.1 his first public debate was with Patrick henry. he was Jefferson’s ally, then opponent; the bitter enemy of Madison; critic of Monroe; unrelenting antagonist of “King John” Adams, then of John Quincy Adams, who had “outdone his [father’s] out doings”; curiosity to Andrew Jackson.2 he aimed a pistol at henry Clay and tried to do the same to Daniel Webster. he had little use for John C. Calhoun, a man he believed united “to the savage ferocity of the frontier man all the insensibility of the Yankee character.”3 Yet this same man established long-lasting friendships with a varied cast that included John Marshall, Albert Gallatin, John Taylor of Caroline, and Francis scott Key. historian henry Adams marveled at the “mystery of affection and faith” Randolph inspired in a host of friends.4 he entered Congress at the age of twenty-six and mastered the men of the house as skillfully as he mastered his blooded horses. his legislative accomplishments were the achievements of Jefferson’s first term: elimination of internal taxes, reduction of the national debt, financing for the Louisiana Purchase, rollbacks in the size of government, and repeal of the Federalist Judiciary Act. Almost as quickly, he was alone in opposition. The alpha was the Yazoo land fraud. A corrupt Georgia legislature conveyed the vast tract of Yazoo 1 2 John Randolph of Roanoke territory to land speculators. An enraged citizenry tossed out the legislature , revoked the transaction, and reclaimed the land. innocent and not-soinnocent third-party purchasers appealed to the federal government for— to use a present-day term—a bailout. As Madison crafted a plan to pay the claimants, Randolph saw nothing less than federal usurpation of state sovereignty . his opposition was sure and vicious, and it cracked the Republican alliance. Yazoo was followed in short order by the failed impeachment trial of Justice samuel Chase—where Randolph’s lack of legal ability ensured defeat— and the secret attempt by Jefferson to purchase Florida. The latter episode completed the break. “The old Republican party is already ruined, past redemption ,” Randolph wrote; “new men and new maxims are the order of the day.”5 he alienated the former and would have no part of the latter. he took his stand, henry Adams wrote, a “queer figure . . . booted, riding whip in hand, flying about the astonished statesmen, and flinging, one after the other, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and dozens of helpless Congressmen headlong into the mire.”6 Jefferson pronounced him finished. “The example of John Randolph, now the outcast of the world,” he wrote, “is a caution to all honest and prudent men to sacrifice a little of self-confidence and to go with their friends although they sometimes think they are going wrong.”7 Randolph would not go along. not with war against Great Britain, not with increased taxes or tariffs, not with expanding federal power, not with “the holy Catholic Church of Expediency and Existing Circumstances.”8 Far from being finished , Randolph became the Tertium Quid—the “third something” of American politics. he alternatively alienated and inspired a constituency that refused to discharge him from duty. At the virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829, he could not “move, no, not even change his position, or even walk across the floor, without being tracked to his stopping place by a thousand eyes.”9 his message there harkened to words he said thirty years earlier as a new member of the house: “Governments are like revolutions: you may put them in motion, but i defy you to control them after they are in motion.”10 When his end came—at an old sixty—he uttered a single word cloaked with echoes of his past: “Remorse!”11 Contemporaries felt the need to describe him. The words rendered Randolph into a walking adjective. “A flowing gargoyle of vituperation,” “pale, meager, ghostly,” “grotesque,” “a phenomenon amongst men.”12 Like Jeremy pRologue 3 Bentham in his auto-icon, Randolph was on permanent display. he entered the house chamber, spurs jingling, with several of his hounds close about his feet. he wore “a full...