John Randolph of Roanoke

2. Macbeth Hath Murdered Sleep

2 Macbeth Hath Murdered Sleep But none beheld with clearer eye The plague-spot o’er her spreading none heard more sure the steps of Doom Along her future treading. The honor of serving as the nation’s first attorney general was diminished ever so slightly by its meager salary of nineteen hundred dollars. “With every frugality, almost bordering on meanness,” Edmund Randolph fumed, “i cannot live upon it as it now stands.”1 Thus the attorney general took in three students: John Randolph, Lawrence Washington—the president’s nephew— and Joseph Bryan. But official duties intruded on this private venture, and the attorney general could manage to instruct Randolph barely “once a fortnight .” The curriculum was similarly irregular. “[hume’s Treatise of Human Nature] was the first [book] he put into my hands,” Randolph wrote, “telling me that he . . . wished me to go through a course of metaphysical reasoning.” hume was followed by “shakespeare . . . Beattie on Truth . . . Kames’ Elements of Criticism, and . . . Gillies’ History of Greece.” Listing these titles on a book flyleaf, Randolph scrawled at the bottom “Risum teneatis?”—“can you restrain your laughter?”2 Before Randolph got to “the first book of Blackstone,” this latest scholastic endeavor was spiraling in the direction of previous ventures. he struck up a friendship with Joseph Bryan, a “bluff, hearty, affectionate, choleric, vehement ” boy, who apparently held legal studies in similarly low regard.3 Before long, Randolph and Bryan had “abandoned a profession for which neither of us had been qualified by regular education, and commenced men of pleasure, plunging into the gayety that fills the mouth with blasphemy.”4 Randolph’s lifestyle in Philadelphia carried a high price tag. “i shall be obliged,” he wrote Tucker in october 1790, “to expend more money this quarter than the next by a great deal . . . to fix myself comfortably.”5 25 26 John Randolph of Roanoke Randolph explained that the expenditures were necessary to purchase winter provisions, but, in fact, substantial debt was the cost driver. he would buy, on credit, “any bauble” that caught his fancy, only to immediately regret the purchase. “Many a nights’ sleep has been broken by sad reflection,” he wrote, “on the difficulty into which i had plunged myself, and in devising means of extrication. At the approach of my creditor, i shrunk, and i looked no doubt as meanly as i felt.”6 Randolph soon admitted his folly. “This i hope, my dear son,” Tucker wrote in a letter enclosing $268, “will be the last demand of the kind you will ever have to pay and i rely on your promise that it shall.” Randolph rejoiced in the “inexpressible satisfaction of being free from debt” and pledged that his “expenditures from this date until the same time twelve months shall not exceed four hundred dollars.”7 other dalliances were not so easily dispatched . “The ladies of Philadelphia are fair and alluring,” Randolph wrote in 1811 to his cousin, “and your time of life is most propitious to their power over your heart.”8 his advice was rooted in experience. “You well know my sentiments on a certain subject,” he wrote in February 1791 to henry Rutledge, “a pin for existence without her—but i will drop a subject which never fails to demand the tribute of a sigh.”9 The next month, he raised the same subject in cryptic words. “My sentiments,” he wrote, “are still the same on a certain subject and ever will remain so.”10 By summer, his emotions were sufficiently recovered for him to counsel Rutledge to “let a second mistress light up another flame and put out this.”11 in the meantime, his friend Joseph Bryan was preparing to marry “a woman as beautiful as the morning who was in the best society in Philadelphia” when Randolph intervened. “i saved him from marriage, when under age, with a woman . . . whose mother kept a boarding house and knew her true character. one hour more would have consigned my friend to the arms of infamy. i rescued him at the hazard of my life; for i am satisfied that he would have cut my throat, if i had not established her falsehood to him. she married that very day the object of her real attachment.”12 “To me,” Randolph concluded, “Mr. Bryan rendered a service not precisely of the same but somewhat analogous nature of which some day or other i will give you the strange history.” no letter survives in which Randolph describes...