Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell

by Hugh Blair Grigsby

He was keenly alive to the pleasures of friendship; and he maintained his affection for his early schoolmates unbroken to the last. His reverence for Mr. Wythe passed all words. Randolph loved him through life; and Tazewell reciprocated his affection with equal warmth. The tide of his affection for John Wickham from his childhood flowed full and strong. The relations which existed between them could be seen in the letter I read some time ago, and were earnest, tender, and affectionate. The affection which Tazewell cherished for Wickham, kindled, as we have seen, over the spelling-book and the Latin grammar, and showing itself in tears in his sixty-fifth year, grew with his growth, and was enhanced by that elevated sense of appreciation with which each regarded the other. It was pleasing to see them together when the descending shadows of age were upon them, and when each had performed those deeds which are now deemed the greatest of their lives. It would be hard to say whether they stood to each other in the relation of father and son, of brothers, or of equals. Wickham was eleven years older than Tazewell, and had taught him to read. It was evident Mr. Tazewell regarded Mr. Wickham with the greatest deference. It was, however, something more than the deference with which one eminent man advanced in life would show to another eminent man still more advanced; it was the deference of the warmest friendship to an individual who not only reciprocated the feelings of affection, but who possessed all the moral and intellectual qualities that can adorn human nature. He considered Mr. Wickham not only the most accomplished lawyer this country ever produced, but the wisest man he ever knew. I have heard him say that the speech of Mr. Wickham on the doctrine of treason in Burr's trial would have been pronounced new and able in Westminster Hall; and that it was the greatest forensic effort of the American bar. Tazewell's abiding affection for Wickham was such, that he drew upon it in favor even of his young friends. When, at one-and-twenty, I took my seat in the House of Delegates, and, not dreaming of mixing in society, was preparing for a course of study during the long winter nights, one of the first calls I received was from Mr. Wickham. With me his name had passed into history. His great speech, which I had read and studied as I had read and studied the speeches of Chatham and of Burke, was made in the year I was born. But I soon found that he was a living and breathing man. His gentle kindness, his incomparable address, his charming talk, and his cordial hospitality pressed upon me, assured me that his heart still glowed with its ancient kindness: and when I recall the hours which I spent at his elegant home; when I recollect the names of Marshall, Leigh, Johnson, Stanard, Harvie, and others whom I have seen at his hospitable board; when I recall that living galaxy of beauty which flashed in his thronged halls, and of which the sweetest and the brightest were his own household stars,—now, alas! extinct and gone; and his own noble presence and demeanor, which drew from the spoiled and fastidious poet Moore the expression of his admiration and applause, it is with feelings of deep and tender regard, and of grateful veneration, that I offer this tribute to his memory.

The question has often been asked whether Mr. Tazewell was fond of literature and had the elements of a literary man. His early opportunities were not favorable for acquiring a profound knowledge of classical learning. In his day Latin and Greek, the foundation of all true taste in letters, were not taught in William and Mary at all, except in the grammar school. That Tazewell knew enough of Latin to translate easily a Latin author, and even to write the language grammatically, is certain; but that he never rose to that excellence in those tongues to which his old tutor Mr. Wythe attained is equally certain. But of English literature he had drunk deeply. He had Bacon, Locke, Burke, Pope, Shakspeare, Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Gillies, Addison, and Roscoe, within three feet of his elbow for the last forty years of his life. In English political history, such as might be gathered from the ordinary historians, and from such books as Baker's Chronicle and Rushworth, he was profoundly skilled. The history of the law from the days of Magna Charta to the passage of the reform bill of Earl Grey's administration, was the study of his whole professional and public life. He not only knew every leading event, every great statute, but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation. The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never read them, and drew his information from the original sources. In the history of Virginia he was, without exception, the greatest proficient of his time. Whatever was told by Smith, Beverly, Keith, Stith, and Burk with his continuators, or by Hening in the statutes at large, or in the journals of the House of Burgesses and of the House of Delegates, or could be gathered from the living voice for eighty years, he knew intimately and could recall at a moment's notice. In respect of the political history of the United States from the adoption of the federal constitution to the day of his death, his knowledge was accurate, ready, and profound. Indeed, if we except the first five years of the federal constitution, it may be said that his actions were a part of that history. He had discussed, in the House of Delegates, the leading measures of the Washington and Adams administrations, and sixty years ago he sate at a stormy period in the House of Representatives of the United States.

But the excellence of Mr. Tazewell consisted not so much in knowing the acts and thoughts of other men, as in the philosophy which he drew from the great facts in all history. He was not in the German, or even in the English sense, a reader of many books; but there was hardly a topic of literature or history which he had not studied, and respecting which he had not elaborated a theory of his own. Even in law he was more apt to work out a question which required a solution than to turn to the books of reports. Neither at the bar nor in the senate was he fond of quoting authorities; but such as he did quote were of the highest merit, and he made them do him yeoman service. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses were favorite books with him. He thought the report of John Quincy Adams on weights and measures one of the ablest works in political literature.

The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical. Common sense was his polar star. He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose. If that purpose was to be accomplished by writing, he took up his pen; if by speech, he rose at the bar and pleaded the case, or in the senate and made a speech. But when the end was attained he thought no more about the means which he had used in attaining it, whether by writing or speaking, than the carpenter who has finished a house thinks of the scaffolding by which he was enabled to complete it. Hence Mr. Tazewell never corrected a speech for the press, if we except two instances; and his greatest speeches are either wholly lost, or exist in the merest outline. But, looking to the result, he was almost invariably successful, at least in the sphere in which he acted; and on the attainment of his purpose forgot the means by which he reached it. If his speeches such as they are, his reports on public questions, his legal opinions, his essays and tracts on political and historical topics, and his private letters, were collected together, the variety of his powers and his singular abilities would strike every reader; and that his works ought to be preserved in volumes is a matter of public interest and is due to his memory.

I have said that Mr. Tazewell should not be considered as a mere scholar, a mere lawyer, or a mere statesman, but in that most august of all characters, the citizen of a commonwealth. But to show what manner of man he was to my younger friends, let us regard him in the aspect of a lawyer, and as he stood in the three great departments of his profession. In criminal law he was easily the first. It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,—an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,—that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other living man. This is but an echo of his general reputation in this department of the law. Analyze the qualities necessary to form a great criminal lawyer—his various power of speech, his skill in the evisceration of facts, his tact and ability in arranging the best line of defence possible in the case, the skill in addressing the jury, and the skill, of a different sort, in addressing the court, his superior generalship in the conflicting and unexpected developments during a trial which threaten instant defeat, his fearlessness, and that perfect self-possession which not only conceals his own fears and weaknesses, but avails itself of the fears and weaknesses of others, and of that deep insight into human passions, penetrating far beyond the eye, or the ear, or the ordinary reason: count the attainments which such a man must possess to win supremacy in such a sphere, and we must assent to the general opinion which places supremacy in such a sphere one of the highest achievements of human intellect and character. Then contemplate that excellence which is shown in the conduct of civil cases as contradistinguished from criminal—that various power here, too, of speech, in itself the lesson of a life to learn—the skill, too, in addressing juries and the court with equal effect; that knowledge of the law in its innumerable doctrines, principles, and decisions, which made the study even in Lord Coke's day the work of twenty years; the prompt application of this learning to the rapid matter in hand; the magical use of the faculties of the mind and the wondrous discipline which they must have undergone, every hour, every minute demanding a stretch of thought and an adroitness of discrimination which have justly classed the dialectics of the bar above all the dialectics of the schools; and the moral as well as intellectual qualities necessary in an adept in the varying practice of municipal law; and here, too, we will yield to the general opinion which places excellence in this single department one of the highest achievements of mind; and then recall what such a judge as Spencer Roane, the ablest and sternest judge of the age, and politically hostile to Tazewell, said when Tazewell pleaded the case of Long vs. Colston before the Court of Appeals. Then let us follow the profession beyond and above the region of municipal law into the higher walk of the Laws of Nations, and of that great practical part of those laws, the law of admiralty. Consider what eminence is, and what it involves, in this department which the master spirits of ancient as well as of modern time selected as their peculiar sphere; what the talents are that may contend with the greatest intellects of the age in that greatest of all our gladiatorial arenas, the Supreme Court of the United States, and what various and rare excellencies must unite in forming a man who may stand forth and share in such generous battle, and, still more, shall come off victorious from such a field. And when, by blending all these characters, each great in itself, and worthy of the ambition of the highest talents and of the longest life, into a single character, we have made a fame which the grandest intellects of modern times might glory in attaining, we have but one of the elements, developed during a comparatively short period only of his career, that make up the reputation of him whose memory we have met this day to honor.

Then, if you please, regard him as a senator, representing the sovereignty of Virginia in our more than Amphictyonic Council. Take any speech which he delivered during his term of service—the speech on the Bankrupt law; the speech on the Piracy bill, which, as it was delivered by him, and not as it appears debased and dwarfed in the report, was one of the grandest displays of pure intellect ever made in the Senate, and which saved the country from giving cause of war to Spain and, perhaps and probably, from actual war; the speech on the Census, which his colleague who sat by his side during its delivery told me gave both Calhoun and Webster quite as much to do as was grateful to both of them; the speech on the Admirals; the reports from the Committee on Foreign Affairs for seven or eight years which controlled the public opinion of the time; that consummate ability which in its grandest displays inspired the hearer with the belief that the speaker, great as he was, was capable of yet greater things-par negotiis et supra—his speeches so settling matters that it seemed almost vain to say anything after him for or against, and calling the remark from Webster, when Tazewell was making one of his last speeches in the senate, "Why, Tazewell grows greater every day." Form your notion of what must enter into the formation of such a character, and then you have another of those elements that make up the character of Tazewell.

Then take your model of a man who draws his sustenance from the plough, a private citizen, who lives privately, not because he cannot obtain office, but because, having won the highest honors, he withdraws from the scene and leaves the glittering rewards of public service to be divided among those who seek them. Look for his name in the newspapers, and you will not find it from year's end to year's end; look for deep intrigues in local politics, and you will find no finger of his in the dirty work. Look at the ill success of those who have engaged in public affairs, their pecuniary entanglements, their deferred hopes, their sleepless nights, those poisoned fountains of feeling bitter as aloes even to the eye that looks on them as they bubble; these and such things you may find, and find easily, but not at the door of Tazewell. He is strictly a private citizen, engaged in his private affairs, raising and selling at fair prices in company with his neighbors his oats and corn and potatoes, and showing to all that the highest faculties are as practical as the lowest, and that diligence and attention always have their reward. Without patrimony, with a moderation in taking fees without an example in our land, living as became a gentleman of his position in life and affairs, he yet accumulated a larger fortune than was probably ever before accumulated by a Virginia farmer or a lawyer beginning life without patrimony; and when wealth was obtained, living with that modesty and simplicity so becoming to great genius and great wealth, ever looking with just contempt on that most piteous of all spectacles, the spectacle of lofty genius debruised and debased by the accursed thirst for gold; and presenting in all the private relations of life an example which may be held up for the imitation of the old and the young. When you have combined these various characters into one whole, you may form some general notion of what Mr. Tazewell was.

His head was of the clearest. Horace says of Apollo that he did not always keep his bow bent; but Tazewell's mind was always on the stretch, or, in a stricter sense, was never on the stretch at all. The most intricate combination of figures he saw through at a glance; and in the arts the most complex machinery was easily understood by him, and readily made plain to others by his familiar explanations. Processes of reasoning the most elaborate seemed rather the play of his mind than a serious exercise of its powers; and in his most refined speculations he never for a moment lost himself, or allowed the hearer to lose him. When in a playful mood he chose to use the weapons of the sophist, the ablest men feared the ticklish game and fought shy, and where the line lay between truth and error it was impossible to find out; and he was equally skilful in unravelling the sophistry of others, dissecting it asunder with the keenest relish and with exquisite skill. When he seriously undertook to assert and defend the truth, he was irresistible, and it was vain to oppose him. Excessive ingenuity has been laid at his door; but, while conceding that his long dallying with inferior courts was likely to lead to faults in that direction, yet, if we look to the occasions when he was charged with using it, and its effect at the time, we may be inclined to believe that his judgment of the line of argument to be pursued was as likely to be appropriate as that of the critic who formed his opinion according to some abstract standard of propriety.

He was never out of tune. Call on him when you would, and you found him self-poised and fresh. Argument or narrative followed at your command. This part of his character was very apparent to me during the last seven years of his life. In that interval I called to see him frequently; and, as my own studies lay in the walks of our earlier history, the talk usually ran, for a time at least, on the men and things of an epoch in which the Revolution held the middle place. He seemed to have perfect command of his stores, not by the mere effort of recollection, but of memory and reflection combined, eliminating a truth from the facts which concealed it. A specimen of the talk which actually occurred between us may illustrate my remark. I would approach him and say deliberately in his ear—for within a few years past he had become slightly deaf—"Mr. Tazewell, Col. Richard Bland (who, by the way, died in October, 1776) wrote tracts in the Parson's cause, a tract against the Quakers, and his inquiry into the rights of the colonies; did he write any other pamphlet?" Quick as thought he replied: "Yes, he wrote a tract on the tenure of lands in Virginia, showing that they were allodial and not held in fee. I read the tract when I was a boy; and it helped me in my examination for a license to practise law." He had probably not recalled this fact before for half a century: no copy of the tract is preserved; and there was not another human being then living, I may venture to say, who knew of the existence of such a tract; and so at times with other facts which he recalled after the lapse of seventy years, and which he had learned from his father or from Mr. Wythe. On the other hand, when his earlier recollections were clearly proved to be inaccurate as to matter of fact, as in the case of what he thought had happened at the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765, when Henry's resolutions against the stamp act were passed, and I placed under his eye the discrepancy between his statement of the case and the entry on the journals of the House, he would fight manfully in defence of his own views, but generally ended in cases where the proof was conclusive: "Well, sir, Mr. Wythe told me so." Dates not common or easily reached were fixed in his memory by a kind of connexion with his own life; as for instance, I would ask him whether he remembered the features of Peyton Randolph? And he would answer: "No, sir; I was born in December, 1774, and he died in October, 1775, in Philadelphia, when I was not a year old." And it was by questions such as these, which I could answer with exact precision myself, that I ascertained not only the integrity and worth of his memory, which we all know in aged persons retains with freshness the incidents of youth, but his capacity of combination which, in the degree in which he possessed it, was extremely rare in young or old; and from the nature of my pursuits for the time in question I may be said not only to have tested his powers of recollection, but to have probed the depth of his knowledge in relation to the history of Virginia and its cognate topics more effectually than it was the privilege of any one else to do; and my admiration of his talents and of his resources increased to the last. Let it be remembered that there was no more reason to look for profound learning on these subjects from Mr. Tazewell, whose life was crowded with business, than from any of his eminent contemporaries, some of whom I knew well, but none of whom approached him in these respects; and I have pointed out, merely for the sake of example, a single department of knowledge only in which I happened to take a passing interest, leaving all those untouched on which I have heard him discourse for thirty years at least, and you will be able to form an opinion of the nature, variety, and extent of his acquisitions, and feel with me what a gap the death of such a man has made in the commonwealth.

From the complexion of his mind he was cautious in bestowing commendation on men and things. Great speeches in public bodies rarely came up to his severe and simple standard of taste; and I do not think that he was sensible in a very high degree of the minor elegancies of rhythm and the harmony of words. His own style might be defined plain words in their right places; and he had studied Anglo-Saxon, and drew largely on the Anglo-Saxon element of our tongue, and especially on its monosyllables. His logic was generally so severe that not a clause and hardly a word could be changed or misplaced without danger, and the merit of his work was rather in the strength and beauty of the demonstration as a whole, than in the rhetorical grace or effect of its several parts. I speak of his great arguments. In his letters he sometimes showed a skill in harmony rarely surpassed. His letter to the executor of Mr. Wickham is delicately drawn; his letter to Mr. Foote on the compromise resolutions is a chaste and elegant composition; and his address from the chair at a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk on the occasion of the death of Jefferson, which I have already alluded to, when he proposed a statue to the author of the Declaration of Independence, was of that rare beauty of thoughts and words in happy union bound, that, though delivered thirty-four years ago, it is with me to this hour one of the most refreshing of my memories of the past. But these were exceptions, and his severe standard was the general rule. Hence, while he valued the vast and conclusive learning of Gibbon, he was not taken with his diction; and though he despised the toryism of Hume, he regarded his style as approaching perfection. He liked the fervid genius of the elder Pitt, and his brilliant speeches, because they were effective weapons in their day; but he would look with contempt at any effort of imitation. While he relished the arguments of Judge Marshall at the bar, in public bodies, and on the bench, I do not think that he placed as high a value as they deserved upon the ability and literary taste which characterize the opinions of Judge Story, and which have earned for their author the highest legal fame at home and abroad. From the eloquent parts of such speeches as Webster's in reply to Hayne he would turn with dislike. Yet when a speech was effective in the delivery, and, though not remarkable in itself, had accomplished something, he was liberal in bestowing fair praise upon it. He heard Mr. Clay deliver his celebrated reply to Josiah Quincy—a venerable statesman who still survives;—and he ever spoke of it as admirable in its way. In the same spirit he spoke of Col. Benton's extemporaneous reply to Mr. Webster in the debate on the bank veto, delivered late at night in the Senate, as surpassing any thing of the kind that he had ever heard, or that the speaker ever reached before or after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after it, probably the speech on the currency, superior to his speech in reply to Hayne, and altogether free from the tinsel of his later speeches. The speech of Pinkney on the Missouri question, which he heard, he thought the ablest ever delivered in the senate. For the intellect of Calhoun he had the highest respect and admiration, and, while differing most essentially from that statesman throughout nearly his whole career, he always regarded his speeches and state papers as those of a master-workman. Strange as it may appear, though exacting so much from his eminent contemporaries, yet, partly from old affection, partly from a love of their literature and from a conviction of their political effect, and partly from the unworthiness of poor human nature, he listened to the speeches of John Randolph with the relish of a school-boy, rubbing his hands and laughing heartily as the orator went along. Aside from the ardent and unquenchable love that existed between them, the explanation may be found to a certain extent in Tazewell's love of humor. When Watkins Leigh's amusing letter of Christopher Quandary appeared in the Enquirer,—a paper, by the way, which, after the feud in the Jefferson administration, he never took in, thus showing that, if the democrats remembered his shortcomings, he did not forget what he deemed theirs—I took the number around to him, and he laughed heartily at its hits. The last extended work which I know that he read was Randall's Life of Jefferson, which evidently made an impression upon him. He spoke of the author as a clever fellow; and he expatiated on the character of Jefferson, which, as he declined in life, I think he valued more than ever, pronouncing him the greatest Secretary of State any country ever had. I may say here, that Mr. Tazewell had no respect for law schools as an instrumentality of rearing great lawyers. He said if the student would have lectures, let him read Blackstone; and he ever maintained the opinion that the popularity of those charming commentaries had tended to depreciate the standard of legal intellect since their appearance—an opinion which he shared with Mr. Jefferson. That he had read them attentively and admired their beauty, though much in the spirit in which he would admire a poem or a play, I know from this fact, that once, when he was in a playful mood, he said he believed he could repeat the heads of all the chapters of the four volumes which he straightway did. He occasionally read novels, but was quite indifferent whether he began with the second or the first volume; and I heard him commend highly the preface of the late novel attributed to Sir Walter Scott, called Moredun, as a fine piece of special pleading, declaring that its author would make a good special pleader. I have spoken already of the hearty praise which he bestowed upon Mr. Adams' report on weights and measures.