Dear tobacco, virgin land, and cheap negroes gave the several families in Virginia, for three generations, a showy, delusive prosperity, which produced a considerable number of dissolute, extravagant men, and educated a few to a high degree of knowledge and wisdom. Of these families, the Randolphs were the most numerous, and among the oldest, richest, and most influential. The soldiers of the late army of the Potomac know well the lands which produced the tobacco that maintained them in baronial state. It was on Turkey Island (an island no more), twenty miles below Richmond; close to Malvern Hill of immortal memory, that the founder of the family settled in 1660,—a Cavalier of ancient Yorkshire race ruined in the civil wars. Few of our troops, perhaps, who rambled over Turkey Bend, were aware that the massive ruins still visible there, and which served as negro quarters seven years ago, are the remains of the great and famous mansion built by this Cavalier, turned tobacco-planter. This home of the Randolphs was so elaborately splendid, that a man served out the whole term of his apprenticeship to the trade of carpenter in one of its rooms. The lofty dome was for many years a beacon to the navigator. Such success had this Randolph in raising tobacco during the fifty-one years of his residence upon Turkey Island, that to each of his six sons he gave or left a large estate, besides portioning liberally his two daughters. Five of these sons reared families, and the sons of those sons were also thriving and prolific men; so that, in the course of three generations, Virginia was full of Randolphs. There was, we believe, not one of the noted controlling families that was not related to them by blood or marriage.
In 1773, when John Randolph was born, the family was still powerful; and the region last trodden by the Army of the Potomac was still adorned by the seats of its leading members. Cawsons, the mansion in which he was born, was situated at the junction of the James and Appomattox, in full view of City Point and Bermuda Hundred, and only an after-breakfast walk from Dutch Gap. The mansion long ago disappeared, and nothing now marks its site but negro huts. Many of those exquisite spots on the James and Appomattox, which we have seen men pause to admire while the shells were bursting overhead, were occupied sixty years ago by the sumptuous abodes of the Randolphs and families related to them. Mattoax, the house in which John Randolph passed much of his childhood, was on a bluff of the Appomattox, two miles above Petersburg; and Bizarre, the estate on which he spent his boyhood, lay above, on both sides of the same river. Over all that extensive and enchanting region, trampled and torn and laid waste by hostile armies in 1864 and 1865, John Randolph rode and hunted from the time he could sit a pony and handle a gun. Not a vestige remains of the opulence and splendor of his early days. Not one of the mansions inhabited or visited by him in his youth furnished a target for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps. A country better adapted to all good purposes of man, nor one more pleasing to the eye, hardly exists on earth; but before it was trodden by armies, it had become little less than desolate. The James River is as navigable as the Hudson, and flows through a region far more fertile, longer settled, more inviting, and of more genial climate; but there are upon the Hudson's banks more cities than there are rotten landings upon the James. The shores of this beautiful and classic stream are so unexpectedly void of even the signs of human habitation, that our soldiers were often ready to exclaim:
"Can this be the river of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas? Was it here that Jamestown stood? Is it possible that white men have lived in this delightful land for two hundred and fifty-seven years? Or has not the captain of the steamboat made a mistake, and turned into the wrong river?"
One scene of John Randolph's boyhood reveals to us the entire political economy of the Old Dominion. He used to relate it himself, when denouncing the manufacturing system of Henry Clay. One ship, he would say, sufficed, in those happy days, for all the commerce of that part of Virginia with the Old World, and that ship was named the London Trader. When this ship was about to sail, all the family were called together, and each member was invited to mention the articles which he or she wanted from London. First, the mother of the family gave in her list; next the children, in the order of their ages; next, the overseer; then the mammy, the children's black nurse; lastly, the house servants, according to their rank, down even to their children. When months had passed, and the time for the ship's return was at hand, the weeks, the days, the hours were counted; and when the signal was at last descried, the whole household burst into exclamations of delight, and there was festival in the family for many days.
How picturesque and interesting! How satisfactory to the tory mind! But alas! this system of exhausting the soil in the production of tobacco by the labor of slaves, and sending for all manufactured articles to England, was more ruinous even than it was picturesque. No middle class could exist, as in England, to supply the waste of aristocratic blood and means; and in three generations, rich and beautiful Virginia, created for empire, was only another Ireland. But it was a picturesque system, and John Randolph, poet and tory, revelled in the recollection of it. "Our Egyptian taskmasters," he would say, meaning the manufacturers of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and New England, "only wish to leave us the recollection of past times, and insist upon our purchasing their vile domestic stuffs; but it won't do: no wooden nutmegs for old Virginia."
His own pecuniary history was an illustration of the working of the system. His father left forty thousand acres of the best land in the world, and several hundred slaves, to his three boys; the greater part of which property, by the early death of the two elder brothers, fell to John. As the father died when John was but three years old, there was a minority of eighteen years, during which the boy's portion should have greatly increased. So far from increasing, an old debt of his father's—a London debt, incurred for goods brought to a joyous household in the London Trader—remained undiminished at his coming of age, and hung about his neck for many years afterward. Working two large estates, with a force of negroes equivalent to one hundred and eighty full field hands, he could not afford himself the luxury of a trip to Europe until he was fifty years old. The amount of this debt we do not know, but he says enough about it for us to infer that it was not of very large amount in comparison with his great resources. One hundred and eighty stalwart negroes working the best land in the world, under a man so keen and vigilant as this last of the noble Randolphs, and yet making scarcely any headway for a quarter of a century!
The blood of this fine breed of men was also running low. Both the parents of John Randolph and both of his brothers died young, and he himself inherited weakness which early developed into disease. One of his half-brothers died a madman. "My whole name and race," he would say, "lie under a curse. I feel the curse clinging to me." He was a fair, delicate child, more like a girl than a boy, and more inclined, as a child, to the sports of girls than of boys. His mother, a fond, tender, gentle lady, nourished his softer qualities, powerless to govern him, and probably never attempting it. Nevertheless, he was no girl; he was a genuine son of the South. Such was the violence of his passions, that, before he was four years old, he sometimes in a fit of anger fell senseless upon the floor, and was restored only after much effort. His step-father, who was an honorable man, seems never to have attempted either to control his passions or develop his intellect. He grew up, as many boys of Virginia did, and do, unchecked, unguided, untrained. Turned loose in a miscellaneous library, nearly every book he read tended to intensify his feelings or inflame his imagination. His first book was Voltaire's Charles XII., and a better book for a boy has never been written. Then he fell upon the Spectator. Before he was twelve he had read the Arabian Nights, Orlando, Robinson Crusoe, Smollett's Works, Reynard the Fox, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Gulliver, Shakespeare, Plutarch's Lives, Pope's Homer, Goldsmith's Rome, Percy's Reliques, Thomson's Seasons, Young, Gray, and Chatterton,—a gallon of sack to a penny's worth of bread. A good steady drill in arithmetic, geography, and language might have given his understanding a chance; but this ill-starred boy never had a steady drill in anything. He never remained longer at any one school than a year, and he learned at school very little that he needed most to know. In the course of his desultory schooling he picked up some Latin, a little Greek, a good deal of French, and an inconceivable medley of odds and ends of knowledge, which his wonderful memory enabled him to use sometimes with startling effect.
Everywhere else, in the whole world, children are taught that virtue is self-control. In the Southern States, among these tobacco-lords, boys learned just the opposite lesson,—that virtue is self-indulgence. This particular youth, thin-skinned, full of talent, fire, and passion, the heir to a large estate, fatherless, would have been in danger anywhere of growing up untrained,—a wild beast in broadcloth. In the Virginia of that day, in the circle in which he lived, there was nothing for him in the way either of curb or spur. He did what he pleased, and nothing else. All that was noble in his life,—those bursts of really fine oratory, his flashes of good sense, his occasional generosities, his hatred of debt, and his eager haste to pay it,—all these things were due to the original excellence of his race. In the very dregs of good wine there is flavor. We cannot make even good vinegar out of a low quality of wine.
His gentle mother taught him all the political economy he ever took to heart. "Johnny," said she to him one day, when they had reached a point in their ride that commanded an extensive view,
"all this land belongs to you and your brother. It is your father's inheritance. When you get to be a man, you must not sell your land: it is the first step to ruin for a boy to part with his father's home. Be sure to keep it as long as you live. Keep your land, and your land will keep you."