Famous Americans of Recent Times Part 12

"'Have you heard the very bad news from Washington this morning?'

"'No, sir,' replied he, with eagerness; 'what is it?'

"'Why, sir, I am sorry to tell you that the House of Representatives has thrown out the Bankrupt Bill by a small majority.'

"'Sorry, sir!' exclaimed he; and then, taking off his hat and looking upwards, he added, most emphatically, 'Thank G.o.d for all his mercies!'

"After a short pause he continued: 'How delighted I am to think that I helped to give that hateful bill a kick. Yes, sir, this very day week I spoke for three hours against it, and my friends, who forced me to make the effort, were good enough to say that I never had made a more successful speech; it must have had _some_ merit, sir; for I a.s.sure you, whilst I was speaking, although the Northern mail was announced, not a single member left his seat to look for letters,--a circ.u.mstance which had not occurred before during the session!'

"I endeavored to combat his objections to a Bankrupt Bill subsequently, but, of course, without any success: _he felt as a planter, and was very jealous of the influence of merchants as legislators_."

There are flashes of sense and touches of pathos in some of his most tory pa.s.sages. As he was delivering in the House one of his emphatic predictions of the certain failure of our experiment of freedom on this continent, he broke into an apology for so doing, that brought tears to many eyes. "It is an infirmity of my nature," said he,

"to have an obstinate const.i.tutional preference of the true over the agreeable; and I am satisfied, that, if I had had an only son, or what is dearer, an only daughter,--which G.o.d forbid!--I say, G.o.d forbid, for she might bring her father's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; she might break my heart, or worse than that--what? Can anything be worse than that? Yes, sir, I _might break hers_!"

His fable, too, of the caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in arrogance, but it was pretty and effective. Every tory intellect on earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only men who greatly help their species,--the patient elaborators of truth.

A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap. "Stop," says the caterpillar,

"you are too flighty; you want connection and continuity; it took me an hour to get over; you can't be as sure as I am that you have really overcome the difficulty, and are indeed over the fence."

To which, of course, the gallant horseman makes the expected contemptuous reply. This is precisely in the spirit of Carlyle's sneers at the political economists,--the men who are not content to sit down and howl in this wilderness of a modern world, but bestir themselves to discover methods by which it can be made less a wilderness.

There is so much truth in the doctrines of the original States' Rights party,--the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry,--that a very commonplace man, who learned his politics in that school, is able to make a respectable figure in the public counsels. The mere notion that government, being a necessary evil, is to be reduced to the minimum that will answer the purposes of government, saves from many false steps. The doctrine that the central government is to confine itself to the duties a.s.signed it in the Const.i.tution, is a guiding principle suited to the limited human mind. A vast number of claims, suggestions, and pet.i.tions are excluded by it even from consideration.

If an eloquent Hamiltonian proposes to appropriate the public money for the purpose of enabling American manufacturers to exhibit their products at a Paris Exhibition, the plainest country member of the Jeffersonian school perceives at once the inconsistency of such a proposition with the fundamental principle of his political creed. He has a compa.s.s to steer by, and a port to sail to, instead of being afloat on the waste of waters, the sport of every breeze that blows.

It is touching to observe that this unhappy, sick, and sometimes mad John Randolph, amid all the vagaries of his later life, had always a vein of soundness in him, derived from his early connection with the enlightened men who acted in politics with Thomas Jefferson. The phrase "masterly inactivity" is Randolph's; and it is something only to have given convenient expression to a system of conduct so often wise. He used to say that Congress could scarcely do too little. His ideal of a session was one in which members should make speeches till every man had fully expressed and perfectly relieved his mind, then pa.s.s the appropriation bills, and go home. And we ought not to forgot that, when President John Quincy Adams brought forward his schemes for covering the continent with magnificent works at the expense of the treasury of the United States, and of uniting the republics of both Americas into a kind of holy alliance, it was Randolph's piercing sarcasm which, more than anything else, made plain to new members the fallacy, the peril, of such a system. His opposition to this wild federalism involved his support of Andrew Jackson; but there was no other choice open to him.

Seldom did he display in Congress so much audacity and ingenuity as in defending General Jackson while he was a candidate for the Presidency against Mr. Adams. The two objections oftenest urged against Jackson were that he was a military chieftain, and that he could not spell.

Mr. Randolph discoursed on these two points in a most amusing manner, displaying all the impudence and ignorance of the tory, inextricably mingled with the good sense and wit of the man. "General Jackson cannot write," said a friend. "Granted," replied he. "General Jackson cannot write because he was never taught; but his compet.i.tor cannot write because he was not teachable." He made a bold remark in one of his Jacksonian harangues. "The talent which enables a man to write a book or make a speech has no more relation to the leading of an army or a senate, than it has to the dressing of a dinner." He p.r.o.nounced a fine eulogium on the Duke of Marlborough, one of the worst spellers in Europe, and then asked if gentlemen would have had that ill.u.s.trious man "superseded by a Scotch schoolmaster." It was in the same ludicrous harangue that he uttered his famous joke upon those schools in which young ladies were said to be "finished." "Yes," he exclaimed, "_finished_ indeed; finished for all the duties of a wife, or mother, or mistress of a family." Again he said:

"There is much which it becomes a second-rate man to know, which a first-rate man ought to be ashamed to know. No head was ever clear and sound that was stuffed with book-learning. My friend, W.R. Johnson, has many a groom that can clean and dress a racehorse, and ride him too, better than he can."

He made the sweeping a.s.sertion, that no man had ever presided over a government with advantage to the country governed, who had not in him the making of a good general; for, said he, "the talent for government lies in these two things,--sagacity to perceive, and decision to act."

Really, when we read this ingenious apology for, or rather eulogy of, ignorance, we cease to wonder that General Jackson should have sent him to Russia.

The religious life of Randolph is a most curious study. He experienced in his lifetime four religious changes, or conversions. His gentle mother, whose name he seldom uttered without' adding with tender emphasis, "G.o.d bless her!" was such a member of the Church of England as gentle ladies used to be before an "Evangelical" party was known in it. She taught his infant lips to pray; and, being naturally trustful and affectionate, he was not an unapt pupil. But in the library of the old mansion on the Appomattox, in which he pa.s.sed his forming years, there was a "wagon-load" of what he terms "French infidelity," though it appears there were almost as many volumes of Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Collins, Hume, and Gibbon, as there were of Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Voltaire. These works he read in boyhood; and when he came to mingle among men, he found that the opinions of such authors prevailed in the circles which he most frequented. Just as he, a natural tory, caught some tincture of republicanism from Jefferson and his friends, so he, the natural believer, adopted the fashion of scepticism, which then ruled the leading minds of all lands; and just as he lapsed back into toryism when the spell which drew him away from it had spent its force, so he became, in the decline of his powers, a prey to religious terrors. For twenty-two years, as we have said, he held aloof from religion, its ministers, and its temples. The disease that preyed upon him so sharpened his temper, and so perverted his perceptions of character, that, one after another, he alienated all the friends and relations with whom he ought to have lived; and he often found himself, between the sessions of Congress, the sole white tenant of his lonely house at Roanoke,--the sick and solitary patriarch of a family of three hundred persons. He sought to alleviate this horrid solitude by adopting and rearing the orphaned sons of old friends; to whom, when he was himself, he was the most affectionate and generous of guardians. But even they could not very long endure him; for, in His adverse moods, he was incarnate Distrust, and, having conceived a foul suspicion, his genius enabled him to give it such withering expression that it was not in the nature of a young man to pa.s.s it by as the utterance of transient madness. So they too left him, and he was utterly alone in the midst of a crowd of black dependants. We see from his letters, that, while he saw the impossibility of his a.s.sociating with his species, he yet longed and pined for their society and love. Perhaps there never lived a more unhappy person. Revering women, and formed to find his happiness in domestic life, he was incapable of being a husband; and if this had not been the case, no woman could have lived with him. Yearning for companionship, but condemned to be alone, his solace was the reflection that, so long as there was no one near him, he was a torment only to himself. "Often," he writes in one of his letters,

"I mount my horse and sit upon him for ten or fifteen minutes, wishing to go somewhere, but not knowing where to ride; for I would escape anywhere from the incubus that weighs me down, body and soul; but the fiend follows me _en croupe_.... The strongest considerations of duty are barely sufficient to prevent me from absconding to some distant country, where I might live and die unknown."

A mind in such a state as this is the natural prey of superst.i.tion. A dream, he used to say, first recalled his mind to the consideration of religion. This was about the year 1810, at the height of those hot debates that preceded the war of 1812. For nine years, he tells us, the subject gradually gained upon him, so that, at last, it was his first thought in the morning and his last at night. From the atheism upon which he had formerly plumed himself, he went to the opposite extreme. For a long time he was plunged into the deepest gloom, regarding himself as a sinner too vile to be forgiven. He sought for comfort in the Bible, in the Prayer-book, in conversation and correspondence with religious friends, in the sermons of celebrated preachers. He formed a scheme of retiring from the world into some kind of religious retreat, and spending the rest of his life in prayers and meditation. Rejecting this as a cowardly desertion of the post of duty, he had thoughts of setting up a school for children, and becoming himself a teacher in it. This plan, too, he laid aside, as savoring of enthusiasm. Meanwhile, this amiable and honest gentleman, whose every error was fairly attributable to the natural limitations of his mind or to the diseases that racked his body, was tormented by remorse, which would have been excessive if he had been a pirate. He says that, after three years of continual striving, he still dared not partake of the Communion, feeling himself "unworthy." "I was present,"

he writes, "when Mr. Hoge invited to the table, and I would have given all I was worth to have been able to approach it." Some inkling of his condition, it appears, became known to the public, and excited great good-will towards him on the part of many persons of similar belief.

Some of his letters written during this period contain an almost ludicrous mixture of truth and extravagance. He says in one of them, that his heart has been softened, and he "_thinks_ he has _succeeded_ in forgiving all his enemies"; then he adds, "There is not a human being that I would hurt if it were in my power,--not even Bonaparte."

In another place he remarks that the world is a vast mad-house, and, "if what is to come be anything like what has pa.s.sed, it would be wise to abandon the bulk to the underwriters,--the worms." In the whole of his intercourse with mankind, he says he never met with but three persons whom he did not, on getting close to their hearts, discover to be unhappy; and they were the only three he had ever known who had a religion. He expresses this truth in language which limits it to one form or kind of religion, the kind which he heard expounded in the churches of Virginia in 1819. Give it broader expression, and every observer of human life will a.s.sent to it. It is indeed most true, that no human creature gets much out of life who has no religion, no sacred object, to the furtherance of which his powers are dedicated.

He obtained some relief at length, and became a regular communicant of the Episcopal Church. But although he ever after manifested an extreme regard for religious things and persons, and would never permit either to be spoken against in his presence without rebuke, he was very far from edifying his brethren by a consistent walk. At Washington, in the debates, he was as incisive and uncharitable as before. His denunciations of the second President Adams's personal character were as outrageous as his condemnation of parts of his policy was just. Mr.

Clay, though removed from the arena of debate by his appointment to the Department of State, was still the object of his bitter sarcasm; and at length he included the President and the Secretary in that merciless philippic in which he accused Mr. Clay of forgery, and styled the coalition of Adams and Clay as "the combination of the Puritan and the Blackleg." He used language, too, in the course of this speech, which was understood to be a defiance to mortal combat, and it was so reported to Mr. Clay. The reporters, however, misunderstood him, as it was not his intention nor his desire to fight. Nevertheless, to the astonishment and sorrow of his religious friends, he accepted Mr. Clay's challenge with the utmost possible prompt.i.tude, and bore himself throughout the affair like (to use the poor, lying, tory cant of the last generation) "a high-toned Virginia gentleman." Colonel Benton tells us that Mr. Randolph invented an ingenious excuse for the enormous inconsistency of his conduct on this occasion. A duel, he maintained, was private war, and was justifiable on the same ground as a war between two nations. Both were lamentable, but both were allowable when there was no other way of getting redress for insults and injuries. This was plausible, but it did not deceive _him_. He knew very well that his offensive language respecting a man whom he really esteemed was wholly devoid of excuse. He had the courage requisite to expiate the offence by standing before Mr. Clay's pistol; but he could not stand before his countrymen and confess that his abominable ant.i.thesis was but the spurt of mingled ill-temper and the vanity to shine. Any good tory can fight a duel with a respectable degree of composure; but to own one's self, in the presence of a nation, to have outraged the feelings of a brother-man, from the desire to startle and amuse an audience, requires the kind of valor which tories do not know. "Whig and tory," says Mr. Jefferson, "belong to natural history." But then there is such a thing, we are told, as the regeneration of the natural man; and we believe it, and cling to it as a truth destined one day to be resuscitated and purified from the mean interpretations which have made the very word sickening to the intelligence of Christendom. Mr. Randolph had not achieved the regeneration of his nature. He was a tory still. In the testing hour, the "high-toned Virginia gentleman" carried the day, without a struggle, over the communicant.

During the last years of his life, the monotony of his anguish was relieved by an occasional visit to the Old World. It is interesting to note how thoroughly at home he felt himself among the English gentry, and how promptly they recognized him as a man and a brother. He was, as we have remarked, _more_ English than an Englishman; for England does advance, though slowly, from the insular to the universal. Dining at a great house in London, one evening, he dwelt with pathetic eloquence upon the decline of Virginia. Being asked what he thought was the reason of her decay, he startled and pleased the lords and ladies present by attributing it all to the repeal of the law of primogeniture. One of the guests tells us that this was deemed "a strange remark from a _Republican_" and that, before the party broke up, the company had "almost taken him for an aristocrat." It happened sometimes, when he was conversing with English politicians, that it was the American who defended the English system against the attacks of Englishmen; and so full of British prejudice was he, that, in Paris, he protested that a decent dinner could not be bought for money. Westminster Abbey woke all his veneration. He went into it, one morning, just as service was about beginning, and took his place among the worshippers. Those of our readers who have attended the morning service at an English cathedral on a week-day cannot have forgotten the ludicrous smallness of the congregation compared with the imposing array of official a.s.sistants. A person who has a little tincture of the Yankee in him may even find himself wondering how it can "pay" the British empire to employ half a dozen reverend clergymen and a dozen robust singers to aid seven or eight unimportant members of the community in saying their prayers. But John Randolph of Roanoke had not in him the least infusion of Yankee. Standing erect in the almost vacant s.p.a.ce, he uttered the responses in a tone that was in startling contrast to the low mumble of the clergyman's voice, and that rose above the melodious amens of the choir. He took it all in most serious earnest. When the service was over, he said to his companion, after lamenting the hasty and careless manner in which the service had been performed, that he esteemed it an honor to have worshipped G.o.d in Westminster Abbey. As he strolled among the tombs, he came, at last, to the grave of two men who had often roused his enthusiasm. He stopped, and spoke:

"I will not say, Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you stand is holy; but, look, sir, do you see those simple letters on the flagstones beneath your feet,--W.P.

and C.J.F. Here lie, side by side, the remains of the two great rivals, Pitt and Fox, whose memory so completely lives in history. No marble monuments are necessary to mark the spot where _their_ bodies repose. There is more simple grandeur in those few letters than in all the surrounding monuments, sir."

How more than English was all this! England had been growing away from and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves and his overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a great empire. A friend asked him how he was pleased with England. He answered with enthusiasm,--

"There never was such a country on the face of the earth as England, and it is utterly impossible that there can be any combination of circ.u.mstances hereafter to make such another country as Old England now is!"

We ought not to have been surprised at the sympathy which the English Tories felt during the late war for their brethren in the Southern States of America. It was as natural as it was for the English Protestants to welcome the banished Huguenots. It was as natural as it was for Louis XIV. to give an asylum to the Stuarts. The traveller who should have gone, seven years ago, straight from an English agricultural county to a cotton district of South Carolina, or a tobacco county of Virginia, would have felt that the differences between the two places were merely external. The system in both places and the spirit of both were strikingly similar. In the old parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, you had only to get ten miles from a railroad to find yourself among people who were English in their feelings, opinions, habits, and even in their accent.

New England differs from Old England, because New England has grown: Virginia was English, because she had been stationary. Happening to be somewhat familiar with the tone of feeling in the South,--the _real_ South, or, in other words, the South ten miles from a railroad,--we were fully prepared for Mr. Russell's statement with regard to the desire so frequently expressed in 1861 for one of the English princes to come and reign over a nascent Confederacy. Sympathies and antipathies are always mutual when they are natural; and never was there a sympathy more in accordance with the nature of things, than that which so quickly manifested itself between the struggling Southern people and the majority of the ruling cla.s.ses of Great Britain.

Mr. Randolph took leave of public life, after thirty years of service, not in the most dignified manner. He furnished another ill.u.s.tration of the truth of a remark made by a certain queen of Denmark,--"The lady doth protest too much." Like many other gentlemen in independent circ.u.mstances, he had been particularly severe upon those of his fellow-citizens who earned their subsistence by serving the public. It pleased him to speak of members of the Cabinet as "the drudges of the departments," and to hold gentlemen in the diplomatic service up to contempt as forming "the tail of the _corps diplomatique_ in Europe."

He liked to declaim upon the enormous impossibility of _his_ ever exchanging a seat in Congress for "the shabby splendors" of an office in Washington, or in a foreign mission "to dance attendance abroad instead of at home." When it was first buzzed about in Washington, in 1830, that General Jackson had tendered the Russian mission to John Randolph, the rumor was not credited. An appointment so exquisitely absurd was supposed to be beyond even Andrew Jackson's audacity. The offer had been made, however. Mr. Randolph's brilliant defence of General Jackson's bad spelling, together with Mr. Van Buren's willingness to place an ocean between the new administration and a master of sarcasm, to whom opposition had become an unchangeable habit, had dictated an offer of the mission, couched in such seductive language that Mr. Randolph yielded to it as readily as those ladies accept an offer of marriage who have often announced their intention never to marry. Having reached the scene of his diplomatic labors at the beginning of August, he began to perform them with remarkable energy. In a suit of black, the best, he declared, that London could furnish, he was presented to the Emperor and to the Empress, having first submitted his costume to competent inspection. Resolute to do his whole duty, he was not content to send his card to the diplomatic corps, but, having engaged a handsome coach and four, he called upon each member of the diplomatic body, from the amba.s.sadors to the secretaries of legation. Having performed these labors, and having discovered that a special object with which he was charged could not then be accomplished, he had leisure to observe that St. Petersburg, in the month of August, is not a pleasant residence to an invalid of sixty. He describes the climate in these terms:--

"Heat, dust impalpable, pervading every part and pore ...

Insects of all nauseous descriptions, bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, flies innumerable, gigantic as the empire they inhabit, who will take no denial. This is the land of Pharaoh and his plagues,--Egypt and its ophthalmia and vermin, without its fertility,--Holland, without its wealth, improvements, or cleanliness."

He endured St. Petersburg for the s.p.a.ce of ten days, then sailed for England, and never saw Russia again. When the appropriation bill was before Congress at the next session, opposition members did not fail to call in question the justice of requiring the people of the United States to pay twenty thousand dollars for Mr. Randolph's ten days'

work, or, to speak more exactly, for Mr. Randolph's apology for the President's bad spelling; but the item pa.s.sed, nevertheless. During the reign of Andrew Jackson, Congress was little more than a board of registry for the formal recording of his edicts. There are those who think, at the present moment, that what a President hath done, a President may do again.

It was fortunate that John Randolph was in retirement when Calhoun brought on his Nullification scheme. The presence in Congress of a man so eloquent and so reckless, whose whole heart and mind were with the Nullifiers, might have prevented the bloodless postponement of the struggle. He was in constant correspondence with the South Carolina leaders, and was fully convinced that it was the President of the United States, not "the Hamiltons and Haynes" of South Carolina, who ought to seize the first pretext to concede the point in dispute. No citizen of South Carolina was more indignant than he at General Jackson's Proclamation. He said that, if the people did not rouse themselves to a sense of their condition, and "put down this wretched old man," the country was irretrievably ruined; and he spoke of the troops despatched to Charleston as "mercenaries," to whom he hoped "no quarter would be given." The "wretched old man" whom the people were to "put down" was Andrew Jackson, not John C. Calhoun.

We do not forget that, when John Randolph uttered these words, he was scarcely an accountable being. Disease had reduced him to a skeleton, and robbed him of almost every attribute of man except his capacity to suffer. But even in his madness he was a representative man, and spoke the latent feeling of his cla.s.s. The diseases which sharpened his temper unloosed his tongue; he revealed the tendency of the Southern mind, as a petulant child reveals family secrets. In his good and in his evil he was an exaggerated Southerner of the higher cla.s.s. He was like them, too, in this: they are not criminals to be punished, but patients to be cured. Sometimes, of late, we have feared that they resemble him also in being incurable.

As long as Americans take an interest in the history of their country, they will read with interest the strange story of this sick and suffering representative of sick and suffering Virginia. To the last, old Virginia wore her ragged robes with a kind of grandeur which was not altogether unbecoming, and which to the very last imposed upon tory minds. Scarcely any one could live among the better Southern people without liking them; and few will ever read Hugh Garland's Life of John Randolph, without more than forgiving all his vagaries, impetuosities, and foibles. How often, upon riding away from a Southern home, have we been ready to exclaim, "What a pity such good people should be so accursed!" Lord Russell well characterized the evil to which we allude as "that fatal gift of the poisoned garment which was flung around them from the first hour of their establishment."

The last act of John Randolph's life, done when he lay dying at a hotel in Philadelphia, in June, 1833, was to express once more his sense of this blighting system. Some years before, he had made a will by which all his slaves were to be freed at his death. He would probably have given them their freedom before his death, but for the fact, too evident, that freedom to a black man in a Slave State was not a boon. The slaves freed by his brother, forty years' before, had not done well, because (as he supposed) no land had been bequeathed for their support. Accordingly, he left directions in his will that a tract of land, which might be of four thousand acres, should be set apart for the maintenance of his slaves, and that they should be transported to it and established upon it at the expense of his estate. "I give my slaves their freedom" said he in his will, "to which my conscience tells me they are justly ent.i.tled." On the last day of his life, surrounded by strangers, and attended by two of his old servants, his chief concern was to make distinctly known to as many persons as possible that it was really his will that his slaves should be free. Knowing, as he did, the aversion which his fellow-citizens had to the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves, and even to the presence in the State of free blacks, he seemed desirous of taking away every pretext for breaking his will. A few hours before his death, he said to the physician in attendance: "I confirm every disposition in my will, especially that concerning my slaves whom I have manumitted, and for whom I have made provision." The doctor, soon after, took leave of him, and was about to depart. "You must not go,"

said he, "you cannot, you shall not leave me." He told his servant not to let the doctor go, and the man immediately locked the door and put the key in his pocket. The doctor remonstrating, Mr. Randolph explained, that, by the laws of Virginia, in order to manumit slaves by will, it was requisite that the master should _declare_ his will in that particular in the presence of a white witness, who, after hearing the declaration, must never lose sight of the party until he is dead.

The doctor consented, at length, to remain, but urged that more witnesses should be sent for. This was done. At ten in the morning, four gentlemen were ranged in a semicircle round his bed. He was propped up almost in a sitting posture, and a blanket was wrapped round his head and shoulders. His face was yellow, and extremely emaciated; he was very weak, and it required all the remaining energy of his mind to endure the exertion he was about to make. It was evident to all present that his whole soul was in the act, and his eye gathered fire as he performed it. Pointing toward the witnesses with that gesture which for so many years had been familiar to the House of Representatives, he said, slowly and distinctly: "I confirm all the directions in my will respecting my slaves, and direct them to be enforced, particularly in regard to a provision for their support."

Then, raising his hand and placing it upon the shoulder of his servant, he added, "Especially for this man." Having performed this act, his mind appeared relieved, but his strength immediately left him, and in two hours he breathed his last.

The last of the Randolphs, and one of the best representatives of the original masters of Virginia, the high-toned Virginia gentleman, was no more. Those men had their opportunity, but they had not strength of character equal to it. They were tried and found wanting. The universe, which loves not the high-toned, even in violins, disowned them, and they perished. Cut off from the life-giving current of thought and feeling which kept the rest of Christendom advancing, they came to love stagnation, and looked out from their dismal, isolated pool with lofty contempt at the gay and active life on the flowing stream. They were not teachable, for they despised the men who could have taught them. But we are bound always to consider that they were subjected to a trial under which human virtue has always given way, and will always. Sudden wealth is itself sufficient to spoil any but the very best men,--those who can instantly set it at work for the general good, and continue to earn an honest livelihood by faithful labor. But those tobacco lords of Virginia, besides making large fortunes in a few years, were the absolute, irresponsible masters of a submissive race. And when these two potent causes of effeminacy and pride had worked out their proper result in the character of the masters, then, behold! their resources fail. Vicious agriculture exhausts the soil, false political economy prevents the existence of a middle cla.s.s, and the presence of slaves repels emigration. Proud, ignorant, indolent, dissolute, and in debt, the dominant families, one after another, pa.s.sed away, attesting to the last, by an occasional vigorous shoot, the original virtue of the stock. All this poor John Randolph represented and was.

Virginia remains. Better men will live in it than have ever yet lived there; but it will not be in this century, and possibly not in the next. It cannot be that so fair a province will not be one day inhabited by a race of men who will work according to the laws of nature, and whom, therefore, the laws of nature will co-operate with and preserve. How superior will such Virginians be to what Dr. Francis Lieber styles the "provincial egotism" of State sovereignty!

[Footnote 1: 1865-6.]

STEPHEN GIRARD AND HIS COLLEGE.

Within the memory of many persons still alive, "old Girard," as the famous banker was usually styled, a short, stout, brisk old gentleman, used to walk, in his swift, awkward way, the streets of the lower part of Philadelphia. Though everything about him indicated that he had very little in common with his fellow-citizens, he was the marked man of the city for more than a generation. His aspect was rather insignificant and quite unprepossessing. His dress was old-fashioned and shabby; and he wore the pig-tail, the white neck-cloth, the wide-brimmed hat, and the large-skirted coat of the last century. He was blind of one eye; and though his bushy eyebrows gave some character to his countenance, it was curiously devoid of expression.

He had also the absent look of a man who either had no thoughts or was absorbed in thought; and he shuffled along on his enormous feet, looking neither to the right nor to the left. There was always a certain look of the old mariner about him, though he had been fifty years an inhabitant of the town. When he rode it was in the plainest, least comfortable gig in Philadelphia, drawn by an ancient and ill-formed horse, driven always by the master's own hand at a good pace. He chose still to live where he had lived for fifty years, in Water Street, close to the wharves, in a small and inconvenient house, darkened by tall storehouses, amid the bustle, the noise, and the odors of commerce. His sole pleasure was to visit once a day a little farm which he possessed a few miles out of town, where he was wont to take off his coat, roll up his shirt-sleeves, and personally labor in the field and in the barn, hoeing corn, pruning trees, tossing hay, and not disdaining even to a.s.sist in butchering the animals which he raised for market. It was no mere ornamental or experimental farm. He made it pay. All of its produce was carefully, nay, scrupulously husbanded, sold, recorded, and accounted for. He loved his grapes, his plums, his pigs, and especially his rare breed of Canary-birds; but the people of Philadelphia had the full benefit of their increase,--at the highest market rates.

Many feared, many served, but none loved this singular and lonely old man. If there was among the very few who habitually conversed with him one who understood and esteemed him, there was but one; and he was a man of such abounding charity, that, like Uncle Toby, if he had heard that the Devil was hopelessly d.a.m.ned, he would have said, "I am sorry for it." Never was there a person more dest.i.tute than Girard of the qualities which win the affection of others. His temper was violent, his presence forbidding, his usual manner ungracious, his will inflexible, his heart untender, his imagination dead. He was odious to many of his fellow-citizens, who considered him the hardest and meanest of men. He had lived among them for half a century, but he was no more a Philadelphian in 1830 than in 1776. He still spoke with a French accent, and accompanied his words with a French shrug and French gesticulation. Surrounded with Christian churches which he had helped to build, he remained a st.u.r.dy unbeliever, and possessed the complete works of only one man, Voltaire. He made it a point of duty to labor on Sunday, as a good example to others. He made no secret of the fact, that he considered the idleness of Sunday an injury to the people, moral and economical. He would have opened his bank on Sundays, if any one would have come to it. For his part, he required no rest, and would have none. He never travelled. He never attended public a.s.semblies or amus.e.m.e.nts. He had no affections to gratify, no friends to visit, no curiosity to appease, no tastes to indulge. What he once said of himself appeared to be true, that he rose in the morning with but a single object, and that was to labor so hard all day as to be able to sleep all night. The world was absolutely nothing to him but a working-place. He scorned and scouted the opinion, that old men should cease to labor, and should spend the evening of their days in tranquillity. "No," he would say, "labor is the price of life, its happiness, its everything; to rest is to rust; every man should labor to the last hour of his ability." Such was Stephen Girard, the richest man who ever lived in Pennsylvania.

This is an unpleasing picture of a citizen of polite and amiable Philadelphia. It were indeed a grim and dreary world in which should prevail the principles of Girard. But see what this man has done for the city that loved him not! Vast and imposing structures rise on the banks of the Schuylkill, wherein, at this hour, six hundred poor orphan boys are fed, clothed, trained, and taught, upon the income of the enormous estate which he won by this entire consecration to the work of acc.u.mulating property. In the ample grounds of Girard College, looking up at its five ma.s.sive marble edifices, strolling in its shady walks or by its verdant play-grounds, or listening to the cheerful cries of the boys at play, the most sympathetic and imaginative of men must pause before censuring the sterile and unlovely life of its founder. And if he should inquire closely into the character and career of the man who willed this great inst.i.tution into being, he would perhaps be willing to admit that there was room in the world for one Girard, though it were a pity there should ever be another. Such an inquiry would perhaps disclose that Stephen Girard was endowed by nature with a great heart as well as a powerful mind, and that circ.u.mstances alone closed and hardened the one, cramped and perverted the other. It is not improbable that he was one of those unfortunate beings who desire to be loved, but whose temper and appearance combine to repel affection. His marble statue, which adorns the entrance to the princ.i.p.al building, if it could speak, might say to us, "Living, you could not understand nor love me; dead, I compel at least your respect." Indeed, he used to say, when questioned as to his career, "Wait till I am dead; my deeds will show what I was."

Girard's recollections of his childhood were tinged with bitterness.

He was born at Bordeaux in 1750. He was the eldest of the five children of Captain Pierre Girard, a mariner of substance and respectability. He used to complain that, while his younger brothers were taught at college, his own education was neglected, and that he acquired at home little more than the ability to read and write. He remembered, too, that at the age of eight years he discovered, to his shame and sorrow, that one of his eyes was blind,--a circ.u.mstance that exposed him to the taunts of his companions. The influence of a personal defect, and of the ridicule it occasions, upon the character of a sensitive child, can be understood only by those whose childhood was embittered from that cause; but such cases as those of Byron and Girard should teach those who have the charge of youth the crime it is to permit such defects to be the subject of remark. Girard also early lost his mother, an event which soon brought him under the sway of a step-mother. Doubtless he was a wilful, arbitrary, and irascible boy, since we know that he was a wilful, arbitrary, and irascible man.