A genetic aberration caused John Randolph, depicted here in 1811 by John Wesley Jarvis, to undergo puberty incompletely. (Image courtesy National Portrait Gallery)
The United States Congress has seated any number of what one might in a charitable sense describe as eccentrics. But few have been the equal — in either intelligence or erratic behavior — of John Randolph, self-styled as “of Roanoke” after his Charlotte County plantation and to distinguish himself from kinsmen.
He came from two established Virginia dynasties through his mother, Frances Bland, and his father, John Randolph. The tendency within the Randolph family for frequent intermarriage caused its lineage to resemble, in the phrase of historian Alan Pell Crawford, “a tangle of fishhooks.”
Randolph claimed with pride descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, but also cousinage to both Thomas Jefferson (at first) and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Though Marshall and Randolph differed widely in their temperaments and political views, they’d eventually develop an enduring friendship, perhaps rooted in what had then become their mutual disdain for Jefferson.
David Johnson, in his 2012 Randolph biography, writes that “John Randolph of Roanoke defied indifference.” Various observers of the day described him as a “flowing gargoyle of vituperation,” “a tall, spare, emaciated figure who seemed to unfold in stages,” “partially deranged and seldom in full possession of his reason,” and “an object of admiration and terror.” Thomas Dudley, his ward and a cousin once removed, poetically described Randolph as being “endowed with two souls.”
Randolph was born into the privileged world of Virginia’s slave-supported plantation aristocracy on June 2, 1773, at Cawsons, the estate of his maternal grandfather Theodoric Bland that overlooked the Appomattox River in present-day Hopewell. The Randolphs settled into the Matoax plantation, near what is now Ettrick in southern Chesterfield County.
The senior Randolph died during his namesake son’s second year of life, leaving his wife to tend to the family businesses, which comprised 40,000 acres between Matoax, Bizarre near Farmville in Prince Edward County, and Roanoke in Charlotte County, until 1778, when she married St. George Tucker, a prosperous jurist, Revolutionary War blockade runner and line officer. Randolph and his brothers, Theodoric and Richard, resented Tucker for bringing discipline, meaning corporal punishment, into their lives.
The Cawsons estate stood near the site of the former John Randolph Medical Center, which HCA Virginia Health System renamed in December as the prosaic but correct TriCities Hospital.
Randolph’s attachment to a hospital is appropriate due to his lifetime of ailments and chronic pains from which he sought relief through alcohol and opium. His afflictions ranged from scarlet fever to tuberculosis, the latter being what likely felled him at age 59. A major dysfunction, however, involved arrested development due to an apparent genetic quirk. His body barely aged past puberty, although Randolph’s maturity made him a gaunt, spindly, wraith-like figure.
He expressed his views with verve and a high, piping voice that beguiled some and irritated others. One political opponent described the sound as though “fixed for an Italian singer.”
Formal education didn’t suit him; he attended Princeton, Columbia and the College of William & Mary without graduating, and he studied law in Philadelphia but never practiced.
A political prodigy, Randolph first entered the U.S. House of Representatives at age 26. He swept into the chamber wearing a duster-length frock coat and riding gloves and boots, and he wielded a whip, with hunting dogs at his heels. He served in Congress from 1799 to 1833 and rose to chair the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
His erratic temperament yielded colorful verbal assaults against colleagues, such as his characterization of Edward Livingston as “the most contemptible and degraded of beings, whom no man ought to touch, unless with a pair of tongs.” Randolph and Congressman Willis Alston mixed it up physically, first with tableware at a Washington boarding house, then with fists, before Randolph finally caned Alston bloody in a Capitol stairwell. He received a $20 fine.
He finally broke with the small-government Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans in 1806 over the purchase of Florida from the Spanish, infuriated by what he viewed as extortion by a foreign dictator. Randolph couldn’t abide by the central-government Federalists and formed the “Tertium Quid,” or “The Third Thing.”
“The old Republican party is already ruined, past redemption,” Randolph wrote. “New men and new maxims are the order of the day.”
He opposed the War of 1812 as a land grab and predicted that the Capitol would burn, which it did in 1814. He also opposed slavery’s expansion into Missouri under the 1820 Missouri Compromise.
John Randolph of Roanoke, seen in silhouette in 1830, served in Congress from 1799 to 1833. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
Randolph owned hundreds of people, but he often condemned the slave trade as an inherited evil and favored gradual manumission over outright abolition. He was among the founders of the American Colonization Society, which began as a way to transport free blacks to what is now Liberia. Randolph, however, pronounced this undertaking a failed experiment.
In 1826, then a senator, he fought a strange pistol duel with statesman Henry Clay, borne out of Clay’s belief that Randolph had called him a “blackleg,” or cheat, on the floor of the House. Clay demanded satisfaction. On a frosty Arlington field, the two each fired twice with little effect. They shook hands and parted as frenemies.
Randolph’s intransigence assisted in creating the Senate filibuster. He spoke for hours opposing an infrastructure bill pushed by President John Quincy Adams and dressed and undressed midspeech.
In October 1829, Randolph participated in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, where he railed against representative and voting apportionment and declared that the ratified constitution wouldn’t last 25 years; he was right.
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson accepted his appointment as special minister to Russia, which was considered odd, as nobody saw Randolph as a diplomat. He served 28 days before his health collapsed.
On his deathbed in 1833, he suddenly exclaimed, “Remorse! Remorse, remorse, remorse,” and wanted to see the word in a dictionary. An attending physician wrote it on Randolph’s calling card. Randolph muttered, “You have no idea what it is. You can form no idea of it whatever.”
He roused himself to reassert his intention not only to release his slaves but also to relocate them to Mercer County, Ohio, and grant 10 acres of land to adults aged 40 and older. Randolph’s manumission foundered through disputes concerning three conflicting wills.
On May 24, 1833, after a brief spasm, Randolph died.
The matter of his slaves’ fate remained unsettled until 1846, when freedom was granted to the 383 enslaved people who remained. They met hostility in Ohio, they didn’t take possession of the promised land in a free state, and neither they nor their heirs ever received a nickel.
As for Randolph, he was buried at Roanoke with his face looking west, to keep an eye on Clay. Then, in 1879, Randolph’s godson oversaw his disinterment and reburial at Hollywood Cemetery.
