#1585 Ten Things About John Randolph of Roanoke
2024-02-06 00:50:31
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Listening to America. Today, 10 things about John Randolph of Roanoke. John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the many, many, many Randolphs, 1773 to 1833, of Jefferson's general political persuasion, but not always, and one of the most extraordinary and eccentric figures of the whole period that we're talking about. Welcome, Lindsay Trevinsky.
Well, thank you for having me back. This is certainly going to be a colorful episode, because you are right. I'm not sure there is anyone more eccentric and unique in this period than John Randolph of Roanoke.
It's hard to get our brains around this fellow. So, 1773, that means he's fully 30 years younger than Jefferson, so he's really a second generation early national period person. He spends a lot of time in Congress, mostly in the House, but eventually in the Senate. He's an old school small R Republican, maybe even we'd call him a radical Republican or a purist Republican, and that, of course, is going to put him on a collision course, particularly with Madison, but even with Thomas Jefferson. You know, you've been working on the world of Massachusetts, Quincy, Massachusetts, Braintree, John Adams, John Quincy Adams for a long time.
What did he seem like to people like John Adams? What did someone like John Adams make of this really strange man who comes into the floor of Congress with his dogs, his hunting dogs and his whip, and he overdresses and he's always either having a duel or having one? He is a very unusual human being, and if he's unusual to the Jeffersonians, what must he have been to the Federalists?
Well, first of all, I'm delighted that you mentioned that he came in with his hounds, because I had a special note to mention that when he first entered Congress, when he was only 26,, so he was kind of this prodigy child thing, he came in in full riding gear, with his riding whip, with his riding boots, and his hunting dogs, which, if I could get away with taking Quincy everywhere with me, I would, so I am sympathetic to this notion, but I'm sure he was particularly disruptive to Congress.
You are a normal human being. You are not flamboyant. You are not a deliberate eccentric. I mean, okay, he brings in his dogs, and this is something that you might have seen in the British Parliament, squires coming in and so on. It's not as unusual as it might sound to us, although it does seem a little indecorous.
Well, Congress was certainly much more, I think we would say, perhaps, although recently they've been giving things a run for their money, but it was very rambunctious. at the time. People were often not paying attention. The floor was covered with straw because they would just spit their tobacco out wherever, and they didn't even really think about making it into buckets, so the level of decorum was not what we would sort of expect, although again, today they're bringing back the violence in a way that's a little bit uncomfortable, but so anyway, yes, to answer your question, he was a very flamboyant figure, and he would have struck, and he did struck the Adamses as pretty nuts. Now, because they enjoyed wit and they were very attentive to intellectual prowess, they did acknowledge that he sometimes could give as good as he got.
He had a very sharp tongue. He was extremely quick on his feet, and there were times that both John Adams and John Quincy Adams both felt the lash of his tongue, but also remarked on it in their writings, that he really was quite notorious for being able to sling a good barb. I'm talking to Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky, ten.
things about John Randolph of Roanoke. We keep saying John Randolph of Roanoke because there's a Randolph in every direction. He was part of one of the most prominent families.
in Virginia. Exactly. He picked up that name. He started calling himself that because he recognized that you could not throw a stone without hitting a Randolph in Virginia. Of.
course, Thomas Jefferson is connected to the Randolphs. His father, Peter Jefferson, who was sort of of the overseer class, maybe just a little above that, marries up, marries Jane Randolph from one of the two or three most prominent families in Virginia, and so Jefferson is connected in all sorts of ways. Then his eldest daughter, Martha, marries Thomas Mann. Randolph, yet another Randolph, and so Jefferson is sort of an aristocrat as Democrat, in a certain way, uncomfortable with the Tidewater aristocracy, but boy was.
he connected to it. Yeah. One of the subjects on our list that you had written down was this Virginia aristocracy, and it was said at the time that the only one good enough for a Randolph was a Randolph. They had a tendency to intermarry in a big way, which makes family trees really fun to try and manage, especially because they often recycled names. We should also mention that in this, John Marshall was related by marriage to all of these families, the Washington.
I mean, really, they were all connected in some way.
Let's start this way. He was brilliant. He went to Columbia and Princeton and William and Mary. He never studied very hard, but he seems to have absorbed a good deal of Enlightenment literature. He was famous for his invective and sarcasm and wit and really deep aggression when he was in a floor debate with somebody and not afraid to do serious character assassination that in some quarters, could lead to a duel.
And did. I think, Jefferson, you tell me if this is right or wrong, I think Jefferson was amused, bemused, and a little afraid of.
Randolph. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think he also recognized the value of Randolph when it suited him. So initially, when Jefferson was first elected president, they worked pretty closely and Randolph was almost like a prime minister figure on behalf of the administration. They were on the same page about a lot of things.
And Randolph didn't, he didn't do Jefferson's bidding because he, I don't think he did anyone's bidding, but he certainly adopted a lot of measures and spoke in such a way that Jefferson was very approving of. And they did work relatively closely. But, as you said, Jefferson, I think, was fearful of that turning at some point. And in fact it did. And their relationship did sour pretty significantly.
And so I think Jefferson understood that he was a weapon, but that weapon could.
go in a lot of different directions. And he was an erratic and unreliable weapon. And we'll come to it when he appears to have bungled the Samuel Chase impeachment trial in the United States Senate. But let's start with slavery. Let's get slavery on and off the table.
here. I'm perplexed. He often said that slavery was wrong. In his will, he attempted to manumit a number of his slaves and also provide living expenses and monies to purchase lands in the Ohio country. And yet he owned hundreds of slaves.
At times he became an advocate and a protector of slavery, particularly during the Missouri Compromise. How do you sort this out with Randolph?
Yeah, he's a very complicated figure on this particular subject because he's not always consistent and sometimes is admirable and sometimes feels pretty gross. So, as you said, he owned hundreds of people. He mostly inherited them. Records suggest that he didn't, once he owned the plantation, he didn't buy any more individuals because he was sort of intellectually uncomfortable with the institution. There's also evidence to suggest that he taught the people that he owned reading and writing and organized his plantation in a different way.
He sort of organized people into different units and gave them a lot of authority and autonomy over the economic production on that particular plot of land, which is quite unusual for Virginia plantation slavery. He did think that slavery was not a great thing, but had real uncertainty about how to get rid of it and recognized his own economic circumstances were completely interwoven with this institution. So one of the ways that he thought the United States could get out of it was through the colonization process. So he was one of the co-founders of the American Colonization Society, which wanted to take manumitted, formerly enslaved people and send them to a new nation in Africa called Liberia. And so Randolph was part of this experiment.
It obviously was a failed experiment. As you said, later in his life, he did change his will a number of times to try and provide territory and funds for the enslaved people that he manumitted in his will, and that was going to be in the.
Ohio country. Ohio country is the whole Northwest Territory, can be Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, you know, the whole zone, but beginning with Ohio.
and Western Pennsylvania. Yeah. So the will basically specified that every adult over 40 would get 10 acres of land in this territory. And when he died in 1833, this was very much a contested will. A lot of his other heirs fought it.
There wasn't a solution until 1846.
. So 13 years later, it was fought for that long. 383 people.
in fact get their freedom. That's a huge number of people that he was able to manumit, not right away, but eventually. I mean, there could be very few individuals who manumitted more enslaved people than did he.
Correct. They didn't, however, end up getting any of the land or any of the money that had been promised to them. So it was definitely a mixed bag.
Jefferson flirted with the colonization process for a time. Monrovia became the capital of Liberia. Sierra Leone was another place where formerly enslaved, now free people might be returned. Jefferson, in his usual kind of type A mathematical way, worked out the cost. What was it going to cost in ships to return all of these people to Africa?
Of course, not only people who had been brought from Africa, but all their progeny and so on. And Jefferson eventually said it can't be done. Economically, it's economically impossible. It's logistically impossible, however desirable that might be. So we're stuck with this.
Either we have to absorb freed blacks, which Jefferson did not want to do, and I don't think Randolph did either, or we find a homeland for them in the Caribbean, or we find a homeland for them in the American West, but we cannot, this is Jefferson speaking, we can neither return them because it's unfeasible, nor absorb them because it's unacceptable. And therefore, it's easier to hang on to slavery in the face of these impossibilities than to try to do the right thing. And I think Randolph was a little less pessimistic than Jefferson, but Jefferson's.
the mathematician. Yeah, I think that that's right. I think that Randolph felt like there was a possibility that freed African Americans could settle in the West. And, as those communities were creating new states from scratch, that perhaps it would work better than trying to integrate formerly enslaved individuals into society like Virginia, which was quite.
established already. So if we think well of Randolph, in some ways, I should just quote this, they were all paranoid about slave rebellions in Haiti and in the Caribbean. And at one point, Randolph said, if these are successful, we will have Negroes as our taskmasters and for the husbands of our wives. And so the usual Southern paranoid rage comes dripping out of him about miscegenation and the threat of black men to our pure white wives and daughters, and so on. And so what that tells me, you know, we could think that's disgusting.
And of course it is. But I think what it tells me, Lindsay, is how unbelievably complicated this issue was.
I think that that's right. And even people who, like you said, Randolph, you know, does better in the end than most, is still what we would think of as morally quite indefensible. And so it's really important to always discuss this subject with nuance, because I don't think, you know, broad strokes really work.
Darrell Bock, Fascinating, Lindsay. I want to ask you about John and Abigail Adams with respect to the view that maybe they too were white supremacists or had some of those impulses. But we need to take a short break. When we come back, I'll be talking with Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky, 10 things about John Randolph of Rawling.
Stay tuned.
Welcome back, everyone, to this special edition of Listening to America. Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky, our favorite guest, 10 things about John Randolph of Rawling. We were talking about, I hate to use the term white supremacist because it's such a loaded term, but the view that black people perhaps deserve freedom, perhaps deserve the rights of man, but were somehow significantly distinct from the white population that there should be. really, we should be really careful about intermingling and, frankly, some belief in white superiority.
And I guess I wonder if you think John and Abigail Adams were susceptible to that too. Lindsay Trevinsky. So he and Abigail are.
so, they're really hard to get at this subject. I think that they definitely occasionally had racial sentiments that we would find uncomfortable. And yet they also had moments that were shockingly modern. And so where I have come down on this is, I think, that they thought that slavery corrupted both the enslavers and the enslaved. And so they looked down upon the black people that were enslaved because they felt that they had no incentive to work hard or to better themselves or to use their brains.
However, if someone was free, and they did have a free black servant in Massachusetts named James, they went to bat for James. Abigail, fought the local community and insisted that he received the same education as the white children. And in the same room, she was not tolerating any of this separate but equal nonsense. And so and she shamed the community and the teacher into letting James be in that room. And that is not something you would expect in the 1790s.
She did this while John was president. So there's things like that, that make me think that they understood individual possibility for equality. But in general, I think that they were pretty, they did tend to think less of people of color.
I'll go to one of the last things you put on your list, that later in his life, John Randolph was engaged in the first Senate filibuster. Explain.
Yes. So there's some disagreement over when the first filibuster actually occurred. A lot of people point to the 1840s. But I actually think that 1825 is the first time that we would recognize as filibuster activity took place. In 1825, John Quincy Adams was president.
So we earlier talked about when the Randolph's and the Adams's sparring, and this is a great example of when they were very much head to head on the subject. And John Quincy Adams was very supportive of what we would think of as internal improvements of the federal government, investing in things to make trade and the infrastructure week, if you will. So he believed that they had a whole infrastructure year. It was great. Or so John Quincy Adams proposed.
So he wanted canals to help commerce, get over things like waterfalls and mountains, and roads to help products from the West to get to the East. A lot of people supported these projects, and he had proposed it in his inaugural address. And so Congress was discussing legislation for these projects. And John Randolph, as you had mentioned, was a true small R Republican. He didn't think that the federal government should be involved in these sorts of things, partly because it forces the federal government to choose and to favor.
So, depending on where the roads went, the communities around those roads would benefit. And you can't have a road everywhere, so it wasn't fair to the different states. So while he was in the Senate at this point, he gave several speeches over the course of several days in his true John Randolph fashion. He apparently dressed and undressed during the speeches. It's kind of unclear, but I read a lot of different reports of what his activities were.
And it was to try and filibuster the passage of this legislation. So I think that was when the first true filibuster. actually. It's fascinating.
to me. So small R Republicans. So, in terms of internal improvements or infrastructural developments, to open the West and inland waterways and national roads and to improve the Postal Service, and so on, just to knit this huge geography together in one nation. Madison was on board with some of that. Monroe even more.
John Quincy Adams, more than either of them. Jefferson, not so much. Jefferson believed in internal improvements, but he wanted them to be handled by states or by cooperatives of some sort. And John Randolph is on the libertarian side of this, that big government should not be involved in this, because the government, as you said, picks winners and losers. And that's not the role of government and that the states are better prepared to do these sorts of things anyway, because that's where our actual sovereignty is.
And so when he saw Jefferson loosening some of his principles while Jefferson served as president and blamed Madison for much of it, of course, and then saw Madison, who was much more of a nationalist than Jefferson ever was, and Monroe, who was his.
. Monroe had been a favorite of John Randolph, but now Monroe became a very moderate president of the United States and moved more towards the federalist idea of a stronger national government. When all that happened, Randolph was deeply disillusioned. And so his last stand was the speeches in the Senate trying to persuade. He wasn't reading the phone book or anything.
He was working very hard to try.
to talk this off the table, wasn't he? He was. You know, an interesting little tidbit about Monroe and Randolph, as you said, Randolph really preferred Monroe and had actually really tried to get Monroe to run for president and challenge Madison. And it was Jefferson's doing to get Monroe basically to back down because he didn't want to have his two proteges or his two favorites.
This is 18-8.
. This is the kind of thing that makes you gag, I know, because we know how much you like to belittle Mr. Jefferson. But Madison is the heir apparent. Jefferson wants him.
It's just clear to Jefferson that Madison is, of course, the next president. The radical Republicans sort of push Monroe forward. Monroe's sort of interested. Jefferson then... Because he was much more radical.
at that point. Jefferson sees this, and he writes one of his famous letters in which he says, oh, it's just so sad for me to see the possibility of a conflict between two men who are so dear to me, when really we all believe in the same thing and we should take our turns. And it would be... Harmony matters so deeply to me. I would just hope that something like this will never happen.
And Monroe backed out. You know, sometimes it would actually be useful to have someone like that today. that could really call a shot. So I'm not necessarily criticizing. You see how Jefferson.
does it. It's always indirect. It's always filled with harmony. He's always about to get a migraine because he sees conflict. But it works.
And he's a master at that. It does. It does. And to close,
the loop on the infrastructure, the internal improvements, much of what John Quincy Adams had envisioned didn't come to pass while he was president. But much of it did come to pass when Andrew Jackson became president right after John Quincy Adams, even though Jackson had, of course, run against much of what JQA had stood for. But everyone sort of understood that there was actually a real benefit to having these internal improvements. And so much of John Quincy Adams' vision was reality just a few short years later. Let's move on to another issue in the.
Senate. The second issue is impeachments. John Pickering of New England was a drunkard and mentally ill. And the Jeffersonians, the Congress of the United States, impeached him and the Senate evicted him. The family was actually relieved because his own family, Pickering's own family, realized what a wreck he was.
And so there was.
. He probably had pretty severe, what we would call.
today, dementia. He was not with it. And he should not be confused for the Timothy Pickering of.
cabinet fame. So just so. everyone is clear. Everyone gets it that this is a very imperfect tool, because impeachment is really about gross malfeasance and criminality, and so on. Pickering was none of those.
He was just a very sick and sad old man. But it worked. So then Jefferson thought, all right, we're going to get Samuel Chase. because Samuel Chase browbeats lawyers in the courtroom. He travels out of the case to give lectures and sermons on the evils of democracy.
He misbehaved with some of the people who had been, were being tried under the sedition law. And so there was a whole brief of reasons why Samuel Chase must go. And so Jefferson thinks, well, we got Pickering. There's a much better case to be made for Samuel Chase. This will really discipline and chasten the Supreme Court of the United States.
So they'll keep within their lane hereafter. And for Jefferson, that was a very, very narrow lane. And so he then asked John Randolph of Roanoke to be the Senate prosecutorial leader. Pick it up from there. Yeah.
So we should make.
very clear that a lot of Chase's behavior today would not be permitted under a lot of the judicial code of ethics and judicial behavior that has since been passed with statute.
What? We have a judicial code of ethics?
Not for Supreme Court justices.
I was not aware of that. But go ahead. Yes, go ahead.
Yeah. So there are a lot of things. There's a lot of, like standard trial practice that is in statute today. that would have limited the activities that Chase engaged in when he was sitting on these sedition cases. And so his behavior is just what we would think of as despicable.
It's absolutely inappropriate. But there weren't those sorts of statutory regulations at the time. He was openly partisan. He campaigned for Adams. I mean, he was.
he was a very staunch federalist. He wanted nothing to do with Jefferson. He loathed Jefferson. So Jefferson came up with this idea of impeachment. That sounds great.
And he suggests it to Randolph. And Randolph brings forth the articles of impeachment in the House, basically browbeats his colleagues into passing them. So they pass these articles, and he's really good at managing the House debates, because that's where his invective and his sarcasm and his verbal sparring skills are really, really.
So Jefferson thinks this is great. He's doing it. He's making it work. He has exactly the right character set to really go after this bully, this mean spirited Chase. And of course, it's personal for Jefferson, because one of the people prosecuted under the sedition law was one James Callender, who had broken the Sally Hemings story.
And so for Jefferson, the sooner Chase disappeared in some legal fashion, the better. Yes. And had the trial continued in the House,
if the Constitution was written differently and if the trial rules worked in a different fashion, then Randolph might have been the perfect person. However, there are a couple of problems with the Senate proceedings. So first, the Senate took its responsibility to be this deliberative body very, very seriously. They were generally, they were older, they were better educated. They tended to be wealthy.
These were sort of the cream of the crop of American leaders at the time, including John Quincy Adams. at this point. They did not appreciate the way that Randolph came to make his case. So it wasn't going to appeal to them. They were looking for facts.
They were looking for evidence. They wanted to understand the actual legal case. That was problem one. Problem two, Randolph was absolutely wasted. What do you mean?
wasted? So Randolph- Drunk? Not just drunk. So, Randolph had a lot of health problems throughout his entire life, but he was having extremely bad stomach problems. in 1803, 1804, when the trial went down.
And his doctor had prescribed to him opium-laced wine to help with the pain. This was the common prescription at the time. And apparently his pain was so bad that in between almost every sentence, he was taking a sip of the wine when he was giving a speech. So by the end, he could barely stand up. He was slurring.
He was completely out of control. And that doesn't look good under the best of circumstances, but especially when you're in this very serious body who wants to take these deliberations with real intensity, that was not going to make the.
case. He's looking for his notes. He admits he's disorganized. He asked for time. He's clearly out of control and not in command of the subject before him.
And, of course, one of the most interesting side notes on this story, Lindsay, is that the presiding officer of this trial was none other than Aaron Burr, the outgoing vice president of the United States, who has already killed a man, one Alexander Hamilton, in a duel.
But apparently he really conducted himself with great honor and decorum. Everyone said he did a really great job of managing this unprecedented trial. This maybe was his best single moment.
I mean, when he gave his farewell speech in the Senate, people wept. And he had the Senate decked out with the right kind of bunting and so on. And he had strict control of the proceedings, was bent over backwards, to be fair, to chase. I mean, this is Aaron Burr at his absolute best, which, of course, infuriates Thomas Jefferson. It really does.
And so there are a couple of other.
nuances that I think are important. So one, Jefferson had really initially supported this. He, of course, never said anything vocally, because that would be inappropriate, or publicly, I should say, that would be inappropriate. But he was very supportive. But as the proceedings went on, it became clear to him how it was going, which direction the wind was changing.
And he really backed away from it. And he withdrew a lot of his support. And so Randolph felt like he was left hanging by the president and was really put out to dry. So I think that was another important piece. The final piece, and I've actually written a fairly long article on this subject, the way the clause about impeachment is structured, I think there's a good case to be made that it doesn't actually have to just be a crime.
Because of, first, where the commas are, but also misdemeanor. at the time was not just what we would think of as a classification of a criminal act, which today, when we think of, you know, you have a felony, you have a misdemeanor, that was not how the word was used. Yeah, exactly. Like you acted badly. And it makes sense, because if you think about what, you know, what you would impeach someone, for, there are things that are against the law, like jaywalking, that of course, you would not impeach someone for that.
But then there's behavior, like, you know, showing up drunk all the time to the bench, or, you know, acting really inappropriately. that isn't necessarily against the law, but would require some sort of action. And so I think that there was one of the real challenges in the discussion in the case was, what actually do these things mean? And did Chase break the law? Or was he just acting in a partisan fashion?
And ultimately, the Senate concluded they were not willing to remove a justice for partisanship, because that was going to set a really dangerous precedent. But Randolph couldn't lay the groundwork that Chase had actually broken the law. And so it set this very fuzzy precedent that still holds to this day, because no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached and removed since this, you know, experience with Chase. And so it is a fascinating interlude, and I think is worth way more study. I wish more people knew about this.
Well, let me try to summarize, and.
you tell me if I'm right or wrong. So Samuel Chase was a brute and a bully. And he behaved in some really obnoxious ways as a Supreme Court justice. And he browbeat attorneys, and he actually, at times he told juries how they must vote, how they must decide cases. And he was an anti-Democrat, anti-Jeffersonian, so we get it.
But in my opinion, A, he probably did not deserve impeachment, conviction in the impeachment trial, and B, this might have saved separation of powers, because Jefferson might have gone further. He might have gone after John Marshall if he had been successful with Chase. And Jefferson, after this humiliation, said, well, we won't do that again. Impeachment's a mere scarecrow. And so he was, to use a term from our time, he was about to weaponize the Congress as a tool against the court system.
And because of the way the trial, the impeachment trial, ended with acquittal, this essentially established once and for all that the courts should not be subject to political impeachment. Yes, I think that's right. I would.
add one other further lesson, which is that Chase afterwards did moderate his behavior. And Marshall was pretty careful, even if he disagreed with Jefferson, and issued a decision to try and be as nonpartisan as possible. And so I think the justice branch, the judicial branch, also took a lesson from this moment, saying, we also have to be careful to respect these boundaries. And so I think everyone was sort of chastened by the event and did really attempt to.
be on their best behavior afterwards. Yeah, the judiciary got the message, so that it did have a chastening effect on the judiciary. And so maybe that was good. When the founding fathers built the Constitution, they were not particularly clear about how this was all going to mingle and work. They were all students of Montesquieu and assumed that separation of powers was the right doctrine and so on.
But the exact powers of the Supreme Court were really unknown. And in fact, as you know, George Washington at one point tried to get the court to be an active group of advisors for his policies, especially foreign policy. And John Jay of the court said, no, that is not our function. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
you know, we've talked and talked about how. Article Two is quite short and doesn't say a whole lot about what the presidency is supposed to be on a day-to-day basis and how the presidency is going to act. Well, Article Three is even shorter. And there's very little there about what the judicial system is supposed to be. And it really left it up to Congress to flesh out a lot of the particulars.
But especially in terms of conduct, that was not something that was really solidified even into the 20th century. Most of the 19th century justices continue to engage in what we would consider today to be wildly inappropriate political behavior.
And there certainly is no inappropriate political behavior now amongst our justices. So we can be thankful for that, can't we? Lindsay, we need to take a short break. When we come back, I want to ask you about the craziest of all the stories. What happened in the sex scandal at Bizarre?
You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America with Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky, 10 things about John Randolph of Rowan. We'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson with Lindsay Trevinsky, 10 things about John Randolph of Rowan. Lindsay, people are raving about the 10 things series. People say we love Lindsay Trevinsky and we love 10 things and don't stop doing that. I think the 10 things idea that we're going to be disciplined, talk about a subject and obviously you can't do justice to John Randolph or anything else in an hour, but we're trying to cover a lot of ground and that there's a breeziness and we don't always agree, although we normally do.
People really love this format, and so I so appreciate your willingness to do it. I know you say you've written, you know, articles about some of these issues and books too. They're all more complicated than we can give them full credit for in the time that we have, but I think people are really learning a lot from this series. I'm so glad. I love doing it.
It's such a fun way to take something that I might already know something about, but then add to that knowledge or learn something completely new. I think we do our best to stay disciplined. It doesn't always work. You know, sometimes I think tangents end up producing.
the most fun stuff. Indeed. And so let me go to the strangest of the issues involving this very, very strange man. He's so soprano. He's hairless.
He is flamboyant. He's eccentric. He's an opium addict. because of his health issues. He's dueling, or nearly dueling a lot of the time.
He's unusual, even by Virginia standards. You know, John Adams said in Virginia, all geese are swans. He is unusual, human being, as Virginia produced during this period, and yet fascinating and powerful and central to the whole subject of the early national period, and at times a serious ally of Jefferson's and at times a critic of Jefferson's and all over the map on slavery. Amazing, amazing man. So he's a Randolph, and the Randolphs have lots of family troubles.
Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Martha, marries. Thomas Mann, Randolph in the immediate family, not distant cousins at all. There is a whopping sex scandal. And, as you said earlier about Yazoo, it's a huge cast of characters, the lawyers, that get involved in this thing. So tell us what happened at the aptly named plantation.
Bizarre. Yeah, this scandal could, you know, knock.
everything off the front page of the tabloids today. So people were not less scandalous in the past. So the best we can tell and the evidence and the records on this are really complicated, because people are obviously acting in their family and their name's best interest. They're trying to protect their reputations. But from the best we can tell, John Randolph, he had two sisters.
One was named Anne or Nancy as she went by, and one was named Judith. Judith married one of, I think, Thomas Mann, Randolph's brothers. He then went, unlike, you know, in a lot of families, the wife would go live with the husband's family. In this case, it seems like the husband went and lived with the wife's family. And so Judith and her husband were living in a house with Nancy as well.
Apparently, Nancy was very charming, very lively, very attractive, had a lot of fans, a lot of suitors. She went to live with the house. At some point, Nancy became pregnant. The speculation was, the rumor was that she was having an affair with her brother-in-law, her sister's husband, which.
almost certainly the father is Richard Randolph, her brother-in-law. Yes, which is a big biblical.
no-no. And in a society that takes that very seriously, it's quite scandalous. These things.
happen, of course. You know, this is not that uncommon, but the way this story then unfolds.
becomes crazy. Very dramatic. So she is pregnant. At some point, she gives birth to the child. It seems likely that the child does not live.
And maybe stillbirth, maybe harmed during birth, unclear. All we know is that there was a fetus. There was a fetus. And someone seemed to have.
carried it outside and put it on the woodpile. So it winds up on the woodpile at this plantation named Bazaar. If you were trying to cover this up, you think you would try harder. Yeah, not the most.
subtle. However, the person that apparently saw this happening was an enslaved woman. Enslaved people cannot testify in court at this point. So that testimony is, for all intents and purposes, did not happen. Well, rumors start to circulate about what has happened.
And basically, Richard basically goes to court and demands that there basically be an investigation to clear his name, because people are accusing him of both having an affair with his sister-in-law and.
infanticide. You can imagine the position that he is in. Let's just assume that he was the father. His wife, of course, is appalled. Everyone else is appalled, too.
Nancy has just lost a child, a child that nobody knew was going to be born. I mean, she had been able to cover up her pregnancy until the end. Suddenly, this blows sky high in the world. And a man's honor is so important in the Virginia world of this time that he has to assert his innocence, whether he's innocent or not,
by demanding a trial to clarify this. Now, at the trial, the defense counsel for Nancy were Patrick Henry and John Marshall. So you really can't get any higher hitters.
The cream of the crop. in Virginia. Two of the greatest Virginians are in a sex scandal trial.
One of the witnesses was Martha Jefferson, Randolph, Jefferson's daughter.
Who's appalled. I mean, humiliated and appalled, just to be even associated with this world.
Unbelievable. And so what she basically at question with her testimony was whether or not she had given or she had provided or encouraged Nancy to take a medicine for colic or stomach upset that would have caused an abortion. And what she basically said was, I told her to take this for her colic, basically saying no, no wrongdoing. Any source that asserts that Martha knew exactly what happened is probably fiction. And anyway, the trial ended up concluding by basically saying not guilty.
It was clear that Nancy had had a relationship, but she would not say with whom, although it seems like it was certainly Richard. It wasn't required to say with whom,
that wasn't the business of the trial. It's just, is Richard the father or not? And they were able to persuade the court that it was inconclusive.
Yes. And it was inconclusive how the fetus got outside. We shouldn't laugh. It's a sad, it's a very sad story. It's just so ridiculous.
Where is John Randolph in all of this? He wants nothing to do with it. He's so humiliated by his family. He's so furious with his family. He, going forward, has a very contentious and very nasty relationship with Nancy.
In fact, one of our listeners, Rebecca Flint, I hope I'm saying her last name correctly, she has sent me a bunch of emails about a lot of great topics, but is writing a book about Nancy. And it's really sad. Her family kind of treats her terribly. It's understandable, I guess, why Judith would hate her, but Richard ends up dying. Nancy's kind of kept under home imprisonment for a while and then eventually makes her way north and does actually end up having sort of a happy ending.
She first works as a housekeeper for Gouverneur Morris, who we should do as a subject of 10 things at Rebecca's suggestion, because, Lord, that's another colorful character, but they ended up getting married and having a very happy marriage. So there is a happy ending.
to that portion of the story. She marries Gouverneur Morris. Yes. The famous Pennsylvania Federalist, friend to George Washington, author of the preamble of the constitution of the United States, diplomat in France, frenemy of Thomas Jefferson, key member of the constitutional convention in 1787.. That Gouverneur Morris winds up marrying the fallen, to use a term from the time, the fallen.
Nancy Randolph. He also had a peg leg and he was a notorious womanizer before his marriage. And the way that he died, I would wish on no one, certainly not anyone that I loved. How did he die? He had a kidney stone that was stuck.
he used a whale bone to try and get it out. And that, I think, punctured his urethra.
And I think he got an infection. So back to this story. So there's a heavy, heavyweight group of lawyers and others involved in this thing. Martha Jefferson, Jefferson's daughter, is married into that world. She then writes a letter to her father saying, I can't, I can never, I can never go in public again.
I'm so humiliated. This is the worst thing ever happened. No one will ever regard me with any affection or respect again. And to this, Jefferson writes one of his greatest letters, in which he says, look, this isn't you. You can't be guilty by associations.
If we hold your head up, say as little as possible about this, time's on our side. These things do happen. If we only chose friends for whom there are no problems or, or blemishes, we would be in a desert for our love. I mean, I think you will, even you, Lindsay, will acknowledge that when Jefferson is at his best, he's amazing. And here he was giving exactly the best possible advice of a father in the midst of this scandal.
Yeah. And so, just for a little bit of context, women were not supposed to go into court at this point in time. So to be called as a witness was, was really not something that elite women were supposed to do. And I think that she wrote to him when she was thinking about whether or not she was going to testify. And what he basically said was we can't protect ourselves at the cost of hurting those that we love.
And so you should help her if you can, and you should not worry about the consequences. And it is a remarkably generous and supportive letter, which, as you know, I have issues with sometimes his manipulation of his children, but in this moment, he really does.
right by Martha. And it's remarkable. He is so thoughtful and, and parental in the best possible sense here. And he says, basically, when people are down in the way that Nancy is down, that's when they need us most. That's when we must step up and be supportive, silently, but be supportive.
Because if you're only a friend to people, when they're succeeding, you're no friend at all. that she needs you now. And so you must not break from her, however humiliated you feel in this incident. One of my favorite members of this era is William Plummer of New Hampshire, a US Senator, he came to Washington in 1803 as a US Senator, fiercely disliked Jefferson, but Jefferson seduced him by bringing him to his dinner parties. And Plummer said, you know, he has terrible politics, and he's a unscrupulous demagogue.
And I have no respect for him, but you know, pretty good wine. And then he served seven different types of wine at dinner. But by the time Jefferson retires in 1880, I'm not exaggerating, Plummer says, don't you think maybe a third term? And so he didn't like Jefferson's politics, but he liked Jefferson. It was hard to dislike Jefferson personally, when Jefferson was at his best as a host and hospitality and his graciousness and making everybody feel comfortable and making sure the politics at the table didn't get out of hand.
I mean, Jefferson is a, is a, is a, is a creature out of a Jane Austen novel, for civility, at least in public. So Plummer wrote the best description we have of Randolph coming into the House of Representatives. Here it is. Mr. Randolph goes to the house booted and spurred with his whip in hand, in imitation, it is said, of members of the British Parliament.
He's very slight man, but of the common stature. At a little distance, he does not appear older than you are. But upon a nearer approach, you perceive his wrinkles and gray hairs. He is, I believe, about 30.. He's a descendant in the right line from the celebrated Indian woman Pocahontas, the Federalist ridicule in effect, to despise him, but a despised foe often proves a dangerous enemy.
His talents are certainly a despised foe often proves a dangerous enemy. His talents are certainly far above average in Congress. What about this whole Pocahontas trope? You know, Thomas Mann, Randolph claimed that he was a descendant of Pocahontas. It was somehow a cachet, a piece of prestige in Virginia, to claim descent from Pocahontas.
Well, I think it was a way of anchoring yourself to the earliest arrivals in Virginia, not unlike some of the genealogy stuff today. We've sort of mentioned it, but I think it's worth circling back to that. So some, some early reports suggested that he had had a lot of disease when he was younger. that maybe had rendered him impotent and therefore unable to go through puberty. Scientists now today, think that that's fairly unlikely.
They actually think it was probably a genetic mutation. And so he, his voice was really high pitched. He never had any facial hair. He often received a lot of criticism or, I mean, quite harsh remarks, I think both from opponents, but also apparently from some women in his family that he was impotent. And so he had a very strange appearance.
His skin seemed like it was almost too tight and his eyes kind of bugged out of his face. And he had very long fingers and limbs, but didn't really have any muscle mass, because he had like grown, but not ever really grown in stature. So he was apparently a very bizarre person to actually look at. So he must have been a person of extraordinary.
talent to overcome all those things and be a central figure of this congressional era.
Yeah, he was. I mean, there's no doubt that he was unbelievably brilliant and very hardworking when he wanted to be. He could really overcome a lot of those things. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that he became very angry. He was very bitter.
He could be very mean because of all of these things that he had to overcome. And he both desperately wanted affection, but really kept people and pushed people away. So I think he probably had a fairly sad life and is someone I think we should probably view with a little bit of sympathy. We have just a few minutes left. Let's.
talk about the War of 1812.
. So the War of 1812, often thought of as our second war of national independence. Jefferson sort of postpones it by adroit diplomacy during his second term, but his second term ends sort of grimly with the US sort of on the brink of a conflict with Great Britain. again. Madison does everything he can to avoid it.
But finally, he declares, gets Congress to declare war on Great Britain. It's a war that comes to a draw, but effectively, we win by not losing. And after that, the relationship with Britain is never good until the 20th century, but it was never again an existential question for the United States. Why does John Randolph?
oppose this war? Well, first, that's a pretty generous assessment for Jefferson and Madison about trying to avoid war. I'm not sure some of their peers would have said as much, but
to answer your question. So, Randolph... I thought it was eminently fair and respectful, but go ahead.
So Randolph, in true small R Republican fashion, didn't think that the federal government should be getting into war. The business of war was not a good idea. The purpose of war was not a good idea. And he felt that it would go badly and would basically just serve as a way to beef up the federal government. And in fact, he said, when they were declaring it, he said, gentlemen, you have made war, you have finished the ruin of our country.
And before you conquer Canada, your idol, parentheses, Napoleon, will cease to distract the world and the capital will be a ruin. For which he was pretty accurate in that assessment, the capital did indeed burn. And, you know, thankfully, the United States sort of got out of it because Great Britain was distracted around the globe. But his assessment of what was going to happen was pretty spot on.
Theodore Roosevelt could not stand Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. And one of his principal arguments were that the two of them mishandled the whole run up to the War of 1812, that it could have been handled so much better. And that by the peace policy of Jefferson and Madison only made inevitable the war. And when the war came, we weren't ready for it either.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Theodore Roosevelt really liked war and was very enthusiastic about it. So I think that probably also has to be taken with a grain of salt. But there's no doubt that the embargo in Jefferson's administration was a complete fiasco. It was seen as sort of, I think, a middle ground, but a lot of Americans didn't want anything to do with it because it was economically damaging. And the federal government was both too weak to fully enforce it, but too strong to not try.
And I think Jefferson and Madison really overvalued their economic impact on Great Britain. So they thought that by imposing this embargo, it would do something, and it only really served to hurt the United States. And so, I think, did start them off in a conflict in a particularly poor position, especially because they hadn't been all that enthusiastic about keeping a strong army or navy to begin with. So they had really been hollowed out prior to the.
Fair enough. So I want to close with one of the stranger facts of John Randolph's life. He retired from the US House of Representatives in 1828.. And then, when Andrew Jackson became president, he sent John Randolph as minister to Russia. That does not seem like a good choice to me.
No. And many people at the time commented that it made zero sense because Randolph had no diplomatic experience and also the worst possible personality for diplomacy.
And I mean, an odd duck, to put it lightly. You know, when I think of a great minister to Russia, I think of John Quincy Adams. You know, I think of there's somebody who spent his whole young life preparing to be the perfect diplomat and who had the understanding of geopolitics and understanding of the history of Russia and the history of Europe and could do this. You know, diplomacy is really a very difficult art form. Randolph had no ability to be diplomatic with.
anyone. He didn't like people. He wasn't really particularly good at getting along with people. I don't know that. he spoke a lot of languages.
He hadn't studied diplomacy. So I mean, just none of the things that you would want. I know this much, Lindsay, we're out of time.
Thank you for this. I would give anything to be able to observe John Randolph holding forth on the floor of the House of Representatives of the United States. Yeah, it's really. there are a lot.
of rooms that I'd love to be a fly on the wall. And that would definitely be one that I wish that had had film or C-SPAN to capture his speeches. They would have been something to behold.
We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os