America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But the poor Randolphs, for all their numbers and for all their pride in being among the first of the first families of Virginia, have fared less well. Though the family started off with a great burst of procreational and entrepreneurial energy in the seventeenth century and continued strong well into the nineteenth century—through the fifth, sixth, and even seventh American generations—it is hard to think of a single twentieth-century Randolph who is distinguished for much more than a family heirloom or two and a great deal of family hubris. Perhaps this is because the Randolphs, as a family, did not encourage and abet such fierce competitiveness and rivalry among their male offspring as the Livingstons did. And perhaps that was because most of the early Randolphs had slaves to carry out their dirty work for them.

  In many ways, the Randolphs and the Livingstons got off to quite similar starts. The first William Randolph arrived in Virginia in 1673, just a year before Robert Livingston’s arrival in Massachusetts, and both men quickly demonstrated an ability to turn a confused local situation to their advantage. Since 1660, the Virginia colony had been governed by Sir William Berkeley, who had created what amounted to an oligarchy consisting of a few privileged families who had been given large plantations along the James River. One of these, called Bermuda Hundred, belonged to a planter named Henry Royall Isham, a descendant of Pocahontas and her English husband, John Rolfe. Another planter was an English aristocrat named Nathaniel Bacon, whose estates composed much of what is now the city of Richmond. As in New York, a thriving fur trade with the Indians had been established, and with his Pocahontas connection Henry Royall Isham was one of the most successful of the Virginia fur merchants. At the same time, another lucrative product was being raised in Virginia—tobacco—and settlers were pressing westward into the fertile interior lowlands toward the borders of the colony to grow it.

  The border colonists, however, found themselves frequently subjected to raids and massacres by the Indians, and these, they complained, were simply being ignored by Governor Berkeley, who was more interested in maintaining the Indian fur trade enjoyed by himself and his eastern shore friends than in assisting struggling tobacco farmers. In the years before William Randolph’s arrival, a number of such Indian raids had occurred in the western part of the colony, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of white border farmers, and had gone unpunished by the governor. In 1676, a particularly bloody attack took place and, once again, Governor Berkeley made no attempt to come to the aid of his western colonists. This injustice was too much for Nathaniel Bacon, who, though he was betraying his class of plantation owners, organized an uprising—the famous Bacon’s Rebellion—against the governor. In Bacon’s Battle of Bloody Run, many Indians were killed.

  It amounted to a small-scale Civil War, and before it was over Governor Berkeley had fled and Jamestown was burned. But then Nathaniel Bacon died of malaria and, with its leader gone, his cause fell into disarray. Berkeley took command of Jamestown again, and harsh reprisals were inflicted on all who had taken part in the revolt, including wholesale executions and confiscations of property. Among those properties confiscated, needless to say, were all those that had formerly belonged to Nathaniel Bacon.

  But a confiscated estate needed someone to run it. Seeing a unique opportunity, William Randolph approached the governor and offered his services. Berkeley, who was eager to get his colony’s affairs back to normal as quickly as possible, graciously accepted and awarded Randolph one of Bacon’s former estates. Thus, almost overnight, William Randolph became a proprietor of a large Virginia plantation. At first, to be sure, his stewardship may have seemed a bit tenuous. Back in England, King Charles II had not been at all pleased with Governor Berkeley’s handling of the rebellion and its aftermath, and had summoned Berkeley to London to deliver an accounting of it and possibly to reprimand him or even dismiss him. But, in a sudden death that may have changed the course of colonial history, Sir William Berkeley died shortly after reaching London and before his meeting with the king.

  Meanwhile, William Randolph moved quickly to secure his place as a member of the Virginia landed gentry. And he did this in the classic way. He married the daughter of Henry Royall Isham, thereby consolidating the former Bacon estate with Isham’s Bermuda Hundred. Once that had been accomplished, there was no way that any succeeding governor could ever dislodge the Randolphs or their heirs and assigns.

  “William Randolph,” writes H. J. Eckenrode, the otherwise affectionate family historian, “was essentially of the predatory type.… His great hawk nose indicated that he looked on mankind as his prey and knew how to make the most of his opportunities.” This is putting it mildly. Before he was through, he had acquired more than ten thousand acres of land for himself and established a plantation for each of his seven sons.

  The Randolph plantations were run rather like feudal duchies, and the seven Randolph sons were known by the lands they ruled. They were William II of Turkey Island, Thomas of Tuckahoe, Isham of Dungeness, Richard of Curies, Henry of Chatsworth, Sir John of Tazewell Hall, and Edward of Bremo. This generation soon established what would become something of a Randolph family tradition or habit—that of marrying close relatives, even first cousins. And so it would not be long before Randolph blood coursed through the veins of all the great Virginians, including John Marshall and Robert E. Lee. Thomas Jefferson himself was more than half Randolph. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a Randolph connection, and his mother, the former Jane Randolph, was the daughter of Isham Randolph of Dungeness. Jefferson’s daughter Martha, furthermore, would marry her first cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph I, the governor of Virginia. The Randolphs would also display a family preference for taking very young wives. For example, John Marshall’s bride (another Randolph connection) was only fourteen.

  Of all the sons of the first William Randolph, it was perhaps Sir John Randolph of Tazewell Hall who had the most distinguished, albeit brief, career and who established the tradition that Randolphs should be given high political and diplomatic posts almost by virtue of being Randolphs. Educated at the College of William and Mary, he then went to England to study law at Gray’s Inn, where his enrollment was recorded as “John Randolph, gent.,” indicating that even in England a second-generation American could be elevated to the squirearchy. Later, he returned to England as the delegate chosen by the Virginia Assembly to present its grievances over tobacco to the king. It was a touchy mission, but the king so admired John Randolph’s legal and diplomatic skills that he thanked his adversary by knighting him—an honor rarely bestowed on any colonial anywhere.

  Though Sir John died young, his son, Peyton Randolph, carried on in his father’s footsteps, and in the decade preceding the Revolution served as presiding officer in nearly every Revolutionary assemblage in the Virginia colony. Peyton married the daughter of Colonel Benjamin Harrison—whose brother would later become President William Henry Harrison and whose great-nephew would become President Benjamin Harrison—adding another to the litany of important American names that would decorate the Randolph family tree and extending the influence of the family into the territory of Ohio.

  And yet in Peyton Randolph’s generation, there were already signs that the fabric of Randolph family unity was beginning to weaken. Though Peyton Randolph was a devout patriot and Revolutionary, his younger brother—another John—was an ardent Tory, and the two brothers became bitter enemies. When the Revolution came, John Randolph sided with the king and eventually fled with his wife and daughters to England, where he remained loyal to the monarchy to the end. Even so, his dying wish was that his body be returned to Virginia for burial, which it was.

  This John Randolph’s son, Edmund Randolph, had strong Revolutionary sympathies and refused to accompany the rest of his family to England, thus creating another lasting rift, between father and son. Edmund was therefore raised by his patriot uncle Peyton and at age twenty-three became the youngest member of the Virginia Convention, which was the first of the states to adopt a constitution. Later, as gove
rnor of Virginia, Edmund Randolph played an important role in getting Virginia to ratify the U.S. Constitution and was rewarded by being made Washington’s attorney general and, still later, secretary of state.

  Edmund Randolph was unusual for a man of his social standing in the South in that he opposed slavery. He was also—because his Tory father had virtually disinherited him—one of the first poor Randolphs. When his uncle Peyton died, he was not rewarded with the comfortable inheritance he might have expected, but instead was saddled with all of his uncle Peyton’s debts. These could have been settled by selling Uncle Peyton’s slaves to another plantation owner. But this, as a matter of principle, Edmund refused to do. Instead, he kept his uncle’s slaves on as his personal dependents, housing them, feeding them, and caring for them, even though this charitable course served only to plunge Edmund even more deeply into debt.

  Then, in 1795, the first truly dark cloud fell across the Randolph landscape and a family belief that had developed, along with a certain hauteur and even arrogance, that Randolphs, being Randolphs, were beyond reproach. Edmund Randolph had by then been named secretary of state, succeeding his relative Thomas Jefferson. One of the most delicate diplomatic problems facing the new nation had become maintaining good relations with both the British and the French, who traditionally distrusted each other at almost every juncture. The French and English were always busily spying on each other, and thus it happened that a dispatch to Paris, sent by the French minister to the United States, Joseph Fauchet, was intercepted by a British man-of-war and sent back to the British minister in New York. In it, M. Fauchet accused Edmund Randolph of asking for money from France in return for trying to influence the American government against Great Britain. The Fauchet dispatch also hinted that Randolph was willing to sell American government secrets to France.

  It was certainly a serious charge—blackmailing and espionage—and faced with it, Edmund Randolph immediately did the gentlemanly thing and resigned. Eventually, both charges were proven to be completely without foundation, and Edmund was able to secure a letter of apology and retraction from Fauchet. But the damage to Edmund’s reputation had been done.

  Then, as though this were not bad enough, his own government filed a claim against him saying that certain of his expenses while in office had been improper, and enclosed a large bill. This charge was never proven either, but Edmund, keeping the stiffest of possible upper lips, insisted on paying off every penny the government alleged he owed it. Needless to say, none of these allegations would have ever been made if it hadn’t been common knowledge that Edmund Randolph needed money. And so, unfairly or not, the whispering continued that Edmund had been guilty of some sort of fiscal hanky-panky involving the government he had sworn to serve.

  In his later years, he was able to redeem his tarnished reputation somewhat when he served as senior defense counsel for Aaron Burr in Burr’s famous treason trial. Edmund’s brilliance and erudition at the trial were credited for the “not proved” verdict, and the case is still studied in law schools as a masterpiece of legal defense. But Burr was not a popular defendant, and so this victory in his behalf did not restore Edmund to the eminence he might have hoped for.

  In some ways, the Aaron Burr trial was a case of Randolph versus Randolph, since the foreman of the grand jury that handed down the indictment against Burr was Edmund Randolph’s cousin John, known as John Randolph of Roanoke. John of Roanoke was the great-grandson of the first William Randolph, the grandson of Richard of Curies, the son of yet another John (not to be confused with John the Tory, Edmund’s father), and the great-great-great-grandson of Pocahontas. As a politician, John of Roanoke served not only in the Virginia legislature but also in the U.S. Congress, where he quickly rose to be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and Republican House leader, and finally to the Senate. Though considered a brilliant statesman, John of Roanoke was an altogether peculiar individual. Thin, bent, emaciated, and often sickly, his behavior was nearly always eccentric and often downright demented.

  He was very rich. He owned a vast Virginia plantation with a huge manor house and an enormous retinue of slaves, a splendid string of Thoroughbred horses, and a library of classics that was considered the finest in America. Yet, when he was in Roanoke, he lived hermitlike in two rude log cabins in the middle of a primeval forest. In the family, John of Roanoke was said to be one of “the weak strain” of Randolphs and to have “weak blood.” He frequently collapsed in dead faints in which he seemed to have ceased breathing altogether. Yet he once rode his horse nonstop from Charleston to Savannah just to prove it could be done.

  Politically, John of Roanoke vacillated wildly. At first, he was strenuously pro-Jefferson. Then he became virulently anti-Jefferson. At first he was outspokenly in favor of the French Revolution. Then, all at once, he denounced everything French and became even more outspokenly pro-English. In private, he claimed to loathe slavery. But in public utterances he defended it as God’s gift to the South. (When he died, his will gave all his slaves their freedom.) He spoke often of his deep sympathies with the common man. Yet, in a speech, he once proclaimed, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality.” Quite often, in his public pronouncements, he seems to have enjoyed saying quite shocking things and making statements that started out seeming to take one side and ended up taking quite the opposite. When it was proposed, for example, that the salary of congressmen should be raised from $6 a year to $1,500 a year, John of Roanoke began by saying that he believed congressmen should be paid nothing at all, since they were “supposed to be gentlemen.” But, he added, since congressmen were obviously not gentlemen, he was in favor of the raise, since that was about what a woodcutter earned, and a congressman deserved no more than that.

  He was a man of many hatreds and was famous for his acid tongue. He hated Patrick Henry, with whom he had a celebrated debate. He hated Henry Clay, with whom he had a famous duel (neither man was hurt). He hated Daniel Webster, and when the latter angrily accused him of being impotent, John of Roanoke replied, “I would not attempt to vie with the honorable gentleman from Massachusetts”—and he drew out the first syllable of “Massachusetts” so that the emphasis lay heavily on “ass”—“in a field where every nigger is his peer and every billy-goat his master.” He hated Richard Rush and, when the latter was appointed secretary of the treasury, declared, “Never was ability so much below mediocrity so well rewarded—not even when Caligula’s horse was made Consul.” He hated Edward Livingston, who had been U.S. district attorney of the state of New York and mayor of New York City and who had drafted a new code of criminal law and procedure called the Livingston Code that had been acclaimed throughout the world. Edward Livingston had been dubbed the first legal genius of modern times, and no doubt John of Roanoke thought that this appellation should have been applied to him. Livingston, said John of Roanoke, “is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.”

  He was most famous, however, as an orator, and this in itself is odd. His voice was thin and fluty, and his manner was mincing and almost effeminate. He danced about the platform as he spoke, and yet he made many memorable observations, such as “The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it,” which was later paraphrased by Henry Thoreau and even later by Franklin D. Roosevelt (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”). And he was most eloquent on his favorite theme, states’ rights. “Asking one of the States to surrender part of her sovereignty,” he once said, “is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity.”

  Though John of Roanoke had once been engaged to a young woman named Maria Ward—who later married Edmund Randolph’s son instead—he never married, and so the weak strain of the family supposedly died with him. Among his last requests were that he not be buried in Washington, where he would lie among too many enemies, and that he not be buried conventionally, facing eastward, but facing westward, where he could “keep an eye on Henry Clay.”
/>   But the weak strain of the Randolph family was as nothing compared with what has been called the scandal strain. When John of Roanoke’s father died, John’s older brother Richard Randolph had inherited a plantation called Bizarre, which turned out to be aptly named. In the family tradition, Richard Randolph of Bizarre had been married when he was young—only twenty—and to his cousin Judith, the daughter of Thomas Mann Randolph, who was only sixteen. As was also something of a custom of the times, Judith’s still younger and unmarried sister Nancy came to live with the newlyweds as her sister’s companion and helpmeet in running the manor house. All seemed well at Bizarre until suddenly, horror of horrors, it was little Nancy who became pregnant, not Judith.

  Desperate to keep the situation within the family—and out of the newspapers—the Randolphs tried to get Nancy married off to another of John and Richard’s brothers, Theodoric, but Theodoric would have nothing to do with this scheme. Finally the tragedy was played out one night in October 1792 at a neighboring plantation called Glenlyvar, belonging to Cousin Randolph Harrison, where Nancy, Judith, and Richard paid a strange midnight visit. At Glenlyvar, Nancy either underwent a primitive abortion or gave birth to a child that died. The little corpse was found in a hastily improvised grave, and Richard and Nancy were charged with murder.