Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough

1812-1833

Kenneth Shorey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351317504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This volume presents a complete collection of correspondence between John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, and his close friend Dr. John Brockenbrough, a Richmond physician. Randolph was an eloquent man, the most talented extemporaneous speaker of the House of Representatives in his day and often wrote biting social commentatary. Of special interest in this collection are his critical comments on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, John Marshall, and many other leading figures of the period. Randolph's correspondence with Brockenbrough touches upon the principal political controversies of his time, from the War of 1812 to South Carolina's Nullification Crisis of 1832.

From the trial of Aaron Burr until his fantastic end in a Philadelphia hotel, John Randolph confided in John Brockenbrough. This book records the friendship of a gifted politician and a sober physician. It also reveals a great deal about an era of American history that ought to be studied more closely.

Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, 1812–1833

“I went to the House Reps. & found Randolph had just commenced a speech which I would not have lost the opportunity of hearing for the loss of my baggage. He is the most impressive & accomplished Parliamentary debater I ever heard. On mentioning this opinion afterwards in the presence of several Senators & members of the lower house, they concurred with me & one of them added that he had heard Pitt, Fox, Sheridan & others of the most celebrated men of the English Parliament & thought none of them in this respect equal to Randolph. Even his youthful & effeminate appearance & voice which, in a man of weak or mean talents would be disadvantageous, are in Randolph’s favor. His feebleness excites sympathy & his voice, which is clear & sonorous, becomes more masculine as his subject rises. His expression is deliberate & solemn & I could scarcely help fancying, as I saw the meagre sprite before me, like a being tottering to the grave, that I heard the voice of an angel sent down from Heaven to warn the deluded from their errors. In the zeal with which he inspired me, I could gladly have leaped from the gallery to clasp him in my arms”

(Thomas P. Cope, Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851, edited by Eliza Cope Harrison [South Bend, Ind., 1978], p. 259).

Holograph, Alderman Library, University of Virginia

Dr. John Brockenbrough to John Randolph

Sunday morning [Richmond, April 26, 1812]

My dear Sir,

Should Congress adjourn on Wednesday, we shall expect to see you on Sunday or Monday. There will be a meeting of the remnant of the Protestant Episcopal clergy in Richmond on the 6th of May, & I understand that [Rev. William] Meade will attend. I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance & my wife is very desirous that he should stay with us whilst he remains here. Will you, in passing thro’ Alexandria, make known this wish to him & give him a line of introduction to me? I hope, however, you will then also be with us. I will write to Leigh¹ & tell him to come over. I presume you know that he is re-elected—Our Printers & state-politicians have not yet received their orders from head-quarters as to the Successor of poor old Mr. [George] Clinton²—or they have been directed to villify De-Witt Clinton so as to frighten him out of all pretension to the Presidency. With respect to the Embargo measure I only hope that it may be persisted in until the next crop of wheat shall be ready for market. Nearly the whole of the last crop has been sold, & rely on it that the people will not agree to lose a dollar a bushel, by an act of our own Government, on the ensuing Crop. Patriotism is a mighty precious thing when it costs nothing, but the mass of mankind think it a very foolish thing when it curtails their self-indulgence.

Adieu! Your’s in sincerity³

John Brockenbrough

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Garland, 2:14–16

To Dr. John Brockenbrough

Roanoke, June 2d, 1813

I did not receive your letter of the 26th until last evening, and then I was obliged for it to my good old neighbor, Colonel [William] Morton, who never omits an occasion of doing a favor, however small. The gentleman by whom you wrote is very shy of me; nor can I blame him for it. No man likes to feel the embarrassment which a consciousness of having done wrong to another is sure to inspire, and which the sight of the object towards whom the wrong has been done never fails to excite, in the most lively and painful degree.

The palatial residence of Dr. John Brockenbrough, erected in 1818. In the heyday of Jacksonian Democracy it was the rendezvous of the Richmond Junto. Much later it became the White House of the Confederacy, and today it is a museum displaying the world’s largest collection of Civil War relics. Pencil sketch (?) reproduced courtesy of the Virginia State Library.

My neighbor, Colonel C[lar]k, who goes down to Petersburg and Richmond to-morrow, enables me (after a fashion) to answer your question, “How and where I shall pass the summer months?” To which I can only reply—as it pleases God! If I go to any watering-place, it will be to our hot springs, for the purpose of stewing the rheumatism out of my carcase, if it be practicable.

It would have been peculiarly gratifying to me to have been with you when Leigh, Garnett, ⁴ W. Meade, and, I must add, M ———, were in Richmond. If we exclude every “party-man, and man of ambition,” from our church, I fear we shall have as thin a congregation as Dean Swift⁵ had, when he addressed his clerk, “Dearly beloved Roger!” What I like M ——— for, is neither his courtesy, nor his intelligence, but a certain warm-heartedness, which is now-a-days the rarest of human qualities. His manner I think peculiarly unfortunate. There is an ostentation of ornament (which school-boys lay aside when they reach the senior class), and a labored infelicity of expression, that is hateful to one’s feelings. We are in terror for the speaker. But this fault he has already in some degree corrected; and by the time he is as old as you or I, it will have worn off. I was greatly revolted by it on our first acquaintance, and even now, am occasionally offended; but the zeal with which he devotes himself to the service of his friends and of his country, makes amends for all. It is sometimes a bustling activity, of little import to its objects, but which is to be valued in reference to its motive.

I am not surprised at what you tell me of our friend. We live in fearful times, and it is a perilous adventure that he is about to undertake. In a few years more, those of us who are alive will have to move off to Kaintuck, or the Massissippi, where corn can be had for sixpence a bushel, and pork for a penny a pound. I do not wonder at the rage for emigration. What do the bulk of the people get here, that they cannot have for one-fifth of the labor in the western country? Surely that must be the Yahoo’s paradise, where he can get dead drunk for the hundredth part of a dollar.

What you tell me of Milnor is quite unexpected. He was one of the last men whom I should have expected to take orders; not so much on account of his quitting a lucrative profession, as from his fondness for gay life. I am not sure that it is the safest path. The responsibility is awful—it is tremendous.

Thanks for your intelligence respecting my poor sister.⁶ If human skill could save her, Dr. [Thomas] Robinson would do it; but there is nothing left, except to smooth her path to that dwelling whither we must all soon follow her. I can give Mrs. B. no comfort on the subject of her son.

For my part, it requires an effort to take an interest in any thing; and it seems to me strange that there should be found inducements strong enough to carry on the business of the world. I believe you have given the true solution of this problem, by way of corollary from another, when you pronounce that free-will and necessity are much the same. I used formerly to puzzle myself, as abler men have puzzled others, by speculations on this opprobrium of philosophy. If you have not untied the Gordian knot, you have cut it, which is the approved methodus medendi of this disease.

Write to me when you can do no better. Worse you cannot do for yourself, nor better for me. You can’t imagine what an epoch in my present life a letter from you constitutes. If I did not know that you could find nothing here beyond the satisfaction of mere animal necessity, I should entreat Mrs. B. and yourself to visit my solitary habitation. May every blessing attend you both.

Yours, unchangeably,
John Randolph of Roanoke

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Garland, 2:22–23

To Dr. John Brockenbrough

Roanoke, Oct. 4, 1813

My Dear Friend:—By this time I trust you have returned to Richmond for the winter. It has been a grievous separation from you that I have endured for the last two months. In this period I have experienced some heavy afflictions, of which no doubt common fame has apprised you, and others that she knows not of. Let us not talk, and, if possible, not think of them. I hope that Mrs. B. has derived every possible advantage from her late excursion. Assure her from me, that she has no friend who is more sincerely interested in her temporal and eternal happiness than myself. Absorbed as I may be supposed to be with my own misfortunes, I live only for my friends. They are few, but they are precious beyond all human estimation. Write to me I beg of you; the very sight of your handwriting gives a new impulse to my jaded spirits. I would write, but I cannot. I sometimes selfishly wish that you could conceive of my feelings. It is not the least painful of my thoughts that I am perpetually destined to be away from the sympathy of my friends, whilst I am deprived of every thing but affection towards them.

Yours truly,
John Randolph of Roanoke

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On June 17, 1812, the U.S. Senate finally approved—after long and bitter debates—a formal declaration of war against Great Britain. John Randolph had remarked, a month earlier, that many members of the majority would not follow the same course if they had it to do over again. He said, “They have advanced to the brink of a precipice, and not left themselves room to turn” (quoted in Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War [Berkeley, 1963], p. 433). In consequence of his vigorous opposition to the war, Randolph was defeated for reelection to Congress the following year.

“From Nov. 1813 until May 9, 1814, I remained in and about Richmond with my good friends Brockenbrough; most hospitably entertained by them and by the inhabitants” (J.R.’s diary, quoted in Bruce, 2:424). Returning then to Roanoke Plantation—some thirty-five or forty miles south of Bizarre—he repaired to “a savage solitude” (Garland, 2:9).

To Dr. John Brockenbrough

[Undated]

I passed but an indifferent night, occasioned, in a great measure, by the regret I feel at leaving such friends as yourself and Mrs. Brockenbrough, and at the prospect of passing my time in that utter solitude of my comfortless habitation, where I have prepared for myself, by my own folly, many causes of uneasiness. If I had followed old Polonious’s advice, and been “to mine own self true,” I might have escaped the lot which seems to be in reserve for me.

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To Dr. John Brockenbrough

[Undated]

Your two letters, the last of which I received this evening by my servant, have given me a degree of satisfaction that I find it difficult to express. Let me beg a continuance of these marks of your remembrance and friendship. At all times they would be highly acceptable; but in my present isolated state—a state of almost total dereliction—they are beyond price. I should have thanked you for your letter by the post, through the same channel, but I was induced from its contents to suppose that you would have left Richmond before my answer could reach it; and I wish that you had, because I may be debarred the pleasure of seeing you and Mrs. B. at my lonely and (as it will probably appear to you both) savage habitation. It is therefore that this letter is written. You will not wonder, when you see how I live, at my reluctance to leave you, and I was going to say my other friends in Richmond. It is indeed a life of seclusion that I live here, unchequered by a single ray of enjoyment. I try to forget myself in books; but that “pliability of man’s spirit” which yields him up to the illusions of the ideal world, is gone from me for ever. The mind stiffened by age and habit refuses to change its career. It spurns the speculative notions which hard experience has exploded; it looks with contempt or pity, in sorrow or in anger, upon the visionary plans of the youthful and sanguine. My dear sir, “there is another and a better world,” and to it alone can we look without a certainty of disappointment, for consolation, for mercy, for justice.

Just a few short days before the battles of Chippawa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie, Randolph finds himself “completely hors du monde”—yet keenly concerned with events abroad.

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Garland, 2:41–43

To Dr. John Brockenbrough

Roanoke, July 15, 1814

I had begun to fear that my long visitation of last winter and spring, had put you so much out of the habit of writing to me, that you would never resume it. But your letter of the 6th (just received) encourages me to hope that I shall hear from you as formerly. It was a sensible relief to me. But I will say nothing about my situation.

Poor St. George continues quite irrational.⁷ He is however very little misc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content Page
• Dedication
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• The Library of Conservative Thought: A Note of Introduction
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chronology
• Presidential Administrations, 1809-1837, and States Admitted to the Union
• Preface
• Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, 1812–1833
• Principal Sources