Page 5 - Demo
P. 5
Clay had been made secretary of state (then considered a stepping stone to the presidency). Clay, he charged, had made what others already had called a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1824. In this multi-candidate election, nobody had garnered an electoral majority, throwing the race into the House of Representatives. Candidate Clay, insisted Randolph, secretly had promised to deliver congressmen’s votes to his rival Adams in exchange
for the most powerful post in Adams’s cabinet. Randolph made this charge (which probably was true) more vivid
and memorable by referring to an unholy alliance between “the Puritan [Adams] and the blackleg [Clay].” This hurt.
A “blackleg” is a professional gambler, and thus a suspected cheater, a wheeler and dealer, someone without principle. Clay, who actually possessed strikingly consistent political principles and policy goals, nonetheless already had combined unparalleled legislative skills with a realistic understanding of the possible to earn the sobriquet of “Great Compromiser.”
In Randolph’s characterization, the compromiser appeared as the great trickster, the great cheat. Clay’s reputation had been sullied in the most public of forums. Randolph had said, in effect: I’m better than you, I have more honor than you have;
Tucker was unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom. In 1796, convinced that slavery was both cruel and doomed,
he constructed an elaborate plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, to be followed by colonization of freed
people to the West—a plan that was pointedly ignored by
the legislature. To his stepson, Tucker was all a gentleman should be: honest, honorable, sophisticated, a man of absolute integrity, unafraid to advance his own opinions, whichever way the wind blew.
Randolph admired his stepfather’s learning, and tried to match it by a lifetime of diligent, independent reading. But Randolph was never a good student of others. He attended William and Mary, Princeton, and Columbia but graduated from none. He studied law for a few months with his kinsman Edmund Randolph— then United States Attorney General—but could not muster the discipline to stick with
the prescribed regimen. Discipline was never Randolph’s strong suit; he was very bright, but never could adhere to someone else’s program. But to a great degree, he did not have to. He
toward John Randolph—right toward the center of his body.
you are a blackleg, and I’m not. That could not stand. And so the Great Compromiser arrived at the dueling
ground in no mood to compromise. The seconds conferred
on the rules, inspected the pistols, instructed the combatants. Clay and Randolph marched their ten paces. The count was spoken: one, two, three. Each fired. Clay hit a boulder behind Randolph; Randolph hit dirt behind Clay. Most duels would have stopped there, and there the seconds wished to stop
this one. “Has honor been satisfied?” one asked. Randolph hesitated. Clay spoke. He was not satisfied. He wanted another round. So the seconds reloaded the pistols, the duelists retraced their ten paces, the count again was spoken: one, two, three. And this time, Henry Clay’s bullet went hurtling toward John Randolph—right toward the center of his body.
Who was the man at the end of this
bullet’s relentless trajectory?
Who was this man who could so enrage one of America’s most lionized public figures that the latter would not be satisfied until he was dead?
John Randolph was a child of the American Revolution, born in Prince George County in 1773. His mother, Frances Bland, having lost her husband (also John Randolph) when son John was a year old, soon married a brilliant immigrant from Bermuda, St. George Tucker. John’s stepfather, whom he idolized and always regarded as his father, was an ardent patriot during the war, helping to smuggle supplies from Bermuda through the British blockade. As a militia officer in 1781 he received a wound at the battle of Guilford Courthouse and witnessed Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. After the war Tucker would become famous as
a legal scholar and jurist, rising to a seat on the Virginia Court of Appeals. Though of a conservative temperament,
was a Randolph. He had wealth, connections, and oratorical skills that Virginians—in a face-to-face, highly physical society—prized above most other talents in a public
figure. In 1799, barely old enough constitutionally to serve, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. His looks were so strikingly boyish that Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, before administering the oath of office, only half-jokingly asked him if
he was old enough. Randolph
stood erect and held his head
high. “Ask my constituents,” he said.
He served in the House with distinction, soon chairing the Ways and Means
Committee and serving the interests of
the Jefferson administration as a shrewd
and skillful floor leader. Randolph served Jefferson, his cousin and fellow Democratic- Republican, so avidly because the president seemed to share Randolph’s bedrock belief in small government, strict construction of the Constitution, the virtue of agrarianism, and the rights of the states. He admired Jefferson so much that he swallowed his scruples in
1803 to shepherd the appropriation
for the Louisiana Purchase through
the House, despite the Purchase’s
assault on strict construction. As time
went on he regretted this, and in 1806 he
broke with Jefferson, joining a group of irreconcilables— House Speaker Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was
FALL/WINTER 2007 


































































































   3   4   5   6   7