America's Secret Aristocracy (15 page)

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.

Never before in Virginia history had such a scandal rocked society as when Richard and his sister-in-law went on trial together. Never before had such highly placed dirty linen been aired before the public or had so many exalted names been linked in the lurid newspaper accounts of the affair—Lees, Marshalls, Harrisons, Randolphs, Jeffersons, all the names of high Virginia society that had Randolph connections, names that stretched into the highest reaches also of American politics and government. Nor did it reduce the magnitude of the sordid public spectacle when not one but two of the greatest lawyers of the day were hired to defend the pair: Patrick Henry and Cousin John Marshall.

The key defense witness, needless to say, was Richard's wife, Judith, who took the stand in her sister's behalf and comported herself, considering her tender years, with remarkable dignity and aplomb. With her chin held proudly high, she looked the prosecutor squarely in the eye and, in the clear and cultivated voice of a southern belle, swore under oath that nothing remarkable had occurred that fateful night except that her sister had had one of her “hysterical attacks.” She had taken some laudanum for this, and then gone straight to bed. John of Roanoke also testified as to the fine character of his brother and young cousin.

In the end, Richard and Nancy were acquitted, but the ordeal of the trial and the scandal seemed to have broken Richard Randolph of Bizarre. He dropped from sight and died just four years later. His wife, Judith, lived on for many years but as a virtual recluse, dressed in widow's weeds. As for lively little Nancy, she seemed not to have been bruised by the affair at all. She bounced right back, and in 1812, still in her twenties, she married New York's Gouverneur Morris of Morrisania, whose family also owned most of New Jersey and who was then sixty. Because it linked the Randolphs and the Morrises, it was considered a brilliant marriage. Gouverneur Morris, among other things, had designed the American coinage system and suggested the terms “dollar” and “cent.” He had served in the U.S. Senate, ran a powerful law firm, and was by then the chairman of the Erie Canal commissioners and was busily drawing up plans for the canal. And, of course, in time the Morrises would be linked in marriage to the Livingstons, who were linked to Schuylers, Jays, Van
Rensselaers, Astors, Vanderbilts, Schieffelins, and practically everybody else, as dynasty joined dynasty to create the intimate network of an American aristocracy.

As for the most famous Randolph of them all, Thomas Jefferson, most American historians have tended to treat the third president's memory as sacrosanct. On the other hand, Jefferson was in some ways almost as strange a man as his cousin John of Roanoke. Tall and auburn-haired and handsome, Jefferson claimed to speak for the masses—the farmers, apprentices, and pioneers—and he claimed to despise what he called “the aristocracy of wealth.” Yet no man of his day lived in a lordlier manner. He owned some two hundred slaves, a huge plantation, and the grandest house in Virginia. In the White House, his staff of fourteen servants included a French chef, and his dinner parties were frequent and lavish. At the same time, he cut down on the number of pompous, ceremonial occasions that George Washington had so enjoyed, was always willing to listen to all petitioners regardless of their social class, went about town like any other citizen, and often did his own grocery shopping.

It was his administration, furthermore, that dealt a fatal blow to primogeniture, the system of inheritance based on English law that permitted the owner of a manor or plantation to bequeath his property in its entirety to his eldest male heir, leaving all other male heirs (and all women) to fend for themselves. “The transmission of estates from generation to generation,” Jefferson wrote, “to men who bore the same name, had the effect of raising up a distinct class of families, who, possessing by law the privilege of perpetuating their wealth, formed by these means a sort of patrician order, distinguished by the grandeur and luxury of their establishments.” Yet Jefferson himself seemed to revel in that luxury and grandeur. Almost too much so—for he always managed to live far beyond his means.

Of course Thomas Jefferson was an extremely complex man. He was a musician, an architect, an inventor, philosopher, statesman, a brilliant lawyer, and a graceful writer. He was, by turns, a revolutionist, an idealist, and a professed believer in human rights. He was also, by many accounts, an ardent womanizer. That so many black American families have the name of Jefferson has long been a cause for comment. It was obvious that such a many-faceted personality would be seen by different people in different lights. To
some, he was nearly a god. To others, such as his political foe Alexander Hamilton, he was “a concealed voluptuary … in the plain garb of Quaker simplicity.”

But one thing is clear about the Great Democrat: He was an aristocrat to his fingertips. Consider this letter he wrote to his daughter Martha, when she was eleven and attending boarding school in Philadelphia, in which he outlined the aristocratic values of discipline, work, and the cultivation of high-minded things:

With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve: From 8 to 10, practise music. From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance and write a letter next day. From 3 to 4, read French. From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bedtime read English, write, &c.… Inform me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and inclose me your best copy of every lesson in drawing.… Take care that you never spell a word wrong.… It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.

The poor child was not even allowed time off for meals. This was the same daughter who would marry her cousin, become first lady of Virginia, and produce ten children, all of whom would engage in aristocratic endeavors. These ranged from the eldest, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who tried without success to straighten out his famous grandfather's financial affairs when they became hopelessly entangled, to the youngest, George Wythe Randolph, who served as Jefferson Davis's secretary of war in the Confederacy.

All the great Randolph estates and plantations are gone now or have passed out of the family's hands. When Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, the years of lavish living as a
grand seigneur
had taken their toll, and he was virtually penniless. His dream house, Monticello, which he had designed and built himself, had to be sold off with all its furnishings and much of its land to pay his debts. For years it sat unoccupied and fell into near-ruin. Monticello probably would not be standing today if it had not been for an aristocratic Sephardic Jewish gentleman from Philadelphia named Uriah Phillips Levy—a great Jefferson admirer—who bought the place and carefully restored it to its former glory.