HENRY CLAY, JOHN Calhoun and the other advocates of war were called “war hawks.” The phrase had originated with Thomas Jefferson as a scornful label for the Federalists who wanted a fight with France in the 1790s. Yet when the Federalists employed it a decade later against Republicans who sought to battle Britain, Clay and the others didn’t object, and war hawks they became.
The war hawks controlled Congress but not completely. Their opponents included a man who held the rare distinction of having bested Patrick Henry in rhetorical combat. John Randolph cut an oddly striking figure. A bookstore owner in Charleston, South Carolina, recalled encountering Randolph one morning in his shop. “A tall, gawky-looking, flaxen-haired stripling, apparently of the age of sixteen or eighteen, with complexion of a good parchment color, beardless chin, and as much assumed self-consequence as any two-footed animal I ever saw,” the bookseller described Randolph, who acted as though he owned the store and perhaps the city. “I handed him from the shelves volume after volume, which he tumbled carelessly over and handed back again. At length he hit upon something that struck his fancy—my eye happened to be fixed upon his face at that moment—and never did I witness so sudden, so perfect a change of the human countenance. That which was before dull and heavy, in a moment became animated, and flashed with the brightest beams of intellect.” Randolph had a companion that morning, a distinguished-looking, elderly fellow. Randolph slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Jack, look at this!” The bookseller concluded, “I was young then, but I never can forget the thought that rushed upon my mind at the moment, which was that he was the most impudent youth I ever saw.”
John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia, was in fact twenty-three. His appearance consistently belied his years. Not long after his Charleston visit he was elected to Congress. He presented himself to the House clerk to claim his seat, and the clerk, wondering if the young man before him met the constitutional threshold of twenty-five, asked his age. Randolph disdained to answer, saying haughtily, “Go, sir, and ask my constituents. They sent me here.”
Randolph’s family was among Virginia’s proudest. He boasted descent from Pocahontas, and he and his brother split forty thousand acres and several hundred slaves upon their father’s death. The land John Randolph always cherished. “Johnny, all this land belongs to you and your brother,” his mother told him one day on a ride about the property. “It is your father’s inheritance. When you get to be a man you must not sell your land: it is the first step to ruin for a boy to part with his father’s home. Be sure to keep it as long as you live. Keep your land and your land will keep you.”
But the land did not keep him. Tobacco exhausted the soil, with each year’s crop yielding less than the year before. Virginia produced little in the way of consumer goods; in colonial times its planters depended on trade with England to support the lifestyle they desired. The annual trading ship from London brought clothing, furniture, books, wines and other items, and it carried away tobacco. But the tobacco dwindled while the purchases didn’t, and debts rose. John Randolph inherited a London debt from his father, along with the land and slaves, and the yield from the land hardly allowed him to carry the debt, let alone extinguish it.
Others shared his condition. American independence freed some of the planters from their British debt burden, namely those who preferred dependence on merchants of New England and the North. Randolph couldn’t abide Yankees, and he stubbornly insisted on maintaining his British ties. Yet both groups of planters struggled, and Virginia grew poor. Randolph had traveled enough to know that others lived better than Virginians. “I passed the night in Farrarville, in an apartment which, in England, would not have been thought fit for my servant,” he wrote while touring the state. “Nor on the Continent did he ever occupy so mean a one. Wherever I stop it is the same: walls black and filthy; bed and furniture sordid; furniture scanty and mean, generally broken; no mirror; no fire-irons. In short, dirt and discomfort universally prevail.” The educated classes couldn’t be bothered to improve things. “Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniards and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations, England and France especially.”
The Randolph family slaves were a burden of a different sort. “I want not a single negro for any other purpose than his immediate emancipation,” Randolph’s brother declared. “I shudder when I think that such an insignificant animal as I am is invested with this monstrous, this horrid power.” Randolph had a higher opinion of himself, but he shared his brother’s horror of slavery. Like many other slaveholders of the day, including Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, he judged slavery corruptive of all it touched, demeaning slaveholders as well as slaves. He looked forward to the time when Virginia would be rid of the curse. He hoped his own day of deliverance would be sooner.
But two things barred its coming. The first was his debt. His plantation required the labor of its slaves to keep his creditors from foreclosing. Randolph lacked the wherewithal to free his slaves; they were collateral for his debt. His creditors would seize the slaves, and Randolph’s plantation, before they would let the slaves go. The second problem was the general difficulty freed slaves encountered. Emancipation broke slave families apart, because slaves often married across plantation lines. And free blacks found themselves competing in the labor market with slaves, in which competition they couldn’t win without reducing their living standard to that of the slaves.
RANDOLPH ENTERED POLITICS as an ally of Jefferson, who happened to be a kinsman, and as a foe of John Adams and the Federalists who then controlled Congress. Randolph’s family name sufficed to win him nomination for the Roanoke seat in the House. The campaign proved a referendum on Federalist policies, including the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which, amid the undeclared naval war with France, outlawed much dissent against the Adams administration. Patrick Henry gave a speech in Randolph’s district in support of Adams and the Federalists. Henry had grown old since immortalizing himself with the words “Give me liberty or give me death!” but his speech summoned the echoes of those early days, and when he finished he collapsed into the arms of friends “like the sun setting in his glory,” one of them recounted.
Until this moment John Randolph had never spoken in public. No one knew if he had the talent; he himself hardly suspected it. But when he opened his mouth in reply to Henry, the words poured forth with ease and eloquence. He complimented Henry, affirming what Virginia owed him for his candor and long service, and then proceeded to eviscerate him. He declared the Alien and Sedition Acts an affront to the rights of Americans; more important, the noxious measures were an assault on the rights of Virginians. If Virginians allowed the laws to stand, they would surrender all that the blood of the Revolution had cost them. They would have swapped the tyranny of King George III for that of King John I. And Patrick Henry would have been complicit in the betrayal.
Randolph’s reply to Henry caught a wave of Republican opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, which had triggered America’s first constitutional crisis. Jefferson, at that time Adams’s vice president, and James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, covertly drafted resolutions against the acts. These resolutions, or resolves, were adopted by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia respectively. In the late 1790s the Supreme Court had yet to assert the judiciary’s right to assess the constitutionality of congressional statutes; in the silence of the court, the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions claimed that right for the states. They also claimed the states’ right to nullify—prevent the enforcement of—laws the states judged invalid.
Jefferson rode the wave of opposition into the White House; Randolph and a majority of Republicans rode it into Congress. The Alien and Sedition Acts were allowed to expire, and the crisis ended, though not before giving other states ideas about how federal power might be resisted.
Randolph became Jefferson’s lieutenant in the House, as chair of the ways and means committee. But though the views of the two men ran parallel, their temperaments and philosophies diverged. Jefferson was a democrat, an advocate of the ordinary people of America. Randolph was an elitist, a believer in government by the best. Jefferson favored small government, fearing that big government would trample the rights of the people. Randolph’s complaint against big government was that it threatened the rights of Virginia.
The break occurred during Jefferson’s second term. Some said the precipitant was Jefferson’s selection of Madison over Randolph as his secretary of state and heir apparent. Randolph himself said—perhaps facetiously: with Randolph one could never be sure—that the cause was a victory he won over Jefferson in a game of chess. A more likely trigger was the growing belligerence of the Republicans toward Britain. Randolph, the tory at heart, preferred Britain over France in the struggle between those two countries. Randolph detested what the French Revolution had done to France and what its principles might do to America. The French Revolution had inspired the slaves of Haiti to rise up and massacre their masters; the slaves of America might do the same. Randolph disapproved of slavery as an institution, but he didn’t want to be murdered in his bed. Britain’s fight against France, he felt, was the fight of reason against unreason, of order against chaos.
This feeling inspired Randolph’s response to Henry Clay and John Calhoun. Randolph resisted a Republican war against Britain in 1812 as ardently as Republicans had resisted the Federalist war against France in the 1790s. He castigated Clay and Calhoun as ambitious men eager to magnify slights into occasion for armed conflict. He accused them of deliberately downplaying the expense of a war; the American people would never agree to a war if they knew how much it was going to cost them. Randolph said there were such things as just, defensive wars; he could support a military response to the actual injuries the United States had suffered at British hands. But what the war hawks advocated, with their talk of taking Canada, was a war of naked aggression.
War power had ruined the Federalists, Randolph declared, and it would ruin the Republicans. “Soon or late, some mania seizes upon its possessors; they fall from the dizzy heights through the giddiness of their own heads.” A recent massacre by Indians of settlers in the Northwest had angered Americans across the country. The war advocates blamed the British, for providing the weapons used by the Indians in the attack. If the allegation was true, Randolph said, it required a response. But he didn’t believe the allegation, and the war hawks had produced no evidence. Randolph thought the tale a pretext for a seizure of Indian land, and for gouging by war profiteers. “No sooner was the report laid on the table than the vultures were flocking around their prey, the carcass of a great military establishment.”
The war hawks predicted swift victory; Randolph forecast defeat. He noted that the United States had no answer to the British navy. While Western militia forces were invading Canada and taking Indian land, the Eastern seaboard, where most Americans lived, would be open to attack. “The coast is to be left defenseless whilst men of the interior are reveling in conquest and spoil.” There were just wars, Randolph repeated, but the war the Republicans projected was nothing of the sort. And he wanted no part of it.