STATESMEN OF THE
OLD SOUTH
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THE M ACHILLAS COMPANY
nv YORK BOSTOH CHICAGO
SAM ntANCtSCO
MACMILLAN & CO , LnarwD
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. LTD.
TOKO WTO
STATESMEN OF
THE OLD SOUTH
OR
FROM RADICALISM TO
CONSERVATIVE
REVOLT
BY
WILLIAM E. DODD, Ph. D.
PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Author of The Life of Nathaniel Macon, Life of Jefferton Davit, Xte.
fork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1911
All right* reserved
COPYEIGHT, igil
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1911
Printed t
The NORWOOD PRESS
Berwick & Smith Company, Norwood, Massachusetts
Co Q0p jFatbct
223968
PREFACE
THE substance of the following papers has
been presented in the form of popular lec
tures at the University of California, the
University of Indiana, the University of Chicago,
Richmond and Randolph Macon Colleges and it
cannot be expected that the treatment of these
interesting Southern leaders of the olden time will
be found entirely free from the defects of the
lecture method. Still it is hoped that the point
of view and the interpretation of certain facts and
conditions of the Southern and national evolution
may justify the publication of these studies.
The author is under obligations to Mr. C. D.
Johns, of the University of Chicago, for reading
the entire proof and for making the index.
WM. E. DODD
University of Chicago
July 20, 1911
CONTENTS
PREFACE v11
THOMAS JEFFERSON
JOHN C. CALHOUN 9 1
JEFFERSON DAVIS
INDEX
FROM RADICALISM TO
CONSERVATIVE
REVOLT
STATESMEN OF THE
OLD SOUTH
THOMAS JEFFERSON
I
THOMAS JEFFERSON is a name to con
jure with in the United States. Extreme
individualists who desire to exploit the
resources of the nation and re-establish feudalism
in the world, make pious pilgrimages to Monti-
cello; radical democrats who feel that the prin
ciples of the Declaration of Independence are
about to perish from the earth, regard the great
Virginia leader as their patron saint; and social
ists appeal to the writings of Jefferson for grave
opinions to justify the "regime of the future."
Andrew Jackson overturned the old Jefferson
party in the name of its founder and Abraham
Lincoln based his arguments against slavery upon
well-known passages from the famous Notes on
N JQF THE OLD SOUTH
Virginia, while Jefferson Davis believed from
the bottom of his heart that secession and civil
war, even on behalf of slavery, was only an appli
cation of the doctrine of the Virginia and Ken
tucky resolutions! And Jefferson himself gave
reason for many of these divergent and irrecon
cilable views; in his published writings there is
abundant justification for the contentions of these
present-day followers, though the man, were he
still with us, would speedily repudiate any and
all who deny the full and complete application of
the doctrine of democracy, that is the democracy
of Lincoln as against slavery, of Bryan as against
Wall street, of the West as against the East.
Jefferson would have been a populist in 1892 or
an insurgent in 1910.
"Jefferson, the populist." With this rather
startling idea in mind, let us look into the life
of the "Man of the Mountain," as John Randolph
was accustomed to say.
Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas, was a
westerner, a land surveyor and Indian fighter, a
character not unlike that of Daniel Boone, vigor
ous, rough, close-fisted. The colony of Virginia
THOMAS JEFFERSON 3
employed him to survey her southern boundary
line and like most other surveyors of land he
patented a good deal for himself and settled upon
it during the fourth decade of the eighteenth
century to "grow up with the back-country."
He came into such good standing with Isham
Randolph of Dungeness that he was given one
of the daughters, of whom there were usually
many among the great clans of Virginia, to wife.
Thomas was therefore well born, though no aris
tocrat. The young boy was put to school with a
Scotch pedagogue in Louisa county the home at
that time of radical democracy and hard-headed
Presbyterian dissent. But the schooling was
good and the environment better in view of the
coming career of the boy. In Louisa county
men wore buckskin breeches, Indian moccasins
and hunting shirts without coats to cover them,
crowned with coonskin caps. There was still
much hunting of deer and turkeys among the
hills and mountains of Louisa the fine country
made famous a hundred years later by the
marches of Lee and Jackson and the two great
battles at Manassas and a slender stooping
4 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
youth from neighboring Hanover had already
made a name for himself in that region by his
"long hunts" and popular ways. The Hanover
hunter was none other than Patrick Henry
and he wore buckskin breeches and a coonskin
cap like his new found neighbors. Louisa, next
to Augusta, was the greatest county in Virginia,
and it was filled with the cabins of a teeming
population of farmers and small proprietors who
had escaped the hard conditions of the ridges and
sandy plains of the old counties between the James
and York and the York and Rappahannock
rivers. Orange, Rappahannock and Augusta
counties made up the West, the first "land of
opportunity" for the restless people of the "Tide
water." And this west extended from a little
above the present Richmond to the sites of Cincin
nati and Pittsburg a princely domain which in
young Jefferson s day was filled with game and
Indians and the fathers of the men who planned
the Revolution and largely fought its battles.
Not only the Jeffersons, but the Madisons, Mon
roes, Marshalls and Lewises dwelt in this region,
and here Washington surveyed Fairfax lands and
THOMAS JEFFERSON 5
later found recruits for his army when all other
sections failed him.
With a thorough training in the rudiments of
Latin and Greek and an even more thorough
knowledge of the strong men of the backwoods,
young Jefferson was next sent, at the age of seven
teen, to the College of William and Mary, then the
best seat of learning in America. He was very
tall, very awkward, timid by nature, uncomfort
able in the presence of greatness and exceedingly
homely. He had the distinction of being the
homeliest youth in school his eyes were gray-blue
and restless, his cheek bones were high and his
thin freckled skin covered no superfluous flesh,
while his hands and feet were large and bony.
Naturally gifted and always ready to learn, he
studied his environment, "sized up" his com
panions and professors and within a short time
was gaining more from the new environment, it is
safe to say, than any other youth in school. Aris
tocratic Virginia centered in and around Williams-
burg. In the town were the winter houses of the
great planters who came in to attend the sessions
of His Majesty s royal council when the burgesses
6 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
assembled which, like the House of Commons in
England, generally met the last week of Novem
ber. The great wigs of Virginia drove into
Williamsburg in their stately but creaking family
carriages preceded by outriders, front and rear,
to scare off the pigs and cattle that roamed at
will about the village common or to warn presump
tuous people against encroaching too close upon
eighteenth century dignity. The great lords of
Virginia when young Jefferson was a student at
William and Mary were the Braxtons, Lees,
Randolphs and Carters, all devoted to the good
English ways of Walpole s day, fox-hunters, deep
drinkers, ceremonious and formal gentlemen who
loved office and office-holding like the Duke of
Newcastle, their exemplar. To be a member of
the council gave a Virginian the relative rank
and standing of a "noble lord" in England and
the great families strove, intrigued and bribed
to secure the coveted position. An important
cause of Richard Henry Lee s entering upon the
revolutionary career was his failure to receive
this honor, though one of his brothers was in the
council. William Beverly of Essex offered 200
THOMAS JEFFERSON 7
for the office of Secretary to the council for which
John Carter had paid 1500 guineas in hard cash.
Plantation masters strove for new plantations and
bought negroes and patented new lands and
lavishly entertained the governors both in their
Williamsburg houses and on their country estates
in order that they and their descendants might be
rated as "first families." The greatest honor
open to a Virginian was membership in the coun
cil; Washington himself recognized this and
strove manfully to attain it. While too much
stress must not be put upon social life and mere
honors, it is true that the love of these distinctions
and the desire to lead in Colonial Virginia were
mainsprings of the law of entails and negro
slavery privilege then, as now, was the high
road to social eminence.
The son of Peter Jefferson from the backwoods
was also the son of a Randolph and despite the
boy s uncouth looks and awkward ways he was
welcomed to the homes of the great, where no
doubt his real abilities found expression. He
"played the fiddle," danced and could turn a deft
hand at cards; he "fell in love" with Judy Bur-
8 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
well or "Sukey" Potter which was no drawback
to a young man of parts, but he had no notion of
marrying young Jefferson was too well-balanced,
too discreet to make a premature alliance, even
with the daughter of so great a house as that of
the Burwells of the Pamunky valley in Hanover.
He was at home at the gay and rollicksome house
of Governor Botetourt whom the burgesses loved
well enough to honor with the name of one of
the great back-country counties whose limits em
braced all Kentucky. But young Jefferson en
joyed most perhaps the free fun of a holiday visit
to Hanover where he saw the true burgess stock
the Lyons, Symes, Winstons and even Patrick
Henry, then a sort of renegade son of a poor
country gentleman.
The orphan boy from Albemarle was more,
however, than a mere pleasure seeker he stood at
"the top of his classes" and enjoyed in conse
quence the companionship of some of his teachers,
especially that of Professor Small the mathema
tician and naturalist whom Jefferson pronounced
then and afterward the foremost scientist of
America. From 1760 to 1767 the young man
THOMAS JEFFERSON 9
remained a student at William and Mary and in
the latter year, having gained both the academic
honors of graduation and his license to practise
law, he returned to Albemarle to take up the seri
ous business of life serious indeed as it proved
to be. He was like many other young Virginians
of the time John Taylor and James Madison,
his juniors to be sure, a real scholar. Latin,
Greek and French he knew well enough to retain
and enjoy all his life; in law, history and juris
prudence he was quite as well versed as the best
men of the country ; and in manners he had drunk
from the Chesterfield fountain from which Bot-
etourt and his set so frequently drew, and which
was to serve the future party leader and president
to such good purpose. But while he saw all sides
of life as lived at Williamsburg and learned from
all, he was not a part of that gay, social and friv
olous group which viewed "all the world as a
stage and all men as mere actors upon it" ; he was
at heart a western man with eastern polish, with
a touch, too, of the sentimentalism which, some
how, reached him from the then great capital of
thought and philosophy Paris, but without the
io STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
least stain of the immorality which, in the forms
of license and drunkenness, was so common in
the "best society" of the Old Dominion. It was
indeed a very good education which Jefferson
received at the little provincial college and at the
cost of less than two pounds, Virginia currency,
a month!
When Jefferson "hung out his shingle" in
Albemarle he was a little more than twenty-four
years old. His practice became immediately lucra
tive, averaging 3000 a year until the great work
of the Revolution called him to other tasks. His
friend, Henry, was at that time winning a similar
income in Hanover. It is rather a suggestive
commentary on the character of Virginia life
just before the Revolution to find two young men
like these both rather out of the main current of
colonial activity "making fortunes" at the law.
Wythe and Pendleton were the great lawyers who
received twice as much from their clients; and
one must remember five thousand a year in Vir
ginia in 1772 was the equivalent of twenty
thousand of our money. But Virginia was a
great country at that time and there was much
THOMAS JEFFERSON II
"lawing" about entails and "negro property" and
land titles. The hill counties of Louisa and
Amherst and Pittsylvania were teeming with
a restless population and most gentlemen of the
older lowland counties had patents to great tracts
of land in Watauga, Kentucky or Augusta, names
which in Jefferson s day suggested the great areas
which we know respectively as Tennessee, Ken-,
tucky and West Virginia, and the lawyers had
much to do to "keep things straight" or perhaps
to tangle matters so that another generation of
lawyers would be needed to clear them up.
Five years after Jefferson left William and
Mary and when his estate had increased from
1900 acres of land to 5000 and his negroes from
thirty to fifty in number, he married Mrs. Skelton,
widow of a prominent lowlander and daughter of
a wealthy planter and lawyer of James City
county. The dowry of the wife was equal to the
husband s entire estate and the Virginian of that
day may have looked upon the young man from
the upper Rivanna as a "captain of industry,"
dangerous almost to the security of the state.
From law $3000 a year and from the plantation
12 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
$2000, not to speak of the increase of the negroes !
And then to marry a wife whose property was
quite as great as his. An income of $9000 or
$10,000 a year, or $25,000 of our money. Jefferson
was in fact an important man in Virginia when he
began his beautiful house on Monticello at the out
break of the Revolution. While Jefferson was an
eminent lawyer in 1774 and his income from his
profession was steadily increasing, he was not a
real lawyer; he did not love the law nor even
respect it as a calling. His real vocation was that
of a farmery relatively small as was the income
from that source His deliberate opinion was :
"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen peo
ple of God, if ever he had a chosen people; whose
breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for sub
stantial and genuine virtue." And if Jefferson
was disqualified for law as a calling he was
still less fitted for politics the one thing which
the world associates with his name.
II
But men s lives are not their own, "rough hew
them as they may." Jefferson was not to be
THOMAS JEFFERSON 13
merely an Albemarle planter and master, ship
ping his tobacco and corn down the Rivanna each
autumn and receiving from his Richmond factor
his annual draft on some stable English or
northern bank. This young man already pre
eminent for his wealth, devoted to his farm and
his plain farmer neighbors, was just the man to
send down to Williamsburg in 1773 to help the
burgesses properly resist the encroachments of
the mother country upon the interests of the col
onies. Already Jefferson had seen a little of
public life; he had been sent on the same mission
to the capital in 1769 but the legislature was
dismissed by his quondam friend, the Governor,
in such short order that the young member from
Albemarle hardly had time to draft a set of reso
lutions, though he had joined the recalcitrant
members in the Raleigh tavern and there signed
the famous non-importation agreement which was
to give the British ministry no end of trouble.
But in 1773 the mature Jefferson was in Will
iamsburg ; then his great career began and he was
never again to be either lawyer or farmer but
statesman. In order to get into the drift of things
i 4 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
in Virginia at the outbreak of the Revolution it is
necessary to review briefly the work of Patrick
Henry. That then famous man had begun his
career in Hanover by embracing the cause of the
Presbyterian preachers and missionaries who
were dealing the established church and ministry
such sturdy blows that many wise heads were
wondering what to do with the arrant dissenters.
A little later another pest was added : the Baptists,
singing, praying and weeping, invaded conserva
tive, respectable "Tidewater" and to these were
added the Methodists in 1772 who threatened to
capture all the southside counties. 1 Rousing
themselves to the danger of their situation the
clergy and the vestries of the Establishment under
took now to defend themselves. The dissenting
preachers were declared to be disturbers of the
peace and thrust into noisome prisons in a dozen
counties. But the people flocked to the prison
doors to hear the "good tidings." A revolution
was already on and there was no stopping it.
What Henry had done was first to arouse the
1 "Southside" in Virginia refers to the large strip of
country south of the James river and east of the Blue
Ridge mountains.
THOMAS JEFFERSON 15
anger of the people against the established church
and then to turn the tide of discontent and re
sentment from the old church toward the cumber- v
some reactionary system of government which the
English ministry had long toyed with in America.
Henry was also a "populist."
When he first aspired to a seat in the House
of Burgesses, his aristocratic neighbors in Han
over swore that such a man should never disgrace
their old county, that he could never be elected
from Hanover. Henry, who was already a
western man in spirit moved to Louisa, the back
woods county just west of Hanover where young
Jefferson had but recently learned his Greek and
Latin forms. Henry had worn buckskin breeches
as a hunter; he now put them on as a politician.
He knew the language of the backwoods already ;
he now made it his own and never afterward
spoke correctly the vernacular of the privileged,
of the Hanover gentry who preferred his exile to
the disgrace of his elevation in their community :
Henry became a burgess from the western
county and a leader of the whole up-country,
the "Qo hees," against the compact "Tidewater,"
16 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
the "Tuckahoes." It was the West against the
East, the dissenter in religion against the estab
lished and formal church.
What followed the advent of Henry in Virginia
politics was the mobilization of the middle classes
in the whole colony as well as the sturdy back
woodsmen. There were thirty-five counties on
the lower reaches of the Virginia rivers, bays and
inlets and twenty-nine among the hills and moun
tains. But not all the thirty-five were in the
hands of the plantation lords, who never made
up a twentieth of the Virginia people, though a
majority of all the counties were probably on the
side of the King and Church in 1765 ; and it had
not been difficult for John Robinson, the Speaker
of the House, to control legislation in the interest
of the East and of the old order and to suppress
most popular movements from the West. But the
hold of the East upon the community was broken
by an alliance which Henry made with Richard
Henry Lee who represented a discontented ele
ment of the old order. Richard Henry Lee was
very able and very ambitious. He had been
disappointed in his campaign of 1762 for a place
THOMAS JEFFERSON 17
in the council and again for the appointment as
stamp collector in 1764; moreover Washington
of the Northern Neck had been preferred in 1755
as the leader of the Virginia forces in the Brad-
dock campaign while Lee, a representative of a
greater house, had been openly snubbed by Govern
or Dinwiddie and General Braddock. Lee had
not been in a good humor these ten years past.
In 1763 he began an investigation into the con
duct of Speaker Robinson who was at the same
time Treasurer of the colony. The investigation
dragged on two or three years. Henry supported
Lee; the up-country was married to the insur
gent element of the East. The result was that
Robinson was shown to have been a lender of the
public funds, to the extent of 103,000 procla
mation money, without security. Not only so ; the
money had been loaned to needy politicians who
were members of the burgesses and who had
always "stood by" the machine. Robinson had
long been dictator in the House and he, not the
"free burgesses," had made the laws. Up-coun
try men now saw why it had been impossible
to get new counties created in their region, why
i8 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
the East had been so indifferent to protecting
the western country against the Indians; and the
middle class population who composed the major
ity even in the Tidewater counties sympathized
with the West, and, now that their old machine
was shown to have been honeycombed with cor
ruption, they joined the standards of Henry and
Lee. The Speaker was manfully supported by the
"people of quality," the Braxtons and Corbins
and even by Pendleton, a fair-minded man but
always a stickler for the forms of law. Rob
inson died under a cloud and his partisans did
not rally again until the close of the Revolution.
His property was seized in part by the Colony,
but the bulk of the great embezzlement was never
repaid.
When Jefferson was a college boy he was in
sympathy with the new West and was a friend of
Henry though a younger man by ten years. The
party which Henry and Lee had created and
which was still in power when the great quarrel
with England came to a crisis was composed
of the people of the twenty-one counties of Vir
ginia which covered the area now known as the
THOMAS JEFFERSON 19
Piedmont and extended to the Redstone settle
ments on the Monongahela and the Ohio in the
northwest and to the Watauga settlements in the
southwest. Small farmers along the upper rivers,
tobacco growers from the ridges between, hunters
and trappers from the slopes of the Alleghanies
and the hitherto inert and unorganized mass
of small proprietors and slave-owners from the
old counties, made up the rank and file of the
party a party with which the great majority
of the people sympathized and acted for ten years
after 1769. The leaders were first of all Henry,
then Richard Henry Lee and George Mason, both
aristocrats but patriots at the same time. Wash
ington, notwithstanding his relations with Lee,
gradually came over, though many of his friends
had been, and some still remained, connected with
the men who had formerly ruled Virginia.
Between 1769 and 1779 Henry and Lee with
their powerful following ruled the burgesses or
the legislature as completely as had Robinson
and his group.
Jefferson had grown up in this party; he was
close to Henry ; his county and neighboring coun-
20 STATESMEN OF THE OLD SOUTH
ties worshiped the great orator who had made
Virginia famous for eloquence; and his younger
friends Dabney Carr and "Jimmie" Madison
were of the same mind. As a lieutenant of
Henry the young scholar from Albemarle entered
politics in 1774 and he was a follower of no
mean sort, a student, a keen lawyer, a good
writer and popular with the common people.
Many long years the minority had struggled
for a hearing; the western counties had grad
ually grown to be the most populous; they
had filled up with Scotch-Irish from Penn
sylvania and Germans from the Palatinate most
of whom were serious minded men who built
log churches on the frontier, established schools,
like Liberty Academy, in the wilderness, and sent
to Princeton for their preachers and teachers.
They believed in God as creator of the universe,
a future state of rewards and punishments and
the mystery of the Trinity, and if they got a
chance, like the Puritans of New England, they
would put these ideas into their organic law, 1
1 Witness the first constitution of Tennessee, also
that of North Carolina.
THOMAS JEFFERSON 21
or compel their opponents to accept their creed.
Their eastern allies were largely Baptists who
knew what persecution for conscience sake was
and who, if their voice could be heard, would
make religious freedom a part of the constitution.
Verily these were not the men who had made
Virginia in the past; they were the men, though,
who were to make the Virginia of 1800.
Still the people who looked to Princeton as a
source of all religious orthodoxy and found their