Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell Part 2

His _debut_ in the Senate was made on the bankrupt bill of that session--not a regular speech, but a searching examination of the details of the bill, which he exposed with such effect that its friends substantially gave it up in despair. His first serious speech was delivered on the 21st day of the same month in which he had taken his seat, on his own motion to strike out the third section of the bill for the suppression of piracy in the West India seas, which had been reported from the Committee of Foreign Affairs, and had been introduced by a forcible speech from its chairman, who was also his colleague--a name to be p.r.o.nounced with respect by every Virginian--the venerable James Barbour then the acknowledged head of the Senate. The section proposed to be stricken out authorized the President of the United States in a time of profound peace to declare, on the representations of a naval officer, any of the ports of Spain in the West Indies in a state of blockade. The bill was likely to pa.s.s without serious opposition, when it arrested the attention of Mr. Tazewell, who, then fresh from his great discussions of the law of prize, exposed the danger of its provisions in an argument which at once placed him at the head of the Senate, and was read, though in a mutilated report, by the whole country, with admiration and applause. The effect of the speech may be seen in the fact that the obnoxious section, though upheld by the eloquent and patriotic patron of the bill, by the gallant Hayne and by others, was stricken out by the decisive vote of 37 to 10. Had it remained in the bill, in less than ninety days it might have produced a war with Spain.[9]

On the election of Mr. John Quincy Adams to the Presidency, and especially after the delivery of his first message to Congress, he became hostile to his administration, and opposed its prominent measures. His most remarkable performance was his speech on the exclusive const.i.tutional competency of the executive to originate foreign missions without the advice and consent of the Senate. As a const.i.tutional thesis, without respect to the time of delivery,--for, although Mr. Adams a.s.serted the power, he at the same moment waived its exercise,--as a specimen of his manner of treating a great const.i.tutional question when numerous authorities and precedents are to be examined and set aside, this speech deserves to be studied. With the exception of Gen. Marshall's speech in the case of Jonathan Robbins, it stands preeminent in our political literature as a model of profound research, of thorough argumentation, and of overwhelming strength. The reader at this day feels that he is borne along by a force which is not only equal to the occasion, but above it, and which it is vain to resist. The speech is no mean system of logic and of the rules of evidence in itself. And in connection with this speech I may mention the speech on the same subject, which he delivered some years later, in reply to Mr. Livingston, and in which the topic is discussed with new ill.u.s.trations. These two speeches alone survive in any fulness of all his forensic exertions. The speech which Mr. Tazewell himself thought the best he ever delivered in the Senate, was on some one of the bankrupt bills of his term of service; but of this speech not a pa.s.sage can now be found.

Nor would it be practicable to present here even a condensed view of the reports which he drew either as the head or as a member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs. Almost any one of those reports would have built up a respectable reputation for its author. I shall only specify his report on the Panama mission, which mainly settled the public mind in relation to that measure; and his report on the Colonization Society, in which, incidentally--and by the way, he demonstrated conclusively the const.i.tutional right of the United States to acquire territory. When it is remembered that Mr. Jefferson took a different view of this question at the time of the acquisition of Louisiana, and believed an amendment to the const.i.tution necessary to the validity of the purchase; the originality as well as the ability of Mr. Tazewell appear in a favorable light.

Meantime his reputation had been extending far and wide. In Virginia some of our older politicians had not become, nor were they ever, fully reconciled to him in consequence of his course during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison; but these were gradually disappearing from the stage, and he now seemed to be regarded by the great body of the people as the most popular man of his time; and he was reelected unanimously to the Senate, or, to speak with strictness, with only four scattering votes. One instance may show the height on which he stood at this time. His second election to the Senate was made the order of the day for the 1st of January, 1829: the day had come; the order was about to be read from the chair; and I was about to rise in my place in the House of Delegates to nominate him for reelection, when a gentleman, advanced in life, who had rendered valuable service to his country, hailing, too, from a central part of the State, came to my seat and implored me to allow him, as the crowning honor of his life, to nominate Mr. Tazewell for reelection. I think I may safely affirm, from close observation at the time both at home and abroad, that the abilities and character of Mr. Tazewell were held in higher estimation, and even veneration, in Virginia and out of it, at this period, than those of any of her statesmen since the retirement of Jefferson and Madison from the public service. It was a commingled feeling of admiration, awe, and pride.

It is a coincidence in the lives of Mr. Tazewell and his father, that the father was elected to the Senate of the United States to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of John Taylor of Caroline; and that the son, after an interval of thirty years from the election of the father, was chosen to fill the vacancy in the Senate made by the resignation of the same individual; and that father and son were twice elected president of the Senate.

The views of Mr. Tazewell on the important topics which arose out of the efforts of South Carolina in relation to the tariff policy of the federal government, can only be alluded to in the briefest manner. He was opposed to the doctrine of nullification as expounded by the South Carolina school of politicians, and did not regard it as a peaceful and const.i.tutional mode of redress; while he condemned the doctrines of the Proclamation of Gen. Jackson as destructive of the rights of the States, and as opposed to the true theory of our federal system. In a series of numbers which appeared in the Norfolk Herald and were republished in the Richmond Enquirer, he traced in the most elaborate of his compositions extant the history of the formation of the present federal const.i.tution, and expounded its theory in a strain of argument as nearly approaching a demonstration as topics of that nature allow. These articles were published in pamphlet form at the time; and, with the exception of the numbers of Senex which appeared in the Herald and Enquirer, and were republished in pamphlet in England, and reviewed in the London Quarterly, on the policy of Mr. Adams' administration respecting the West India trade, are the only serial contributions, as far as I know, he ever made to the periodical press.

The only one of the vexed questions which hara.s.sed the administration of Gen. Jackson that Mr. Tazewell, after his retirement from the Senate, discussed in public, was the removal of the deposits from the Bank of the United States by the Treasury order of October, 1833. The reasons of the Secretary of the Treasury for issuing that order were communicated in detail to Congress on the 3d of December following; and his report was discussed in both Houses for several months with an ability and warmth never before displayed in a congressional discussion. The people caught the excitement; and public meetings were held in all the commercial cities; and memorials were forwarded to Congress urging the immediate restoration of the deposits to the vaults of the bank. Each memorial, as it was received by a Senator or Representative, was honored with a speech from some master spirit. And now the most menacing monetary crisis occurred which the country had ever seen. In a little less or more than six months the Bank of the United States had shortened its line of discounts ten millions of dollars; and all the State banks in self-defence were compelled to follow the example of that great inst.i.tution. Confidence ceased to exist. No man in business could look ahead a single day without fear and trembling. Men spoke in whispers, and walked doubtfully as if the earth might quake beneath their feet.

The result was a change in the party relations of those who lived in towns without a parallel in our history. And it was soon seen that a new party was forming in comparison of which the _tertium quid_ party of Jefferson's administration was a mere bubble floating on the surface of the stream. In that tempest was rocked the cradle of that large and intellectual party, which a.s.sumed the appellation of Whig, which won some splendid victories, which encountered some decisive defeats, which then slept awhile, and which has recently burnished its armor anew for a fresh campaign.

Richmond set the example among us of holding meetings of the people, with a view of urging the restoration of the deposits to the Bank.

Watkins Leigh and Chapman Johnson made on that occasion an appeal to the people of Virginia in favor of a restoration, which was heard from so respectable a source with the attention it deserved. The a.s.sembly then in session, which, when elected, had been favorable to the administration of Jackson, faltered in their faith, instructed the senators in Congress to vote for a restoration of the deposits, and on the resignation of Mr. Rives, who upheld the policy of the administration, elected Mr. Leigh in his stead. Even the _Richmond Enquirer_, its polar star momentarily obscured, was tossing helplessly on that tempestuous sea.

In this state of things, some of the citizens of Norfolk, of both parties, as those parties had previously stood, highly distinguished by social position, by talents, by wealth, and by their intimate connection with our banking inst.i.tutions, called on Mr. Tazewell, and requested him to take the chair at a public meeting to be held on the 8th of January, 1834. He consented to do so, and on taking the chair delivered one of the most graceful, most nervous, and most eloquent speeches that ever fell from his lips. In language not to be misunderstood, he denounced the act of removing the deposits from the Bank of the United States, advised their immediate restoration, and condemned the whole series of the measures of the President of the United States in relation thereto.

A gentleman happening to be present who had heard Canning, Brougham, and Sir Robert Peel from the hustings and in the House of Commons, declared that the speech of Mr. Tazewell fully equalled their grandest efforts on such occasions; and all who heard it p.r.o.nounced it a wonderful work of argument, eloquence, and declamation combined. A few days after the meeting, Mr. Tazewell was elected Governor of the Commonwealth.

The conduct of Mr. Tazewell on this occasion I leave to history. It was my misfortune to differ from him, and to strive against him in public meetings, by resolutions, by speeches, and by essays in the public prints, and to have been on the side of the victorious party; and I owe it to candor to say that, after a deliberate investigation of the arguments and the circ.u.mstances of that time with such faculties as G.o.d has bestowed upon me, my views through the twenty-seven years that have since pa.s.sed remain unaltered; but now that my ill.u.s.trious friend is gone, and as I measure that chasm which his death has made in the Commonwealth, leaving none equal to him or like him behind, and especially in my own bosom--a chasm which, at my time of life, can never, never be closed--I have looked with fear and trembling over all I said and wrote on that occasion, and I am gratified to find that, although I spoke with as great freedom of men and things as the occasion, in my opinion, demanded, I spoke personally of Mr. Tazewell as a son should speak of a father, and with that exalted respect with which I ever regarded his colossal character.

Still, if Mr. Tazewell had been a man of narrow mind, our friends.h.i.+p would have ended, and the instruction and delight which I have derived from his conversation for the last twenty-seven years--a period in which I have doubled my own age--would have been lost. But, independent himself, and the proudest man I ever knew when the faintest shadow of va.s.salage was sought to be cast upon him, he valued independence in others, and his wide experience taught him that the friend who would not hesitate to stand up firmly against him when he thought him wrong, would be the last to skulk from his side in the hour of danger, and from the defence of his memory when his head was low.

While I leave the wisdom of his course in relation to the deposit question and in the executive chair of the commonwealth to the award of history, I recall one lesson which may be read from his acts, which is, that he never was, strictly speaking, a party man; that while he held to his dying day the theory of our federal system which he had adopted in his youth, and in defence of which he prepared, as has just been said, in his old age, with his vast stores of learning and experience unrolled before him, the most elaborate and conclusive exposition which that system ever received; his course on the restrictive policy and on the removal of the deposits, irrespective as it was whether he carried along with him one or a thousand of his a.s.sociates, shows that on great questions involving mere expediency he would burst the trammels of party, and act with his old and inveterate opponents against the darling measures of his political friends. I have said that he was not, and could not well be, in a series of years, the unvarying adjunct of any party. He looked upon a subject through so many lights,--the lights of the past, the lights of the present, the lights of the future; he saw such a tissue of good and evil so inextricably intermingled in human projects; he saw so much that was questionable in the best party measures; so much that was not bad in what seemed the worst; and so much that could be accomplished by doing nothing, that, though he was prompt above most men in decision, and to the last degree practical, his enthusiasm was cooled by philosophy, and he was never very much exalted or depressed by the success or failure of political schemes.

While Mr. Tazewell was engaged in his senatorial career, he was elected by the Norfolk district a member of the Convention which a.s.sembled in Richmond on the fifth day of October, 1829, to revise the first Const.i.tution of Virginia. The character of that body is familiar to all; some of the most ill.u.s.trious names recorded in our annals were inscribed upon its rolls,--Madison, Marshall, Monroe, Watkins Leigh, Charles Fenton Mercer, Chapman Johnson, Philip Doddridge, Robert Stanard, Philip P. Barbour, Morris, Fitzhugh, Baldwin, Scott, Cooke--that wonderful man whose train was always tracked by fire, John Randolph, and a host of younger statesmen who have since risen to eminence, and who, like their elder colleagues, have, I am grieved to think, nearly all pa.s.sed away, were among the members, and were engaged day after day, for three months and a half, in performing the office which their country had committed to their hands. The most distinguished men of the Union,--statesmen whose own names were historical, men of letters, merchants who remembered that the wealth of the counting-room and the wealth of statesmans.h.i.+p were indissolubly bound together, old planters, clever young men from Virginia and from nearly all the southern States, came to behold its meeting, to see its members, and to hear the debates; and, as if to invest the scene with a yet lovelier hue, beauty, brightened by intelligence and glowing with patriotism, shed its softened light over that imposing spectacle. In that body, in which an ex-president of the United States presided, in which another ex-president was at the head of a committee, in which the chief justice of the United States was at the head of another committee, in which there was no place of honor for judges, governors, ministers to foreign courts, speakers of the House of Representatives, and senators of the United States, above their fellow-members, the eye of the visitor soon singled out Mr. Tazewell. He was the grandest figure of a man among them all. His fame was then at the height, and his large stature, his full stern features, lighted by a wide grave blue eye, his solemn gait, all inspiring awe as he leaned in his seat or pa.s.sed through the hall--were in fair keeping with that intellectual image of him which had previously existed in the mind of the beholder.

To trace with any minuteness the course of Mr. Tazewell through more than three of the most anxious months of his life would far exceed my present limits, and as I have already treated this topic in a separate work, and have been required to treat it again, I shall simply say here, that Mr. Tazewell made the opening speech in support of a resolution which he offered, and which marked out the course of the campaign which he believed to be best adapted to attain the general end in view. Had that resolution been adopted, I now believe, as I believed then, that a const.i.tution would have been formed which would have lasted for half a century, and that Tazewell, as a skilful and fearless mediator between the East and West, would have performed the office with glorious success. But the pa.s.sions of men raged high; extremes were the order of the day, and each party stood pledged to its favorite scheme. His first regular effort on the floor of the Convention was in reply to Mr.

Monroe, and gave him the opportunity of expounding his theory of interests as the basis of a political system--a system as beautiful as true. His speech presented a fair specimen of what the discussions on the basis question ought to have been--not of the elaborate dissertation which lasted two days, but of the vigorous living speech, which, while it reviewed critically intermediate points in pa.s.sing, kept the main subject steadily in view, and of which the House of Commons has afforded us so many ill.u.s.trations. When the house rose, a gentleman, who was perhaps the most accomplished scholar in the State, said to me that the speech of Tazewell was the first truly parliamentary speech delivered during the session, and drew the distinction between a legitimate debate and a discussion by dissertations. I recall a happy effort of Mr.

Tazewell on the subject of the election of governor by the people, which was possessed of singular beauty and order. The effect of that speech was the settlement of the question.

But the occasion which impressed his hearers most deeply with a sense of his abilities, was a discussion on the tenure of the judicial office, in which Chief Justice Marshall, Philip P. Barbour, Stanard, Scott, Giles, and others took part. Each speaker was conscious of the powers of his opponent; posterity, in the presence of the skilful reporter, as well as the existing generation represented by some of the ablest men, were the spectators of the combat; and a visible air of solemnity pervaded the manner of each. The question was precisely that which sprung from the repeal of the judiciary act of 1800 by the Congress of 1802, and is the nicest of all our party questions. It was a magnificent display of parliamentary tact and intellectual vigor; and I do not think that an hour of my life ever glided so insensibly away as while I listened to that debate. Blows fell fast and heavy. I saw Judge Barbour, who, though president of the Convention, as the house was in committee, engaged in the debate, fairly reel in his seat from one of Judge Marshall's ma.s.sy blows, which he returned presently with right good will; but Tazewell, if I may use a figure which presented the pith of the argument of one side, and which was frequently used by both,--Tazewell fairly "_sunk the boat_" under the Chief Justice. The views of Tazewell prevailed; and in such a contest, in which all were kingly, and in which the combatants were _magis pares quam similes_--rather equals than alike--if the victor's wreath could with propriety be awarded to a single individual, I do not think I err in saying that it would have been a.s.signed by a majority of the hearers to Tazewell. As an ill.u.s.tration of the effect of his manner and argument on the minds of able men who were opposed to him in State politics, which then raged fiercely, a gentleman from the West, who held for several years a seat in the House of Delegates and in the Council, speaking of the debate to me on the day it occurred, said: "Why, Tazewell trod down those great men as if they had been children."

When the Convention adjourned _sine die_, every heart melted, and all animosity soothed by the last words of the president, I saw Tazewell approach Madison and Marshall, and exchange parting salutations. He could go no further; the members pressed round him: but, old as he then was, for he had reached his 56th year, he little dreamed that he was destined to outlive almost all of those young and gallant spirits that then loved and greeted him. He was the last survivor of those who sate in the House of Delegates during the eighteenth century; and of the Convention of 1829, out of 96 members who composed it, he attained to a greater age than has yet been attained by any member of the body, not excepting Madison, whom he exceeded by one month and five days, and surviving all but twenty; and three of that twenty have come here this day to honor his memory.[10]

Perhaps the best description of his manner at the bar would be to say that he had no manner at all. In addressing juries, he talked to them, I am told, ordinarily as he would converse with the same number of men in society on the merits of the case; and his gestures were those which might be used without serious remark in animated conversation. His postures were sometimes negligent enough; he had a contempt for rant, and hated show and pomp. His voice was pleasant, and of ample compa.s.s for an ordinary court-room, and he never dealt in vociferations; indeed, his style of argument to the jury, as well as to the bench, would have been impossible to a boisterous talker. While his manner was natural, his matter seemed equally void of art. When by the examination and cross-examination of witnesses, he had obtained his facts, he formed his theory of the case, and unfolded it to the jury in the simplest possible way. It was plain to see, however, that the argument was a continuous chain of demonstration, every link of which seemed to be of equal strength. Some of his speeches to the jury, could they have been preserved as they were delivered, would have been invaluable specimens of dialectics for the use of students. I heard the late William Maxwell say, that it was vain and even fatal to attempt before a jury to find the defective links in the chain of Mr. Tazewell's arguments, for the process would become too refined for their comprehension; and that his own mode of argument in such cases was to let the reasoning of Tazewell pa.s.s, and press with all his force some plain views of the case. Some lawyers are successful in the elenchical mode of argument--to use a logical term--that is, in demolis.h.i.+ng the structure of their opponents, while they fail in the deictic, that is, in raising on its ruins an impregnable fabric of their own; but it was difficult to decide which process was the most thorough in the reasoning of Tazewell. In putting his arguments before a jury he showed great adroitness. He either knew himself or learned from others the calling of every juryman; and as he proceeded with his case, if he saw a dangerous man among them, he drew his figures from his particular calling, and not unfrequently made the man believe that his standing in his own business depended upon his bringing in a verdict in his favor. When the pa.s.sions were to be a.s.sailed, he indulged in a style of fervid appeal which was the more effective as it was rare; and his speech in Shannon's case was often referred to by Wirt as a fine piece of eloquence in the popular acceptation of the word.

His mode of addressing the bench differed, of course, from his jury speeches. He was less familiar in his manner and in his talk, and his argumentation was more severe; and he was evidently more at home, or rather more congenially employed; and he brought as much learning to bear upon the case as was politic for the time. Here, too, he showed no great deference to manner as a means of victory. When Gen. Taylor was addressing the late judge St. George Tucker, who was deaf, the judge requested him to come nearer and speak louder; but the General, observing that a certain s.p.a.ce between the judge and himself was indispensable for the proper exercise of his faculties, declined the request; Tazewell, however, who replied to Taylor, had no scruples in the case, but, approaching the judge's ear, poured the stream of his argument into its inner portal. It sometimes appeared that in addressing inferior courts he went too much into detail, instead of resting his case on its great points; but it is probable that Mr. Tazewell had taken the true gauge of the judge's mind, and was right after all; and it is certain that in important cases, in which appeals would probably be taken, he reserved his strong points for the higher tribunal.

Those who heard even his latest speeches at the bar have almost all pa.s.sed away. It was thirty-four years ago that I heard him for the first time in public. At a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk, held in the Town Hall, to give expression to their feelings on the occasion of the death of Jefferson, which occurred on the Fourth of July, 1826, he was called to the chair, and, before taking it, addressed the large a.s.sembly for twenty-five or thirty minutes, on the character of the great man whose death they had met to commemorate. He was at that time a senator of the United States, and in the height of his fame; and to hear him speak was then a great novelty, which attracted hundreds to the hall.

Though then a youth of nineteen, I can recall his manner and the outline of his speech. He seemed to speak as a man of fine personal appearance accustomed to public speaking and of a good address, who was deeply impressed by the solemnity of his theme, might be expected to speak. His voice was a volume of sweet, full, natural sound, unmarked by any artistic training or modulation, and such as would flow from a well-bred man in animated recitation; and his gestures were those which rose spontaneously and unconsciously with the thought, and were wholly unstudied; thus presenting an obvious contrast to the manner and action of his friend Randolph, whose every att.i.tude, the slightest motion of whose finger, the faintest intonation of whose voice, whose every smile and frown, natural as they seemed, were the deliberate reflection of the closet.

Three years later, in the Virginia Convention of 1829, I heard all that he uttered in committee and in the body; and his manner was such as I have just described it to be. Although he had full command of the whole armory of parliamentary warfare, he had none of that violent gesticulation or loud intonation which fas.h.i.+on or taste has lately introduced among us, but which would not be tolerated a moment in the British House of Commons. His first speech, which was in support of his own resolution proposing a method of procedure in the discussion of the Const.i.tution, though fine and effective, was delivered under somewhat unfavorable circ.u.mstances. He stood some distance from the Chair and on a line with it, so that he was compelled to face the audience instead of the Speaker, and to pitch his voice to a key that could be heard throughout the length of the hall and the crowded galleries, and an occasional hoa.r.s.eness, the result of overstraining, was apparent during his speech. He mentioned this circ.u.mstance to me as we left the hall, as the first intimation he had of having lost that control of his voice which had hitherto been equal to every occasion. But when he followed Mr. Monroe, he happened to be in a better position on the floor; and his voice retained its usual fulness, and was pleasing to the ear. And afterwards in the Baptist church, to which the Convention adjourned, in his speech on the election of Governor, his voice was fresh and musical; and in the grand debate on the judiciary tenure, when the debaters were near each other and the Chair, he spoke with full command of his voice, and with great animation. In fine, his manner, including the management of his voice and gesture, approached nearer the English model of debating than that which has been gradually gaining ground in this country, and was most appropriate to his style of thought and discussion.

Tazewell, with all his intercourse with the world, with all his habits of speaking, and with all his marvellous endowments, was a remarkably modest man. His modesty may unfold a clew to the explanation of his whole career. He said himself that he never rose to make a speech without serious trepidation. In the cochineal case, it was obvious to the court and to the spectators. I have seen him, when he had been speaking ten minutes, not fully a.s.sured. It was only when personal danger, as in a memorable criminal case, in which even brave men were for a time appalled, was present, that his trepidation disappeared, and he became fearless and defiant.

Nor was the modesty of Tazewell confined to the bar. It pervaded his whole life; and when his fame was coextensive with the Union, and when his presence inspired awe in companies of able men, a close observer could detect in his tones or in his manner that he was not wholly at ease. It was only when the ice of a gathering party was fairly broken, that he was thoroughly self-possessed. Like Judge Marshall, he had a profound sense of respect for the female s.e.x; and his attentions to women were rendered with a delicacy and a gallantry that were enhanced by the reflection that such a man was not wholly at ease in approaching them. And n.o.bly did woman repay his courtesy and his affection. As I dwell upon this aspect of his life, the image of her who was the bride of his youth, the partaker of his splendid fame, and the delight of his declining years, rises before me. I behold her as she moved in that happy household, bestowing not a thought upon herself, but intent on making others happy. I see her as she enters the room in which her husband is discoursing on learned topics to those who are grouped around him, and I see him pause as that "ocean-eye" rests benignantly and affectionately upon her. I shall never forget the moment when thirty-five years ago I saw her in her own house for the first time; how cordially she pressed my hand; how kindly she talked to an orphan boy of a father he had never known; and how soon she put an awkward youth of seventeen at his ease. The characteristic grace of that admirable woman was her love of domestic life. With her the throne of human felicity was the family altar. Life with her, as it ever was with those elder Virginia matrons whom she resembled, was too serious a business for pomp and show. Had she been inspired with a pa.s.sion for display, had she coveted the fleeting honors of a residence at a foreign court, or in the metropolis of our own country, a single word from her lips would have obtained all she wished. But her heart, like a true Virginia mother as she was, was in the midst of her family; and though she properly appreciated the talents of her husband, and was willing that they should be exerted in the public service, she knew him well, and believed that he would be happier in his own home than when he was beset with public cares, or galled by those tortures with which ambition wrings its victims. And when her last day had come, and the union of more than half a century had been dissolved, and her husband had seen her beloved remains put away in that solitary tomb by the sea, the charm of life was lost to him; and he calmly awaited the hour when he should be laid by her side. Nor did the generous care of woman cease with her death. When his hour was come, and he was placed beside her, his daughters, who had tended him for years with unceasing devotion, were borne in almost a dying state from his tomb.

He was keenly alive to the pleasures of friends.h.i.+p; and he maintained his affection for his early schoolmates unbroken to the last. His reverence for Mr. Wythe pa.s.sed all words. Randolph loved him through life; and Tazewell reciprocated his affection with equal warmth. The tide of his affection for John Wickham from his childhood flowed full and strong. The relations which existed between them could be seen in the letter I read some time ago, and were earnest, tender, and affectionate. The affection which Tazewell cherished for Wickham, kindled, as we have seen, over the spelling-book and the Latin grammar, and showing itself in tears in his sixty-fifth year, grew with his growth, and was enhanced by that elevated sense of appreciation with which each regarded the other. It was pleasing to see them together when the descending shadows of age were upon them, and when each had performed those deeds which are now deemed the greatest of their lives.

It would be hard to say whether they stood to each other in the relation of father and son, of brothers, or of equals. Wickham was eleven years older than Tazewell, and had taught him to read. It was evident Mr.

Tazewell regarded Mr. Wickham with the greatest deference. It was, however, something more than the deference with which one eminent man advanced in life would show to another eminent man still more advanced; it was the deference of the warmest friends.h.i.+p to an individual who not only reciprocated the feelings of affection, but who possessed all the moral and intellectual qualities that can adorn human nature. He considered Mr. Wickham not only the most accomplished lawyer this country ever produced, but the wisest man he ever knew. I have heard him say that the speech of Mr. Wickham on the doctrine of treason in Burr's trial would have been p.r.o.nounced new and able in Westminster Hall; and that it was the greatest forensic effort of the American bar. Tazewell's abiding affection for Wickham was such, that he drew upon it in favor even of his young friends. When, at one-and-twenty, I took my seat in the House of Delegates, and, not dreaming of mixing in society, was preparing for a course of study during the long winter nights, one of the first calls I received was from Mr. Wickham. With me his name had pa.s.sed into history. His great speech, which I had read and studied as I had read and studied the speeches of Chatham and of Burke, was made in the year I was born. But I soon found that he was a living and breathing man. His gentle kindness, his incomparable address, his charming talk, and his cordial hospitality pressed upon me, a.s.sured me that his heart still glowed with its ancient kindness: and when I recall the hours which I spent at his elegant home; when I recollect the names of Marshall, Leigh, Johnson, Stanard, Harvie, and others whom I have seen at his hospitable board; when I recall that living galaxy of beauty which flashed in his thronged halls, and of which the sweetest and the brightest were his own household stars,--now, alas! extinct and gone; and his own n.o.ble presence and demeanor, which drew from the spoiled and fastidious poet Moore the expression of his admiration and applause, it is with feelings of deep and tender regard, and of grateful veneration, that I offer this tribute to his memory.

The question has often been asked whether Mr. Tazewell was fond of literature and had the elements of a literary man. His early opportunities were not favorable for acquiring a profound knowledge of cla.s.sical learning. In his day Latin and Greek, the foundation of all true taste in letters, were not taught in William and Mary at all, except in the grammar school. That Tazewell knew enough of Latin to translate easily a Latin author, and even to write the language grammatically, is certain; but that he never rose to that excellence in those tongues to which his old tutor Mr. Wythe attained is equally certain. But of English literature he had drunk deeply. He had Bacon, Locke, Burke, Pope, Shakspeare, Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Gillies, Addison, and Roscoe, within three feet of his elbow for the last forty years of his life. In English political history, such as might be gathered from the ordinary historians, and from such books as Baker's Chronicle and Rushworth, he was profoundly skilled. The history of the law from the days of Magna Charta to the pa.s.sage of the reform bill of Earl Grey's administration, was the study of his whole professional and public life. He not only knew every leading event, every great statute, but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation.

The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never read them, and drew his information from the original sources. In the history of Virginia he was, without exception, the greatest proficient of his time. Whatever was told by Smith, Beverly, Keith, St.i.th, and Burk with his continuators, or by Hening in the statutes at large, or in the journals of the House of Burgesses and of the House of Delegates, or could be gathered from the living voice for eighty years, he knew intimately and could recall at a moment's notice. In respect of the political history of the United States from the adoption of the federal const.i.tution to the day of his death, his knowledge was accurate, ready, and profound. Indeed, if we except the first five years of the federal const.i.tution, it may be said that his actions were a part of that history. He had discussed, in the House of Delegates, the leading measures of the Was.h.i.+ngton and Adams administrations, and sixty years ago he sate at a stormy period in the House of Representatives of the United States.

But the excellence of Mr. Tazewell consisted not so much in knowing the acts and thoughts of other men, as in the philosophy which he drew from the great facts in all history. He was not in the German, or even in the English sense, a reader of many books; but there was hardly a topic of literature or history which he had not studied, and respecting which he had not elaborated a theory of his own. Even in law he was more apt to work out a question which required a solution than to turn to the books of reports. Neither at the bar nor in the senate was he fond of quoting authorities; but such as he did quote were of the highest merit, and he made them do him yeoman service. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses were favorite books with him. He thought the report of John Quincy Adams on weights and measures one of the ablest works in political literature.

The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical. Common sense was his polar star. He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose. If that purpose was to be accomplished by writing, he took up his pen; if by speech, he rose at the bar and pleaded the case, or in the senate and made a speech. But when the end was attained he thought no more about the means which he had used in attaining it, whether by writing or speaking, than the carpenter who has finished a house thinks of the scaffolding by which he was enabled to complete it. Hence Mr. Tazewell never corrected a speech for the press, if we except two instances; and his greatest speeches are either wholly lost, or exist in the merest outline. But, looking to the result, he was almost invariably successful, at least in the sphere in which he acted; and on the attainment of his purpose forgot the means by which he reached it. If his speeches such as they are, his reports on public questions, his legal opinions, his essays and tracts on political and historical topics, and his private letters, were collected together, the variety of his powers and his singular abilities would strike every reader; and that his works ought to be preserved in volumes is a matter of public interest and is due to his memory.

I have said that Mr. Tazewell should not be considered as a mere scholar, a mere lawyer, or a mere statesman, but in that most august of all characters, the citizen of a commonwealth. But to show what manner of man he was to my younger friends, let us regard him in the aspect of a lawyer, and as he stood in the three great departments of his profession. In criminal law he was easily the first. It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,--an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,--that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other living man. This is but an echo of his general reputation in this department of the law. a.n.a.lyze the qualities necessary to form a great criminal lawyer--his various power of speech, his skill in the evisceration of facts, his tact and ability in arranging the best line of defence possible in the case, the skill in addressing the jury, and the skill, of a different sort, in addressing the court, his superior generals.h.i.+p in the conflicting and unexpected developments during a trial which threaten instant defeat, his fearlessness, and that perfect self-possession which not only conceals his own fears and weaknesses, but avails itself of the fears and weaknesses of others, and of that deep insight into human pa.s.sions, penetrating far beyond the eye, or the ear, or the ordinary reason: count the attainments which such a man must possess to win supremacy in such a sphere, and we must a.s.sent to the general opinion which places supremacy in such a sphere one of the highest achievements of human intellect and character. Then contemplate that excellence which is shown in the conduct of civil cases as contradistinguished from criminal--that various power here, too, of speech, in itself the lesson of a life to learn--the skill, too, in addressing juries and the court with equal effect; that knowledge of the law in its innumerable doctrines, principles, and decisions, which made the study even in Lord c.o.ke's day the work of twenty years; the prompt application of this learning to the rapid matter in hand; the magical use of the faculties of the mind and the wondrous discipline which they must have undergone, every hour, every minute demanding a stretch of thought and an adroitness of discrimination which have justly cla.s.sed the dialectics of the bar above all the dialectics of the schools; and the moral as well as intellectual qualities necessary in an adept in the varying practice of munic.i.p.al law; and here, too, we will yield to the general opinion which places excellence in this single department one of the highest achievements of mind; and then recall what such a judge as Spencer Roane, the ablest and sternest judge of the age, and politically hostile to Tazewell, said when Tazewell pleaded the case of Long _vs._ Colston before the Court of Appeals. Then let us follow the profession beyond and above the region of munic.i.p.al law into the higher walk of the Laws of Nations, and of that great practical part of those laws, the law of admiralty. Consider what eminence is, and what it involves, in this department which the master spirits of ancient as well as of modern time selected as their peculiar sphere; what the talents are that may contend with the greatest intellects of the age in that greatest of all our gladiatorial arenas, the Supreme Court of the United States, and what various and rare excellencies must unite in forming a man who may stand forth and share in such generous battle, and, still more, shall come off victorious from such a field. And when, by blending all these characters, each great in itself, and worthy of the ambition of the highest talents and of the longest life, into a single character, we have made a fame which the grandest intellects of modern times might glory in attaining, we have but one of the elements, developed during a comparatively short period only of his career, that make up the reputation of him whose memory we have met this day to honor.

Then, if you please, regard him as a senator, representing the sovereignty of Virginia in our more than Amphictyonic Council. Take any speech which he delivered during his term of service--the speech on the Bankrupt law; the speech on the Piracy bill, which, as it was delivered by him, and not as it appears debased and dwarfed in the report, was one of the grandest displays of pure intellect ever made in the Senate, and which saved the country from giving cause of war to Spain and, perhaps and probably, from actual war; the speech on the Census, which his colleague who sat by his side during its delivery told me gave both Calhoun and Webster quite as much to do as was grateful to both of them; the speech on the Admirals; the reports from the Committee on Foreign Affairs for seven or eight years which controlled the public opinion of the time; that consummate ability which in its grandest displays inspired the hearer with the belief that the speaker, great as he was, was capable of yet greater things-_par negotiis et supra_--his speeches so settling matters that it seemed almost vain to say anything after him for or against, and calling the remark from Webster, when Tazewell was making one of his last speeches in the senate, "Why, Tazewell grows greater every day." Form your notion of what must enter into the formation of such a character, and then you have another of those elements that make up the character of Tazewell.

Then take your model of a man who draws his sustenance from the plough, a private citizen, who lives privately, not because he cannot obtain office, but because, having won the highest honors, he withdraws from the scene and leaves the glittering rewards of public service to be divided among those who seek them. Look for his name in the newspapers, and you will not find it from year's end to year's end; look for deep intrigues in local politics, and you will find no finger of his in the dirty work. Look at the ill success of those who have engaged in public affairs, their pecuniary entanglements, their deferred hopes, their sleepless nights, those poisoned fountains of feeling bitter as aloes even to the eye that looks on them as they bubble; these and such things you may find, and find easily, but not at the door of Tazewell. He is strictly a private citizen, engaged in his private affairs, raising and selling at fair prices in company with his neighbors his oats and corn and potatoes, and showing to all that the highest faculties are as practical as the lowest, and that diligence and attention always have their reward. Without patrimony, with a moderation in taking fees without an example in our land, living as became a gentleman of his position in life and affairs, he yet acc.u.mulated a larger fortune than was probably ever before acc.u.mulated by a Virginia farmer or a lawyer beginning life without patrimony; and when wealth was obtained, living with that modesty and simplicity so becoming to great genius and great wealth, ever looking with just contempt on that most piteous of all spectacles, the spectacle of lofty genius debruised and debased by the accursed thirst for gold; and presenting in all the private relations of life an example which may be held up for the imitation of the old and the young. When you have combined these various characters into one whole, you may form some general notion of what Mr. Tazewell was.

His head was of the clearest. Horace says of Apollo that he did not always keep his bow bent; but Tazewell's mind was always on the stretch, or, in a stricter sense, was never on the stretch at all. The most intricate combination of figures he saw through at a glance; and in the arts the most complex machinery was easily understood by him, and readily made plain to others by his familiar explanations. Processes of reasoning the most elaborate seemed rather the play of his mind than a serious exercise of its powers; and in his most refined speculations he never for a moment lost himself, or allowed the hearer to lose him. When in a playful mood he chose to use the weapons of the sophist, the ablest men feared the ticklish game and fought shy, and where the line lay between truth and error it was impossible to find out; and he was equally skilful in unravelling the sophistry of others, dissecting it asunder with the keenest relish and with exquisite skill. When he seriously undertook to a.s.sert and defend the truth, he was irresistible, and it was vain to oppose him. Excessive ingenuity has been laid at his door; but, while conceding that his long dallying with inferior courts was likely to lead to faults in that direction, yet, if we look to the occasions when he was charged with using it, and its effect at the time, we may be inclined to believe that his judgment of the line of argument to be pursued was as likely to be appropriate as that of the critic who formed his opinion according to some abstract standard of propriety.

He was never out of tune. Call on him when you would, and you found him self-poised and fresh. Argument or narrative followed at your command.

This part of his character was very apparent to me during the last seven years of his life. In that interval I called to see him frequently; and, as my own studies lay in the walks of our earlier history, the talk usually ran, for a time at least, on the men and things of an epoch in which the Revolution held the middle place. He seemed to have perfect command of his stores, not by the mere effort of recollection, but of memory and reflection combined, eliminating a truth from the facts which concealed it. A specimen of the talk which actually occurred between us may ill.u.s.trate my remark. I would approach him and say deliberately in his ear--for within a few years past he had become slightly deaf--"Mr.

Tazewell, Col. Richard Bland (who, by the way, died in October, 1776) wrote tracts in the Parson's cause, a tract against the Quakers, and his inquiry into the rights of the colonies; did he write any other pamphlet?" Quick as thought he replied: "Yes, he wrote a tract on the tenure of lands in Virginia, showing that they were allodial and not held in fee. I read the tract when I was a boy; and it helped me in my examination for a license to practise law." He had probably not recalled this fact before for half a century: no copy of the tract is preserved; and there was not another human being then living, I may venture to say, who knew of the existence of such a tract; and so at times with other facts which he recalled after the lapse of seventy years, and which he had learned from his father or from Mr. Wythe. On the other hand, when his earlier recollections were clearly proved to be inaccurate as to matter of fact, as in the case of what he thought had happened at the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765, when Henry's resolutions against the stamp act were pa.s.sed, and I placed under his eye the discrepancy between his statement of the case and the entry on the journals of the House, he would fight manfully in defence of his own views, but generally ended in cases where the proof was conclusive: "Well, sir, Mr. Wythe told me so." Dates not common or easily reached were fixed in his memory by a kind of connexion with his own life; as for instance, I would ask him whether he remembered the features of Peyton Randolph? And he would answer: "No, sir; I was born in December, 1774, and he died in October, 1775, in Philadelphia, when I was not a year old." And it was by questions such as these, which I could answer with exact precision myself, that I ascertained not only the integrity and worth of his memory, which we all know in aged persons retains with freshness the incidents of youth, but his capacity of combination which, in the degree in which he possessed it, was extremely rare in young or old; and from the nature of my pursuits for the time in question I may be said not only to have tested his powers of recollection, but to have probed the depth of his knowledge in relation to the history of Virginia and its cognate topics more effectually than it was the privilege of any one else to do; and my admiration of his talents and of his resources increased to the last. Let it be remembered that there was no more reason to look for profound learning on these subjects from Mr.

Tazewell, whose life was crowded with business, than from any of his eminent contemporaries, some of whom I knew well, but none of whom approached him in these respects; and I have pointed out, merely for the sake of example, a single department of knowledge only in which I happened to take a pa.s.sing interest, leaving all those untouched on which I have heard him discourse for thirty years at least, and you will be able to form an opinion of the nature, variety, and extent of his acquisitions, and feel with me what a gap the death of such a man has made in the commonwealth.

From the complexion of his mind he was cautious in bestowing commendation on men and things. Great speeches in public bodies rarely came up to his severe and simple standard of taste; and I do not think that he was sensible in a very high degree of the minor elegancies of rhythm and the harmony of words. His own style might be defined plain words in their right places; and he had studied Anglo-Saxon, and drew largely on the Anglo-Saxon element of our tongue, and especially on its monosyllables. His logic was generally so severe that not a clause and hardly a word could be changed or misplaced without danger, and the merit of his work was rather in the strength and beauty of the demonstration as a whole, than in the rhetorical grace or effect of its several parts. I speak of his great arguments. In his letters he sometimes showed a skill in harmony rarely surpa.s.sed. His letter to the executor of Mr. Wickham is delicately drawn; his letter to Mr. Foote on the compromise resolutions is a chaste and elegant composition; and his address from the chair at a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk on the occasion of the death of Jefferson, which I have already alluded to, when he proposed a statue to the author of the Declaration of Independence, was of that rare beauty of thoughts and words in happy union bound, that, though delivered thirty-four years ago, it is with me to this hour one of the most refres.h.i.+ng of my memories of the past. But these were exceptions, and his severe standard was the general rule.

Hence, while he valued the vast and conclusive learning of Gibbon, he was not taken with his diction; and though he despised the toryism of Hume, he regarded his style as approaching perfection. He liked the fervid genius of the elder Pitt, and his brilliant speeches, because they were effective weapons in their day; but he would look with contempt at any effort of imitation. While he relished the arguments of Judge Marshall at the bar, in public bodies, and on the bench, I do not think that he placed as high a value as they deserved upon the ability and literary taste which characterize the opinions of Judge Story, and which have earned for their author the highest legal fame at home and abroad. From the eloquent parts of such speeches as Webster's in reply to Hayne he would turn with dislike. Yet when a speech was effective in the delivery, and, though not remarkable in itself, had accomplished something, he was liberal in bestowing fair praise upon it. He heard Mr.

Clay deliver his celebrated reply to Josiah Quincy--a venerable statesman who still survives;--and he ever spoke of it as admirable in its way. In the same spirit he spoke of Col. Benton's extemporaneous reply to Mr. Webster in the debate on the bank veto, delivered late at night in the Senate, as surpa.s.sing any thing of the kind that he had ever heard, or that the speaker ever reached before or after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after it, probably the speech on the currency, superior to his speech in reply to Hayne, and altogether free from the tinsel of his later speeches. The speech of Pinkney on the Missouri question, which he heard, he thought the ablest ever delivered in the senate. For the intellect of Calhoun he had the highest respect and admiration, and, while differing most essentially from that statesman throughout nearly his whole career, he always regarded his speeches and state papers as those of a master-workman. Strange as it may appear, though exacting so much from his eminent contemporaries, yet, partly from old affection, partly from a love of their literature and from a conviction of their political effect, and partly from the unworthiness of poor human nature, he listened to the speeches of John Randolph with the relish of a school-boy, rubbing his hands and laughing heartily as the orator went along. Aside from the ardent and unquenchable love that existed between them, the explanation may be found to a certain extent in Tazewell's love of humor. When Watkins Leigh's amusing letter of Christopher Quandary appeared in the Enquirer,--a paper, by the way, which, after the feud in the Jefferson administration, he never took in, thus showing that, if the democrats remembered his shortcomings, he did not forget what he deemed theirs--I took the number around to him, and he laughed heartily at its. .h.i.ts. The last extended work which I know that he read was Randall's Life of Jefferson, which evidently made an impression upon him. He spoke of the author as a clever fellow; and he expatiated on the character of Jefferson, which, as he declined in life, I think he valued more than ever, p.r.o.nouncing him the greatest Secretary of State any country ever had. I may say here, that Mr. Tazewell had no respect for law schools as an instrumentality of rearing great lawyers. He said if the student would have lectures, let him read Blackstone; and he ever maintained the opinion that the popularity of those charming commentaries had tended to depreciate the standard of legal intellect since their appearance--an opinion which he shared with Mr. Jefferson.

That he had read them attentively and admired their beauty, though much in the spirit in which he would admire a poem or a play, I know from this fact, that once, when he was in a playful mood, he said he believed he could repeat the heads of all the chapters of the four volumes which he straightway did. He occasionally read novels, but was quite indifferent whether he began with the second or the first volume; and I heard him commend highly the preface of the late novel attributed to Sir Walter Scott, called Moredun, as a fine piece of special pleading, declaring that its author would make a good special pleader. I have spoken already of the hearty praise which he bestowed upon Mr. Adams'

report on weights and measures.

In respect both of argumentation and style it has often occurred to me that Mr. Tazewell occupied an intermediate position between Judge Marshall and Mr. Wickham. He has the strength of Marshall with something more of refinement in style and imagery, and more vivacity in the play of his reasoning; while he has a stricter line of demonstration than Wickham without his very decided elegance. In some physical as well as intellectual aspects he resembled Chief Justice Parsons of Ma.s.sachusetts. Not, indeed, in dress; for Parsons was a sloven, and Tazewell was neat in his dress, which was in winter, during the last twenty years, a full suit of black cloth, and in summer he was usually attired in white drilling with a light linen coat and fancy vest. He always wore a white cravat, and his linen was spotless. But both Parsons and Tazewell were men of large stature, at least to the eye, in a sitting posture; both delighted to drink at the deep fountains of the law, and were skilled in the lore of their profession in which they held an easy supremacy; both liked novels as a relief from grave cares, and were indifferent as to the volume of the novel that first came to hand; both were so strongly enamored of the exact sciences that it is probable they would have cultivated them with extraordinary success. But Tazewell, though a fair scholar in the old way, never attained to that excellence in cla.s.sical literature which made the name of Parsons an authority for a disputed reading in the colleges of Germany. I have always regretted that Tazewell did not bring his mind to bear upon the science of language, and especially of comparative philology. Had he been able to read Bonn, or had mastered the New Cratylus or the Varronia.n.u.s of Donaldson, his versatile and sharp intellect might have sent forth a work of "winged words" of equal interest and infinitely more profound than the Diversions of Purley.

Tazewell had evidently modelled his mind before the death of president Pendleton in 1802; and nearly up to that period Marshall and Wickham were the leaders of the Virginia bar. His reverence for Pendleton was something more than a shadow. It was, as also in the case of Wythe, a deep-seated, ever-living and glowing principle. He loved those two ill.u.s.trious judges with a warmth of veneration blended with affection which he never felt for any human being after they were laid in their graves; and he delighted to speak of them. He held Pendleton's judicial talents in the highest respect; and I have heard him say that no man living but Pendleton could have reconciled the clas.h.i.+ng laws pa.s.sed during the first twelve years of the commonwealth, and made such just and satisfactory decisions. Speaking of the peculiarities of Pendleton and Wythe, he said that Pendleton always professed the most profound respect for British decisions, but rarely followed them; while Wythe, who spoke disrespectfully of them, almost invariably followed them. But, on the ground of pure love and affection, Wythe was nearer to Tazewell than was Pendleton. Wythe was the guide and instructor of his youth, the old neighbor of his father in Williamsburg; and he always spoke of him as _Mr._ Wythe, following his father who knew Wythe long before he was a judge. His reminiscences of Wythe were deeply interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, and, in reference to the last illness of the old patriot, sad in the extreme; and they were always uttered in that subdued and tender tone which, it grieves me to think, will fall no more on mortal ears.

The great age attained by Mr. Tazewell makes us curious to know his modes of life and his habits of study. In youth and early manhood he was fond of athletic sports and of horsemans.h.i.+p; and he must have possessed great muscular power. As late as 1802 he accomplished on horseback a trip of a hundred and odd miles in as short a time as that distance was ever travelled in Virginia. His form was most symmetrical; and he had the broad chest and the well-proportioned neck that are so often seen in those who enjoy a healthful and protracted old age; and that small wrist and hand that told of his Norman blood. From the time when he became engrossed in business, it is probable that he rarely took any other exercise than was inevitable in pa.s.sing to his various courts; and since his retirement from the bar, except during his trips to the Eastern Sh.o.r.e and to Was.h.i.+ngton and Richmond, he seldom walked more than a few hundred yards in twenty-four hours. Yet, throughout his career, he enjoyed fair health, and during the last forty years, when, as man and boy, I have observed him, he has not had more than one really serious spell of illness--a pleuritic attack, which he encountered in Was.h.i.+ngton. In that interval he has contracted several bilious diseases; but they soon pa.s.sed off, and were not thought dangerou