Eccentricity and Outsider Status
Despite being a Virginia gentleman, one of the great orators in the history of Caroline, and House leader, Randolph after five years of leadership became (1803) a permanent outsider. He had personal eccentricities as well, which were made worse by his lifelong ill health (he died of tuberculosis), his heavy drinking, and his occasional use of opium. According to Bill Kauffman, Randolph was “a habitual opium user a bachelor who seems to have nurtured a crush on Andrew Jackson.” However, modern science has well established that latent pulmonary tuberculosis, which "consumption" killed his brother Theodorick Randolph at age 21 and which eventually killed him at age 60, can sometimes settle in the genital tract and, once there, can cause the symptoms and the painful and permanent damage that would prevent the onset of puberty as Randolph experienced it in his boyhood. Though he openly used opium, the only treatment of that time for the extreme pain caused by his lifelong battle with tuberculosis, his belligerent and bellicose personality can be traced to his early boyhood and before the onset of any disease. He once fought a duel with Henry Clay, but otherwise kept his bellicosity to the floor of Congress. He routinely dressed in a flashy manner, often accompanied by his slaves and his hunting dogs. "hen Clay had set about making the speakership a position of true power upon his first election to that post in 1811, he had unceremoniously ordered Randolph to remove his dog from the House floor—something no previous Speaker had dared to do."
Together with Henry Clay, Randolph was one of three founders of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, a collaboration of slaveholders and abolitionists that planned to transport and resettle free blacks in a colony in Africa (this territory became Liberia). Like some other slaveholders, Randolph had long been opposed to slavery in theory. In the two decades after the Revolutionary War, so many planters freed slaves that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased from less than one percent in 1782 to 13.5 percent in 1810.
In 1819, Randolph provided in his will for the manumission of his slaves after his death. He wrote, "I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom, heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one." Three years later, in 1822, in a codicil to that will, he stipulated that money be provided to transport and settle the freed slaves on land to be purchased in the free state of Ohio. Each slave above the age of 40 was to receive 10 acres of land. He provided for the manumission of hundreds of slaves in his will. Although the will was challenged in the courts, his slaves were finally ruled to be free. After a lengthy court case, his will was upheld. In 1846 three hundred eighty-three former "Randolph Slaves" arrived in Cincinnati, before settling in Rumley, Shelby County, Ohio. (See List of ghost towns in the United States).
Read more about this topic: John Randolph Of Roanoke
Famous quotes containing the words eccentricity and/or status:
“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)