noted controlling families that was not related to them by blood or
marriage.

In 1773, when John Randolph was born, the family was still powerful;
and the region last trodden by the Army of the Potomac was still
adorned by the seats of its leading members. Cawsons, the mansion in
which he was born, was situated at the junction of the James and
Appomattox, in full view of City Point and Bermuda Hundred, and only
an after-breakfast walk from Dutch Gap. The mansion long ago
disappeared, and nothing now marks its site but negro huts. Many of
those exquisite spots on the James and Appomattox, which we have seen
men pause to admire while the shells were bursting overhead, were
occupied sixty years ago by the sumptuous abodes of the Randolphs and
families related to them. Mattoax, the house in which John Randolph
passed much of his childhood, was on a bluff of the Appomattox, two
miles above Petersburg; and Bizarre, the estate on which he spent his
boyhood, lay above, on both sides of the same river. Over all that
extensive and enchanting region, trampled and torn and laid waste by
hostile armies in 1864 and 1865, John Randolph rode and hunted from
the time he could sit a pony and handle a gun. Not a vestige remains
of the opulence and splendor of his early days. Not one of the
mansions inhabited or visited by him in his youth furnished a target
for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps. A country better adapted
to all good purposes of man, nor one more pleasing to the eye, hardly
exists on earth; but before it was trodden by armies, it had become
little less than desolate. The James River is as navigable as the
Hudson, and flows through a region far more fertile, longer settled,
more inviting, and of more genial climate; but there are upon the
Hudson's banks more cities than there are rotten landings upon the
James. The shores of this beautiful and classic stream are so
unexpectedly void of even the signs of human habitation, that our
soldiers were often ready to exclaim:

"Can this be the river of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas?
Was it here that Jamestown stood? Is it possible that white
men have lived in this delightful land for two hundred and
fifty-seven years? Or has not the captain of the steamboat
made a mistake, and turned into the wrong river?"

One scene of John Randolph's boyhood reveals to us the entire
political economy of the Old Dominion. He used to relate it himself,
when den