country was irretrievably ruined; and he spoke of the
troops despatched to Charleston as "mercenaries," to whom he hoped "no
quarter would be given." The "wretched old man" whom the people were
to "put down" was Andrew Jackson, not John C. Calhoun.

We do not forget that, when John Randolph uttered these words, he was
scarcely an accountable being. Disease had reduced him to a skeleton,
and robbed him of almost every attribute of man except his capacity to
suffer. But even in his madness he was a representative man, and spoke
the latent feeling of his class. The diseases which sharpened his
temper unloosed his tongue; he revealed the tendency of the Southern
mind, as a petulant child reveals family secrets. In his good and in
his evil he was an exaggerated Southerner of the higher class. He was
like them, too, in this: they are not criminals to be punished, but
patients to be cured. Sometimes, of late, we have feared that they
resemble him also in being incurable.

As long as Americans take an interest in the history of their country,
they will read with interest the strange story of this sick and
suffering representative of sick and suffering Virginia. To the last,
old Virginia wore her ragged robes with a kind of grandeur which was
not altogether unbecoming, and which to the very last imposed upon
tory minds. Scarcely any one could live among the better Southern
people without liking them; and few will ever read Hugh Garland's Life
of John Randolph, without more than forgiving all his vagaries,
impetuosities, and foibles. How often, upon riding away from a
Southern home, have we been ready to exclaim, "What a pity such good
people should be so accursed!" Lord Russell well characterized the
evil to which we allude as "that fatal gift of the poisoned garment
which was flung around them from the first hour of their
establishment."

The last act of John Randolph's life, done when he lay dying at a
hotel in Philadelphia, in June, 1833, was to express once more his
sense of this blighting system. Some years before, he had made a will
by which all his slaves were to be freed at his death. He would
probably have given them their freedom before his death, but for the
fact, too evident, that freedom to a black man in a Slave State was
not a boon. The slaves freed by his brother, forty years' before, had
not done well, because (as he supposed) no land had been bequeathed
for their support. Accordingly, he left directions in