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. Analyze 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
generalship 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 passions, 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 assent 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 Coke'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 classed
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 municipal 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 municipal 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 accumulated a larger fortune than
was probably ever before accumulated 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 assert 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 illustrate 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 passed, 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 passing 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 surpassed. 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 refreshing 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 surpassing 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 hits. 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, pronouncing 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
Massachusetts. 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 classical 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
Varronianus 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.