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
illustrious 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 clashing laws passed
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 horsemanship; 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 passing to his various courts; and since
his retirement from the bar, except during his trips to the Eastern
Shore and to Washington 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
Washington. In that interval he has contracted several bilious diseases;
but they soon passed off, and were not thought dangerous. The secret of
his exemption from disease, apart from the healthful structure of his
frame, was the extreme temperance and the regularity of his habits. At
first sight he would seem the most irregular of men, sitting up till two
or three in the morning and rising late; but, in fact, this habit,
persisted in for so many years, became fixed; and, as nature requires
regular periods of rest rather than any special time for taking it, he
suffered no material inconvenience in that respect. But his main source
of exemption from sickness was his temperance in eating. I had an
opportunity of seeing him daily at every meal for many weeks, and he ate
more sparingly than any one of those who sate at the table with him. He
generally took a glass of toddy or a glass of wine at dinner; and the
only form in which he used tobacco was in chewing. If he ever went into
excess in any thing it was in the use of tobacco; but he never appeared
to me to err above ordinary chewers even in that way, though I have
heard one of his clerks say that he could always tell the dignity of a
case by the size of the chew which Tazewell put into his mouth when he
took it up for the first time. His usual remedy for indisposition was
strict abstinence from food, which he could endure as heroically as a
Brahmin, or a disciple of Mahomet.
Many to whom the name of Mr. Tazewell is dear would be inclined to know
his opinion respecting the religion of Christ. Far be it from me to
intimate in the remotest degree that the testimony of any man, however
distinguished, can add the weight of a single feather to the abounding
evidences of the Christian faith, or grave it a line deeper on the heart
of a true believer; but it may close the lips of the ribald, it may
repress the vanity of her who, forgetting what Christianity has done for
woman, aims her feeble shafts against its humblest professor, to know
that such a man as Tazewell, whose whole life was spent in the science
of proofs and probabilities, must henceforth be ranked with Milton and
Newton--the prince of song and the prince of philosophy, and with our
own Pendleton and Wythe--those serene and undying lights of the
law--among the stedfast believers in the truth of the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments.[11]
It has been said that Tazewell had no ambition. In one sense he was the
most ambitious man of our times; but his ambition was out of the
ordinary range. To retain a seat in a deliberative assembly, and endure
the routine of daily sessions for months at a time; to take upon himself
a regular foreign mission, or even to accept the presidency itself,
would, I firmly believe, have been most grating to his feelings. Of all
but the last we may speak with certainty. But if some difficult
proposition was forced upon the public mind; if some extraordinary
emergency had presented itself; if he had been called upon to encounter
a national question of the first magnitude, from which others would have
shrunk, and which was susceptible of a definitive adjustment in a given
time, I believe he would have accepted the mission at once. Had Mr.
Madison, on his election to the presidency, called him to the State
Department with a _carte blanche_ as to the terms and mode of settling
the vexed questions which grew out of the Berlin and Milan decrees and
the British orders in council, I do not say that he would have accepted
a seat in the cabinet of a statesman whose election to the presidency he
had opposed,--for I believe he would not; but, if he had accepted it, it
is probable those questions which were afterwards discussed by Mr.
Webster and Lord Ashburton, and which were settled by the treaty of
Washington, would then have received a satisfactory solution. It was
this aspect of Tazewell's character which called from Randolph the
saying in his letter to Gen. Mercer, that, if such a conjuncture in our
affairs were to arise as would call into full play the faculties of
Tazewell, he would be the first man of the nineteenth century.
It has been said by some from whom better things might have been
expected, that Tazewell did not spend his latter years in a manner
altogether worthy of his great talents. To me it appears that such a
sentiment has been expressed without due reflection on all the facts of
the case, and that the retirement of such a man, under all the
circumstances, presents to the contemplative observer one of the
grandest moral spectacles of the age. We have seen that he retired from
the active employment of the bar in his 45th or 46th year, merely
following up afterwards to the appellate courts some important cases
which he had discussed in the lower. At that time he stood almost
without a rival in his profession in Virginia, and, after the death of
Pinkney, in the Supreme Court of the United States; and he might have
received as large an annual income as was ever derived from the practice
of the law in this country; and if he had devoted his time and talents
to his profession for twenty years thereafter--which he might have done,
and yet been younger on leaving off than Webster was when that eminent
lawyer pleaded the great India-rubber case at Trenton, and would still
have had sixteen or eighteen years to spare for repose in old age,--he
would have accumulated the most colossal fortune which has ever been
made by forensic exertions at the American or the English bar. Now this
very aspect of the life of Mr. Tazewell strikes me, and I feel assured
will appear to posterity, as the most imposing, the most eloquent, and
the most sublime picture in his various career. When he retired he was
not wealthy, according to our present standard of wealth, and he had
several children born to him after his retirement; yet, with enormous
wealth within his grasp, and a moderate competency only in hand, he
withdrew from the field of his fame to the bosom of his family,
thenceforth to draw his living from the moderate profits of agriculture.
I have said that Mr. Tazewell's character was formed in the mould of our
early statesmen; and of all those statesmen there was not one who did
not delight in agriculture as the crowning pleasure and pursuit of life,
and more especially as its shadows were falling low. It was this spirit
which impelled Washington, amid all the magnificence of office when
office was held by such a man, to sigh for the shades of Mount Vernon,
and to prefer the simple employments of the farm, where he might behold,
in the words of the "judicious Hooker," "God's blessing spring out of
our mother earth," above the glory of arms, and the fleeting shadows and
shabby splendors of public office.
But the lesson which the example of Tazewell presents to the American
mind is of yet greater significancy. If there be one unpleasant trait
more revolting than another in our national character, it is the
inordinate pursuit of wealth: _rem, quocunque modo rem_. To get money is
the first lesson of childhood, the engrossing purpose of middle age, and
the harassing employment of declining years. Such is the rabid thirst
for money, its effects are seen over the whole moral and intellectual
character of the people. It constitutes wealth as the standard of worth,
and all the noblest qualities of the head and the heart are despised in
the comparison. As wealth is the point of honor, it must be sought at
every hazard, and the mortifying occurrences of the last twenty years,
the dishonest bankruptcies, the numerous forgeries, perpetrated by the
first people in social position, on a scale never known before, the
innumerable defalcations which have crowded the papers, until they have
become a matter of course; the insatiable craving for the money and
lands of others, which seems to have passed from the workshop and the
counting-room to the halls of legislation; the unbounded extravagance of
expenditure which might serve to indicate the possession of the darling
prize, and, above all, that worst sign of all, the almost perfect
indifference with which the most enormous frauds are received by the
public; these and similar things show the bitter consequences of this
vulgar passion. I rejoice that our venerable friend, when in the prime
of his extraordinary powers, and at a period of life when the flame of
ambition glows wildest, turned his back upon the gilded phantoms which
have lured so many to destruction, and sought repose in the bosom of
domestic life.
The conduct of Mr. Tazewell in respect of public office has also been
misunderstood. He would hold no office in perpetuity, and I have already
shown that, whenever called upon to render public service, he obeyed the
call without a thought of the pecuniary sacrifices which he inevitably
must incur;[12] and it would be easy, if it were proper, to show that
Mr. Tazewell, though in retirement, afforded most valuable assistance to
those who held office, and indeed to all who chose to consult him. He
held it as a settled maxim, that it was the first duty of every citizen
to serve his country; and I have no doubt that, if the office of Chief
Justice of the United States had become vacant during the first fifteen
or twenty years after his retirement from the bar, and he had been
called to fill it, as perhaps he would have been, he would have accepted
the appointment; and I further believe that if the presidency of the
Court of Appeals had been tendered him, or even the judgeship of the
Superior Court on the Eastern Shore, provided in this last case he did
not interfere with the expectations of his brethren of that bar, he
would have accepted either, and held it for a certain time, and for a
certain time only; for he had no respect for perpetuities in great
public trusts.
They also misjudge him who say that he ought to have composed a great
historical work for posterity--a task which Jefferson, Madison, and John
Quincy Adams, with every possible motive urging them to its performance,
declined to undertake. In this respect, Mr. Tazewell acted with his
usual good sense; not that he did not write on particular topics of our
history, as, for instance, the difference between the original and
recent surveys, a subject which he has illustrated with a skill in
mathematics, with a beauty of argumentation, and with a minuteness of
historical research wholly unexpected, and altogether admirable; and so
with some other topics. But he acted well in not undertaking the history
of Virginia. To write that history worthily would require a residence of
some years abroad. Of the materials necessary for such a work not a
twentieth part exists in Virginia, or in the United States. Such a work,
and Mr. Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in
that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame.
There is another view of a more personal kind. Whether history is of
higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the
greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain,
that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and
for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been
united in a supreme degree in any human being, and certainly not in the
literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. To pass over other languages and
nations, let us look at our own. One of the greatest minds of this age,
and, so far as logical capacity is concerned, perhaps of any age, was
that of Chief Justice Marshall; and yet, from the date of the
publication of his Life of Washington, which is a history of the
colonies and of the United States, until it was rewritten and revised by
him late in life, it hung like a millstone from his neck; and it has
required all his subsequent legal fame, his exalted patriotism, and his
domestic purity, to keep him above water in this country. As for
England, the work sunk instantly and irrecoverably.
The writing of history, difficult at all times, is more difficult now.
Recent history trenches alike upon the epic and the dramatic, and the
narrator must be half a poet and half a player. It is, therefore, a
subject of gratulation that Mr. Tazewell did not undertake a work which,
if done at home, would have been badly done, and which, if done at all,
must have called into exercise a peculiar class of talents which neither
the bar nor the senate tends to develop, but which in their highest
efforts alone can ensure success. I rejoice that the fame of Tazewell is
free from such questionable topics. There he stands, great as a citizen
of a free commonwealth, great at the bar, great in the senate, and
great in his rich, various, and overflowing talk.
Tazewell spent his old age as Washington, Jefferson, Jay, Madison, and
John Adams spent theirs, but with far greater success than them all, in
attending mainly to his private affairs, and in those offices which a
splendid reputation draws in its train. He was exact in all things. If
you inquired what any one of his estates cost him, he would take down a
bound foolscap volume, turn at once to the farm in question, read off
the price, the amount of its outfit, the number of hands engaged in
working it, and, if you pleased to listen, the cost of every improvement
he put upon it, the division of its fields, and their products for every
year since he owned it, and the money value of those products in market.
He knew what fields on his various estates were in cultivation; and in
the spring--for all his crops were annual--he made an estimate of the
probable product of each field, and entered it in the book; and in the
fall, the actual result, which sometimes fell a little short, sometimes
slightly exceeded, and sometimes was identical with the estimate of the
spring. This process was something more than a pastime; it kept him
intimately acquainted with his different estates, and was a severe check
on the management of the overseers. He loved the game of chess, was
always ready to engage in it, and often played alone. He read chess
periodicals, kept an account of his own moves, and, deducting the
employment which it gave him when his eyes were dimmed with reading,
devoted to that fascinating but frivolous game more time and attention
than it deserved.
To form a just opinion of Mr. Tazewell in private life, he must have
been seen again and again. In matters of business he was scrupulously
exact himself, and would be satisfied with nothing less from others. In
this way he may have given offence, and subjected himself to the charge
of closeness; but it was partly the result of his legal habits, and
partly of the rigid system which pervaded his financial schemes. That
the love of accumulation was no element in the case was shown, apart
from the great lesson which his life will read to all, by his large
deposits in the vaults of the banks, by which, in the course of thirty
years, he must have lost thousands; and by the proverbial moderation of
his fees.[13] Such was his care and judgment that I do not think he
ever made a bad investment, or lost a sum of money.
Withal I am inclined to wish that he had devoted the first ten years of
his retirement to a work on the Laws of Nations, and especially of the
Law of Admiralty, which was the favorite science of his venerable
grandfather, and of which, during the preceding twenty years, he had
obtained so perfect a mastery. He loved the Common Law, revelled in its
subtleties, expounded with a richness and a grace ever to be remembered
the leading statutes by which the wisdom of a thousand years had
controlled or modified it, and gloried in it as the living remembrancer
of the liberties of his ancestral land. But he regarded the law of
admiralty with peculiar and almost hereditary affection. It suited the
caste of his intellect. No ordinary horizon bounded its sphere. It
overlooked the limits of any single realm, however proud that realm
might seem. It was the queen of the sea, whose influence, cast far and
wide over the raging billows, breathed peace and safety to the humblest
sailor who trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized
man the flag of the feeblest power. Amid the changing revolutions of the
human will, amid the fall of empires and the ruin of dynasties, it alone
was immutable. It was the tie of nations, which bound men in one
universal brotherhood, and gathered peoples about a common altar. No
private rule, no immemorial custom, no formal statute, controlled its
operations; but right reason in all its supremacy enacted its
provisions, and justice, with an even hand, in every dominion and on
every sea under heaven, was its pure and equal administrator. Tazewell
was fond of repeating that eloquent and exact definition of the general
law, which Lord Mansfield, plucking it from the fragments of Cicero's
work on the Republic, has made the household thought of our common
nature: _Non erit alia lex Romæ, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac,
sed et apud omnes gentes et omnia tempora, una eademque lex
obtinebit_.[14] Such a science suited the complexion of Tazewell's
genius; and in his practice he had framed a large and liberal system of
his own. The task would have been a work of love, and would have
required little more than the embodiment of his thoughts on paper. But
the engagements and associations of Southern life are hostile to
authorship, and the fortunate time glided by forever.