Hugh Blair Grigsby - Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell
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Hugh Blair Grigsby >> Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell
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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 Romae, 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.
A hundred years hence, when Norfolk may or may not have become the
commercial seat of a vast Southern empire; when the face of external
nature in this low region, unmarked by mountain ranges, will be wholly
changed in all but in the course of our great river and of our two
glorious seas; and when the rising genius of Virginia, turning from the
sages and statesmen of Greece and Rome, from Socrates and Demosthenes,
and from Cato and Cincinnatus, shall seek to know the details of the
lives of the greater men who have adorned our own annals; it may be
pleasing to know the spot in which Tazewell spent his latter years, and
the manner of his private life. Simplicity marked his dress, his
dwelling and its furniture, and all his accompaniments. His house and
grounds were such as appeared, if you looked into the assessors' books,
of considerable value; but if you looked at the objects themselves, they
were such as any respectable citizen might possess without the
reputation of great wealth. The lot, bounded on the east by Granby
street, included several acres in the heart of the city; and the house,
which, though capacious, had no idle room, was a plain structure of wood
built originally by a private citizen of moderate means as his abode.
Its position in front of a large lawn overlooking the Elizabeth could
not be surpassed. The water came rippling up to the southern enclosure
twice a day from the sea, and presented a broad silvery expanse on which
every arriving and departing vessel of the port was borne in broad view
from the portico. But, aside from the assessed value of the lot, which
was accidental and produced nothing, there was no exhibition of wealth
within. All was plain as became the residence of a man who had those
claims to public respect which no mere wealth could give, and which the
absence of wealth could not impair. As you lifted the knocker of his
door--for he never adopted the comparative novelty of bells in our
region--a black servant, who, with his ancestors of several generations,
had been born in the family, soon appeared, and you entered a broad
central passage which extended through the house, which was the old
sitting place of Virginia families for nine months of the year, and
which is hardly known in the crowded cities of the North. The floor of
the passage was covered with a strip of carpeting in winter, and in
summer presented a smooth polished surface devoid of matting. If you
opened the first door on the left, you entered the office of Mr.
Tazewell, a well lighted southern room, fourteen by twenty, in the
middle of which was a table furnished with writing apparatus and covered
with books and manuscripts. By that table, in an arm-chair, he commonly
sate in cold weather; and the chances were, at least during the morning,
you would find him pen in hand, and sheets of paper freshly written and
full of figures strewn about him. It was rare that you saw any thing
like continuous writing except in the case of a letter. He delighted in
calculations, which kept his mind sweet and clear. At his left hand, and
a little behind him, was a small bookcase containing about two hundred
volumes, neatly bound, of the English classics, all printed forty years
ago and more, the very pith and quintessence of the philosophy, the
politics, the literature of all ages strained through the alembic of the
Anglo-Saxon mind. The office opened by a large folding-door into the
capacious dining-room where the family usually sate, and where he
lingered after each meal, talking, or reading the day's paper, which he
took in to the last, as if loth to retire to his own particular den. In
summer he sate in the passage, or on the broad tessellated pavement of
the portico. On the right hand on entering the front door you saw a
small room in which an aged or invalid guest might repose without
ascending the stairway, and in which Gen. Jackson and Mr. Randolph
lodged at various times. And adjoining this room was the parlor, a
single room of twenty by twenty, containing probably the same furniture
he purchased when he first went to housekeeping, all plain now, though
elegant in its day, and thoroughly kept; and suspended from the walls of
the room were the portraits of his father, Judge Tazewell, a handsome
youth of one-and-twenty though a married man at that age, and his
bride, a sweet face almost perfectly reflected in the features of one of
his own daughters, both well executed by the elder Peale, and in good
preservation. There, too, were the portraits of Col. Nivison and his
wife, the parents of Mrs. Tazewell; of Mr. Tazewell himself by Thompson,
the most intellectual and lifelike of all his portraits, taken at the
age of forty-two; of his wife's two sisters, who were the beauties and
the belles of forty-five years ago, and who have long passed away, and
of their brother, the amiable and beloved William Nivison, whose early
death was long deplored by our people. The general library of Mr.
Tazewell was kept in a separate building, and consisted of his numerous
law books, of the British statutes at large in many thick quartos, and
most of the writers of Queen Anne's time and of the Georges, many in the
original quarto, and few or none later than the beginning of the
century. Some of the books had a history of their own. There was a copy
of the Lectures on History, which Dr. Priestley had presented to Judge
Tazewell, the father of our subject, in memory of the kindness of the
judge to the author when he was flying from the flames of Birmingham.
The beautiful copy of Wilson's Ornithology with Bonaparte's
continuation, which at the date of its publication was one of the most
elegant issues of the American press, had a singular value in the eyes
of Mr. Tazewell as the bequest of his friend John Wickham, an extract
from the will having been pasted on the fly-leaf of the first volume.
As soon as the visitor fixed his eyes on Mr. Tazewell all else was
forgotten. He was without exception in middle life the most imposing,
and in old age the most venerable person I ever beheld. His height
exceeded six feet; and until recently, whether sitting or standing, he
was commonly erect, and always when in full flow. His head and chest
were on a large scale, and his vast blue eye, which always seemed to
gaze afar, was aptly termed by Wirt an "eye of ocean." In early youth he
was uncommonly handsome. In middle life he was very thin though lithe
and strong, with a face the outline of which is very like that of Lord
Mansfield. But for the last thirty-five years, the period during which I
have been familiar with his person, all those traces of early beauty
which had marked his youthful face, and which in middle life may be seen
in the portrait of Thompson, had disappeared, and he was altogether on
a more developed scale. His stature had become large, his features were
massive, his silver hair fell in ringlets about his neck, and his
bearing was grave, and with strangers, until the ice was broken, almost
stern; and he appeared with a majesty which filled the most careless
spectator with veneration and awe. And when we add to these the
overshadowing reputation universally accorded him, we can readily
imagine the solicitude with which the most eminent of his contemporaries
approached him for the first time. But beneath the cold surface flowed a
warm and cordial current of generous feeling, or, as John Randolph said
to Mercer, "his ice rested on a volcano;" and the firm grasp of the
hand, the ready talk on any topic of the time, the quick illustration
which was so frequently borrowed from some characteristic or incident in
the life of the person, or the person's ancestor, with whom he was
conversing, the eloquent disquisition playful or profound, put the
visitor at his ease, and hours flew like minutes in refreshing talk. It
was a mistake to suppose that Mr. Tazewell arrogated all the talk to
himself, and purposely kept others silent in his company. On the
contrary, he delighted in colloquial discourse, and listened with rapt
attention to all that was said; and was then more brilliant and
entertaining than ever in argument, or narrative, or repartee; and on
such occasions he was a most instructive and entertaining companion. I
remember his encountering at dinner-table several gallant captains of
the navy on the subject of the movements of a ship under certain
relations of wind and tide; and although the naval gentlemen combated
his position with much boldness and skill, he worked his ship, at least
in the opinion of the landsmen who were present, safely into her
destined harbor. It was from the fear which even able men felt in his
presence, and which made them averse to venture their remarks, that from
pure good nature Mr. Tazewell sought to entertain and instruct them in
detail on any topic of the time; though it was plain that he courted
inquiry and remark, which to a certain extent was necessary to the full
and pleasant exercise of his faculties. But it was infinitely amusing to
hear him banter an obstinate old lawyer on a point of law, catching at
his arguments before he had half uttered them, and dissecting them with
such wonderful dexterity that the listeners, shaking with laughter,
saw, probably for the first time, that the severest logic and the
deepest learning became in his hands the source of the keenest wit and
of the broadest humor. What was conspicuous to all who had frequent
opportunities of seeing Mr. Tazewell in his own house or in the house of
a friend was, that he had no set topics. His range of reading and
observation had been so wide, his knowledge of men and things was so
vast, his faculties of combination were so active, it was impossible to
state a question to be decided by precedent or reasoning, which he could
not instantly handle with a force of logic which most men could only
have reached by deliberate preparation. But all that humor and wit and
genius are gone: that stream of talk has ceased to flow; and on leaving
the study, where for so many years he delighted his hearers by acts of
personal kindness and instructed them by his wisdom, we pass into
another room--the saddest of all--the chamber of Death.
There, in, that room above the parlor, on the bright Sabbath morning of
May the sixth, at twenty-five minutes past ten, he breathed his last. He
was slightly indisposed the Monday previous; but until the evening of
that day he did not appear to be seriously ill. He complained of no
particular pain, but of a general restlessness and _malaise_. On Friday,
two days before his death, seated in his chair as the easiest position
he could obtain, he engaged in a game of chess with a friend; but his
tremulous hand refused to make the moves, which were made by another at
his suggestion, and were recorded by one of his daughters. He was too
weak, however, to finish the game, which was postponed with his consent
to another time. It was now plain that his disease, which was pneumonia,
could not be conquered, and that his end was nigh. On Saturday morning
his faculties became clouded. He was heard to call a long lost son by
the name known only to the family; then the name of his dear departed
wife was uttered; and presently the name of the master of the steamer
that plies between Norfolk and the Eastern Shore where that son and that
wife were buried; showing that his own burial by their side was passing
in dim review before his failing faculties. In the course of Saturday
his mind was wholly gone. On Sunday morning, a quarter after ten, he
drew a long breath, and it was thought that all was over; but he
rallied, and another long inspiration followed. And then all was still.
His spirit had passed away. An hour later I entered the chamber, and
took a seat by the side of the corpse. His hands were folded on his
chest, which loomed larger than in life; and his extended form looked
like one of those marble effigies which adorn the tombs of his Norman
sires. His features appeared full and natural as if a deep sleep had
come upon him. The massy forehead, the firm aquiline nose, the wide
reliant upper lip which looked as I have so often seen it when about to
put forth a serious utterance, and the broad chin--all were there as in
life; and even his silver hair, curled freshly by daughter's fingers,
clustered about his neck and brow. The "ocean eye" alone was closed.
Death had put his seal upon it. As I gazed upon that majestic form reft
of its mighty spirit and soon to be laid away forever, and as I pressed
the parting salutation upon those lips not yet cold in death, on which
admiring Senates have so often hung, and from which I had so often heard
the words of wisdom and affection, I thought of those who were bathing
his dust with their tears--of the kindest and tenderest of fathers, and
of the bravest and best of friends; and I wept as I felt that a large
and various chapter of my own humble life, written all over with the
memories of this illustrious man,--a chapter running from early youth to
grey hairs--would thenceforth be closed evermore. It was only when the
flood was past, that I thought of our common country.
His time had come. He had disappeared from our sight to take his place
in history. He had attained an age almost double that which his father
had reached when that honored statesman fell in a distant city in the
service of his country; and he had been blessed with a larger share of
health than usually attends extreme old age. His faculties, which had
kindled the admiration of our fathers, shone bright to the last. His
children had reached maturity, and watched and cheered with tender care
his failing hours; and with each revolving morn his numerous
grandchildren came with their infantile ways to win the blessing of
their ancestor. Had he lived, he could not have performed any public
service. The voice whose tones had so often echoed in the forum was
gone, and his feeble limbs could no longer bear his weight. His duty
was done. His orations for the crown had all been delivered; and that
crown had been won and worn for half a century with the modesty which
became a wise and virtuous statesman of a republic; and when it was
about to be taken from his brow to be garnered for the coming ages, its
flowers were fresh, and, like those which the muse of Milton strewed
about the walks of Eden, were without a thorn. He had run a long and
glorious course. His duty was all done. He had taken his place in the
history of his country.
In the contemplation of such a character, when the keen pang of parting
is past, joy should take the place of mourning. Let us rejoice at the
prospect which greeted his closing eyes. In his last days he was cheered
by the greatness of his country. When he first saw the light, his
beloved Virginia was indeed bounded by the Ohio, and had a nominal line
on the Mississippi, the extreme verge of the British claim; but she was
the humble vassal of imperial power. He saw that Virginia, when,
retiring from the Danube of the West, she gave independence and position
to that lovely region, which, under the name of Kentucky, became her
equal in the federal union. He saw that Virginia, beneath the banner of
the gallant Clark, dipping her feet in the waters of the Northern lakes;
and he saw her cede to the confederation that vast North-western domain
with the single provision that states as free and as sovereign as
herself should be carved from its territory; and he saw those states,
one by one, take their station in the American Union. When he was born,
the flag of Britain streamed from the old Capitol in his native city,
and flapped above his head; and in the South the St. Mary's was the
extreme limit of British territory. He lived to see that flag the trophy
of his country, and to see the stars and stripes wave above the waters
of the Mexican gulf, and over those of the Atlantic and Pacific seas. He
lived to see our numbers swell from three millions to more than
thirty-one millions; and our commerce which at his birth was confined to
a few ports of Britain float on every sea, and freighted with the wealth
of every clime. He saw our extended country flourishing, beyond the
example of so young a nation in ancient or in modern times, in the arts
and sciences, in knowledge and in power and in true religion. And, with
such a scene before him, he closed his eyes in peace.
Let us remember ourselves, and inculcate upon our children the lessons
of so august a life. Let us point them to his pure and studious youth,
and his love of those who taught him, weeping at the age of eight in
parting from his young tutor, whom he was to meet again; and later as
his rival and equal at the bar; and later still when both, having
attained the highest honors of the profession, had retired from its
walks; and later still, when half a century had elapsed, he closed a
tender and life-long friendship at his grave. Let us point to him,
unguarded by a parent's care from his third year, that parent one of the
master-spirits of a great Revolution and ever absent in his fearful
work, remarkable for his correct deportment and that perseverance in
well-doing so strikingly shown by the fact that he, alone among his
young contemporaries, finished his studies at college with the
approbation of the faculty, and received the only degree conferred upon
his class. Let us point our youth to the zeal with which he sought
instruction in useful knowledge; how, a mere boy, almost imperceptibly,
it may be in the office of his grandfather, or of Mr. Wythe, or of Mr.
Wickham, or of the General Court, but some how, somewhere, perhaps drawn
on the instant from the philosophy of the law, he acquired a thorough
knowledge of all the mysteries and learning of a clerk of a court--a
mastery so thorough, that in after years he was consulted by the most
eminent clerks in difficult cases in their calling; and how he not only
mastered that department of knowledge, but studied its mere mechanical
details, and learned that beautiful hand which was conspicuous in all
his writings. Let us recall to them the industry with which he, the
heir-apparent of a fortune, which, however, he never received, pursued
the study of the law; how, by his moral purity, his intelligence, and
his becoming deportment, he won, a mere youth, the confidence and the
intimacy of some of the most distinguished men of that age; and how he
heeded the lessons which he heard from their lips, and imitated the
singular virtues which shone in their lives. Let us recall the fact, so
patent in his life, and so cheering to the young and virtuous of every
land, that moral worth and abilities will ever be promptly recognized by
those true patrons of the age--the People--who took the young Tazewell
in charge, who, at the age of one-and-twenty, sent him to the Assembly,
and who, as soon as he was eligible to a seat in the House of
Representatives, conferred upon him that most distinguished honor in
their gift and placed him in the chair of John Marshall. Let us call the
attention of our young men to the next great step in his life, when,
having obtained the highest political honors which could be conferred on
so young a man, realizing that a competent fortune was the solid basis
of independence moral and political, and that the family hearth was the
true home of human happiness; he let the cup of ambition pass from him,
and devoted himself to the practical business of life. And then let us
unfold before our youth his splendid career at the bar--a career radiant
with genius, marked by untiring industry and fidelity to the interests
confided to his care, brilliant with extraordinary displays of
intellect, upheld by dauntless courage, memorable as well by his
triumphant successes as by the moderation of his fees and by the moral
light which he diffused around him, regarding, as he ever did, rapacity,
extortion, and complicity in evil-doing as the worst of crimes, and more
memorable, as blending in a single character, and at an early age, those
uncommon qualities which separately make the reputation of a great
advocate, of a great civilian, and of a great master of the Laws of
Nations; and, more memorable still, when, his high position attained,
and able to add thousands upon thousands to his wealth, he, with noble
self-denial, put another enticing cup away from his lips, and withdrew
with a moderate competence only to the bosom of his family and to the
peaceful pursuits of agriculture, leaving, as an example worthy of all
imitation, a broad margin which Plutus might have condemned, but which
Socrates, Cato, and Cicero would have extolled, between the bar of man
and that supreme tribunal before which we must all appear; how, when in
the retirement which he so much loved, his country called for his
services, he promptly and generously rendered them, serving a long term
of years, speaking, accustomed as he was to speak, rarely, but
effectively and conclusively, so that nothing was to be said after him,
and winning laurels for himself in the high places of the land, and from
the foremost spirits of the age--laurels whose only worth in his eyes
was that he might lay them at the feet of that blessed mother of us all,
our beloved Virginia; how, when he had performed long and distinguished
service abroad, which Virginia and the whole country were anxious to
reward, he again sought retirement, relinquishing without a sigh to
others those personal honors which so fascinate the votaries of
ambition, but which had no charm for him; how, when he had formed with
the utmost deliberation his political creed, he adhered most closely and
conscientiously, and in the face of great temptations, to its cardinal
doctrines throughout his entire course; yet, throning country above
party in the empire of his affections, he did not hesitate to oppose as
readily and as fearlessly his political friends when he deemed them
wrong as he sustained them when he believed them to be right; how,
though a stern upholder of the public honor, he ever sought to avoid
war, when it was consistent with the public interests to defer it, and,
in 1807, when a false step on his part would have brought on an instant
rupture with Great Britain, he, with consummate tact and courage, poured
oil upon the troubled waters, and averted a war which, under the
circumstances, would have been worse than a civil war--_bellum plus quam
civile_--a war to the knife; how, at a later day, when, on the eve of
the conclusion of the war in Europe, it was resolved to commence
hostilities with England, he sought to postpone the struggle for a
season, convinced that a short delay would render it unnecessary, and
how signally his foresight was justified by the result; thus
recommending, in opposition to the pervading sentiment of the State, a
policy which would have saved thousands of valuable lives, and a hundred
millions of money, expended in our contest with England; how, at a still
later day, when the Senate of the United States, unconsciously and
needlessly, were about to involve us in a war with Spain, his eloquence
rescued the country from the impending danger; yet, when war was
declared against his will, ever ready to unite with his countrymen in
prosecuting hostilities with the greatest vigor; how, alone among all
the departed statesmen of Virginia, he managed, with the industry and
attention of an ordinary citizen, his private affairs, into which he
introduced a system which the planter and the merchant might wisely
imitate, and which enabled him to compete with his most skilful
contemporaries in the success which followed all his exertions; how,
unseduced by a love of gold in an age of speculation, he never committed
a dollar to the caprices of fortune, or lost an investment; how, though
affluent with wealth, won mainly by downright industry, and waxing
greater every hour by the force of that wondrous element in the
accumulation of money, a lengthened lapse of years, he constantly and
steadily turned his back upon the extravagance and social follies of the
day, and exhibited in his household and in his life those stern and
sterling virtues of prudence, economy, and thrift, which were the
characteristics of the early fathers of the republic; displaying before
the eyes of the people a model wherein the loftiest genius, the most
varied and profound learning, the most fervid patriotism ever sinking
self in country, the severe simplicity and frugality which should ever
shine along the track of a true republican statesman, and an escutcheon
undebased by a solitary vice, were united in all their fair and grand
proportions; how, in his happy home, he dispensed, freely and without
price, the marvellous stores of learning and experience which he had
amassed during his long and eventful career, turning his modest study
into a chamber of philosophy, and the well-spring of oracles more
practical, more prudent, more profound, and penetrating further into the
abyss of the dark and illimitable future than were ever uttered at the
Pythian fane; and last, though not least, how, in the lingering twilight
of his years as in their earliest dawn, he loved Virginia, not with that
cold feeling which looks to latitude and longitude, to East or to West,
as the limits of affection, but, first, in that tender and household
light, as the home of his ancestry, the sepulchre of his sires, his own
birth and burial-place, and the birth and burial-place of those who were
dear to him, and then in that more majestic aspect as the bride of
liberty, the first born of the colonies of Britain, and the first born
of the States of the new world, as the mother of heroes, statesmen, and
philosophers, "above all Greek, above all Roman fame," as the sole
mistress of his heart, valuing her humblest commission, whether stamped
by the greater or the lesser seal, above the highest honors which a
federal executive could bestow, or the most gorgeous transcript of
imperial praise, as a free, puissant, and perfect commonwealth, as an
integral, independent, and sovereign State, as independent, as
sovereign, as when she struck the lion with his senseless motto from her
flag, and placed in their stead her own Virtue, erect, with a helmet on
her head, a spear in her hand, and a fallen crown at her feet, and that
ever dear and ever living sentiment, "SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS," and
especially and touchingly, with unutterable and inextinguishable
affection, as the beneficent parent who had rocked his cradle, who had
held out to him in youth the helping hand, who had honored his meridian
and his setting years with her greenest bays, and who as he humbly and
fondly hoped, would drop a tear upon his tomb, and hold his name not
unworthy of her remembrance. Let us, gentlemen, recall these and similar
traits of this illustrious man, and holding up before posterity his pure
and bright example, let us not only honor it with our tongues, but
imprint it on our hearts, and imitate it in our lives.
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