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\1RG1XIA BIOGRAPHY
their devotion to those principles, which
men of their breed had wrested from John
at Runnymede. He loved to hear recounted,
and to recount in turn, stories of the beau-
tiful and gracious old civilization, which he
had seen swept away by war and the sub-
sequent shabby tide of "progress." Though
unconscious of it. he himself was. in his gen-
eration, a consummate flower of that civiliza-
tion, which, in the old Roman phrase, "was
of its own kind." and to which, despite his
twentieth-century spirit of enterprise, he
always turned with wistful eyes. Once,
w hen we were travelling togeiner in the far
south and our talk was of the proper am-
l)itions in life, he turned to the writer and
said with the most perfect simplicity, "of
earthly things, my highest ambition is to
li\e and die as becomes a \'irginia gentle-
man."
Doubtless, it seemed to those of a younger generation that, in his passionate loyalty, this man of ardent temperament somewhat idealized the picture that he drew of those brave old days, but he had seen with his own eyes, in his boyhood and young manhood, its high-bred simplicity, its generous cour- age, its unfailing courtesies to gentle and simple alike, its reverence for women, its simple faith in things religious, and he be- lieved with all the fervor of his soul that it was the highest and finest type of civiliza- tion in the western world. He held with Emerson that "the true test of civilization is not the census or the size of the cities, nor the crops — no. but the kind of men the coun- try turns out." Tried by this test, Virginia civilization need fear comparison with none other on earth.
As to slavery, he had seen only the gra- cious, kindly side of it. as actually adminis- tered in Virginia and not as grotesquely caricatured in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Like the great majority of gentle folk in Vir- ginia, his family has long regarded slavery as wrong in principle, if beneficent in prac- tice, and as an economic blunder, the remedy for which lay in gradual emancipation. In his father's and mother's immediate family connection, the opinions of John Randolph of Roanoke (his father's "foster-father."' his mother's "dearest uncle"), naturally counted for much — of even greater weight were the views of his mother's grandfather, the learned and accomplished St. George Tucker, a judge of the general court, who
had succeeded George Wythe as professor
of law at William and ]\Iary College, and
who afterwards became president of the
court of appeals and a United States circuit
judge. He remembered that as early as
1796. St. George Tucker had published his
"Dissertation of Slavery with a Proposition
for its Gradual Abolition in Virginia" — that
John Randolph in his will had manumitted
all his slaves, stating in his last testament
that he "greatly regretted that he had ever
been the owner of one" — that Randolph's
brother Richard (the language of whose will
is even more emphatic as to the evils of the
system) had done the same, as had Edmund
Randolph at the time of his resignation as
Washington's secretary of state. But he
also remembered, with a sort of righteous
indignation, and with a virile scorn, the
mawkish maunderings of the self-righteous
Pharisees, who. harping on "the blot of
slavery." derided \'irginia's claim to a high
civilization.
He had at his finger's end the whole story of how colonial \'irginia repeatedly during the eighteenth century tried to rid herself of the moral and economic burden, but had always been stopped by the mother-coun- try — how in the convention of 1787. that framed the Constitution. Virginia's efforts to put a sharp and definite stop to the slave- trade, had been defeated by the votes of the New England delegates — finally, how the carefully matured plans of the leading men of the commonwealth put forward in 1831-32 to bring about gradual emancipa- tion, had been wrecked by the insolent and aggressive interference of the fanatics, who afterwards reviled her as a "slave-holding oligarchy."
His own relations with a large number of colored servants employed both at "Labur- num" and at his plantation. "Eagle Point," were quite those of ante-bellum days, when the master was the friend, supporter and defender, and the servants (they were never called "slaves" by gentle-folk in the old days) proudly regarded themselves as mem- bers of the family. His affectionate personal interest in them, when ill or in trouble of any sort, was constant — his benefactions in- numerable, extending even to their relatives not in his employ. In turn, they simply worshii)ed "liars' Joe," as they always called him ("freedom" or no "freedom"), arid when the end came, eisfht of these faith-
