He could not have correctly answered the question we have
proposed, but he _was_ an answer to it. Born when George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison were Virginia
farmers, and surviving to the time when Andrew Jackson was President
of the United States, he lived through the period of the decline of
his race, and he was of that decline a conscious exemplification. He
represented the decay of Virginia, himself a living ruin attesting by
the strength and splendor of portions of it what a magnificent
structure it was once. "Poor old Virginia! Poor old Virginia!" This
was the burden of his cry for many a year. Sick, solitary, and half
mad, at his lonely house in the wilderness of Roanoke, suffering from
inherited disease, burdened with inherited debt, limited by inherited
errors, and severed by a wall of inherited prejudice from the life of
the modern world, he stands to us as the type of the palsied and dying
State. Of the doctrine of States' Rights he was the most consistent
and persistent champion; while of that feeling which the North
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