III. styles "State pride," we may call him the
very incarnation. "When I speak of my country," he would say, "I mean
the Commonwealth of Virginia." He was the first eminent man in the
Southern States who was prepared in spirit for war against the
government of the United States; for daring the Nullification
imbroglio of 1833, he not only was in the fullest accord with Calhoun,
but he used to say, that, if a collision took place between the
nullifiers and the forces of the United States, he, John Randolph of
Roanoke, old and sick as he was, would have himself buckled on his
horse, Radical, and fight for the South to his last breath.
But then he was a man of genius, travel, and reading. We find him,
therefore, as we have said, a _conscious_ witness of his Virginia's
decline. Along with a pride in the Old Dominion that was fanatical,
there was in this man's heart a constant and most agonizing sense of
her inferiority to lands less beloved. By no tongue or pen--not by
Summer's tongue nor. Olmstead's pen--have more terrible pictures been
drawn of Virginia's lapse into barbarism, than are to be found in John
Randolph's letters.
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