We hug our lousy
cloak around us, take another _chaw of tub-backer_, float
the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons,
where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon
constitutional points."
What truth and painting in this passage! But if we had asked this
suffering genius as to the cause of his "country's" decline, he would
have given us a mad answer indeed. He would have said, in his wild
way, that it was all Tom Jefferson's doing, sir. Tom Jefferson
abolished primogeniture in Virginia, and thus, as John Randolph
believed, destroyed the old families, the life and glory of the.
State. Tom Jefferson was unfaithful to the States' Rights and
strict-constructionist creed, of which he was the expounder and
trustee, and thus let in the "American system" of Henry Clay, with its
protective tariff, which completed the ruin of the agricultural
States. This was his simple theory of the situation. These were the
reasons why he despaired of ever again seeing, to use his own
language,
"the Nelsons, the Pages, the Byrds, and Fairfaxes, living in
their palaces, and driving their coaches and sixes, or the
good old Virginia gentlemen in the Assembly drinking their
twenty and forty bowls of rack punches, and madeira and
claret, in lieu of a knot of deputy sheriffs and hack
attorneys, each with his cruet of whiskey before him, and
puddle of tobacco-spittle between his legs.
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