There was, we believe, not one of the
noted controlling families that was not related to them by blood or
marriage.
In 1773, when John Randolph was born, the family was still powerful;
and the region last trodden by the Army of the Potomac was still
adorned by the seats of its leading members. Cawsons, the mansion in
which he was born, was situated at the junction of the James and
Appomattox, in full view of City Point and Bermuda Hundred, and only
an after-breakfast walk from Dutch Gap. The mansion long ago
disappeared, and nothing now marks its site but negro huts. Many of
those exquisite spots on the James and Appomattox, which we have seen
men pause to admire while the shells were bursting overhead, were
occupied sixty years ago by the sumptuous abodes of the Randolphs and
families related to them. Mattoax, the house in which John Randolph
passed much of his childhood, was on a bluff of the Appomattox, two
miles above Petersburg; and Bizarre, the estate on which he spent his
boyhood, lay above, on both sides of the same river. Over all that
extensive and enchanting region, trampled and torn and laid waste by
hostile armies in 1864 and 1865, John Randolph rode and hunted from
the time he could sit a pony and handle a gun.
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