" The "wretched old man" whom the people were
to "put down" was Andrew Jackson, not John C. Calhoun.
We do not forget that, when John Randolph uttered these words, he was
scarcely an accountable being. Disease had reduced him to a skeleton,
and robbed him of almost every attribute of man except his capacity to
suffer. But even in his madness he was a representative man, and spoke
the latent feeling of his class. The diseases which sharpened his
temper unloosed his tongue; he revealed the tendency of the Southern
mind, as a petulant child reveals family secrets. In his good and in
his evil he was an exaggerated Southerner of the higher class. He was
like them, too, in this: they are not criminals to be punished, but
patients to be cured. Sometimes, of late, we have feared that they
resemble him also in being incurable.
As long as Americans take an interest in the history of their country,
they will read with interest the strange story of this sick and
suffering representative of sick and suffering Virginia. To the last,
old Virginia wore her ragged robes with a kind of grandeur which was
not altogether unbecoming, and which to the very last imposed upon
tory minds.
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