Part 4

To confirm the remark that Mr. Tazewell, though opposed to the restrictive policy of Jefferson, was still friendly to that statesman, and was unwilling to be considered hostile to him, I may recall to the recollection of my elder hearers an incident which created much amusement when it occurred. It appears that, in the winter of 1807, when Tazewell had been sent to the Assembly to attend to some local interests of Norfolk, a caucus of the republican members had been called in Richmond with a view of denouncing those who opposed the restrictive policy as deserters from the party. When the night of the caucus arrived, Tazewell, who was confined to his bed by sickness, heard of the gathering for the first time. Ill as he was, he hastened to the place of meeting, and, with his head bound with napkins, and in haggard attire, made his appearance in the middle of the caucus. The clever young men who then managed the machinery of the party were struck dumb by his presence as by that of an apparition. Then Tazewell spoke. He reasoned upon the impolicy of forcing a third party into existence, when, while he was speaking, the winds might bear over the waters the revocation of the British orders and the French decrees, and all would be well. He showed that, while he disapproved a single measure of the administration, he heartily approved its general policy, and the constitutional doctrines which composed its faith. There was no reply. The meeting dispersed, and my democratic friends have ever since been cautious how they undertook to read clever fellows out of the party.

In 1807 occurred one of those painful incidents which roused the people of that day to madness--which fills the heart, even at this late day, with pain and sadness, but which has such a connection with Mr. Tazewell, that I, a Norfolk man, addressing Norfolk men, cannot pass it by in silence. On the early morn of the 22d of June, a frigate, built by your own mechanics, in sight of your city, baptized in the waters of your own Elizabeth, bearing the name of your own noble bay, and under the command of as gallant a Virginian as ever trod a deck, lifting her anchor in the Roads, put out to sea on the errand of her country. On the following day, unsuspecting of danger, she was attacked by the British frigate Leopard, and became her prize. The commander of the Leopard, when he had taken from the Chesapeake certain men whom he alleged were deserters from the British flag, declined to take further possession of the captured frigate, which returned to the Roads. Three of our men were killed, and sixteen wounded, during the attack. These wounded men were brought to the marine hospital, and received every possible attention. One of them died, and was buried with all the solemnities of public sorrow.

When the fatal tidings were known, there arose a piercing shriek of agony and grief, followed presently by the low, touching wail from the stricken heart of the nation. And then, the louder and the longer for the delay, came the cry for vengeance, which burst from the lips of a whole people. The promptness and dispatch with which the British frigate acted indicated deliberate design; and the suspicion instantly flashed across the public mind that the consular authorities of England in our port were privy to its execution. The outbreak in Norfolk was terrible. Had Col. Hamilton, the consul, not been long and intimately known and loved by the people, he would have been taken from his house and gibbeted on the square, as an expiation of the blood of our countrymen, wantonly shed, in a time of peace, by a British captain. An unfortunate British officer, who came up from one of the four frigates in the bay, had well-nigh been torn in pieces by the infuriated people. In such a conjuncture the ordinary forms of government were overlooked, and the citizens in full assembly, the venerable Mathews in the chair, appointed, as in the days of the Revolution, a Committee of Safety. A preamble, setting forth in becoming terms the outrage on the Chesapeake, was adopted, and it was resolved that there should be no intercourse with the British frigates in our waters, or with their agents, until the decision of the federal government was known, under the penalty of being deemed infamous; and the Committee of Safety, consisting of fourteen of our most worthy citizens, some of whose descendants are now within the sound of my voice, were authorized to take such measures as the emergency demanded.

As soon as Commodore Douglas read the resolves of the Norfolk meeting, he addressed an insolent note to the mayor of the borough, in which he declared that if the resolutions were not instantly annulled, he would prohibit every vessel bound in or out of Norfolk from proceeding to her place of destination. This letter was written on board the Bellona frigate, on the third of July. "You are aware," said this haughty Briton, "that the British flag never has, nor ever will be insulted with impunity." After some further remarks, he adds: "It therefore rests with the inhabitants of Norfolk either to engage in a war, or remain on terms of peace." And he closed his letter by saying that he had proceeded with his squadron, which consisted of four fifty-gun frigates, to Hampton Roads, to await the answer of the mayor of Norfolk, which he hoped would be forwarded without delay.

It is in this stage of the proceedings, which he probably regulated from the first, that I shall introduce Mr. Tazewell to your notice. No community was ever placed in a more delicate dilemma. The stoppage of our commerce would produce great inconvenience, and there was no force which the federal government could command at all competent to raise the embargo; and at any moment blood might be shed. The people, meantime, were in a tempest of rage. I have heard, from men who saw those times, that, if the British commodore had put his threat in execution--if, in so doing, as would have been inevitable, he had taken another human life, or shed another drop of American blood, not only would war have followed, but something worse than war, which, even at this distance of time, we tremble to contemplate. The blood of innocent Englishmen would have been shed everywhere as a propitiation to the manes of our murdered countrymen. Under these circumstances Tazewell dictated the celebrated letter of the mayor of Norfolk, which was admired over the whole country, not only for its spirit, but for the admirable tact with which it put the British commodore in the wrong. That letter, which was written on the Fourth of July, begins with this paragraph:

"Sir, I have received your menacing letter of yesterday. The day on which this answer is written ought of itself to prove to the subjects of your sovereign that the American people are not to be intimidated by menace; or induced to adopt any measures except by a sense of their perfect propriety. Seduced by the false show of security, they may be sometimes surprised and slaughtered, while unprepared to resist a supposed friend. That delusive security is now passed forever. The late occurrence has taught us to confide our safety no longer to anything than to our own force. We do not seek hostility, nor shall we avoid it. We are prepared for the worst you may attempt, and will do whatever shall be judged proper to repel force, whensoever your efforts shall render any act of ours necessary. Thus much for the threats in your letter."

Of this letter Tazewell was appointed to be the bearer, and, attended by a friend whose son is now a leading member of our bar, delivered it to Commodore Douglas on board the Bellona frigate in the presence of the captains of the fleet. An account of the scene is fortunately preserved by his own pen in a letter to the Mayor; and it is plain to see that the British captains, among whom was Sir Thomas Hardy, to whom Lord Nelson addressed in his dying moments that affectionate request, surprised and overwhelmed by the address and ability of Tazewell, recanted all their threats; and in their letter of the 5th breathed nothing but amity and peace. Whoever will read the letter of Commodore Douglas of the 3d of July, and his letter of the 5th, will see the most amusing instance of backing out in the annals of diplomacy. The federal government now took the case in hand, and the committee of safety in an eloquent address resigned the authority with which they had been invested by the people.

One of the obvious results of the peace of 1815 with Great Britain was the active employment of our commercial marine. During the war the seeds of new enterprises had been sown, and much of that capital which had previously been employed in navigation had been diverted, and fresh capital was required in its place. There was a general desire for the creation of new banks; and as the principles of banking, which have become more familiar since, were in 1816 comparatively unknown to those who composed a majority of the assembly, it was important that Norfolk should be ably represented in the assembly. At this time the existing banks, which had suspended during the war, had not resumed the payment of specie. On the subject of banks, Tazewell though brought up by men who had been almost ruined by a paper currency and hated the name, his own father having been one of the most active statesmen in forcing a resumption of specie payments after the peace of 1783, was not unwilling that commercial men should employ the agency of banks under proper restrictions; and having been elected by the people of Norfolk to the House of Delegates without his knowledge and during his absence from home, he took his seat in that body in 1816. Let it be remembered, that when he took this trust from the people of Norfolk, he was constantly engaged in the highest duties of his profession; that he was not only employed in courts, but was consulted by foreign clients--by the merchants of London and by the Court of Rome; and that his absence from town in the performance of his duties in the assembly would result in the loss of thousands at a time when he was far from being a wealthy man; and we will have some idea of the principles which guided his conduct in respect of the public service. He sought nothing--he asked nothing from public bodies or from the people, but he recognized the obligation resting on every citizen to serve his country; and when an emergent case occurred, and he was called out by the people, he never declined office, but entered into it at every personal sacrifice, performing its duties with such success and such ability as to leave an impression upon the times in which he lived. He practically defeated the wild banking schemes of the session by the insertion of a specie clause which was readily adopted by the friends of those measures, but which, as was designed, made their schemes impracticable.

But his great effort in the assembly of 1816 was his speech on the Convention bill of that year. He spoke in reply to the late Gen. Smythe of Wythe; and in an argument of uncommon power, which formed one of the eloquent traditions of the House when I took my seat in it twelve years later, he answered the objections urged against the existing constitution, and sustained that instrument in all its length and breadth. His speech produced a wonderful effect upon all who heard it. The late Philip Doddridge, one of the ablest and most decided of all Mr. Tazewell's opponents in state and federal politics, but ever abounding in that magnanimity which flourishes most in the finest minds, always spoke of the argument of Mr. Tazewell in reply to Gen. Smythe as extraordinary--as surpassing any that he ever heard in a deliberative assembly. He told me so in conversation, and he afterwards spoke of it in the same exalted strain in the House of Delegates and in the Convention of 1829. The result of the Convention discussion was, that, though a bill calling a Convention passed the House by a small majority, it was lost in the Senate; and a compromise was effected between the East and the West by reorganizing the basis of representation in the Senate on white population according to the census of 1810. In this as on most other occasions the testimony magnifying the speeches of Tazewell come from a hostile quarter.

His election to the Senate of the United States in 1824 was one of the severest trials of his life. Having withdrawn alike from the inferior and appellate courts, he anxiously desired to spend the reminder of his days in the bosom of his family, and to mingle no more in public affairs. To undertake any special service in behalf of his country was always a grateful employment; but to leave his home for months, and to be engaged in the monotonous routine of deliberative bodies, was most distasteful to him; but, true to the great maxim of his life--never to seek or to decline a public trust--he accepted the appointment; and took his seat in the early part of January, 1825. A casual view of his career in that body, which extended from 1825 to 1833--a period of nearly eight years--during which he held, at least in the estimation of Virginia, if not of the whole Union, the foremost place, would alone occupy the brief hour allotted me on the present occasion. The exciting questions of that exciting period would pass in review; and the ashes are too thinly spread over the smouldered fires of those days yet to be trodden with safety, and certainly not with pleasure by some of those who hear me, and who heartily joined in decreeing a tribute to the memory of Mr. Tazewell. I will merely allude to two or three speeches and writings, which the student of history may consult as specimens of parliamentary ability, and as eminently displaying the caste of Mr. Tazewell's intellectual character as well as his views on political subjects.

His debut in the Senate was made on the bankrupt bill of that session--not a regular speech, but a searching examination of the details of the bill, which he exposed with such effect that its friends substantially gave it up in despair. His first serious speech was delivered on the 21st day of the same month in which he had taken his seat, on his own motion to strike out the third section of the bill for the suppression of piracy in the West India seas, which had been reported from the Committee of Foreign Affairs, and had been introduced by a forcible speech from its chairman, who was also his colleague--a name to be pronounced with respect by every Virginian--the venerable James Barbour then the acknowledged head of the Senate. The section proposed to be stricken out authorized the President of the United States in a time of profound peace to declare, on the representations of a naval officer, any of the ports of Spain in the West Indies in a state of blockade. The bill was likely to pass without serious opposition, when it arrested the attention of Mr. Tazewell, who, then fresh from his great discussions of the law of prize, exposed the danger of its provisions in an argument which at once placed him at the head of the Senate, and was read, though in a mutilated report, by the whole country, with admiration and applause. The effect of the speech may be seen in the fact that the obnoxious section, though upheld by the eloquent and patriotic patron of the bill, by the gallant Hayne and by others, was stricken out by the decisive vote of 37 to 10. Had it remained in the bill, in less than ninety days it might have produced a war with Spain.

On the election of Mr. John Quincy Adams to the Presidency, and especially after the delivery of his first message to Congress, he became hostile to his administration, and opposed its prominent measures. His most remarkable performance was his speech on the exclusive constitutional competency of the executive to originate foreign missions without the advice and consent of the Senate. As a constitutional thesis, without respect to the time of delivery,--for, although Mr. Adams asserted the power, he at the same moment waived its exercise,--as a specimen of his manner of treating a great constitutional question when numerous authorities and precedents are to be examined and set aside, this speech deserves to be studied. With the exception of Gen. Marshall's speech in the case of Jonathan Robbins, it stands preeminent in our political literature as a model of profound research, of thorough argumentation, and of overwhelming strength. The reader at this day feels that he is borne along by a force which is not only equal to the occasion, but above it, and which it is vain to resist. The speech is no mean system of logic and of the rules of evidence in itself. And in connection with this speech I may mention the speech on the same subject, which he delivered some years later, in reply to Mr. Livingston, and in which the topic is discussed with new illustrations. These two speeches alone survive in any fulness of all his forensic exertions. The speech which Mr. Tazewell himself thought the best he ever delivered in the Senate, was on some one of the bankrupt bills of his term of service; but of this speech not a passage can now be found.

Nor would it be practicable to present here even a condensed view of the reports which he drew either as the head or as a member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs. Almost any one of those reports would have built up a respectable reputation for its author. I shall only specify his report on the Panama mission, which mainly settled the public mind in relation to that measure; and his report on the Colonization Society, in which, incidentally--and by the way, he demonstrated conclusively the constitutional right of the United States to acquire territory. When it is remembered that Mr. Jefferson took a different view of this question at the time of the acquisition of Louisiana, and believed an amendment to the constitution necessary to the validity of the purchase; the originality as well as the ability of Mr. Tazewell appear in a favorable light.

Meantime his reputation had been extending far and wide. In Virginia some of our older politicians had not become, nor were they ever, fully reconciled to him in consequence of his course during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison; but these were gradually disappearing from the stage, and he now seemed to be regarded by the great body of the people as the most popular man of his time; and he was reelected unanimously to the Senate, or, to speak with strictness, with only four scattering votes. One instance may show the height on which he stood at this time. His second election to the Senate was made the order of the day for the 1st of January, 1829: the day had come; the order was about to be read from the chair; and I was about to rise in my place in the House of Delegates to nominate him for reelection, when a gentleman, advanced in life, who had rendered valuable service to his country, hailing, too, from a central part of the State, came to my seat and implored me to allow him, as the crowning honor of his life, to nominate Mr. Tazewell for reelection. I think I may safely affirm, from close observation at the time both at home and abroad, that the abilities and character of Mr. Tazewell were held in higher estimation, and even veneration, in Virginia and out of it, at this period, than those of any of her statesmen since the retirement of Jefferson and Madison from the public service. It was a commingled feeling of admiration, awe, and pride.

It is a coincidence in the lives of Mr. Tazewell and his father, that the father was elected to the Senate of the United States to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of John Taylor of Caroline; and that the son, after an interval of thirty years from the election of the father, was chosen to fill the vacancy in the Senate made by the resignation of the same individual; and that father and son were twice elected president of the Senate.

The views of Mr. Tazewell on the important topics which arose out of the efforts of South Carolina in relation to the tariff policy of the federal government, can only be alluded to in the briefest manner. He was opposed to the doctrine of nullification as expounded by the South Carolina school of politicians, and did not regard it as a peaceful and constitutional mode of redress; while he condemned the doctrines of the Proclamation of Gen. Jackson as destructive of the rights of the States, and as opposed to the true theory of our federal system. In a series of numbers which appeared in the Norfolk Herald and were republished in the Richmond Enquirer, he traced in the most elaborate of his compositions extant the history of the formation of the present federal constitution, and expounded its theory in a strain of argument as nearly approaching a demonstration as topics of that nature allow. These articles were published in pamphlet form at the time; and, with the exception of the numbers of Senex which appeared in the Herald and Enquirer, and were republished in pamphlet in England, and reviewed in the London Quarterly, on the policy of Mr. Adams' administration respecting the West India trade, are the only serial contributions, as far as I know, he ever made to the periodical press.

The only one of the vexed questions which harassed the administration of Gen. Jackson that Mr. Tazewell, after his retirement from the Senate, discussed in public, was the removal of the deposits from the Bank of the United States by the Treasury order of October, 1833. The reasons of the Secretary of the Treasury for issuing that order were communicated in detail to Congress on the 3d of December following; and his report was discussed in both Houses for several months with an ability and warmth never before displayed in a congressional discussion. The people caught the excitement; and public meetings were held in all the commercial cities; and memorials were forwarded to Congress urging the immediate restoration of the deposits to the vaults of the bank. Each memorial, as it was received by a Senator or Representative, was honored with a speech from some master spirit. And now the most menacing monetary crisis occurred which the country had ever seen. In a little less or more than six months the Bank of the United States had shortened its line of discounts ten millions of dollars; and all the State banks in self-defence were compelled to follow the example of that great institution. Confidence ceased to exist. No man in business could look ahead a single day without fear and trembling. Men spoke in whispers, and walked doubtfully as if the earth might quake beneath their feet. The result was a change in the party relations of those who lived in towns without a parallel in our history. And it was soon seen that a new party was forming in comparison of which the tertium quid party of Jefferson's administration was a mere bubble floating on the surface of the stream. In that tempest was rocked the cradle of that large and intellectual party, which assumed the appellation of Whig, which won some splendid victories, which encountered some decisive defeats, which then slept awhile, and which has recently burnished its armor anew for a fresh campaign.

Richmond set the example among us of holding meetings of the people, with a view of urging the restoration of the deposits to the Bank. Watkins Leigh and Chapman Johnson made on that occasion an appeal to the people of Virginia in favor of a restoration, which was heard from so respectable a source with the attention it deserved. The Assembly then in session, which, when elected, had been favorable to the administration of Jackson, faltered in their faith, instructed the senators in Congress to vote for a restoration of the deposits, and on the resignation of Mr. Rives, who upheld the policy of the administration, elected Mr. Leigh in his stead. Even the Richmond Enquirer, its polar star momentarily obscured, was tossing helplessly on that tempestuous sea.

In this state of things, some of the citizens of Norfolk, of both parties, as those parties had previously stood, highly distinguished by social position, by talents, by wealth, and by their intimate connection with our banking institutions, called on Mr. Tazewell, and requested him to take the chair at a public meeting to be held on the 8th of January, 1834. He consented to do so, and on taking the chair delivered one of the most graceful, most nervous, and most eloquent speeches that ever fell from his lips. In language not to be misunderstood, he denounced the act of removing the deposits from the Bank of the United States, advised their immediate restoration, and condemned the whole series of the measures of the President of the United States in relation thereto. A gentleman happening to be present who had heard Canning, Brougham, and Sir Robert Peel from the hustings and in the House of Commons, declared that the speech of Mr. Tazewell fully equalled their grandest efforts on such occasions; and all who heard it pronounced it a wonderful work of argument, eloquence, and declamation combined. A few days after the meeting, Mr. Tazewell was elected Governor of the Commonwealth.

The conduct of Mr. Tazewell on this occasion I leave to history. It was my misfortune to differ from him, and to strive against him in public meetings, by resolutions, by speeches, and by essays in the public prints, and to have been on the side of the victorious party; and I owe it to candor to say that, after a deliberate investigation of the arguments and the circumstances of that time with such faculties as God has bestowed upon me, my views through the twenty-seven years that have since passed remain unaltered; but now that my illustrious friend is gone, and as I measure that chasm which his death has made in the Commonwealth, leaving none equal to him or like him behind, and especially in my own bosom--a chasm which, at my time of life, can never, never be closed--I have looked with fear and trembling over all I said and wrote on that occasion, and I am gratified to find that, although I spoke with as great freedom of men and things as the occasion, in my opinion, demanded, I spoke personally of Mr. Tazewell as a son should speak of a father, and with that exalted respect with which I ever regarded his colossal character.

Still, if Mr. Tazewell had been a man of narrow mind, our friendship would have ended, and the instruction and delight which I have derived from his conversation for the last twenty-seven years--a period in which I have doubled my own age--would have been lost. But, independent himself, and the proudest man I ever knew when the faintest shadow of vassalage was sought to be cast upon him, he valued independence in others, and his wide experience taught him that the friend who would not hesitate to stand up firmly against him when he thought him wrong, would be the last to skulk from his side in the hour of danger, and from the defence of his memory when his head was low.

While I leave the wisdom of his course in relation to the deposit question and in the executive chair of the commonwealth to the award of history, I recall one lesson which may be read from his acts, which is, that he never was, strictly speaking, a party man; that while he held to his dying day the theory of our federal system which he had adopted in his youth, and in defence of which he prepared, as has just been said, in his old age, with his vast stores of learning and experience unrolled before him, the most elaborate and conclusive exposition which that system ever received; his course on the restrictive policy and on the removal of the deposits, irrespective as it was whether he carried along with him one or a thousand of his associates, shows that on great questions involving mere expediency he would burst the trammels of party, and act with his old and inveterate opponents against the darling measures of his political friends. I have said that he was not, and could not well be, in a series of years, the unvarying adjunct of any party. He looked upon a subject through so many lights,--the lights of the past, the lights of the present, the lights of the future; he saw such a tissue of good and evil so inextricably intermingled in human projects; he saw so much that was questionable in the best party measures; so much that was not bad in what seemed the worst; and so much that could be accomplished by doing nothing, that, though he was prompt above most men in decision, and to the last degree practical, his enthusiasm was cooled by philosophy, and he was never very much exalted or depressed by the success or failure of political schemes.

While Mr. Tazewell was engaged in his senatorial career, he was elected by the Norfolk district a member of the Convention which assembled in Richmond on the fifth day of October, 1829, to revise the first Constitution of Virginia. The character of that body is familiar to all; some of the most illustrious names recorded in our annals were inscribed upon its rolls,--Madison, Marshall, Monroe, Watkins Leigh, Charles Fenton Mercer, Chapman Johnson, Philip Doddridge, Robert Stanard, Philip P. Barbour, Morris, Fitzhugh, Baldwin, Scott, Cooke--that wonderful man whose train was always tracked by fire, John Randolph, and a host of younger statesmen who have since risen to eminence, and who, like their elder colleagues, have, I am grieved to think, nearly all passed away, were among the members, and were engaged day after day, for three months and a half, in performing the office which their country had committed to their hands. The most distinguished men of the Union,--statesmen whose own names were historical, men of letters, merchants who remembered that the wealth of the counting-room and the wealth of statesmanship were indissolubly bound together, old planters, clever young men from Virginia and from nearly all the southern States, came to behold its meeting, to see its members, and to hear the debates; and, as if to invest the scene with a yet lovelier hue, beauty, brightened by intelligence and glowing with patriotism, shed its softened light over that imposing spectacle. In that body, in which an ex-president of the United States presided, in which another ex-president was at the head of a committee, in which the chief justice of the United States was at the head of another committee, in which there was no place of honor for judges, governors, ministers to foreign courts, speakers of the House of Representatives, and senators of the United States, above their fellow-members, the eye of the visitor soon singled out Mr. Tazewell. He was the grandest figure of a man among them all. His fame was then at the height, and his large stature, his full stern features, lighted by a wide grave blue eye, his solemn gait, all inspiring awe as he leaned in his seat or passed through the hall--were in fair keeping with that intellectual image of him which had previously existed in the mind of the beholder.

To trace with any minuteness the course of Mr. Tazewell through more than three of the most anxious months of his life would far exceed my present limits, and as I have already treated this topic in a separate work, and have been required to treat it again, I shall simply say here, that Mr. Tazewell made the opening speech in support of a resolution which he offered, and which marked out the course of the campaign which he believed to be best adapted to attain the general end in view. Had that resolution been adopted, I now believe, as I believed then, that a constitution would have been formed which would have lasted for half a century, and that Tazewell, as a skilful and fearless mediator between the East and West, would have performed the office with glorious success. But the passions of men raged high; extremes were the order of the day, and each party stood pledged to its favorite scheme. His first regular effort on the floor of the Convention was in reply to Mr. Monroe, and gave him the opportunity of expounding his theory of interests as the basis of a political system--a system as beautiful as true. His speech presented a fair specimen of what the discussions on the basis question ought to have been--not of the elaborate dissertation which lasted two days, but of the vigorous living speech, which, while it reviewed critically intermediate points in passing, kept the main subject steadily in view, and of which the House of Commons has afforded us so many illustrations. When the house rose, a gentleman, who was perhaps the most accomplished scholar in the State, said to me that the speech of Tazewell was the first truly parliamentary speech delivered during the session, and drew the distinction between a legitimate debate and a discussion by dissertations. I recall a happy effort of Mr. Tazewell on the subject of the election of governor by the people, which was possessed of singular beauty and order. The effect of that speech was the settlement of the question.

But the occasion which impressed his hearers most deeply with a sense of his abilities, was a discussion on the tenure of the judicial office, in which Chief Justice Marshall, Philip P. Barbour, Stanard, Scott, Giles, and others took part. Each speaker was conscious of the powers of his opponent; posterity, in the presence of the skilful reporter, as well as the existing generation represented by some of the ablest men, were the spectators of the combat; and a visible air of solemnity pervaded the manner of each. The question was precisely that which sprung from the repeal of the judiciary act of 1800 by the Congress of 1802, and is the nicest of all our party questions. It was a magnificent display of parliamentary tact and intellectual vigor; and I do not think that an hour of my life ever glided so insensibly away as while I listened to that debate. Blows fell fast and heavy. I saw Judge Barbour, who, though president of the Convention, as the house was in committee, engaged in the debate, fairly reel in his seat from one of Judge Marshall's massy blows, which he returned presently with right good will; but Tazewell, if I may use a figure which presented the pith of the argument of one side, and which was frequently used by both,--Tazewell fairly "sunk the boat" under the Chief Justice. The views of Tazewell prevailed; and in such a contest, in which all were kingly, and in which the combatants were magis pares quam similes--rather equals than alike--if the victor's wreath could with propriety be awarded to a single individual, I do not think I err in saying that it would have been assigned by a majority of the hearers to Tazewell. As an illustration of the effect of his manner and argument on the minds of able men who were opposed to him in State politics, which then raged fiercely, a gentleman from the West, who held for several years a seat in the House of Delegates and in the Council, speaking of the debate to me on the day it occurred, said: "Why, Tazewell trod down those great men as if they had been children."

When the Convention adjourned sine die, every heart melted, and all animosity soothed by the last words of the president, I saw Tazewell approach Madison and Marshall, and exchange parting salutations. He could go no further; the members pressed round him: but, old as he then was, for he had reached his 56th year, he little dreamed that he was destined to outlive almost all of those young and gallant spirits that then loved and greeted him. He was the last survivor of those who sate in the House of Delegates during the eighteenth century; and of the Convention of 1829, out of 96 members who composed it, he attained to a greater age than has yet been attained by any member of the body, not excepting Madison, whom he exceeded by one month and five days, and surviving all but twenty; and three of that twenty have come here this day to honor his memory.

Perhaps the best description of his manner at the bar would be to say that he had no manner at all. In addressing juries, he talked to them, I am told, ordinarily as he would converse with the same number of men in society on the merits of the case; and his gestures were those which might be used without serious remark in animated conversation. His postures were sometimes negligent enough; he had a contempt for rant, and hated show and pomp. His voice was pleasant, and of ample compass for an ordinary court-room, and he never dealt in vociferations; indeed, his style of argument to the jury, as well as to the bench, would have been impossible to a boisterous talker. While his manner was natural, his matter seemed equally void of art. When by the examination and cross-examination of witnesses, he had obtained his facts, he formed his theory of the case, and unfolded it to the jury in the simplest possible way. It was plain to see, however, that the argument was a continuous chain of demonstration, every link of which seemed to be of equal strength. Some of his speeches to the jury, could they have been preserved as they were delivered, would have been invaluable specimens of dialectics for the use of students. I heard the late William Maxwell say, that it was vain and even fatal to attempt before a jury to find the defective links in the chain of Mr. Tazewell's arguments, for the process would become too refined for their comprehension; and that his own mode of argument in such cases was to let the reasoning of Tazewell pass, and press with all his force some plain views of the case. Some lawyers are successful in the elenchical mode of argument--to use a logical term--that is, in demolishing the structure of their opponents, while they fail in the deictic, that is, in raising on its ruins an impregnable fabric of their own; but it was difficult to decide which process was the most thorough in the reasoning of Tazewell. In putting his arguments before a jury he showed great adroitness. He either knew himself or learned from others the calling of every juryman; and as he proceeded with his case, if he saw a dangerous man among them, he drew his figures from his particular calling, and not unfrequently made the man believe that his standing in his own business depended upon his bringing in a verdict in his favor. When the passions were to be assailed, he indulged in a style of fervid appeal which was the more effective as it was rare; and his speech in Shannon's case was often referred to by Wirt as a fine piece of eloquence in the popular acceptation of the word.

His mode of addressing the bench differed, of course, from his jury speeches. He was less familiar in his manner and in his talk, and his argumentation was more severe; and he was evidently more at home, or rather more congenially employed; and he brought as much learning to bear upon the case as was politic for the time. Here, too, he showed no great deference to manner as a means of victory. When Gen. Taylor was addressing the late judge St. George Tucker, who was deaf, the judge requested him to come nearer and speak louder; but the General, observing that a certain space between the judge and himself was indispensable for the proper exercise of his faculties, declined the request; Tazewell, however, who replied to Taylor, had no scruples in the case, but, approaching the judge's ear, poured the stream of his argument into its inner portal. It sometimes appeared that in addressing inferior courts he went too much into detail, instead of resting his case on its great points; but it is probable that Mr. Tazewell had taken the true gauge of the judge's mind, and was right after all; and it is certain that in important cases, in which appeals would probably be taken, he reserved his strong points for the higher tribunal.