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.  Not a vestige remains of the opulence and splendor of his early days.  Not one of the mansions inhabited or visited by him in his youth furnished a target for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps.  A country better adapted to all good purposes of man, nor one more pleasing to the eye, hardly exists on earth; but before it was trodden by armies, it had become little less than desolate.  The James River is as navigable as the Hudson, and flows through a region far more fertile, longer settled, more inviting, and of more genial climate; but there are upon the Hudson’s banks more cities than there are rotten landings upon the James.  The shores of this beautiful and classic stream are so unexpectedly void of even the signs of human habitation, that our soldiers were often ready to exclaim: 

“Can this be the river of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas?  Was it here that Jamestown stood?  Is it possible that white men have lived in this delightful land for two hundred and fifty-seven years?  Or has not the captain of the steamboat made a mistake, and turned into the wrong river?”

One scene of John Randolph’s boyhood reveals to us the entire political economy of the Old Dominion.  He used to relate it himself, when denouncing the manufacturing system of Henry Clay.  One ship, he would say, sufficed, in those happy days, for all the commerce of that part of Virginia with the Old World, and that ship was named the London Trader.  When this ship was about to sail, all the family were called together, and each member was invited to mention the articles which he or she wanted from London.  First, the mother of the family gave in her list; next the children, in the order of their ages; next, the overseer; then the mammy, the children’s black nurse; lastly, the house servants, according to their rank, down even to their children.  When months had passed, and the time for the ship’s return was at hand, the weeks, the days, the hours were counted; and when the signal was at last descried, the whole household burst into exclamations of delight, and there was festival in the family for many days.