It was fortunate that John Randolph was in retirement when Calhoun brought on his Nullification scheme.  The presence in Congress of a man so eloquent and so reckless, whose whole heart and mind were with the Nullifiers, might have prevented the bloodless postponement of the struggle.  He was in constant correspondence with the South Carolina leaders, and was fully convinced that it was the President of the United States, not “the Hamiltons and Haynes” of South Carolina, who ought to seize the first pretext to concede the point in dispute.  No citizen of South Carolina was more indignant than he at General Jackson’s Proclamation.  He said that, if the people did not rouse themselves to a sense of their condition, and “put down this wretched old man,” the country was irretrievably ruined; and he spoke of the troops despatched to Charleston as “mercenaries,” to whom he hoped “no quarter would be given.”  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.  Scarcely any one could live among the better Southern people without liking them; and few will ever read Hugh Garland’s Life of John Randolph, without more than forgiving all his vagaries, impetuosities, and foibles.  How often, upon riding away from a Southern home, have we been ready to exclaim, “What a pity such good people should be so accursed!” Lord Russell well characterized the evil to which we allude as “that fatal gift of the poisoned garment which was flung around them from the first hour of their establishment.”