He was first elected to Congress in 1799; he spent twenty-four years in the House and two years in the Senate. (Being a Randolph never hurt anyone. To this day, in Virginia, a Randolph woman who marries will insert her maiden name in the middle, before her married one, and anyone whose mother was a Randolph will find occasions to bring it up. Thomas Jefferson’s mother was a Randolph. It mattered.)
By all accounts John Randolph was one of our more peculiar politicians. Even his home was a plantation named Bizarre. He fought his maiden duel when he was eighteen and a student at William and Mary, where he seriously wounded another student over the pronunciation of a word used in the debating society. Long years later, with his opponent still carrying the bullet in his hip, they met again, and Randolph promptly snapped, “But Robert, it was pronounced so!”
He was brilliant, fractious, occasionally charming, more often vicious, and frequently drunk, though perhaps not as frequently as people thought; it was hard to tell. In one of his first pronouncements in Congress, he offered the toast, “Damn George Washington!” Accompanied by his pack of hound dogs and carrying a whip, he strode around the Capitol in riding breeches or flowing robes, voluminous coats, weird hats, and buckskin riding gloves, calling out for more glasses of porter and glaring insolently at his colleagues.
Source:
Holland, Barbara. “V. Birth of a Nation.” Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk. Bloomsbury, 2004. 120-21. Print.
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