Hugh Blair Grigsby

“ Such was Norfolk, not enveloped in the mists of tradition, but such as she was, when Mr. Tazewell came to reside here in 1802.
He lived to behold a very different state of things. He lived to see it one of the cleanest cities in the world, and to see more miles of paved streets in Norfolk than any other city south of the Potomac can boast of; and those streets lighted up every night with a brilliancy equal to that which a rejoicing people, thirteen years later than 1802, kindled in commemoration of the victory of New Orleans, and of the peace with Great Britain. ”

“ Look for his name in the newspapers, and you will not find it from year's end to year's end; look for deep intrigues in local politics, and you will find no finger of his in the dirty work. Look at the ill success of those who have engaged in public affairs, their pecuniary entanglements, their deferred hopes, their sleepless nights, those poisoned fountains of feeling bitter as aloes even to the eye that looks on them as they bubble; these and such things you may find, and find easily, but not at the door of Tazewell. ”

“ I hardly know what apology to make to Littleton W. Tazewell, of Norfolk, for dragging his name from the obscurity which he seems to court, but is unable to win. He has shrunk from the great national amphitheatre, the Olympic games, where it is the glory of Mr. Pinkney to challenge and to conquer, to an obscure sea-port town. But, more confident in his powers than he is himself, I do not fear a comparison with this veteran of the bar of the Supreme Court. His person may be a little above the ordinary height, well-proportioned, and having the appearance of great capacity to endure fatigue. ”

“ Had he lived, he could not have performed any public service. The voice whose tones had so often echoed in the forum was gone, and his feeble limbs could no longer bear his weight. His duty was done. His orations for the crown had all been delivered; and that crown had been won and worn for half a century with the modesty which became a wise and virtuous statesman of a republic; and when it was about to be taken from his brow to be garnered for the coming ages, its flowers were fresh, and, like those which the muse of Milton strewed about the walks of Eden, were without a thorn. ”

“ And when, by blending all these characters, each great in itself, and worthy of the ambition of the highest talents and of the longest life, into a single character, we have made a fame which the grandest intellects of modern times might glory in attaining, we have but one of the elements, developed during a comparatively short period only of his career, that make up the reputation of him whose memory we have met this day to honor. ”

“ Nor did the generous care of woman cease with her death. When his hour was come, and he was placed beside her, his daughters, who had tended him for years with unceasing devotion, were borne in almost a dying state from his tomb.
He was keenly alive to the pleasures of friendship; and he maintained his affection for his early schoolmates unbroken to the last. His reverence for Mr. Wythe passed all words. Randolph loved him through life; and Tazewell reciprocated his affection with equal warmth. The tide of his affection for John Wickham from his childhood flowed full and strong. ”

“ Without patrimony, with a moderation in taking fees without an example in our land, living as became a gentleman of his position in life and affairs, he yet accumulated a larger fortune than was probably ever before accumulated by a Virginia farmer or a lawyer beginning life without patrimony; and when wealth was obtained, living with that modesty and simplicity so becoming to great genius and great wealth, ever looking with just contempt on that most piteous of all spectacles, the spectacle of lofty genius debruised and debased by the accursed thirst for gold ”

“ But the lesson which the example of Tazewell presents to the American mind is of yet greater significancy. If there be one unpleasant trait more revolting than another in our national character, it is the inordinate pursuit of wealth: rem, quocunque modo rem. To get money is the first lesson of childhood, the engrossing purpose of middle age, and the harassing employment of declining years. Such is the rabid thirst for money, its effects are seen over the whole moral and intellectual character of the people. ”

“ The writing of history, difficult at all times, is more difficult now. Recent history trenches alike upon the epic and the dramatic, and the narrator must be half a poet and half a player. It is, therefore, a subject of gratulation that Mr. Tazewell did not undertake a work which, if done at home, would have been badly done, and which, if done at all, must have called into exercise a peculiar class of talents which neither the bar nor the senate tends to develop, but which in their highest efforts alone can ensure success. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tazewell. It is the great and clear comprehension; the freshness and rapidity with which every thing luxuriates on the generous soil of his mind, which is further removed from even occasional sterility than in any one I have known. This soil has no succession of seasons; the sun which warms it is never for a moment obscured by cloud or eclipse; there reigns a bright, a genial, a perpetual summer. His perceptions are as intuitive and as strong as those of Judge Marshall. He has as much intrepidity of intellect as Mr. Pinkney, and great boldness ”

“ But both Parsons and Tazewell were men of large stature, at least to the eye, in a sitting posture; both delighted to drink at the deep fountains of the law, and were skilled in the lore of their profession in which they held an easy supremacy; both liked novels as a relief from grave cares, and were indifferent as to the volume of the novel that first came to hand; both were so strongly enamored of the exact sciences that it is probable they would have cultivated them with extraordinary success. ”

“ Tazewell in his own house or in the house of a friend was, that he had no set topics. His range of reading and observation had been so wide, his knowledge of men and things was so vast, his faculties of combination were so active, it was impossible to state a question to be decided by precedent or reasoning, which he could not instantly handle with a force of logic which most men could only have reached by deliberate preparation. But all that humor and wit and genius are gone: that stream of talk has ceased to flow ”

“ The characteristic grace of that admirable woman was her love of domestic life. With her the throne of human felicity was the family altar. Life with her, as it ever was with those elder Virginia matrons whom she resembled, was too serious a business for pomp and show. Had she been inspired with a passion for display, had she coveted the fleeting honors of a residence at a foreign court, or in the metropolis of our own country, a single word from her lips would have obtained all she wished. ”

“ Resolved, That, while we feel painfully the death of so illustrious a member of our profession, we are grateful to the Disposer of Events that, with all his noble faculties unimpaired, and in the midst of untold temporal blessings, our deceased brother attained to such an advanced age, and reflected for so many years upon the Bar, upon his native and beloved Commonwealth, and upon the Union at large, the lustre of his splendid talents, the pure and unsullied glory of his name and fame, and his eminent moral and social virtues. ”

“ There is but one instance in history of a really great man seeking an obscurity which he could not win,—the case of Chief Justice Wilmot, of England. But Mr. Tazewell had the right to judge and decide for himself, and that he preferred private to public life is rather to be lamented than complained of. Nor must it be supposed that this preference was the effect of indolence. On the contrary, he was, in his way, a laborious man, and it may be that the leisure of his latter years may have been productive of important fruits in literature and science to those who have survived him. ”

“ Tazewell. The generation of men who smiled at his wit, whose tears flowed at his bidding, who relished his wonderful colloquial powers, who regarded with a sense of personal triumph his marvellous displays at the Bar and in the public councils, and who looked up to him in the hour of danger as their bulwark and defence, have, with here and there a solitary exception, long preceded him to the tomb. ”

“ Powerful as an orator, brilliant as a writer, scarcely equalled in his knowledge of the great principles of law, his irresistible grasp of intellect astonished thousands in former days—bright and clear as "the cloudless azure of the upper sky."
The proceedings of the meeting of the members of the bar were very appropriate. All the addresses were eloquent and impressive. The speakers aptly mentioned his splendid and successful career as a lawyer, his wonderful legal acquirements, and irresistible eloquence. ”

“ Tazewell acted with his usual good sense; not that he did not write on particular topics of our history, as, for instance, the difference between the original and recent surveys, a subject which he has illustrated with a skill in mathematics, with a beauty of argumentation, and with a minuteness of historical research wholly unexpected, and altogether admirable; and so with some other topics. But he acted well in not undertaking the history of Virginia. To write that history worthily would require a residence of some years abroad. ”

“ Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame. There is another view of a more personal kind. Whether history is of higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain, that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been united in a supreme degree in any human being, and certainly not in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. ”

“ Wickham was eleven years older than Tazewell, and had taught him to read. It was evident Mr. Tazewell regarded Mr. Wickham with the greatest deference. It was, however, something more than the deference with which one eminent man advanced in life would show to another eminent man still more advanced; it was the deference of the warmest friendship to an individual who not only reciprocated the feelings of affection, but who possessed all the moral and intellectual qualities that can adorn human nature. ”

“ In this young man, Tazewell was to find an intimate friend, a fit, an able, and a lifelong competitor. They were nearly of the same age: they had been classmates in College, and had been in the Assembly together; and while Tazewell was studying law in Mr. Wickham's office in Richmond, Taylor was following suit a few doors off in the office of Gen. Marshall. Even on the score of physical beauty they were not unmatched. Though belonging to different models, each in his sphere was, in youth, in middle life, and in old age, among the finest looking men of their generation. ”

“ The history of the law from the days of Magna Charta to the passage of the reform bill of Earl Grey's administration, was the study of his whole professional and public life. He not only knew every leading event, every great statute, but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation. The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never read them, and drew his information from the original sources. ”

“ But he regarded the law of admiralty with peculiar and almost hereditary affection. It suited the caste of his intellect. No ordinary horizon bounded its sphere. It overlooked the limits of any single realm, however proud that realm might seem. It was the queen of the sea, whose influence, cast far and wide over the raging billows, breathed peace and safety to the humblest sailor who trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized man the flag of the feeblest power. ”

“ One may easily reconcile to his philanthropy that "some mute, inglorious Milton" may rest in every neglected grove, because it requires a strong effort of imagination to suppose the clod of the valley ever to have been "pregnant with celestial fire;" but we have not this comfort to allay our mortification, when we see talents of the purest and brightest ray, united to the noblest qualities of the human heart, emitting their lustre in broad daylight, and to the public eye, unnoticed or forgotten. ”

“ The foreign policy of the administration had been as successful as the domestic. Partly by chance, partly by that wise foresight which anticipates the possibilities of the future and provides for them, the administration had acquired from France the vast domain of Louisiana; and thenceforth the exclusive navigation of that mighty river, on which hitherto we dared not lift a sail or dip an oar without the consent of a foreign power, and on the banks of which, since its transfer from Spain to France, we had been vainly begging a place of deposit, became the birthright of every American citizen. ”

“ The man who is in possession of such talents as Sidney's, is in possession of a most dangerous gift; and it behoves him to walk before the public with a circumspection proportionate to the superiority of those talents. Exorbitant power, whether intellectual or political, naturally begets distrust and jealousy in the good as well as envy in the wicked; and it requires on the part of its possessor a constant display, not only of the most scrupulous integrity and sacred purity on every occasion, great or small ”