A Survivor's Story.........Part Five, The Destruction of the Randolphs

Read Part 1 of this story here PART ONE
Read Part 2 of this story here PART TWO
Read Part 3 of this story here PART THREE
Read Part 4 of this story here PART FOUR


So Nancy Randolph became Nancy Randolph Morris, had a son with Gouverneur Morris, became a wealthy widow in 1816 and lived out her life in comfort on her Morrisania Estate.

Gouverneur Morris Jr. went on to have an illustrious career in railroading.  He was Vice President of the New York and Harlem River Railroad and was instrumental in building the railroad line that runs along Park Avenue in Manhattan today. He went on the serve and retire as President of the Vermont Valley Railroad.
Morris was also an active entrepreneur, involved with development in the 19th century of what is today the Bronx.
Not a powerhouse of politics like his father, nonetheless Gouverneur was a founding member of the Republican Party and attended it's first convention back in 1854.

Gouverneur Jr. married Martha Jefferson Cary, his first cousin, the daughter of his mother's older sister, Virginia Randolph Cary.  Virginia also had married a cousin(not sure of the degree of cousin with them yet), Wilson Jefferson Cary, and became a published author after her husband's death.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia......
Judith Randolph, her sons and brother in-law John Randolph's lives were spinning out of control.

Being of the landed gentry class meant Judith, the widow of Richard Randolph had the weight of the plantation and it's business upon her shoulders.  Woman weren't taught but the womanly arts back in that time and thus Judith had no skills in the business arena so she relied on her brother's only surviving sibling, John Randolph, to keep their lives afloat. 

John Randolph of Roanoke was by far the most famous and accomplished member on this branch of the Randolph tree in the late 1700's/early 1800's. 

He was a Virginia planter, served in the House of Representatives as well as the Senate.  He was spokesman for his cousin, Thomas Jefferson, when Jefferson served as POTUS.  John also served as Minister to Russia under President Andrew Jackson.
He served on/chaired important committees while in Congress and was known for his wit and oratory abilities.

John had a falling out with Jefferson over what he perceived as a veering of the President from traditional Jeffersonian principles and growing nationalism, John also resented how he was treated as prosecutor during the impeachment of Salmon P. Chase.  John Randolph was vehemently against the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the War of 1812.  All this drove a wedge between John and cousin Thomas.
John was of two minds about the issue of slavery....as a Virginia planter his livelihood depended on owning slaves but he believed in the gradual abolition of the peculiar institution and was one of the founding members of the American Colonization Society of 1816.

Despite all he accomplished in his career he was a political outsider.  He did not suffer fools gladly, was a man of his own mind, had a flamboyant personality and clashed with many of his fellow Congressmen. Henry Clay challenged John Randolph to a duel(at least twice)and John had physical altercations with Rep. Willis Alston of NC.  Once they brawled in a Washington DC boarding house and on another occasion they came to blows in a Congressional stairwell with Randolph beating Alston bloody with his cane.

John Randolph never married as it's thought that due to what we call Klinefelter's Syndrome today, Randolph never went through puberty.  It's thought that the latent pulmonary tuberculosis in his body(his oldest brother and his nephew both died from TB)caused his body too never change and develop.  Later in life the TB manifested itself and he ended up relying on opium and alcohol to soothe his extreme pain.  Randolph lived alone in a near hermit like state in his small cabin on his Roanoke estate in Charlotte Courthouse County, VA when he wasn't away on congressional business.  John Randolph died in 1833 in Philadelphia, PA while serving in the 23rd Congress.

John Randolph of Roanoke was reburied in 1879 in the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

Judith and Richard Randolph's older son, St. George Tucker Randolph known as "St. John" to the family was born deaf.  He was sent to Braidwood Academy in London in 1805 when he was 14.  Founded by Thomas Braidwood, a Scottish educator in 1783, it was the first school for the deaf in England.  "St. John" later attended Sicard's Deaf School in Paris, traveling there in 1807, escorted to school by James Monroe(yes that James Monroe). Monroe was a Senator at that time and had to travel to Paris on business.
St. John came home to Virginia and lived a quiet life near his family, dying between the ages of 65 and 66 in 1857 and was buried in the Village Church Cemetery in Charlotte Courthouse, Virginia, near where my great grandparents lived at "Roxabel".

Judith and Richard's second son, Theodorick Tudor Randolph had gone to Harvard to study in 1814 but came down with consumption while there and slowly withered and died before accomplishing anything in life.  He was about 20 years old at his death and his burial place is unknown.

The plantation house at Bizarre burned down in 1813 and Judith had to relocate.  The present day town of Farmville, Virginia is on part of what was the "Bizarre" plantation.  Judith was dealt another blow 2 years later when Theodorick Tudor Randolph died from consumption.

Judith lasted another year, until March of 1816, dying in Richmond Virginia at the age of 43.  She is buried at Tuckahoe Plantation where she was born and raised.  Married at 17 to her cousin, the scandal/trial of her husband and sister in 1792,  made a widow at the age of 24, the fire that consumed the family home in 1813 and the death of her son Theodorick Tudor Randolph in 1815  I suppose was the last blow of many for Judith.

So this ends my tale of Anne Cary "Nancy" Randolph Morris.

But this is just the beginning of another part of the Randolph saga.

Sluggy

A Survivor's Story....Part Four, Nancy Has a Happy Ending

Read Part 1 of this story here PART ONE
Read Part 2 of this story here PART TWO
Read Part 3 of this story here PART THREE

So Nancy Randolph, pariah of Virginia Colonial Society, set out from her homeland.
Nancy left on foot and went to her childhood home of Tuckahoe Plantation. By 1800 Tuckahoe was an abandoned relic of it's former glory.  Years later Nancy said she slept at Tuckahoe among the ruins for awhile before walking from one to another plantation in the area seeking shelter and food. She was taken in briefly at these stops before walking elsewhere.  She ended up at Monticello being cared for by her brother and his wife, Thomas Mann and Martha Jefferson Randolph, who lived there with Martha's father, Thomas Jefferson.

By 1808, wearing out her welcome at Monticello, she found a little money from somewhere.  Perhaps her sisters Virginia or Mary got their husbands to bankroll Nancy on this journey or her brother Thomas Mann Jr.  We will never know from whom but Nancy obtained the price of pass and traveled North, to New York City in 1808.

She was staying at a boarding house in Greenwich village when she ran into someone from her past.
That someone, who had been a friend of her long dead father, Thomas Mann Randolph Sr., was Gouverneur Morris.

Born into a prestigious New York family he was the son of Lewis Morris Jr. and his second wife, Sarah Gouverneur.

He studied law at what would become Columbia University and then served in the provincial NY Congress.
His family's loyalties were divided once the revolution started.  He and his half-brother, Lewis Morris were for the rebels yet another half-brother, Staats Lewis Morris was a loyalist and a Major General in the British army.  After the Battle of Long Island the British seized New York City and Gouverneur's' mother, Sarah Morris, an ardent loyalist, gave the family estate over to the British for military use during the war.

Gouverneur Morris was appointed to the NY delegation of the Continental Congress in 1778.  He was on a committee to reform the the American military forces with George Washington.  He pushed for reforms to the financing and the training of the troops after witnessing conditions of the military during their Winter encampment at Valley Forge.  He signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778 and went on to serve on the committee that drafted the Constitution(and was a signer of that document as well).  He is thought to have drafted the the Preamble to the Constitution himself and is often called "the Penman of the Constitution".  He also helped draft the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War.
Afterwards he was an emissary to England then later to France, replacing Thomas Jefferson in that role.  He was in France during the French Revolution and kept a diary of that historical time and his first hand accounts of it.  Gouverneur criticized that revolution and the execution of Marie Antoinette.
Upon his return to America in 1798 he won a seat in the US Congress and served there until 1803.

Gouverneur Morris was a man of 55 who had never married when he had his chance meeting with Nancy Randolph in NYC.  Gouverneur is known to have had many affairs and liaisons, over the years, the most notably with a French writer, Adelaide-Emilie Filleul, marquise de Souza-Botelho(who's mother had been a mistress of King Louis XV)and an Early American Boston novelist Sarah Wentworth Apthrop Morton(whom he was sleeping with as late as 1804).

Gouverneur, one of the leaders of the American Revolution, remembered Nancy Randolph as a child(he was 22 years older than her)at Tuckahoe plantation riding her pony, shadowing her father and a grown-up Thomas Jefferson when he visited the family. They began a correspondence even after Nancy left New York to travel to Rhode Island, and then to Connecticut and found menial work there.

Gouverneur wanted to help Nancy in a real way other than friendship.  At that time Gouverneur had a hard time keeping a housekeeper(he thought them all lowly born and crude plus they couldn't get along with the chef and coachman he brought back from Paris with him)so he offered Nancy the job.  It was strictly an employer/employee friendship situation when Morris went to fetch Nancy from Armrstrong's Tavern in April of 1809.

But love seemed to bloom between them and Gouverneur didn't hold Nancy's checkered past against her, and 6 month after the employment arrangement Gouverneur Morris sent for a preacher on Christmas Day of 1809 and married Nancy Randolph on at Morris' estate, "Morrisania" located in what it today Bronx, NY, in front of confused and shocked Christmas day dinner guests there.

Evidently it was a good marriage for the both of them.  Gouverneur wrote in his diary upon returning from a trip to Albany, "Dear quiet, happy home."  Two years after wedding Gouverneur, Nancy gave birth to a son, Gouverneur Morris, Jr. in February of 1813.
Nancy Randolph Morris has landed in a soft, safe place and have the love and life she never thought possible.

Their happy home was shattered in 1816 when Gouverneur Morris, mostly retired from politics, died after accidentally causing internal injuries to himself(which led to infection), attempting to use a piece of whalebone as a catheter to clear of urinary blockage at the age of 64.

He was buried in the cemetery of St. Ann's Episcopal Church, the oldest church located in present day Bronx, the same chapel that was built on the family Morrisania land in 1841.  The Morris family crypt holds many Morris family members, including his father, Lewis Morris, a leader in the American Revolution and Governeur's half-brother Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Ann Cary "Nancy" Randolph Morris raised her son, Gouverneur Morris Jr., as the widow of a much revered American statesman, and reigned over Morrisania until her own death in 1837.

But there is more to tell of this story next time in Part Five.


Sluggy

A Survivor's Story....Part Three, Things Go From Bad to Worse

Read Part 1 of this story here PART ONE
Read Part 2 of this story here PART TWO

So the murder trail of Richard Randolph and his sister in-law Nancy Randolph was over and they were both acquitted.
So it was back to their normal life.....or was it?

Though legally they were free and clear, the notoriety it brought on the families was altogether something else.

Not only was there the stigma that the unmarried Nancy had become pregnant and either miscarried or given birth to a stillborn infant but society of that time wasn't able to get past the murder trial.
There was no way for Nancy to stay among her social peers and have any hope of marrying within her social set and having the only type of life a woman of her standing in the late 1700's could hope for.  In that time the only thing a woman had going for her was her virginity and her good name.  Nancy now had neither and it was a widely known fact.  No proper young suitor would be trying to court her.

Unwed and widowed women in that time and culture were the burden born of their extended families.
Until a woman married she was either under the control of her father(and mother to an extant)or if her father was dead, she became the ward of another male relative-either a brother who was of age, an uncle, a grandfather, a nephew or some other male relation.  Very few women could own property outright, they certainly couldn't vote, or even enter into a legal contract during this time.

A young and attractive(and even better if her husband had left her with property/wealth)widow could still hope to remarry if a suitable societal match could be found.

Nancy had no hope of every making a proper marriage match now.  To be 17-18 years old and to know that your best days were behind you.....never to have a husband or your own family.  Nancy could only live at the pleasure of your male benefactor's whims for the rest of her days.

      Painting of Nancy Randolph in later years.

So Nancy continued to live at "Bizarre" Plantation with Richard and Judith and their two sons, John St. George Randolph(named after Richard's beloved stepfather St. George Tucker)and Theodorick Tudor Randolph(named for Richard's deceased brother and Nancy's secret betrothed and/or for Richard's maternal grandfather, Theodorick Bland).

Society was very strict place in Colonial times.  You associated with those in your social circle and you married within that circle or you didn't marry.  For the Founding Families in Colonial Virginia this meant a very small pool of folks from which to choose a spouse.  People did not move around and people did not as a rule travel far from where they were born so the available potential marriage partners were located within say 100 miles of where you lived.

And with these families, more than not, having a great number of children, who in turn, married cousins of varying degrees to themselves, the gene pool began to break down, much like the farmlands in Colonial Virginia did by the turn of the 19th century.

The Randolphs of Virginia were notorious for marrying within their extended family. Richard's brother, Theodorick died of consumption.  Consumption or Pulmonary Tuberculosis has long been thought to be one of the common side effects too close intermarriage within a family.
Richard and Judith's sons-John St. George Randolph(called St. George or as he was known within the family "St. John")was born deaf(another genetic defect)and Theodorick Tudor(called Tudor)also died at a young age of TB.

Tobacco had been successfully and commercially cultivated since 1612 in Virginia.  Tobacco is a bothersome crop in terms of the nutrients it takes from the soil.  But in the 1600's our forefathers knew nothing of crop rotation and such, so soils were depleted after a few seasons of tobacco and new fields had to be hacked out of the forests and put into use.  Tobacco by the 1790's was in decline as a cash crop, being replaced by the cotton trade which  flourished further South in the Delta lands.  To be successful with tobacco farming at this point in time meant continually buying more and more land to plant, and land in Virginia was getting quite expensive and these grand plantations, after primogeniture passed out of favor in the Colonies after the Revolutionary Way, got broken up or sold away.  The Landed Gentry Class in Virginia was hanging on by a thread by the 1790's.

Bizarre was founded by Richard's grandfather, Richard Randolph of Curles.  Upon Richard of Curles death, Bizarre would have gone to his son, John Randolph of Mattoax, Richard's father, but since John was dead, the plantation went to his son, Richard.
So Judith, Richard and their children lived life at Bizarre along with their relation Nancy.
Judith was not convinced that Richard and Nancy had/were still having an affair so she slowly simmered a hatred toward her sister Nancy.  After the trial Judith had written to the cousin they had been visiting at Glenlyvar when Nancy had given birth, Mary Harrison, "My health is very bad, indeed so much have I suffered lately, both in body and mind that I much fear that a few months will put an end to my troubles in this world, neglected and thrown off by all whom I once fondly relied on".

A mere three years after the scandalous trial ended Richard Randolph lay near death in June of 1796.  There are stories that still persist about that time.  One tale says that Judith changed the amount of ingredients in a concoction to alleviate Richard's pain which brought on his death.  Judith told Nancy to fix this altered potion and give it to Richard but then slipped the original recipe into Nancy' apron pocket thereby framing her once Richard passed and questions began to be asked.

Another story goes that Nancy knew Judith was trying to poison Richard but she was too afraid of Judith to say anything and expose her.

Still other's say Judith and Nancy were in cahoots to bring on Richard's end.

There was a witness to this macabre scene playing out, an English traveler who had come to Bizarre with a letter of introduction from yet another famous family member, Colonel Beverly Randolph(the 8th Governor of Virginia).  This traveler asked why Judith had not sent for a doctor yet to help Richard.  As a thunderstorm boomed large Judith replied that the doctor wouldn't come until the storm had passed.  Once the doctor arrived the next day Judith insisted on nursing Richard but it seems she didn't give him the medicines that the doctor prescribed but her own potions. Richard Randolph died within 2 days after that, a month past his 26th birthday.
We will never know what hand Judith and/or Nancy had in Richard's death or even what killed him.

After Richard's death the lone surviving Randolph brother, John Randolph of Roanoke inherited Bizarre but he spent very little time there.  Judith, Nancy and the two children, John St. George and Theodorick Tudor lived together at Bizarre in isolation from most of their family and society.  Between Judith and her brother in-law John Randolph, they spent the rest of their lives vilifying Nancy, blaming her for Richard's demise and twisting Judith's sons young minds against Nancy.

Once Richard died Judith became emboldened toward her sister Nancy.  She began to take away all of Nancy's privileges.  She no longer had free run on the plantation and house.  She no longer was allowed to ride the plantation's horses(one of the joys of her life), could no longer play the drawing room harpsichord, or given leisure time for reading.  She was forced to take all her meals in the kitchen or in her bedroom and not in the dining room with the boys and Judith.

For the next 12 years Nancy lived as a servant at Bizarre.  She was expected to work from rising until Judith went up to bed every night and to stay out of Judith's sight.  Nancy was expected to empty the chamber pots every morning so that "it would free up a slave to do other work" in Judith's words.  Nancy spent a lot of time in needlework(probably one of the few useful skills she had)when she wasn't reduced to menial labor like a slave.
Judith's mental state deteriorated over those 15 years and she was reported to suffer convulsions and fits.
The final straw came when a note Nancy had written to a literate slave named Billy fell into Judith's hands.  Nancy had written, "Dear Billy Ellis" and had asked him to polish the andirons.  In Judith's twisted mind she was convinced Nancy was having sex with this slave.  After screaming at Nancy Judith had Billy whipped, Nancy locked in her room until John Randolph could be sent for.
Upon hearing from Judith, John ordered Nancy to leave Bizarre plantation and never return.

In the year 1808, at the age of 33-34, Ann Cary "Nancy" Randolph left Bizarre, her home for the last 19 years.  Both her parents were long dead and she had no relationship with her father's second wife who was only 2 years older than Nancy, and the reason she had fled her father's home 19 years ago. Nancy had no relatives who would take her in being a social pariah and nowhere to go and no financial support.

Part Four next time..........

Sluggy