FAMILIES ARE NOT WHAT THEY ONCE WERE—but this may not be entirely a bad thing. Cinderella, after all, had a family. So too did Hamlet, King Lear, Oedipus, and Antigone. So did Anne Cary Randolph, better known as “Nancy,” the prime mover in our first great American scandal and now the heroine of Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman—And the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, a book by the Virginia historian Alan Pell Crawford. Imagine Gone With the Wind if Eugene O’Neill had written it, add a spoonful of Alexis de Tocqueville, a suspicion of incest and murder, many great names and reversals of fortune, and you have this love-hate-mystery tale of political history. “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household,” warns the Gospel of St. Matthew. Nancy Randolph’s were. She not only had a family; she had a family whose sway in its own time was enormous. It all had begun in the late 1660s, when William Randolph, descendant of a nephew of Robert the Bruce, and then of a long line of advisers to the royal houses of England and Scotland, migrated to the New World and built a grand house on Virginia’s James River. He had seven sons who in turn built their mansions and planted tobacco. In no time, they replicated the country-house world they had known in England, their opulence in dramatic contrast to the untamed wilderness around. Tuckahoe, Nancy’s birthplace, built near Richmond in 1710, was, Crawford writes, “the scene of boisterous barbecues, fish fries, and fancy dress balls. The clapboard mansion was known throughout the colonies for its fine walnut paneling and fragrant boxwood gardens. Done up in velvet and gold, the colonel’s bedroom was the stuff of legend; the stables housed some of the fastest horses in the South.” With all of this wealth went political power. Edmund Randolph would be the new country’s first attorney general. Peyton Randolph was an early revolutionary leader. John Marshall’s mother was a Randolph. Thomas Jefferson’s mother was a Randolph, and his oldest daughter would marry one. The result was something akin to the old English system, where one ducal family controlled a whole county. Still, there was something unreal and precarious about it. It had come too fast, its hold on the wilderness was too superficial, and before long, it began to wear off. Growing tobacco became harder and harder. The family stock was becoming exhausted. Typical were the three sons born around 1770 to John Randolph of Matoax and his wife, Frances Bland. The youngest, Jack—John Randolph of Roanoake—became an eccentric congressman, famous mainly for duels and epigrams. Known as effeminate before and after a bout of high fever, he had a spindly build, a high voice, and the smooth hairless skin of a child. Theodorick, the middle son, would die at twenty. Richard, the eldest, was charming and spoiled enough to be utterly worthless. They caused great concern, both to their father and their stepfather, a hard-working lawyer, who tried to warn them that the money was going, that they would inherit debts only, and that they would have to rely on “their own personal abilities and exertions” to get by. Richard, however, had little inclination to exert himself. His one show of nerve was his insistence on marrying his cousin, Judith Randolph of Tuckahoe, whom he wed in a grand society function on Christmas Day in 1789. Settling first in his birthplace, they moved on to Bizarre, a plantation whose name would prove all too prophetic. Soon, they would be joined there by more family members: his younger brothers, Jack and Theodorick; and her sister, Nancy, who by that time had been forced to leave home. Nancy’s problems had begun when her mother died and her father remarried, to Gabriella Harvey, the wicked stepmother of all children’s terrors, who lost no time in “sowing discord” between her new husband and his children. Relations between Gabriella and Nancy were especially difficult—and so Nancy fled to Bizarre, a curious choice, where her life became still more peculiar. At once, she became the focus of all the men in the family: of the waspish attentions of Jack, the more straightforward attentions of Theodorick (who became her fiancé, as she later attested), and the more complex attentions of Richard, whose marriage to Judith had begun rather badly, and had since then become worse. It was soon noted that Nancy and Richard shared a certain rapport and affinity. It was noted that Judith, then pregnant, was distant and querulous. Late in 1791, Theodorick was ailing, and he died on February 14 the next year. And some months after this sad thing happened, it was noted that Nancy was…fat. This weight gain of Nancy’s—its possible cause, and its probable author—began to obsess the Randolphs and Virginia society, which were, in those days, the same thing. Tongues wagged, rumors flew, and eyes stared. Nancy took to locking her door while undressing, while relatives took to peering through the cracks. Complaining of colic, she asked her sister-in-law, Patsy Jefferson Randolph, for a medicine known to induce miscarriage. An aunt had seen her “look at her waist, and cast her eyes up to Heaven,” with a great sigh of grief. Late in September, the family went on an overnight trip to their cousins, the Harrisons, with Nancy wrapped up in a thick winter coat. Late that night, screams were heard coming from her upstairs bedroom, along with the noise of footsteps going up and downstairs. The next day, Nancy appeared pale, but quiet; the next day, the Randolphs departed. And weeks later, rumors began to course through Virginia that the body of a dead white infant had been discovered at the Harrisons’ plantation by their slaves. The trial of the century—the eighteenth century—of Richard Randolph for the murder of the child born presumably to himself and his sister-in-law began at the courthouse in Cumberland county on April 29, 1793. Present were all the marks of celebrity trials and scandals we have come to expect. There were the rival teams of celebrity lawyers: Edmund Randolph for the prosecution; John Marshall and Patrick Henry for the defense. There were crowds of spectators, eager to see well-connected, rich people in trouble. There were the stories of stonewalling among family members: the Harrisons, who claimed to have heard and seen nothing; Jack, who denied that Nancy was pregnant; Judith, the aggrieved party, who had said nothing at all. The problem was that while a narrative could have certainly been constructed that would add up to murder, there were few facts that seemed watertight. Some people thought Nancy seemed fatter in May, but could not have sworn she had later grown too much larger; while some noticed nothing. Richard had indeed been warm toward Nancy, but in the presence of others, including his wife. Bloodstains at the Harrisons’ on the stairs and the pillowcase could have had many causes. Writes Crawford, “Nancy’s friends, Marshall admitted, ‘cannot but deny that there is some foundation on which suspicion may build,’ but her enemies could not dispute that every circumstance might be accounted for, without imputing guilt.” Everything, in short, could be surmised, but nothing quite proven. The charge was dismissed. The Randolphs then went home to Bizarre, condemned to each other. Money and power may seem to have triumphed, but in reality, the Randolphs and the world around them had received a fatal blow. In retrospect, the trial had been a defining moment, at which the inheritors of a great ruling family had begun to surrender their moral authority, and made a descent into figures of ridicule. “Before the year was out,” writes Crawford, “the girl had become the Jezebel of the Old Dominion and the young man who was the alleged father had become its laughing stock. Idlers in taverns made ribald jokes at his expense.” Back at Bizarre, feelings, always intense, now became poisonous. Judith, who had maintained her faith in her relatives’ innocence, began to have doubts and to turn on her husband and sister. Richard, whose moral fiber was never excessive, was worn down by the trauma, and died of a sudden mysterious illness in June 1796. With his death, Jack began to turn against Nancy, whom he soon claimed had poisoned his brother. While Judith took—Nancy claimed—to treating her like a servant, Jack had begun spreading poisonous rumors: that she had killed his brother, that she had killed her own infant, that she behaved like a prostitute and slept with servants and slaves. At the end of 1805, Nancy was ordered off the plantation, at age thirty-one, scandal-ridden and penniless. Scarlett in the vegetable garden at post-Sherman Tara, had not fallen further. But, like Scarlett, Nancy had no intention of submitting tamely. “I will rally again,” she said, and she did. Gouverneur Morris may not have looked like Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler, but he was in all other ways perfect: a worldly roué with a large reputation; seasoned and clever and rich. Born in 1752 to great wealth at Morrisania in what is now the Bronx, he had been successively a delegate to the Continental Congress, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, an ambassador to France under President Washington, a senator from the state of New York, and a friend to most of the leading lights of his era, from such fellow Federalists as Washington, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton to people he had met abroad in his travels, such as Talleyrand, Madam de Staël, and Lafayette. He was a witty patriot and an egregious rake, who had lost a leg at the age of twenty-seven when his carriage turned over as he was speeding away from the house of a woman whose husband had returned prematurely. He was fifty-four in 1806, when he received a note from Anne Cary Randolph, whom he had met only once, when she was fourteen. In it, she said she was now in New York, seeking employment, and asking his help and advice. Nancy had come to New York in late 1806, after perhaps the worst years of her life. She had first gone to Tuckahoe, which she found run-down and deserted. She then went to Richmond, where she rented a room that had almost no furniture. Frequently destitute, she seems to have lived on small sums from her brothers. She went on to Connecticut, where she befriended a widow. She stopped in Rhode Island, where she may have taught school. And finally, she came to New York, where Morris came to her in 1808 with a business proposal: He was looking for a “reduced gentlewoman” to take care of his house. Correspondence followed, and in April 1809, Nancy moved into the Morris estate. On Christmas, Morris, the confirmed bachelor uncle, played host to his extended family and prospective heirs, plus the rector of his church. After dinner, the party adjourned to the parlor, and the rector stepped forward. Then, as Morris later confided to his diary, “I marry this day Anne Cary Randolph. No small surprise to my guests.” Nancy’s coup in snaring the catch of the country did not mean that her life after this was untroubled. The Morris heirs disinherited by the marriage—and by the resulting son, Gouverneur II, born some years later—eagerly joined the Randolphs in calling Nancy a slut and a murderess. Nonetheless, she had recovered the heights of social preeminence to which she had been born. In December 1811, she and her husband went to the White House for a private meeting with President and Mrs. Madison, dined with the minister at the French legation, and “in mid January, she celebrated with her husband when the House committee voted its approval of the Erie Canal.” This story of success was played out against the decay of the society that had ejected her, now increasingly debt-ridden and desperate. Always unhappy, her sister Judith had one son who was deaf and one who died before twenty. Jack through the years had become still more eccentric and violent. He fought one duel with Henry Clay, threatened two more with Jefferson’s sons-in-law, and, in an infamous incident, nearly beat a fellow congressman to death. Her brother Tom was depressed and insolvent, driving his wife, Patsy Jefferson, into long stays at Monticello to escape his rages, where her father, the ex-president, spending far too much on incessant house renovations, was quickly sinking into poverty himself. Twice in American history, there have been attempts to build in the agrarian South a landed hereditary aristocracy based on the models of Europe and England. The second was the cotton kingdom of the nineteenth century, which was broken by the Union armies. The first was the tobacco kingdom of the Old Dominion, which was broken by market forces and by human nature. The great theme of Gone With the Wind is the collapse of cotton’s faux aristocracy, and the success and failure of its members to cope with the tough world that followed. The great theme of Alan Pell Crawford’s Unwise Passions is the collapse of tobacco’s faux aristocracy. Richard Randolph is the Ashley Wilkes of this story, who was soft and went under. Nancy and Morris are like Rhett and Scarlett, who were tough and did not. In the one statement she seems to have made about the events that had altered her life, Nancy seems to have admitted that she had carried a child—but the child of her fiancé, Theodorick, and that child was born dead. “I was left at Bizarre, a girl not yet seventeen, with the man [I] loved. I was betrothed to him, and considered him my husband in the presence of God.” As Crawford elaborates, “They had all lied at Cumberland court. She had given birth that night at Glentivar, but it had been Theodorick’s baby, not Richard’s, and it had been born stillborn.” It is likely that the child was premature, for several reasons, among them that a full-term pregnancy would have been all too self-evident. But a child fathered by Theodorick would have had to have been conceived before his death in mid-February, and before this, he had been desperately ill. Was he in any condition to have fathered a child, and could Nancy have found him attractive in his illness? By the summer of 1791, Crawford says, “friends and relatives began to feel that Richard’s attentions to Nancy were improper. They had also come to suspect that his feelings were returned, and that any desire Nancy might have once felt for Theodorick was gone.” Later, when the Randolphs were dead, Richard was “the only one she ever again referred to with fondness.” So was the baby born dead or killed, in a moment of panic? If the baby was due, why did the family go to Glentivar? If Nancy had taken a drug to induce a miscarriage, why did she then go on an overnight visit? Why, if the family wished to hide her condition, did they go on a visit at all? Mysteries persist as to exactly what happened, but few doubts remain about why. Intense family feelings were not uncommon. For one thing, it was hard for these people to meet others who were not their relatives. For another, once penned up with one’s in-laws and extended family members, one could not escape—especially if one lived, as the Randolphs did in Virginia, in a series of large, remote houses alone in the wilderness, with transportation difficult and neighbors miles away. Confined as they were with a very few people, strange feelings emerged and swelled into unwise passions, furious jealousies, murderous hates. One wonders what might have happened to the Bizarre contingent if they had left home more often, gotten around more, met more people who were not their in-laws and cousins. Much has been made recently, and with good reason, of the conspicuous fraying of family ties, the strain put upon them by outside influences, and constant distractions. What Unwise Passions reminds us is that there is sometimes something to be said for distractions from family. It is worth noting that Nancy found happiness only when forced out of the family orbit. Say what you will about Nancy’s dilemma—it did get her out of the house. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
