USA > Virginia > The history of the Virginia federal convention of 1788, with some account of eminent Virginians of that era who were members of the body, Vol. II > Part 2
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siding judge gave it as the decision of the court, "that if Mr. Holmes did not quit worrying Mr. Jones and making him curse and swear so, he should be sent to jail."11 Withal he was a most skilful and learned lawyer, indefatigable in maintaining the inter- ests of his clients, and most successful in winning verdicts.
His politics were pitched to the same high key with his tem- per. He had no fears of a strong government which was, at the same time, a representative government. He thought that the principal defect in popular institutions consisted in their weak- ness, and that vigor in the administration was the true and the only means of sustaining successfully a republican system. He warmly supported the Federal Constitution, and was to his last hour a thorough, open, and uncompromising Federalist. Look- ing upon every honor to be conferred upon him as a mark of disgrace if founded on an erroneous view of his opinions, he expressed himself on public occasions with a freedom and a harshness that gave great scandal even to men not ordinarily squeamish. Thus, when he was a candidate with Thomas Lewis for a seat in the present Convention, though his opinions were everywhere known in the Valley, having heard that some of the voters whom he disliked intended voting for him out of regard for his brother-in-law, he declared from the hustings, on the opening of the polls, "that he would not receive the votes of such damned rascals." 12 He had no concealments, in public or in private. He was never worse than he appeared to be. In the relations of private life he was punctual, liberal, and honor- able. The man never lived who doubted his integrity. By strict attention to the duties of his profession he accumulated a large estate. In pecuniary matters he was stern, but just. He exacted indiscriminately his own dues from others, but he ren- dered the dues of others with equal exactness. In an age of wild speculation, he would never buy a bond under par, nor receive more than six per cent. for the use of money. Hence, by the aid of his large capital, his influence was extensive; and that influence was invariably wielded in behalf of suffering
11 I have given this nearly in the words of a writer in the Virginia Historical Register, Vol. III, 17. I have received it from various sources.
12 I have heard this incident detailed in several ways, but all illustra- tive of the fearlessness of Jones in the presence of the voters.
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GABRIEL JONES.
virtue, of sound morals, and of public faith. He kept an account of all his expenses; and when he engaged at his own fireside, or at the firesides of his friends, as was the fashion of the times, in a game of cards, he noted his losses and his gains; and a regular account of his luck, kept through his whole life, was found among his papers. When we regard his protracted career, and the influence which his strict veracity, his incorrupti- ble integrity, and his fearless assertion of the right, exerted on the public opinion of a young and unsettled country, rapidly filling up with the waifs of a various emigration, almost beyond the reach of law, his peculiarities, though ever to be pitied and deolored, are softened in the contemplation. He neither sought nor would accept public office; but it is certain that he was elected a member of Congress under the Confederation, and, it is believed, a judge of the General Court. 13
" The election of Jones to Congress was made under flattering Corvumstances. He was at the head of a delegation consisting of Edmund Randolph, James Mercer, Patrick Henry, William Fitzhugh, Meriwether Smith, and Cyrus Griffin. He was elected June 17, 1779. Journal of the House of Delegates of that date.) He ran against Paul Carrington on the first election of the judges of the General Court, and was defeated by sixteen votes. (Journal House of Dele- gates, January 23, 1778.) I confess my obligation to Francis B. Jones, Exq .. for information concerning his ancestor. There was a portrait of Gabriel Jones at the residence of the late General J. B. Harvie, of Richmond, who was his grandson.
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THOMAS LEWIS.
But Gabriel Jones was not the only man of influence and talents whom Rockingham sent to the present Convention. No two men could differ more from each other in physical and moral qualities than Jones and his colleague, Thomas Lewis. Jones was diminutive in stature; Lewis was one of a family of gallant brothers whose height exceeded six feet; and he was large in proportion to his height. Jones, to the extreme verge of a pro- tracted and prosperous life, gave way to an uncontrollable tem- per; Lewis, though sprung from a fiery race, governed his passions with such deliberate judgment that few even of his intimate friends had ever seen him under high excitement. Jones, when he was furious-and he was apt to be furious on slight provocation-swore with such vehemence as to shock even men of the world; Lewis, though unconnected with any church, was essentially a pious man, and gave instructions in his will that the burial-service of, the Episcopal Church should be read by his friend Gilmer at his grave. In the science and practice of law, to which he had devoted for more than half a century the energies of a vigorous mind, Jones was superior not only to Lewis, but to all his rivals west of the Ridge; but in a love of order, in popularity derived from personal worth, and in integ- rity, Lewis was his equal; and in profound and elegant scholar- ship, and in a knowledge of political affairs, acquired in the pub- lic councils during the earlier stages of those measures which led to the Revolution, he was not only ahead of Jones, but of all the able and patriotic men to whom the West had confided its interests at this critical conjuncture, he was regarded at home and throughout the State as confessedly the first. They were brothers-in-law, lived in a style of liberal hospitality on their princely estates lying on the opposite banks of the Shenandoah, and were personal friends. Lewis was the elder by six years. Both had probably studied at William and Mary, had emigrated in early life to the Valley, with the interests of which they were
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THOMAS LEWIS.
fully conversant, and advocated with equal zeal the ratification of the Federal Constitution. They were descended from differ- ent stocks-possibly from the same stock developed under differ- ent circumstances. Jones was of English parentage, and though born in Virginia, spent his youth in England.14 With the gov- ernment of that country he was familiar, and he saw nothing in it to excite remark or to demand reform. In common with the most conspicuous statesmen of the Revolution, he would have preferred a safe and honorable connection with England to a state of independence. He was in favor of an energetic govern- ment vigorously administered, and from habit, from policy, and from principle would have chosen rather to await the full develop- ment of bad measures than to assail in the beginning an abstract principle from which bad measures were likely to follow. Lewis was the descendant of a Scotch ancestor, who had become an Irish colonist, and who imbibed the spirit, partly religious and partly military, which a colonist of the dominant race in the cir- cumstances of his condition could not fail to cherish. Hence the readiness with which Lewis separated himself from the great body of the eastern delegation in the House of Burgesses of 1765, and voted for the resolutions of Henry against the Stamp Act. He well knew that the Colony could bear the weight of a stamp tax as easily as we now bear the weight of the tax on letters transmitted through the post ; but he saw in the principle of laying taxes on the people without representation a source of danger, the extent of which could only be measured by the cupidity of those who had unjustly assumed the power. Jones, in common with many eastern members, might have hesitated to adopt means of resistance until the policy had become fixed; but Lewis voted to resist the infraction at the outset, and to incur present difficulty in the hope of forestalling future trouble. Hence, while many of the eastern men in March, 1775, were reluctant to proceed to extremities, and were disposed to rely on the operation of the non-importation agreements as an appeal to
"Governor Gilmer, already cited, calls Jones a Welshman, and assigns his reasons for believing that the Lewises were originally from Wales. I lean to the belief that the Lewises were neither Huguenot nor Welsh, but were Scotch, and emigrated to Ireland in the time of James the First, or of Cromwell. [This question grows .- EDITOR. ]
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the commercial sensibilities of England, Lewis approved the resolutions of Henry for putting the Colony into military array; and in the following year sustained the resolution instructing the delegates of Virginia in Congress to propose independence, and the resolution appointing a committee to report a Declaration of Rights and an independent Constitution. But on this great occasion Lewis and Jones united to attain a common object.
This change in the policy of Lewis did not fail to attract atten- tion. It was from a close observation of his conduct in past years that the opponents of the Federal Constitution counted upon his vote. In the eyes of Henry and his compatriots, who had steadily guarded the right of taxation, not only from the encroachments of the mother country, but from the encroach- ments of our own Confederation, it seemed monstrous to cede that invaluable right without limitation to any authority what- ever, whether that authority was seated on the other side of the Atlantic or on this. The statesmen of whom Henry was the chief were free to declare that the Northern States richly merited their gratitude for their heroic conduct in resisting British tyranny, and that they ardently desired a union with them; but between an expression of gratitude and a love of union, and an entire surrender of the right most precious to freemen, there was an immense interval which it was madness to overleap. Lewis doubtless felt the delicacy of his position. It was pain- ful to part from friends with whom we had long held intimate communion; but it was his deliberate conviction that the diffi- culties of the crisis demanded a trial of the new system, and he voted with his colleague, who from the first had no doubts on the subject.
Nor was his vote confined to the ratification of the Consti- tution. On the greatest of all the amendments which were reported by the select committee, and which aimed to secure to the States a modified control over the right of taxation, he again parted from his ancient allies. It may be remarked, as an instructive fact in the history of the Scotch-Irish race which settled in the Valley, and made an impression upon its popula- tion likely to last for years and ages to come, that those among them who were attached to the Episcopal Church were eager for the ratification of the Federal Constitution ; and that those
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who had been dissenters before the Revolution, and were con- nected with the Presbyterian Church, opposed the adoption of that instrument in its unamended form with all their zeal. 15
Of the early life of Lewis, of his birth in Ireland, and the circumstances which led to the emigration of his family, of his services as the first surveyor of Augusta, when Augusta extended to the Ohio and to the Mississippi, and of his career in the House of Burgesses, in the early conventions, and especially in the Convention of 1776, when he voted in favor of the resolu- tion instructing the delegates from Virginia in Congress to pro- pose independence, and was a member of the committee which reported the Declaration of Rights and the Constitution, we have already treated in detail. 16 His knowledge of mathematics was held in high repute; and when the boundary line between Virginia and Pennsylvania, an exciting question, which had nearly involved the two States in civil war, was about to be run, he was placed at the head of the commission to which Virginia assigned that delicate duty ; but, as he was unable to be pres- ent at the meeting of the commissioners of the two States in Baltimore, and as the arrangement made by his colleagues was not conclusive, he was again called upon by the Assembly to examine the subject in dispute and to report his opinion at a subsequent session.17 In the intervals of public employments he devoted his time to the cultivation of his estate, and was ever pleased when he could snatch an hour from business and from society to engage in the pursuits of science, or to enjoy the pleasures of literature. He imported the elder as well as the more recent productions of British genius; and the intelligent visitor from the East, who had come into the Valley in search of a patrimonial land-claim, and was welcomed as a guest at his hearth, saw with unfeigned surprise, on shelves freshly made from trees which had reared for centuries above the waters of the
13 Archibald Stuart and Thomas Lewis on the one side, and William Graham, the Ajax Telamon of the Presbyterians of the Valley, are instances illustrative of the fact stated in the text.
16 In the discourse on the Virginia Convention of 1776, page 112.
" His colleagues in the first instance were the Rev. James Madison and the Rev. Robert Andrews; and in the second his brother, Andrew Lewis, and Colonel Innes. (Journal of the House of Delegates, June 24, 1779.)
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Shenandoah, the most elaborate treatises on the sciences and the most instructive and most elegant performances in history, in theology, and in general literature.18 His position in the Valley was so prominent that all who sought information or advice on any topic connected with the West either repaired to his house or consulted him through the post. Washington, who had served with him on many trying occasions in the House of Bur- gessess and in the Conventions, and who had taken up vast tracts of land on the Kanawha and the Ohio, earnestly asked his aid in the management of his affairs, which Lewis, whose whole time hardly sufficed to manage his own, was compelled to refuse. He had long suffered from a cancer on the face, and on the 3Ist day of January, 1790, within less than two years after the adjourn- ment of the present Convention, in the midst of his children and grandchildren, and in the seventy-third year of his age, he died on his estate on the Shenandoah, and was buried on its banks.
[He accompanied the commission in 1746 to determine the line of Lord Fairfax's-the Northern Neck grant-from the head spring of the Rappahannock to the head spring of the Potomac. A journal of the expedition, kept by him, is in the possession of his descendant, the Hon. John F. Lewis. It gives the only authentic narrative now extant of the planting of the Fairfax stone. - EDITOR. ]
16 In an account of the library of Colonel Lewis, see the discourse on the Convention of 1776, as last cited.
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JOHN STUART.
By the side of Thomas Lewis sat his son-in-law, a man of the ordinary height, but of a stalwart frame, whose large head, low, receding forehead, black, bushy eyebrows, small blue eyes, aquiline nose, bronzed features, and stern aspect, presented the beau-ideal of that hardy race, which in the outskirts of the Com- monwealth cultivated the earth and worshipped God with a rifle constantly by their side and with a ball-pouch flung across the shoulder. He had learned from his father-in-law to beguile the cares and dangers of a frontier life with the pleasures of litera- ture.
In his rock-built home near Lewisburg, in a cherry case as bright as mahogany, he had collected some of the best authors of the Augustan age of English literature. Nor were his literary amusements unprofitable to his country .. He has left to posterity the most accurate and lifelike account of the greatest Indian battle ever fought on the soil of Virginia; and in a neat and truthful narrative has interwoven with charming effect the inci- dents, of personal and general interest, developed during the settlement of the country west of the Alleghany, of which he was now the representative.
Such was John Stuart, of Greenbrier. He was the son of David Stuart, who was born in Wales in 1710, who married, in 1750, Margaret Lynn, of Loch Lynn, Scotland, and who shortly after his marriage emigrated to Virginia, settling himself in the county of Augusta, where his brother-in-law, John Lewis, the father of Andrew and Thomas Lewis, resided.19 David died
19 Governor Gilmer says that the name of Colonel John Stuart's father was John; but my information is derived from the family records in the possession of the accomplished granddaughter of Colonel Stuart, Mrs. General Davis, of Fayette. Governor Gilmer states that the father of Colonel Stuart was an intimate personal friend of Governor Dinwiddie, and came over with him in 1752. If this be true, then David Stuart must have come by way of the West Indies. ("Georgians," page 50.) ["The probability is that Stuart had no personal connection
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early, leaving two daughters, whose reputable descendants live in the East and in the West, and one son, whose services it is our duty to record. Young Stuart had not the advantages of early instruction; but he was a close observer, a diligent inquirer, and was constant in his endeavors to improve his mind. He acquired a knowledge of mathematics ample enough to qualify him to perform with skill the duties of a surveyor, and was appointed by his uncle, John Lewis, his agent in locating land-warrants in the region now included in the county of Greenbrier. Thither he removed, and there during fifty eventful years he continued to reside. He settled himself on a tract of land four miles from Camp Union, as the present site of Lewisburg was once called, which was presented to him by his cousin, General Andrew Lewis, which he improved and adorned with commodious build- ings, and on which he lived until his death. In the Indian skir- mishes of the times he was frequently engaged, and in the army of General Andrew Lewis, which fought in October, 1771, the memorable battle at the Point, he commanded one of the Bote- tourt companies of Colonel Fleming's division, and acted with distinguished gallantry. In 1780 he was returned to the House of Delegates by the county of Greenbrier, which three years before had been set apart from Botetourt and Montgomery, and in November of the following year was appointed the clerk of the court. For more than a quarter of a century he performed the duties of clerk of all the courts of Greenbrier with scrupu- lous fidelity, and, retiring in his old age from public business, was succeeded by his son, Lewis. He became the County Lieu- tenant at a time when that office was keenly coveted by our fathers. Indeed, the County Lieutenant 20 then held the same honorable office which the Lord Lieutenant held in the parent country, and presided in the court, commanded the militia, and was in all public affairs the exponent of the county. His respon- sible duties were marked out by special enactments. It was not obligatory upon him to take the field; but if he took the field,
with Governor Dinwiddie. He certainly settled in the Valley long before Dinwiddie became Governor of the Colony."-Waddell's Annals of Augusta County, page 463 .- EDITOR.]
" For the rank and position of the County Lieutenant, see pages 35-36 of the Journal of the Convention of July, 1775.
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the colonel of the regiment became lieutenant-colonel and the lieutenant-colonel became major. It was the experience in civil and military affairs thus acquired, and his long and intimate acquaintance with the wants and interests of the West, that impelled him to approve a vigorous government and to favor the ratification of the Federal Constitution by the present Con- vention. His sagacity led him to fear that the Indian, though driven beyond the Ohio, might prove a dangerous foe to the West; and he knew that it rested not with Virginia, but with Eng- land in the North and with Spain in the West, whether there should be peace or war within our borders; and that a coalition between those two foreign forces might result in the extermina- tion of the settlers west of the Blue Ridge. He viewed both these nations with distrust; yet, if either of them should choose to bring all the Indians within its control into the field, it would require all the resources of the Union to repel the savages and to punish them. With such impressions, he brought all his influence to bear upon his countrymen, and succeeded in securing the vote of Greenbrier in favor of the Constitution. Nor did his affection for the Constitution cease with its adoption. He gave a cordial support to those who were charged with its administration, and upheld the policy of Washington and of Adams with unwavering confidence. As he was earnest and sincere in his political feelings, he maintained his opinions unal- tered by the fluctuations of popular passion or by the lapse of time, and died as he had lived-an honest, upright, and consist- ent Federalist. He rarely spoke with severity of his opponents; but in his letters to confidential friends he handled the foibles of the Democratic leaders without mercy, but without venom; and he showed his antipathy to their doctrines rather by laughing at what he deemed their inconsistencies and absurdities than in fierce and vulgar denunciation.21 Indeed, the conspicuous trait of his character was a decorous self-command. It was hard to tell what impression a remark made upon him. In mixed com- panies he was silent and reserved, and his grave deportment and severe aspect were apt to repress the loquacity of others. He
. 21 The letters of Colonel Stuart, addressed to the Rev. Benjamin Grigsby during the Adams and Jefferson administrations, are in my col- lections.
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never lost his youthful love of the rifle, which to the last he wielded with unerring skill; and it was the delight of his old age to wander through the forest ; and he has been seen to halt and carve a date or a name on the bark of a beech, and to sit upon a fallen tree with his rifle on his lap, as he was wont to do in youth when he watched the Indian enemy. Yet, with one or two old friends he would occasionally unbend, and on such occa - sions it was pleasing to hear him recount the early incidents of his life and his clear and admirable estimate of the Revolution- ary statesmen with whom he had served in the public councils. With all his seeming sternness, he was revered by the great body of his fellow-citizens; and his popularity was the more honorable to him, as it arose from no concession to fashionable follies, from no concealment of unpopular opinions, but from the computation of solid worth in the calm judgments of the peo- ple. His habit of self-command and the steadiness of his nerves were remarkable even in his last hour. Like many of the early settlers, he had insensibly caught some of the Indian traits. He did not appear to suffer from any particular disease, but seemed, like a soldier on duty, patiently to await the time of his final discharge. On the evening of the 23d of August, 1823, he told his son that his time had come; and, rising from his bed, shaved and dressed himself with unusual care. When he had finished his toilet he rested on the bed, and in five minutes breathed his last. He had reached his seventy-fifth year. He was buried on his estate, not far from the site of a fort which he had erected for protection from the sudden forays of the Indians. A slab with an appropriate epitaph marks the spot.
Taciturn and unbending as this worthy patriot appeared, there was a romance in the courtship of his wife, which has become one of the traditions of the West. About mid-day on the 10th of October, 1774, in the town of Staunton, a little girl, the daughter of John and Agatha Frogge, and the granddaughter of Thomas Lewis, who was sleeping in the room in which her mother was attending to her domestic affairs, suddenly awoke, screaming that the Indians were murdering her father. She was quieted by her mother, and went to sleep again. Again she awoke, screaming that the Indians were murdering her father. She was quieted once more, and was waked up a third time by the same horrid vision, and continued screaming in spite of all
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the efforts of her mother to soothe and pacify her. The mother of the child was much alarmed at the first dream ; but when the same dreadful vision was seen by the child a third time, her imagination, quickened by that superstition which is almost uni- versal among the Scotch, and which the highest cultivation rather conceals than eradicates, presented before her the lifeless form of her husband gashed by the tomahawk of the savage. Her cries drew together her neighbors, who, when informed of what had occurred, joined in her lamentations, until all Staunton was in a state of commotion. It so happened that the bloody battle of the Point was fought on the very day when Staunton was thus agitated, and, what was still more wonderful, John Frogge, the father of the child who had seen the vision, was killed during the engagement.22 When Captain Stuart, at the close of the Western campaign, visited the Valley, he saw the mother of the affrighted child, who was his first cousin, and, as he had pro- bably seen her husband fall and assisted in committing his body to the grave, communicated to her the melancholy but interesting details of his fate. The sequel is soon told. He was enter- prising and brave; she was young and beautiful; and in due time he conducted her as a bride to his mountain home. The off- spring of this marriage were two sons and two daughters, who survived their parents, but are now dead, leaving numerous descendants. Mrs. Stuart outlived her husband some years, and saw her grandchildren attain to maturity.23
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