USA > Virginia > Virginia and Virginians; eminent Virginians, executives of the colony of Virginia, Vol. I > Part 16
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Tariff. He addressed a letter to Chief Justice John Marshall disdaining the expressions, not the general sentiments, in regard to Washington. ascribed to him in the Life of Washington. He also appeared before the public as a correspondent of John Quincy Adams. His writings were collected and published in 1827, under the general title of Miscellanies. Giles County, Virginia, formed in 1806 from the counties of Monroe and Tazewell, was named in his honor. He married, March 3, 1810, Miss Frances Anne Gwynn. Of the issue of this happy marriage, a son, Thomas T. Giles, a member of the Richmond bar, and long the zealous chairman of the Executive Committee of the Virginia Historical Society, died January 18, 1883, in the eightieth year of his age. Two daughters married respectively the late A. D. Townes, and the late Gustavus A. Myers, a distinguished lawyer. The son of the last, the late Major William Branch Myers, was an artist of merit, and several portraits executed by him are preserved in the collections of the Vir- ginia Historical Society, where also is an excellent full length portrait of Governor Giles. He is represented seated before a table with writ- ing materials, and with a crutch, rendered necessary from rheumatic affliction, resting against his chair. His countenance bears a shrewd expression. His dress is that of his day-the striking ruffled shirt, blue coat with brass buttons, etc. The tout ensemble impresses one as that of a quondam fox-hunting English squire, who enjoyed the good things of this world with keen zest.
JOHN FLOYD.
The received tradition in the distinguished Floyd family of Virginia is that its progenitor, a native of Wales, was a very early settler in that portion of the Colony known as the Eastern Shore. The name is indeed of carly record. Walter Floyd appears, with associates, as a pat- entee of four hundred acres of land in " Martin's Hundred," on "Skitfe Creek," April 24, 1632. Nathaniel Floyd patented eight hundred and fifty acres in Isle of Wight County November 20, 1637 ; and John Floyd, Thomas Hunt, Edward Bibby, and George Clarke were the grantees, September 28, 1681, of Hog Island, containing twenty-two hundred acres, upon the Atlantic coast, opposite the counties of Northampton and Accomac. Walter Floyd was in all probability the father or grandfather of the John Floyd last named, and the lineal progenitor of the subject of the present sketch, but the connecting links have not been preserved. The family account commences with three brothers (whom it is fair to presume were the sons of John Floyd, as above) : William, John ("who went North"), and Charles Floyd, who migrated to Georgia, and was the ancestor of General John Floyd, of Darien, in that State. William Floyd removed to the county of Amherst, then a wild region, and married there Abidiah, the fifth child of Robert and - (Hughes)
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TETOURT. lafe Governor of Virginia.
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Best beloved of the Royal Governors of Virginia.
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Davis .* Their eldest son, John Floyd, was born in 1751. He mar- ried, in 1769, a Miss Barfoot, who died within a year, leaving an in- fant daughter, who was taken charge of by the mother of Mrs. Floyd. Soon afterwards John Floyd removed to the county of Botetourt, where he engaged in teaching school, and writing in the office of the county surveyor, Colonel William Preston, in whose family he lived. His duties were unremitting; when his services were not demanded in the surveyor's office, he was in the saddle as the deputy of the county sheriff, Colonel William Christian. In 1774 he went to Kentucky, where he located and surveyed for himself and others many rich tracts of land on Elkhorn Creek, and within the present counties of Clarke, Woodford, Shelby, and Jefferson. The service was attended with many hardships and much danger from savage hostility. Colonel Floyd re- turned to Virginia in 1776, soon after the Declaration of Independence, and took command of a schooner-the " Phoenix"-which had been fit- ted as a privateer by Dr. Thomas Walker, Edmund Pendleton, Colonel William Preston, and one or two others. Sailing to the West Indies, he took a valuable prize; but on his return, when nearly in sight of the capes of Virginia, he was overtaken by a British vessel of war, captured, and taken to England, where he remained in irons, a pris- oner, for nearly a year. He obtained his liberty through the sympa- thy of the jailer's daughter, who stealthily left his cell unlocked. He begged his way to Dover, where he was first concealed and then se- cured a passage to France by a clergyman who was thus in the habit of assisting American fugitives. Making his way to Paris, he was there furnished by Benjamin Franklin with means to return to America. In November, 1778, he married his second wife, Jane, daughter of Colonel. John and Margaret (daughter of Colonel James Patton) Buchanan. Colonel Floyd remained in Virginia until October, 1779, when he re- moved to his fine estate in Kentucky, ; on Bear Grass Creek, six miles from Louisville, where he built a stockade fort, which was known as Floyd's Station. In 1783 he was a member of the first court of Ken- tucky, which held its first session at Harrodsburg, and, in addressing the body, ardently said that he felt that he had set his foot on the threshold of an empire. He was a conspicuous actor in the stirring
# Robert Davis, the father of him of the same name of the text, a native of Wales, removed from Eastern Virginia and settled in Amherst County about 1720. He became wealthy by traffic with the Catawba Indians, and took up extensive tracts of rich and valuable lands. The tradition in the Floyd family is that he married a half-breed Indian girl. This, if true, would account in some measure for the striking physique of the Colonels John Floyd, father and son. The descendants of Robert Davis are numerous, and their connections embrace the best estcemed of the Virginia families.
t He was accompanied to Kentucky by his brothers Isham, Robert, and Charles Floyd, and his brothers-in-law LeMaster, Sturgis, and Pryor, husbands of his sisters. Three other sisters married respectively Alexander, Powell, and Tuley.
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scenes of the period. Alternately a surveyor, a legislator, and a sol- dier, his services were essentially important to the infant settlement. He was the principal surveyor of the Transylvania Company, and was chosen a delegate, from the town of St. Asaph, to the Assembly that met at Boonesborough on the 24th of May, 1775, to make laws for the colony. Honorably acquitting himself in all stations to which he was called, he finally met a violent death at the hands of the savages, on the 13th of April, 1783. The county of Floyd, Kentucky, com- memorates his name. His third son, # John, the subject of this sketch, was born in Jefferson County, on the 24th of April, eleven days after the death of his father. Mrs. Floyd, after the death of her husband, married, secondly, Captain Alexander Breckinridge, his successor as sur- veyor of Jefferson County. || In 1796 young John Floyd entered Dickin- son College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as a student, but through the failure of his guardian to meet his expenses he had to return home. He was fort- unately enabled to resume his studies in 1801. Returning home in his twenty-first year, he married, May 13, 1804, in Franklin County, Ken- tucky, his second cousin, Lætitia (born September 29, 1799), the tenth child of Colonel William and Susannah (Smith) Preston. In October following he entered the University of Pennsylvania as a student of medicine, and graduated thence M. D. in April, 1806, and settled in Montgomery County, Virginia. He was appointed a justice of the peace in June, 1807; commissioned as major of militia in 1808; served as surgeon in the Virginia Line, in 1812, in the second war with Great Britain, and in the same year was elected a member of the House of Delegates of Virginia. In 1817 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, and served ably in that body until 1829. " He was," it has been claimed, "the efficient head of the Virginia delegation. Others harangued more lengthily and learnedly, but his opinions were most deferred to, and his moral influence the greatest. ' We laugh,' said a facetious partisan member, 'at your Barbour's [P. P.] hair-splitting, but we indulge in no such merriment when we feel the glance of Floyd's savage eye.'" Mr. Floyd's influence in Congress was not the result of his superior eloquence or learning, for in both he was surpasssed; it was a concession to a sound and practical judgment united with a high and haughty courage, and, above all, an honesty that never entertained the first thought of barter or compromise. Mr. Floyd was elected Governor of Virginia by the Assembly, to succeed William B. Giles, in 1830; and in 1831 was unanimously re-elected by the samo
# Theelder sons were William Preston, born in 1789, and George Rogers Clarky Floyd, born in 1782. The last distinguished himself in the war of 1812, in which he attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
| The issue of this marriage was six sons. Captain Broekinridge died in Feb- ruary, 1801, and Mrs. Breckinridge on the 13th of May, 1812.
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body, under the amended constitution of the State. The second year of his administration is memorable as that of the tragic occurrence known as the "Sonthampton Insurrection." On Saturday night the 20th of August, 1831, a body of sixty or seventy slaves arose upon the white inhabitants of Southampton County and massacred fifty-five unsuspecting men, women, and children in their beds. The leader of this inhuman massacre was a negro slave named Nat Turner, about thirty-one years of age, born the slave of Benjamin Turner, of South- ampton County. From childhood Nat was the victim of superstition and fanaticism. He stimulated his fellow-slaves to join him in the mas- sacre by declaring to them that he had been commissioned by Jesus Christ, and that he was acting under inspired direction in atrocious de- signs. In the confession which he voluntarily made while in prison, he said : " That in his childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on his mind and laid the groundwork of the enthusiasm which was so fatal in its termination. Being at play with other children, when three or four years old, I told them something, which my mother overhearing, said it happened before I was born. I stuck to my story, however, and related some things which went, in her opinion, to confirm it. Others being called upon, were greatly astonished, knowing these things had happened, and caused them to say, in my hearing, I surely would be a prophet, as the Lord had showed me things which happened before my birth." His parents strengthened him in this belief, and said in his presence that he was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on his head and breast. Nat, as he grew up, was fully persuaded he was destined for some grand accomplishment. His powers of mind being much superior to his fellow-slaves, they looked up to him as one guided by divine inspiration. This belief he was assiduous to impress by exercises of apparently religious devotion and by the austerity of his life and manners. After a variety of alleged revelations from the spiritual world, Nat claimed that on the 12th of May, 1828 :- " I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the spirit instantly appeared to me and said that the serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of man, and that I should take it on and fight the serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first; and by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work; and, until the first sign appeared, I should conceal it from the knowledge of men. And on the appearance of the sign (the eclipse of the sun in February, 1831) I should arise and prepare my- self, and slay my enemies with their own weapons. And immediately upon the sign appearing in the heavens the seal was removed from my Jips, and I communicated the great work laid out for me to do to four
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in whom I had the greatest confidence." The massacre was laid for the 4th of July, but Nat fell sick, and the design was postponed until the "sign appeared again." Nat commenced the massacre by the mur- der of his master and family-Mr. Joseph Travis-with whom he had been living since the commencement of 1830; who was, Nat said, "a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me." Their first victims they slaughtered in their beds with axes. The wretches pro- cured here " four guns that would shoot and several old muskets, with a pound or two of powder." Nat then paraded his force at the barn, " formed them in line as soldiers, and, after carrying them through all the manœuvres he was capable of, marched them" on to further diab- olism.
They proceeded from house to house, murdering all the whites they could find, their force augmenting as they proceeded, till they num- bered between fifty and sixty men, all mounted, and armed with guns, axes, swords, and clubs. They then started to Jerusalem, the county seat, and proceeded a few miles, when they were met by a party of the white inhabitants, who fired upon them and forced them to retreat. Their force of forty strong stopped for the night, putting ont sentinels, but, being suddenly attacked by the whites, were thrown into great confusion. Nat, however, escaped with a portion of his adherents; but they were all hunted down save Nat, who supplied himself with pro- visions, and, scratching a hole under a pile of fence rails in a field, concealed himself for six weeks, leaving his hiding-place only for a few minutes at a time, in the dead of night, to obtain water, which was near. Finally he grew bolder, and ventured to the houses in the neigh- borhood to gather intelligence by eavesdropping. He was at last dis- covered by an accident. A dog, passing his cave one night when he was out, was attracted by some meat in the cave, crawled in, and was just emerging with it when Nat returned. A few nights after, two negroes were hunting with the dog, and passed the cave just as Nat came out of it. The dog, seeing him, barked, when Nat (thinking him- self discovered) spoke to the negroes and begged them not to betray him; but, on making himself known, they fled from him. Knowing that he would be betrayed, Nat left his hiding-place, and was pursued incessantly until he was taken, about two weeks afterwards. Nat was executed at Jerusalem, November 11, 1831.
Governor Floyd served most acceptably in that office until March 31, 1834, when he was succeeded by Governor Littleton Waller Tazewell. He subsequently served for some time as Brigadier-General of the 17th Brigade of Virginia Militia. Governor Floyd had been in feeble health previous to his gubernatorial term, and his disease finally exhibited itself in paralysis. But he rallied after the first attack, and hopes were enter- tained that he would live for many years; but excitement, produced by the unexpected arrival, on a visit, of his son, Dr. William Preston
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Floyd, caused a return of the paralysis on the 15th of August, 1837, which terminated his life, at the Sweet Springs, Montgomery County, Virginia, the following morning. The gifted John Hampden Pleasants, in an obituary which appeared in the Richmond Whig, August 24, 1837, glowingly eulogizes the worth and services of Governor Floyd, whom he characterizes as "a man gifted with the noblest qualities of our nature ;
* * * scrupulously just, and even obstinately honest; one of the very few public men of our country who died the same man he started in the beginning of his career, and who ran his course without the im- putation or suspicion of tergiversation which springs from the fear of consequences, moral or personal cowardice. He entered life a States- rights man of the strict school of '98, and he battled for the cause to the end, and died in the faith. An ardent supporter of General Jackson, he renounced him the instant he conceived him to have devi- ated from those principles to which he was not merely affectionately, but passionately attached. His courage and honesty led him to scorn to palter with his own principles and understanding ; and thus, when Nullification came on the stage, he adopted it as the doctrine of '98, which Mr. Jefferson, with the concurrence of the old Republicans, had pronounced the 'rightful remedy,' and which they had actually carried into practice at that era. He knew the unpopularity of the doctrine, but his honesty was made of sterner stuff than to barter his opinions for convenience or profit; and to his courage it was a matter of indif- ference what were the odds he encountered .* None who knew Governor Floyd well, could have failed to receive the impression that nature had endued him with the qualities of the hero, and that the stage and the opportunity only were wanting to have enabled him to shine among those who dazzled mankind with deeds of chivalry and prowess. The day has not long passed when some deemed the dark form of civil con- flict not remote ; and it is within our knowledge that many who then thought and feared had turned their eyes to him as the man worthy of leading the rebels against Federal tyranny and usurpation to the field. This brave and noble spirit is no more, and he deserves to be mourned in sincerity by every good man and patriot-himself inflexibly upright and a devoted patriot."
Governor Floyd was of a singularly handsome and commanding phy- sique. " In height and erectness of person, gait, color and straightness of hair, swarthy skin, and, above all, his keen and dark rolling eye, he was the personification of an Indian chief-characteristics accounted for,
* It is noteworthy that the symbolic seal adopted by Governor Floyd was eminently characteristic. It was the well-known vignette on the title-page of Sanderson's Signers of the Declaration of Independence: A coiled serpent, ready to strike, on the summit of an isolated rock. This, engraved as a book-plate, garnished every book in his library, and was so used also by his distinguished Bon, Governor John Buchanan Floyd.
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perhaps superstitiously, in a popular legend which ascribes them to the fact of his mother, before his birth, having been alarmed by a threat- ened savage attack upon her residence." It will be recollected that he was born a few days after his father had been slain by the Indians. Mrs. Floyd survived her husband several years, dying at " Cavan," her home, in Burke's Garden, Tazewell County, December 12, 1852. She was a mate worthy of so chivalric a husband, and possessed mental traits of a high order. They had issue twelve children, as follows :
i. Susannah Smith, born March 4, 1805; died August 29, 1806.
ii. John Buchanan, born June 1, 1806; died August 26, 1863; mar- ried his cousin, Sarah B., daughter of General Francis Preston ; no issue ; Governor of Virginia ; Secretary of War of the United States under Buchanan ; Major-General C. S. A., etc.
iii. George Rogers Clarke, born November 25, 1807; died August 15, 1808.
iv. William Preston, M. D., born January 16, 1809.
v. George Rogers Clarke, born September 13, 1810.
vi. Benjamin Rush, lawyer, born December 10, 1811; married Nancy Matthews, of Wytheville, Va. (issue: i. Malvina, married Major Peter Otey, C. S. A .; ii. John; iii. Benjamin Rush).
vii. Lætitia Preston, born March 13, 1814; married her cousin, Colonel Willian L. Lewis, of Sweet Springs, Va. (issue : i. Susan M., married Alfred Frederick, of South Carolina; ii. Lætitia, mar- ried Thomas L. P. Cocke; iii. William J., married Miss Dooley, of Richmond, Va. ; iv. John Floyd ; v. Charles).
viii. Eliza Lavalette Madison, boru December 16, 1816; married Prof. George F. Holmes, LL. D., University of Virginia (issue : Mary Ann, Lætitia P., Henry H., Isabella, and Frederick L.).
ix. Neickettic, born June 6, 1819; married Hon. John W. Johnston, United States Senator (issue : i. Lætitia F .; ii. Louisa B .; iii. Sarah B., married Henry Carter Lee; iv. Lavalette; v. Will- iam F .; vi. George Ben., a popular physician of Richmond, Va .; vii. Miriam ; viii. Joseph ; ix. Coralie).
x. Coralie Patton, born June 26, 1822; died July 14, 1833.
xi. Thomas Lewis Preston, born August 16, 1824; died Sept. 4, 1824. xii. Mary Lewis Mourning, born March 10, 1827; died July 26, 1833.
There is an excellent portrait of Governor Floyd in the State Library at Richmond, Virginia. . Floyd County, formed in 1831 from Mont- gomery County, was named in his honor.
At the organization of the Virginia Historical Society, December 29, 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall was elected President and Governor John Floyd First Vice-President. The last presided at several meetings of the Society, and took the deepest interest in its foundation and mission.
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LITTLETON WALLER TAZEWELL.
The ancestor of the Tazewell * family, in Virginia, was William Taze- well, a lawyer by profession, who settled in Accomac County in 1715. He was the son of James Tazewell, of Somersetshire, England, was born at Lymington, in that county, July 17, 1690, and was therefore twenty- five years old at the time of his arrival in the colony. He speedily found employment in his profession, and, as the records of Accomac County attest, attained an extensive and lucrative practice. Soon after settling in Virginia he married Sophia, daughter of Henry and Gertrude (daughter of Colonel Southey Littleton) Harmanson. The issue of this marriage was : i. John, Clerk of the Virginia Convention of June, 1776, and an eminent lawyer; died in 1781; ji. Littleton, brought up in the office of the Secretary of the Colony, Thomas Nelson, and married Mary, daughter of Colonel Joseph Gray, of Southampton County, who was a member of the House of Burgesses; iii. Anne, and iv. Gertrude. With the view of being near the relations of his wife, Littleton Tazewell sold his es- tate in Accomac County (which long afterwards became the property of his distinguished grandson, the subject of this sketch) and purchased land in Brunswick, became the clerk of the court of that county, and died at the early age of thirty-three years. He left issue, a son, Henry Taze- well, who was born in 1753; was a student at William and Mary Col- lege, and of law, in the office of his uncle, John Tazewell, and was soon admitted to the bar. In 1775, in the twenty-second year of his age, he was returned by his native county of Brunswick a member of the House of Burgesses, which was convoked to receive the conciliatory propositions of Lord North; and with an alacrity that was most honor- able, he prepared an answer in detail, which was read and approved by Robert Carter Nicholas and Edmund Pendleton, but which, from ae- cident, he was prevented from presenting, and it was anticipated by the answer of Thomas Jefferson, which was ultimately adopted. In the Convention of June, 1776, he was placed on the committee which re-
* The family was assumed by the late Hugh Blair Grigsby, LL.D., to be of Nor- man origin, and to deduce from one Tankersville, a knight under William the Conqueror, whose name is inscribed on the roll of Battle Abbey. He traces the changes in orthography as Tan'sville, Tanswell, and Tazewell. Indeed, the name is at this day variously rendered Tanswell, Tarswell. Tassell, Taswell, and Taze- well. In the Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica (Vol. I, p. 254) the family is traced to the year 1588, and the arms given as: Vair, purpure and erm. on a chief gu. a lion passant or. Crest-A demi-lion purpure, in the paws a chaplet of roses gu., which, however, differ from those used by John Tazewell and by Governor Little- ton Waller Tazewell in book-plate and seal-ring respectively. By the former, from example in the possession of the writer, they were: Ar. or a fesse sa. three crescents between three eagles displayed. Crest-An eagle's head bearing in its beak a branch, head to the left. Motto-Vi quid Nimis. By the latter, from an impression of the seal-ring furnished by Robert Page Waller, Esq., of Norfolk, Va .; the same, with the difference of two instead of three crescents, which may have been a mistake of the engraver.
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Curious Old Valentine of cut paper of 1753, From the original in possession of R. A. Brock, Secretary Virginia Historical Society.
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ported the Declaration of Rights, and the Constitution. He was con- tinuously returned a member of the House of Delegates, under the new Constitution, until his elevation to the bench, serving with conspicuous ability and wielding much influence in the councils of that body. He was the zealous friend of religious freedom, and advocated the abolition of primogeniture and entails, and the separation of the Church from the State. In 1785 he was made a judge of the General Court of the State, and as such was a member of its first Court of Appeals. In 1793, when the Court of Appeals was established, he was appointed one of its five judges. In 1794 he was elected over James Madison to succeed John Taylor "of Caroline," in the United States Senate, over which he presided in 1795, and bore in that body a distinguished part in the dis- cussions on the British Treaty, sustaining with unqualified applause the leadership of the Republican party. In person he was singularly hand- some, with a graceful and dignified mien. He died at Philadelphia, Janu- ary 24, 1799, and his remains rest in that city near those of the eloquent James Innes. The county of Tazewell, formed in 1799 from Russell and Wythe, was named in his honor. The wife of Henry Tazewell was Doro- thea Elizabeth, daughter of Judge Benjamin Waller, t at whose residence in Williamsburg, Virginia, a long low wooden building, the subject of this sketch, Littleton Waller Tazewell, was born December 17, 1774. His mother, who died three years after his birth, was a lovely woman, and her name, which, from the distasteful abbreviation of Dolly, has gone out of vogue, was a popular one in the last century. It was borne by
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