HISTORICAL PAPERS

RANDOLPH-MACON COLLEGE.

JUNE. 1906.

INTRODUCTION.

The Branch Papers present this year the result of a careful study of the public life of R. M. T. Hunter. The importance of Hunter's position in the South just prior to the outbreak of the civil war would justify a fuller biography than is here offered. However, until such a work is forthcoming it is hoped that this may prove serviceable to students of American History and of the war between the States.

The examination of Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in the case of Cohens vs. the State of Virginia by Judge Spencer Roane is nothing less than a commentary on the national constitution in matters touching the relative rights of the States and of the Union. The bitterness of the conflict between the Virginia judge and the United States Supreme Court can be clearly seen in these articles after the lapse of nearly a century. For a complete study of this subject it is necessary to refer to the Branch Papers of 1905, in which a detailed outline of Roane's life appeared. The importance of Roane's position may be inferred by recalling the political situation in 1821. The newspapers of the South, with not a few of those of the North, discussed freely these Algernon Sidney Papers, which were generally understood to represent the views of the Virginia Supreme Court as well as the Virginia Democracy. This installment concludes the publi

cations on Roane.

WM. E. DODD.

TH

D. R. ANDERSON, A. M.,

PRESIDENT WILLIE HALSELL COLLEGE

I. T.

HE PERIOD of Robert M. T. Hunter's public life was the most momentous in our history. It was the period of the financial panic of 1837, the establisnment of the Independent Treasury, and the adoption of nemerous important tariff measures; the period of the Mexican War and the Oregon contest; of the many slavery disputes-the annexation of Texas and the Wilmot Proviso; the compromise of 1850 and abolitionism; the Kansas struggle and the Nebraska act; the Dred Scott Decision and the organization of the Republican Party; of Secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction. It was indeed a "half century of conflict." It was fifty years fraught with trying vicissitudes for Mr. Hunter's section of the country and his native state. His entrance into public life found southern ideas predominant; he saw the decline of the South; he witnessed her attempt to stand alone and the bloody conflict by which she was reduced to submission; and he passed through the painful days of Reconstruction and felt a flutter of the reviving hopes of his people. He was a leader in those stirring combats, and the history of his life is an epitome of the events from 1837 to 1887-and particularly a summary of the part played during these years by the Southern States.

We are therefore mainly concerned with Hunter's public life. His private life has been left in the main to his daughter, Miss Martha T. Hunter, whose "Memoir" covers the ground more familiarly than the writer could do. Hunter was born on the 21st of April, 1809-that year which gave birth

A memoir of Robert M. T. Hunter by Martha T. Hunter. Washington Neale, 1903. To this work I am indebted for many incidents of Hunter's private life.

to so many other distinguished men-Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, W. E. Gladstone,-at the Garnett homestead in the county of Essex, Virginia. His family is of Scotch descent, the American branch going back to a James Hunter, from Dunse, Scotland. The Hunters had been a family of means; but by the time of the inheritance of James Hunter, Robert's father, their fortune had been much diminished. R. M. T. Hunter's father who was a man of business ability as well as of literary tastes and strength of character restored the family financial independence. James Hunter married his cousin, Miss Maria Garnett, by whom he had eight children. The family of Mrs. James Hunter was distinguished for its intellectual ability, two brothers representing in Congress the district to which Essex belonged; and Mrs. Hunter herself is said to have been a woman of remarkable powers. From either father or mother Hunter might have derived his literary tastes, strength of mind, and force of character.

One of his earliest recollections was of being called up at late hours of the night to read to his father history and biography. In this way both a love for reading was stimulated and the particular field of his reading determined His early education was received at the hands of his father and sisters-his mother having already died-or at a school at Rose Hill" to which, two miles and a half from home, Robert and Austin, his colored boy, walked every morning. By his seventeenth year, his father had died and Robert was left at the head of a large family of brothers and sisters. He attended the University of Virginia, entering at its first session, and was one of its first graduates. Finishing the Academic course at the University, he attended the law school of Judge Henry St. George Tucker at Winches

ter, Virginia. On his return from the law school, he removed the family from Hunter's Hill-his father's home place, to an estate near Lloyds, farther from the Rappahannock and more healthful than the old homestead. He called the new place "Fonthill," a name which it still bears. From 1830 to 1835, Mr. Hunter practiced law in his native county. In the latter year, on the day of his eligibility, he was elected to the House of Delegates of Virginia.

I have not thought it necessary or interesting to pay close attention to Hunter's services in the House of Delegates. He served in 1835-6, 1836-7 during the term of Governor Littleton Waller Tazewell. Some of his contemporaries at the first session were Thomas W. Gilmer, Valentine Southall, Edmund P. Hunter, William R. Johnson, John M. Gregory, Fayette McMullen, John Minor Botts, Hugh A. Garland, George W. Summers, Vincent Witcher, and O. M. Crutchfield, and in 1836-7 some of the above, together with Thomas H. Bagley, Alexander Rives, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, A. H. H. Stuart, William L. Goggin, Robert W. Withers, John R. Edmunds, Robert McCandlish, Joseph Segar, and Samuel McDowell Moore. This was the period of the formation of anti-slavery associations in the north and the southern excitement resulting from them. The American Anti-slavery Society had been organized in 1833—animated not with the purpose of such movements as the African Colonization Society of 1816, but infused with the new spirit preached by Garrison in the "Liberator." It demanded the "immediate and total abolishment of slavery throughout the country, laws and constitutions to the con

See A. R. Micou in the Richmond Dispatch, Dec. 13, 1891, and Miss Hunter (who copies from Micou) p. 45.

Woodrow Wilson's Division and Reunion, p. 120,