Understanding revolutionary and Jeffersonian America.

The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752-1830, by Phillip Hamilton, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. xiv + 250 pp.

JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, St. George Tucker, Henry St. George Tucker, and the rest of the Tucker family of Virginia long have exercised a special fascination upon historians, students of American literature, political scientists, students of rhetoric, and devotes of the South. Beverley Tucker, for example, played a leading role in establishing the idea of Southern nationality in the 1830s and 1840s, and his The Partisan Leader, written in the 1830s, now seems an eerily prescient forecast of Southern secession.

John Randolph of Roanoke, certainly the most famous of the clan, emerges from the literature as a human Rorschach test. He has stood in various works as a symbol of Southern insistence on the rightness of slavery, as a notable slaveholder next to whose Thomas Jefferson's record as steward of his bondmen seems appalling, as a drug-besotted extremist with whom Jefferson was unfortunate to have to deal, as a pious crypto-Catholic, and as a nostalgic reactionary and descendant of Princess Pocahontas from whom the bemused lords and ladies of England who made his acquaintance could have learned a thing or two about conservatism. The late Russell Kirk gave Randolph extensive attention in The Conservative Mind, included him in The Portable Conservative Reader, and wrote a full-length study of Randolph, complete with representative speeches.

At the center of the account offered by Phillip Hamilton here, however, is St. George Tucker, father or stepfather of the other eminences with whom this slender book deals and a kind of Jeffersonian Virginian synecdoche. In making Judge Tucker represent the entire planter class of his adopted state and time, Hamilton is entirely successful. Having devoted considerable time and attention to learning the ways of that group, I am happy to report that Hamilton's is the most satisfactory treatment of them in the literature.

For the color of a Randolph speech or the flair of fire-eater Beverley Tucker, however, one needs to look elsewhere. The material upon which Hamilton relies in crafting his story comes, in the main, from the mountain of Tucker Family letters in the collection of the Swem library at the College of William and Mary. In addition, as the title indicates, the study's temporal focus ends before the rise of Beverley Tucker to intellectual prominence. This shortcoming is not so lamentable as it might otherwise be, however, because the public Randolph and the later Beverley are topics adequately, indeed more than adequately, covered by other studies.

St. George Tucker immigrated to Virginia in the days immediately preceding the American Revolution. Scion of a socially and politically prominent Bermudian family (whose economic activities extended to piracy, according to an insistent descendant of the Tucker branch that did not migrate to America who is among my graduate students), St. George made his way to the Main because he intended to become a lawyer. The Revolution, however, interrupted his quest. St. George made his way among the leading families of the Old Dominion by assisting them in smuggling military materiel from Bermuda; from the beginning, St. George cast his lot with the rebels.

His goal? To become a planter--which, in that day, was the goal of every Virginian for whom it was reasonably practicable (and even of many for whom it was not). An immigrant lawyer likely would have encountered notable difficulty, but young Tucker succeeded in elbowing his way into the elite the easy way; like many others (including George Washington), he gained admission to the Virginian oligarchy by marrying a wealthy, well-bred widow. Not only was Frances Bland Randolph a widow, but she was a widow from the leading family in Virginia, with ties to Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and a score of eminent Randolphs.

Young Tucker must have thought he had it made: he had married wisely and well, to a woman who brought beauty, brains, and--according to Hamilton--managerial savvy. Yet, even as he found himself accepted into Virginia's ruling elite, that elite met its doom in the American Revolution. As John Tyler, Sr., lamented to Thomas Jefferson in 1814, and as John Randolph of Roanoke wails in Hamilton's account, the Revolution meant the death of the old landed, leisured, educated aristocracy that made colonial Virginia one of the best governed territories in H.M. Empire. It meant, in other words, the closing of the window of time during which St. George Tucker could have lived the kind of life he imagined for himself.

Hamilton's book is closely knit into the historiography of the period. So, for example, one finds the remarkable Frances Bland Randolph Tucker an intriguing figure. Readers familiar with John Randolph of Roanoke will remember her as the mother who told her young son, "John, take care of your land, and your land will take care of you." Yet, there was, in Hamilton's version, much more to her than that. St. George Tucker did not live, like William Byrd II decades earlier, like a patriarch of old, but instead virtually shared government of his family with his wife. She was perfectly able to manage their extensive lands and slaves in his absence, and often did so. The familiar tales of southern women sitting doing nothing are of course difficult for anyone in contact with actual women in the here and now to believe, and Frances Tucker's personality shines through this book like a distant beacon on a foggy night. No wonder John Randolph of Roanoke missed her so, was so stricken by her early death.

Tucker had difficulty with his stepsons, intellectual offspring of that independent wife, for they all proved more or less unwilling to accept his authority over them. Foremost among the recalcitrant was the famous Senator Randolph, who in his early adulthood accused St. George of mismanaging the Randolph lands and permanently severed their once filial relationship. St. George, it seems, was devastated by this development, and his natural sons took it as a great wound. With whom could they side, the half brother who accused their father of a dastardly kind of theft, or the father who might be innocent?

Here we see one shortcoming of St. George's career, one failure of his attempt to create the kind of family to which he had been accustomed in Bermuda. Perhaps he had married into Virginia aristocracy, but they were not his blood. Blood, as the old saying goes, is thicker than water. If John Randolph blamed St. George for his and his brothers' inability to live in the fashion to which his mother's generation had been accustomed, what could he say?

For St. George, the ties of sentiment and obligation that came with family relationships extended to remote kinsmen, just as they had in Bermuda. In America, on the other hand, where the benefits that came with these responsibilities were attenuated by the great distances that separated people over time, he found that even his own offspring refused to maintain these old ties. Why should a teenager in the Shenandoah Valley strike up a correspondence with a Bermudian septuagenarian she had never met? To Tucker, the answer seemed obvious; to his granddaughter, it seemed obvious that she need not.

Besides the breakdown of traditional family ties resulting from westward migration, Tucker also experienced serious financial difficulty. Had Frances Tucker's first husband lived, he would have exercised moral, political, and pedagogical mastery over his sons because he was their Randolph father. He was the lord of the manors, the owner of the slaves, the sire of the children. He was (as Randolph of Roanoke liked to note) descended from Pocahontas, and he could pass the heritage of political eminence, social eminence, manners, morals, and land on to them.

Yet, with the Revolution came the impoverishment of many of the old families, including St. George Tucker's patrons, the Nelsons. Ever the realist, St. George decided that his boys and Frances's must not expect to live the lives of landed gentlemen. He urged them to seek their futures in law or medicine. All three Randolph boys refused, to St. George's frustration. In the end, his own boys divided on the subject, with Beverley accepting Randolph of Roanoke's gift of a few slaves and some land near Roanoke Plantation.

For St. George Tucker, one's vocation was a practical matter. His family had been merchants because they lived in Bermuda, and he had left home to become a lawyer. Once in Virginia, he desired to become a tobacco planter, but in the end, he returned to law. For John Randolph, in particular, planting was integral to the Virginia elite's identity. It was what a Virginian gentleman did.

Henry St. George Tucker, on the other hand, followed Tucker's advice. He ended as a miserably bored, secluded attorney in what was then western Virginia. His isolation from family and society seemed an awful price to pay for a career in law, but Henry--the dutiful son--could see no alternative. Beverley Tucker, too, tried his hand at law, and for a time served as a judge in Missouri. In the end, like Henry, he assumed a position as a teacher of law--in Beverley's case, succeeding his father as professor at William and Mary.

Perhaps the most poignant personage in this story is that of Anne "Fanny" Tucker Coalter, the Tucker daughter who married Judge John Coalter. Like Henry Tucker, John Coalter ended up in socially remote western Virginia; like her mother, Fanny managed her plantation in her husband's absence. Young John Coalter spent much of his time traveling among Virginia's county courts, and Fanny felt the enormous burden of her responsibilities. Her plaintive pleas for her father's sympathy strike the reader even now. It was not the fault of John Coalter, who had risen from the position of Tucker family tutor to that of successful lawyer/planter, that Fanny could not enjoy a life of leisure; this was the fate of people of her class. Hamilton makes his reader feel sorry for a woman who, after all, lived in relative comfort as mistress of slaves and wife of a successful attorney and judge.

One can see why the younger Tuckers wished they had been born a generation sooner. One can understand why John Randolph, casting about for someone to blame, lit on his stepfather. Then, as Judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals, St. George Tucker encounters the difficult Judge Spencer Roane, personification of the "Principles of '98" and, by temperament, precursor of Robert Toombs and James Henry Hammond. St. George, whose main claim to fame now lies in his forward-looking proposal that Virginia adopt a gradual emancipation plan along the lines of those ultimately implemented in New York and Pennsylvania and whose mien seems to have been virtually ideal for a judge, could barely stand this son-in-law and political disciple of Patrick Henry. While St. George aligned himself with the Jeffersonians, Hamilton makes him seem strikingly Federalist. (In this sense, his portrait is markedly different from that offered by Tucker's kinsman Mary Haldane Coleman in her 1938 St. George Tucker: Citizen of No Mean City.)

Remarrying in his old age, St. George Tucker grew to loathe public affairs. Here, he seems to have been much like the contemporaries portrayed by Jan Lewis in The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (1983). Leaving the Virginia Court of Appeals, Tucker found happiness in the bosom of his family.

Hamilton's Tuckers differ from Lewis's Jefferson clan in their patriarch's determination to adapt to the times, to find some way to maintain their ascendancy, and in the seeming absence of religion from their thinking in both St. George's and Beverley's generations. Likely St. George's adaptability, his willingness to cast off Virginia's old ways, can be explained by their newness to him; unlike John Randolph and Thomas Jefferson, Tucker did not have the ways of the planter in his bones. The relative absence of religion from their correspondence must be explained in some other way--perhaps by their enduring Episcopalianism.

While this volume will be of interest mainly to scholars, then, it represents a significant contribution to our understanding of Revolutionary and Jeffersonian America. Written in a felicitous style and sprinkled with some of the memorable prose of its subjects, this latest addition to the University of Virginia Press's "Jeffersonian America" series is a worthy tome.

KEVIN R. C. GUTZMAN teaches history at Western Connecticut State University.