John Randolph of Roanoke: Hounds in the House and a Duel With Henry Clay

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John Randolph of Roanoke was born in 1773 into the Bland and Randolph families of Virginia, a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson who claimed descent from Pocahontas. His father died when he was a toddler, and his stepfather, judge St. George Tucker, reportedly abused him. A youthful case of tuberculosis, or possibly Klinefelter syndrome, left him beardless with a soprano voice, and he relied on opium for pain. He drifted through Princeton and Columbia and left William and Mary after a duel over the pronunciation of a word. Elected to the House in 1799 at 26, he answered Speaker Theodore Sedgwick's question about his age with ask my constituents, and chaired the Ways and Means Committee as a Jefferson ally.

In 1805 he broke with Jefferson over the bid for Spanish Florida and the failed impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase, and in 1806 formed the Tertium Quids, or Old Republicans. He mocked the War Hawks' cry of Canada, Canada, Canada and predicted the Capitol would be left in ruins, which happened in 1814. He brought hunting dogs into the House until Speaker Henry Clay banned them, beat Willis Alston with his cane, and in 1826 dueled Clay over his Puritan and Blackleg insult, firing into the air and telling Clay, you owe me a coat. His will freed nearly 400 enslaved people after his 1833 death and bought them land in Ohio, where armed mobs drove them away in 1846.

• He opposed abolishing entail and primogeniture, warning that old Virginia families would sink into overseers' sons and daughters.
• He and Alston once hurled tableware at each other across a Washington boarding house dining room.
• A religious conversion around 1818 left him writing that he regretted owning a single slave.
• He joined Henry Clay in founding the American Colonization Society in 1816.
• Twentieth century conservative Russell Kirk drew on his defense of limited government and local control.