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VOL. IX.

No. 5.

BOSTON.

MAY, 1897.

JOHN RANDOLPH TUCKER. BY SUSAN P. LEE. JOHN RANDOLPH TUCKER, who died at his home in Lexington, Virginia, on the 1 3th of February, 1897, was a man of distinctive and marked personality worthy of special mention and honorable remem brance. In his characteristics and his career, Mr. Tucker furnishes a fine illustration of the important influence of heredity. His grand father, St. George, the first of the Virginia Tuckers, came to the colony from Bermuda, as ayouth, in 1770. He received his education at William and Mary College, and became a lawyer in the Ancient Dominion. When the War of the Revolution opened, the young Bermudian not only took up arms in defense of the country of his adoption, but headed a secret expedition to his native is land, which seized and brought off" a quan tity of military stores, which served to eke out Washington's scant supplies at the siege of Boston. As a colonel of cavalry, St. George Tucker also distinguished himself in Green's campaign, and was wounded at the siege of Yorktown. American independence once established, Colonel Tucker resumed the practice of his profession. In 1786, he was a member of the Annapolis Convention, the precursor and originator of the Constitutional Conven tion of 1787. The next year he was ap pointed a judge of the general court, and law professor at William and Mary College. He also performed excellent service as one of the revisers of the Virginia Code. These honors came to him before he was forty years old. Later on, Judge Tucker suc

ceeded the eminent jurist, Edmund Pendleton, as president of the court of appeals. ' Judge Tucker's legal decisions all tended to uphold and strengthen constitutional power as stronger and farther reaching than the laws of legislatures, or of Congress. His annotations of Blackstone's Commen taries are noteworthy for their discussion of the principles of government, and especially of constitutional government. They offered the first disquisition upon the origin and na ture of the Federal Constitution, and upon its character and interpretation. Judge St. George Tucker's first wife was Mrs. Frances Bland Randolph, mother of the eccentric statesman, John Randolph of Roanoke. The first son of this marriage, Henry St. George Tucker, and a younger son, N. Beverley Tucker, were, like their father, educated at William and Mary Col lege; and both of them became lawyers, and afterwards, like him also, judges and law professors. Henry St. George Tucker, with his bodyservant Bob, left tide-water Virginia for the newer country beyond the mountains, and began the practice of law in Winchester, in 1802, when he had just come of age. His father promised to support him for three years, and during that time, the young law> yer called upon the parental purse for three hundred and seventy-five dollars. At the age of twenty-six he married Miss Anna Evelina Hunter, through whom their chil dren inherited a strain of Scotch-Irish blood. In the War of 1812 Henry St. George Tucker took up arms, as his father had done 201