January 6, 2006
Presidential Suicide Shocker! Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST At National Review Online (a conservative website), Bradford William Short discusses a new book on assisted suicide in which the author, Margaret Pabst Battin, suggests that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson may have killed themselves. The reasoning behind this speculation seems to be that they died on the same day—July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of independence*—and both men had made vague semi-endorsements of the idea of suicide years earlier. I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to, but Short does not make it sound very convincing (though as a pro-life advocate, he is hardly impartial; by the end he strays far enough from the Founding Fathers to deride the entire field of “bioethics” as a “cult of death”). In the course of his discussion, he mentions Battin’s use of a quotation from Rep. John Randolph of Roanoke, who, upon hearing of Jefferson’s death, wrote, “they have killed Mr. Jefferson.” This inspired a rejoinder from Richard Brookhiser, a friend of American Heritage as well as of National Review, who points out that Randolph “was, to put no finer point on it, nuts.” And indeed he was. His entry in the Dictionary of American Biography is a long chronicle of alternating madness and brilliance, sometimes both at once, punctuated by speeches filled with eloquently contemptuous ridicule that on at least one occasion led to a duel (with Henry Clay, in 1826). Randolph was beardless and diminutive and spoke in a high-pitched voice. He seems to have been unable to function sexually as an adult, which could certainly make a person crabby. The DAB says, “The universal contemporary opinion that he was impotent was verified after his death,” though it doesn’t say how. Characteristically, Randolph made this deficiency the basis for one of his most devastating ripostes. When teased about his lack of virility, he replied: “You pride yourself on a faculty in which your slave is your equal, and your ass is your superior.” * In 1776 Adams predicted that the 2nd of July, when the Continental Congress first decided to declare independence (though without a specific text), would be celebrated by Americans, but custom quickly established the 4th, when the actual Declaration was adopted, as the date for commemoration.
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