I78159: Eleanor Melinda "Link" ALVIS (23 Aug 1888

Notes

(2nd husb.of Lila Skipworth). from "Colonial Families of the United States":

St. George Tucker, came to Virginia in 1771; was graduated at Mary and William College the next year, L.L.D. In 1790 studied law and began its practice. Embracing the Revolutionary cause he early in the War planned and helped to carry out an expedition against his native island which resulted in the capture of a fort and its stock. He was a Colonel during the Revolutionary War; as a Lt. Colonel at the siege of Yorktown he received a wound which rendered him lame for life. He was a Member of the State Legislature and of the Annapolis Convention, 1786. He was the author of "First Commentary on the Constitution of the United States". He was a member of the Supreme Court of Virginia from 1803-1811. He was a member of the United States District court of Virginia 1813-1827. He was a member of the first Congress; a professor of Law at William and Mary College from 1789 succeeding George Wythe. He was the author of a pamplet in 1796 entitled a "Disssertation on Slavery with a Proposal for its Gradual Abolition in Virginia" and "Letter on the Alien and Sedition Laws" in 1799. He was a Judge in the State Court for nearly half a century; he was called "The American Blackstone".

Children by Frances Bland:
2 Anne Frances Bland TUCKER b: 26 SEP 1779 + John COULTER , Judge
2 Henry St. George TUCKER b: 29 DEC 1780 d: 28 AUG 1848 + Ann Evelina HUNTER
2 Nathaniel Beverley TUCKER b: 6 SEP 1784 d: 1851 + Lucy Anne SMITH
2 Henrietta Eliza TUCKER b: 16 DEC 1787

Children by Lila Skipworth:
2 St. George TUCKER II b: 29 AUG 1792
2 Julia Maria TUCKER b: 25 NOV 1793
2 Martha Rutledge TUCKER b: 4 OCT 1796

St. George Tucker was a lawyer, trader, inventor, scholar, professor, judge, essayist, poet, avid gardener, and amateur astronomer.

Tucker was born in Bermuda, on July 10, 1752. The Tucker's migrated to Bermuda from England and established themselves on the island in the mid-1600s. With a substantial population of slaves, there was little work for established families and St. George Tucker, the youngest of four sons (there were also two daughters) would begin the study of law in Bermuda but left in 1771 at age nineteen to finish his studies at the College of William and Mary.

Evert A. & George L. Duyckinck, The Cyclopedia of American Literature 87
(Philadelphia: William Rutter & Co., 1880) (Vol. 1)

In Williamsburg he took up general studies for six months or so and then signed on to read law under George Wythe, who had been a teacher of Thomas Jefferson. He graduated from William and Mary in 1772, and was admitted to the bar in 1774. He practiced law briefly but with the Revolutionary War in its early stages, the Virginia courts were closed and Tucker returned to Bermuda in 1776.

When he returned to Virginia in January, 1777 he took up residence and law practice in Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1778 he married the widow of John Randolph, Francis Bland Randolph, and became the father of three in doing so. After his marriage he moved to the Randolph plantation near Petersburg.

During the war, Tucker joined the militia as a major and served as a major, and participated in an engagement at Guilford Courthouse. After the war Tucker reestablished his law practice at Petersburg and became a judge on the general court of Virginia in 1788, the year his wife died after giving birth to their sixth child. In 1791 he remarried, this time a widow with two children. Three children of this marriage all died in their early years.

Tucker assumed a professorship of law at the College of William and Mary in 1800, was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia in 1803, where he served until 1811. The year of his appointment to the Virginia high court, also saw publication of his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. In 1804 he gave up his law faculty appointment for another judicial appointment, and in 1813 became a U.S. District Court judge by appointment of President James Madison, a position he held until 1825.

Tucker wrote poetry, political satire, tried his hand at drama, but is known best for his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries and his other legal commentaries, including View of the Constitution, one of the first extended commentaries on the newly ratified Constitution. He is sometimes referred to as the "American Blackstone" for his Americanized version of a multi-volume of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Tucker died in November, 1827, at the age of seventy-five.

The following comment on Tucker can be found in Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of America 40 (New York: James Miller, Publisher, 1872):

Judge Tucker had a ready talent for versification, which he exercised through life, and he was particularly successful in vers de societé, when that species of literary accomplishment was more practised and admired than it is at the present day. His rhymed epistles, epigrams, complimentary verses, and other bagatelles, would fill several volumes, but he gave only one small collection of them to the public in this form. When Dr. Wolcott's satires on George the Third, written under the name of "Peter Pindar," obtained both in this country and in England a popularity far beyond their merits, Judge Tucker, who admired them, was induced to publish in Freneau's "National Gazette" a series of similar odes, under the signature of "Jonathan Pindar," by which he at once gratified his political zeal and his poetical propensity. His object was to assail John Adams and other leading federalists, for their supposed monarchical predilections. His piece might well be compared with Wolcott's for poetical qualities, but were less playful, and had far more acerbity. Collected into a volume, they continued to be read by politicians, and had the honour of a volunteer reprint from one of the early presses in Kentucky.

Judge Tucker was capable of better things than these political trifles. He wrote a poem entitled "Liberty," in which the leading characters and events of the revolution are introduced. Of his numerous minor pieces some are characterized by ease, springliness, and grace. One of them so affected John Adams, in his old age, that he declared he would rather have written it than any lyric by Milton or Shakespeare. He little dreamed it was by an author who in earlier years had made him the theme of his satirical wit.

In prose also Judge Tucker was a voluminous writer. His most elaborate performance was an edition of Blackstone's "Commentaries," with copious notes and illustrative dissertations. He lived to a great age, and through life had numerous and warm friends. He was an active and often an intolerant politician, yet such was the predominance of his kindly affections and companionable qualities, that some of his cherished friends were of the party in the mass he most cordially hated.

The Tucker family produced a long line of jurists and scholars, including St. George Tucker's sons, Henry St. George Tucker (1780-1848) and Nathaniel Beverley, and a grandson, John Randolph Tucker (1823-1897), all lawyers, and Nathaniel and John Randolph poets as well.

A Concise History of the Marshall-Wythe Law Library

Frances Bland Randolph Tucker (1752-1788)

Poems

Days of My Youth

DAYS of my youth, ye have glided away;
Hairs of my youth, ye are frosted and gray;
Eyes of my youth, your keen sight is no more;
Cheeks of my youth, ye are furrowed all o'er;
Strength of my youth, all your vigor is gone;
Thoughts of my youth, your gay visions are flown.

Days of my youth, I wish not your recall;
Hairs of my youth, I'm content ye shall fall;
Eyes of my youth, you much evil have seen;
Cheeks of my youth, bathed in tears have you been;
Thoughts of my youth, you have led me astray;
Strength of my youth, why lament your decay?
Days of my age, ye will shortly be past;
Pains of my age, yet a while ye can last;
Joys of my age, in true wisdom delight;
Eyes of my age, be religion your light;
Thoughts of my age, dread ye not the cold sod;
Hopes of my age, be ye fixed on your God.

[Source: Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of America 40 (New York: James Miller, Publisher, 1872) (with punctuation corrections)] [Resignation: Or, Days of My Youth] [Rufus Wilmot Griswold]
Days of My Youth

Southern Cross

Poetry

St. George Tucker, Liberty, a Poem; On the Independence of America (Richmond: Printed by Aug. Davis, 1788) (20 pgs.)

______________, The Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar, Esq. a Cousin of Peter's and Candidate for the post of Poet Laureat to the C.U.S. (Philadelphia: Printed for Benj. Franklin Bache, 1796)

______________, The Poems of St. George Tucker of Williamsburg, Virginia, 1752 -1827 (New York: Vantage Press, 1977) (William S. Prince ed.)

Writings

St. George Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for Its Gradual Abolition of It in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey,1796) (New York: [s.n.], 1861) (Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970)

______________, Letters on the Alien and Sedition Laws (1799)

______________, Blackstone's Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Philadelphia: W.Y. Birch and A. Small, 1803) (5 vols.) (Union, New Jersey: Lawbook Exchange, 1996) (5 vols.)

St. George Tucker on Rights of Conscience and Freedom of Speech and Press [on-line excerpt from Tucker's Blacktsone's Commentaries]
______________, The Old Bachelor (Richmond, Virginia: Printed at the Enquirer Press, for Thomas Ritchie & Fielding Lucas, 1814) (2nd ed. 1814) (Baltimore: Published by Fielding Lucas, jun. J. Robinson, printer, 1818) (2 vols.)

______________, Hansford: A Tale of Bacon's Rebellion (Richmond, Virginia: George M. West, 1857)

______________, View of the Constitution of the United States: With Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999) (foreword by Clyde N. Wilson)

______________, Of the Right of Conscience; and of the Freedom of Speech and of the Press [on-line text]

Bibliography

Mary Haldane Coleman, St. George Tucker: Citizen of No Mean City (Richmond, Virgina: Dietz, 1938)

Charles T. Cullen, St. George Tucker and Law in Virginia, 1772-1804 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987)

Bibliography: Dissertations

Claudia Lamm Wood, "With Unalterable Tenderness:" The Courtship and Marriage of St. George Tucker and Frances Randolph Tucker (Master's Thesis, College of William and Mary, 1988)

Robert M. Scott, St. George Tucker and the Development of American Culture in Early Federal Virginia 1790-1824 (Dissertation, George Washington University, 1990) (Examination of Tucker's relationship to the culture of federal Virginia drawing on his poems, essays, and plays and his identification with Jeffersonian republicanism and the republican ideal. The study draws on Tucker's manuscript letters, journal, notebooks, case reports, and law practice notes in the Tucker-Coleman Collection at the University of William and Mary)

Bibliography: Articles & Bibliographies

William S. Osborne, "St. George Tucker," in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (ed.), A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature 315 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1969)

Robert L. Scribner, "Fort St. George" [Home of St. George Tucker], 5 (2) Virginia Cavalcade 21 (Autumn 1955)

Research Resources

Tucker-Coleman Papers
Swem Library
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia

The Jeffersonian Constitution

The Jeffersonian view of the Constitution prevailed until it was overthrown by force of arms in 1861–1865. The best presentation of this view is St. George Tucker’s book, View of the Constitution of the United States. Tucker was a professor of law at William and Mary College, fought in the Revolution, became a successful lawyer afterward, adopted a young John Randolph whose mother had been widowed, and authored one of the first plans for the abolition of slavery in Virginia (in 1796).

Tucker warned that any confederacy would become a despotism if the central government ever ceased being merely the agent of the states that created it and delegated certain enumerated powers to it. "The union of the SOVEREIGNTY of a state with the government," he wrote, "constitutes a state of USURPATION and absolute TYRANNY, over the PEOPLE" (p. 24). Moreover, if the "unlimited authority" of the central state were ever to extend so far as to "change the constitution itself, the government, whatever be its form, is absolute and despotic . . ." (p. 27). This, too, has occurred, via "judicial activism" in the post-1865 era.

The system of checks and balances is not what protects the people from tyranny, Tucker explained. What did was "the nature and extent of those powers which the people have reserved to themselves as the Sovereign." (p. 28). That is, it all depends on states’ rights. Moreover, the "doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive to the good and happiness of mankind" (p. 112). Having been created by the citizens of the states, a free government must by bound to the Constitution "by its creators, the several states in the union, and the citizens thereof." Otherwise, despotism is the inevitable result.

Tucker’s contemporary, Virginia Senator John Taylor, was also a Jeffersonian who mocked the idea that the founders would ever have trusted the Supreme Court to be the sole judge of constitutionality (and the limits of government). "Being an essential principle for preserving liberty," he wrote in Tyranny Unmasked (p. 198), the Constitution "never could have designed to destroy it, by investing five or six men, installed for life, with a power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political departments."

Until 1865, virtually every state of the union invoked the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition in defense of liberty and against encroachments on liberty by the central government. The New England states "nullified" President James Madison’s trade embargo (1807); they also invoked Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve in refusing to participate in the War of 1812; the New England Federalists plotted to secede for over a decade after Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800, culminating with the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814; Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, South Carolina, New York and New Hampshire all invoked the Kentucky Resolve to oppose the existence of the Bank of the United States within their borders; some New England states nullified the Fugitive Slave Act by refusing to enforce it; and South Carolina famously nullified the infamous 1828 Tariff of Abominations. The rights of nullification and secession, which were accepted as inalienable rights of the citizens of all the states, ceased to exist after 1865.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo74.html
Constitutional Futility
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

View of the Constitution of the United States: With Selected Writings Publisher: Liberty Fund; (December 1, 1998) ISBN: 086597201X

A dissertation on slavery: With a proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia
by St. George Tucker Publisher: Negro Universities Press; (1970) ASIN: 0837120683

Blackstone's Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia : In Five Volumes by St. George Tucker, William Commentaries on the Laws of England Blackstone Publisher: Lawbook Exchange; Reprint edition (September 1, 1996) ISBN: 1886363153

My Southern Family

Eleanor Melinda "Link" ALVIS

23 Aug 1888 - 23 Mar 1970

ID Number: I78159

Notes

Sources

Henrietta CARTER

27 Jul 1825 - 24 Sep 1871

ID Number: I6961

Notes

Sources

Samuel COMPTON

ABT 1793 - ____

ID Number: I90759

Notes

Sources

Abner PEARCY

ABT 1800 - ABT 1837

ID Number: I15206

Notes

Sources

Frank Woodard QUIN III

Charlotte Foushee RANDOLPH

24 Jun 1822 - ____

ID Number: I88330

Sources

James Carey REDD

1850 - 1936

ID Number: I65555

Sources

Thomas TAYLOR II

15 Mar 1573 - 1618

ID Number: I21492

Notes

Sources

Hon. St. George TUCKER Judge "the Immigrant"

10 Jul 1752 - 10 Nov 1827

ID Number: I52951

Notes

Sources

GERALD fitzMaurice de WINDSOR 1st Baron of Offaly

ABT 1150 - 15 Jan 1202

ID Number: I26859

Sources