Florida Founder William P. DuVal

Frontier Bon Vivant

James M. Denham

• Verlag: University of South Carolina Press
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611174670
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Political Biographies

The first full-length biography of the well-connected, but nearly forgotten frontier politician of antebellum America. The scion of a well-to-do Richmond, Virginia, family, William Pope DuVal (1784–1854) migrated to the Kentucky frontier as a youth in 1800. Settling in Bardstown, DuVal read law, served in Congress, and fought in the War of 1812. In 1822, largely because of the influence of his lifelong friend John C. Calhoun, President James Monroe appointed DuVal the first civil governor of the newly acquired Territory of Florida. Enjoying successive appointments from the Adams and Jackson administrations, DuVal founded Tallahassee and presided over the territory's first twelve territorial legislative sessions, years that witnessed Middle Florida's development into one of the Old Southwest's most prosperous slave-based economies. Beginning with his personal confrontation with Miccosukee chief Neamathla in 1824 (an episode commemorated by Washington Irving), DuVal worked closely with Washington officials and oversaw the initial negotiations with the Seminoles. A perennial political appointee, DuVal was closely linked to national and territorial politics in antebellum America. Like other "Calhounites" who supported Andrew Jackson's rise to the White House, DuVal became a casualty of the Peggy Eaton Affair and the Nullification Crisis. In fact he was replaced as Florida governor by Mrs. Eaton's husband, John Eaton. After leaving the governor's chair, DuVal migrated to Kentucky, lent his efforts to the cause of Texas Independence, and eventually returned to practice law and local politics in Florida. Throughout his career DuVal cultivated the arts of oratory and story-telling—skills essential to success in the courtrooms and free-for-all politics of the American South. Part frontiersman and part sophisticate, DuVal was at home in the wilds of Kentucky, Florida, Texas, and Washington City. He delighted in telling tall tales, jests, and anecdotes that epitomized America's expansive, democratic vistas. Among those captivated by DuVal's life and yarns were Washington Irving, who used DuVal's tall tales as inspiration for his "The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood, " and James Kirke Paulding, whose "Nimrod Wildfire" shared Du Val's brashness and bonhomie. "In large brushstrokes, but with great attention to detail, Denham embeds DuVal's life in a wider portrait of the young Republic, and particularly in issues affecting the western states and the former Spanish borderlands Readers will find in this book a well-researched and well-written history that informs on many levels." — The Historian "Relying on a variety of sources extending well beyond DuVal's papers, Denham's work provides an intriguing account of a southerner immersed in the dynamics of politics at both the local and national levels. The study will be a definitive must for any student of antebellum regional and national history." — The Journal of Southern History

CHAPTER 1

Scion of the Old Dominion

In 1848 William Pope DuVal was in the political battle of his life. His decision to run for Congress in his adopted state of Florida as a Democrat put him in the unenviable position of defending a long political career that had seen him often change political positions. The sixty-four-year-old candidate had represented Kentucky in the Thirteenth Congress, and now, thirty-two years later, he was running against fellow Richmond, Virginia, native Edward Cabell for Florida’s lone congressional seat. DuVal’s long career in Florida had begun in 1821 with his appointment as U.S. judge of the Eastern Judicial District, but a year later he had succeeded Andrew Jackson as territorial governor. DuVal had served three consecutive terms as Florida’s territorial governor, until 1834, holding appointments from the Monroe, Adams, and Jackson administrations. Since leaving the governor’s chair, DuVal had remained involved—at least peripherally—in political affairs. He had participated in the state’s constitutional convention in 1838 and had served as leader of the Florida Senate several years later.

In the spring of 1848, one of Florida’s leading Whig newspapers called for DuVal to make “necessary explanations” of the contrary positions he had taken through a long career. Accordingly, the paper, as well as other critics, charged that he was a Federalist in 1815 and a supporter of the National Bank but later became a Democrat and changed his position once Andrew Jackson called for the institution’s demise. “He was for Van Buren in 1836—for Harrison in 1840—Tyler in 1841—for Polk in 1844—for Taylor six months ago, and is for Cass now. In 1840 we heard him advocating for Tippecanoe and Tyler Too on the stump, and that he should accept no office under that administration—but one or two months after, he repented and took the office of the United States Law Agent in East Florida. [As governor] he founded the Union Bank and now is opposed to that monster.” The Whig press excoriated DuVal as a joker, a trickster, and a hack politician who changed course whenever he thought it would benefit his career. “We think it is clear that Gov. DuVal has been dodging about, not a little all his life, discharging his blunderbuss.”¹

Throughout the campaign the “hero” in Washington Irving’s “Ralph Ringwood Tales” faced charges that he was a broken-down politician in pursuit of one last political plum.² In a mock depiction of Florida’s 1848 Democratic nominating convention, delegates deplore the lack of electable candidates; when a man from Tallahassee puts DuVal’s name in nomination, “hisses from several parts of the house” are heard and a voice cries out, “he is an old turn-coat!” But as the man explains, the issue is

not whom we will have but whom we can elect. I know of no other Individual whom we can elect. And you yourselves gentlemen can’t mention one. Now, I will tell you what my reasons are for thinking that we can elect ex-governor DuVal. In the first place—though he has been hitherto a little somewhat erratic in his course, “I think he is now a good and sound democrat. He goes in for the Mexican War tooth and toenail and is in favor of all the other good old Jeffersonian measures. And fellow members, you all know his powers at stumping. You all know his felicity at telling an anecdote. I tell you gentlemen, Cabell will be no where before him. The old governor will be able to upset every thing he can say, with one good laughable story. But, gentlemen, these matters are but trifles compared with what I am going to mention to you—it is that upon which I base my preference for him as an available candidate. Fellow Democrats! Did any of you ever meet with a tale by Washington Irving called Ralph Ringwood? The hero of the story is said to be old Governor DuVal—the tale is one of Irving’s masterpieces. He has brought all the powers of his splendid imagination to bear upon it. You know what favorites he always makes his heroes. That story, gentleman, will be irresistible. We ourselves know that most of it came out of Irving’s head—but what of it? The people don’t know it—they will believe it true as the gospel. It will take mightily with the Whigs of West Florida, and with the romance loving Creoles of Pensacola. As to the Democrats, gentlemen, it will make no difference to them who we nominate—they will vote for the nominee of the convention let it be who it will. All we want to do is, to gain over a few of the Whig votes. And, gentlemen, is it my opinion, that we will be certain to do that with the help of Washington Irving and a few of the old governor’s anecdotes.

A stir among the members.

Cries of Capital!! Capital from all sides.

The West Florida Member: ‘Well, I will declare! Who would have thought of that? Why the old man won’t be so bad after all. Three cheers, gentlemen, for governor Duval (three tremendous cheers). Now three cheers for Washington Irving (Cheers)’ … Governor DuVal was unanimously elected.³

Since the publication of the stories in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1840, DuVal had nurtured the “Ralph Ringwood Myth” when it served his purposes. But in the 1848 campaign the notoriety backfired. It seemed only to confirm DuVal’s shifty stances on issues, his playing fast and loose with the facts, and his exaggeration of his own record. According to the “Ringwood Myth,” DuVal left his Richmond home as a young lad after an argument with his father, promising never to return to Virginia unless as a member of Congress from Kentucky. Migrating to Kentucky, DuVal hunted in the woods, survived by his own resources, and eventually read law. After thirteen years in the wilderness DuVal had married his sweetheart, become a successful lawyer, been elected to Congress, and returned home on his way to Washington to redeem his promise. DuVal had told this story so often to friends, assembled gatherings, and, of course, Irving himself that the myth took on a life of its own, even before the writer’s publication of the “Ralph Ringwood Tales.” Like most myths the story carried some elements of truth, but most of the facts of DuVal’s past were quite at variance with this tale.

William Pope Duval descended from Daniel DuVal, a French Huguenot, who landed on the York River on March 5, 1701. Duval’s great-grandfather and his wife, Philadelphia, came to Virginia by way of England, on board the ship Le Nasseau. Eventually settling in Gloucester City, Ware Parish, Daniel Duval was an architect and joiner. Daniel and Philadelphia had four sons, including Samuel (William P. Duval’s grandfather), who was born in 1714, and two daughters. Samuel followed his father’s profession and in 1752 became prosperous enough to acquire a four-hundred-acre plantation, Mount Comfort, just north of Richmond. By that time he had married Lucy Claiborne, and the two were on their way toward building a large family of eight children. Their first son, William (William P. DuVal’s father), was born in 1748. Samuel built, farmed, and took an active part in his community, serving as justice of the peace, county coroner, and vestryman in St. Johns Church.⁴

Five years younger than Thomas Jefferson, Samuel DuVal’s son William also attended William and Mary College, where he studied law under George Wythe. Both men came to idolize Wythe. DuVal practiced law and in 1772 married Anne Pope, a distant relative of George Washington. In 1775 and 1776, as the Revolutionary War began, he represented Henrico County in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He was a member of the Committee of Safety and the Virginia Convention of 1774. DuVal’s home was familiar to the well-to-do who visited the Richmond area. On March 24, 1774, George Washington recorded in his diary that he “spent the evening & lodged at Mr. Saml. Duvals.”⁵ DuVal took an active part in the growing controversies between the colonials and the mother country. In 1775 the twenty-seven-year-old lawyer enlisted as a lieutenant in a unit formed by the Committee of Safety under Patrick Henry’s command. As the war progressed he served off and on in Virginia as emergencies arose. When Benedict Arnold’s raid up the James River threatened Richmond in December 1781, DuVal answered Governor Thomas Jefferson’s call for volunteers. He served in the various battles leading up to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.⁶ By the end of the war DuVal had attained the rank of major, a title he enjoyed for the rest of his days, and near the end of his life DuVal was granted a pension for his service.

But the most significant outcome of the war for William DuVal and his descendants, including his two sons, Samuel, born in 1775, and William Pope, born in 1784, were the Kentucky land grants the state of Virginia gave to its soldiers. DuVal and his brothers, Samuel, Daniel, Philip, and Claiborne, who later migrated to Danville, Kentucky, received vast tracts of Kentucky land for their Revolutionary War service. Among DuVal’s brothers, Daniel’s service was perhaps the most distinguished. Eventually reaching the rank of colonel, he served under Lafayette and Von Steuben, fighting in the Battle of Monmouth and leading a light infantry regiment at Yorktown. The Popes also received large tracts of land in Kentucky, and various branches of Anne Pope’s family were already in Kentucky by the end of the American Revolution. Among the most distinguished of the Popes to migrate from Virginia to Kentucky was John Pope.⁷ In the next two decades Kentucky lands—and the profits to be gained through speculating on these lands—consumed the attention of the DuVals as they did that of other well-rewarded Virginia veterans.

The year after the Peace of Paris, William DuVal’s father died, and his second son, William Pope, was born. William and Anne would eventually produce five children, but in 1784 their household contained only nine-year-old Samuel and the infant William. After the war DuVal resumed his law practice and also developed planting and mercantile interests in Henrico and Louisa Counties. Not long after the war, Major DuVal had moved into his father’s Mount Comfort estate just north of Richmond. Then, in 1791, the year his son John Pope was born, DuVal moved into town, where he lived diagonally across the street from “Chancellor” George Wythe. One year later DuVal’s wife, Anne, died suddenly.⁸

Even without his consort DuVal’s “double-winged, triple porticoed frame house” on Grace Street was a focal point for Richmond’s most fashionable citizens. “One of the last of the cocked hats, satin shorts, and bag wigs,” DuVal entertained visiting dignitaries often.⁹ According to one account the house was “large and commodious … situated on the healthiest and most agreeable part of the city of Richmond on Shockoe-Hill; it contains five large rooms … with a kitchen, garden, and all the necessary out houses.”¹⁰ Major DuVal remained one of the most prominent citizens in Richmond, serving various posts in city government, including mayor in 1805.¹¹ As a Richmond lawyer DuVal associated with many of the important lawyers and statesmen of the time, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and George Wythe and his young assistant Henry Clay, who joined the chancellor in 1793.¹² DuVal also bought and sold land continually. DuVal’s lands north of Richmond on which the Mount Comfort plantation sat would eventually be plotted out for sale and annexed to the city as “DuVal’s Addition.”¹³ DuVal also acquired tracts in outlying areas. In 1792, for example, he wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson in Paris that he had several tracts of Virginia land that he would be glad to exchange for “goods as will answer our market here.”¹⁴

While DuVal and his fellow veterans struggled to rebuild their communities, resume the normal pursuits of life, and establish a more permanent form of government under the Constitution, thousands of the less well-to-do Virginians chose to migrate west into Kentucky immediately following the Peace of Paris. Hardy pioneers had entered the “dark and bloody ground” as early as 1775, establishing “stations” to protect themselves from Indian attacks. The campaigns of George Rogers Clark during the American Revolution introduced Virginians to the entire breadth of Kentucky. By war’s end soldiers had crossed the Ohio River and were in possession of the distant outposts of Kaskaskia and Vincennes, in what would later become the Indiana and Illinois territories. Within a few years after the peace, the rush into the fertile lands of Kentucky became a flood. Individuals and their families made up most of the settlers.¹⁵ But those representing huge grantees also patented large tracts. From 1782 to 1792 the Commonwealth of Virginia issued just over 9,500 grants in Kentucky, primarily in consideration for military service in the French and Indian War and in the American Revolution. Before Kentucky became a state, in 1792, Virginia had reserved for its soldiers the lands in Kentucky south of the Green River. Records show that Major DuVal was granted approximately fifty-seven thousand acres of land, surveyed for the first time in Jefferson, Nelson, Mason, and Bourbon Counties from 1784 to 1788.¹⁶ DuVal’s acquisition and release of land continued in the new state. Court of appeals records show that from 1794 to 1825 Major DuVal was a grantee of approximately 160,000 acres of Kentucky lands, and from 1793 to1807 he was the grantor of approximately 83,000 acres of lands.¹⁷

After the Revolution warrants for land surveyed or unsurveyed, patented or unpatented, and deeds in various forms of execution changed hands constantly. Surveys were unclear, of uncertain quality, and often fraudulent. Adding more confusion was the fact that, as one scholar has noted regarding Green River pioneers, “migrants traded debts just as they exchanged land certificates and surveys. Promises to pay passed from hand to hand, with a new assignation scribbled on the back as the note passed to a new owner. In the absence of banks, these petit capitalists created their own money, which functioned as a medium of exchange, and the legal system’s role in making debtors pay kept the economic system afloat.”¹⁸

Thomas Abernethy has noted that of the “rank and file of the planters and yeomen, there were few who were secure in the titles to their lands…. Furthermore, unlike the inhabitants of the older-settled areas, many lived on lands to which they had no titles at all.”¹⁹ Henry Clay’s biographer Robert Remini noted that for Clay, who migrated there in 1797, and other lawyers, Kentucky was the land of opportunity. “Land titles were in constant dispute because of earlier Virginia laws that allowed recorded entries in claims to a single tract of land. As a consequence, lawsuits abounded, providing handsome fees for a veritable army of lawyers who had begun to descend on Kentucky.”²⁰ Much of the land by the late 1790s had not yet been surveyed, entered, or patented. The field offered potential wealth for lawyers, especially those skilled at litigating land titles.

By 1800 Kentucky’s population neared 221,000 persons. Most of its inhabitants hailed from the Old Dominion, but some migrants came from Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, or other eastern states. Migrants from Virginia traveled southwest along the Great Valley of the Shenandoah and entered Kentucky at the Cumberland Gap, then headed northwest on the Wilderness Road, reached the Falls of the Ohio via Bardstown, or jutted directly north to Lexington. According to one source, “The portion of Road from Kingsport, Tennessee, to the Bluegrass regions of Kentucky, which gave the road its name, was no more than a narrow, difficult, hazardous trail winding over mountains, across streams, through marshes and canebreaks, and penetrating dark forests where hostile Indians and wild animals lurked. From 1775 to 1796 this segment was only a horse path. No wagon passed over it during that period when more than 200,000 people made their way into Kentucky and beyond.”²¹

Major Duval’s buying and selling of lands linked him with other distinguished Virginia veterans on the make. On July 31, 1799, from Mount Vernon, only five months before he died, George Washington wrote to a business associate thanking him for the information “respecting the removal of Mr. Duval to Kentucky.” Washington enclosed a deed for land on Rough Creek, “recommending them to the care of Mr. Duval” for delivery to an associate in Kentucky.²²

It is not known when William’s first son, Samuel, first visited Kentucky, but it is certain that he had taken frequent visits before 1799. He certainly had relatives in the area, and his father’s many business contacts would have welcomed him there. For a time Samuel lived with his Aunt Catherine and her well-to-do husband, Christopher Greenup, in Danville, Kentucky. His uncle Claiborne also resided nearby, moving to lands he had acquired in 1794. Records show that Samuel had been granted approximately sixty thousand acres of land. Also, in 1799 he represented Mercer County in the Kentucky state legislature.²³ Kentucky offered excitement, opportunity, and adventure to Samuel’s fifteen-year-old younger brother, William. With their father’s good name, land warrants, and financial backing from Richmond commercial interests, the DuVal brothers had a number of advantages that a majority of other migrants lacked. Not the least of these advantages was cash and a vast family network to draw from.

The circumstances under which the DuVal brothers migrated to Kentucky in 1799 can be gleaned through a series of court cases that were adjudicated in future decades. These court cases, as discovered and analyzed by the historian Frank Snyder in the Nelson County Court, tell the story of a spendthrift older brother who borrowed money to establish a store on Rough Creek in Ohio County, Kentucky, and later died, leaving his father and younger brother holding the bag.²⁴ The basic facts are these. In May...