The Elopement Story

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]

THE LEGEND

The story of Mary Isham Randolph’s “elopement” first appeared as the “Legend of the Randolphs,” a melodramatic story of her elopement, her family’s revenge, and her subsequent insanity. That legend was set out in William Paxton’s 1885 genealogy of the descendants of Capt. John Marshall^[1][2], of which he was one.

Paxton claims as the basis of his legend a passage in the writings of William Byrd, a surveyor, gentleman farmer, and diarist of Virginia in the 1720s and 1730s. The passage in question is contained in Byrd’s diary entry reciting the day’s events of September 20, 1732, and includes a conversation with Mary Isham’s widowed mother:

I … pursued my Journey to Mr. Randolph’s, at Tuckahoe … Here I found Mrs. Fleming^[3], who was packing up her baggage with design to follow her husband the next day, who was gone to a new settlement in Goochland^[4]. The widow^[5] smiled graciously upon me, and entertained me very handsomely. Here I learnt all the tragical story of her daughter's humble marriage with her uncle's overseer [bolding added]. Besides the meanness of this mortal's aspect, the man has not one visible qualification, except impudence, to recommend him to a female's inclinations. But there is sometimes such a charm in that Hibernian endowment, that frail woman cannot withstand it, though it stand alone without any other recommendation. Had she run away with a gentleman or a pretty fellow, there might have been some excuse for her, though he were of inferior fortune: but to stoop to a dirty plebeian, without any kind of merit, is the lowest prostitution. I found the family justly enraged at it . . .^[6].

Paxton expanded that single passage into his “Legend of the Randolphs” thus:

The story is told that when Mary Isham Randolph was blooming into womanhood, she was induced by the bailiff upon the estate of Tuckahoe to elope with him. There was great excitement among the family and neighbors, and threats were freely made by the brothers. Some years ago, the Diary of Col. Byrd, who lived at about the period referred to, was published in the Southern Literary Messenger and he records the excitement in the family of the Randolphs, on the occasion of the elopement of one of the daughters. The search for the fugitives for a time was fruitless. At length their retreat was discovered on Elk Island, in James River. The angry brothers came upon them by night, murdered the bailiff and the child, and brought their sister home. The deed of blood and cruelty so affected the wife and mother that she became deranged. … Years passed. Mary Randolph married Parson James Keith. A family of children had grown up around them. The tragedy at Elk Island had been forgotten. The bailiff was supposed to be dead. But, one day Mrs. Keith received a letter, and, on opening it, found that it purported to be from the Bailiff. It stated that he still lived; that he that was left as dead, had revived, had changed his name, and had fled to foreign countries; after years of wandering had returned to look upon his lawful wife; had found her married and happy; that he would not afflict her by claiming her as his own, but advised her to be happy and forget him, who had more than died for her love, for she should hear no more of him. This letter was perhaps written by some evil-disposed person, or may have been only a practical joke. However that may be, it unhinged the mind of Mrs. Keith. She vainly sought for him, and throughout the remnant of her days her insanity manifested itself by a quiet melancholy, varied by some sudden freak of folly^[7].

Paxton’s legend is cited by Albert Beveridge in a note in his biography of Chief Justice John Marshall^[8], referenced only in regard to Mary Isham Randolph’s being Marshall’s grandmother:

With this lady the tradition deals most unkindly and in highly colored pictures. An elopement, the deadly revenge of outraged brothers, a broken heart and resulting insanity overcome by gentle treatment, only to be reinduced in old age by a fraudulent Enoch Arden letter apparently written by the lost love of her youth -- such are some of the incidents with which this story clothes Marshall’s maternal grandmother. (Paxton, 25-26)^[9].

Jean Edward Smith follows Beveridge’s note in his own biography of John Marshal^[10], introducing “Enoch Arden” into his version of the legend thus:

In the early 1730s Mary Isham Randolph, the eldest daughter of Thomas and Judith of' Tuckahoe, then a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, fell in love and eloped with a slave overseer from her uncle Isham's Dungeness plantation — an Irishman by the name of Enoch Arden.¹⁷ The two were married secretly and had a child. Eventually they were discovered to be living on remote Elk Island in the James River. According to family chroniclers, the enraged Randolphs descended on the island, killed Arden and the baby, and took Mary back to Tuckahoe. The tragic loss of her husband and child shattered Mary's sanity.^18[11].

HOW THE LEGEND GREW

First, Byrd’s “humble marriage” became Paxton’s “elopement.” Then Paxton expanded Byrd’s remark with the addition of threats from the family, search and discovery of the fugitives, murder and infanticide, and derangement of the infant’s mother — further embellishing his own telling by adding the letter from the thought-dead bailiff with the finale in Mrs. Keith’s lunacy. Smith then inserted Enoch Arden as the name of the “bailiff” and Mary Isham Randolph’s “first husband,” adding embroidery to Paxton’s already-embellished legend.

And it is that expanded, embellished, and embroidered “legend” around Mary Isham Randolph that can be encountered in accounts of Rev. James Keith, in online family trees as well as otherwise earnest genealogies of the Randolphs.

CAN “THE LEGEND” BE PROVEN? DISPROVEN?

While Byrd’s narrative timeline is consistent with known individuals and dates, he did not claim to be providing true records or documentation of the times^[12]. As editor of the 1841 (and first) printing of the Byrd diaries, Edmund Ruffin writes:

“The manuscripts offer abundant internal evidence that they were written merely for the amusement of the author, and for the perusal of his family and friends, and not with any view to their being printed^[13].

Whether gossip or intended amusement, Byrd’s narrative offers no genealogical information. But Byrd does not claim his diary entries to be matters of fact, nor can they be taken as such.

Paxton, on the other hand, claims in the opening sentence of his book that “This volume is intended for a book of reference. …. I have dealt in facts, rather than panegyric”^[14]. Yet regarding Mary Isham Randolph, the very subject of his “Legend,” Paxton relents from that claim, writing that “Stories are told of this lady that need confirmation”^[15], and only a few pages later, he gives the game away entirely:

It was my purpose, when I commenced this work, to eschew all legends, but I find —

'Tis better the past be embellished with story,

Of maiden and lover, or hero and glory;

Than left a dark void which the fancy may fill,

With fiends to affright us, or monsters to kill’ ^[16].

Paxton provides no evidence by which his case can be proven, and with no evidence to the contrary, his case cannot be disproven. To argue otherwise, that the assertion is true because there are no facts against it, is to fall victim to the fallacy of lack of evidence as illustrated in this aphorism: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

While Paxton’s embellished legend is a genealogical myth, Smith’s assertion concerning Enoch Arden is a different matter altogether. Smith reads Beveridge’s reference to an “Enoch Arden letter” to name Enoch Arden as author of the letter. But Beveridge, a lawyer, refers to Enoch Arden not as a letter writer but to the legal term for the marriage in which a husband, who disappeared and was thought dead, returns to find his wife remarried^[17] — the situation in Tennyson’s 1864 poem that gives the Enoch Arden statutes their name. In citing the Enoch Arden letter as “fraudulent,” Beveridge is referring to Paxton’s allegation that such a letter was even written at all: in the Tennyson poem, the returning husband decides ‘’not’’ to contact, and so disturb, the now-happy woman^[18].

The mistaken reading of Beveridge’s "Enoch Arden letter" is fatal to Smith’s attribution of Enoch Arden as Mary Isham Randolph's “first husband," and that assertion can be dismissed outright.

Sources

1. ↑ Captain John Marshall “of the forest,” father of Chief Justice John Marshall, was born “about the year 1700; d. April 1752, according to Paxton (pg. 13)
2. ↑ Paxton, William McClung, ‘’The Marshall Family, or a Genealogical Chart of the Descendants of John Marshall and Elizabeth Markham, His Wife, Sketches of Individuals and Notices of Families Connected With Them.’’ Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Company, 1885, pp. 24-25.
3. ↑ Sister-in-law to widow Judith Fleming Randolph (Kemper, Charles E. editor, “Virginia Council Journals 1726-1753 Vol. 605-1418 (Continued).” ‘’Virginia Magazine of History and Biography’’ 32, No. 4 (1924): 392)
4. ↑ Presumably Col. John Fleming, Burgess for Goochland in 1732 & 1737 (“Fleming Family.” ‘’The William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine’’ Vol. 12, No. 1 (1903): 47.
5. ↑ Judith Fleming Randolph (Kemper, Charles E. editor, “Virginia Council Journals 1726-1753 Vol. 605-1418 (Continued).” ‘’Virginia Magazine of History and Biography’’ 32, No. 4 (1924): 392)
6. ↑ Edward Ruffin, editor, ‘’The Westover Manuscripts: Containing the History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina; A Journey to the Land of Eden, A. D. 1733; And A Progress to the Mines. Written from 1728 to 1736, and Now First Published Westover Manuscripts, William Byrd, of Westover.’’ Petersburg: Printed by Edmund and Julian C. Ruffin, 1841, p. 125.
7. ↑ Paxton, William McClung, ‘’The Marshall Family, or a Genealogical Chart of the Descendants of John Marshall and Elizabeth Markham, His Wife, Sketches of Individuals and Notices of Families Connected With Them.’’ Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Company, 1885, pp. 25-26.
8. ↑ Beveridge, Albert J. ‘’The Life of John Marshall Vol. I, Frontiersman, Soldier, Lawmaker 1755-1788.’’ Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.
9. ↑ Beveridge, Albert J. ‘’The Life of John Marshall Vol. I, Frontiersman, Soldier, Lawmaker 1755-1788.’’ Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916, note #7, pp. 17-18.
10. ↑ Smith, Jean Edward. ‘’John Marshall: Definer of a Nation.’’ New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.
11. ↑ Smith, Jean Edward. ‘’John Marshall: Definer of a Nation.’’ New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996, p. 24.
12. ↑ John Spencer Bassett, editor of the 1901 printing of the Byrd diaries, notes that at least in one case, a “piece of London gossip seems to not have been recorded by any other contemporary” and was “at variance” with characterization of the gossip’s subject among his peers. (Bassett, John Spencer, editor. “The Dividing Line,” in ‘’The Writings of “Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia Esqr.’’ New York, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1901, note 2 on page 19.
13. ↑ Ruffin, Edward, editor. “Editor’s Preface,” in ‘’The Westover Manuscripts: Containing the History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina; A Journey to the Land of Eden, A. D. 1733; And A Progress to the Mines. Written from 1728 to 1736, and Now First Published Westover Manuscripts, William Byrd, of Westover.’’ Petersburg: Printed by Edmund and Julian C. Ruffin, 1841, pg. iii.
14. ↑ Paxton, William McClung, “Introduction,” in ‘’The Marshall Family, or a Genealogical Chart of the Descendants of John Marshall and Elizabeth Markham, His Wife, Sketches of Individuals and Notices of Families Connected With Them.’’ Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Company, 1885, pg. 3.
15. ↑ Paxton, William McClung, ‘’The Marshall Family, or a Genealogical Chart of the Descendants of John Marshall and Elizabeth Markham, His Wife, Sketches of Individuals and Notices of Families Connected With Them.’’ Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Company, 1885, pg. 25
16. ↑ Paxton, William McClung, ‘’The Marshall Family, or a Genealogical Chart of the Descendants of John Marshall and Elizabeth Markham, His Wife, Sketches of Individuals and Notices of Families Connected With Them.’’ Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Company, 1885, pg. 29.
17. ↑ Oliphant, Robert E., and Ver Steegh, Nancy. ‘’Examples & Explanations for Family Law.’’ United States, Aspen Publishing, 2018, p. 94.
18. ↑ “Enoch Arden,” ‘’Encyclopedia Britannica’’ [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Enoch-Ardenpoem- by-Tennyson]