Following up on my posts on John Marshall and Edgar Allan Poe's foster parents, I want to continue talking about the people buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond. Right now I want to talk about Richard Ivanhoe Cocke, who was born in 1820. His parents were fans of Sir Walter Scott, I'm guessing.
Cocke studied at William and Mary and delivered two addresses to their literary societies. The first was to the Franklinian Society in 1839, the year he graduated from William and Mary, and the other was to the Licivyronean Society on May 15, 1847. The former is characteristic of Whig literary addresses in the late 1830s; it talks about the importance of education and constitutionalism and in some ways represents the last vestiges of the Enlightenment. (Though pieces of it are critical of the French Enlightenment's excesses.) Cocke alluded to the challenges to Union and to slavery briefly in the address:
There is much in the situation of our country, calculated to arose the fears of the patriot, much that requies all the energies of his mind, all the virtues of his heart, to detect and to amend. Our sky is no longer spread in cloudless beauty, but dimmed by many a dark spot, perhaps the herald of an approaching storm. The lawless spirit of mobocratic misrule has found its ways into our land, violating the most sacred rights of property, and substituting the dominion of force for that of right. A miserable class of deluded fanatics at the North, who, like Erostratus, would immolate their country to minister to their own ambitious schemes, are daily sending into our borders the incentives ot servile rebellion, and lighting the torch of civil discord. Our people now gravely debate the policy of a dismemberment of the union,--that union cemented by the best blood of our heroes, the abundant spring of all our blessings--the source of our pride and our defence--the basis on which the lovers of freedom have founded all their hopes of future glory and distinction.
By 1847, Cocke was still talking about the importance of Union and constitutionalism -- though this time he was focused on the Union as properly understood with protection for the states' power to regulate their internal affairs (slavery). Cocke's really interesting to me as a person who was pro-Union and pro-slavery at the same time; there were a lot of people talking about such ideas in Virginia and North Carolina in the 1830s and 1840s. The addresses given to the William and Mary literary societies by Oliver Baldwin (who also gave the dedication address at Hollywood Cemetery), John Randolph Tucker, and Tiberius Gracchus Jones in the 1850s were substantially more proslavery. I hope to talk about them soon.
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