Among the Virginia worthies who as yet have not inspired chronicles of
their careers, there is no more conspicuous name than that of William
Branch Giles. It is true that no historian narrating the period
I790-1830 has failed to give him mention, but no study of his career has
been presented to the public. Such knowledge as is generally possessed
of his character and achievements has been secured from biographies and
histories written, as a rule, from a point of view antagonistic to the
famous Virginian. This meagre information has usually been presented in
such bitter language as to arouse suspicion of the correctness of the
facts and their interpretation.
In Lodge’s
Alexander Hamilton, Giles is spoken of as “a rough, brazen, loud-voiced Virginian, fit for any bad work, no matter how desperate.”
[1]
But Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge is a worshipper of Hamilton, whom Giles
hated, and an exponent of broad construction, which Giles bitterly
fought. In Adams’s life of John Randolph, he is spoken of as a man “whom
no man ever trusted without regret.”
[2]
And in Morse’s life of John Quincy Adams, it is asserted that “Giles’
memory is now preserved solely by the connection he established with the
great and honorable statesmen of the Republic by a course of ceaseless
attacks upon them.”
[3] The standard work on the period of Giles’s prominence, Mr. Henry Adams’s
History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison,
hardly mentions the name of Giles without harsh epithets. In reading
these accounts, one cannot but remember that Giles was a bitter enemy of
John Quincy Adams, Mr. Henry Adams’s grandfather, and that Mr. Morse is
the admiring biographer.