Peyton Randolph

Peyton Randolph was a planter and public official from the Colony of Virginia. He served as Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, president of Virginia Conventions, and the first President of the Continental Congress.
Born: September 10, 1721, Williamsburg, VA
Died: October 22, 1775, Province of Pennsylvania
Resting place: Chapel of the College of William and Mary
Previous offices: President of the Continental Congress (1775–1775)
Parents: John Randolph, Susanna Beverley
Siblings: John Randolph, Mary Randolph
Revolutionary leader
Cousin of Thomas Jefferson
Attorney General of Virginia Colony
Chaired first and second Continental Congress
First to be called “Father of country”
Peyton Randolph was on the black list of patriots the British proposed to arrest and hang after he presided over the Continental Congress in 1775. Upon his return to Williamsburg, the volunteer company of militia of the city offered him its protection in an address that concluded:

“May heaven grant you long to live the father of your country –
and the friend to freedom and humanity!”

True revolutionary
If his friend George Washington succeeded him as America’s patriarch, Randolph nevertheless did as much as any Virginian to bring the new nation into the world. He presided over every important Virginia assembly in the years leading to the Revolution, was among the first of the colony’s great men to oppose the Stamp Act, chaired the first meeting of the delegates of 13 colonies at Philadelphia in 1774, and chaired the second in 1775.

Randolph was born 54 years before the Second Continental Congress – probably in Williamsburg in 1721 – the second son of Sir John and Lady Susannah Randolph. His first name was his maternal grandmother’s maiden name, just as his older brother Beverley’s was their mother’s. The surname Randolph identified him as a scion of 18th-century Virginia’s most powerful clan.

When Peyton Randolph was three or four years old, the family moved into the imposing wooden home on Market Square now known as the Peyton Randolph House. His father, among Virginia’s most distinguished attorneys, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and a wealthy man, died when Peyton was 16, leaving the house and other property for him in trust with his mother. The will also gave Peyton his father’s extensive library in the hope he would “betake himself to the study of law.” By then, he had a brother John and a sister Mary.

Attentive to his father’s wishes, Peyton Randolph attended the College of William & Mary, then learned the law in London’s Inns of Court. He entered the Middle Temple on October 13, 1739, and took a place at the bar February 10, 1743. Returning to Williamsburg, he was appointed the colony’s attorney general by Governor William Gooch on May 7, 1744. His father had filled the office before him, and his brother would assume the role after.

At the age of 24, Randolph was eligible for his inheritance. On March 8, 1746, he married Betty Harrison, and on July 21 (more than two years after his return from London), he qualified himself for the private practice of law in York County.

His cousin Thomas Jefferson may have shed some light on the delay in a character sketch he wrote of Randolph years later. “He was indeed a most excellent man,” Jefferson said, but “heavy and inert in body, he was rather too indolent and careless for business.”