arms, his father was drawing, probably in the same room with him, a
reply to the conciliatory propositions of Lord North, to be offered in
the House of Burgesses. His youthful ears were stunned by the firing of
the guns of the Virginia regiments drawn up in Waller's Grove, when the
news of the passage by Congress of the Declaration of Independence of
the Fourth of July, 1776, reached Williamsburgh; and, as he was
beginning to walk, he was startled by the roar of cannon when the
victory of Saratoga was celebrated with every demonstration of joy
throughout the land. As a boy of seven he heard the booming of the
distant artillery at Yorktown; and he might have seen the faces of the
old and the young brightening with hope, when the Articles of
Confederation, which preceded the present Federal Constitution, having
been ratified at last by all the States, became the first written
charter of the American Union. In his ninth year the treaty of peace
with Great Britain, which acknowledged the independence of the United
States, was ratified by Congress; and in his fourteenth, when he
remembered with distinctness current events of a political nature, the
Commonwealth of Virginia adopted the present Federal Constitution.

The first of the Tazewells, who emigrated to the colony of Virginia, was
William, a lawyer by profession, who came over in 1715, and settled in
Accomack. He was the son of James Tazewell, of Somersetshire, England,
and was born at Lymington in that county, and baptized, as appears from
an extract from the register of that parish in my possession, on the
17th day of July, 1690; and was twenty-five years old on his arrival in
the colony. Wills of wealthy persons, which are still preserved in his
handwriting, attest his early employment; and his name soon appears in
the records of Accomack, on one or the other side of every case in
court. Within the precincts of Lymington church, whose antique tower and
rude structure, typifying in the graphic picture struck off by the