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.
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