piety. For example, he wrote to John Brockenbrough that he was restrained from taking communion "by the fear of eating and drinking unrighteously." Thus, the executors of Randolph's last will and testament (described below) included Virginia's bishop, William Meade (who had freed his slaves years earlier, but would by the end of his life during the American Civil War become a defender of the "peculiar institution"). Slavery Together with Justice Bushrod Washington and his former student Henry Clay, Randolph was among the founders of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816. It began as a collaboration of slaveholders and abolitionists that planned to transport and resettle free blacks in a colony in Africa (this territory became Liberia). Like some other slaveholders, Randolph had long been opposed to slavery in theory. Also, his eldest brother, Richard Randolph, had freed slaves in his will, and his widow Judith fought to implement that provision, which led to the founding of the free black community of Israel Hill on the former Randolph estate in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In the two decades after the Revolutionary War, so many planters freed slaves that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased from less than one percent in 1782 to 13.5 percent in 1810. Nearly two decades after Richard's death, in 1819, John Randolph also wrote a will providing for the manumission of his slaves after his death. He wrote, "I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom, heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one." Three years later, in 1822, in a codicil to that will (since these freed men unlike Richard's could not date their freedom before Virginia's law requiring freed blacks to leave the Commonwealth), Randolph stipulated that money be provided to transport and settle the freed slaves on land to be purchased in the free state of Ohio. Each slave above the age of 40 was to receive of land. He provided for the manumission of hundreds of slaves in his will. Although the will was challenged in the courts, his slaves were ultimately ruled to be free. After a lengthy court case, his will was upheld. In 1846, 383 former "Randolph Slaves" arrived in Cincinnati, before settling in Rumley, Shelby County, Ohio. Many of them ultimately settled at Rossville near Piqua, Ohio, of which only the community cemetery remains. Electoral history 1799; Randolph was elected to