1844
“John Randolph Dos Passos is born in Philadelphia.”
John Randolph Dos Passos, noted American lawyer and author. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress)
His father, Manoel dos Passos, is an immigrant from the island of Madeira off the Portuguese coast. His mother, Lucy Catell, hails from New Jersey.
John Randolph Dos Passos, known as “John R.” or “The Commodore,” serves as a drummer boy in a Union regiment in the Civil War. He studies law and ultimately opens a private practice in New York City with his brother Benjamin, where he gains fame as a criminal defense attorney. Later he practices corporate and brokerage law. He spends money as often as he acquires it, however, and his son John Roderigo Dos Passos does not inherit much wealth. “One of his partners once told me,” John Roderigo Dos Passos writes in his memoirs, The Best Times, “that, though Jack Dos Passos pulled in larger fees than anyone in the firm, every year’s end found him in the red.”
What does transfer to the next generation is love of literature, languages, learning, and the strenuous life. John R. often writes his family in French and enjoys reciting Shakespeare. He reads Dickens’ The Christmas Carol aloud every Christmas. He hates pulp fiction.
John R. becomes a noted author in his own right, writing Treatise on the Law of Stockbrokers and Stock Exchanges (1882) and The American Lawyer (1907) and The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People (1903).
Image Credit: Nabu Press
John R. earns enough as a lawyer to acquire several thousand acres of farm property along the banks of the Potomac in the Northern Neck of Virginia—the northernmost peninsula in the state, jutting into the Chesapeake Bay. “He loved to play the lavish host,” Dos Passos writes of his father in his memoirs, The Best Times. “Westmoreland County, where he had bought what turned out to be the family farm, was a remote and rural area then. One of his delights was to invite all the neighbors, white and colored alike, to a Christmas barbecue at Sandy Point, or to a foxhunt on his land. Sometimes a steer was roasted whole in a pit. There was an endless supply of oysters shucked out of the barrel or roasted on an iron sheet. Kegs of beer had come down on the boat from Washington or Baltimore.”
Regional map courtesy Westmoreland County, Virginia, Westmoreland highlighted in white.
(Dos Passos family collection) The historic maritime culture of the Northern Neck. 2007.
John R. loves the sea. He relishes every opportunity take his wife and son for a sail along the Potomac River aboard his steam yacht named the Gaivota. After dinner, John R. may entertain by singing a tune from Pinafore or Larboard Watch Ahoy. This maritime lifestyle makes an impression on his son, who briefly considers entering the Naval Academy.
(Dos Passos family collection) John R. Dos Passos aboard the Gaivota.