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“OUR WORTHY GOVERNOR”
Patrick Henry in Wartime
LANDON CARTER, ONE OF VIRGINIA’S most wealthy and reactionary planters, knew Henry had won the governorship fair and square, so he resolved to mourn the “destructive tendency in secret.” But then, on July 13, Carter received exciting news: Patrick Henry had died! Carter deemed this development “particularly favourable by the hand of Providence.” Unfortunately for Carter and for Henry’s other opponents, it turned out that the governor was only sick, not dead.1
Moderate Virginians were hardly thrilled to have Patrick Henry as governor. They saw him as an extremist, and extremism in such a volatile moment was the last thing they thought Virginia needed. Of course, other Virginians were delighted with Henry’s election. The soldiers of the First and Second Regiments, among his staunchest supporters, praised him as the ideal governor: “Uninfluenced by private ambition, regardless of sordid interest, you have uniformly pursued the general good of your country,” they told him. Henry wrote back and reminded them that as heavy a burden as the governor’s office might be, “to you is assigned the glorious task of saving, by your valour, all that is dear to mankind.” He encouraged them to fight on for Virginia’s deliverance.2
Even as Henry chafed at the constitutional limitations imposed on the governor’s office, he became the public face of Virginia during its first three years of independence. The House of Delegates possessed most of the state’s legislative authority, but they were in session only part of the year, with Henry administering the war effort year-round, a job he relished because of the close connection he had forged with the military. The British had begun to focus their attention on invading New York City, and the royal governor, Dunmore, having lost control of Virginia, left the state in August 1776. Rumors circulated that Dunmore might return to Virginia at the head of a large British army, but this threat did not materialize.3
As indicated by the erroneous reports of his death, Henry struggled badly with his health during the summer and fall of 1776, which distracted him from the daunting challenges he still faced. As the delegates to the Continental Congress drafted, redrafted, and then approved the Declaration of Independence that July in Philadelphia, Patrick Henry was falling seriously ill. He was sworn in as governor on July 6 and quickly left Williamsburg to recuperate at home. Henry’s medical troubles would become an issue for the rest of his life. It is often difficult to discern what specifically was wrong with him, medical care and diagnoses being essentially medieval in that era, even for the elite, but the timing of his sickness suggests a malaria-related fever that he might have contracted in Williamsburg. As would become his standard practice during the summer, Henry retreated to Scotchtown, which stood on relatively high ground, away from swampy lowlands and mosquitoes. Bedridden, Henry slowly recovered, and the Virginia Gazette reported happily in August that “our worthy governor . . . is so much recovered from his late severe indisposition that he walks out daily.” The newspaper hoped he could return to the capital soon, which Henry was indeed able to do.4
Arriving in Williamsburg in September, Henry confronted a dire military situation, with little power to respond to the setbacks American forces were experiencing in the northern states. He and Washington exchanged letters shortly after the general’s nearly disastrous flight from New York City. The British had abandoned Boston in March 1776 and then attacked New York beginning on August 22. Washington’s army staged a defense of Brooklyn Heights, but because Washington had divided his army between Long Island and Manhattan, he was nearly overwhelmed by the British, evacuating his remaining soldiers with no time to spare. Henry reported to Washington some victories against the Cherokees on the western frontier of Virginia, where, despite Henry’s amicable statements toward the Indians, troops from the southern states would prosecute a brief, nasty war with them until a preliminary peace was signed in April 1777. Henry also worried that the British might be planning a naval invasion of the state. Lord Dunmore and his British troops had left Virginia for New York, but patriot leaders worried he would eventually return with a much larger force. Henry had heard about Washington’s narrow escape from Brooklyn. “I trust every virtuous man will be stimulated by it to fresh exertions,” he wrote.5
Washington responded with urgency, declaring that he needed a regular army to fight the British—a well-trained and committed national military. He was disgusted with the state militias, “who from an utter disregard of all discipline and restraint among themselves are but too apt to infuse the like spirit into others.” In the aftermath of the Battle of Long Island, whole militia regiments had deserted Washington, to his horror. The militiamen might be fit to fight Indians in isolated frontier skirmishes, Washington wrote, but he warned Henry not to depend on them should a British invasion come. In September, the Congress had authorized a recruitment campaign to bolster Washington’s Continental army with soldiers who would serve for the duration of the war. Virginia was instructed to deliver fifteen battalions, and Washington urged Henry to do whatever he could to produce the officers and soldiers he needed.6
General Washington was desperate. As his army fled through New York and New Jersey in the fall of 1776, the patriots faced their darkest hour. Tom Paine, serving in the Continental army, penned the famous lines “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”7
Alarmed by Washington’s letter and frustrated at the constitutional limitations of his office, Henry became convinced that the crisis was so urgent that he needed special wartime powers to raise and supply troops for the national army and for Virginia’s own defense in case of an invasion. Recruitment had gone badly earlier in the year, not least because of resentment among the troops and potential soldiers over Henry’s treatment by the Committee of Safety. Many Virginians also feared that enlisting would mean serving in the Continental army outside of Virginia, with little guarantee of supplies, payment, or success. In December, the House of Delegates gave Henry the broad authority he sought to make requisitions, pay for supplies, order troop movements, and raise additional battalions. Jealous of its prerogatives, the legislature limited the term of his mandate to only a few months. The delegates warned Henry that “this departure from the constitution of government, being in this instance founded only on the most evident and urgent necessity, ought not hereafter to be drawn into precedent.” Virginia was already wrestling with the problems of a weak governor’s position in wartime.8
Thomas Jefferson was among those unhappy with the legislature’s authorization. Five years later, he would assert that Henry and the delegates were trying to create “a dictator, invested with every power legislative, executive, and judiciary, civil and military, of life and death, over our persons and over our properties.” By any standard, his claim was an exaggeration. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that Henry did often support strengthening the governorship. He did not abuse his power during the emergency, and his bid made sense given the intense panic among the patriots in December 1776, when it seemed that all could be lost. His brief expansion of executive authority was a pragmatic move, yet it is one that contradicted his later opposition to executive power granted under the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps Henry reasoned that a temporary but robust expansion of power (placed in his own responsible hands, of course) could be justified due to the greater threat to liberty the British army presented.9
Even with the governor’s expanded command, enlarging the army continued to prove extremely difficult. Beyond the rampant inflation that encouraged speculators to gouge the army with high prices for basic supplies, agents from other states were also recruiting soldiers from Virginia, driving up costs for the bounties that the state paid enlistees and reducing the number of available men. Disease was also ravaging the soldiers who had already enlisted. “The terrors of the smallpox, added to
the lies of deserters and want of necessaries, are fatal objections to the continental service,” Henry wrote to Richard Henry Lee. Washington agreed with Henry that fear of smallpox was keeping many from enlisting, but instead of turning to short-term volunteers, he suggested that Henry move forward with more aggressive inoculation campaigns. Henry sympathized with these tactics: he himself had received inoculation (the intentional introduction of a mild strain of smallpox, to promote immunity) from Dr. Benjamin Rush while in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress. Washington had already ordered Virginia troops to receive inoculation as soon as they enlisted.10
In December 1776, some relief did come for Washington, when his army scored a great symbolic victory at the Battle of Trenton in New Jersey. On Christmas night, the general’s weary force crossed the Delaware River in the midst of a blizzard of sleet, surprising and capturing a garrison of 1,500 Hessian troops, mercenaries hired by the British to fight in the war. Washington pulled off another win a week later at Princeton, New Jersey, helping to convince Americans that the war was worth carrying forward.
Trenton and Princeton were valuable victories, but they hardly solved the problems of enlisting soldiers. The difficulty in recruitment created tension between Henry and Washington, who had very different views of how best to fill the ranks of the army. Henry asked Washington in March 1777 to approve a plan that would allow him to return to raising volunteers for six- to eight-month terms. He had recently recruited such volunteers from the western parts of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and he thought they could supply their own firearms and clothing. He also suggested that these volunteer companies could choose their own captains.11
Washington angrily replied to Henry that he needed a professional army that he could train, discipline, and count on to stay long-term. As for Henry’s volunteer scheme, Washington wrote, “I can not countenance in the smallest degree, what I know to be pernicious in the extreme. Short enlistments when founded on the best plan, are repugnant to order and subversive of discipline, and men held upon such terms, will never be equal to the important ends of war; but when they are of the volunteer kind, they are still more destructive.” Henry quickly dropped the idea, saying that he deferred to the general’s opinions in military matters. Despite their disagreements, Washington’s pleas had gotten Henry’s attention. The governor wrote repeatedly to Colonel Charles Lewis of Albemarle County in early 1777 instructing him to take his regiment north to support Washington. He urged Lewis to move as quickly as possible, despite the incompleteness of his regiment, before the Continental army should “receive a wound that may prove mortal.”12
Even though he was struggling to manage the war in Virginia and support the military campaign of the new United States, Henry was reelected as governor in May 1777. But he would be plagued by the same problems in his new term. In May, the legislature passed a plan for more vigorous recruitment and, if necessary, a compulsory draft. But the new policy resulted in desertions and ever-higher expenses. “Although it seems impossible to enlist continental recruits here,” Henry told Washington, “yet the zeal of our countrymen is great and general in the public cause.” But revolutionary zeal often could not overcome Virginians’ fear of the prospect of deprivation or death when serving as soldiers in the Continental army.13
Henry faced a fundamental problem common across a nation barely a year old: many Virginians were motivated to fight for their homes and their state, but not for the new country called “America.” When a British fleet entered the Chesapeake Bay in August 1777, Henry called out county militias to defend against invasion and, in a letter to George Wythe, expressed his delight at the response he received: “amid all the discouragements which the backwardness of our countrymen to enlist into the regular service throws us under, I congratulate you, Sir, on the zeal and alacrity with which that demand was generally complied with.” As many as 5,000 men were said to have risen up to defend Virginia against the invasion (which never materialized). Given the stark contrast between Virginians’ enthusiastic participation in the militias, and their resistance to enlisting in the Continental army, we can understand Henry’s sanguine attitude about militias. For these volunteers, Virginia commanded more allegiance than did their new nation. This devotion to one’s state was a sentiment many Americans would continue to feel strongly, even after the war’s end.14
The Continental army continued to struggle in the North. The British launched a massive campaign against Philadelphia in July, resulting in a clash at Brandywine Creek, about thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, on September 11. There, Washington suffered a humiliating defeat with about 1,100 men dead, wounded, or captured. Two weeks later the British occupied Philadelphia itself. On October 4, Washington tried to surprise a British garrison at Germantown, five miles north of Philadelphia, but his complicated plan of attack was repulsed. The Continental Congress was forced to flee to York, Pennsylvania.
Washington was discovering that America’s national government was not designed for the kind of nimble authority needed in wartime. In 1776, the patriots had summoned the Continental Congress to address the crisis with Britain, not to create a national entity that would be sovereign over the states. America’s initial political framework was formalized in late 1777 when Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States. Then Congress sent it to the states for ratification, a dilatory process that lasted until 1781. But from 1777 until 1789, the Articles comprised America’s government. The novelty of American political union is evident in the very beginning of the document, when Article I states that the “style of this confederacy shall be, ‘The United States of America.’” Until then, no one really knew what the independent country would be called.15
As its name suggested, the national government under the Articles was a confederation of sovereign, independent states. This was no fully integrated nation. The Articles meant only to codify a unified entity authorized to conduct war and diplomacy on behalf of the states. But even the Confederation’s power to make war was restricted by the fact that the Congress—the only branch of the new government—lacked the power to tax. Instead, the state legislatures were supposed to tax their respective citizens and deliver funds for the “charges of war” to the Congress. The contributions due from the states would be proportional to the value of the land in each. This sounded good in principle, but in the desperate economic circumstances of war, the states routinely evaded their responsibility to supply requested funds.16
Despite its structural defects, the Confederation government was not totally ineffective, as some historians have suggested. It was functional enough, after all, to enable Americans to defeat the British in the American Revolution. But the lack of taxing authority did result in paralyzing inefficiencies that George Washington found exasperating as commander of the Continental army. After the war, Washington and his allies James Madison and Alexander Hamilton would decide the Articles of Confederation did not afford the nation nearly enough power—a decision that Patrick Henry would ultimately denounce, in the debate over ratifying the Constitution.
Washington’s humiliation in Philadelphia threatened to arouse the same desperation Americans had felt after the defeats of the previous fall. New movements by British forces sought to drive a wedge between New England and the rest of the colonies. In fall 1777, General John Burgoyne hoped to move his lumbering force of 9,000 men to the south along Lake Champlain to the Hudson River and Albany. But repeated battles with Continentals and American militia wore his army down, and ultimately Burgoyne surrendered his army at Saratoga, New York, on October 17.
News of the great victory arrived in Virginia within two weeks, and Williamsburg held a military parade to celebrate. Cannon discharges and three volleys of musket fire were followed by “3 huzzas from all present; joy and satisfaction, upon the occasion, was evident in the countenance of every one; and the evening was celebrated with ringing of bells, illuminations, and etc.” Governor Henry enhance
d the festivities by ordering a “gill of rum” for each soldier.17
Henry knew the victory at Saratoga warranted more than merriment. He proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving, with the hope that Virginians might not, “through a vain and presumptuous confidence in our own strength, be led away to forget the hand of Heaven, whose assistance we have so often in times of distress implored, and which, as frequently before, so more especially now, we have experienced in this signal success of the arms of the United States, whereby the divine sanction of the righteousness of our cause is most illustriously displayed.” According to Henry and other Christian patriots, proper dependence on God began with their acknowledgment of divine blessings, of which Saratoga was an obvious example. Henry worried that Americans might turn away from God, ironically, at those moments of military success for which they had prayed. Victory might tempt them to become ungrateful, arrogant, or lazy. He closed the proclamation with the prayer “God save the United States,” replacing the familiar pre-Revolutionary prayer of “God save the king.”18
AMID THE ANXIETIES OF WAR, Patrick Henry found some personal happiness. In October 1777, two and a half years after Sarah’s untimely death, he married Dorothea Dandridge. Dorothea, in her early twenties, was much younger than Henry, who was forty-one. Coming from a prestigious family—she was the daughter of Nathaniel West Dandridge, Henry’s family friend and law client—she helped Henry grow even more connected to wealthy Virginia elites. She and Patrick would eventually have eleven children together—in addition to his six children from his marriage with Sarah—although two of them died very young. Dorothea brought twelve slaves into the marriage, upping Henry’s total number of bound workers to forty-two. He sold his Scotchtown plantation and moved his family onto a new one, Leatherwood, situated on 10,000 acres in Henry County, a new jurisdiction in southern Virginia recently named for him. Such new land acquisitions appealed to Henry and other Virginians of means, even in wartime. Many, including Henry, wanted the state to expand its power into the western territories, especially Kentucky, to develop more land. But with this push, Virginians also wanted to eliminate the western territories as a base for British operations and to secure settlers against disgruntled Native Americans, who were inclined to side with the British in the Revolution.19
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