George Rogers Clark, a young surveyor and soldier in Kentucky, became Virginia’s leading fighter against the British and Native Americans in the West. (Clark was the older brother of William, who would become famous thanks to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which occurred during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.) Clark not only clamored for a vigorous defense of Kentucky, which had recently been organized as a large county of Virginia, but he also proposed attacks against small British outposts in the distant Illinois country. Ultimately he hoped to lead an army against the British fort at Detroit, where a victory could end all western threats against Virginia.
To begin his campaign, Clark appealed to Henry for permission to attack the small British and French settlement at Kaskaskia in southern Illinois. He claimed, dubiously, that Kaskaskia was a key staging area for British and Native American attacks against Kentucky. Nevertheless, in December 1777, Henry and the Virginia government agreed to sponsor the expedition. The governor issued two sets of instructions to keep Clark’s real mission a secret. Publicly, Clark was authorized simply to raise a militia and proceed to Kentucky. The secret orders directed Clark’s militia to push ahead and attack Kaskaskia. Henry advised Clark to treat mercifully any British residents of Illinois who professed allegiance to Virginia. But those who remained loyal to the empire “must feel the miseries of war,” the governor insisted. Jefferson, George Mason, and George Wythe also supported Clark’s expedition, hoping it would score revenge for the area’s recent Indian attacks, which they viewed as cruel and unprovoked. They assured Clark that his militiamen could count on a reward of three hundred acres each, derived from lands taken from Native Americans.20
The promise of the expedition immediately clashed with the realities of wartime Virginia. The state had few excess men or resources to draw on for a grand campaign into the West. Within three weeks of giving his approval, Henry was scolding Clark for trying to recruit volunteers from south-central Virginia. Any available men from those counties were needed for the Continental army, and Henry understood that Clark had agreed to seek recruits primarily from Kentucky and the western counties. Clark struggled badly to raise his militia; soon he also had to combat rumors spreading among his small army that the expedition against Illinois was only a pretext for a land grab by Clark, Henry, and others in the Virginia gentry, which led to a rash of desertions. Nevertheless, Clark and his troops easily seized Kaskaskia and Vincennes in July 1778, a success that Henry said “equaled the most sanguine expectations.” One of Henry’s letters to Clark during this period revealed a somewhat surprising glimpse of vanity in the governor, when Henry pressed Clark to secure him “two of the best stallions that [can] possibly be found at the Illinois.” The expense of the horses and their transport to Virginia was no object, Henry wrote, because he simply wanted the best pureblood Spanish horses available. Letters like this, as well as Henry’s preoccupation with land acquisitions, show that despite Henry’s emphasis on virtue, he too wrestled occasionally with the temptations of luxury.21
Clark’s claims of victory, and Henry’s subsequent trumpeting of them, minimized the difficulty and qualified success of this western campaign. Clark’s venture would not turn out quite as well as expected; Vincennes was soon retaken by British and Indian forces from Detroit. Clark unexpectedly decided to attack Vincennes again during the winter, marching through flooded, icy rivers to lay siege to the lightly defended fort in February 1779. After managing to capture a small detachment of British-allied French and Indian scouts, Clark’s men tomahawked three of the Indian prisoners. Then, on Clark’s orders, they proceeded to partially scalp one of the French Canadian soldiers within sight of the fort. This brutal measure had its intended effect, and the British promptly surrendered Vincennes back to Clark. Again, Henry reported that the campaign had “succeeded to our utmost wishes.”22
Despite Clark’s early success, Henry and Clark never cooperated well. By the time of Clark’s second Vincennes campaign, serious problems began to divide them. Clark grew angry that Henry and his government failed to communicate regularly with the western frontier. He wrote in February 1779 that he had not received any intelligence from Henry for almost a year, at a time when he desperately wanted reinforcements. Clark still appealed to Henry to help him to secure frontier lands, but knew that his hope for wealth and acreage was becoming illusory. The western front was only of secondary concern to Henry, and inefficient means of communication continually degraded his relationship with Clark.23
After Henry left the governor’s office in 1779, his successor, Thomas Jefferson, would continue to take a hopeful view of Clark’s foray into the Illinois country. Other Virginia officials, including Henry, began to think Clark was squandering Virginia’s opportunities there by draining resources in roguish expeditions and failing to secure the state’s control of the region. Rumors suggested that Clark was a drunk. Back in the Virginia legislature, Henry became one of Clark’s chief enemies and opposed any further plans for an attack on Detroit by Clark’s militia.
Henry’s and Jefferson’s developing animosity—which would boil over in 1781, when Henry proposed an investigation of Jefferson’s conduct as governor—may have hurt Clark, too. Jefferson sympathetically wrote to Clark in 1782 and commented obliquely that he was surprised “to find one person hostile to you as far as he has personal courage to show hostility to any man. Who he is you will probably have heard.” Jefferson left little doubt about this enemy’s identity when he noted that he considered the man as “all tongue without either head or heart” and consumed with “crooked schemes.” Many of Henry’s antagonists would have agreed with that description. In their view, Henry was a gifted orator who did not act on his own fine words, and who exhibited less than virtuous behavior in land grabs and ill-conceived ventures in the West, including Clark’s. Henry was not Clark’s only enemy, however. Benjamin Harrison, who became Virginia governor after Jefferson, excoriated Clark for failing to build forts in the West that the Virginia government had ordered. When Clark arrived in Richmond in 1783, hoping to plan a new war against the western Indians, Harrison removed him from his command.24
Henry’s involvement with the sometimes sordid exploits of George Rogers Clark reminds us that Henry and the Virginians were interested in controlling the West for various reasons: security, expansion, and personal wealth. As noble as Henry’s patriotic ideals may have been, he was not averse to profiting from the removal of the British.
DESPITE THE ATTENTION Clark’s expedition garnered, in the winter of 1777–78, Henry and his fellow patriots were chiefly concerned with the survival of the Continental army. Although the victory at Saratoga had lifted Americans’ spirits, the fact remained that Washington’s branch of the army had been humiliated in the battles around Philadelphia. Washington settled into winter quarters at Valley Forge, where a disaster slowly unfolded: poor supplies and disease would eventually lead to the loss of nearly a quarter of the Continental troops at the camp. Although it is hard to imagine in retrospect, this winter of discontent easily could have led to Washington’s ouster as general. Some of the general’s commanders, including Saratoga hero Horatio Gates, had begun a whispering campaign to have Washington replaced. Henry had his share of disagreements with Washington about military affairs, and in early 1778 his loyalty to the general would face a severe test.
News of the conspiracy to oust Washington reached Henry by mid-February, when he received a shocking letter from a correspondent who claimed to know him but identified himself only as a “Philadelphia friend.” The letter began by flattering Henry, recalling how he “taught us to shake off our idolatrous attachment to royalty, and to oppose its encroachment upon our liberties with our very lives. By these means you saved us from ruin.” The writer went on to lament the troubles Americans had brought on themselves in the past year. He particularly worried about Washington’s army, which he considered an undisciplined mob. But the correspondent thought the patriot cause could be revitalized if Gates or another gen
eral from the northern branch of the Continentals replaced Washington.25
The anonymous writer seemed to have assumed that Henry would recognize his identity; he implored Henry not to tell anyone about the letter or its author, even asking Henry to destroy it. Would Henry, he asked, spread the word that it was time to remove the general? In an admirable display of integrity, Henry did not. To the contrary, he immediately packaged the letter with one of his own and sent them off to Washington.
Henry wrote to the general that “you will no doubt be surprised at seeing the enclosed letter, in which the encomiums bestowed on me are as undeserved, as the censures aimed at you are unjust. I am sorry there should be one man who counts himself my friend, who is not yours.” He assured Washington that the conspiracy would get no assistance from him. “Believe me Sir, I have too high a sense of the obligations America has to you to abet or countenance so unworthy a proceeding. The most exalted merit hath ever been found to attract envy. But I please myself with the hope, that the same fortitude and greatness of mind which have hitherto braved all the difficulties and dangers inseparable from your station, will rise superior to every attempt of the envious partisan.” Washington’s reply was delayed, so Henry wrote him again in two weeks to confirm that he had received the secret letter. Those who conspired against him risked fighting against God’s providence, Henry said. “While you face the armed enemies of our liberty in the field, and by the favor of God have been kept unhurt, I trust your country will never harbor in her bosom the miscreant who would ruin her best supporter.”26
Washington finally replied, the delivery of the original letters having taken about a month. Even though the general already knew of attempts to have him removed from command, he was understandably grateful to Henry for forwarding the anonymous letter to him. He appreciated even more Henry’s continued support, the loss of which would have been devastating to Washington, who had few military successes to show for himself in the early years of the war. “Your friendship, Sir, in transmitting me the anonymous letter you had received, lays me under the most grateful obligations,” the general said. The next day Washington wrote to Henry again, having received the second letter on the subject. Again he profusely thanked Henry and then revealed the person he believed to have written the anonymous letter: Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia patriot and physician who had inoculated Henry, and who was serving as medical director for the middle department of the Continental army. While Rush would only later admit to writing the letter, Washington immediately discerned that Rush was the author because of a “similitude of hands” between this new letter and earlier ones he had received from the doctor. The general was disgusted with Rush’s hypocrisy, for he recalled that Rush had spoken very kindly to him, even since the time he would have sent his secret letter to Henry. Rush was understandably concerned about the deplorable conditions of the troops, but his participation in a subversive campaign against Washington has detracted from his historical reputation. Washington, having information like Rush’s letter in hand, began to make the conspiracy against him publicly known, which immediately deflated the prospect that he would be removed.27
Rush obviously believed that if a prominent patriot such as Henry could be turned against Washington, then the conspiracy might have gained traction. But Rush had badly judged Henry’s disposition. Despite his temporary squabbles with Washington, the loyalty of Virginia’s governor to the Continental army commander was unshakeable. Henry had acted boldly and riskily in forwarding the letter to Washington. What if the conspiracy had worked, and the general had been removed? Henry surely would have suffered as well. Washington always remembered Henry’s loyalty to him. Sixteen years later, as president, Washington wrote, “I have conceived myself under obligations to [Henry] for the friendly manner in which he transmitted to me some insidious anonymous writings that were sent to him in the close of the year 1777, with a view to embark him in the opposition that was forming against me at that time.” Who knows what might have happened if Henry had lent his powers of persuasion to the effort to remove Washington?28
Henry’s support for Washington helped ease the tensions between the two men. Henry struggled to raise Virginia militiamen in 1778 to face threats from western Indians and gangs of outlaws within the state. He came to believe the patriots were losing momentum and the state might descend into lawlessness, so he pushed for harsher punishments against militia deserters and marauding criminals, writing Benjamin Harrison in May 1778 that “no effort to crush these desperadoes should be spared.” He sought more authority from the legislature to coerce Virginians into military service but got little response. Despite these problems, Henry was chosen for a third yearlong term as governor that May.29
By June, Henry had grown almost disconsolate about the war. The recent good news of the French alliance with America—secured following the triumph at Saratoga—cheered him. But within Virginia, the mood was gloomy. “Public spirit seems to have taken its flight from Virginia,” he wrote Richard Henry Lee. The state was below half its quota of troops, and the “great bounties” in cash and real estate offered by Virginia for enlistment would only put Virginia in a worse light, he feared. “Let not Congress rely on Virginia for soldiers,” for almost nothing could convince men to serve, Henry lamented.30
The war’s cruel grinding-on even brought some Virginians to the edge of revolt against the state government. One of Henry’s military correspondents warned him in November that far-western Montgomery County, Virginia, was at serious risk of a “general mutiny.” Young men were chafing under the relentless demands for military service, which would take them away from home for many months and expose their families to “ruin and beggary, which many of them are on the brink of already,” owing to the disruptions of war and longtime hostilities with local Native Americans. Henry desperately tried to find the right balance: How could he request reasonable sacrifices without pushing Virginians into utter destitution? Many citizens found that the war just required too much of them, so they balked at every request from the governor.31
MILITARY RELIEF CAME from an ironic source: France. The French might well have chosen to stay out of the war in America, given their old rivalry with the American colonists from the wars of empire earlier in the century, and the continuing anti-Catholicism that pervaded British American culture. But the victory at Saratoga convinced the French that the Americans could win independence, and an American alliance gave them another opportunity to harm their inveterate enemies, the British. Benjamin Franklin had been working on a Franco-American alliance since the nation first declared its independence, but only news of a major military victory could convince the wary French. Henry viewed the alliance as a providential blessing: “I look at the past condition of America, as at a dreadful precipice, from which we have escaped, by means of the generous French.... Salvation to America depends upon our holding fast our attachment to them.” Henry knew that the chastened British had evacuated Philadelphia following the French alliance and had begun to suggest that they might offer peace to the Americans, if the patriots forsook independence. He railed against such a possibility but feared that some lagging Virginians might consider the offer. For him, the prospect of peace with Britain was like the desire of ancient Israelites to return to slavery: “The flesh pots of Egypt are still savory to degenerate palates.” Henry had not lost his radical edge in pursuit of independence, and he fumed at many Virginians’ lack of commitment to that goal.32
Through 1778, Henry struggled to discern the intentions of the British, who were beginning to shift their focus to the southern theater of the war. Would they stage a direct attack on the Chesapeake states? Fear of British invasion made Henry and the Virginia assembly reluctant to respond to Congress’s periodic requests to deliver assistance to Georgia or South Carolina, where the British threat seemed more significant. In November, Henry explained to Henry Laurens, president of the Congress, that the assembly would agree to send Virginia troops out of state only when an i
nvasion was imminent elsewhere. Recurrent rumors suggested that the British might come ashore in Virginia, but their first major strike in the South was actually against Savannah, Georgia, which they captured in December 1778.33
The bleak mood following Savannah’s defeat led Congress to issue another call for a day of prayer and fasting, one that Henry implored Virginians to observe. The Congress summoned Americans to pray that they would learn the lessons behind God’s chastisements, including Savannah’s fall, and that God would “extend the influence of true religion, and give us that peace of mind which the world cannot give. That he will be our shield in the day of battle, our comforter in the hour of death, and our kind parent and merciful judge.”34
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