Patrick Henry
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Strict separation of church and state, which today often means the government should have no connections with religious institutions, was uncommon in the founding period. Jefferson took a strong view of church-state separation, but as president even he felt comfortable permitting and attending church services in government buildings. The notion that government agencies could totally disengage from religion simply did not occur to most Revolutionary-era Americans. Churches were seen as the moral bulwark of the republic. Henry and most of his Revolutionary colleagues on either side of the establishment debate also would not have supported strict separation because they believed that government should promote morality. Two primary ways to do this were punishing immorality under the law, and encouraging morality through churches and schools. The real point of contention concerning the general assessment was whether, as a matter of conscience, people should be required to support a church at all. Jefferson and Madison cooperated with many evangelical dissenters, especially Baptists, in arguing that religion would survive, and even thrive, on a purely voluntary basis. The Baptists also had plenty of experience with state-sponsored persecution in Virginia; as recently as the early 1770s, Baptist preachers were still being sent to jail for illegal preaching. Government support inevitably led to persecution of dissenters and corruption of the official churches, they said.
In mid-1784, the Church of England in Virginia proposed an act of incorporation that would put it on more stable legal footing. This would have given the clergy of what was now the renamed Protestant Episcopal Church both greater independence from state oversight and increased legal protection for church property, which it held as the established church. Henry introduced the measure, but it struggled to gain support in the legislature and was postponed until the next session. Madison thought the bill was outrageous, because it tried to reverse the state’s obvious movement toward full religious liberty. He told Jefferson that “extraordinary as such a project was, it was preserved from a dishonorable death by the talents of Mr. Henry.”32
Later that year, Henry again introduced both the incorporation bill and the general assessment plan. Many Virginians sent petitions to the legislature endorsing the assessment, including the influential Hanover Presbytery (founded by Samuel Davies). As non-Anglicans, the Presbyterians had suffered under the religious establishment of the colonial period, but they still desired a plural system of establishment. James Madison spoke out against the assessment, but the tide seemed to be turning in its favor.
The momentum for the assessment bill abruptly changed when the legislature again elected Henry governor on November 17. Neither the assessment nor the incorporation bill had come up for a final vote, but Henry may have thought he could safely leave the House of Delegates before their approval. He was wrong. Madison was quite pleased to see Henry go to the governor’s mansion, and anticipated that the change of offices would prove “inauspicious to [Henry’s] offspring.” He would be right. Henry was a great communicator, but he would prove no match for Madison’s political maneuvering. Henry remained a hero in Virginia; legislators remembered his solid performance as governor in the difficult early years of the Revolution and they were glad to choose him again as governor. Henry was happy to take on the post. After some years of relative ease at his Leatherwood plantation, he felt renewed attraction for the governor’s mansion. Madison believed that Henry accepted the governorship for family reasons, and undoubtedly Dorothea Henry and the couple’s growing children relished the prospect of living full-time in Richmond, rather than in the remote southwest of Leatherwood. Having chosen—or having been lured into accepting—the relatively weak governorship, he would not be able to save the general assessment plan.33
Although the incorporation bill passed the House, Madison got the vote on the general assessment delayed until 1785. In his Memorial and Remonstrance, he crisply stated the reasons many Virginians, including many evangelical Christians, opposed the plan. Religion, he argued, “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” To Madison and his Baptist allies, religious freedom required that the government give no support to churches. Any action government took on behalf of a particular denomination was inherently discriminatory toward people of other faiths or opinions. Ultimately, the legislature set the assessment bill aside due to lack of popular support (the incorporation bill would later pass the Senate). Baptists across the state celebrated. As one minister put it, “this formidable imp was destroyed at the time of his formation, and never suffered to draw breath nor perform one action in this happy land of freedom.”34
The demise of the general assessment gave new life to the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. Jefferson had drafted this bill in 1777, but it lacked support until the controversy over the general assessment focused Virginians’ attention on the question of their church-state relationship. In early 1786, Madison won final approval for the statute, which proclaimed that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”35
Henry’s effort to promote religious liberty by the plural establishment of churches had generated a backlash, resulting in Virginia’s remarkably modern position on religion and government. The state no longer could use tax money to help the churches do their business. The Virginia model heavily influenced the First Amendment’s encouragement of the “free exercise of religion” and its ban on a national established church. As it turned out, the legal and constitutional endorsement of religious voluntarism would put Christianity on a much stronger basis in Virginia and America generally, with evangelical churches growing exponentially in the next seventy-five years, prior to the Civil War.
The battle over the general assessment accelerated the downward spiral in Henry’s relationship with Madison and Jefferson. Although Jefferson was in Paris during this time, serving as ambassador to France, his personal animosity toward Henry grew steadily even in absentia. Jefferson came to see Henry as the opponent of every worthy political goal he endorsed. For example, Jefferson and Madison had dreamed of holding a convention that would revise the state’s 1776 Constitution. Jefferson sent Madison a draft constitution in 1783 that would have rearranged the political branches of state government, giving more power to the governor and courts. There was little popular support for such a plan, and Jefferson blamed Henry for it. In his most bitter invective toward Henry, Jefferson told Madison that as long as Henry lived, there was no chance for constitutional reform. “What we have to do I think,” Jefferson wrote, “is devoutly to pray for his death.” Though Jefferson probably meant this comment sarcastically, he also wrote it in one of his encrypted codes so no one else would see his malevolent wishes for Henry.36
DESPITE THE FAILURE OF THE GENERAL ASSESSMENT, Henry remained committed as governor to the public support of religion. He responded enthusiastically to a proposal for Christianizing Native Americans presented to him by England’s Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. The countess was a key evangelical Methodist leader who corresponded with a number of American religious and political figures, including her distant relative George Washington. George and Martha Washington were so enamored with the countess that they placed an engraving of her on their bedroom wall at Mount Vernon.37
Sir James Jay, a prominent physician and brother of New York’s John Jay, provided Governor Henry an outline of the countess’s plan, including a letter from the countess to Henry. The American Revolution had opened a door for the evangelization of the Indians, she told him, and her plan sought to “introduce the benevolent religion of our blessed R
edeemer among heathen and savage nations.” The countess wanted the legislatures of Virginia and other states with substantial frontier areas to grant lands for Christian settlers to establish new towns near the Indian tribes. There they would set up schools and churches, attracting Indians with the prospect of education and refinement. The countess would administer the licensing of Christian settlers from Europe. All she needed, she said, was for the legislatures to provide the land and tax incentives toward settlement.
Henry saw the plan as an antidote to the continuing turmoil on the frontier, which he attributed partly to Indian resistance to Christianity and what he saw as their lack of civilization. He longed to introduce more white Christian settlers who would reduce Virginia’s overall dependence on slave labor. The plan would ultimately bolster public virtue, which Henry believed had woefully languished during the war. Henry advocated for the countess’s plan with the state legislature, but because most of Virginia’s vacant land had been deeded to Congress, he directed his appeals there, writing to Virginia’s congressional delegates in 1785 and telling them that the twin goals of attracting Christian settlers and evangelizing Native Americans demanded immediate action. Similarly, Henry wrote to Joseph Martin, his prominent neighbor near Leatherwood, expressing his zeal for the plan. “She hopes to do [this] at her own expense chiefly,” he said, “and to import large number of people from Great Britain and Ireland that are good whigs and strictly religious.”38
But concerns over the settlers’ political allegiances, and the means of doling out land, derailed the countess’s proposal. As Richard Henry Lee told George Washington, who had also strongly recommended the plan, Congress feared the settlers might prove to be British sympathizers, and moreover, all available land was committed for sale to pay off public debts.39
Henry continued to promote the plan in the Virginia legislature, but the countess’s scheme was doomed, an unsuccessful instance of Henry and Washington’s continuing interest in using state power to support religion, virtue, and even missionary work. Lest we think that such ideas were peculiar to Henry and Washington or that they faded after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were adopted, President Thomas Jefferson himself would approve federal funding for a missionary and church in Illinois. Even the great champion of total disestablishment believed that the government could employ religious workers to accomplish public goods, in this case the education and “civilization” of Native Americans. To Revolutionary-era Americans such as Henry and Jefferson, that civilizing project by definition meant instructing them in Christianity.40
THE FAILURE OF THE PLAN TO evangelize Native Americans was only one example of Henry’s struggles as governor and the lack of assistance he received from Congress. Other problems lingered after the war, such as the difficulty of aligning the state militias with national defense goals. George Washington sought to have militias led by Continental army veterans because he had found the militia units so difficult to control during the war. In the absence of a national wartime army, the militias would need to be ready in case of a new war with Britain or Native Americans.
At times, such conflicts seemed imminent. A series of dubious treaties earlier in the decade, regarding the status of lands north of the Ohio River, angered local Native Americans. Continued intrusions by white settlers and local fighting threatened to incite full-fledged war between Virginia and its Indian neighbors. Henry spent much of 1785 trying to keep Virginians from fighting with the Cherokees of western North Carolina. He also wrote urgently to officials in Greenbrier County (in present-day West Virginia) in June 1785, telling them to prepare their militia for hostilities with Native Americans in that area. He tried to prevent white settlers from crossing the Ohio River into disputed territory, but thousands went anyway, risking their lives to obtain fertile farmland. Indians along the Ohio River in the mid-1780s killed several hundred Americans. Probably even more Indians were killed by Americans.
In July, word came that a party of Virginians on their way to a peace conference with Indians had been murdered north of the Ohio. Daniel Boone, the militia commander and famous frontiersman, wrote to Henry, telling him of the churning violence. In his rough dialect, he said “an Inden Warr is Expected” and that the local militias would not be able to stop an invasion by the Wabash Confederacy. As frontier settlers clamored for retaliation, Henry admonished them to stop advancing into Indian lands; the prospect of Indian war was a “fatal evil” that would unleash new depths of suffering and undermine Virginia’s faltering finances. Though Henry was no pioneer of peaceful relations with Native Americans, neither did he seek war with them. Virginia could not afford it.41
Virginia’s Militia Act of 1784 attempted to address Washington’s wishes for a stronger militia by releasing all county lieutenants and field officers from duty by April 1785, with Henry to appoint their replacements. The act was a disaster. The governor received numerous protests against the system of replacements, with some complainants accusing Henry of insulting the existing officers in an undemocratic power grab. The prominent lawyer and militia officer St. George Tucker resigned his newly appointed post, telling Henry that he did not realize the act would be “rendered abortive by the dissenting voice of the people.” Henry became convinced that the Militia Act was unenforceable and asked the legislature to amend it, telling the Speaker of the House of Delegates that the “execution of the Militia Law has caused much embarrassment to the executive”—meaning himself. Henry blamed a lack of adequate information for the debacle, but the failure of the reorganization showed heightened expectations among the militia for choosing their own officers, as well as the difficulty of getting Virginians to accept direction in military affairs. The amended act simply restored the positions to the old officers. A chastened Henry even had to write to the counties asking them to provide him complete lists of the officers he was to reinstate.42
Also fueling Henry’s unease were strange rumors that agents of the Barbary states were in Richmond. The Barbary pirates, based along the North African coast, had harassed and captured European and American ships for decades. When the pirates sensed the weakness of the fledgling American navy, major hostilities between America and the Barbary states erupted in 1785, with Algerians seizing two American ships that year. In November, Henry wrote a peculiar yet ominous letter to the House of Delegates, telling them that “certain persons from the coast of Barbary are now in this city.” He sought to ascertain whether he had authority “to arrest dangerous characters coming from abroad.” Three suspected Barbary spies were indeed detained and interrogated by Virginia officials. The suspects claimed not to be Algerians but Moors, or Spaniards of North African descent. Their interrogators remained suspicious that they might have subversive intentions, but found no evidence to support that notion. Governor Henry’s apprehension at the prospect of Barbary espionage revealed fresh concern for Virginia’s security.43
CONFRONTING SO MANY TROUBLES on such different fronts, Henry conceivably could have become a defender of the increased national power that the new Constitution would provide in three years’ time. Perhaps if things had developed differently in the mid-1780s, he would have. As late as the end of 1786, James Madison still hoped that Henry might join him in the fight for a more energetic national government.
Madison would be sorely disappointed, because Henry would soon emerge as Virginia’s leading opponent of the move for a new Constitution. His concern for Virginia’s security did not lead him to support a more centralized government, because he viewed Congress as interest-driven and inept. His negative view of the Confederation government crystallized in 1785 and 1786 because of two related issues: Congress’s lack of protection for frontier settlers, and a proposed treaty that would have surrendered America’s navigation rights on the Mississippi River to the Spanish.
By 1785, Henry had begun to fear that a broader war with Indians was about to erupt. He suspected that Native Americans in the trans-Mississippi West might align with the Spanish, threatening Virg
inia and other states that had substantial western frontiers. Henry longed to open Kentucky (which was still part of Virginia) and the greater West to settlement, but he knew that Indian and Spanish aggression could pin Americans along the Atlantic coast. Richard Henry Lee warned him in February that Spain’s new minister to America, Don Diego Maria de Gardoqui, would claim an exclusive Spanish right to commerce on the Mississippi. “Spain is proud,” Lee wrote, “and extremely jealous of our approximation to her South American territory, and fearing the example of our ascendancy on that country, is grasping forever at more territory.”44
Henry became increasingly exasperated with Congress’s failure to protect Virginia settlers in the Ohio River Valley, who continued to suffer periodic attacks from Shawnees and other Native Americans, despite Henry’s efforts to limit their settlement to areas safely south of the Ohio River. George Rogers Clark told Henry that war with the Wabash Confederacy was certain and that Kentucky’s prospects were bleak, with “so formidable and bloody an enemy to encounter [and] much irregularity in the country.”45
Henry bluntly appealed to Congress for help in 1786. The management of Indian affairs was one of the few things he needed the national government to do well, but it had failed miserably. Henry, always sensitive to the essential purposes of government, saw Congress’s abandonment of settlers in western Virginia as neglect of “the most valuable article of the social compact.” To receive the government’s protection of their most essential rights—including the rights, as English philosopher John Locke had famously argued, to life, liberty, and property—Americans paid taxes and gave up a measure of their freedom to the national and state governments. If the national Congress would not protect its vulnerable citizens from Indian attacks, then what good was the government?46