Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Tongue-tied . . .
Chapter 2 - Tongue Untied
Chapter 3 - The Flame Is Spread
Chapter 4 - We Are Slaves!
Chapter 5 - To Recover Our Just Rights
Chapter 6 - We Must Fight!
Chapter 7 - “Give Me Liberty ...”
Chapter 8 - “Don’t Tread on Me”
Chapter 9 - Hastening to Ruin
Chapter 10 - Obliged to Fly
Chapter 11 - A Belgian Hare
Chapter 12 - Seeds of Discontent
Chapter 13 - On the Wings of the Tempest
Chapter 14 - A Bane of Sedition
Chapter 15 - Beef! Beef! Beef!
Chapter 16 - The Sun Has Set in All Its Glory
Afterword
Appendix A: The Speech
Appendix B: Henry on Slavery
Appendix C: Henry’s Heirs
Notes
Bibliography of Principal Sources
Index
Copyright Page
Clay bust of Patrick Henry by
“itinerant Italian sculptor” in 1788.
(RED HILL MUSEUM COLLECTION, PATRICK HENRY
MEMORIAL FOUNDATION, BROOKNEAL, VA)
To my friend and mentor
John P. Kaminski
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to Karen Gorham and Edith C. Poindexter of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation at Patrick Henry’s Red Hill home, in Brookneal, Virginia. Karen Gorham is director at Red Hill, and Edith Poindexter was, until her recent retirement, curator and genealogist there for many years. Both are superb historians and were generous in sharing their encyclopedic knowledge of Henry, his family, and his times. In addition, both ladies were gracious enough to vet the final manuscript to ensure its accuracy. Ms. Poindexter also shared important research materials that shed new light on Patrick Henry’s life and family, while Ms. Gorham provided me with several key illustrations and a number of essential research materials. I must add, as well, that both ladies deserve the thanks of all Americans for their important work at the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation in Brookneal, Virginia.
I am also most grateful to John P. Kaminski, one of America’s premier (and busiest) scholars, who, with his usual generosity, was kind enough to vet this manuscript. Historian, author, educator, lecturer, documentary editor, and patriot, John P. Kaminski is founder and director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution. He is also responsible for producing one of the nation’s most important historical treasures: The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, and I am honored by his friendship.
I want to express my deepest thanks as well to the many gracious folks at my publisher, Da Capo Press of the Perseus Books Group, who work so hard and expertly behind the scenes and seldom receive public acknowledgment for the beautiful books they help produce and market. Among them are Lissa Warren, Director of Publicity; Kevin Hanover, Director of Marketing and the wonderful sales force for the Perseus Books Group; Sean Maher in marketing; assistant editor Jonathan Crowe; project editors Renee Caputo and Cisca Schreefel; copy editor Anais Scott; proofreader Laura Keenan; indexer Robie Grant; and designer Trish Wilkinson.
Finally, my deepest thanks to my editor, Robert Pigeon, executive editor at Da Capo Press, for the time and effort he put into improving this manuscript, and to my friend and literary agent, Edward W. Knappman, of New England Publishing Associates.
Author’s Note: Spellings and grammar in the eighteenth-century letters and manuscripts cited in this book have, where appropriate, been modernized to clarify syntax without altering the intent of the original authors. Readers may find the original spellings in works cited in the endnotes and bibliography at the back of the book. Regarding the depictions of Patrick Henry, the wide and sometimes incongruous differences in the portraits and sculptures result in part from the degenerating effects of malaria as he aged. A second reason, however, is that Henry only sat for four portraits during his lifetime—two miniatures, the sketches by Latrobe on page 250, and the clay bust on the frontispiece. Subsequent portraits shown in this book were made long after his death from the two miniatures and include distortions by artists who never actually saw Henry. The clay bust, however, “was considered a perfect likeness [at the time],” according to Patrick Henry’s friend, Judge John Tyler.
Chronology
May 29, 1736. Patrick Henry born in Hanover County, Virginia.
1752. Opens store with brother William; fails one year later.
1754. Marries Sarah Shelton; begins farming.
1757. House burns down; farm fails; he opens a new store.
1759. Economic depression closes store; he moves into tavern; tends bar, studies law.
1760. Passes law exams; begins practice.
1763. Gains fame in “Parsons’ Cause” case.
1765. Elected to House of Burgesses; Stamp Act Speech, May 29.
1767. Moves to “Scotchtown” plantation; wife Sarah suffers depression.
1774. Delegate to Continental Congress.
1775. “Liberty or Death” speech, March 23; Virginia’s commander in chief; wife Sarah dies.
1776. Resigns military command; returns to state assembly; Virginia declares independence; helps write state constitution; champions religious liberty and end to slave trade; elected Virginia’s first governor; leads war effort.
1777. Elected to second term as governor; organizes Virginia Navy; sends troops against British in Illinois, Indiana, the Carolinas; marries Dorothea Dandridge.
1778. Elected to third term; exposes plot to oust Washington; uncovers corruption behind Valley Forge miseries.
1779-1784. Leader, Virginia Assembly; champions restoration of British trade, return of Tories; intermarriage of whites and Indians.
1784. Elected governor a fourth time.
1785. Threatens secession over Mississippi River navigation rights; reelected governor; rejects stronger confederation; supports farmer tax protests; nation faces anarchy.
1786. Daughters marry; his views on women, marriage, slavery; declines another term as governor.
1787. Refuses to attend Constitutional Convention; prophesies tyranny under national government.
1788. Leads fight against ratification; demands Bill of Rights and limits on federal powers; resumes law practice.
1791. Quits politics for full-time private law practice; landmark British Debts Case.
1792. Land speculations; Yazoo scandal.
1794-1796. Declines appointments as U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other federal posts.
1799. Returns to politics; recaptures Assembly seat; Dorothea gives birth to her eleventh child—his seventeenth—lives four days.
June 6, 1799. Patrick Henry dies at sixty-three. Buried at Red Hill, Charlotte County, Virginia.
Introduction
“As this government stands,” Patrick Henry thundered, “I despise and abhor it. . . . I speak as one poor individual—but when I speak, I speak the language of thousands. If I am asked what is to be done when a people feel themselves intolerably oppressed, my answer is . . . ‘overturn the government!’”
Henry’s roar of exhortation was not aimed at Britain; it was aimed at the United States, as the thirteen former British colonies considered whether to adopt a new constitution. As he had done a decade earlier in his famed cry for “liberty or death,” Henry once again roared for the rights of free men to govern themselves with as few restrictions from government as possible. His roar would reverberate through the ages
of American history to this very day.
Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, for revolution against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much freedom as possible from government—American as well as British. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.1
As first governor of Virginia—then the most important colony in America—Henry became the most important civilian leader of the Revolutionary War, ensuring troops and supplies for Washington’s Continental Army and engineering the American victory over British and Indian forces in the West that brought present-day Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky into the Union. Without Patrick Henry, there might never have been a revolution, independence, or United States of America.
A champion of religious freedom, Henry fought to end slave importation and was the true father of the Bill of Rights. Recognized in his day as America’s greatest orator and lawyer, Henry bitterly opposed big national governments—American as well as British. He sought, instead, to unite American states in an “amicable” confederation that left each state free to govern itself as it saw fit, but ready to unite with its neighbors in defense against a common enemy. A bitter foe of the Constitution, he predicted that its failure to limit federal government powers would restore the very tyranny that had provoked the revolution against Britain. He warned that the Constitution as written failed to include a bill of rights to guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, redress of grievances, and other basic individual rights.
Although the First Congress passed some of Henry’s amendments to protect individual liberties, it rejected his demands to impose strict limits on federal powers and safeguard state sovereignty. His struggle for the rights of states to govern themselves sowed the seeds of secession in the South and subsequent growth of the large intrusive federal government that Henry so despised. Within months of taking office, Congress enacted a national tax without the consent of state legislatures—as Parliament had with the Stamp Act in 1765. In 1794, President Washington fulfilled Henry’s prophesy of presidential tyranny by sending troops into Pennsylvania to suppress protests against federal taxation—as Britain’s Lord North had done in Boston in 1774.
To this day, many Americans misunderstand what Patrick Henry’s cry for “liberty or death” meant to him and to his tens of thousands of devoted followers in Virginia’s Piedmont hills—then and now. A prototype of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American frontiersman, Henry claimed that free men had a “natural right” to live free of “the tyranny of rulers”—American, as well as British. A student of the French political philosopher Montesquieu, Henry believed that individual rights were more secure in small republics, where governors live among the governed, than in large republics where “the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views.” Rather than the big government created by the Constitution, Henry sought to create an alliance of independent, sovereign states in America—similar to Switzerland, whose confederation, he said, had “stood upwards of four hundred years . . . braved all the power of . . . ambitious monarchs . . . [and] retained their independence, republican simplicity, and valor.”2
The son of a superbly educated Scotsman from Aberdeen, Henry grew up in Virginia’s frontier hill country—free to hunt, fish, swim, and roam the fields and forests at will. Far from government constraints and urban crowding, everyday life in the Piedmont was an adventure with wild animals, Indian marauders, and fierce frontiersmen. Unable at times—or unwilling—to distinguish between license and liberty, they viewed government with suspicion and hostility—and tax collectors as fit for nothing better than a bath in hot tar and a coat of chicken feathers. The results were often conflict, gunfire, bloodshed, death, and quasi-civil war. For backcountry farmers and frontiersmen, the business end of a musket was the best way to preserve individual liberty from government intrusion. And Patrick Henry was one of them—their man, their hero. George Washington viewed frontier life as anarchy; Henry called it liberty!
Neither saint nor villain, Henry was one of the towering figures of the nation’s formative years and perhaps the greatest orator in American history. Lord Byron, who could only read what Henry had said, called him “the forest-born Demosthenes,” and John Adams, who did hear him, hailed him as America’s “Demosthenes of the age.”3 George Washington “respected and esteemed” him enough to ask him to serve as secretary of state, then Chief Justice of the United States. Virginia Patriot George Mason called Henry “the first man upon this continent in abilities as well as public virtues” and the Founding Father most responsible for “the preservation of our rights and liberties.”4
Unlike Washington and Jefferson, who tied their fortunes to Virginia’s landed aristocracy, Henry achieved greatness and wealth on his own, among ordinary, hard-working farmers in Virginia’s wild Piedmont hills west of Richmond, where independence, self-reliance, and a quick, sharp tongue were as essential to survival as a musket.
A charming storyteller who regaled family and friends with bawdy songs and lively reels on his fiddle, Henry was as quick with a rifle as he was with his tongue—and he fathered so many children (eighteen) and grandchildren (seventy-seven at last count) that friends insisted he, not Washington, was the real father of his country. His direct descendants may well number more than 100,000 today—enough to populate the entire city of Gary, Indiana.
Remembered only for his cry for “liberty or death,” Henry was one of the most important and most colorful of our Founding Fathers—a driving force behind three of the most important events in American history: the War of Independence, the enactment of the Bill of Rights, and, tragically, the Civil War.
Chapter 1
Tongue-tied . . .
Eloquence had flowed from his family’s lips for generations. The echoes of his kinsmen’s voices resounded from the pulpits in Midlothian and Edinburgh to the halls of London’s Houses of Parliament. Even in the far-off hills of central Virginia, the dazzling voice of his uncle and namesake, the Reverend Patrick Henry, drew worshipers from miles around for the rapture of his wondrous words each Sunday—words, it seemed, from God himself.
It was quite natural, then, that spectators flocked to Hanover County Courthouse on December 1, 1763, for the inaugural courtroom appearance of the Reverend Henry’s nephew, Patrick Henry Jr., as defense lawyer in a major case. Although he had spent three years practicing mostly “paper law” (deeds, wills, and such) and defending petty thieves, this was his first appearance in the theatrical setting of a major courtroom case. Headlined in the press as the “Parsons’ Cause,” the case had far-reaching religious and political implications for both Virginia and Mother England, where the official Church of England supported itself by taxing landowners in each parish, regardless of whether they were Anglicans or not. In the Parsons’ Cause, a Church of England priest sued the vestrymen and landowners of his parish—almost all of them small farmers—for failure to pay all their taxes in 1758. If Henry lost the case, many would lose their homes and lands.
The Hanover County Courthouse, where Patrick Henry began practicing law and won fame in the Parsons’ Cause case. (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPH)
Henry had started well enough, shooting to his feet to object when appropriate, and successfully countering his opponents’ objections during jury selection, and he’d done well enough during the main trial. But now it was time for his closing argument, and, as an eerie stillness settled over the courtroom, he moved to center stage, bowed his head, and stared at the floor. Seconds went by . . . a minute . . . then another. . . . He seemed at a loss for words. Inquietude spread across the room; spectators exchanged puzzled looks with one another, shifting in their seats uncomfortably. The
plaintiff’s attorney broke into a snide grin; defendants groaned, and Patrick Henry’s father—the presiding judge—slumped in his chair in embarrassment—his expectations for his son all but crushed.
Judge John Henry finally shook his head in despair and prepared to pound his gavel and end his son’s travail with a summary judgment for the plaintiff. It was a difficult moment. . . .
Neither he nor the rest of Henry’s family could understand why twenty-seven-year-old Patrick was flirting with failure again—as he had in three previous careers—twice as a storekeeper and once as a farmer. He was intelligent, hard-working, cheerful, personable, learned, extremely talented in innumerable ways and, above all, he came from solid, well-educated, hard-working, and successful Scottish and Welsh stock.
The judge, his father, had been born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to a devoutly Anglican family “more respected for their good sense and superior education than for their riches.”1 At fifteen, John Henry had won a Latin composition prize and a scholarship to Aberdeen University, where he spent four years before emigrating to the United States at the behest of John Syme, a boyhood friend and Aberdeen schoolmate. Young Syme had sailed to America three years earlier and grew rich growing tobacco and speculating in land. His education, erudition, and wealth propelled him into Virginia’s highest social and political circles—and such sinecures as a militia colonelcy and membership in the House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature. At Syme’s urging, John Henry followed his friend to America in 1727, learned surveying and, in partnership with Syme, began speculating in land. Surveying skills were essential in Virginia, where tobacco crops consumed soil nutrients after four to six years and forced planters to find virgin lands in which to plant new crops. Speculators joined the search, of course, and those who were first to claim virgin lands reaped the most profits reselling claims to planters.
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