The Capitol in Williamsburg, where Patrick Henry sat as a member of the House of Burgesses under British rule and the House of Delegates after Virginia declared independence from Britain. (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY DRAWING)
“The proud airs of aristocracy, added to the dignity of that truly August body, were enough to have deterred any man possessing less firmness and independence of spirit than Mr. Henry,” Henry’s friend Judge John Tyler recalled.
He was ushered with great state and ceremony into the room of the committee . . . dressed in very coarse apparel . . . and scarcely treated with decent respect . . . but the general contempt was soon changed into general admiration, for Mr. Henry distinguished himself by a copious and brilliant display on the great subject of the rights of suffrage, superior to anything that had been heard before within those walls. Such a burst of eloquence from a man so very plain and ordinary in appearance struck the committee with amazement, so that a deep and perfect silence took place during the speech, and not a sound, but from his lips, was to be heard.3
Henry lost his plea for Dandridge, but his plain, farmer’s work clothes, his occasional—and carefully measured—country twang, his long dramatic pauses, his self-deprecation in the face of “learned” judges or opponents, and his occasional appeals to heaven became his standard rhetorical instruments, designed simultaneously to lower juror expectations and arouse their sympathies before startling them with a thunderous—and brilliant—exposition of irrefutable truths. He left courtroom spectators stunned, breathless, helpless—in effect, captives.
In the wake of the Parsons’ Cause, vestrymen from across the colony trooped to the hill country to plead with Henry to defend them against clergymen who refused to accept the Parsons’ Cause verdict. Henry defeated the claims of every parson he faced, including those of his own uncle, Reverend Patrick Henry. In the end, the clergymen succeeded only in stirring up dissent against the church—and the crown, for sustaining the church with a universal tax on every landowner, regardless of religious convictions.
In 1764, Sarah Henry’s father sold the Hanover Tavern, and Patrick Henry sold their farm for £350, to which he added £250 from legal fees to purchase 1,700 acres just north of Hanover town, but close enough for him to walk to court, his musket slung over his shoulder to pick off small game for Sarah’s table. A one-and-a-half-story wooden structure, his house had three large rooms on the main floor and two upstairs, with the kitchen in a separate outbuilding to prevent fires from burning the house. Other outbuildings included a pantry, a smokehouse, a woodshed, and a spare room for the boys to use if guests needed their quarters in the main house. “His furniture was all of the plainest sort,” his long-time friend and brother-in-law Samuel Meredith remarked. “They consisted of necessities only; nothing for show or ornament.”4
Popular resentment against the Anglican clergy generated by the Parsons’ Cause continued to increase in the winter and spring of 1765, when news arrived that Britain’s Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, the first direct tax Parliament had ever imposed on American colonists. For generations, Parliament had only collected indirect “hidden” taxes such as import duties, and allowed each colony’s elected legislature to impose direct taxes such as sales taxes and property taxes to pay costs of colonial administration.
Although England had won the Seven Years’ War, her victory left the government nearly bankrupt, with a national debt of £130 million (nearly $8 billion today) and £300,000 in annual costs of military garrisons to protect American colonists against Indian attacks. To pay for the garrisons, Parliament raised taxes at home first, but the increases plunged 40,000 Englishmen into debtor’s prisons and provoked widespread antitax riots. Threatened with a national uprising, Parliament rescinded some tax increases at home and compensated by raising duties on America’s imports and exports—and extending the reach of the British Stamp Tax to the colonies. Parliament—and, indeed, most Englishmen—believed Americans should pay for their own military protection, and the stamp tax seemed the most innocuous way to do so. In effect for decades in England, the stamp tax required the purchase and affixment of one or more revenue stamps—often worth less than a penny—on all legal documents (wills, deeds, marriage certificates, bills of lading, purchase orders, etc.), newspapers and periodicals, liquor containers, decks of playing cards, and a host of other industrial and consumer goods. All but negligible when added to the cost of any individual item, it nevertheless amounted to a considerable—and reliable—revenue source for the government when collections from the stamps on tens of thousands of documents and products poured into the treasury. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Grenville estimated that stamp tax collections in America would reap about £60,000 a year, or about 20 percent of troop costs there.
Although costs of the stamp tax to the average American was trivial, Parliament chose just the wrong moment to impose it. Increased duties were already strangling the American economy in the spring of 1765. Importers were collapsing under the weight of debts to English suppliers; shopkeepers and craftsmen closed their doors; even the largest merchants struggled to stay in business, leaving farmers without their usual outlets for crops and at the mercy of speculators. Patrick Henry loaned his father-in-law, John Shelton, several hundred pounds to help Shelton keep his farm and stave off personal bankruptcy.
Further inflaming colonist anger were frantic warnings from Boston’s ambitious political malcontents—the emotionally unbalanced lawyer James Otis and the failed merchant Samuel Adams. In a pamphlet entitled The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Otis raised the first specious cry against parliamentary imposition of direct taxation without representation, conveniently overlooking the absence of parliamentary representation for almost all English taxpayers in England as well as in America. Indeed, only one million of Britain’s nine million adult males were permitted to vote.
“Copyholders, leaseholders, and all men possessed of personal property choose no representatives,” explained a member of parliament in defense of colonial taxation. “Manchester, Birmingham, and many more of our richest and most flourishing trading towns send no members to Parliament.”5
Helping Otis generate his evocative propaganda was Harvard-educated Samuel Adams, the son of a politically powerful Boston brewer. After his parents died, young Adams inherited the family brewery and Boston mansion, but allowed both to deteriorate, and he sank deeply in debt. His father’s political friends saved him from bankruptcy by appointing him Boston tax collector, but within a short time he owed the town £8,000 for taxes that he had either embezzled or failed to collect. Mired in poverty after fifteen years of failure, he festered with hatred for royal rule and those who profited from it, and he blamed them for all the ills of the world, including his own.
Teaming with Otis, Adams all but smothered Boston’s editors with propaganda leaflets that the proroyalist Boston Evening Post labeled “mad rant and porterly reviling.” Indeed, few but the world’s most disgruntled citizens would have paid any attention to it except in North America, where settlers isolated in the hamlets and woods of New England had lived free of almost all government authority for more than 150 years. They had cleared the land, felled great forests, built homes and churches, planted their fields, hunted, fished, and fought off Indian marauders on their own, cooperating with each other, collectively governing themselves, electing their militia commanders and church pastors and turning to assemblies of elders to mediate occasional disputes. Self-reliant—often courageously so—they had thought and acted independently for four or more generations, seldom hearing, let alone responding to, utterances from the church, throne, or Parliament in far-off London. Like Patrick Henry, they had lived in freedom, without government intrusion in their lives and saw little need for it.
Nor had London objected. With a wealth of lumber, furs, pelts, and other resources flowing across the Atlantic to enrich British merchants, the British government had left the American colonists free to govern themselv
es and trade with the world. In 1651, however, Parliament began to interfere in colonial affairs after Dutch cargo ships began capturing more and more of the trade between America and Europe, threatening the health of Britain’s merchant fleet. Parliament passed a series of “Navigation Acts,” which, one by one, over the next fifty years, banned all American trade with any country but England and forced all ocean-going trade onto British or American bottoms.
Although galled by parliamentary intrusions in their affairs, most New England lumbermen and shipbuilders profited handsomely from the Navigation Acts and the massive expansion of the British and American fleets they engendered. In any case, smuggling goods onto unguarded landing points avoided duties altogether. The unexpected economic collapse that followed the Seven Years’ War, however, left New Englanders easy prey for Boston’s rabble-rousers and the frenzied warnings that the stamp tax would bankrupt them.
With their economy tied to tobacco and agriculture rather than ship-building, Virginians and most other southerners were less agitated. Even Otis conceded that “nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of the colonists will never once entertain a thought but of submission to our sovereign and to the authority of parliament. ...”6 The Stamp Act, therefore, was not the first item on the agenda as Virginia’s House of Burgesses assembled at the end of May 1765, when Patrick Henry arrived as a newly elected burgess, nine days short of his twenty-ninth birthday.
Williamsburg boiled with festive activity whenever the burgesses arrived: The population tripled; ornate coaches—some pulled by four horses, even six—rolled along the beautiful tree-shaded boulevard through the center of town; a colorful assortment of horsemen trotted about—farmers, hunters in buckskin, elegantly dressed gentlemen, English officers in bright red uniforms, swords flashing in the sun, their eyes trained on ladies in satins and lace, gliding in and out of the fashionable shops.
The House of Burgesses met twice a year, in May and October, and the arrival of burgesses and their wives opened a season of pomp and ceremony, with dances at the elegant Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, concerts and plays at the town’s two theaters, horse races and foxhunts at nearby plantations. Wealthy merchants and burgesses, almost all of them planters, hosted nightly dinners at their elegant town houses, while the Governor’s Palace—the site of grand banquets throughout the legislative session—exploded in brilliance on the night of the Governor’s Ball, to mark the official celebration of the British monarch’s birthday.
Henry arrived in his drab, farmer’s work clothes, but went unnoticed until he tethered his horse at the House of Burgesses and tried to walk past sentries. Ordered to stop, he extracted his official papers and showed his election certificate to the sergeant at arms, who rather warily let him pass. For the second time in his life, Henry strode into the hall, this time to assume a seat of power with the elite assemblage of 116 members who ruled Virginia—the largest, wealthiest, and most populated English colony in the New World, with 800,000 people, or nearly 27 percent of the 3 million people in the thirteen colonies. In contrast, Massachusetts, the second largest colony had 400,000 people, or just over 13 percent of the colonial population. (Eighty-one percent of Americans were white, and 19 percent were black, of whom 96 percent of blacks were slaves.)
Virginia’s stately looking burgesses—bewigged and dressed in formal morning clothes—drew reverent stares as they marched into the House, legends all: four members of the Lee family, including Richard Henry Lee, acclaimed as the “Cicero of America,” and his brother Francis Lightfoot Lee; law professor George Wythe; former attorney general John Randolph and his son Peyton, who succeeded him to that post; John Blair, the Scottish-born chancellor of the College of William and Mary; George Washington, the soft-spoken, heroic warrior; and Colony Treasurer John Robinson, who had been Speaker of the House for twenty-five years.
Together, they were Virginia.
Nearly three-fourths owned properties of more than 10,000 acres. Washington owned more than 20,000—with 300 slaves—and Speaker Robinson, 30,000 acres and 400 slaves. The median holding of burgesses was 1,800 acres with 40 slaves. In comparison, Henry owned 1,700 acres, but no slaves. Some 85 percent of burgesses had inherited their properties and what they deemed their right to rule the colony.7 Of the 116 members, forty had attended the College of William and Mary and nearly one hundred had served as justices in their home counties before entering the House. Almost all had won election to the House without opposition. During the fifty previous years, four families—the Randolphs, Carters, Beverlys, and Lees—had dominated House leadership, providing thirty-four of the speakers. The only serious political division in the House reflected the deep split in Virginia society between Tidewater aristocrats from the large tobacco plantations in the East and the isolated upland farmers and backwoodsmen from the western Piedmont hills. Thirty-five of Virginia’s fifty-six counties, however, were in the Tidewater region, and only twenty-one were upland. With each county electing two burgesses, the well-organized, closely connected aristocrats gained overwhelming control of the House of Burgesses. Adding to their majority were four additional burgesses, two representing Williamsburg and two representing Richmond.
With his half-brother John Syme Jr. already sitting in the House as a burgess from Hanover County, Henry found a warm welcome among the disorganized, younger, upland Burgesses. “They wanted a leader,” explained former Attorney General John Randolph’s son Edmund, who was a young burgess himself when Henry entered the House.
From birth he derived neither splendor nor opulence. . . . The mildness of his temper . . . rendered him amiable. . . . He was never profound . . . [but] had no reason to shrink from a struggle with any man. Not always grammatical and sometimes coarse in his language, he taught his hearers how to forget his inaccuracies by his action, his varying countenance and voice. . . . He was naturally hailed as the democratic chief.”8
After only four days in his seat, Henry openly challenged House elders by asking for recognition—an unheard-of impudence for a first-term burgess, especially a coarsely dressed uplander with no firsthand knowledge of the sensitive issue at hand. The central figure in the discussion was John Robinson, the good-hearted Speaker of the House and colony treasurer since 1735. Robinson was Virginia’s most influential politician and one of its wealthiest planters, whom colleagues in the House had, over the years, approached for personal loans—often to forestall financial ruin after a poor tobacco crop. As owners of Virginia’s largest plantations, linked by generations of intermarriage, their survival was essential to the colony’s economic survival. As noted, they—and he—were Virginia.
With the colony’s funds at his disposal, Robinson started making loans from the treasury, fully prepared to cover any losses with funds from his own, seemingly infinite fortune—until the Seven Years’ War reduced it to a dangerously low, finite amount. As he took the speaker’s chair, he was “sensible that his deficit to the public was become so enormous that a discovery must soon take place,” and he and his colleagues in the House—all of them his debtors—proposed creation of a public loan office, with £240,000 that the colony would borrow from Britain, in part to cover the losses the colonial treasury had suffered from Robinson’s malfeasance.
“It had been urged, that from certain unhappy circumstances of the colony, men of substantial property had contracted debts, which, if exacted suddenly, must ruin them and their families, but with a little indulgence of time, might be paid with ease,” Thomas Jefferson recalled. Still a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson often stood near the doorway listening to House debates.9
“What, sir?” roared the outraged Patrick Henry. “Is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by filling his pockets with money?”10
Infuriated by the young uplander’s insult to the most revered of their number, the burgesses ignored Henry’s objections without a response and created the loan office, from which Robinson was able to salvage his weal
th. But Henry’s public attack shattered the Speaker’s reputation, and Robinson died in disgrace a year later. After Henry’s initial address to the House, older conservatives—all Robinson allies—stared at the ill-mannered young uplander with a mixture of loathing and dread, but “what he lost on one side of the House he gained on the other,” Edmund Randolph explained. “Members who, like himself, represented the yeomanry of the colony were filled with admiration and delight. They rallied around the man who was one of themselves, and who showed himself able to cope with the ablest of the old leaders.”11
Randolph called Henry “the first who broke the influence of that aristocracy” and ascribed his success to his “abounding . . . good humor.” Henry’s “peculiar and even quaint” language, which he expressed with “a certain homespun pronunciation,” won “the hearts” of Virginia’s popular majority. “He identified with the people, [and] they clothed him with the confidence of a favorite son.”12
Five days after Henry’s impertinent outburst against the venerable Speaker of the House, the Burgesses began the Stamp Act debate. Older members, such as Edmund Pendleton of Caroline County, had close family and business ties to England and hoped for quick approval of the new law without debate, followed by a motion to adjourn for the summer. Indeed, some members had already left Williamsburg. Most colonies to the north had already approved the Stamp Act quite routinely, with little debate, and Virginia expected to follow suit. As older burgesses gasped with outrage, Patrick Henry stood and refused to allow the House “to end its session in feeble inaction.”
“I had been for the first time elected a burgess a few days before,” he recalled later. “I was young, inexperienced, unacquainted with the forms of the House and the members that composed it. . . . All the colonies, either through fear, or want of opportunity to form an opposition . . . had remained silent. Finding men of weight averse to opposition, and the commencement of the tax at hand, and that no person was likely to step forth, I determined to venture, and alone, unadvised and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law book wrote . . . the first opposition to the Stamp Act and the scheme of taxing America by the British Parliament.”13
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