By the time the Stamp Act became law, every stamp officer in the colonies had resigned, and, with no distributors to sell stamps, the act could not take effect. Americans nonetheless greeted November 1 as a day of mourning, with church bells tolling throughout the day, from St. John’s in Richmond, Virginia, to Boston’s North Church. The Sons of Liberty gathered about Liberty Trees in towns and cities across the colonies to hang effigies of Grenville, their royal governors, and any other government official they could think of to blame for their economic woes.
Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia planter whose resolution in the Continental Congress—that Britain’s colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States”—provoked the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The boycott against English imports had terrible economic consequences for English merchants. Colonial merchants owed them about £4 million, and the flow of orders from America had all but dried up. British exports dropped 14 percent, and goods piled up inside and outside British warehouses. Merchants in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, and every other trading town in Great Britain inundated Parliament with petitions demanding repeal of the Stamp Act.
George Washington observed that,whatsoever contributes to lessen our importations must be hurtful to their manufacturers. And the eyes of our people . . . will perceive that many luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for, can well be dispensed with whilst the necessities of life are (mostly) to be had within ourselves. . . . As to the Stamp Act . . . I fancy the merchants of Great Britain will not be among the last to wish for a repeal of it.2
Washington proved a good prophet. By mid-January 1766, English merchants warned Parliament that they faced bankruptcy unless normal trade with North America resumed immediately. Letters from their trading partners in America promised nothing but armed rebellion if Britain sent troops to enforce the Stamp Act. If Parliament wanted to tax the colonies, they counseled, it should continue the tradition of using indirect, hidden taxes such as import duties. By the end of February, pressure for repeal grew overwhelming and, only four and a half months after the Stamp Act had taken effect, Parliament yielded, without a single stamp having been affixed to a colonial document. In addition, it lowered duties on imported molasses from the French West Indies that New Englanders used to make rum, and it eliminated duties on sugar from the British West Indies, thus reducing mainland prices for two key commodities.
Repeal of the Stamp Act was a humiliating defeat for Grenville and his party in Parliament—particularly because it came at the hands of a constituency without a single vote in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. In the end, the British government had collected no new taxes and left its own treasury and many British merchants far poorer than they would have been had it never passed the act. A far more ominous consequence of the act, however, was the appearance of the first organized opposition to royal rule in the colonies—provoked by Patrick Henry and joined by others chafing under the London government’s arbitrary regulations and restrictions.
In mid-May, about a month after the actual vote in Parliament, news of America’s success arrived in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other ports. Across the colonies, Americans set aside a day they named “Repeal Day,” to celebrate their triumph over the government of the world’s most powerful nation. Merchants broke open barrels of rum, wine, beer, and other beverages for employees, clients, and passersby to toast his Majesty’s health, believing false rumors that the young King George III himself had intervened on behalf of the Americans. In Virginia, jubilant city fathers illuminated Norfolk and Williamsburg and sponsored balls that lasted until dawn. The royal governor would not recall the House of Burgesses until November 1766, but when it reconvened it voted to erect a statue of King George III and an obelisk in recognition of Henry and other patriots who had fought for repeal. (Neither was ever built.) Even Londoners rejoiced over repeal of the Stamp Act. The city illuminated its streets, and its merchants—ecstatic over prospects of renewed trade with America—rolled out kegs of wine to serve to dancing celebrants in the lanes outside their doors.
As Americans and Englishmen feted the prospects of economic recovery, bitterness gripped the hearts of the humiliated parliamentary tyrants who had provoked the crisis. Refusing to accept defeat or seek reconciliation, they lit the fuse for the next colonial explosion by quietly passing a Declaratory Act on the very day they repealed the Stamp Act. The act asserted that “the Parliament of Great Britain had, hath and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain in all cases whatever.”3
When the House of Burgesses reconvened at the end of 1766, Patrick Henry and his young rebels held a clear majority of votes. Speaker Robinson had died and many of his closest allies had either followed him to the grave or retired in disgust at Henry and other blasphemers intent on undermining the standards of British decency and respect expected from loyal subjects of the crown.
With their Stamp Act victory, Henry and the Sons of Liberty in other colonies stowed their torches and banners, took the helms of their little ships of state and set sail over the uncertain seas to utopia. When Henry reentered the House of Burgesses, he walked with authority. Elected a vestryman in his home county, he was a leader of the established church as well as political leader of the western part of the largest American colony. Indeed, his own family—his half-brother, John Syme Jr., his friend and future brother-in-law, Samuel Meredith, and relatives from five western counties—made up a powerful backcountry voting bloc that Henry used effectively to influence House of Burgesses legislation. Like other burgesses, Henry took the traditional oath of office at the beginning of each new session and swore allegiance to King George III, but he followed his oath with proposals for social, economic, and political reforms to dilute royal powers. He also called for separation of church and state, an end to slave importation, expansion of Virginia’s domestic manufacturing to ease dependence on British imports, and new rules to prevent political corruption. Named to several key committees, he proposed—and the burgesses approved—prohibiting the Speaker of the House from serving simultaneously as colonial treasurer—as Speaker Robinson had done. “Away with the schemes of paper money and loan offices, calculated to feed extravagance and revive expiring luxury,” Henry barked at the House.
Although Henry sought to ban importation of slaves, the Assembly agreed only to slow the influx of slaves with a tax that would make importation more costly but not prohibitive. Virginia had actually voted to ban slavery early in the century, but the government of “Good Queen Anne” overruled the act because of the royal treasury’s dependence on revenues from British slave traders. At the time, only 25,000 slaves had arrived in Virginia, and an outright ban might have permitted most, if not all, to sail home to Africa, thus aborting the growth of slavery in America. In the next half century, however, Virginia’s many appeals to end slave importations brought nothing but rejections from the three Georges who mounted the British throne in succession. By 1770, more Africans had crossed the Atlantic—albeit involuntarily—than Europeans, and Virginia’s slave population grew almost eightfold, to nearly 190,000, the equivalent of 20 percent of the white population. The slavery issue had grown insoluble. “To re-export them is now impracticable,” Henry lamented, “and sorry I am for it.”4
Ironically, the increase in the number of slaves proved more of a burden than a benefit to most Virginia planters. Unable to speak English when they arrived and usually unskilled, slaves had fewer incentives to work than piece workers in the North, and, as they aged and fathered children, they added enormous numbers of nonproductive infants and infirm elderly to the population that planters had to support. “How comes it,” Henry railed at the House of Burgesses, “that the lands in Pennsylvania are five times the value of ours? Pennsylvania is the countr
y of the most extensive privileges with few slaves. . . . Europeans instead of Africans till the lands and manufacture. Is there a man so degenerate as to wish to see his country the gloomy retreat of slaves?”
“No!” he answered his own question.
“While we may, let us people our lands with men who secure our internal peace, and make us respectable abroad.”
Like Henry, most tobacco planters favored ending slavery, but none had a practical way to do so. “There is not a man living,” George Washington declared, “who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery in this country. . . . an evil exists which requires a remedy. ...”5
For Washington, like Henry and other well-meaning planters, straightforward abolition appeared as cruel as perpetuation of their bondage. To set loose nearly 190,000 largely unskilled, illiterate, or semiliterate people—one-third of them children and an equal number of crippled or overaged men and women—was unthinkable. Where would they go? What would they do? How would they eat? The urbanized North had relatively few slaves and offered an array of apprenticeships in craft shops and manufactories to impart a range of skills; the South was a land of vast plantations, one after another, abutting each other, and worked by mostly unskilled, largely illiterate labor. With few towns or cities, few opportunities existed for work off the fields that paid freedmen enough to support themselves, let alone their families. The only opportunities for runaway slaves were in outlaw bands, pillaging isolated farms in the wilderness.
“I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil,” Patrick Henry wrote to his friend, Quaker leader Robert Pleasants. “If not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence of slavery. If we cannot [produce] this wished-for reformation . . . let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity. It is the furthest advance we can make toward justice.”6
The conflict of his moral opposition to slavery and his ownership of slaves tore at Patrick Henry’s heart and mind throughout his life. Although he acquired only slaves attached to farmlands he purchased, he rued his ownership of other human beings and could not reconcile it with his moral and religious beliefs. “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase!” Henry all but sobbed to his Quaker friend Pleasants. “I will not, I cannot justify it.”
“Is it not amazing,” he went on, “in a country above all others fond of liberty, that in such an age and such a country we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty.”7 Henry said he hoped that “the disadvantage from the great number of slaves may perhaps wear off when the present stock and their descendants are scattered through the immense deserts in the West.”8
Beyond the confines of the House of Burgesses, Henry took advantage of his triumph in the Stamp Act controversy to expand his law practice, building his client base to more than 550 in 1767. His renown—and popularity—were such that he could afford to champion such unpopular causes as separation of church and state. Indeed, he succeeded in winning an exemption for Quakers from military service. Still bitter over Anglican Church treatment of his mother and other dissenters as treasonous heretics, Henry championed the rights of Baptists and other sects to practice their faiths. When he learned that Baptist minister John Weatherford had languished in Chesterfield County jail south of Richmond for five months, he rushed to court and won a judge’s order of release. The jailer, however, refused to set Weatherford free until he paid the costs of his imprisonment. All but destitute, the minister faced perpetual imprisonment until an anonymous donor met the jailer’s demands. It was Patrick Henry.
“From that time until the day of their complete emancipation, the Baptists found in Patrick Henry an unwavering friend,” according to his grandson.9 As the colony’s leading advocate of church-state separation and defender of dissenters, Henry traveled the colony to defend them against oppression for “worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences.”10 Some Baptist ministers opted for martyrdom, however, refusing Henry’s offers to pay the often small, albeit unjust, fines for preaching without a license and choosing to remain in jail rather than posting bond. Their tactic combined with the soaring oratory of leading Baptist preachers to capture the minds, hearts, and souls of thousands across the South. Unlike the Anglican Church, which shunned the poor and disenfranchised, the Baptists welcomed all—and the effects were evident immediately. From the founding of Virginia’s first Baptist church near the James River in 1767, the number of Baptist churches mushroomed to fifty by 1774, with the burgeoning numbers of worshipers cleaving to the Anglican Patrick Henry as their most committed political supporter.
Living as he did near the edge of the vast western wilderness, Henry befriended and accumulated supporters among the disenfranchised. His new home at Roundabout stood in the middle of Louisa County, a way station for men in buckskin—some with families—caught in the mania to claim and settle western lands. Many disappeared into nearby forests only to return from the forbidding wilderness weeks later, shattered by a devastating encounter with nests of snakes, bears, brigands, Indians. Many had no conception of the dangers they faced when they left or the unspeakable violence that awaited in the anarchic world of the frontier.
The Louisa County Courthouse stood nine miles north of Roundabout. Henry covered the distance on horseback, dressed in coarse clothes, leather breeches, and leggings, a musket at the ready to fell deer, rabbits, and game birds for his and Sarah’s table. He often strode into court adorned with burrs and splashes of blood from eviscerated game—as did many of his clients and, often, the judge. This was deep country, and Patrick Henry—eloquent though he was before the bench—blended perfectly with Louisa County’s hill folk, even striking up his fiddle in the nearby tavern after overwhelming a prosecuting attorney with an impossibly artful oration.
In court, he seemed otherworldly—even Godlike—his rude dress transformed into saintly robes, his voice soaring, defending rich and poor alike—planters, craftsmen, Anglicans, and dissenters—against the crown, church, colonial or local government, and the law itself—fierce in his constant struggle against government intrusion in the lives of free men. Whatever the verdict—and it usually was in his favor—he bought everyone, clients, jurymen, judges, and prosecuting attorneys, drinks in the tavern across the road and serenaded them on his fiddle. And win or lose, they adored him, stood in awe of him, and pledged their loyalty to him. He brought joy into everyone’s life—and a promise of protection against injustice. As he pursued fame and fortune, however, his wife Sarah languished at home, tending her—and his—flock of children, all but unseen by the outside world, alone, socially isolated, and sinking into depression.
In 1769, Henry obtained a license to practice before the General Court, the highest court in the colony, where the breadth of each case allowed him to raise his fees and reduce the number of petty disputes he handled in county courthouses. His smaller caseload, however, did not reduce his time in court—away from home. As much as he disliked separating himself from his family, he had little choice but to increase his income to meet their ever-increasing needs. He and Sarah had added two more girls to the family, making him father of six.
The General Court met for about two weeks each in April and October for civil cases and two weeks each in June and December for criminal cases. The House of Burgesses also convened twice a year, in May and November, which meant that Henry now spent four to six months a year in Williamsburg.
“His countenance was grave, penetrating, and marked with the strong lineaments of deep reflection,” according to one of his fellow burgesses. “His visage was long, thin . . . his profile was of the Roman cast . . . his eyebrows dark, long, and full; his eyes a dark gray, not large, penetrating, deep-set in his head.”11
He astounded lawyers in the Gener
al Court as much as he had the lawyers in the most insignificant county court, now adding a broad-based legal knowledge to the histrionics he brought to rural courtrooms. Henry had accumulated a substantial law library, but disguised his broad knowledge of the law behind a scrim of self-deprecatory remarks and a mountain twang that lured opposing lawyers and judges into underestimating his skills and knowledge. After Henry successfully defended a Spanish ship captain against government efforts to seize his vessel and cargo, Judge William Nelson said he had never heard “a more eloquent or argumentative speech” in his life. He said he was “astonished how Mr. Henry should have acquired such a knowledge of maritime law, to which he had never before turned his attention.”12
Patrick Henry, probably as a delegate to the House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress in 1775. Painted by Alonzo Chapelle. (RED HILL MUSEUM COLLECTION, PATRICK HENRY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION, BROOKNEAL, VA.)
He began most cases the same way: lips pursed, head bowed in thought, allowing the suspense of his silence to grow all but unbearable. Only then did he lift his face and peer at the judges with a sad, humble look:
“I stand here, may it please your honors, to support, according to my power, that side of a question. ...” The questions he supported could vary from a dissenter’s right to avoid the whip for not attending Anglican services, to the right of a starving migrant to steal a chicken.
“I beg leave to beseech the patience of this honorable court, because the subject is very great and important, and because I have not only the greatness of the subject to consider, but those numerous observations which have come from the opposing counsel to answer. ...”
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