Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Henry and the other former burgesses voted to print £350,000 in Virginia currency to establish an arms production plant in Fredericksburg near the northern Virginia iron mines. At Henry’s insistence, the Convention gave troops complete freedom of worship and dissenting ministers the right to preach in the Virginia Army, thus bringing freedom of religion to a small corner of Britain’s southern colonies for the first time.

  When the Convention adjourned on August 26, Henry rode home to put his plantation and family affairs in order. After seeing his children safely ensconced in his daughter Martha’s home, he returned to Williamsburg in September to take command of Virginia’s armed forces. One thousand strong, with more drifting in every hour, the volunteers cheered his arrival and escorted him through town along Duke of Gloucester Street past the deserted Governor’s Palace to the College of William and Mary. Among them were the fierce-looking Culpeper Minutemen, wearing buck-tailed hats, scalping knives and tomahawks in their belts, and green shirts emblazoned with Patrick Henry’s words: Liberty or Death. The cornet, or standard-bearer, who led them carried a flag with a coiled rattlesnake poised to strike. Beneath it a motto warned, Don’t Tread on Me.

  “They look like a band of assassins,” commented one merchant.

  All the men from Henry’s Piedmont hills seemed to be in the march, young and old. Clients he had defended in court marched with those he had opposed—along with Shelton’s tavern regulars who had reeled to his fiddle. They were an odd mixture of wizened frontiersmen, farmers, planters, boys. . . . In the mix were Major Thomas Marshall and his son, Lieutenant John Marshall, the future secretary of state and chief justice of the United States. Student volunteers from William and Mary included James Monroe, the future president. His fearlessness and rifle skills earned him a quick promotion to lieutenant.

  Henry’s oldest son, eighteen-year-old John, rode alongside his father, ready to fight, but like so many other young volunteers, woefully untrained for anything other than shooting quail. Henry appointed his son a cornet of the First Virginia Regiment. Unfortunately, Henry was no better trained than his son or the rest of his men, and he remained in Williamsburg in September to learn to be a soldier while the Continental Congress reconvened in Philadelphia. Historians still question how well Henry learned his lessons. The Committee of Safety, apparently, did not believe he learned them well enough to lead his troops into battle—that he was too indecisive, too friendly with his men, and unable or unwilling to impose the harsh discipline that produced precision soldierly responses.

  One of many Revolutionary War “rattlesnake flags” symbolizing vigilance (it has no eyelids) and deadly bite when attacked. Some Virginia rattlesnake flags bore Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” slogan as well as “Don’t Tread on Me.”

  (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  “His studies had been directed to civil and not to military pursuits,” one member of the Committee of Safety argued. “He is totally unacquainted with the art of war and has no knowledge of military discipline.”1 Indeed, Edmund Pendleton apologized to the experienced Colonel Woodford: “Believe me, sir the unlucky step of calling that gentleman from our councils, where he was useful, into the field . . . the duties of which he must . . . be an entire stranger to, has given me many an anxious and uneasy moment. In consequence of this mistaken step . . . we must be deprived of the service of some able officers, whose honor and former ranks will not suffer them to act under him in this juncture, when we so much need their services.”2

  Even George Washington, a staunch friend and admirer of Henry, seemed uneasy about sending Henry into the field as a regimental commander. “I think my country made a capital mistake when they took Henry out of the senate to place him in the field; and pity it is that he does not see this, and remove every difficulty by a voluntary resignation.”3

  Although Patrick Henry appointed experienced officers to train rank-and-file troops, he had no one to teach him the skills of command and battlefield strategy, and when the Committee of Safety decided to strike at Lord Dunmore, it sent the experienced Colonel Woodford and his troops instead of Henry.

  From his ship off Norfolk, Lord Dunmore had wreaked vengeance on Virginians by sending marines to raid coastal towns and plantations, plunder supplies, and carry off slaves with promises of freedom for volunteering to fight alongside the British. Late in October, British marines were on their way to Hampton, with orders to pillage the town and burn it to the ground. Pendleton’s Committee of Safety ordered Woodford to lead his 700-man regiment and the 500 Culpeper Minutemen to repel the British landing and establish an independent command post. Although Woodford succeeded, Henry was furious at having been ignored by the Committee of Safety and demanded that it relay all future orders through him.

  A few days later, word arrived that King George had not only rejected the Olive Branch Petition, he had declared the colonies to be in open rebellion and ordered an armada of 500 British ships to sail for America with 20,000 British troops and 9,000 German mercenaries to crush colonial resistance. The armada divided into two fleets, with the larger part sailing to New York to establish the central British command for North America and divide the New England colonies from the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies. The smaller part of the fleet would carry Major General Lord Cornwallis toward Charleston, South Carolina, the largest port in the South and a primary link in America’s vital tobacco and rice trade. Once he captured Charleston, he could then send some warships to blockade Wilmington, North Carolina, and another flotilla to block the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, thus shutting down the economy of Virginia without engaging the most powerful of the American colonies militarily.

  With carte blanche from London to combat Virginia’s rebellion from within, Lord Dunmore ordered marines to seize Norfolk, Virginia’s largest town. With sentries posted at every corner, he offered residents the choice of swearing allegiance to the king or losing their homes and properties. He then proclaimed martial law in the entire colony and ordered all able-bodied men to report for duty in the British military or risk forfeiting their properties and possibly their lives as deserters. He offered all slaves, indentured servants, and criminals their freedom if they turned on their masters and joined the British army. “I hope it will oblige the rebels to disperse to take care of their properties,” Dunmore gloated.

  After lengthy strategy discussions, the Committee of Safety again ignored Henry and sent Woodford with 900 Virginia regulars and the Culpepper Minutemen to attack Norfolk. To deceive Dunmore, Major Thomas Marshall sent one of his servants to Dunmore’s camp pretending to be a runaway with information indicating Woodford’s troop strength to be far smaller than it actually was. On that intelligence, Dunford went into battle with only 200 regulars and 300 blacks and Tories. The result was a slaughter that left even the most battle-hardened frontiersmen retching at the blood-bath. Dunmore and the survivors fled to Norfolk and rowed to the safety of British frigates. Outraged, Dunmore plotted revenge, and, on January 1, 1776, he ordered his ships to fire on the Norfolk waterfront while marines landed and set the town ablaze, leaving 6,000 people homeless in the dead of winter—some of them loyal Tories. With Dunmore’s ships patrolling the coast, every other town along Virginia’s shoreline feared the same fate.

  Frustrated again at not having been sent into action, Henry quarreled with Woodford, saying that, as a subordinate, he should have kept his commanding officer informed of all his movements. Woodford snapped back that he had received his orders from the Committee of Safety, had kept them informed, and assumed that they were in touch with Henry.

  Just as the controversy reached explosive proportions, the Continental Congress intervened by incorporating the First and Second Virginia and four other regiments into the Continental Army. Congress put two experienced brigadier generals in overall command and relegated Henry to the command of only the First Regiment as a colonel. Insulted by his subordinate position and rank, he resigned from the military on February 28, 1776.

 
When they learned of his resignation, Henry’s troops “went into mourning, and, under arms, waited on him at his lodgings,” according to the Virginia Gazette. “Your withdrawing yourself from the service,” they said in a letter to him, “fills us with the most poignant sorrow, as it at once deprives us of our father and General, yet . . . we are compelled to applaud your spirited resentment to the most glaring indignity.”4

  Henry comforted them by admitting, “I am unhappy to part with you. I leave the service, but I leave my heart with you. May God bless you, and give you success and safety, and make you the glorious instruments of saving our country.”5

  The controversy over Henry’s resignation did not die, however. In a letter to the Gazette, one officer charged that Henry’s political enemiesstrove to bury in obscurity his [Henry’s] martial talents. . . . Virginia may truly boast, that in him she finds the able statesman, the soldier’s father, the best of citizens, and liberty’s dear friend. . . . The officers and soldiers, who know him, are riveted to his bosom: when he speaks, all is silence; when he orders, they cheerfully obey . . . 6

  Ninety officers signed a letter expressing the same sentiments, and, at a farewell dinner hosted by his officers, the endless toasts to his health left them so drunk, they “assembled in a tumultuous manner and demanded their discharge, and declared their unwillingness to serve under any other commander.” Henry delayed his departure to put down the mutiny, visiting “several barracks and using every argument in his power with the soldiery to lay aside their imprudent resolution.” Saying that “his honor alone” had motivated his resignation, Henry pledged that while he would no longer be able to serve his country in the military, he would serve “the glorious cause” as a private citizen.7

  No satisfactory explanation exists for denying Henry’s appointment to high command other than Pendleton’s letters referring to lax discipline over his men. What Pendleton called laxity, however, Henry called liberty, believing that free men—neighbors all—needed only direction from their elected leader, not schoolhouse discipline. On the other hand, nothing in his few months of military service in Williamsburg gave him any claim over two experienced brigadiers general to supreme command of the eight Virginia regiments in the Continental Army. Henry did study some military science in Williamsburg—The New Art of War, Treatise of Military Discipline, and The Manual Exercise, with “the most up-to-date methods of infantry drill and tactics. ...” But without any war experience, his textbook studies did not qualify him to risk men’s lives and the fate of the Revolution in battle. With his forthright, humble letter to his troops, he all but admitted his lack of qualifications as a military commander and set about serving his state as a civilian leader instead. Indeed, he was destined to become one of the most important civilian leaders of the American Revolution.

  After resigning his military commission, Henry returned to Scotchtown to gather his family about him once again, put his financial affairs in order, and, like other farmers—in or out of the military—attend to the spring planting. Within days of his return, however, his Hanover County followers elected him and his brother-in-law John Syme to the Fifth Virginia Convention.

  On March 17, 1776, British troops began evacuating Boston, and Virginia’s Convention prepared to declare independence from England, naming Henry to a committee to create a new government. What was Virginia to become? The short struggle against Britain had made it clear that most colonies would be unable to stand alone as independent countries and survive. But Virginia was not like most colonies. It was wealthier and more heavily populated than the other colonies, and huge by comparison—larger than every European nation except Russia and Turkey.

  At the time of the First Continental Congress, Henry had studied Baron de Montesquieu’s seminal work on government, The Spirit of Laws. The French political philosopher classed government into three categories: the republic, based on virtue; monarchy, based on honor; and despotism, based on fear. Liberty, Montesquieu wrote, was most likely to survive in small republics in which governors remain close to the governed and aware of their needs. “In a large republic,” he warned, “the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views . . . In a small one, the interest of the public is perceived more easily, better understood. ...”8 Also essential to the survival of liberty, Montesquieu declared, was the separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, with the powers of each branch held by different individuals, acting independently of those in other branches, to prevent collusion.

  “The grand work of forming a constitution for Virginia is now before the convention . . . ” Henry wrote to John Adams, the man he most respected among delegates from other states he had met at the Continental Congress. “Is not a confederacy of our states necessary? If that could be formed, and its objects for the present be only offensive and defensive, and guaranty respecting colonial rights, perhaps dispatch might be had.” Adams sent Henry—“as a token of friendship”—a pamphlet he had written entitled Thoughts on Government,9 with a plan for a democratic/ republican style government, which Henry “read with great pleasure. ...” In his letter of thanks, Henry warned Adams that unless Congress agreed on a plan for funding the Continental Army, “our mutual friend the General [Washington] will be hampered. ...”10

  “My Dear Sir,” John Adams answered Henry,I had this morning the pleasure of yours. . . . Happy Virginia, whose Constitution is to be framed by so masterly a builder! . . . I know of none so competent to the task as the author of the first Virginia resolutions against the Stamp Act, who will have the glory with posterity, of beginning and concluding this great revolution. . . . I esteem it an honor and a happiness that my opinion so often coincides with yours. . . . It has ever appeared to me that the natural course and order of things was this: for every colony to institute a government; for all the colonies to confederate and define the limits of the continental constitution; then to declare the colonies . . . confederated sovereign states; and last of all, to form treaties with foreign powers. But I fear we cannot proceed systematically, and that we shall be obliged to declare ourselves independent states before we confederate, and indeed before all the colonies have established their governments. . . . We all look up to Virginia for examples.11

  After Henry published Adams’s scheme of government in the Virginia Gazette, the Convention adopted most of it in principle, creating a bicameral legislature with a popularly elected lower house—the House of Delegates, or Assembly—and a Senate, or upper house, elected by members of the Assembly. The two houses were to elect a governor to serve as chief executive with consent of a privy council—also elected by the two houses. The two houses would also elect all other executives—treasurer, attorney general, and so forth. The governor would appoint all judges, with the advice and consent of the upper house.

  The Virginia Convention made a few minor changes, most of them based on the deep fears of executive tyranny implanted by George III’s treatment of the colonies and the arbitrary powers imparted to colonial governors as the king’s personal representatives. It limited the governor’s term in office to one year and the length of time he could serve to three successive terms. After a hiatus of four years, he could serve a maximum of three more one-year terms. He could not legislate or rule by decree. Only the House of Delegates could originate laws, which the Senate would have to approve or reject for them to take effect. Despite Henry’s objections, the Convention denied the governor the right of veto and the right to dissolve the legislature.

  The Convention rejected “every hint of power which might be stigmatized as being of royal origin,” explained Edmund Randolph, then a delegate and later governor. “No member but Henry could with impunity to his popularity have contended as strenuously as he did for an executive veto. ... Amongst other arguments he averred that a governor would be . . . unable to defend his office from usurpation by the legislature . . . and that he would be a dependent instead of a coordinate branch of power.” In the end, however, “the Convention gav
e way to their horror of a powerful chief magistrate without waiting to reflect how much stronger a governor might be made for the benefit of the people.”12

  One addition Virginians made to the John Adams plan of government was mandatory voting, with fines for failing to vote. The convention limited voting privileges, however, to white, male freeholders with at least fifty acres of unimproved land, or twenty-five acres of improved land (cultivated, with a dwelling), or an improved lot in a town. Independence, in other words, did not change the “mental condition” of Americans, as an English observer put it at the time. “Their deference for rank and for judicial and legislative authority continued nearly unimpaired,” and early state constitutions such as Virginia’s kept voting powers in the hands of property owners and Christians—despite inclusion of bills of rights that seemed to empower all citizens.13

  As a preface to its framework for government, the Virginia Convention included a declaration of rights written by George Mason, who began with an affirmation that “all men are born equally free. ...” After delegates complained that the phrase gave blacks equal claims to freedom, old Edmund Pendleton resolved the arguments with an eight-word amendment that “all men are created equally free and independent when they enter into a state of society. . . .”