Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Henry had just returned to the Virginia Assembly for the first time in more than a year when the Assembly faced a vote on the national tariff. Still the unquestioned leader in the Assembly, he found himself caught by surprise by the impending vote. Not having studied the issues, he urged his followers to vote as his friend Washington had recommended—that is, for the tax. After the vote, however, he developed second thoughts about granting Congress any taxing powers and, a few days later, he asked the Assembly to rescind its vote and add restrictions. He suggested a 5 percent tariff limited to twenty-five years, with receipts earmarked to pay wartime debts.

  Henry’s “enmity to everything which may give influence to Congress and infringe on individual liberties put him in opposition to any permanent national government tax,” Thomas Jefferson explained. After rebelling for more than twenty years against taxation by London’s Parliament, Henry said he was not about to grant those powers to Congress. On the other hand, he recognized that none of the states would be able to engage in international trade until Congress repaid their collective war debts and that “ruin was inevitable unless something was done to give Congress a compulsory process for the delinquent states.”2

  So the question for Henry and other American leaders was how to repay national government debts without giving the national government taxing powers. It was an impossible question that leaders of every state tried to answer, knowing that there was no answer. Henry had never before been so indecisive—at a loss for words for one of the few times in his political career. After Washington sent a circular letter urging the states to strengthen the powers of the Confederation Congress, Henry recognized there was no other solution. Yielding to Washington’s argument, he sacrificed his political beliefs in the interests of the national economy and told James Madison to “sketch out some plan for giving greater power to the federal government” and that he would support it in the Assembly. “A bold example set by Virginia,” he declared, “would have influence on the other states.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that Henry had been “strenuous for invigorating the federal government.”3

  Although shocked by Henry’s political turnabout, the Assembly voted as he asked—in favor of the import duty, which, unlike a property or income tax, had a noncompulsory complexion in that no one is obligated to buy imported goods. To his and the Assembly’s dismay, however, the New York legislature refused to accept it in its present form and set the process of saving the Confederation back to the beginning. Without approval by all the states, Congress could not levy the tax, and it remained without funds to pay current expenses, let alone the nation’s debts. Henry’s political sacrifice had been meaningless.

  Henry’s turnabout on the national tax, however, was but the first political shock he had prepared for Virginia’s legislators. The next shock came when he called for reopening trade with Britain, and a third came with his call to permit Tories who had fled the state to return and reclaim their properties. A barrage of catcalls greeted his trade proposal, but Henry returned fire with accusations of insensitivity. He argued that most Virginians had suffered devastating economic hardships, “struggling through a perilous war, cut off from commerce so long that they were naked and unclothed. Why should we fetter commerce?” he asked, insisting that renewal of trade with Britain would “bless the land of plenty.”4

  Henry’s proposal to allow the return of Tories provoked even more consternation. His close friend Judge John Tyler asked how he, “above all other men” could think of inviting “into our family an enemy from whose insults you have suffered so severely?”5 Henry was ready, with one of his most eloquent speeches, saying he was willing to sacrifice his personal resentments and “all private wrongs . . . on the altar of my country’s good.”

  “We have, sir, an extensive country without population,” he explained, adopting the dramatic pose that had won him such renown:People form the strength and constitute the wealth of a nation. . . . Fill up the measure of your population as speedily as you can . . . and I venture to prophesy there are those among the living who will see this favored land among the most powerful on earth. . . .

  But, sir, you must have men!

  Open your doors, sir . . . Let . . . liberty stretch forth her fair hand toward the people of the old world—tell them to come, and bid them welcome—and you will see . . . your wildernesses will be cleared and settled, your deserts will smile, your ranks will be filled . . .

  Henry scoffed at fears of Tory uprisings, insisting that relations with “those deluded people” had changed with the king’s acknowledgment of American independence. “The quarrel is over,” he affirmed. “Peace hath returned and found us a free people. Let us have the magnanimity to lay aside our antipathies and prejudices and consider the subject in a political light. They are an enterprising, moneyed people. They will be serviceable in taking off the surplus produce of our lands and supplying us with necessaries during the infant state of our manufactures.” He then looked at Judge Tyler:

  “Afraid of them?” Henry sneered. “Shall we who have laid the proud British lion at our feet now be afraid of his whelps?”6

  Henry’s remarkable oration won passage of both resolves, but some assemblymen stalked out angrily when he presented a fourth proposal—to subsidize marriages between whites and Indians to encourage “the friendship and confidence of the latter, whereby . . . their hostile inroads be prevented.” Henry proposed a £10 bounty to every white man or woman marrying an Indian and settling in Virginia, along with a £5 bonus for each child born of such marriages. He also suggested tax exemptions on the livestock of mixed couples and free education for their minor children. Among the few to support Henry’s proposal was John Marshall, America’s future U.S. Chief Justice, who called it “advantageous to this country,” but conceded to the all-but-empty chamber that “our prejudices . . . operate too powerfully.”7

  Although few transcripts exist, Henry sometimes relied on “such a volume of wit and humor” in his oratory, that, according to Judge Tyler, “the house would be in an uproar of laughter, and even set his opponents altogether in a perfect convulsion.”8 His wit and humor proved of little avail, however, in promoting intermarriage of whites and Indians.

  Although his chronic illness made attendance difficult, Henry made token appearances in the Assembly in the spring of 1783, arriving after its opening and leaving before its adjournment to return to Leatherwood in time for the birth of Dolly’s first son—Patrick Henry Jr.—his tenth child and fourth by Dolly. He made the weeklong ride back to Richmond for the fall session of 1783 and spring and fall sessions of 1784, and he used his still-enormous prestige and influence to obtain significant government support for improving river navigation and education. As an inveterate speculator in lands, he stood to gain—and did—from canal-building projects that tied the Staunton and Dan rivers to the Roanoke, which flows to Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. Henry’s Leatherwood plantation sat only twelve miles from the headwaters of the Dan. He also proposed a canal to connect Suffolk, on an inlet off Hampton Roads, to the Great Dismal Swamp. He and nine other investors, including George Washington, had purchased 40,000 acres of the area’s marshland with which they intended harvesting timber, draining swamps, and developing land into a rich agricultural area.

  In the fall of 1784, however, Henry alienated younger members of the House by bewailing the large number of abandoned churches in Virginia—the result of church-state separation following disestablishment of the Church of England. Railing against growing licentiousness, Henry proposed a new tax to support Christian churches, and a law making Christianity “the established religion of this Commonwealth; and all denominations of Christians demeaning themselves peaceably and faithfully, shall enjoy equal privileges, civil and religious.” Although former Anglicans—now de-Anglicized as “Episcopalians”—supported Henry, younger delegates joined Presbyterians and Baptists in voting him down. Even ardent former Anglicans such as George Washington and John Marshall voted against H
enry. Indeed, his proposal provoked reintroduction and passage of Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which ended Virginia’s state-church ties forever.

  Henry’s proposal also provoked a movement among ambitious young Assembly rebels to displace him and seize control of the House. Led by thirty-three-year-old James Madison of Orange, the rebels devised a scheme to flatter Henry into relinquishing power by putting him back into the governor’s chair, where the state constitution would render him all but powerless to influence legislation. Without the temporary wartime authority that the Assembly had given him, they believed the ailing fifty-two-year-old governor would be helpless to prevent a new, younger generation linked to Jefferson from taking control of state government. Madison badly underestimated Patrick Henry’s political staying power.

  Barely five feet tall, Madison suffered chronic intestinal problems and “a constitutional liability to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy. ...”9 Too frail and sickly for military service, he had spent three years of the war in Congress and led the unsuccessful struggle for interstate unity and congressional powers to levy taxes for national defense. Madison, however, served as the eyes and ears in Congress for Thomas Jefferson, whose ambitions were fixed on higher office. He called Madison “a pillar of support.”10 Because of Madison’s ties to Jefferson, however, Henry saw the little man as a potentially dangerous political enemy and prepared to counter his every move in the Virginia Assembly.

  James Madison. A Federalist at the Constitutional Convention, he won election to the House of Representatives only after agreeing to support Patrick Henry’s Antifederalist demands for a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other individual liberties.

  (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  As the Assembly session approached its end, Virginia erupted in a frenzy of excitement with the return of the Marquis de Lafayette for a farewell tour of America. He had sailed home to France after Yorktown and been unable to participate in the celebrations that had followed the signing of the peace treaty with Britain. After touring the New England states, he boarded the French frigate Nymphe in Boston harbor and enjoyed a restful sail to Virginia for a reunion with Washington in Richmond. After landing at Yorktown and touring the site of his heroic charge, he banqueted at Williamsburg and rode to Richmond the next day for a huge reception, where he stunned staid Virginians by embracing his former commander. Arm in arm, they strode into Trowser’s Tavern to the cheers of the state’s leading citizens, including governor-elect Henry, who announced he would name his next son Fayette. The Assembly voted to commission marble statues of Washington and Lafayette for Richmond’s capitol.11

  Although a constitutional figurehead, Henry remained the most revered patriot in America after Washington and Virginia’s most powerful leader—indeed, one of America’s most powerful leaders—and he knew it. So his return to the governorship would not, as Madison and his young friends had hoped, diminish Henry’s control over the Assembly. Indeed, the governorship would offer many unforeseen advantages: On the personal side of his life, he could spend more time with his wife, children, and grandchildren, free of the exhausting day-to-day political struggles of the Assembly floor and the periodic three-hundred-mile round-trip rides to and from his Leatherwood home. On the political side, he could speak out on important issues, knowing that each utterance would command public attention whenever he signed legislation, welcomed important visitors, and greeted Virginia’s notables at official functions with his lovely Dolly at his side. He had every intention of using his matchless rhetoric to bully, shame, or blackmail the Assembly into passing his legislative agenda. As Washington put it, Patrick Henry “has only to say, let this be law, and it is law.”12

  As his first term neared its end, Dolly bore him an eleventh child—another son, whom they named Fayette, in keeping with his promise to the marquis. A collection of Sonnets and Other Poems on the shelf of a Henry descendant contained this couplet to commemorate the arrival of Fayette Henry:The Belgian hare could nothing to you show, Prolific Patrick—what a family man!13

  To add to his own brood—and his immeasurable joy in the company of children—his daughter Martha came to stay with her three boys, ages six, nine, and ten.

  Although Henry’s bill to subsidize mixed marriages with Indians evaporated into the legislative ether, his ceaseless pronouncements sustained his position as Virginia’s most powerful political figure. To their immense frustration, Madison and the young Assembly rebels found it impossible to dislodge him. Indeed, his first days back in the governor’s seat saw him reassert some of his wartime powers as head of state, as he ignored Virginia’s constitutional limitations and issued executive orders to right what he considered Virginia’s worst social wrongs.

  On January 6, 1785, he put an end to settler incursions into Indian territory by “commanding all the commissioners, surveyors, and other persons to suspend the taking possession or surveying of any lands on the northwest side of the Ohio or below the mouth of the river Tennessee . . . [and] forthwith to withdraw therefrom.” In an effort to make punishments fit crimes, he ordered the Mayor of Richmond to halt blanket executions and build a prison to hold perpetrators of lesser crimes. “With respect to some of them,” he asserted, “the punishment of death seems disproportionate to the crime.”14

  In addition to righting wrongs, Henry set about rebuilding Virginia’s military and establishing trade relations with other states and foreign countries. He asked the American consul in Paris “to procure . . . arms, powder, flints, and cartridge papers . . . and military stores” for a militia of about 50,000 men, and he wrote to the governors of other states suggesting that they appoint representatives to meet with Virginia’s representatives “for the purpose of framing such regulations of trade . . . to promote the general interest.”15

  Henry’s return to the governorship elated his old political ally Richard Henry Lee in the Confederation Congress, who wrote to restore “the same political relation under which our former correspondence was conducted. If it shall prove as agreeable to you to revive it . . . I shall be happy in contributing my part.”

  Admitting that their correspondence would not be as “interesting” as it had been during the Revolutionary War, Lee nonetheless warned Henry of an impending Spanish threat to Virginia’s trade. Spain, he said, was “intent upon possessing the exclusive navigation of the Mississippi.”16

  Unlike the luxurious Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, the Governor’s residence in Richmond was a simple two-story house with but two rooms on the ground floor—hardly adequate for Henry’s wife, his eight children, and the army of relatives that marched through his house each year. Henry found a large home to rent on a plantation twelve miles west of Richmond across the James River in Salisbury, where, according to his son-in-law, Judge Spencer Roane, “They lived as genteely, and associated with polished society, as that of any governor before or since has ever done.” Although his governor’s salary did not provide enough funds to live as “genteely” as he wanted, he had realized enough cash from the sale of his Scotchtown plantation to allow him and his family to live in comfort. Roane said Henry and his wife “entertained as much company as others, and in as genteel a style.”17 Apart from allowing the Henrys to live together full time, living in the Richmond area restored Dolly’s ties to her family and friends in Virginia’s aristocracy and elevated her to the pinnacle of Virginia’s society as First Lady—especially after George Washington came to dine and spend the night at Salisbury during his Richmond visit. Although Henry offered guests their choice of wine and alcoholic drinks, he never drank or smoked—indeed, despised both to the point where he prohibited his slaves from drinking or smoking.

  “My complaints are many,” he chuckled, “but it is gratifying to know that not one of them was caused by vice or any excess.” His grandson confirmed that Henry “was very abstemious in his diet and used no stimulants.” 18 While Henry served George Washington hi
s favorite Madeira wine, Henry himself toasted his old friend with a glass of so-called “small beer,” a low-alcohol beer that he drank on festive occasions instead of his usual spring water.

  Dolly hosted regular public dinners for “the leading men of the Revolution,” including George Mason, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, and others. To Dolly’s delight, Richmond also gave the Henrys opportunities to present his two unmarried daughters to the most eligible bachelors in the state. The end of the war and its designation as the state capital had spurred a rapid growth of the once tiny village, with more than 1,000 new homes already built and an array of new government buildings under construction—including an ostentatious all-marble capitol designed by Jefferson. A copy of a Roman temple in Nîmes, France, he crowned it with a grandiose portico, complete with six Corinthian columns.

  The new capitol at Richmond, Virginia, built from 1785-1788 and designed by Thomas Jefferson, who copied plans of a Roman temple, the Maison Carée, in Nîmes, France. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  In 1785, death struck Henry’s family repeatedly and relentlessly, claiming his mother, his older brother William, and his last surviving aunt. “Thus is the last generation clearing the way for us, as we must shortly do for the next,” he wrote in a somber letter to console his wife’s cousin, Martha Washington’s brother, Judge Bartholomew Dandridge, who was also nearing his end. Henry had no sooner posted his letter, when he learned that his sister Anne’s husband, Colonel William Christian, had died fighting Indians in Kentucky. Death’s staggering blows chased Henry back to the church of his childhood for solace, and he soon became a fervent parishioner. “Would to God,” he wrote to Anne, “I could say something to give relief to the dearest of women and sisters. . . . While I am endeavoring to comfort you, I want a comforter myself.”19