As shouts of anger spewed from the gallery, Madison stood to try to refute Henry, but Henry would not be silenced. After proposing a rapid-fire series of amendments, including a bill of rights, his voice rose to a crescendo as he called on God’s wrath to punish the authors of the Constitution.
“He [Madison] tells you of important blessings, which he imagines will result to us and mankind in general from the adoption of this system,” Henry thundered. “I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.
“I see it!
“I feel it!”
Patrick Henry as Governor of Virginia by unknown artist. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
He spread wide his arms and quaking hands and looked to the heavens, playing the scene like the veteran actor he was. Outside the skies blackened suddenly and turned day into night.
I see beings of a higher order—anxious concerning our decision. When I see beyond the horizon . . . those intelligent beings which inhabit the ethereal mansions, reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America . . . Our own happiness alone is not affected by the event. All nations are interested in the determination. We have it in our power to secure the happiness of one half of the human race. Its adoption may involve the misery of the other hemispheres.31
Lightning struck the ground outside, then an explosion of thunder shook the entire hall. Henry closed his eyes and lifted his face to the heavens, as his ghostly words continued echoing through the chamber:
“I see it!
“I feel it!”
And the heavens responded with another bolt of lightning and jolt of thunder. Terrified delegates fell to their knees or raced to the door. “The spirits he had called seemed to come at his bidding,” cried Federalist delegate Judge Archibald Stuart, “and, rising on the wings of the tempest, he seized upon the artillery of heaven, and directed its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries. The scene became insupportable, and . . . without the formality of adjournment, the members rushed from their seats with precipitation and confusion.”32
The lion of liberty had summoned the very heavens to set men free of government tyranny.
Chapter 15
Beef! Beef! Beef!
When the convention resumed the following morning, some spectators in the gallery returned convinced that Henry had summoned the “black arts” and called down lightning bolts on his antagonists. Black arts or not, he nonetheless failed to win enough votes to block ratification. James Madison had summoned a few black arts of his own by approaching moderate Antifederalists with a pledge to fight for passage of a bill of rights in the First Congress if they switched their votes in favor of ratification. He succeeded in organizing an eighty-nine to seventy-nine vote in favor of ratification, allowing Virginia to become what delegates believed was the decisive ninth state to ratify the Constitution.
Henry won just three of fourteen Kentucky votes, with eleven of the buckskins deciding that a federal army would give them greater protection against Indian attacks and a better chance to seize control of the Mississippi River from Spain. Most delegates agreed that Madison’s pledge to champion a bill of rights was the decisive factor in the Federalist victory. Henry had no faith in Madison’s pledge, but he learned about it too late to mitigate its effects. Before the convention adjourned, Madison urged Federalists to try to heal the wounds of discord by supporting Antifederalist proposals to recommend forty amendments to the Constitution, including a bill of rights, “to the consideration of the Congress which should first assemble under the Constitution.”1
Although Washington never set foot in the convention hall, Federalists and Antifederalists agreed that he, rather than Henry, had dominated the exhausting drama. Indeed, Henry seemed at times to be debating Washington rather than Madison, Randolph and the other Federalists in the convention hall. Delegates sensed Washington’s presence in every utterance, and, knowing he was the nation’s all but unanimous choice for president, he exerted his political power behind the scenes by neutralizing two of Virginia’s most influential political leaders: former governor Thomas Jefferson and the state’s sitting governor Edmund Randolph. A year after the critical Virginia convention, Washington, by then the nation’s chief executive, would confirm Henry’s suspicions by appointing Jefferson the nation’s first secretary of state and Randolph the first attorney general.
“Be assured,” James Monroe declared, “General Washington’s influence carried this government.”2 Antifederalist William Grayson concurred. “I think that, were it not for one great character in America,” he growled in his closing argument, “so many men would not be for this Government. . . . We have one ray of hope. We do not fear while he lives, but we can only expect his fame to be immortal. We wish to know, who besides him can concentrate the confidence and affections of all America.”3
After the vote, all eyes turned to Henry. Many feared he would rise from his seat and cry for vengeance as in 1775: “We must fight!” Some buckskins in the gallery were ready to cock their rifles. Seeing the looks of fear on the faces of some delegates, Henry acted to calm the situation and forestall civil disobedience, but he nonetheless vowed to continue his struggle for a bill of rights.
If I shall be in the minority, I shall have those painful sensations which arise from a conviction of being overpowered in a good cause. Yet I will be a peaceable citizen! My head, my hand, my heart shall be at liberty to retrieve the loss of liberty and remove the defects of that system—in a constitutional way. I wish not to go to violence, but will wait with hopes that the spirit which predominated in the revolution is not yet gone, nor the cause of those who are attached to the revolution yet lost. I shall therefore patiently wait in expectation of seeing that Government changed so as to be compatible with the safety, liberty and happiness of the people.4
By the time transcripts of his address reached the nation’s newspapers, enough words and phrases, such as “in a constitutional way,” had been smudged or omitted to produce a revolutionary manifesto—especially when paired with the statements of Henry’s confederates. Mason, Monroe, and their “Federal Republicans” had been far less conciliatory than Henry after the ratification convention. They had stormed out of the hall, intent on continuing the fight, gathering at a nearby tavern, and sending for Henry to propose ways to reverse the convention result. Although Henry had suffered a humiliating defeat at the convention, Virginia’s farmers and frontiersmen still looked to him to defend their rights.
After calming the angry gathering, he proposed various schemes for reversing the effects of ratification “in a constitutional way.” First and foremost, he would try to prevent the remaining four states from ratifying. At the same time, he would call on state legislatures that had ratified to call a second constitutional convention to undo the work of the first convention and prevent a new government from taking office. If, however, the states rejected the idea of another convention and the new Constitution took effect, Antifederalists had other weapons at their disposal to undo the Constitution: They could use their popular majority to elect an Antifederalist majority to the new congress and, once installed, they could propose constitutional amendments to guarantee individual rights and states’ rights and to dilute the powers of the new government.
When Madison learned of the meeting, he reported to Washington that “although Henry and Mason will give no countenance to popular violence, it is not to be inferred that they are reconciled to the event.” He warned that Henry planned to work for the election of a Congress “that will commit suicide on their own authority.”5
After Virginia’s ratification convention, jubilant Federalists spent two days of raucous, self-congratulatory celebrations before learning that theirs had not been the decisive ninth state to ratify. New Hampshire had reconvened its convention and ratified four days before Virginia, on June 21.
With Virginia’s ratification, however, New York’s Antifederalist Governor George Clinton recognized th
e futility of continuing his own struggle. Although an independent and sovereign New York might have presented physical obstacles to overland trade between New England and the rest of the Union, traders could easily bypass New York harbor over a sea link between Philadelphia and Boston—via a canal then under consideration across the base of Cape Cod at Buzzard’s Bay. On July 26, 1788, New York ratified and became the eleventh state in the Union.
In the end, Patrick Henry and his Antifederalists scored their only success in North Carolina, where an overwhelming majority of delegates at the ratification convention voted against ratification. Like Henry’s own Piedmont area, North Carolina was almost entirely rural, sparsely populated by relatively poor, but fiercely independent, farmers and frontiersmen who resented government intrusions in their lives and had been unrepresented at the Constitutional Convention. Desperate to secure at least one political base, Henry’s acolytes warned that wealthy big-city merchants and bankers were plotting to control the country. Willie Jones, the state’s political boss, pleaded with the ratification convention to keep North Carolina out of the Union until it could negotiate more advantageous terms for joining. Jones read the letter from Thomas Jefferson, declaring, “Were I in America, I would advocate it warmly till nine should have adopted it and then as warmly take the other side to convince the other four that they ought not to come into it till the declaration of rights is annexed to it.”6 On August 2, North Carolina voted to defer ratification 184 to 84.
After a brief rest at his Prince Edward County plantation, Henry returned to the Virginia legislature on October 20, determined to oppose every measure to organize the new government without prior passage of a bill of rights. He then moved that the Virginia Assembly issue a formal request to the new Congress “to call a convention for proposing amendments . . . as soon as practicable.”7
Of all people, young Corbin stood to oppose Henry’s motion, arguing in aristocratically coated words, with gestures learned at Cambridge, that “the gentleman tells us that he bows to the majesty of the people.”
With that, according to William Wirt, Corbin bowed deeply “in so exaggerated a way as to elicit laughs.” Henry sat stone-faced, staring at Corbin in disbelief and rage.
“Yet,” Corbin continued unperturbed,he has set himself in opposition to the people throughout the whole course of this transaction. The people approved of the Constitution; the suffrage of their constituents in the last convention proved it. The people wished, most anxiously wished, the adoption of the Constitution as the only means of saving the credit and honor of the country and producing the stability of the Union. The gentleman, on the contrary, had placed himself at the head of those who opposed its adoption—yet the gentleman is ever ready and willing at all times and on all occasions to bow to the majesty of the people.
According to Wirt, “He made another deep bow, sweeping one arm gracefully out to the side.”
Corbin added a bit of arrogance to his irritatingly haughty English accent: “It is of little importance whether a country was ruled by a despot with a tiara on his head or by a demagogue in a red cloak and a caul-bare wig, although he should profess on all occasions to bow to the majesty of the people.”8
And still another bow . . . thirteen in all—“graceful and deep as those before a magisterial throne,” according to Wirt. Although Corbin finally took his seat “with the gayest of triumph,” Henry was not amused. Indeed, Corbin’s performance left Henry deeply hurt and delegates all but gasping. “The friends of Mr. Henry,” his grandson commented, “considered such an attack on a man of his years and high character as . . . sacrilege.”9
The old patriot rose slowly, “heavily . . . awkwardly,” according to his grandson, who was familiar with his grandfather’s huge repertoire of acting tricks. After a long silence, Henry spoke, contorting his face in apparent pain.
Mr. Speaker, I am a plain man and have been educated altogether in Virginia. My whole life has been spent among . . . other plain men of similar education, who have never had the advantage of that polish which a court alone can give and which the gentleman . . . has so happily acquired. Indeed, sir, the gentleman’s employments and mine, in common with the great mass of his countrymen, have been as widely different as our fortunes. For while that gentleman was availing himself of the opportunity which a splendid fortune afforded him, of acquiring a foreign education, mixing among the great, attending levees and courts, basking in the beams of royal favor at St. James’s, and exchanging curtsies with crown heads . . .
Now it was Henry’s turn, and he made “one elegant, but most obsequious and sycophantic bow,” according to Mecklenberg delegate William L. Tabb.
. . . I was engaged in the arduous toils of the revolution and was probably as far from thinking of acquiring those polite accomplishments which the gentleman has so successfully cultivated, as that gentleman then was from sharing in the toils and dangers in which his unpolished countrymen were engaged. I will not therefore presume to vie with the gentleman in those courtly accomplishments, of which he has just given the house so agreeable a specimen. Yet such a bow as I can make shall ever be at the service of the people.10
Henry then caricatured Corbin by making a bow “so ludicrously awkward and clownish” that the house exploded with laughter.
“The gentleman, I hope,” Henry croaked in a voice he used to feign the helplessness of old age, “will commiserate the disadvantages of education under which I have labored and will be pleased to remember that I have never been a favorite with that monarch, whose gracious smile he has had the happiness to enjoy.”
Another roar from the members who remembered George III’s death sentence on Henry, among others. “I believe there was not a person,” William Tabb recalled, “who did not feel every risible [laughter-inducing] nerve affected. His adversary meantime hung down his head, and sinking lower and lower until he was almost concealed behind the interposing forms.”11
Henry’s son-in-law Judge Spencer Roane confirmed that “it exceeded anything of the kind I ever heard. He spoke and acted his reply, and Corbin sank at least a foot in his seat.”12
Having underestimated the reverence of friends and foes alike for Patrick Henry, Corbin could only watch in embarrassment as his crude—and cruel—assault produced the opposite of its intended effect. Virginia’s House of Delegates—Federalists and Antifederalists—voted overwhelmingly to endorse Henry’s proposals and send them to Congress. In acknowledging Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution, the message of the House of Delegates to Congress asserted thatthe good people of this commonwealth . . . gave their most unequivocal proofs that they dreaded its operation under the present form. . . . The cause of amendments we consider as a common cause . . . We do therefore . . . make this application to Congress, that a convention be immediately called of deputies from the several states, with full power to take into their consideration the defects of this constitution.13
With that, Henry proposed a series of amendments that drew wild cheers from Antifederalists—among them the requirement that three-fourths of the members of both houses (instead of two-thirds of the senators) approve a treaty before it can take effect. He demanded that the passage of any federal law require a two-thirds majority instead of a simple majority—and that a similar two-thirds majority be required for Congress to raise a standing army in peacetime. Most significantly, however, was an amendment that would force Congress to requisition funds from each state before it could tax the people of that state directly. Henry would thus have denied Congress and the federal government the power of direct taxation unless a state government failed to meet its financial obligations to the federal government.
“We are told the sword and purse are necessary for the national defense,” he said thoughtfully, then answered his own postulate. “The junction of these without limitations in the same hands is . . . the description of despotism. . . . It is easier to supply deficiencies of power than to take back excess of power. This no man can deny!”14
/> Rather than appear to endorse young Corbin’s attack on Henry, Madison and other Federalists ceded the battleground over what were nothing more than suggestions to the First Congress—if indeed it decided to amend the Constitution. Madison then set about thwarting the second part of Henry’s plan to undermine ratification by stacking Congress with Antifederalists pledged to amend or undo the Constitution. Madison declared himself a candidate for the first U.S. Senate. Henry was too savvy a politician, however, and enlisted two of the state’s most beloved Antifederalists to run against Madison—Richard Henry Lee, a “father” of independence, and William Grayson, a prominent attorney and devoted Patrick Henry supporter, who had fought gallantly in the Revolution, served as a Washington aide-de-camp, and helped defeat the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations in the Confederation Congress. Comparing the patriotism of Lee and Grayson to Madison’s failure even to lift a rifle in the Revolution, Henry’s Antifederalists warned the House of Delegates that Madison was untrustworthy. Having betrayed his own Federalist friends, including Washington, by pledging to support a bill of rights, he would almost certainly betray Antifederalists in the Senate, where a six-year tenure would immunize him from retaliation by his constituents. A Madison victory, Henry warned, would ensure a Federalist victory, and a Federalist victory would ensure civil war and send “rivulets of blood” flowing across the country.
Henry’s Antifederalists crushed Madison’s bid and sent Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson to the first U.S. Senate with substantial pluralities. Antifederalists even gave Henry twenty-six unsolicited votes rather than seat Madison in the national capitol.
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