Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Hamilton’s plan provoked outrage across the nation. Throughout the Revolutionary War and Confederation years, the government had paid soldiers, merchants, farmers, craftsmen, and other citizens with government certificates, which they, in turn, had to resell to bankers and speculators for whatever they could get—never more than 75 percent of face value and sometimes less than 15 percent.

  Hamilton’s proposal to recall certificates at face value promised untold riches for the bankers and speculators who had exploited American veterans when they were struggling to survive. Adding to the outrage was a second Hamilton scheme for the federal government to assume $25 million in state war debts—and pay those debts with proceeds from a federal tax on whiskey—the most popular beverage in America. Americans consumed whiskey for both pleasure and medicinal purposes, and, in a barter society, they used various sized jugs to buy staples and other dry goods at market. In the West, the tax threatened every farmer’s earnings. With no wagon roads across the rugged Appalachians, farmers could only market their grain by converting it to whiskey, which they could carry in jugs by mule or packhorse along the narrow mountain trails. A whiskey tax was as abhorrent to Americans in 1790 as Britain’s tea tax had been to Bostonians in 1773, when they staged the Boston Tea Party.

  Southern states were irate—especially Virginia, which had already repaid most of its own war debts and felt no obligation to help repay debts accumulated by profligate states such as Massachusetts. Even Federalists, including Virginia Governor Henry Lee, reviled Hamilton and the northern Federalists. Recalling Patrick Henry’s words at the Virginia ratification convention, Lee raged at Madison, who was still a member of the House, that disunion would be preferable to domination and economic exploitation by “an insolent northern majority.

  “Henry is considered a prophet,” Lee growled. “His predictions are daily verified. His declarations with respect to the divisions of interests which would exist under the Constitution and predominate on all the doings of government already have been undeniably proved. But we are committed and we cannot be relieved, I fear, only by disunion.”6

  Despite higher taxes and losses from his Yazoo Land Company investment, Patrick Henry’s profits from other land speculations, from his lands under cultivation, and from his law practice left him with abundant wealth in his last years. Nor did the Yazoo scandal diminish the adulation of his countrymen, for whom he remained a legendary patriot whom they flocked to see and hear whenever he tried a case. More often than not, he gave them a show to remember—as in the case of a young man on trial for abduction of a minor after eloping with his underaged girlfriend. The young man had had the foresight to consult Henry before the “kidnapping.” Henry told him to ask the young lady to ride to their rendezvous on her father’s horse and let her husband-to-be mount behind her for the ride to the marriage ceremony. When the case came to trial, Henry put her on the witness stand and asked whether her husband had abducted her. She answered truthfully: “No, sir. I ran away with him.” After the roars of laughter died down, the judge dismissed the case.

  In 1794, the isolation of Long Island proved “so much as to disgust” Dolly that Henry bought another estate about twenty miles to the east—still on the Staunton River, but just across the Campbell County line in Charlotte County, where the Henrys could lead a richer social life. Named Red Hill for the color of its soil, their new home—his twelfth over the course of his life—had four rooms, with magnificent views of the valley. Before they moved, Dorothea gave birth to their eighth surviving child and fourth son, whom they named Edward, after Henry’s late son “Neddy.”

  Only fifty-eight, but ailing, Henry finally retired from the law to live at home full time and “see after my little flock and the management of my plantations.” Despite the move to Red Hill, he kept the profitable Long Island plantation and, indeed, moved the family back to its healthier climate each year during the “sickly season” when mosquitoes swarmed across most of the bottom land at Red Hill. Red Hill nonetheless proved to be his most profitable property, with nearly 3,000 acres, on which 69 slaves produced more than 20,000 pounds of tobacco annually and tended nearly 130 head of cattle, 186 hogs, 38 sheep, 5 yoke of oxen, and 19 horses.7 Near the kitchen garden stood an apple and a peach orchard, along with fig trees. Like his Long Island farm, Red Hill was on the Staunton River, where flat-bottomed “bateaux” could carry his tobacco and grains to market. As he had done at his previous homes, he built a separate, freestanding law office from which he not only practiced law but trained his son, Patrick Jr., his two nephews Johnny Christian and Nathaniel West Dandridge II, and his grandson Patrick Henry Fontaine for the law.

  Patrick Henry’s home at “Red Hill,” near Brookneal, in Charlotte County, Virginia, where he spent his retirement years and died on June 6, 1799. He is buried on the property alongside his second wife, Dorothea. (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRINT)

  As Henry had predicted at the Virginia ratification convention, Federalist Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton lured the Federalist-dominated Congress into using its unrestricted powers under the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to expand the scope of the whiskey tax to include stills. The tax proved a disproportionately heavy burden on farmers west of the Appalachian Mountains after the Spanish closure of the Mississippi River to American navigation left them unable to ship their grain to market in New Orleans. Farmers could only market their grain by converting it to whiskey. The tax on stills, therefore, threatened every western farmer’s earnings.

  For the first two years of the tax, Hamilton’s collectors resisted making the arduous trip across the Appalachians, where farmers greeted them with tar and feathers and other forms of brutalization. As armed federal agents appeared to protect tax collectors, farmers responded violently and, on August 1, 1794, they declared “a state of revolution,”8 gathering by the thousands outside Pittsburgh and threatening to burn the city and march to Philadelphia to overthrow the federal government. A week later, President Washington issued a proclamation ordering rebels to return to their homes or face arrest. His words echoed those of British governors to stamp tax protestors thirty-five years earlier and further raised Henry’s status as a prophet. Dismissing comparisons to the British, Washington ordered 13,000 state militiamen drafted into a federal force to march against the rebels. It was Patrick Henry’s worst nightmare come true. As he had predicted at the Virginia ratification convention, the Constitution had replaced the tyranny of Parliament and the British king with the tyranny of Congress and the American president. Congress had indeed taxed the people without the consent of their state legislatures—as Parliament had done—and the president was sending troops to enforce tax collections—as King George III had done.

  As Washington’s troops neared Pittsburgh, however, the rebels vanished, realizing that rifles and pitchforks were no match for army field artillery. Although federal troops captured twenty laggard “Whiskey Boys,” as they were called, all the others had either returned to their homes or fled into the wilderness. The troops carted their prisoners back to Philadelphia expecting cheers as they paraded them down Market Street, but the thousands who watched stood in silence—mourning the powers they had ceded to the federal government by ignoring Patrick Henry’s warnings against granting unrestricted powers “over the sword and the purse” to a national government. Although the courts convicted only two of the Whiskey Boys—and Washington pardoned them both—the president became the target of ferocious criticism for suppressing the very type of citizen protest he had led before the Revolutionary War. Although Washington shrugged off the comparisons, his aura of infallibility evanesced in a ceaseless rain of press criticism that left the old warrior bitter about having remained in office as long as he had. “I can religiously aver,” Washington complained, “that no man was ever more tired of public life or more devoutly wished for retirement than I do.”9

  Although furious at Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion, Henry no longer wielded
the regional or national political power of his days in the Virginia capital. In any case, there was little he or anyone else could do. Richard Henry Lee and George Mason had both died in 1792, and most of the other Antifederalist leaders had drifted off the national political scene—as, indeed, he had done. “It is time for me to retire,” he admitted to his daughter Betsey. “I shall never more appear in a public character . . . My wish is to pass the rest of my days as much as may be unobserved by the critics of the world, who show but little sympathy for the deficiencies to which old age is so liable. May God bless you, my dear Betsey, and your children.”10

  The sun that had set on Henry’s political life, however, did not cease to shine over his home life. Still the “Belgian hare,” prolific Patrick fathered yet another son. In 1795, Dorothea gave birth to John, her ninth surviving child and Patrick’s fifteenth. Patrick’s son John, by his first marriage, had died four years earlier.

  To try to calm the furor associated with the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington asked Virginia Governor Lee to renew his offer of a Senate seat to Henry. Senator Grayson’s old seat, which Antifederalist James Monroe had filled, was vacant again after Washington appointed Monroe minister to Paris. Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the former Virginia governor, told Washington he believed that Henry had embraced the Constitution and the concept of a strong national government. “He grows rich every hour,” Randolph explained, “and thus his motives to tranquility must be multiplying every day.”11

  Henry quickly disavowed Randolph’s assertions. “The reports you have heard of my changing sides in politics,” he told his daughter Betsey, “are not true. I am too old to exchange my former opinions, which have grown up into fixed habits of thinking.” Calling Federalist policies “quite void of wisdom and foresight,” he accused them of twisting his most casual words “to answer party views. Who can have been so meanly employed, I know not—nor do I care; for I no longer consider myself as an actor on the stage of public life.”12

  Henry again declined Lee’s offer of a Senate seat in a simple note that avoided political controversy: “It gives me great pain to declare that existing circumstances compel me to decline this appointment . . . arising from my time of life—combined with the great distance to Philadelphia.”13

  Randolph and other Federalist leaders, however, remained convinced that the wily old Antifederalist simply wanted a higher-profile post than the Senate, where he would have to compete with and continually compromise his beliefs with more than two dozen other senators. Washington countered Henry’s refusal to enter the Senate with the offer of a mission as “envoy extraordinary” to Spain to wrest a treaty guaranteeing American navigation rights on the Mississippi—an almost sacred quest for Henry and his constituents in the West. Success might have propelled him to the presidency or, certainly, the vice presidency. But again, Henry confounded the political world by declining. “The importance of the negotiation and its probable length in a country so distant,” he explained, “are difficulties not easy to reconcile to one at my time of life.”14

  When in 1795, Edmund Randolph resigned as secretary of state after being accused of soliciting a bribe from the French government, Henry’s earlier rejections of federal appointments convinced Washington to turn to other candidates to replace Randolph. But after they refused the post, he again approached Henry, warning that “a crisis is approaching that must . . . soon decide whether order and good government shall be preserved, or anarchy and confusion ensue. . . .My ardent desire is . . . to keep the United States free from political connections with every other country, to see them independent of all and under the influence of none. In a word, I want an American character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves, and not for others. . . . I am satisfied these sentiments cannot be otherwise than congenial to your own. Your aid therefore in carrying them into effect would be flattering and pleasing to, dear Sir,

  Go. Washington15

  Henry again declined, acknowledging thatto disobey the call of my country into service when her venerable chief makes the demand of it must be a crime unless the most substantial reasons justify declining it . . .

  My domestic situation pleads strongly against a removal to Philadelphia, having no less than eight children by my present marriage, and Mrs. Henry’s situation [she was pregnant again!] now forbidding her approach to the small pox, which neither herself nor any of our family have ever had. To this may be added other considerations arising from loss of crops and consequent derangement of my finances—and what is of decisive weight with me, my own health and strength I believe are unequal to the duties of the station you are pleased to offer me.

  Aware of the political suspicions that most Federalists harbored toward him, Henry pledged Washington his full support: “Believe me, Sir, I have bid adieu to the distinctions of federal and antifederal ever since the commencement of the present government, and . . . have often expressed my fears of disunion amongst the states from collision of interests, but especially from the baneful effects of faction. . . . If my country is destined to encounter the horrors of anarchy, every power of mind or body which I possess will be exerted in support of the government.”16

  Convinced of Henry’s loyalty to the new government, Washington offered to appoint him Chief Justice of the United States in 1795, but by then Henry’s health was indeed failing. The long-term effects of his many bouts with malarial fever and intestinal infections had taken their toll; he had lost interest in political affairs and, when he wasn’t doting over his children, he read the Bible incessantly—at dawn and again by candlelight in the evening. “This book is worth all the books that ever were printed,” he concluded, “and it has been my misfortune that I have never found time to read it with the proper attention and feeling till lately. I trust in the mercy of heaven that it is not yet too late.”17

  Henry hired a tutor for his children and, when they weren’t at their studies, he spent as much time with them as possible to compensate for the time he had lost while traveling the legal circuits. As with his newfound attention to the Bible, he put his trust “in the mercy of heaven that it was not yet too late” to show his family how much he loved them. According to his brother-in-law Samuel Meredith, “His visitors have not un-frequently caught him lying on the floor with a group of these little ones climbing over him in every direction, or dancing around him with obstreperous mirth to the tune of his violin, while the only contest seemed to be who could make the most noise.” In retirement, Henry again grew “fond of entertaining himself and his family with his violin and flute and often improvising the music.”18

  The Federalists, though, refused to believe that so political an animal as Patrick Henry would reject an offer of political power. “Most assiduous court is paid to Patrick Henry,” Thomas Jefferson growled to James Monroe. “If they thought they could count on him, they would run him for their vice president.”19

  In fact, Henry’s successful defense of so many American debtors in the British Debts Case had restored his status as the most popular figure in the nation after George Washington. Like no one else among the Founding Fathers, he consistently defended the interests of the ordinary citizen. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had harbored ambitions to succeed Washington to the presidency, but he knew that the taxes he had imposed as secretary of the treasury had left him too unpopular to do so. Rather than see his party fall from power, he decided to offer the nomination of his party to Patrick Henry, whom he believed to be a convert to federalism. Hamilton knew that Henry would automatically win the support of the Antifederalist South and West, while Hamilton and other Federalist leaders would rally support for Henry in the largely Federalist Northeast.

  At Hamilton’s behest, Massachusetts Federalist Rufus King wrote to John Marshall, who went to see Henry with Governor Henry Lee, but found him “unwilling to embark in the business. His unwillingness I think proceeds from an apprehension of the difficulties to be encountered by those who shall fill high executi
ve offices.”20 Henry explained to his daughter Elizabeth that he had watched “with concern our old Commander in Chief [Washington] abusively treated. If he whose character as our leader during the whole war was above all praise is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected by men of the common standard of character?”21

  Despite his refusal to run, a groundswell of popular support for his candidacy developed across the nation among moderate Antifederalists, Federalists, and independents who shunned radical politics. “A strong reason for the appointment of Mr. Henry is that it may have a tendency to unite all parties,” wrote Virginia’s Leven Powell, who was campaigning to be a presidential elector. He predicted that Henry’s election would “do away with the spirit of contention which . . . threatens the destruction of the Union.”22

  Elated by the prospects of Henry’s elevation to the presidency, the Virginia legislature elected him to a sixth term as governor in November—without his knowledge. Henry decided the efforts to draw him back into public office had gone too far. After rejecting the governorship, he wrote to the Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser:I am informed that some citizens wish to vote for me . . . to be president of the United States. I give them thanks for their goodwill and favorable opinion of me. I think it is incumbent upon me thus publicly to declare my fixed intention to decline accepting that office if it would be offered to me, because of my inability to discharge the duties of it in a proper manner. . . .