Lion of Liberty (12 page)

Another of Henry's brothers-in-law said Henry's sons at fourteen ran “bareheaded, barefooted, hallooing and whooping about the plantation in every direction, and as rough as nature left them.”
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Henry derived unbounded joy from watching his son's antics, describing them as living in pure liberty.

In addition to luxurious living, Scotchtown added to Henry's annual earnings, as thirty slaves produced profitable crops of tobacco and wheat from the 600 acres under cultivation. Elated by the spaciousness of his new home, Patrick Henry hoped the rich new surroundings would lift his wife's spirits, but she spurned his advances, and they slept in separate rooms for the first time. The marriage of their oldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Martha, to John Fontaine lifted his but not her spirits. She had grown so dependent on Martha to care for the younger children that she was unable to cope with even their simplest needs.

The son of a prominent Hanover County tobacco planter, Fontaine was the youngest in a long line of wealthy Huguenots whose noble ancestors—the de la Fontaines—fled persecution in France and embraced Quakerism when they arrived in America. Flocks of Fontaines and Henrys filled Scotchtown for the wedding. The ceremony took only a few minutes, but newlyweds in colonial times often eschewed honeymoons in favor of at-home celebrations with friends and relatives over several days and often as long as a week. Many of the invited had traveled great distances—sometimes for days—by horse or wagon over dusty, bumpy roads. They were not about to turn around and drive home the same day.

When celebrants and newlyweds had finally left, however, Sarah Henry felt a deep sense of loss and sank into depression. She seemed dazed, distant
from her five children; she looked into her husband's face, saw him speak and heard nothing. According to the Henry family physician, Sarah Henry had “lost her reason and could only be restrained from self-destruction by a strait-dress.”
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Although a penitentiary for the insane had opened in Williamsburg, eighteenth-century institutions often treated mental illness as the devil's work and offered little but ghastly exorcisms, with bloodletting, dunking, and restraints that left patients maimed or dead. Unwilling to submit his wife to such horrors, Henry confined her to a large sunny room in the half basement at Scotchtown. “Here she was in her own home with loyal and faithful servants giving her ever tender loving care,” according to a family descendant. Although Henry often brought her food, and her children made persistent efforts to engage her in conversation and games, she developed “a strange antipathy” towards them all, rejecting her children and distressing Henry so much that he described himself as “a distraught old man.”
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Henry's oldest daughter, Martha, and her husband, John Fontaine, came to stay at Scotchtown, with Martha becoming mistress of the household, nursing her mother and becoming a second mother to her younger brothers and sisters. Her husband, meanwhile, managed the plantation and freed Patrick Henry to tend to his law practice and pursue his public service career.

To add to Henry's personal tragedy, a natural disaster befell much of Virginia in the spring of 1771, when ten days of heavy rains drenched the Piedmont hills and sent a forty-foot-high wall of water over the banks of Virginia's low-lying rivers. The flood waters carried away houses, outbuildings, and, farther downstream, tobacco warehouses bulging with the previous year's harvest—and the fortunes of hundreds of planters, large and small. Upriver planters on small hillside properties in the Piedmont suffered the worst losses. Unlike large plantations with ample room for their own storage sheds, small farms seeded every square inch of soil and depended on commercial warehousers at dockside to store crops until a cargo vessel came to transport them to market. Not only did the floods wash away warehouses, the torrential rains that produced the floods washed away the precious topsoil that nourished hillside crops. James River planters alone lost 2.3 million pounds of warehoused tobacco.

When the waters receded, many farmers were penniless, searching for missing children and other family members and family retainers. Hundreds died; thousands of livestock vanished; tens of thousands of acres of spring plantings and top soil flowed away into the maelstrom, leaving direct losses estimated at £2 million (more than $150 million) today. Thousands of slaves had disappeared. Although the roaring floodwaters swallowed some, many took advantage of the chaos to flee into the wilderness—some to die, some to prey on passersby, some to settle in or near Indian encampments. A few who were unable to cope retraced their steps to their masters' plantations. Rather than face starvation—or possible abduction by bounty hunters and shipment to the horrors of the West Indies—they chose to face their master's whip.

When Henry rode into Hanover town over the washed-out trails, farmers—many with their wives and children huddled about them—gathered near the courthouse and tavern, trying to comfort each other. After listening to their tales of trouble, he pledged to ride to Williamsburg for help and urged those with homes still intact to shelter the homeless. Before leaving, he made the difficult decision to separate his five children from their mother after his oldest daughter, Martha, and her Quaker husband, John Fontaine, agreed to care for them.

Patrick Henry rode at a gallop at times, reaching the capitol in a cloud of dust that left him looking more like a crazed chimney sweep than a distinguished burgess. Once in the House, his colleagues yielded the floor to hear his appeal for help to rescue Virginia's hill folk from the ravages of the Great Flood of 1771. The Pamunkey River, the James River, and countless streams were clogged with debris. The colony's entire navigation system—its trading lifelines to Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and Britain—was in peril. Courageous hill folk were toiling night and day to clear the debris, he pleaded, but they needed tools, food, clothes, and compensation for their labors. All Virginians would suffer if they failed; all Virginians had an obligation to ensure their success.

It was vintage Henry oratory, this time fighting for his up-country hill folk—the farmers, hunters, frontiersmen, the disenfranchised and homeless who trusted him. He expected the Tidewater majority to reject his pleas—and they did—until news arrived that Piedmont uplanders in neighboring
North Carolina had rebelled against their colony's assembly. North Carolina's Royal Governor William Tryon had to lead a force of 1,200 troops into the Piedmont to subdue the rebels, who called themselves “Regulators.” Largely unarmed, they had little choice but to surrender. The governor ordered one Regulator leader executed on the spot. Of the dozens tried for treason, twelve were found guilty and six executed. The governor gave the other six—along with some 6,500 other Piedmont Regulators—a choice of a similar fate or swearing allegiance to the Crown and the British government.

Fearing the North Carolina Piedmonter rebellion would spread into their colony, Virginia burgesses reluctantly supported Patrick Henry's appeal for the Pamunkey River cleanup and improvements to help up-country farmers transport harvests to market more efficiently. Henry's legislation would prove one of the last constructive acts of the House of Burgesses as an arm of colonial rule.

Late in 1771, Lord Botetourt died, and the British government shifted the hateful New York Governor Lord Dunmore to Williamsburg to replace him. Dunmore was Virginia's first royal governor to be paid by the king's treasurer instead of the colonial legislature, thus becoming the first governor to rule the colony financially independent of those he governed. With the royal blood of Stuarts flowing in his veins, he scoffed at self-government, dismissed the House of Burgesses, and slammed shut the door of the Governor's Palace, refusing to make himself available to discuss public needs.

When the House of Burgesses reconvened in February 1772, many delegates came to the capital hoping once again to end Virginia's costly slave trade. Virginians owned 40 percent of all the slaves in America, and, with record numbers of slave traders streaming up the James River, burgesses feared blacks would soon outnumber whites and stage an uprising that would end in widespread massacres.

“The colony was filling up rapidly with a barbarous population taken from the wilds of Africa,” Henry's grandson explained. “As slaves,” he added, “they retarded the prosperity of the country, and to give them the rights of citizenship seemed certain destruction to every interest held dear by the English.”
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Time after time, the House had petitioned the king to end the slave trade, but the king himself shared the profits of the trade and refused even to respond. The winter of 1772, however, made ending the slave trade more urgent. The floods had destroyed hundreds of farms and left thousands of slaves roaming the countryside hungry, desperate, ready to assault or even kill for food. Some had organized gangs to attack and kill plantation owners and their families and seize control of properties. With thousands more angry, half-starved, black captives arriving from Africa each day, a full-scale rebellion seemed likely.

Playing on their fears, Henry rallied burgesses to petition the king to help avert “a calamity of a most alarming nature. The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity, and, under its present encouragement, we have too much reason to fear it will endanger the very existence of your Majesty's American dominions.”
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The ill-tempered royal governor, however, dismissed the Assembly on the assumption—a correct one, as it turned out—that George III profited too much from the slave trade to consider the petition and that asking him to do so represented an impertinence. The governor would not recall the Assembly for another year.

In the spring of 1772, the embers of antipathy towards the motherland burst aflame again in New England after the British customs schooner
Gaspée
ran aground near Providence and a mob rowed out in boats to burn it. What many Americans might have dismissed as an act of vandalism turned into a cause célèbre when British officials announced they would send the culprits to England for trial. Although the British never caught the attackers, colonists saw the threat of trying American colonists in England as an infringement on their rights as British subjects to trial by a jury of peers in their own vicinage [district].

Samuel Adams used the
Gaspée
incident to call for revolution. “Let every town assemble,” he wrote in the
Boston Gazette
. “Let associations and combinations be everywhere set up to consult and recover our just rights.” The Boston Town Meeting organized a “committee of correspondence . . . to state the rights of the colonists of this province . . . as men, as Christians . . . and publish the same to the several towns in the province
and to the world.”
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Three weeks later, the committee issued a 7,000-word declaration that began:

Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson charged that the document

John Adams agreed with the governor's words, but not his sentiments. “It is difficult to draw a line of distinction between the universal authority of Parliament over the colonies . . . and no authority at all,” Adams exclaimed. “If there be no such line, the consequence is either that the colonies are vassals of the Parliament or that they are totally independent. As it cannot be supposed to have been the intentions of the parties in the compact that we should be reduced to a state of vassalage, the conclusion is that it was their sense that we are thus independent.”
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Hutchinson and Adams were both closer to the truth than they realized.

When Virginia's House of Burgesses finally reconvened in March 1773—more than a year after its previous meeting—Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson responded to the Adams document and formed an eleven-man committee of correspondence.

“Not thinking our old and leading members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required,” Thomas Jefferson recalled,