Lion of Liberty (3 page)

Patrick Henry grew up “an indolent, dreamy, frolicsome creature,” according to William Wirt, a family friend, who said the boy harbored

Although Wirt called Henry's “aversions to study . . . invincible, and his faculties benumbed by indolence,”
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one of Henry's boyhood friends portrays him as simply a normal country boy. “He was remarkably fond of fun . . . but his fun was innocent, and I never discovered in any one action of his childhood or youth the least spice of ill-nature or malevolence; he was remarkably fond of hunting, fishing, and playing on the violin.”
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Henry's future brother-in-law, Samuel Meredith, who was four years older and lived nearby, remembered him as

Fiddling, of course, was one of the most popular pastimes in early America. Fiddlers such as Henry seldom read music, relying instead on memory and improvisational skills to learn the tunes they played. He also learned to play the flute, English guitar, and harpsichord.

Like most country boys, he learned to fish in his early years, and, by the time he was ten, his father had taught him to shoot a muzzle-loading musket with unfailing accuracy—and add tasty small game to the family fare. Like most literate parents in the colonies, the Henrys taught their two boys to read, write, and calculate, using the Scriptures and a variety of literature and periodicals. John Henry taught his sons Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, and science—and the histories of Rome, England, and the American colonies. Sarah improved their skills in reading and writing and exposed them to English literature. “He was delighted with
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
,” one friend recalled. “I have known him to read several hours together, lying with his back upon a bed. He had a most retentive memory, making whatever he read his own.”
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By the time Patrick Henry was fifteen, he and his brother had read the
Odyssey
in Greek, mastered Horace, Virgil, and Livy in Latin, and conversed well enough in colloquial Latin to chat with educated Europeans who could not speak English.

Despite his fine education, Patrick Henry grew up with the coarse mountain accent of the wild country boys that lived nearby. “Mr. Henry was remarkably well acquainted with mankind,” his son-in-law Judge Spencer Roane explained. “This faculty arose from mingling freely with mankind and from a keen sense of observation. . . . Nothing escaped his attention.”
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Unlike Tidewater Virginians, Piedmonters were a secular lot, chafing under taxes they had to pay to the Anglican Church, resenting restrictions on non-Anglican religious practices, hating government agents, and mocking both royalty and nobility in the bawdy folk tunes they sang at local taverns. Although baptized in the Anglican Church of his father and uncle, Patrick Henry also attended his mother's Presbyterian services, where he learned the differences between autocracy and democracy. Anglicans pledged unquestioned allegiance to the king and the Bishop of London, who appointed all parish priests; Presbyterians governed their own churches and elected their own ministers. It was the Presbyterian Church that “nourished . . . his partiality for the dissenters of the Established Church,” according to Edmund Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson and scion of one of Virginia's oldest and most powerful families. “From a
repetition of . . . the history of their sufferings,” Randolph said, Henry began “descanting . . . on the martyrs in the cause of liberty.”
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By attending two churches, Henry received a broad-based religious education, learning of the infallibility of King and Church in his father's Anglican church and the fallibility of King and Church in his mother's Presbyterian church.

When Patrick Henry turned fifteen, John Henry lacked the money to send his son to an English or Scottish university, but reasoned that a university education would be of little practical use in the West. He sent young Patrick to work in a country store to learn how to run a business. A year later he helped Patrick and William open a store of their own, where Virginia's complex barter economy put the boys at an immediate disadvantage. Ninety-five percent of Americans lived on farms and bought what they needed with a jug of whiskey, a bag of grain, a piglet, a chicken, a land certificate, or a personal note. By the end of their first year, the Henry boys had accumulated a stack of IOUs, but no liquid assets to replenish their merchandise, and they went out of business.

In the fall of 1754, Patrick Henry, now eighteen, married sixteen-year-old Sarah Shelton, a girl he had known since early childhood. Sarah's grandfather was a bookseller and the first publisher of the
Virginia Gazette.
Her father was not only a successful Hanover County planter, he owned the thriving inn and tavern opposite the Hanover County Courthouse, on the Stage Road from Fredericksburg to Williamsburg. After Patrick Henry's uncle married them, Sarah's father gave the newlyweds a 300-acre farm adjoining his own, along with six slaves. From the beginning, however, their lives on the farm seemed destined for disaster. Years of successive tobacco crops had depleted soil nutrients and left the land yielding low-quality weed. In 1757, Henry harvested only 6.5 bushels of tobacco, for which he received just over £10 pounds ($610 today) at market. Making matters worse, their six slaves were mere boys—children of recently imported slaves. Unskilled and unable to speak English, they were of little use to Patrick, who nonetheless had to feed, clothe, and house them—while he himself performed the “labor on his farm with his own hands,” according to his grandson.
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Nor was Sarah's life any easier. Within a year, their first child, Martha, was born. A boy, John, followed the next year, and a third—another boy, William—was on his way in 1757 when fire consumed their farmhouse
and its contents. Patrick, Sarah, and the children moved into an empty cabin and tried to halt their financial free fall. Patrick sold his slaves to furnish the cabin and buy a stock of goods to open another store, then hired a clerk to tend the store while he worked the fields and Sarah tended the children and kitchen garden.

He could not have picked a worse time to open a store: A drought had devastated the area's harvest and left farmers without means to buy necessities, let alone extras or luxuries. At the end of his first year, Patrick Henry had collected a mere £10. During the first half of his second year, only twenty-six customers set foot in the store. In debt himself, without capital to buy more inventory, with a wife, a newborn, and two other children to feed, he closed the store and moved his family into the attic of his father-in-law's inn, across the road from the Hanover County Courthouse. In exchange for room and board, Henry tended bar and entertained customers with his fiddle, hiring an overseer to continue wringing whatever he could out of the farmland.

In the winter of 1759-1760, Patrick went by himself to several Christmas celebrations to search for job opportunities, leaving Sarah alone at home to mind the children—a lonely, isolated role she would play almost without variation the rest of her life.

“My acquaintance with Mr. Henry commenced in the winter of 1759- 1760,” Thomas Jefferson recalled. On his way to enroll at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was spending his Christmas holidays on the 6,000-acre Hanover plantation of the wealthy shipbuilder Nathaniel West Dandridge, a son-in-law of the colonial governor and a cousin of George Washington's fiancée, Martha Dandridge Custis. A neighbor of John Henry, Dandridge was a close friend of the judge, and young Patrick “was at home as one of the family,” according to Jefferson.

Hanover County was entirely rural, with only about 10,000 people scattered across the land—more than half of them slaves. Hanover town—the county seat and largest community—had fewer than fifty houses. Court days, though, turned the town into a fairground. A procession of vendors peddled horses, quilts, “white lightning,” and patent medicines often more potent than white lightning. In the yard before the courthouse, burly sheriffs and fierce-looking deputies dispensed justice—often dragging sobbing women or somnambulant drunks into the stocks or flogging runaway slaves, as spectators hallooed at the agony.

Across the road from the courthouse, the Shelton tavern was aswarm with lawyers and their clients, debating virtually every written, unwritten, and should've-been-written law. Henry's cousin William Winston recalled that Patrick dressed like most hill folk—in coarse work clothes, “very often barefooted. . . . He was very active and attentive to his guests and very frequently amused them with his violin on which he performed very well.”
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Reels were popular, setting the men to dancing—and tripping over themselves. Patrick Henry sang Scottish ballads—some bawdier than others, but all of them enlivened with facial expressions that sent drinkers doubling over with laughter:

Between the laughter, singing, and dancing, Patrick Henry listened intently to the legal arguments in the tavern and attended trials at the courthouse when he could. As his interest peaked, he bought copies of a
Digest of Virginia Acts
and Sir Edward Coke's
First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, or, A Commentarie upon Littleton
.
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Using a fragmented grasp of the law, he debated lawyers in the tavern and practiced a crude but entertaining form of law, offering free legal counsel for every drink his client bought and revealing a spell-binding gift for “talking a long string of learning.” Warned that practicing without a license carried the risk of personal liability—and even a musket ball from a disgruntled client—he went to the colonial capital to get a license.

On April 1, 1760, Patrick Henry arrived in Williamsburg for oral examinations, each to be administered by a renowned legal scholar. In contrast to the impeccably tailored, bewigged examiners, Henry appeared in
drab homespun—his mountain drawl all but unintelligible as he spoke of his country learning, which he feared was scarcely up to Williamsburg standards.

Truth was, Henry knew next to nothing about the law, but he needed to pass only two of four examinations to obtain a license. The first examiner, law professor George Wythe, refused to receive the ill-dressed young man at first, but relented—as did the second, the illustrious attorney Robert Carter Nicholas—after Henry made a dramatic plea defending his right to be heard. Even then, he resisted arbitrary rule by authorities. Henry entertained both Wythe and Nicholas with dramatic gestures and effusive praise for the “righteousness of the law,” the “natural rights of man,” and “the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed upon us” in Virginia. He had heard the phrases in his father's courtroom, his father-in-law's tavern, and his uncle's church, and he assumed they were relevant to the law.
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He spoke of honest, hard-working farmers in Virginia's hill country, beset by savage Indians and vicious squatters. He talked of scalpings, murders, and cries of orphaned children—and the need for lawyers to defend their interests. “The music of his voice” and “natural elegance of his style and manner” all but transfixed Nicholas, and, after eliciting Henry's promise to continue studying the law, he signed the young man's license.