Lion of Liberty (37 page)

In a separate election, Patrick Henry won a seat in the Electoral College and cast his vote for George Washington as president. Allowed to cast two votes, he cast his other vote for Antifederalist George Clinton as vice president. Washington won by a unanimous vote, while Federalist John Adams received the second largest vote total and defeated Clinton for the vice presidency.

With Washington's approval, Madison fulfilled his campaign pledge to champion Henry's bill of rights. After taking his seat in the House of Representatives, he moved for “Amendments . . . that may serve the double purpose of satisfying the minds of well-meaning opponents, and of providing additional guards in favor of liberty.”
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Madison failed to address the issue of states' rights, however, and Antifederalist Senator Grayson expressed his outrage to Henry:

The seeds of civil war were taking root.

Four months later, Madison resolved that the Constitution be amended with “a declaration of the rights of the people” to ensure “the tranquility of the public mind, and the stability of the government.”
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Although members proposed seventy-five amendments, the House approved only seventeen, and the Senate reduced the number to twelve. The states ratified ten, which became known collectively as the Bill of Rights. After reading them,
Henry exploded with rage over the failure of the amendments to restrict national government powers over the states. “I wrote the first of those amendments in these words,” he exploded in front of his sons. “‘Each state in the Union
shall respectively retain
every power, jurisdiction and right which is not by this Constitution delegated to the Congress of the United States or to the departments of the Federal Government.' But they have omitted it . . . and changed it into this
equivocal
thing . . . ‘or to the people.' My sons, this Constitution cannot last. It will not last a century. We can only get rid of it by a most violent and bloody struggle.”
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The South would long remember his words.

Despite Henry's objections to the amendments, Americans of all political persuasions hailed him as father of the Bill of Rights and champion of individual liberties, although it was Madison who had proposed them in Congress and fought for their adoption.

The overwhelming Federalist victory in the congressional and presidential elections swept Federalists to power in most state legislatures, and, when the Virginia legislature reconvened in October 1789, the Federalist majority all but emasculated Henry as a major political force. “In the business of the lately proposed amendments,” he wrote despondently to his old friend and political ally, Richard Henry Lee, “I see no ground to hope for good, but the contrary.”
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After a few weeks, he left for home—a certain indication that Dorothea would bear him another child nine months later.

Knowing nothing of the joys that awaited Henry at home, Edmund Randolph told Washington that “Mr. Henry has quitted rather in discontent that the present assembly is not so pleasant as the last.”
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With Henry's departure, Antifederalists lost heart. Even in North Carolina, they realized that Henry's struggle to limit federal government powers had come to an end. On November 21, 1789, North Carolina ratified the Constitution and became the twelfth state to join the Union. Rhode Island followed suit the following spring. In March 1790, Henry's staunch ally Senator William Grayson died. Virginia's moderate Federalist governor, General Henry (“Lighthorse Harry”) Lee, believed that appointing Henry to fill Grayson's seat would reconcile some of the political differences between Federalists and Antifederalists and the personal differences
between America's two most revered patriots. Lee wrote to Washington, saying that Henry believed that “you consider him a factious and seditious character. . . . He seems to be deeply and sorely affected. It is very much to be regretted; for he is a man of positive virtue . . . and, were it not for his feelings above expressed, I verily believe he would be found among the most active supporters of your administration.”
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Unaware, apparently, of the rumors of his enmity for Henry, Washington replied immediately, charging that “these reports are propagated with evil intentions to create personal differences. . . . With solemn truth . . . I can declare that I never expressed such sentiments of that gentleman . . . ” Though born in the Tidewater region of Virginia, Washington had chopped his way through the wilderness as a surveyor and soldier and knew western thinking better than most. His differences with Henry were purely philosophical: Washington believed that only strict law enforcement by a strong federal government could protect individual liberties from the ravages of anarchy; he believed the patchwork of independent sovereign states that Henry favored would provoke incessant European-style wars. Their political differences, however, had never eroded their mutual respect—nor had either ever questioned the other's patriotism or love of country.

“On the question of the Constitution,” Washington acknowledged to Lee, “Mr. Henry and myself, it is well known, have been of different opinions; but personally, I have always respected and esteemed him; nay, more, I have conceived myself under obligation to him for the friendly manner in which he transmitted to me some insidious writings that were sent to him in . . . 1777, with a view to embark him in the opposition that was forming against me.”
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After showing Henry the Washington letter, Lee offered Henry Virginia's Senate seat. Deeply moved by the president's words, Henry waxed eloquent, saying he was “grateful . . . to know that some portion of regard remains for me amongst my countrymen; especially those . . . whose opinions I most value.” Calling Washington's words “most flattering,” he said the fear that he had “forfeited the good-will of that personage” had pained him, and the knowledge that “there was no ground to believe I had incurred his censure gives very great pleasure.” Henry nonetheless declined
Lee's offer of a Senate seat, saying that “my present views are to spend my days in privacy.”
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Henry went on to serve out his term in the legislature, but refused to stand for reelection in the fall of 1791 and would never again serve in public office. He had lost his battle against big government, and he knew it. He also needed to earn some money.

“I am obliged to be very industrious and to take on me great fatigue to clear myself of debt,” he explained to daughter Betsey. “I hope to be able to accomplish this in a year or two if it pleases God to continue me in health and strength.”
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Not surprisingly, with Henry at home full time, Dolly gave birth to her seventh and his thirteenth child—Nathaniel West, born on April 7, 1790. To his great distress, however, his sister Anne died, and Henry, in effect, adopted her son, his nephew, twelve-year-old John Henry Christian (“Johnny”), raising him as his own, sending him to Hampden-Sydney College at sixteen and then training him for the law. Other relatives took in Anne's six orphaned daughters. Johnny had no sooner entered the Henry household, however, when death claimed grandson Edward Fontaine, one of Martha's four children. Weeks later, Martha's husband, John Fontaine, succumbed to malaria. All but broken emotionally, Martha and her three surviving children came to live with the Henrys. By late summer of 1792, the Henrys were harboring fifteen children, along with his grown daughter Martha.

“What a weight of worldly concerns rest upon this old man's shoulders,” his neighbor Richard Venable said in disbelief as he arrived at the Henrys' home for dinner. “He supports it with strength, but nature must sink under the load ere long.”
²⁹
Within weeks, Henry received another crushing blow: his twenty-one-year-old son Edward—never robust—had fallen ill. Although he made a partial recovery and went to stay with his aunt and uncle, he relapsed within a few months and died at the age of twenty-three.

At the time, Henry was doing his best to supervise his farms and rebuild his law practice—not an easy task for a man of fifty-six suffering the debilitating aftereffects of repeated bouts with malaria and intestinal infections.
To reduce the amount of time away from home, he built an office on his property on “an avenue of fine black locusts—a walk in front of it . . . at some distance from his dwelling,” according to one of his grandsons.

After years away from home, his new office allowed him to spend more time treasuring his children, grandchildren and, of course, his wife. Although clients often came to see him at Pleasant Grove, his practice nonetheless required hours, and sometimes days, of travel in his bumpy gig, mile after mile, on unimproved roads across vast spaces of farmland and through dark forests, where brigands, runaway slaves, and renegade Indians often lurked to prey on passersby. His account books often showed little pecuniary return for his efforts—the ubiquitous “barrel of rum” from one client, £2.10 (about $100 today) from another, three shillings (£0.15, or about $15 today) from a third, and nothing from many others. His practice led him on a 200-mile circuit across five counties into the Blue Ridge Mountains and back, and, little by little, case by case, he restored his pre-Revolution reputation and climbed back to the pinnacle of his profession as America's finest defense attorney.

In rebuilding his practice, Henry naturally took on high-profile cases where possible, but he never disdained cases of lesser importance and almost always managed to turn them into causes célèbres that received regional, and sometimes national, attention—often for their humor as much as their legal significance. After a wagon driver ran over and killed a turkey, then drove away with the dead bird, the turkey's owner sued both driver and passenger. Rather than serve time in jail, the wagon driver submitted to a whipping, but the passenger refused, saying he was innocent.
“Gentleman of the jury,” Henry pleaded on behalf of the turkey farmer, “this man tells you he had nothing to do with the turkey. I dare say he didn't . . .

“ . . . until it was roasted!”

Judge Roane said Henry had pronounced the word
roasted
“with such rotundity of voice and comicalness of manner and gesture that it threw everyone into a fit of laughter. . . . I have likened this faculty of Mr. Henry of operating upon the feelings, whether tragic or comic, by the mere tone of his voice . . . ”

In one of Henry's first cases after the Virginia ratification convention, John Hook, a wealthy Scottish storekeeper with Tory sympathies, sued a former Continental Army procurement officer for confiscating two of Hook's steers to feed the troops during the 1781 Cornwallis invasion of Virginia. After the plaintiff's lawyer had clearly proved his client's case, Henry stood and stared at the floor, motionless, in prayer-like silence. He turned to the jury and, according to Judge Archibald Stuart, “painted the distresses of the American army, exposed almost naked to the rigor of a winter's sky, marking the frozen ground over which they marched with the blood from their unshod feet.”
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“Where was the man,” Henry asked, “who had an American heart in his bosom who would not have thrown open his fields, his barns, his cellars, the doors of his house, the portals of his breast to have received with open arms, the meanest soldier in the little band of famished patriots? Where is the man?”

Henry turned to the defendant with an accusing finger and roared:

“There he stands!”

After a pause, Henry turned back to the jury: “But whether the heart of an American beats in his bosom, you, gentlemen, are to judge.”
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Judge Stuart described the rest of Henry's presentation:

“But hark!” Henry sang out. “What notes of discord are these which disturb the general joy and silence the acclamations of victory? They are the notes of
John Hook,
hoarsely bawling through the American camp:
‘Beef! Beef! Beef!'”