Lion of Liberty (4 page)

Deciding to obtain a third, but unnecessary signature, Henry foolishly chose to challenge Williamsburg's legal establishment by approaching Attorney General John Randolph, who boasted the best legal training and legal mind in the colony. Randolph was affronted by Henry's farm clothes and set about humiliating the arrogant farm boy with an examination that “continued for several hours,” according to one of Henry's friends, “interrogating him, not on . . . law, in which he no doubt soon discovered his deficiencies, but . . . on the laws of nature and of nations, on the policy of the feudal system, and on general history, which last he found to be his stronghold.”

“‘You defend your opinions well, sir,' Randolph conceded. ‘I will never trust to appearances again. Mr. Henry, if your industry be only half equal to your genius, I augur that you will do well and become an ornament and an honor to your profession.'”
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And so, with almost no knowledge of law,
Henry returned to his native hill country and, on April 15, 1760, took an oath and gained admission to the bar.

In fact, Henry's legal training was no less than that of most country lawyers—and more than many. America had no law schools, and only a handful of wealthy young men could afford to travel to London to study law at the Inns of Court. The rest learned their trade through a combination of self-study and apprenticeships with “master lawyers.” Once in practice, most lawyers did little more than draw up bills of sale, deeds, contracts, and wills, leaving serious disputes in small towns and rural areas to mediation by sheriffs and ministers. For court cases, jury pools were so small that jurors, lawyers, and defendants were on a first-name basis and defense lawyers routinely packed juries with friends and neighbors.

With his father, step brother, and five other family members presiding in the Hanover County Court, it was not surprising that Patrick Henry proved phenomenally successful—so much so that he attracted clients from the farthest points of neighboring counties to appear with him in his father's court. In the closing months of 1760 after receiving his license, Patrick Henry handled 197 cases; by 1763 his caseload had climbed to 374 and his income had reached more than £600, or about $42,500 in today's currency—an enormous sum in eighteenth-century rural Virginia. In the first three years of practice, he handled 1,185 suits, in addition to preparing legal documents and dispensing legal advice in his father-in-law's tavern.

To his credit, Henry kept his word to Nicholas and studied the full range of legal texts, including Sir William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
, William Bohun's
Declarations and Pleadings
, Giles Jacob's
The Compleat Chancery-Practiser
, Samuel Pufendorf's
The Law of Nature and Nations
, and other tomes. Little by little, he acquired as much knowledge of British law as any lawyer in Virginia, and on December 1, 1763, after three years of practicing mostly “paper law,” he stepped onto center stage for his inaugural appearance in a major courtroom drama—the Parsons' Cause.

But as his father the judge and the rest of the packed courtroom awaited his closing argument, Patrick Henry stood silent, his head bowed, staring at the floor, apparently at a loss for words. His clients could only fear the worst for their case.

Chapter 2

Patrick Henry's clients had good reason to despair. Depending on his summation, many could lose their properties and all their assets. In an earlier trial, the court had already found them guilty of failure to pay their taxes to the Anglican Church, as required by law—regardless of their religion. This was their second trial to determine how much they owed—a far more complex calculation than it might seem.

In the absence of currency, Virginia required each parish to pay the Anglican minister 16,000 pounds of tobacco a year, which the minister then sold in the open market. Parish landowners paid into the total in proportion to the acreage they had under cultivation. Ministers earned more when tobacco prices rose and absorbed losses when they fell, but over the years they earned an average of about two pence per pound. In 1758, however, a catastrophic drought devastated Virginia's tobacco crop, sending tobacco prices to record highs but reducing tobacco stocks to levels that would have left many planters bankrupt, without any tobacco left to sell if they delivered the required 16,000 pounds of tobacco to each parish priest. Virginia's legislature—the House of Burgesses—passed the Twopenny Act, to permit each parish to pay its minister in cash instead of tobacco at the average rate that ministers had earned in the sixty years the tobacco tax had
been in effect—namely, two pence a pound, or a total of about V£133 (Virginia currency), instead of 16,000 pounds of tobacco.

The drought, however, had sent the actual market value of tobacco soaring to more than three times that amount, and each minister would have earned about V£400 had he been paid in tobacco and sold it on the open market. With the richest planters profiting most from high tobacco prices, the outraged ministers protested, saying that the House of Burgesses had no authority to alter what was “the king's law” on church taxes. They sent lawyers to London, where the British government agreed—and voided the Twopenny Act. The ministers then sued their respective parishes for payment of the difference between the two pennies per pound they received in 1758 and the market value of the 16,000 pounds of tobacco that they should have received. The Reverend James Maury, a renowned scholar who had tutored young Thomas Jefferson and prepared him for the College of William and Mary, filed his suit in the County Court of Hanover before the devout Anglican Justice John Henry. Henry declared the Twopenny Act to have been “no law,” ruled in favor of Reverend Maury, and ordered a second trial to determine damages.

Believing that Justice Henry's decision had made the amount of damages a mere formality, the lawyer for parishioners quit the case, telling his clients to await the inevitable jury determination and pay Reverend Maury his due. Refusing to face trial without counsel, however, the vestrymen turned to young Patrick Henry, with hopes that, given his uncle's ties to the church, he might persuade Reverend Maury to reduce his monetary demands enough to permit local farmers to avoid bankruptcy.

Reverend Maury's renown drew a larger than normal crowd to the Hanover County Courthouse. Anxiety and anger tinged the usual holiday mood, as prosperous planters mixed with ordinary farmers and their relatives from Maury's parish—all of them stern-faced over the prospect of paying the minister his pound of flesh. Adding to the agitation was a large group of dissenters—Presbyterians and the like—who resented having to pay taxes to the Anglican Church and had vague hopes of turning the trial into a protest against church-state ties. As would-be spectators streamed toward the courthouse, hawkers extolled the benefits of white
lightning, patent medicines, livestock, young slaves, and whatever else they hoped to sell. As Patrick Henry approached the courthouse, he saw his uncle's carriage arrive and, fearing that his uncle's presence might sway jurors, he ran up to plead with him not to attend the trial.

“Why?” said the surprised clergymen.

“Because,” young Patrick said disingenuously, “I am engaged in opposition to the clergy, and your appearance there might strike me with such awe as to prevent me from doing justice to my clients.” Convinced that his nephew faced humiliation, the old parson climbed back into his carriage and rode home.
¹

Inside, the call to order brought presiding justice John Henry to the center of the long bench, followed by six other justices—all of them relatives of the Henry family by blood or marriage. Although twenty Anglican parsons had come to support the Reverend Maury, farmers made up the rest of the packed courtroom. After the clerk called the case, Justice Henry ordered the sheriff to summon a jury. Of the twelve called, at least four, including one of Patrick Henry's relatives, were Presbyterian dissenters. A fifth member of the jury was one of the parishioners whom Reverend Maury was suing. Maury objected, charging that the sheriff had gone “among the vulgar herd” and failed “to summon gentlemen.” He complained that he knew one juror was “a party in the cause. . . . Yet this man's name was not erased. He was even called in court, and had he not excused himself, would probably have been admitted.”
²

Henry shot to his feet, demanding to know whether Maury was accusing the prospective jurors of dishonesty. Taken aback by Henry's aggressive challenge, Maury remained silent, and Henry turned to his father, proclaiming the jurors to be honest men and, therefore, “unexceptionable.” Justice Henry agreed and the jurors took their oaths and their seats in the jury box to await the plaintiff's argument.

Maury's lawyer had a compelling case: The parish had paid him a mere £144 at a time when market prices of tobacco, according to the testimony of two tobacco dealers, would have yielded three times that amount had he received the usual 16,000 pounds of tobacco and sold it. With the Twopenny Act null and void and there being no excuse for underpayment,
Maury's lawyer demanded that the jury award his client the difference between £144 (about $8,800) and £432 (about $26,000) or £288 (about $17,500 today), plus legal fees and court costs.

The assembled parsons nodded their collective heads in agreement and turned to each other with self-satisfied smiles. Farmers among the spectators shuffled their feet uncomfortably and moaned softly over the huge losses they and their friends faced. As Maury's lawyer took his seat, Patrick Henry stepped onto center stage.

“No one had ever heard him speak, and curiosity was on tiptoe,” according to William Wirt, a future U.S. attorney general. “He rose very awkwardly.”
³

In contrast to the dignified robes of the justices and men of the cloth, his coarse country clothes, though neat, gave him the appearance of a penitent rather than an attorney. Not a soul in the courtroom believed that his clients did not owe Parson Maury the difference between the amount they had paid him and the market value of 16,000 pounds of tobacco in 1758. Seconds passed—it seemed like minutes—as silence gripped the courtroom. Finally, Henry tilted his head upward, eyes fixed at the ceiling, lips pursed, and . . .

... still nothing. Not a word.

The spectators shifted uneasily in their seats, wondering with his father whether he was too young for the task ahead. Young Henry, however, had practiced long hours in the silence of the woods rehearsing for this moment—rehearsing rhetoric, trying out different acting techniques, reading plays aloud, memorizing lines with universal meanings that might apply in court. So he was ready when he stepped into court on December 1, 1763, and he opened his performance with a classic dramatic pause that gripped the courtroom with suspense.

When he finally spoke, he was nothing short of brilliant, modestly lowering his head at appropriate times, lifting his eyes to heaven in supplication at the right moment, roaring in rage, mewling in sorrow or pity, all but whispering one moment and thundering the next. In contrast to the pseudo-English inflections of most lawyers, he spoke the language of his jurors, with a mountain drawl. His days in the tavern across the road had
taught him how to win their minds and hearts. Six feet tall, lean, cheek-bones protruding from his gaunt face, he marched back and forth, using every element of the stage. Instead of a defense attorney, he turned into a prosecutor, charging Maury and the Anglican clergy with un-Christian acts of extracting the last pennies from poverty-stricken farmers and forcing their wives and babies from their homes.

“We have heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy, but how is this manifested?” he demanded to know.

The failed storekeeper and sometime tavern-keeper had found his voice and vocation.

“A wondrous change came over him,” according to his grandson. “His attitude became erect and lofty, his face lighted up with genius, and his eyes seemed to flash fire; his gestures became graceful and impressive, his voice and his emphasis peculiarly charming. His appeals to the passions were overpowering. Those who heard him said he made their blood run cold and their hair to rise on end.”
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