Patrick Henry

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Also by Thomas S. Kidd

 

 

 

 

P
ATRICK HENRY'S CAREER was celebrated the most for his speeches. His performances summoned the memory of ancient heroes of the Greek and Roman republics who rallied their citizens to a noble and urgent cause with orations that changed history and made history themselves. But one of Henry's speeches thunders above his others in American patriotic memory: the address to the Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond in 1775, when he shamed reluctant colonial delegates into taking defensive measures against the British. Tension between crown and colonists was at a historic high, and many Americans expected war to begin shortly. Some Virginia delegates continued to push for reconciliation with Britain, which to Henry seemed cowardly. “We must fight! I
repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us!” he declared, his voice echoing in the rafters of the white clapboard church, the only building in Richmond large enough to hold the delegates. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” With this, Henry raised his arms and bellowed, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
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The speech represented Henry as “his pure self,” said future Virginia governor Edmund Randolph. “It blazed so as to warm the coldest heart. In the sacred place of meeting, the church, the imagination had no difficulty to conceive, when he launched forth in solemn tones various causes of scruple against oppressors, that the British king was lying prostrate from the thunder of heaven.” Without a doubt, Henry's rousing call to arms was the most electrifying speech of the Revolution.
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There was, however, another, lesser-known speech that framed Henry's remarkable career, a speech that revealed a different but no less fervent aspect of Henry's belief in political liberty. It came thirteen years later, at the Virginia convention tasked with evaluating the new U.S. Constitution, and accepting or rejecting the charter that would bind Americans into a firmer union. The vote among the delegates for ratification would be very close. Henry warned that in his mind's eye he could see angels watching, “reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America, and consequent happiness or misery of mankind—I am led to believe that much of the account on one side or the other, will depend on what we now decide.”
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But here is the surprise: Henry was an anti-federalist. He believed that Americans would secure their own destruction if they
ratified
the Constitution.

With its stirring summons to “liberty or death,” Henry's 1775 oration fits easily into American patriotic history. It is more difficult to account for Henry's opposition to the Constitution, because it leads us to confront a less familiar, and more problematic and enduring question raised by the American Revolution: Now that the people had won liberty, how might it be preserved? No one deserved more credit for the Revolution than Henry, and that fact alone makes his life a compelling one to study. But by 1788, Henry had begun to fear that the Revolution was in deep trouble. For him, the Constitution was no culmination of the Revolution. Ratifying the Constitution betrayed the Revolution because it threatened to forfeit America's freedom.

Some Federalists—supporters of the Constitution—truly loathed Henry for his opposition to the Constitution. The French writer St. John de Crèvecoeur, a longtime resident of New York and vehement Federalist, wrote to a friend from Virginia that the “nefarious and highly criminal P. Henry” was trying to destroy the incipient Union. “Now is the critical hour and which in Virginia remarkable from the opinion of Mr. Henry the fate of America seems now to depend.” If the Constitution failed there, Crèvecoeur believed, “the flames of civil war I am persuaded will be first kindled in your country, for both parties are and will be still more incensed against each other.”
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The fifty-two-year-old Henry was used to these kinds of accusations. He had heard them for most of his adult life, beginning with his legislative resolutions against the Stamp Act in 1765, the action that inaugurated the Revolutionary crisis with Britain. “Twenty-three years ago,” Henry mused, “I was supposed a traitor to my country: I was then said to be a bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country.” And here he was again—a man first among patriots, denounced as a turncoat.
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In his final speech at the Richmond ratifying convention, Henry evoked a vision of monitory angelic figures, to emphasize the gravity of Virginia's decision. The vote over ratification was an epochal moment in the history of human liberty, Henry declared. “I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.—I see it—I feel it.—I see
beings
of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision.” As he pleaded with his colleagues not to shackle themselves by consenting to this powerful new government, a howling storm arose outside the hall. Thunder crashed; delegates took cover under tables. Henry's first biographer wrote that the “spirits whom he had called, seemed to have come at his bidding.” And yet when the vote was cast, Henry lost. Virginia—and the United States—embraced the Constitution.
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Patrick Henry always wondered whether Americans had the moral and political fortitude to safeguard the American Revolution. To him, the Revolution promised a return to the best kind of republic: a virtuous society with robust local governments. In his view, and the view of many other patriots, moral dissipation and consolidated political power set the stage for tyranny. From his own education in the classics, he knew that republics had fallen many times throughout history. Henry had witnessed, and eloquently decried, the tyranny that had threatened the American colonies from 1765 to 1775 and incited a revolution. In 1788, with the war for independence won, Henry believed that the new republic was in peril again. Although he would reconcile himself tentatively to the outcome of ratification, Henry never got over the feeling that when Virginia approved the Constitution, the Revolution was lost. This patriot believed that he had helped America win its independence, only to find the legacy of the Revolution forsaken by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

Can we still place Henry in the pantheon of leading Founders if
he opposed the Constitution? Can a sincere patriot question the Constitution itself, the document that has ostensibly become the bedrock of national freedom? Whatever we think of his resistance to the “more perfect union” embraced by other patriots, Henry's opposition to the Constitution was born out of the cause that defined his career, an unshakeable commitment to liberty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

P
ATRICK HENRY WAS WORKING as a part-time barkeeper when Thomas Jefferson first met him. It was Christmas 1759, and the seventeen-year-old Jefferson was going to college at William and Mary, spending the Christmas holidays at the Hanover, Virginia, home of a family friend, Captain Nathaniel West Dandridge. Hanover, the midway point on the journey from Jefferson's Albemarle County home to the college at Williamsburg, was also the new home of Patrick Henry, who was twenty-three years old, and his young family.

Henry was also a good friend of Dandridge's; five years later, he would become Dandridge's lawyer. But that association seemed improbable in 1759: Henry had already failed twice as a shopkeeper, he had recently lost his family home in a fire, and his prospects
appeared uncertain at best. Neither he nor Jefferson came from elite families, but Jefferson's parents at least had the means to send him to college. Unlike Jefferson, Patrick would never receive any formal higher education. That Christmas, he was just trying to feed his family, which is what had brought him to work at his father-in-law's tavern and inn, just across from the Hanover courthouse. Patrick served drinks and tended to the needs of lodgers who had traveled by horse and carriage to address grievances and settle accounts in the bustling county seat on the edge of Virginia's farm frontier. On court days, little Hanover took on the festive air of a carnival, attracting all kinds of peddlers and performers. Men took bets on cockfights, horse races, and boxing matches, and hooted at convicted criminals sentenced to stand in the wooden pillory outside the courthouse. As he poured hot toddies and home-brewed beer for the guests and watched them play backgammon, dice, and cards, he pondered the future. He could not tend bar forever. Thomas Jefferson was young enough and well-off enough to enjoy years of contemplative study and political reflection. Henry, older, poorer, with two young children and a needy wife, had to find his calling in life as soon as possible; he needed a good career.
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Despite the difference in their age and situation, Jefferson and Henry became friends during Henry's daily visits to the Dandridge home. During the twelve days of Christmas, they enjoyed the “usual revelries of the season,” as Jefferson put it. Henry undoubtedly joined in the fun, playing the violin and taking turns in the dances that animated a household like Dandridge's in eighteenth-century Virginia. His wife, Sarah, a quiet, dutiful twenty-one-year-old, might also have joined in the reels down the length of Dandridge's parlor. And of course there was food: the colonists' celebrations from Christmas to Twelfth Night (January 5) featured gastronomic delights bordering on the gluttonous. For example, in 1771, the Christmas menu for the Fairfax family of northern Virginia included “six
mince pies, seven custards, twelve tarts, one chicken pie, and four puddings.”
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Although Jefferson observed Henry to be a bit coarse, he also found him charming. “His passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry,” Jefferson recalled. “He excelled in the last, and it attached everyone to him.” Patrick Henry had not proved himself successful in farming or business, but he won people's affections with his joyful embrace of the life he shared with other rural Virginians. He would find his vocation through the bonds that his conviviality created with his fellow citizens. Over the next five years he would move from behind his father-in-law's bar to join the bar—the legal profession—and rapidly rise in local politics. Yet he would remain close enough to the people among whom he lived to understand and represent their hopes and anxieties. Personality and place formed Patrick Henry's politics.
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