Patrick Henry (19 page)

Washington angrily replied to Henry that he needed a professional army that he could train, discipline, and count on to stay long-term. As for Henry's volunteer scheme, Washington wrote, “I can not countenance in the smallest degree, what I know to be pernicious in the extreme. Short enlistments when founded on the best plan, are repugnant to order and subversive of discipline, and men held upon such terms, will never be equal to the important ends of war; but when they are of the
volunteer kind
, they are still more destructive.” Henry quickly dropped the idea, saying that he deferred to the general's opinions in military matters. Despite their disagreements, Washington's pleas had gotten Henry's attention. The governor wrote repeatedly to Colonel Charles Lewis of Albemarle County in early 1777 instructing him to take his regiment north to
support Washington. He urged Lewis to move as quickly as possible, despite the incompleteness of his regiment, before the Continental army should “receive a wound that may prove mortal.”
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Even though he was struggling to manage the war in Virginia and support the military campaign of the new United States, Henry was reelected as governor in May 1777. But he would be plagued by the same problems in his new term. In May, the legislature passed a plan for more vigorous recruitment and, if necessary, a compulsory draft. But the new policy resulted in desertions and ever-higher expenses. “Although it seems impossible to enlist continental recruits here,” Henry told Washington, “yet the zeal of our countrymen is great and general in the public cause.” But revolutionary zeal often could not overcome Virginians' fear of the prospect of deprivation or death when serving as soldiers in the Continental army.
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Henry faced a fundamental problem common across a nation barely a year old: many Virginians were motivated to fight for their homes and their state, but not for the new country called “America.” When a British fleet entered the Chesapeake Bay in August 1777, Henry called out county militias to defend against invasion and, in a letter to George Wythe, expressed his delight at the response he received: “amid all the discouragements which the backwardness of our countrymen to enlist into the regular service throws us under, I congratulate you, Sir, on the zeal and alacrity with which that demand was generally complied with.” As many as 5,000 men were said to have risen up to defend Virginia against the invasion (which never materialized). Given the stark contrast between Virginians' enthusiastic participation in the militias, and their resistance to enlisting in the Continental army, we can understand Henry's sanguine attitude about militias. For these volunteers, Virginia commanded more allegiance than did their new nation. This devotion to one's state
was a sentiment many Americans would continue to feel strongly, even after the war's end.
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The Continental army continued to struggle in the North. The British launched a massive campaign against Philadelphia in July, resulting in a clash at Brandywine Creek, about thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, on September 11. There, Washington suffered a humiliating defeat with about 1,100 men dead, wounded, or captured. Two weeks later the British occupied Philadelphia itself. On October 4, Washington tried to surprise a British garrison at Germantown, five miles north of Philadelphia, but his complicated plan of attack was repulsed. The Continental Congress was forced to flee to York, Pennsylvania.

Washington was discovering that America's national government was not designed for the kind of nimble authority needed in wartime. In 1776, the patriots had summoned the Continental Congress to address the crisis with Britain, not to create a national entity that would be sovereign over the states. America's initial political framework was formalized in late 1777 when Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States. Then Congress sent it to the states for ratification, a dilatory process that lasted until 1781. But from 1777 until 1789, the Articles comprised America's government. The novelty of American political union is evident in the very beginning of the document, when Article I states that the “style of this confederacy shall be, ‘The United States of America.'” Until then, no one really knew what the independent country would be called.
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As its name suggested, the national government under the Articles was a
confederation
of sovereign, independent states. This was no fully integrated nation. The Articles meant only to codify a unified entity authorized to conduct war and diplomacy on behalf of the states. But even the Confederation's power to make war was restricted
by the fact that the Congress—the only branch of the new government—lacked the power to tax. Instead, the state legislatures were supposed to tax their respective citizens and deliver funds for the “charges of war” to the Congress. The contributions due from the states would be proportional to the value of the land in each. This sounded good in principle, but in the desperate economic circumstances of war, the states routinely evaded their responsibility to supply requested funds.
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Despite its structural defects, the Confederation government was not totally ineffective, as some historians have suggested. It was functional enough, after all, to enable Americans to defeat the British in the American Revolution. But the lack of taxing authority did result in paralyzing inefficiencies that George Washington found exasperating as commander of the Continental army. After the war, Washington and his allies James Madison and Alexander Hamilton would decide the Articles of Confederation did not afford the nation nearly enough power—a decision that Patrick Henry would ultimately denounce, in the debate over ratifying the Constitution.

Washington's humiliation in Philadelphia threatened to arouse the same desperation Americans had felt after the defeats of the previous fall. New movements by British forces sought to drive a wedge between New England and the rest of the colonies. In fall 1777, General John Burgoyne hoped to move his lumbering force of 9,000 men to the south along Lake Champlain to the Hudson River and Albany. But repeated battles with Continentals and American militia wore his army down, and ultimately Burgoyne surrendered his army at Saratoga, New York, on October 17.

News of the great victory arrived in Virginia within two weeks, and Williamsburg held a military parade to celebrate. Cannon discharges and three volleys of musket fire were followed by “3 huzzas from all present; joy and satisfaction, upon the occasion, was evident
in the countenance of every one; and the evening was celebrated with ringing of bells, illuminations, and etc.” Governor Henry enhanced the festivities by ordering a “gill of rum” for each soldier.
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Henry knew the victory at Saratoga warranted more than merriment. He proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving, with the hope that Virginians might not, “through a vain and presumptuous confidence in our own strength, be led away to forget the hand of Heaven, whose assistance we have so often in times of distress implored, and which, as frequently before, so more especially now, we have experienced in this signal success of the arms of the United States, whereby the divine sanction of the righteousness of our cause is most illustriously displayed.” According to Henry and other Christian patriots, proper dependence on God began with their acknowledgment of divine blessings, of which Saratoga was an obvious example. Henry worried that Americans might turn away from God, ironically, at those moments of military success for which they had prayed. Victory might tempt them to become ungrateful, arrogant, or lazy. He closed the proclamation with the prayer “God save the United States,” replacing the familiar pre-Revolutionary prayer of “God save the king.”
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AMID THE ANXIETIES OF WAR, Patrick Henry found some personal happiness. In October 1777, two and a half years after Sarah's untimely death, he married Dorothea Dandridge. Dorothea, in her early twenties, was much younger than Henry, who was forty-one. Coming from a prestigious family—she was the daughter of Nathaniel West Dandridge, Henry's family friend and law client—she helped Henry grow even more connected to wealthy Virginia elites. She and Patrick would eventually have eleven children together—in addition to his six children from his marriage with Sarah—although two of them died very young. Dorothea brought twelve slaves into the marriage, upping Henry's total number of bound workers to
forty-two. He sold his Scotchtown plantation and moved his family onto a new one, Leatherwood, situated on 10,000 acres in Henry County, a new jurisdiction in southern Virginia recently named for him. Such new land acquisitions appealed to Henry and other Virginians of means, even in wartime. Many, including Henry, wanted the state to expand its power into the western territories, especially Kentucky, to develop more land. But with this push, Virginians also wanted to eliminate the western territories as a base for British operations and to secure settlers against disgruntled Native Americans, who were inclined to side with the British in the Revolution.
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George Rogers Clark, a young surveyor and soldier in Kentucky, became Virginia's leading fighter against the British and Native Americans in the West. (Clark was the older brother of William, who would become famous thanks to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which occurred during Thomas Jefferson's presidency.) Clark not only clamored for a vigorous defense of Kentucky, which had recently been organized as a large county of Virginia, but he also proposed attacks against small British outposts in the distant Illinois country. Ultimately he hoped to lead an army against the British fort at Detroit, where a victory could end all western threats against Virginia.

To begin his campaign, Clark appealed to Henry for permission to attack the small British and French settlement at Kaskaskia in southern Illinois. He claimed, dubiously, that Kaskaskia was a key staging area for British and Native American attacks against Kentucky. Nevertheless, in December 1777, Henry and the Virginia government agreed to sponsor the expedition. The governor issued two sets of instructions to keep Clark's real mission a secret. Publicly, Clark was authorized simply to raise a militia and proceed to Kentucky. The secret orders directed Clark's militia to push ahead and attack Kaskaskia. Henry advised Clark to treat mercifully any British residents of Illinois who professed allegiance to Virginia. But those
who remained loyal to the empire “must feel the miseries of war,” the governor insisted. Jefferson, George Mason, and George Wythe also supported Clark's expedition, hoping it would score revenge for the area's recent Indian attacks, which they viewed as cruel and unprovoked. They assured Clark that his militiamen could count on a reward of three hundred acres each, derived from lands taken from Native Americans.
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The promise of the expedition immediately clashed with the realities of wartime Virginia. The state had few excess men or resources to draw on for a grand campaign into the West. Within three weeks of giving his approval, Henry was scolding Clark for trying to recruit volunteers from south-central Virginia. Any available men from those counties were needed for the Continental army, and Henry understood that Clark had agreed to seek recruits primarily from Kentucky and the western counties. Clark struggled badly to raise his militia; soon he also had to combat rumors spreading among his small army that the expedition against Illinois was only a pretext for a land grab by Clark, Henry, and others in the Virginia gentry, which led to a rash of desertions. Nevertheless, Clark and his troops easily seized Kaskaskia and Vincennes in July 1778, a success that Henry said “equaled the most sanguine expectations.” One of Henry's letters to Clark during this period revealed a somewhat surprising glimpse of vanity in the governor, when Henry pressed Clark to secure him “two of the best stallions that [can] possibly be found at the Illinois.” The expense of the horses and their transport to Virginia was no object, Henry wrote, because he simply wanted the best pureblood Spanish horses available. Letters like this, as well as Henry's preoccupation with land acquisitions, show that despite Henry's emphasis on virtue, he too wrestled occasionally with the temptations of luxury.
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Clark's claims of victory, and Henry's subsequent trumpeting of them, minimized the difficulty and qualified success of this western
campaign. Clark's venture would not turn out quite as well as expected; Vincennes was soon retaken by British and Indian forces from Detroit. Clark unexpectedly decided to attack Vincennes again during the winter, marching through flooded, icy rivers to lay siege to the lightly defended fort in February 1779. After managing to capture a small detachment of British-allied French and Indian scouts, Clark's men tomahawked three of the Indian prisoners. Then, on Clark's orders, they proceeded to partially scalp one of the French Canadian soldiers within sight of the fort. This brutal measure had its intended effect, and the British promptly surrendered Vincennes back to Clark. Again, Henry reported that the campaign had “succeeded to our utmost wishes.”
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Despite Clark's early success, Henry and Clark never cooperated well. By the time of Clark's second Vincennes campaign, serious problems began to divide them. Clark grew angry that Henry and his government failed to communicate regularly with the western frontier. He wrote in February 1779 that he had not received any intelligence from Henry for almost a year, at a time when he desperately wanted reinforcements. Clark still appealed to Henry to help him to secure frontier lands, but knew that his hope for wealth and acreage was becoming illusory. The western front was only of secondary concern to Henry, and inefficient means of communication continually degraded his relationship with Clark.
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