Patrick Henry (23 page)

Jefferson thought that Henry instinctively opposed expanding the power of Congress, but he would later suggest that Henry was inclined to support the impost because of a developing rivalry with Richard Henry Lee, who opposed the plan. The friendship between the two men would grow strained because of the dispute over the impost, with Lee preferring that Virginia strictly comply with congressional requisitions rather than submit to the impost, and Henry originally disagreeing. Their debate fueled a larger rivalry between Lee and Henry's ally, John Tyler Sr., over the position of the Speaker of the House of Delegates. Lee won the Speaker's chair in 1780, only to lose it the next year to Tyler, who presided from 1781 to 1784. But the dynamic between the two men changed when a compromise was reached on a modified, broadly acceptable impost, and Lee was reelected to Congress in 1784, which led Lee to write Henry in frank but welcoming terms about their friendship in late 1784. “We are placed now,” he said, “pretty nearly in the same political relation under which our former correspondence was conducted; if it shall prove as agreeable to you to revive it, as you were then pleased to
say it was to continue it, I shall be happy in contributing my part.” They did indeed revive their friendship, setting the stage for their work together as anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution.
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Jefferson scoffed at Henry's indecision on the impost, writing to Madison that “Henry as usual is involved in mystery: should the popular tide run strongly in either direction, he will fall in with it.” We might give Henry a bit more credit than Jefferson did. Henry knew Congress needed more revenue to support legitimate national projects, but he also feared that giving it any power to tax might lead the national government to disregard the prerogatives of the states and ruin the economy. Henry's initial enthusiasm for the impost waned as he began to suspect that Madison and Alexander Hamilton had more in mind than a modest tax. Hamilton had risen to prominence as Washington's senior aide-de-camp during the war, and he was emerging as a leading politician in New York and a promoter of national power. To counter Hamilton's suggestion in early 1783 that federal tax authority was his ultimate goal, Henry proposed a complex system ensuring that Virginia would not have to pay more than its fair share of the impost duties. Consideration of the impost, both in Virginia and elsewhere, soon became paralyzed in debate.
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Henry still wished to make the Confederation government more stable without destroying the independence of the states. Madison, Henry, and others met in Richmond in May 1784 and agreed that Madison would draw up a “plan for giving greater power to the federal government and that Mr. Henry should support it on the floor.” For his part, Henry reportedly “saw ruin inevitable unless something was done” to bolster the national government's authority. Nothing came of this meeting, however.
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Madison never shared Jefferson's bitterness toward Henry. He was, in general, better able than Jefferson to distinguish political issues from the personal. The two men never had the kind of falling-out that Henry did with Jefferson. But as time went on, it became
increasingly difficult for Madison and Henry to compromise on national authority over the states. Henry's fight against Britain taught him that the dangers of consolidated national power outweighed its benefits, a belief corroborated for him by seeing how little Virginia ever benefited from the national government, even in the state's darkest hours. Madison shared with Hamilton a belief that America was destined to become a great nation. It could never embrace that destiny, however, without a nimble national government. The contradictory visions of these two Virginians were bound to clash.

 

BEYOND HIS CONCERNS WITH THE ECONOMY, Henry remained committed to promoting virtue in Virginia. Independence would be worth nothing if Virginia degenerated into immorality, selfishness, and vice. To Henry, only one institution could adequately support virtue, and that was the church.

At the beginning of the Revolution, Virginia stopped providing financial support to the Anglican Church, and its parishes suffered badly during the war, the financial privation exacerbated by the church's traditional association with Britain. Other churches struggled, too. The militant Methodists had been hurt by their association with Loyalism; their English founder, John Wesley, had opposed the patriot cause. The Baptists were surging toward a massive outbreak of revivals in 1785, but as of 1783, they were not that publicly influential. The outlook for religion in Virginia was bleak.

Henry believed the state should resume public funding for religion, but he knew Virginia would never go back to one exclusive, established church. Instead, he became the champion of a so-called general assessment for religion. Under this system, people would have to pay taxes to support a church of their choice. For Henry and the assessment's many supporters, this arrangement honored both the public importance of religion and the realities of Christian pluralism in the state. He introduced a bill declaring that “the general
diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned [pastors], ... and it is judged that such provision may be made by the legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians.”
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The general assessment plan is one of the main reasons Henry is not more widely esteemed as a Founder, for in this debate, he seems to have diverted from the progressive flow of history. Jefferson and Madison's campaign for disestablishment and religious freedom—leading ultimately to Virginia's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom and the First Amendment's religion clauses—pioneered the church-state system that most Americans have embraced. Yet Henry was as much an activist for religious
liberty
as were Madison and Jefferson. He had opposed the clerics' claims for lost salary in the Parsons' Cause, supported the rights of Baptists and other dissenters, and championed the religion article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Henry had consistently sought to bolster the rights of religious dissenters and enshrine religious pluralism in law. His general assessment plan would have transitioned Virginia from having a single state church to offering multiple options, ensuring not a strict separation of church and state, but robust religious diversity.
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Henry was not alone in his advocacy for a general assessment. Other prominent Virginia leaders, such as George Washington and Richard Henry Lee, backed it as well. Lee wrote to Madison in 1784 cautioning him that “refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer in our country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute
something to its support.” Washington thought Christians should be made to support what they professed to believe. Most defenders of the assessment also agreed that tax exemptions could be given for non-Christians.
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Strict separation of church and state, which today often means the government should have no connections with religious institutions, was uncommon in the founding period. Jefferson took a strong view of church-state separation, but as president even he felt comfortable permitting and attending church services in government buildings. The notion that government agencies could totally disengage from religion simply did not occur to most Revolutionary-era Americans. Churches were seen as the moral bulwark of the republic. Henry and most of his Revolutionary colleagues on either side of the establishment debate also would not have supported strict separation because they believed that government should promote morality. Two primary ways to do this were punishing immorality under the law, and encouraging morality through churches and schools. The real point of contention concerning the general assessment was whether, as a matter of conscience, people should be required to support a church at all. Jefferson and Madison cooperated with many evangelical dissenters, especially Baptists, in arguing that religion would survive, and even thrive, on a purely voluntary basis. The Baptists also had plenty of experience with state-sponsored persecution in Virginia; as recently as the early 1770s, Baptist preachers were still being sent to jail for illegal preaching. Government support inevitably led to persecution of dissenters and corruption of the official churches, they said.

In mid-1784, the Church of England in Virginia proposed an act of incorporation that would put it on more stable legal footing. This would have given the clergy of what was now the renamed Protestant Episcopal Church both greater independence from state oversight and increased legal protection for church property, which
it held as the established church. Henry introduced the measure, but it struggled to gain support in the legislature and was postponed until the next session. Madison thought the bill was outrageous, because it tried to reverse the state's obvious movement toward full religious liberty. He told Jefferson that “extraordinary as such a project was, it was preserved from a dishonorable death by the talents of Mr. Henry.”
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Later that year, Henry again introduced both the incorporation bill and the general assessment plan. Many Virginians sent petitions to the legislature endorsing the assessment, including the influential Hanover Presbytery (founded by Samuel Davies). As non-Anglicans, the Presbyterians had suffered under the religious establishment of the colonial period, but they still desired a plural system of establishment. James Madison spoke out against the assessment, but the tide seemed to be turning in its favor.

The momentum for the assessment bill abruptly changed when the legislature again elected Henry governor on November 17. Neither the assessment nor the incorporation bill had come up for a final vote, but Henry may have thought he could safely leave the House of Delegates before their approval. He was wrong. Madison was quite pleased to see Henry go to the governor's mansion, and anticipated that the change of offices would prove “inauspicious to [Henry's] offspring.” He would be right. Henry was a great communicator, but he would prove no match for Madison's political maneuvering. Henry remained a hero in Virginia; legislators remembered his solid performance as governor in the difficult early years of the Revolution and they were glad to choose him again as governor. Henry was happy to take on the post. After some years of relative ease at his Leatherwood plantation, he felt renewed attraction for the governor's mansion. Madison believed that Henry accepted the governorship for family reasons, and undoubtedly
Dorothea Henry and the couple's growing children relished the prospect of living full-time in Richmond, rather than in the remote southwest of Leatherwood. Having chosen—or having been lured into accepting—the relatively weak governorship, he would not be able to save the general assessment plan.
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Although the incorporation bill passed the House, Madison got the vote on the general assessment delayed until 1785. In his
Memorial and Remonstrance
, he crisply stated the reasons many Virginians, including many evangelical Christians, opposed the plan. Religion, he argued, “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” To Madison and his Baptist allies, religious freedom required that the government give no support to churches. Any action government took on behalf of a particular denomination was inherently discriminatory toward people of other faiths or opinions. Ultimately, the legislature set the assessment bill aside due to lack of popular support (the incorporation bill would later pass the Senate). Baptists across the state celebrated. As one minister put it, “this formidable imp was destroyed at the time of his formation, and never suffered to draw breath nor perform one action in this happy land of freedom.”
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The demise of the general assessment gave new life to the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. Jefferson had drafted this bill in 1777, but it lacked support until the controversy over the general assessment focused Virginians' attention on the question of their church-state relationship. In early 1786, Madison won final approval for the statute, which proclaimed that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess,
and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
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Henry's effort to promote religious liberty by the plural establishment of churches had generated a backlash, resulting in Virginia's remarkably modern position on religion and government. The state no longer could use tax money to help the churches do their business. The Virginia model heavily influenced the First Amendment's encouragement of the “free exercise of religion” and its ban on a national established church. As it turned out, the legal and constitutional endorsement of religious voluntarism would put Christianity on a much stronger basis in Virginia and America generally, with evangelical churches growing exponentially in the next seventy-five years, prior to the Civil War.

The battle over the general assessment accelerated the downward spiral in Henry's relationship with Madison and Jefferson. Although Jefferson was in Paris during this time, serving as ambassador to France, his personal animosity toward Henry grew steadily even in absentia. Jefferson came to see Henry as the opponent of every worthy political goal he endorsed. For example, Jefferson and Madison had dreamed of holding a convention that would revise the state's 1776 Constitution. Jefferson sent Madison a draft constitution in 1783 that would have rearranged the political branches of state government, giving more power to the governor and courts. There was little popular support for such a plan, and Jefferson blamed Henry for it. In his most bitter invective toward Henry, Jefferson told Madison that as long as Henry lived, there was no chance for constitutional reform. “What we have to do I think,” Jefferson wrote, “is devoutly to pray for his death.” Though Jefferson probably meant this comment sarcastically, he also wrote it in one of his encrypted codes so no one else would see his malevolent wishes for Henry.
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