Patrick Henry (24 page)

DESPITE THE FAILURE OF THE GENERAL ASSESSMENT, Henry remained committed as governor to the public support of religion. He responded enthusiastically to a proposal for Christianizing Native Americans presented to him by England's Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. The countess was a key evangelical Methodist leader who corresponded with a number of American religious and political figures, including her distant relative George Washington. George and Martha Washington were so enamored with the countess that they placed an engraving of her on their bedroom wall at Mount Vernon.
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Sir James Jay, a prominent physician and brother of New York's John Jay, provided Governor Henry an outline of the countess's plan, including a letter from the countess to Henry. The American Revolution had opened a door for the evangelization of the Indians, she told him, and her plan sought to “introduce the benevolent religion of our blessed Redeemer among heathen and savage nations.” The countess wanted the legislatures of Virginia and other states with substantial frontier areas to grant lands for Christian settlers to establish new towns near the Indian tribes. There they would set up schools and churches, attracting Indians with the prospect of education and refinement. The countess would administer the licensing of Christian settlers from Europe. All she needed, she said, was for the legislatures to provide the land and tax incentives toward settlement.

Henry saw the plan as an antidote to the continuing turmoil on the frontier, which he attributed partly to Indian resistance to Christianity and what he saw as their lack of civilization. He longed to introduce more white Christian settlers who would reduce Virginia's overall dependence on slave labor. The plan would ultimately bolster public virtue, which Henry believed had woefully languished during the war. Henry advocated for the countess's plan with the state
legislature, but because most of Virginia's vacant land had been deeded to Congress, he directed his appeals there, writing to Virginia's congressional delegates in 1785 and telling them that the twin goals of attracting Christian settlers and evangelizing Native Americans demanded immediate action. Similarly, Henry wrote to Joseph Martin, his prominent neighbor near Leatherwood, expressing his zeal for the plan. “She hopes to do [this] at her own expense chiefly,” he said, “and to import large number of people from Great Britain and Ireland that are good whigs and strictly religious.”
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But concerns over the settlers' political allegiances, and the means of doling out land, derailed the countess's proposal. As Richard Henry Lee told George Washington, who had also strongly recommended the plan, Congress feared the settlers might prove to be British sympathizers, and moreover, all available land was committed for sale to pay off public debts.
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Henry continued to promote the plan in the Virginia legislature, but the countess's scheme was doomed, an unsuccessful instance of Henry and Washington's continuing interest in using state power to support religion, virtue, and even missionary work. Lest we think that such ideas were peculiar to Henry and Washington or that they faded after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were adopted, President Thomas Jefferson himself would approve federal funding for a missionary and church in Illinois. Even the great champion of total disestablishment believed that the government could employ religious workers to accomplish public goods, in this case the education and “civilization” of Native Americans. To Revolutionary-era Americans such as Henry and Jefferson, that civilizing project by definition meant instructing them in Christianity.
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THE FAILURE OF THE PLAN TO evangelize Native Americans was only one example of Henry's struggles as governor and the lack of assistance he received from Congress. Other problems lingered after the
war, such as the difficulty of aligning the state militias with national defense goals. George Washington sought to have militias led by Continental army veterans because he had found the militia units so difficult to control during the war. In the absence of a national wartime army, the militias would need to be ready in case of a new war with Britain or Native Americans.

At times, such conflicts seemed imminent. A series of dubious treaties earlier in the decade, regarding the status of lands north of the Ohio River, angered local Native Americans. Continued intrusions by white settlers and local fighting threatened to incite full-fledged war between Virginia and its Indian neighbors. Henry spent much of 1785 trying to keep Virginians from fighting with the Cherokees of western North Carolina. He also wrote urgently to officials in Greenbrier County (in present-day West Virginia) in June 1785, telling them to prepare their militia for hostilities with Native Americans in that area. He tried to prevent white settlers from crossing the Ohio River into disputed territory, but thousands went anyway, risking their lives to obtain fertile farmland. Indians along the Ohio River in the mid-1780s killed several hundred Americans. Probably even more Indians were killed by Americans.

In July, word came that a party of Virginians on their way to a peace conference with Indians had been murdered north of the Ohio. Daniel Boone, the militia commander and famous frontiersman, wrote to Henry, telling him of the churning violence. In his rough dialect, he said “an Inden Warr is Expected” and that the local militias would not be able to stop an invasion by the Wabash Confederacy. As frontier settlers clamored for retaliation, Henry admonished them to stop advancing into Indian lands; the prospect of Indian war was a “fatal evil” that would unleash new depths of suffering and undermine Virginia's faltering finances. Though Henry was no pioneer of peaceful relations with Native Americans, neither did he seek war with them. Virginia could not afford it.
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Virginia's Militia Act of 1784 attempted to address Washington's wishes for a stronger militia by releasing all county lieutenants and field officers from duty by April 1785, with Henry to appoint their replacements. The act was a disaster. The governor received numerous protests against the system of replacements, with some complainants accusing Henry of insulting the existing officers in an undemocratic power grab. The prominent lawyer and militia officer St. George Tucker resigned his newly appointed post, telling Henry that he did not realize the act would be “rendered abortive by the dissenting voice of the people.” Henry became convinced that the Militia Act was unenforceable and asked the legislature to amend it, telling the Speaker of the House of Delegates that the “execution of the Militia Law has caused much embarrassment to the executive”—meaning himself. Henry blamed a lack of adequate information for the debacle, but the failure of the reorganization showed heightened expectations among the militia for choosing their own officers, as well as the difficulty of getting Virginians to accept direction in military affairs. The amended act simply restored the positions to the old officers. A chastened Henry even had to write to the counties asking them to provide him complete lists of the officers he was to reinstate.
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Also fueling Henry's unease were strange rumors that agents of the Barbary states were in Richmond. The Barbary pirates, based along the North African coast, had harassed and captured European and American ships for decades. When the pirates sensed the weakness of the fledgling American navy, major hostilities between America and the Barbary states erupted in 1785, with Algerians seizing two American ships that year. In November, Henry wrote a peculiar yet ominous letter to the House of Delegates, telling them that “certain persons from the coast of Barbary are now in this city.” He sought to ascertain whether he had authority “to arrest dangerous characters coming from abroad.” Three suspected Barbary spies
were indeed detained and interrogated by Virginia officials. The suspects claimed not to be Algerians but Moors, or Spaniards of North African descent. Their interrogators remained suspicious that they might have subversive intentions, but found no evidence to support that notion. Governor Henry's apprehension at the prospect of Barbary espionage revealed fresh concern for Virginia's security.
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CONFRONTING SO MANY TROUBLES on such different fronts, Henry conceivably could have become a defender of the increased national power that the new Constitution would provide in three years' time. Perhaps if things had developed differently in the mid-1780s, he would have. As late as the end of 1786, James Madison still hoped that Henry might join him in the fight for a more energetic national government.

Madison would be sorely disappointed, because Henry would soon emerge as Virginia's leading opponent of the move for a new Constitution. His concern for Virginia's security did not lead him to support a more centralized government, because he viewed Congress as interest-driven and inept. His negative view of the Confederation government crystallized in 1785 and 1786 because of two related issues: Congress's lack of protection for frontier settlers, and a proposed treaty that would have surrendered America's navigation rights on the Mississippi River to the Spanish.

By 1785, Henry had begun to fear that a broader war with Indians was about to erupt. He suspected that Native Americans in the trans-Mississippi West might align with the Spanish, threatening Virginia and other states that had substantial western frontiers. Henry longed to open Kentucky (which was still part of Virginia) and the greater West to settlement, but he knew that Indian and Spanish aggression could pin Americans along the Atlantic coast. Richard Henry Lee warned him in February that Spain's new minister to America, Don Diego Maria de Gardoqui, would claim an exclusive Spanish right
to commerce on the Mississippi. “Spain is proud,” Lee wrote, “and extremely jealous of our approximation to her South American territory, and fearing the example of our ascendancy on that country, is grasping forever at more territory.”
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Henry became increasingly exasperated with Congress's failure to protect Virginia settlers in the Ohio River Valley, who continued to suffer periodic attacks from Shawnees and other Native Americans, despite Henry's efforts to limit their settlement to areas safely south of the Ohio River. George Rogers Clark told Henry that war with the Wabash Confederacy was certain and that Kentucky's prospects were bleak, with “so formidable and bloody an enemy to encounter [and] much irregularity in the country.”
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Henry bluntly appealed to Congress for help in 1786. The management of Indian affairs was one of the few things he needed the national government to do well, but it had failed miserably. Henry, always sensitive to the essential purposes of government, saw Congress's abandonment of settlers in western Virginia as neglect of “the most valuable article of the social compact.” To receive the government's protection of their most essential rights—including the rights, as English philosopher John Locke had famously argued, to life, liberty, and property—Americans paid taxes and gave up a measure of their freedom to the national and state governments. If the national Congress would not protect its vulnerable citizens from Indian attacks, then what good was the government?
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When Virginia's congressional delegation reported back to Henry regarding his plea for assistance, the news was not good. The northern states without large frontier areas were unwilling to help. “They with reluctance assent to relieving us from difficulties to which they are not themselves likely to be exposed to,” they wrote. Henry was “mortified” at this news. “I cannot be persuaded,” he told the delegation, “to think it necessary for me to endeavor to excite sympathy for that part of the union whose extermination
seems to be attempted by an enemy thirsting for blood.” Did Congress intend to protect frontier settlers or not? Their dreadful disregard of the frontier had started rumors of secession from the Confederation government by the western settlers. Henry began to wonder whether he would eventually have to choose between the national Confederation government and Virginians in the West. With sectional issues already hampering Congress's ability to act on Virginia's behalf, what would an even stronger national government mean for Virginia, if the same northeastern interests retained their dominant power?
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In August 1786, Henry's consternation regarding the national government reached new heights. John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs, recommended that the United States give up the use of the Mississippi to Spain for twenty-five or thirty years, in exchange for trade privileges that would primarily profit the northern states. Jay, a wealthy New Yorker nine years younger than Henry, would soon become, along with Alexander Hamilton, one of his state's key advocates for the new Constitution and, in 1789, the first chief justice of the United States. According to Jay, the Mississippi deal would confer short-term commercial benefits on the country, while allowing the possibility that American control of the river could be reestablished after several decades of Spanish control. Virginia's delegates in Congress countered with a motion calling for perpetual American access to the Mississippi, but northern members defeated it. A northern majority gave Jay authority to negotiate away America's access to the great river.
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Southerners were outraged. Virginia congressman James Monroe, an army veteran and lawyer who was becoming one of Henry's chief allies, wrote the governor to say he felt Jay's actions were not just misguided but dishonest. Congress had earlier instructed Jay not to put navigation rights up for negotiation, but Jay did so anyway and then convinced northern delegates to rescind the instructions
forbidding such a deal. Monroe saw the affair as a plot against southern interests “pursued by a set of men so flagitious, unprincipled, and determined in their pursuits, as to satisfy me beyond a doubt they have extended their views to the dismemberment of the government.” Monroe believed that changes in the Confederation would be necessary to preserve the Union, but he doubted whether northern delegates possessed the requisite virtue and common sense to make those modifications.
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