Patrick Henry (7 page)

The controversy over the Two Penny Act steeled Carter's resolve to assert the authority of Virginia's laymen over the clergy. The planter maintained that the Two Penny Act was a just reaction to the humanitarian crisis in the colony, a set of dire economic conditions for which the clergy apparently had no sympathy. His pamphlet excoriated the bishop of London, warning Virginians that the bishop intended to take Britain back to the time, prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when “priesthood and cruelty were the inseparable enemies of British liberty.” (The colonists had viewed James II, who was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, with particular fear and disdain, because he tried to tighten imperial control over the colonists, and because he was Roman Catholic.) Carter believed God had given Britain its Protestant monarchs, beginning with King William and Queen Mary, the successors to James II, to protect Britons from “diabolical schemes of merciless bigotry.” He did not blame the aging King George II (who died in 1760, to be replaced by his grandson King George III) for misunderstanding the nature of the dispute: officials like the bishop, he asserted, meant to deceive the king into violating the colonists' liberties, as the clergy did in annulling the Two Penny Act.
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Richard Bland's
Letter to the Clergy of Virginia
also presented the clergy as plotting against the colonists' liberties. Bland, a planter and Anglican vestryman from Prince George County, had his share of controversies with the clergy, including one that resulted in the dismissal of the Reverend John Camm from the faculty of the College of William and Mary. Camm, whom Governor Fauquier described as a “turbulent man who delights to live in a flame,” represented the Virginia clergy in London in their appeal of the Two Penny Act.
When Camm returned, proudly bearing the veto of the Two Penny Act to the governor's palace in Williamsburg, Fauquier was disgusted. The governor was appointed by the Crown, to be sure, but like many royal governors before him, he still felt that he needed flexibility to respond to local conditions. He did not want to wait on approval from London to make moves such as the Two Penny Act. As Camm waved the veto in his face, Fauquier summoned his slaves and pointed at the intruder: “Look at that gentleman and be sure to know him again,” he said, “and under no circumstances permit him to revisit the palace.” Camm and the clergy had exacerbated their bad reputations, even among those closest to the Crown.
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In his pamphlet excoriating the clergy, Richard Bland represented Camm and his fellow ministers as “Romish Inquisitors” who “carry on their insidious practices in the dark, lest the daylight should discover the iniquity of their transactions.” Both Bland and Carter drew on deep cultural wells of anti-Catholicism that dated back to the Protestant Reformation. Virginia Protestants responded readily to the notion that Roman Catholicism represented the epitome of corrupt spiritual power, and the parsons' appeal to the king seemed tainted with that kind of venality. Bland bristled at the notion that the Two Penny Act evidenced disloyalty to Britain. Ironically, he believed the clergy were pushing the colonists toward “a thought of withdrawing their dependency from the British throne.” To Bland, enforcing royal supremacy would reduce the colonists to political slavery. But he speculated that they might declare independence before that happened.
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The House of Burgesses, for its part, saw London's nullification of the Two Penny Act as more evidence of the British government's insensitivity to the colony's needs. Swiftly changing economic conditions, such as fluctuations in the price of tobacco, required nimble responses from the Virginia government. Getting approval from London could take months, long after action was required. “Many
unavoidable changes in our circumstances do frequently happen,” the Burgesses protested, “which require the immediate assistance of the legislature before it is possible for us at so great a distance to make any application to your Majesty.” But the king's counselors rejected their petition on appeal—this was just the way the colonial system worked, Virginia's legislators were told. The Burgesses did not have the discretion to change royally sanctioned laws.
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A year before Henry took on the case, the furor over the Parsons' Cause became more intense when priests began suing in Virginia county courts to recoup salary lost under the Two Penny Act. Parson Alexander White sued in King William County in 1762, but the court struggled to seat a proper jury. In the end, so many of the gentry refused to appear for service that the jury “consisted at last of ordinary planters some of whom we found after had declared beforehand what they would do,” reported an Anglican official. White lost the case.
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The court in Maury's case also encountered problems in assembling a qualified jury, much to Maury's dismay. Several gentlemen declined to serve, so the sheriff, in Maury's words, “went among the vulgar herd” to corral jurors. Maury complained that not only had he not heard of many of the jurors before, but that several of them were dissenters “of that denomination called New Lights.” One of these New Lights was Samuel Morris, the bricklayer who had originally started the evangelical meetings in Hanover County. The parson knew that these evangelicals would oppose him, but when he protested the composition of the jury, Patrick Henry rose to its defense; these jurors were honest men, he insisted. From the start, Reverend Maury thought the case was rigged against him.
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The trial took place at the Hanover County courthouse, a distinguished brick building less than twenty-five years old. Earlier Virginia courthouses had often amounted to little more than wooden shacks, but Hanover's edifice reflected the growing sophistication and
prestige of Virginia's legal system. Its most distinctive feature was the brick arcade across its front and sides. On court days the courthouse became a hive of activity, as did the adjacent tavern of Henry's father-in-law, where the new lawyer had labored until recently.

The courtroom for the Parsons' Cause case was packed. An early nineteenth-century rendering of the scene shows Henry addressing the clerk and jury from a slightly raised lawyers' bar, with the rest of the chamber jammed with observers, including a couple of mischievous-looking children. It was a standing-room-only event, perfectly suited for Henry's oratorical tastes. Now the young attorney would test the potential of his rhetorical powers.
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Maury thought Patrick Henry's behavior in the case was revolting. The parson's account is the best contemporary record of the trial, even though he may have exaggerated Henry's legal pyrotechnics. Henry seems to have come into the trial prepared, or even recruited by the vestrymen, to do the “dirty Jobb” (as Maury called it) of accusing the Anglican clergy of helping the Crown expand imperial power. At one point, Henry addressed the court for almost an hour on the ominous implications of the king's annulment of a legitimate law.

Henry's attack on the clergy illuminated his view of what the state's proper establishment of the church should represent. State-supported clergy should encourage obedience to good civil laws, he argued. In this case, Henry declared, the parsons not only failed to perform their duty, but also actively disobeyed the law themselves—which gave the state the right to strip clergy of their civil appointments. Henry thundered that Maury deserved not reimbursement but punishment for undermining the colony's assembly. If the jury did not wish to “rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks,” he thundered, then they should make an example of Maury. Such a judgment would make other clergymen think twice before challenging the true legal authority over the people of Virginia: their colonial government.
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Henry's appeal worked wonderfully, and the “vulgar herd” relished the chance to throw's Maury lawsuit back in his face. When the verdict came, the jury awarded James Maury a grand total of one penny in damages.

Maury dubiously claimed that Henry had apologized to him after the trial, saying that he had given his juror-rousing speech only to “render himself popular.” Whatever Henry actually said to him, Maury concluded that the fiery-tongued young lawyer had chosen celebrity over honor, pandering to the people who relished his trampling of church and crown.
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A disgusted John Camm publicly skewered Henry and Richard Bland in the aftermath of the trial, accusing Bland of attacking the king's integrity; if such an established politician would dare challenge the Crown, he thought, it was no wonder an “obscure lawyer” from Hanover would tell a jury that the king “had forfeited the allegiance of the people of Virginia.” For Camm, Maury's trial was a farce, and no doubt he felt the same when the General Court of Virginia—which handled cases related to imperial law—decided against Camm himself in a similar case. Camm, always eager to defend the clergy's prerogatives, appealed to London's Privy Council to overturn the General Court's decision. He found no sympathy from them the second time around. By that time, in 1767, the British government had bigger problems to deal with in America than John Camm's salary.
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WHATEVER HENRY'S MOTIVATIONS in the Parsons' Cause, he had begun to position himself for a political career. With his genial manner and his orations defending the liberty of common-folk Virginians, he was developing a following in the backcountry counties, and in 1764 he began to gain more attention in Williamsburg. That year he represented Nathaniel West Dandridge in a case against James Littlepage, who had recently replaced Dandridge in the House of Burgesses. Dandridge had accepted the position of coroner for
Hanover County but apparently had second thoughts about leaving the House when Littlepage was elected. Dandridge accused Littlepage of bribing voters to win his seat, and when a House committee heard the case in late 1764, Henry represented Dandridge.
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Bribery was not unusual in Virginia elections prior to the Revolution. Indeed, voters expected candidates to give them gifts, especially alcohol. This practice was called “swilling the planters with bumbo.” (Bumbo was rum punch.) In one typical case, when George Washington ran for the House of Burgesses in 1758, he distributed 160 gallons of alcoholic beverages to 391 voters and “unnumbered hangers-on.” The libations included fifty gallons of rum punch, forty-six gallons of beer, thirty-four gallons of wine, twenty-eight gallons of straight rum, and two gallons of hard cider.
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In 1762, the House banned such practices in electioneering, but the law was hardly enforced. Most House members had, themselves, employed such tactics in their own campaigns. Henry used the 1762 law to make his case against James Littlepage before the Burgesses, but because bribery was so pervasive, Henry's argument was weak. True, Littlepage's friends had bought gifts for his supporters, and at one function the candidate himself ordered more rum when the supply ran out, but most of his “treating” was undertaken by intermediaries. On Election Day, for example, a freeholder named Grubbs appeared at Hanover Courthouse offering to vote for the candidate who bought him a “dram.” A friend of Littlepage's purchased him a drink, and Grubbs obliged him by voting for Littlepage. The House committee found this evidence unpersuasive and dismissed Dandridge's case as “frivolous and vexatious.” Later recollections of the case portrayed Henry as dazzling the House with an oration on the rights of voters, but we do not actually know what he said. In any event, the case gave Henry an opportunity to present himself again to the political leaders in Williamsburg, if not endear himself to them; the committee members who heard the arguments included
such luminaries as Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, George Wythe, and Richard Henry Lee. The Dandridge case also revealed Henry as something of an opportunist. His dramatic accusations did not translate into victory this time, but maybe a negative outcome was worth the price for the up-and-coming attorney.
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Even though Patrick Henry had not yet held public office, people were now mentioning his name as a candidate for the House of Burgesses. Although most Virginia politicians first served in county-level positions before entering the legislature, Henry capitalized on his expanding landholdings and political connections to make the jump straight to the House. In 1765, he received from his father a 1,700-acre parcel of land called Roundabout in Louisa County. When that county's delegate to the House resigned his office, friends of the Henry family from Louisa promoted the twenty-eight-year-old Patrick as a candidate in the special election. Even though Patrick did not live in Louisa County, he was qualified to run for office because he owned land there. Even some residents of Hanover who owned land in Louisa traveled to Louisa's courthouse to vote for their local hero, who entered the House on May 20, 1765.
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For a man who had been polishing beer glasses in his father-in-law's tavern just five years before, Henry's ascension to the House of Burgesses was a dramatic reversal of ill fortune. His newfound political success arose from a variety of factors: his family's connections, an increasing legal caseload, his passionate oratory modeled in the evangelical style, an eagerness to seize political opportunities, and a keen sense of the popular mood in the backcountry. Henry had developed a prodigious aptitude for creating a political sensation, as he had enthusiastically demonstrated in the Maury case. He deeply appreciated the anxieties of Virginians. His fellow colonists never believed that the empire took them seriously as full British citizens, and they worried that the powerful government in London wielded too much power over them. British officials, they increasingly
believed, could easily turn Americans into slaves of the imperial system. Henry perfectly articulated the slowly escalating unease of Americans with that subservient status.