Patrick Henry (14 page)

As was typical of women in colonial families, Sarah had spent much of her married life pregnant and tending to small children. At the time of her death, she and Patrick had six children. The oldest, Martha, was already twenty years old and married, the second, John, was eighteen, but the other four were young; all were born in the twelve years between 1763 and Sarah's passing. Patrick was a devoted father, a commitment no doubt intensified by Sarah's illness and death. He later developed a particularly close relationship with his daughter Elizabeth, who was born in 1769. Their sixth child—and their only one born at Scotchtown—was Edward (called “Neddy”), born in 1771.
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Memories recorded long after the fact recalled that Sarah had become deranged, suicidal, and perhaps violent toward others, maybe even toward her young children, which would explain her confinement to an isolated portion of her home. Few other options would have existed at the time for treating or housing the mentally ill. A state mental hospital had just opened in Williamsburg, but it was tiny, with twenty-four beds, and meant primarily for patients whose only other alternative was jail. Although the opening of this hospital represented a progressive step toward recognizing the medical realities of mental illness, the treatments offered there were, by modern standards, barbaric. Mostly doctors attempted to balance patients' bodily “humors”—a balance that, in Hippocratic medicine, would supposedly produce health by routines of bleeding and vomiting. It is unlikely that Henry would have even considered the hospital as an option. Though it is difficult to assess Sarah's condition or the nature of her confinement, there is no reason to think Patrick's treatment of her was negligent or cruel. We will never know quite what happened in Sarah's declining months, but it seems likely that Henry arranged for her to be as comfortable as possible, without harming herself or others.
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HENRY MUST HAVE EXPERIENCED great personal turmoil during his wife's illness, but during her decline and death, he managed to maintain his involvement in political affairs. He traveled to Richmond in March 1775 for the second session of the Virginia Convention at St. John's Church, which would be the scene of his “Liberty or Death” speech. The freeholders of Hanover County had once again chosen him and John Syme as their delegates, instructing them to support the collection of the colonial taxes required to secure their liberty. They also encouraged the delegates to explore measures to provide for the families of Virginians killed or wounded in a 1774 war against Native Americans in western Virginia. This second injunction suggested the emerging belief among Virginians that the convention constituted an independent provincial government, which would care for veterans' families, among other tasks.
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At the convention, the combustion among the delegates began when Edmund Pendleton offered a resolution endorsing a 1774 petition from the legislature of Jamaica (which, like Virginia, was a British colony). The Anglo-Jamaicans had strongly protested recent British actions as a “plan almost carried into execution, for enslaving the colonies, founded, as we conceive, on a claim of Parliament to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever,” even as they struck a moderate tone by affirming George III's right to veto colonial legislation. Endorsement of this sentiment would have communicated Virginia's desire for a “speedy return of those halcyon days, when we lived a free and happy people.”
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A perturbed Henry struck back against Pendleton with amendments calling for Virginia to assume a defensive posture against Britain—that is, through the raising of a militia that would hopefully replace British regular troops. Moderates balked at this bold statement, because it assumed that armed conflict with Britain was unavoidable. Henry would not back down, however. He rose to call Virginia to arms.

There are many moments in Henry's life for which we might wish for better documentation. The “Liberty or Death” speech is probably the most significant of those points. Amazingly, we do not have a contemporary text of it, even though it is one of the most celebrated and stirring orations in American history. One of Patrick Henry's charms was an apparent lack of concern for his personal legacy. Unlike most of the major founders, he made almost no effort to preserve his papers, or texts of his major speeches. For historians, this lack of attention to the autobiographical record causes peculiar problems. What record we do have for the “Liberty or Death” speech is a version published in 1816 by William Wirt, a Virginia politician who became attorney general under President James Monroe. Wirt corresponded widely with associates of Henry to craft his biography
Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry
and seems to have depended heavily on the recollections of Virginia judge St. George Tucker for the wording of the speech. The speech's content seems consistent with Henry's style and radical ideology, so we can be confident that the essence of the text came from the original.
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“Liberty or Death” relied heavily upon biblical references for its persuasive power. These are easily missed now, but they would have been familiar to the audience at the Virginia Convention, who grew up in the Bible-soaked culture of colonial America. Several phrases came directly from the prophet Jeremiah. For example, Henry warned that British assurances of benevolent intentions would “prove a snare to your feet” (Jeremiah 18:22). He worried that Virginians would become like those “who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not” (Jeremiah 5:21). And he warned that “gentlemen may cry, peace, peace—but there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).
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Henry also explained his suspicion of the British by referencing his own worldview regarding the natural human tendency to engage in deceptive behavior. He had “but one lamp by which his feet
were guided; and that was the lamp of experience.” The British had given the colonists no reason to trust them, he declared, other than assurances of goodwill, and he warned that behind those assurances, the British were really like the disciple Judas, who had sold out Jesus to his enemies. “Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss,” he cautioned.
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For Patrick Henry, there could be no compromise, no false peace. At the conclusion of the speech, Henry thundered that the time for war had come. “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! . . . 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 lifted his arms and cried, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
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IN THE DIMMED LIGHT cast from two centuries past, we may forget how audacious the “Liberty or Death” speech was. Henry's words shocked some and horrified others. While Edmund Randolph thought the speech “blazed so as to warm the coldest heart,” a Virginia Tory grumbled that “you never heard anything more infamously insolent than P. Henry's speech.”
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For the climactic words of his speech, Henry recalled the play
Cato, A Tragedy
by Joseph Addison. Originally published in London in 1713, Addison's play was one of the most popular and enduring in the colonies, opening in Philadelphia in 1749 in a performance by the first professional American drama company. Cato, one of the heroes of Roman antiquity, was revered by colonists for his opposition to political corruption and the power of Julius Caesar. In the play, Cato declared:

Appeals to classical antiquity allowed Patriots like Henry to argue for the historic rectitude of resisting encroaching power and corruption. Cato and Brutus had done it, and so should the Americans.
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To Henry, the crisis had become a “question of freedom or slavery.” By liberally using biblical rhetoric, Henry drew on his Christian heritage and evangelical style to place the Virginians' struggle in a providential frame. Fighting against Britain required more than pragmatic justifications. Moderation at such a time would be an offense not just to the people of Virginia but also to God.

Henry acknowledged the power of the British armed forces, but he believed that waiting to fight would only weaken the American position as the British continued to concentrate their troops on the colonies' shores. The conspiracy against their liberty would grow more insidious. If they fought, he proclaimed, God would be on their side. “Three millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. . . . Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat, sir, let it come!”
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These words resound with Henry's ultimate expression of Christian republicanism. For founders like him, republican ideology, which trumpeted both the value and fragility of liberty, would have been incomplete if not expressed with Christian zeal. Some elite founders privately held unorthodox beliefs about the Christian God, but patriots like Henry who had more traditional faith used Christian themes to mobilize the people at large. One of Henry's critics lamented that Henry was “so infatuated, that he goes about I am told, praying and preaching amongst the common people.” Henry, along with most rank-and-file patriots, entered the war against
Britain with the conviction that God would defend the liberty of the righteous.
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Henry also believed, along with most patriots, that God moved in the affairs of nations. The notion that “a just God presides over the destinies of nations” would have resonated at the Virginia Convention and among founders as diverse as Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. But to Henry, God did not simply bless America because it was America. God defended the liberty of the
righteous
, while confounding the plans of oppressive nations such as Britain. Henry would have added—and did indeed declare later in the war—that if America lost its virtue, then it risked forgoing the blessing of God. This was a constant refrain among many revolutionaries and a theme that also hearkened back to the warnings of Jeremiah and other biblical prophets.

 

THE CONVENTION WAS CONVINCED. It adopted Henry's resolutions and made him the chair of a committee entrusted with developing a strategy to arm the colony. Under the committee's plan, the counties would form volunteer militia companies that would respond in case of military emergency. Each militiaman, “clothed in a hunting shirt by way of uniform,” would be supplied with a gun, ammunition, and a tomahawk. Patriot soldier Dr. George Gilmer, of the Albemarle County volunteers, vowed “never to bury the tomahawk until liberty shall be fixed on an immoveable basis through the whole Continent.” These rustic fighters, with their fearsome appearance, would not have to wait long to see action.
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The convention selected the same seven men who served in the first Continental Congress to serve in the second, which would gather in Philadelphia in May. All of them, including Henry, received strong support from the other delegates. Thomas Jefferson was chosen as an alternate. Although moderates like Peyton Randolph continued to exercise great influence, all signs pointed toward
the establishment of a separate Virginia government and military to resist the British. Events of the next month would hardly slow the momentum.

On March 28, Governor Dunmore issued a proclamation forbidding, by order of the king, the election of delegates to the Continental Congress—three days after the convention had elected Henry and his colleagues to attend the meeting in Philadelphia. Undeterred, Dunmore insisted that government officials stop the appointment of delegates to a gathering the British deemed the latest in a series of illegitimate acts by an increasingly unreasonable crowd of colonists. The conflict drew its first blood in April 1775 at Lexington, Massachusetts, where the British military commander General Thomas Gage sought to arrest rebel leaders and to seize arms held at Concord. In the early morning of April 19, the Massachusetts militia, warned by Paul Revere's network of spies, faced down the redcoat army on the town green of Lexington. No one knows who shot first, but the “shot heard 'round the world” would begin the armed conflict that became the American Revolution. The British then met a fierce resistance at Concord and were forced to retreat to Boston, suffering almost three hundred casualties. Lord Dunmore knew the Virginia Convention had called for its counties to organize militias like those in Massachusetts (although he seemed not yet to know about the events at Lexington and Concord). He ordered marines on the royal schooner
Magdalen
to take a cache of gunpowder held in Williamsburg and remove it to a ship waiting outside of Norfolk before the colonists could steal it. In the early morning of April 21, a small group of British troops loaded fifteen half-barrels of gunpowder into a wagon the governor provided. Someone raised an alarm, but the soldiers successfully fled Williamsburg with the powder.
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A mob began to gather in Williamsburg, threatening to attack the governor's palace. No attack came, as moderate leaders calmed the
crowd and the city government prepared a sober address to the governor. In addition to decrying the seizure of the gunpowder and demanding its return, the city's complaint also focused on the possibility of slave uprisings, rumors of which had swept up and down the James River the week before. “We have too much reason to believe,” the city leaders wrote, “that some wicked and designing persons have instilled the most diabolical notions into the minds of slaves, and that, therefore, the utmost attention to our internal security is become the more necessary.” The Virginians were imagining nightmarish scenarios of the British disarming the colonists just at the moment of a great slave insurrection. Or worse, Lord Dunmore might encourage the slaves to revolt to stop the colonists' resistance. Dunmore was keenly aware of these fears, and immediately after removing the powder, he threatened to fulfill white Virginians' worst dreams by declaring freedom for the slaves.
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