Lion of Liberty (20 page)

Chapter 9

With Virginia all but helpless to repel a British assault, Henry proposed the unthinkable to the House of Delegates. “In December 1776,” Thomas Jefferson recalled, “our circumstances being much distressed, it was proposed in the House of Delegates to create a dictator, invested with every power, legislative, executive and judiciary, civil and military, of life and of death, over our persons and over our properties.”
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In fact, it was Washington who had implanted the idea in Henry's mind, having urged “an indiscriminate draft” to raise troops for the Continental Army. Although the final bill did not go as far as Henry had hoped, it nonetheless enhanced his powers

It also gave him powers to seize foodstuffs and supplies for the military.

The irony of the self-professed opponent of British tyranny seeking dictatorial powers was not lost on his political opponents. “Surely,” he argued, “whether ... called a dictator or governor . . . an officer armed with . . . enlarged . . . powers was necessary to restrain the unbridled fury of a licentious enemy. ...”
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Hypocritical or not, Henry's political turnabout was nothing more than a statesman's adaptation to changing realities. Every contemporary leader of consequence—Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others—would stage equally dramatic reversals of their political positions.

If Henry had not seized power, the British army would have overrun Virginia by the time the legislature or even the Council could have agreed on an effective response under democratic rules of debate. Democratic rule, Henry recognized, was inappropriate in a wartime emergency.

“Self-preservation is paramount to all law,” Jefferson agreed. “There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator, or martial law.”
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With supplies of food, arms, ammunition, and money all but exhausted, however, Henry's task—even with dictatorial powers—bordered on the impossible. “Virginia,” he lamented,

As the Continental Congress considered capitulation, Washington knew he needed a quick, dramatic strike against the British to revive American morale and save the Revolution. In the dead of night on December 25, he led 2,400 troops through a blinding snowstorm across the ice-choked Delaware River. At eight the next morning, they reached Trenton, New Jersey, and found the 1,400-man Hessian garrison still abed, dissuaded by the storm from posting their usual patrol. Shocked awake by the reality of their plight, the terrified Germans raced out into the snow in
their nightclothes to secure cannon emplacements at the head of King Street and repel the approaching Americans. Before they could get there, a young Virginia captain, William Washington, a distant cousin of the commander in chief, and his eighteen-year-old lieutenant James Monroe, charged through a hail of rifle fire and seized the weapons. Both men fell wounded but held fast until Washington's Continentals forced the Hessians to surrender, taking more than 1,000 Hessian prisoners.

Washington's victory set off a wave of euphoria that temporarily bolstered troop morale and public support for the Revolution. With the new year, army ranks began to swell instead of shrink, and, after a subsequent Washington victory at Princeton left western New Jersey in Patriot hands, Congress returned to Philadelphia.

Washington's victory did not resonate in many parts of the South, however, where the war seemed too far removed to be of concern. “I am very sorry to inform you,” Henry wrote to Washington, “that the recruiting business of late goes on so badly that there remains little prospect of filling the six new battalions from this state voted by the Assembly.”
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In fact, enlistments had come to a halt, Henry admitted to Richard Henry Lee. He blamed the failure to enlist new recruits on fears that leaving home to fight in the army would leave their families and farms vulnerable to attack—either by Indians in the West, British marines along Chesapeake Bay, or renegade slaves across the state. “Our seacoasts are defenseless almost,” Henry complained to Lee. “The people on the Eastern Shore are very uneasy . . . Arms . . . are wanted here most extremely. . . . Five swift sailing boats are gone for arms to the West Indies. . . . Our factories are making some.”
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In the West, he reported that a peace agreement between Virginia and the Cherokee nation had proved ineffective. “A fellow called the ‘Dragging Canoe' has seceded from the Cherokees and 400 warriors have followed his fortune, lying in the woods and making war with us . . . Orders were issued a few days since for destroying Pluggy's Town [an Indian settlement]. Three hundred militia are ordered . . . from Fort Pitt.”
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In fact, the British had provoked the increased attacks by supplying Indians west of the Ohio River with arms and promises that they could keep any plunder and land they seized, along with all the scalps they could harvest.

Despite setbacks in the West, the Assembly sustained Henry's conduct of the war and, on May 29, 1777, unanimously elected him to a second term as governor. A few days later, Henry left abruptly for Hanover, where his uncle and namesake, Reverend Patrick Henry, had died suddenly. While there, however, the wedding of his sister Elizabeth mitigated his sadness—especially after he met Dorothea Dandridge, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his former neighbor in Hanover, Nathaniel West Dandridge, Martha Washington's cousin. When Henry had practiced law at Hanover Courthouse, Dolly, as her family called her, had been but a child. Only slightly older than his oldest daughter, she had now matured into a magnificent young woman, and forty-one-year-old Patrick Henry fell irretrievably in love. Although he did not know it, his son John, who was serving with Virginia's regiments in the North, also loved Dolly and had asked her father for her hand.

When Patrick Henry returned to Williamsburg in early July to begin his second term as governor, the vision of the beautiful Dorothea Dandridge haunted his every minute, and after only a few weeks, he rode back to Hanover and asked her father's permission to marry her. When he—and she—accepted, he sent the news to his entire family, including his son John, who had won a promotion to artillery captain in General Horatio Gates's Northern Army, near Albany, New York. In an era when fathers decided whom their daughters would marry, Dorothea's father evidently thought a sitting governor a better prospect for his daughter that a governor's son who might soon die in battle.

By the time Henry returned to Williamsburg, the British government had increased British forces in America to 48,000 and ordered North American commanders—General Sir William Howe in New York and General John Burgoyne in Canada—to crush the insurrection or face dismissal and disgrace. Howe and Burgoyne planned a three-pronged strategy to capture the rebel capital of Philadelphia and isolate New England from the rest of the colonies by gaining control of the Hudson River Valley from New York City to the Canadian frontier. While Howe led one force south to capture Philadelphia, a second force was to sail northward on the Hudson River to rendezvous in Albany with a third British army under
Burgoyne, which was then sweeping southward from Canada along Lake Champlain and Lake George.

Burgoyne's campaign started well, with 8,000 British and Hessian troops and Indian warriors overrunning the shores of Lake Champlain and capturing Fort Ticonderoga, Mount Defiance, and Fort Anne. Hopelessly outmanned, outgunned, and out of ammunition, the Patriots under British-born General Horatio Gates were helpless to slow Burgoyne's advance—until they reached Saratoga, about forty miles north of Albany. Suddenly, wagon loads of ammunition, arms, clothing, and tons of other materiel rolled into camp. Under a secret aid agreement, French ships had landed 200 field artillery pieces at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, along with thousands of muskets, kegs of powder, and enough blankets, clothes, and shoes to resupply 90 percent of the Northern Army. Farmers—by the dozens at first, then by the hundreds—joined the wagon train of arms and stayed to fight to keep the British from overrunning their lands. By early October, the American army had swelled to 17,000, and new weapons were still arriving.

Unlike Gates, Burgoyne could not count on resupply or replacements. He put his troops on half rations and resolved to break through the American line that barred the road to Albany and the Hudson River link to New York. Unaccustomed to fighting in the North American wilderness, however, the British and Hessians advanced in traditional linear formation and marched straight into a slaughterhouse. General Daniel Morgan's riflemen lay hidden behind trees and boulders on the slopes of Bemis Heights, near Saratoga, New York, and let loose a hailstorm of bullets that toppled the Redcoats by the score as they marched forward relentlessly, row after row, stepping over their fallen comrades before dropping under the ceaseless fire. At the end of the day, Burgoyne had lost about 600 men—the Patriots half that number.

The Redcoats attacked again the next day, only to meet with another slaughter that cost them 700 troops captured, wounded, or killed. The Americans lost 150 men. On October 13, Burgoyne's army hoisted the white flag, and, after their commander signed the appropriate documents of surrender, 4,000 Redcoats began the slow trek to internment camps near Boston to await ships to carry them back to England.

Gates's victory elated the nation—and, evidently, the French government, which added to America's national euphoria by formally recognizing the United States as an independent nation. While the nation celebrated, Patrick Henry and Dorothea Dandridge took advantage of the festive mood in Williamsburg to wed. Both brought a variety of assets to their marriage—she a dowry of twelve slaves to add to his thirty; he, five children for her to raise—three of them young enough to require her particular attention: ten-year-old Anne, eight-year-old Betsy, and six-year-old Edward. All three grew to adore her, and in return for her evident love for his children, Henry grew to be “perhaps the best husband in the world,” according to his brother-in-law Samuel Meredith.
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With his marriage, Henry's assets now included his huge estate at Scotchtown, four farms totaling about 10,000 acres in the western part of the state, 10,000 acres in Kentucky and forty-two slaves, including Dolly's twelve dower slaves. Faced with the joyous prospects of a new life with a new wife, Henry decided to sell Scotchtown and “move away from all objects reminding me” of Sarah's madness and death. The sale yielded £5,000—enough to leave him independently wealthy for the moment.

After carrying his bride into the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, Henry proclaimed a day of thanksgiving to celebrate French recognition of American independence, beginning with a military parade, artillery salutes, and “three huzzas from all present.” Church bells rang, and Henry ordered a mug of rum for every soldier in town. Nine months later, Dolly gave birth to their first child.

After the guns fell silent at Saratoga, Patrick Henry's son, Captain John Henry, who had distinguished himself as an artillery commander, staggered between the hundreds of dead on the battlefield—many of them men he had commanded; some of them close friends. Already distraught over the marriage of the girl he loved to his father, he went “raving mad” as he walked among the fallen and finally broke his sword into pieces, and wandered off to no-one-knew-where.
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Efforts to find him by his distraught father proved useless.

As Burgoyne's army marched to defeat in Saratoga, Howe's army of 15,000 British troops was sailing from New York into undefended Chesapeake
Bay and landed on its northern shore near Philadelphia. Washington miscalculated British army strength and concentrated his power at the center of the lines along the east bank of Brandywine Creek, which blocked the road to Philadelphia. British general Lord Cornwallis, however, slipped away to the northwest with 8,000 troops and looped around and behind Washington's lines. As Redcoats closed in from three directions, Patriot troops fled in panic, losing about 1,000 men during the retreat. On September 19, Congress fled west to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a week later, General Howe and the British army marched into Philadelphia, believing they had ended the American Revolution.

Washington's humiliating defeat provoked angry grumbling in Congress that he was incompetent and should be replaced. A barrage of anonymous letters to Congress and the press praised Gates's success at Saratoga and denounced Washington's loss of the national capital. Washington was furious at the comparison, confiding in Henry that “I was left to fight two battles . . . to save Philadelphia with less numbers than composed the army of my antagonist, whilst the world has given us at least double.