Lion of Liberty (28 page)

Equally irate was Virginia's young delegate to Congress, James Monroe, the hero of the Battle of Trenton who had replaced Madison in Philadelphia. “The object in the occlusion of the Mississippi,” Monroe vented in a letter to Henry,

Outraged settlers in Kentucky talked of forming a militia to march against the Spanish in New Orleans; others threatened to reassert loyalty to the English king and invite British troops to reclaim the West and guarantee settler access to the Mississippi. “To sell us and make us vassals to the merciless Spaniards,” one Kentuckian raged in the
Maryland Journal
, “is a grievance not to be born.”

The threats of secession in the West emboldened New Englanders to call for establishment of a northern confederacy. “The five states of New England, closely confederated, have nothing to fear,” proclaimed a correspondent in the
Boston Independent Chronicle.
“Let then our General Assembly immediately recall their delegates from . . . Congress, as being a useless and expensive establishment. Send proposals for instituting a new . . . nation of New England, and leave the rest of the continent to pursue their own imbecile and disjointed plans. ...”
²⁸

With the Confederation facing political and economic collapse, delegates had gone to Annapolis to prevent fragile interstate ties from snapping. Without a quorum of states, however, they were impotent even to make recommendations. New York's Alexander Hamilton proposed a new and more forceful call to convention in Philadelphia, in May 1787, to discuss not only commercial relations, but “to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”
²⁹
It was perhaps the last hope for saving the Union.

Chapter 12

Towards the end of Henry's second year as governor, he and Dolly hosted the capital's most joyous receptions since pre-Revolution Williamsburg days: the marriage of his two daughters. Anne married a prominent lawyer, Spencer Roane, while seventeen-year-old Betsey married Philip Aylett, a handsome, extremely wealthy nineteen-year-old who spent most of his days enjoying his family's apparently limitless supply of money. A hard-drinking card player, Aylett nonetheless became a devoted husband and father—and an effective legislator in the Virginia House of Delegates. Roane became a distinguished judge, winning appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court and eventually serving as its chief justice.

Henry is said to have given each daughter the same fatherly advice in letters that reflected his own married life. “My Dear Daughter,” he began:

Asserting that wealth did not produce “matrimonial happiness,” Henry gave his daughters several maxims to “impress upon your mind,” the first of which was “never to attempt to control your husband, by opposition, by displeasure, or any other mark of anger.” Calling “mutual politeness essential to that harmony which should never be once broken . . . between man and wife,” he warned that any differences between husband and wife are

He urged each of his girls to “cultivate your mind by the perusal of those books which instruct while they amuse.” He urged them to avoid novels and plays, which, he said “tend to vitiate the taste. History, geography, poetry, moral essays, biography, travels, sermons, and other well-written religious productions will . . . enlarge your understanding, to render you a more agreeable companion and to exalt your virtue.”
¹

After his daughters' weddings, Henry stunned the Virginia political world by announcing his decision not to seek a third term as governor. “I shall resign my office next month and retire,” he explained to his sister Anne Christian, “my wife and self being heartily tired of the bustle we live in here. I shall go to Hanover to land I am likely to get . . . or if that fails, towards Leatherwood again. My wife has five very fine and promising children. I rejoice to hear yours are so. Pray, my dearest sister, let me know how I may serve you or them. . . . God bless and preserve you, ever beloved sister.”
²

Several factors had combined to provoke his resignation: fatigue with “the bustle” of Richmond life was but one of them. Money had become a
prime consideration after the marriages of his two older daughters. After providing them each with a dowry of £1,000, he found himself in the same position as most “wealthy” Virginia planters—land rich and cash poor. All but phobic about falling in debt, he faced just that if he depended on only his governor's salary for another year to support his wife and five small children—and pay maintenance and entertainment expenses of the governor's mansion. In addition, he had two older sons by his first marriage—fifteen-year-old Edward and his older brother, William, in his early twenties—whom he planned to send to college. To do so, he would have to turn his farms into profitable enterprises and resume practicing law.

Recognizing that a permanent move to Leatherwood would cut his ties to the state's political hub and isolate Dolly, he found a 1,700-acre plantation with twenty-seven slaves called Pleasant Grove in Prince Edward County. Only about eighty miles southwest of Richmond overlooking the Appomattox River tobacco country, it was near Hampden-Sydney College, the college he had helped found and where he planned to send his sons. To pay for the property, he hammered out an agreement to provide the equivalent of about $100,000 (today's dollars) in goods and services. According to his records, payment included several slaves, some lands he had bought in and around Richmond, his own legal services, two horses, and a barrel of rum. Within a year he added nearly 600 more acres to expand farm output. On a hill near the Appomattox River, the two-story house faced the world through a stately, two-story portico supported by tall Grecian columns.

On February 21, 1787, the Confederation Congress recommended that the states send delegates to a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation . . . ”
³
Henry had only just settled into his new home when he received a letter from his long-time friend from their days in the House of Burgesses: the new governor Edmund Randolph. “I most sincerely wish your presence at the federal convention,” Randolph wrote.

As he had when he refused to run for a third term as governor, Henry again shocked the nation by refusing to go to the Constitutional Convention—without even offering a reason for his refusal. Next to Washington, he had received the most votes in the Assembly—ahead of Randolph himself and such legendary figures as George Mason, George Wythe, and John Blair. Washington tried to convince Henry to change his mind, as did James Madison. Both met with outright rejections. “I am entirely convinced,” Madison wrote to Washington,

In fact, Henry had already gone “over to the opposite side.” Indeed, the Jay-Gardoqui affair had so infuriated him that he questioned whether the states should abolish rather than strengthen the Confederation. If the all-but-impotent Confederation had come so close to stripping Virginia's western farmers of their “natural rights” to ship goods to market, he reasoned that a strengthened national government could succeed where the Confederation had failed. He now argued that Virginia remained America's largest, richest, most heavily populated state, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and northward to the Ohio River. As such, he saw no benefits in ceding her sovereignty and uniting with other states into a huge, unwieldy federal system. Whenever necessary or to her advantage, Virginia could, whenever she saw fit, join in a common defense against attack by foreign powers and participate in joint ventures like the Potomac Company.

Although he remained open to the idea of reforming the Confederation, he believed that the convention in Philadelphia was a fraud. Its delegates were all men of great wealth who exploited the economies of their states and, he believed, would collude to dominate the economy of the entire continent—at the expense of western farmers. “Mr. Henry's disgust exceeds all measure,” Madison reported to Washington. By not attending the convention, Madison surmised, Henry would remain aloof from the proceedings and free “to combat or espouse the result of it.”
⁶

Henry was not the only American leader who refused an invitation to the convention. Richard Henry Lee, like Henry, a father of independence who had proposed the resolution for independence at the Continental Congress, also declined. George Washington, who had initiated the process of constitutional reform, also refused—changing his mind only after influential friends warned him that his refusal would doom the convention to failure and provoke the very anarchy he sought to prevent.

Although the Jay-Gardoqui negotiation was Henry's overriding political motive for not going to Philadelphia, Henry also faced financial problems. The combined tobacco production of his Prince Edward and Leatherwood plantations was not yielding enough revenue to support him and his family in the midst of the economic downturn. He simply could not afford to spend several months wining and dining with the nation's wealthiest men in Philadelphia. He could barely support his family—let alone send his boys to college—unless he resumed his law practice, and that would require his full-time attention.

Beginning on May 25, 1787, fifty-five delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia without the man who had sounded the clarion call for independence and become the symbol of liberty to almost all Americans. His absence was notable; his name was on everyone's lips, and his spirit seemed to hover about in the sweltering summer atmosphere of the convention hall. Although absent in person, Henry remained in continual contact with confederates at the convention who opposed a strong national government, and Madison conceded that “the refusal of Mr. Henry to join in the task of revising the Confederation is ominous.”
⁷

From the first, the conflicts that threatened the nation with anarchy were evident in delegate relationships—or lack of relationships—in the convention hall: the regional conflicts between North, South, East and West; the commercial conflicts between agrarian and urban interests; the political conflicts between large and small states. Indeed, Rhode Island, the smallest state, refused to send a delegate to the convention.