Patrick Henry (10 page)

What led Henry to make his inflammatory stand against the Stamp Act? Certainly he was disposed to view encroachments against the colonists' liberties in the worst possible light. Throughout
his career, Henry's brilliant speeches would paint grim scenarios of the desolation awaiting those who would not stand up for their freedom. Patriots must act while they still could, he proclaimed. For him, accepting small infractions against fundamental rights represented a headlong path toward tyranny.

Henry himself saw his stand against the Stamp Act as a defense of both liberty and virtue. On the back of his copy of the resolutions against the Stamp Act, he wrote that resisting the tax galvanized the colonists against taxation by Parliament, where they had no representatives. This fundamental disagreement with Parliament, which Henry first exposed to public controversy, would ultimately lead to war and independence. Henry did not know whether Americans would finally benefit from their independence, however; it was up to succeeding generations to avail themselves of “the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed upon us. If they be wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable.” Citing a well-known Bible passage from the book of Proverbs, Henry concluded that “righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation.” A virtuous people would resist—even to the point of blood—those who sought to undermine their liberty.
²⁵

In the prelude to the Revolution, Patrick Henry embodied the emerging American zeal for independence and integrity that he helped kindle during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Those years saw both the maturation of the House of Burgesses as a semiautonomous legislature and the spiritual fires of the Great Awakening. The era summoned heroic personalities like his, men who were called to defend America's liberties with political and moral fervor. In 1765, the twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry responded, ultimately becoming one of the greatest patriots of all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
FTER THE FAILURE OF THE STAMP ACT, Britain imposed a new round of taxes, the Townshend Duties, in 1767. Two years later, in 1769, Massachusetts continued its protests by instituting a boycott of British goods—a measure that Virginia Governor Norborne Berkeley had warned the House of Burgesses not to follow. When the delegates defied him by passing a resolution supporting Massachusetts's position, Berkeley told them bluntly, “I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their effect: you have made it my duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”
¹

Having anticipated their dismissal by the governor, the Burgesses immediately left the governor's council chamber and hurried down the street to reconvene at Williamsburg's Raleigh Tavern. Led by George Washington (a member who usually preferred a quieter role), the legislators adopted a version of the nonimportation
agreements that had been circulating in the colonies. Virginia's agreement was probably written by George Mason, with whom Washington had been discussing nonimportation as a means to resist the British duties. Washington told Mason that “at a time when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our ancestors.” The Virginia agreement required subscribers to avoid importing goods taxed by the Townshend Duties. Displayed prominently at the top of the list of the agreement's signers was the name of Patrick Henry.
²

The repeal of the Stamp Act had not clarified Parliament's uncertain authority in the colonies. In 1767 Charles Townshend, Britain's new chancellor of the exchequer (the finance minister), tried to raise revenues again by enacting levies on trade goods imported into the colonies. The British government simultaneously took steps to enforce its authority in America. It established a new Board of Customs in Boston, and the British army withdrew from the American frontier and redeployed in towns of the East Coast. This move raised fears that the army was actually in America to control not Native Americans but the colonists themselves. In Virginia, leaders such as Patrick Henry interpreted Townshend's reforms as the latest attempt to assert parliamentary dominance.

In its 1768 session, the House of Burgesses passed a remonstrance—a statement of grievances—reemphasizing its opposition to taxation without representation. Henry, still torn between tending to his personal affairs and representing Louisa County in Williamsburg, did not attend. He was apparently surveying lands in western Virginia he had recently acquired from his father-in-law.

Over the course of the next year, the colonists' resolve to stop importing British goods escalated the conflict over the Townshend
Program. Massachusetts circulated a letter among the other colonial legislatures calling for concerted action against the duties, which the British secretary of state for the American colonies ordered revoked, but the colonial legislature in Boston overwhelmingly rejected the directive. The imperial governor of Massachusetts subsequently dissolved the legislature, and the British insisted that the other legislatures ignore Massachusetts's “flagitious attempt to disturb the public peace,” or face dissolution themselves.
³

Patrick Henry and his fellow Burgesses refused to comply with the British administration's order. In May 1769, four years after the Stamp Act resolutions, the legislature (with Henry now in attendance) adopted resolutions that would frustrate the efficacy of the Townshend Program. In addition to protesting taxation by any legislature other than the Burgesses, the House passed a resolution supporting Massachusetts's circular letter. Anticipating retribution from London, they also opposed Parliament's proposed new extension of treason laws to the colonies, which might have brought accused traitors from America to England for trial.

A committee of delegates, including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, quickly drafted a remonstrance against the Townshend Program, which the House unanimously adopted. The declaration reiterated the colonists' continuing devotion to the king, and their hope that George III would intervene on America's behalf against a despotic Parliament. In the fawning yet sincere rhetoric of the era, the Burgesses presumed to “prostrate ourselves at the foot of your royal throne, beseeching your majesty, as our king and father, to avert from your faithful and loyal subjects of America, those miseries which must necessarily be the consequence of such measures.”

The Burgesses closed their entreaty by reminding the king that Americans prayed for him daily, wishing “that your Majesty's reign may be long and prosperous over Great Britain, and all your dominions; and that after death your Majesty may taste the fullest
fruition of eternal bliss, and that a descendant of your illustrious house may reign over the extended British empire until time shall be no more.” At this point in their conflict with Britain, Virginians assumed their devotion to the monarchy would eventually assuage the conflict between the colonists and Parliament. Appeals to the king did not cool this feud, however, and Virginia's governor dissolved the defiant Burgesses immediately after they passed Henry and Lee's remonstrance.
⁴

Although Henry's most spectacular acts as a political instigator would occur in 1765 and 1775, the Burgesses' stubborn denunciations of the Townshend Program showed how in the intervening years his radicalism had spread even to previously reticent members such as Washington. In the lead-up to the Revolution, Henry's zeal opened up possibilities never before imaginable for his fellow colonists, from denouncing the king as a tyrant to calling for a military struggle against the empire. But the time for war had not yet arrived. As it had with the Stamp Act, Parliament eventually repealed most of the Townshend Duties, but the underlying crisis of authority festered.

 

HENRY CONTINUED TO HAVE PLENTY to do beyond his duties in Williamsburg. Like most American officials in the colonial era, he never intended to make government service a career. Henry had high political ambitions that drove his pursuit of office and fueled his penchant for controversy, but he also remained an active lawyer, land speculator, and family man, and would return to those roles repeatedly in life, often forgoing opportunities for greater political involvement in favor of tending to private business. Henry was very devoted to his children—his third child, William, was born in 1763, and his fourth, Anne, in 1767. He would maintain an engaged paternal relationship with the children even after they became adults, keeping up an avid correspondence with them about
family matters. Henry could never envision himself serving continuously in office; like Washington, he viewed political life with ambivalence. It was noble to serve, but it caused difficulty for his family and his finances.

By the early 1770s, practicing law seemed the most promising way for Henry to bolster his finances. Ever since his star-making turn in the Parsons' Cause, Henry had developed a sizeable legal practice in Hanover and Louisa Counties. In 1769, he began practicing before the General Court of Virginia, a more prestigious venue than the county courts. Working in the General Court also gave him even more access to the established political leaders of the colony, such as Robert Carter Nicholas, a longtime Burgess, and since 1766, the treasurer of the colony, who would turn over his law practice to Henry in 1773 when his duties as treasurer prevented him from maintaining his caseload. Nicholas initially offered the work to Thomas Jefferson, who declined. The General Court did not always provide a steady income, however. Jefferson, Henry, and other lawyers who worked in the General Court apparently found it difficult to make ends meet there; they published a notice in the
Virginia Gazette
in 1773 announcing that they would no longer accept cases from clients who did not pay their whole fee in advance.
⁵

Henry loved arguing cases before a jury. Sometimes he could win marginal cases just by appealing to the hearts of jurors. Even though he and Jefferson were still friends at this point, Jefferson thought that Henry's courtroom pyrotechnics evaded the hard principles of the law. In comments on a marriage case concerning an annulment and dowry rights in 1773, Jefferson wrote that “Henry for the plaintiff avoided, as was his custom, entering the lists of the law, running wild in the field of fact.” Yet Henry won the case. There was more than a hint of jealousy in Jefferson's dismissive comment: he could never stir a jury's emotions like Henry. The differences in sensibility and legal values between the two men would not fracture their
friendship, however, until well into the Revolutionary War, when Jefferson's questionable behavior as governor, and a subsequent legal investigation initiated by Henry, would nearly ruin Jefferson's reputation.
⁶

In retrospect, real estate seemed a more risky path to financial security than law, but Henry followed the lead of his father and father-in-law in buying and selling land in the west. (The “west,” to Henry, was central and western Virginia.) Often the lands were in locations uncertain to their sellers and buyers, encompassing territory traditionally used by Native Americans. Nevertheless, up-and-coming colonists like Henry believed that western land deals offered the potential for significant profits. Land was traditionally associated with independence in British culture. Tobacco also depleted soils quickly, requiring access to new areas for cultivation.

In 1765, the year of the Stamp Act crisis, Henry received 1,700 acres in Louisa County from his father as repayment of a loan. This land, on Roundabout Creek, became the Henry family residence for six years; he built a modest home of one and a half stories there, with three rooms downstairs and one upstairs. John Shelton, his father-in-law, also became a source of major land acquisitions for Henry. In 1766, Henry helped save Shelton from bankruptcy by purchasing about 3,400 acres of land from him on separate tracts in southwest Virginia. Henry bought the land unseen and had difficulty locating the tracts when he went surveying. When he did find them, he realized that Cherokees occupied them, but eventually he arranged for the government to acknowledge his claims to that acreage. Aggressive American attempts to remove the Cherokees from their traditional lands would not culminate until seventy years later, with the Trail of Tears. As governor of Virginia during the Revolution, Henry repeatedly assured the Cherokees that Virginia wanted to ally with them against their Native American rivals and that “his heart and the hearts of all the Virginians are still good
toward the Cherokees.” Henry's assurances did not keep Virginia out of a vicious war with the Cherokees, a conflict that would begin in 1776.
⁷

Henry sensed the opportunities waiting for land speculation in America's interior, especially in the Ohio River valley region. Henry and his business associates were planning to settle English families in the Kentucky territory, negotiating to relocate Native Americans when necessary. In one of his earliest surviving letters, written to the Scottish immigrant William Fleming, who was surveying lands in Kentucky where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers met, Henry encouraged Fleming to keep a diary while on his journey, so that detailed information on the characteristics of that vast region could be “printed in order to invite our countrymen to become settlers. The task is arduous, to view that vast forest, describe the face of the country and such of the rivers, creeks, etc., as present themselves to view is a work of much trouble, hazard, and fatigue, and will in my judgment entitle you to the favorable notice of every gentleman engaged in the scheme.” Henry and other leading Virginians, such as Washington, continued to acquire land in the west, even as that region descended into chaotic violence between new colonial settlers and Native Americans in the early 1770s.
⁸