Patrick Henry (22 page)

The assemblymen fled farther westward, to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, while Jefferson narrowly escaped from his Monticello home at Charlottesville. With his term about to expire, Jefferson informed legislators that he would no longer serve as governor and that they should appoint a replacement for him. Then he took off for the safety of his isolated Poplar Forest plantation,
far to the south, in the wooded hills near present-day Lynchburg. Thanks to Jefferson's unexpected departure, for about a week Virginia essentially had no leader. On paper, his time of service was over, but abandoning his post at this critical juncture was nothing short of cowardly.
¹⁴

Faced with a dire emergency and the flight of its elected leader, the assembly met in Staunton and considered appointing a replacement governor with extraordinary powers similar to those they allowed Henry in late 1776. According to an account written many years later, Henry was one of the principal advocates of this action, seconding the motion for it and asserting in the debate that “it was immaterial with him whether the officer proposed was called a dictator, or governor with enlarged powers, or by any other name, yet surely an officer armed with such powers was necessary to restrain the unbridled fury of a licentious enemy.” No doubt Henry and his supporters were reacting to Jefferson's untimely exodus, seeking to reassert the authority of executive leadership, but ultimately the move for a governor with dictatorial powers was defeated. In
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Jefferson would criticize the assembly's debate over installing a wartime commander, failing to recognize that his own lack of leadership had brought Henry and the assembly to a point of utter panic. Moreover, it is hard to imagine what kind of role Jefferson imagined for Washington when he had recently asked him to return, if not as some kind of military dictator. A few weeks later, in mid-June, Richard Henry Lee explicitly asked Congress to give Washington these kind of “dictatorial powers” in Virginia, acidly noting that Jefferson's resignation had left his own state “in the moment of its greatest danger without government, abandoned to the arts and the arms of the enemy.” Jefferson himself clearly favored Lee's proposal, but by the time he published
Notes
, he had changed his tune about the virtue of empowering an executive to save Virginia.
¹⁵

Although the assembly did not name a dictator, it did grant the new governor, Thomas Nelson, broad powers like the ones given to Henry in 1776. Nelson had been serving as a militia commander, and the legislature gave him authority to call out the militia at will, seize supplies, and detain suspected Loyalists. They also resolved that no further aid be sent out of state to help the Continental army while Virginia remained under direct assault. Excoriating Congress for its neglect of Virginia, the assembly adopted a complaint it had commissioned Henry to write. Despite his private doubts about Virginians' moral courage, he painted the citizens of his home state as heroic and beleaguered: “the sufferings of a virtuous people, who now feel everything that a cruel, vindictive, and enraged enemy can inflict, compel us to make the demand [for aid], and justice ensures a compliance with it on the part of Congress.”
¹⁶

Henry also struck out against Jefferson for his conduct as governor. At Henry's instigation, George Nicholas made a motion that the House of Delegates inquire into Jefferson's service as governor to determine what misdeeds, if any, had occurred. At its December meeting, at a time when military victory had turned the state's mood from vindictive to celebratory, the assembly thought better of trying to humiliate Jefferson, clearing him of charges of cowardice and thanking him for his devoted service. Nevertheless, Jefferson seethed with anger toward Henry. Nicholas was not to blame for this outrageous investigation, Jefferson wrote to another legislator. “The trifling body [Nicholas] who moved this matter was below contempt; he was more an object of pity. His natural ill-temper was the tool worked by another hand. He was like the minnows which go in and out of the fundament of the whale. But the whale himself was discoverable enough by the turbulence of the water under which he moved.”
¹⁷

Stung by the very suggestion that he might have behaved dishonorably, Jefferson wrote a lugubrious letter to James Monroe, likely
intended for circulation among Virginia politicians, suggesting that since the assembly had hurt him so badly, he would take his political talents away forever to his mountain retreat at Monticello. The investigation “inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.” Jefferson's loathing of Henry would fester for decades, only moderating long after Henry's death.
¹⁸

Henry seems to have spent most of the second half of 1781 at Leatherwood. His criticism of Jefferson's flight from Charlottesville notwithstanding, he was not particularly engaged in political affairs in these months. Once again, we are left to wish for more of Henry's thoughts, for we know almost nothing of his reaction when a surprising shift in the winds of war produced the final battle in Virginia, and of the Revolution.

Continental troops reinforced their numbers in Virginia in early June, and in late July, Cornwallis received orders from British commander in chief Henry Clinton to hold the Tidewater region. Cornwallis decided to entrench at Yorktown. Washington and his army left New York to meet a French fleet headed for the Chesapeake Bay, and at the end of September a large combined force of French and American troops laid siege to Yorktown. Short supplies and epidemic disease ravaged Cornwallis's camp, with escaped Virginia slaves who had hoped to fight for the British enduring the brunt of the horrors. Cornwallis began expelling blacks infected with smallpox, leaving them to be captured by the Americans, or simply collapse and die in the woods around Yorktown. After the siege, one Pennsylvania soldier observed, “Negroes lie about, sick and dying, in every stage of the small pox. Never was in so filthy a place.” The hopes and lives of runaway African-Americans became casualties of the war.
¹⁹

The Americans and French bombarded the British position at Yorktown, sending Cornwallis and his officers running for cover along the York River's edge. Finally, on October 14, Washington's
twenty-six-year-old chief of staff, Alexander Hamilton, led a bold assault on the British line, and the humiliated Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. The struggle for independence, which had begun with Patrick Henry's Stamp Act speech in Williamsburg in 1765, had been won sixteen years later, only a few miles to the east of the site of that famous oration, in the riverine lands of the Tidewater.

 

PATRICK HENRY FOUGHT CONTINUING ILLNESS as he recuperated from his long service as governor and Revolutionary leader, receiving a leave of absence from the legislature in November 1781. Surely he was delighted at Cornwallis's surrender. The mood among his victorious friends was captured in a letter he received in May 1782 from General Horatio Gates, who congratulated Henry for his part in America's peace and independence. “Now the glorious opportunity approaches,” Gates wrote, “when upon the broad basis of civil liberty, may be established, the happiness of the present generation and their posterity.” Henry would soon be far less sanguine than Gates that the new nation had the virtue it needed to meet that opportunity.
²⁰

Gates also expressed hope for “equal liberty” to spread throughout the land, and Virginia took a halting step in that direction in 1782 when the legislature passed a law permitting private manumissions of slaves. Previously, any masters wishing to free their slaves would have to appeal to the state. It had become embarrassingly obvious during the war that the British offered slaves better prospects for freedom than the Americans did. Newer evangelical churches, such as those of the Methodists and the Baptists, often put pressure on members to free their enslaved workers. Some masters in Virginia wished to set their slaves free in their wills, or by some gradual process. Now owners could free their slaves by submitting a legal request to a county court.

Although journal records do not exist for this assembly session, biographers have assumed Patrick Henry supported the bill. Many white Virginians did not; the assembly received more than 1,000 anti-manumission petitions claiming that the new law would encourage unrest. About 10,000 slaves would be manumitted under this law before it was amended in 1806, but its effects were less than revolutionary: many masters used the law only to free a favorite slave, not to free their slaves en masse. Those Virginia slaves manumitted during these twenty-four years represented about only 3 percent of the state's total slave population, which in 1790 was just under 300,000. With legislators worried about the burgeoning free black population, the 1806 amendment required that any freed slaves leave the state, which functionally ended the state's more progressive policy.
²¹

In 1782, as the nation settled into an uneasy peacetime, Henry reentered public life, seeking to use his position in the legislature to put Virginia on solid ground economically—and morally. Sometimes his economic and moral imperatives clashed, as they did around the thorny issue of repaying debts to British creditors. The 1783 Treaty of Paris that officially concluded the war stipulated that lawfully contracted debts be paid back to creditors on both sides of the Atlantic, but Henry resisted, countering James Madison's arguments by protesting that the British had not yet vacated their military posts in the Great Lakes region. Only when the British withdrew from their American forts should Virginians and other Americans pay their debts, Henry maintained. The issue would fester until the War of 1812.
²²

Taking priority in Henry's view was debt relief for the struggling people of post-Revolutionary Virginia, including planters large and small. Thanks to the vagaries of their agricultural economy, Southside Virginians—residents of the state's south-central region, where Henry now lived—carried a disproportionate individual debt burden,
an encumbrance Henry knew well from enduring the bankruptcies of his youth and watching his dissolute half-brother John Syme struggle financially. But Henry hated the thought that his supporters would be forced to repay the British, no matter if their debts arose from legitimate transactions or even undisciplined consumption of luxury goods.

This issue did not inspire Henry's finest hour. Avoiding the payment of legitimate debts was not consistent with his career-long emphasis on virtue. Even friends such as George Mason challenged the ethics of Henry's position. Writing to Henry in May 1783, Mason implored him to use the opportunity of independence to establish moral foundations for the republic. “Whether our independence shall prove a blessing or a curse, must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness,” Mason cautioned. Based on Virginians' performance during the war, Mason himself was not particularly hopeful about the future. He knew that some Virginians wondered why they had fought the war if they still had to pay their debts to the enemy they had vanquished. In Mason's view, Virginians had served in the Revolution “not to avoid our just debts, or cheat our creditors; but to rescue our country from the oppression and tyranny of the British government, and to secure the rights and liberty of ourselves, and our posterity.” Mason was surprised to find Henry on the other side of the issue. Henry's lifelong championing of virtue was sincere, but as a planter preoccupied with maintaining his own prosperity, he also factored financial considerations into his policymaking and his worldview.
²³

Despite his position against debt repayment, Henry took more pro-British positions in promoting the resumption of British imports to Virginia and encouraging Loyalists to return to the state. Sponsoring a bill renewing commerce with Britain, Henry had to overcome the opposition of many fellow assemblymen, including John Tyler Sr. (father of the future president). Tyler recalled that
Henry unleashed his rhetoric in defense of thriving business: “‘Why,' said he, ‘should we fetter commerce? If a man is in chains, he droops and bows to the earth, for his spirits are broken, (looking sorrowfully at his feet:) but let him twist the fetters from his legs, and he will stand erect,' straightening himself, and assuming a look of proud defiance.—‘Fetter not commerce, sir—let her be as free as air—she will range the whole creation, and return on the wings of the four winds of heaven, to bless the land with plenty.'”
²⁴

Henry saw no point in holding a grudge against the Loyalists; in his view, Virginia needed as many industrious settlers as it could get. For Henry, the end of the war offered America a chance to become the “asylum for liberty” that Tom Paine's
Common Sense
had envisioned. Asserting that if America opened her doors, the free peoples of Europe would flow in, Henry declaimed, “They see here a land blessed with natural and political advantages, which are not equaled by those of any other country upon earth—a land on which a gracious Providence has emptied the horn of abundance.... They see a land in which liberty hath taken up her abode—that liberty, whom they had considered as a fabled goddess, existing only in the fancies of poets—they see her here a real divinity—her altars rising on every hand throughout these happy states—her glories chanted by three millions of tongues—and the whole region smiling under her blessed influence.” There was no need to fear British Loyalists, Henry assured the legislators. “Shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?” But even Henry's oratory could not persuade the legislature. It passed a bill prohibiting the Tories' return.
²⁵

With the end of the war, Henry and his fellow political leaders also had to address an emerging issue that would beset the new nation from its beginnings into its maturity: the balance between a stronger national government and the power of the states. The Articles of Confederation—which had structured America's government
since the beginning of the war—provided no power to tax, a constraint that made sense given that the country's controversy with Britain had centered on taxation. Why substitute American taxes for British ones? But Henry had witnessed, and indeed had been engaged in, Washington's struggle to supply his army because of the Congress's inability to raise funds directly. In the late stages of the Revolution, some policymakers had proposed an impost on imported goods. All the states would have to give their assent to such a plan for it to go into effect. Now, as the thirteen states struggled to define themselves as a single entity, the issue of national taxation gripped the Virginia legislature. Henry wavered in his opinion of the impost. He understood that the national government needed to generate more revenue, but he was concerned that the government would abuse its power to tax.