Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (13 page)

We might, with the utmost ignominy, have passed the rest of our days in exile. Some of you, after losing your property, might have waited at Rome for assistance from others. But because such a life, to men of spirit, was disgusting and unendurable, you resolved upon your present course. If you wish to quit it, you must exert all your resolution, for none but conquerors have exchanged war for peace. To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle, those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to a rampart.

When I contemplate you, soldiers, and when I consider your past exploits, a strong hope of victory animates me. Your spirit, your age, your valor, give me confidence—to say nothing of necessity, which makes even cowards brave. To prevent the numbers of the enemy from surrounding us, our confined situation is sufficient. But should fortune be unjust to your valor, take care not to lose your lives unavenged; take care not to be taken and butchered like cattle, rather than fighting like men, to leave to your enemies a bloody and mournful victory.

Elected Pope in 1088, Urban waited three years until the antipope was ejected before entering Rome. Europe was a maelstrom of warring feudal barons, lawless nobles, and Norman buccaneers. The new pope came up with the way to channel their energies into what he thought would be both diverting and constructive: the recovery of the Holy Land, which was then in the hands of unbelievers. He proposed to start a war—a holy war, or crusade—to tame the threatening Turks on their home ground, to open the Eastern Mediterranean to Italian commerce, and to make possible the adventurous penitentiary pilgrimages that would recruit new adherents to the Church.

At Clermont in November 1095, to an audience of thousands who had pitched their tents in open fields, the French pope stood on a platform to deliver what historian Will Durant called “the most influential speech in medieval history.” He summoned Christendom to a crusade, sanctified by God, against the common enemy. He promised them that their families and property would be protected while they were on the crusade, and if they died for God’s glory, all their sins would be remitted and Heaven would await their souls. “God wills it!” he shouted in Latin, and the crowd roared back, “God wills it!”

What was willed by Urban II turned out to be a slaughter. After the first wave of twenty thousand disorganized rabble failed, the nobles took over and defeated the Turks at Antioch, driving across Asia Minor to lay siege to Jerusalem, demanding unconditional surrender. After forty days, the small Muslim force gave in. An eyewitness priest, Raymond of Agiles, wrote delightedly, “Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded… or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days and then burned… one rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.” All seventy thousand Muslim residents of Jerusalem were butchered; Jews were herded into their synagogue and burned alive.

The first of the nine crusades that would turn Asia Minor into a field of blood and death over two centuries had begun. The national monarchies of Europe were unified and strengthened, the ports of Italy prospered, the native Christians were oppressed by the European rulers, and the seeds of religious hatred were firmly planted.

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O RACE OF
Franks! race beloved and chosen by God!…

From the confines of Jerusalem and from Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth that an accursed race, wholly alienated from God, has violently invaded the lands of these Christians, and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part they have killed by cruel tortures. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanliness. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them, and has been deprived of territory so vast in extent that it could not be traversed in two months’ time.

On whom, then, rests the labor of avenging these wrongs, and of recovering this territory, if not upon you—you upon whom, above all others, God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great bravery, and strength to humble the heads of those who resist you? Let the deeds of your ancestors encourage you—the glory and grandeur of Charlemagne and your other monarchs. Let the Holy Sepulcher of Our Lord and Saviour, now held by unclean nations, arouse you, and the holy places that are now stained with pollution…. Let none of your possessions keep you back, nor anxiety for your family affairs. For this land which you now inhabit, shut in on all sides by the sea and the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; it scarcely furnishes food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage wars, and that many among you perish in civil strife.

Let hatred, therefore, depart from among you; let your quarrels end. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others, a paradise of delights. That royal city, situated at the center of the earth, implores you to come to her aid. Undertake this journey eagerly for the remission of your sins, and be assured of the reward of imperishable glory in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Dieu li volt
—“God wills it!”

Vain, miserly, and fickle, the spinster queen commanded the affection of her subjects by virtue of her courage and her identification with the nation’s fate. One of her many rejected suitors, Philip II of Spain, in 1588 assembled what was called the “Invincible Armada” of tall ships to invade England, thereby to assert Catholic power against the center of Protestantism. Elizabeth I, despite the danger of a cross-Channel invasion, went with a small army to visit the troops in Tilbury. Her ostentatious unconcern for personal security while in the midst of the English people was expressed in a strong “Let tyrants fear”; as her soldiers knelt, she affirmed her faith in a “famous victory.”

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MY LOVING PEOPLE
, we have been persuaded by some, that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms: to which, rather than any dishonor should grow by me, I myself will take up arms; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, by your forwardness, that you have deserved
rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble and worthy subject; not doubting by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and by your valor in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over the enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

On March 23, 1775—the same day that Edmund Burke was urging conciliation with America in London’s House of Commons—a thirty-eight-year-old self-taught lawyer named Patrick Henry rose in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, where 122 of the colony’s delegates were meeting. The church’s windows were open on the fine spring day to let a crowd gather outside listen to the deliberations of the British colony’s representatives. Henry handed a series of resolutions to the clerk, who read them out, concluding, “Resolved therefore, That this Colony be immediately put into a posture of defence; and that [blank] be a Committee to prepare a plan for the embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient for that purpose.” As the proposer, Henry would have been the first called upon to speak for his resolutions, although the initial lines of his reported speech refer graciously
to colleagues who differed with him; perhaps he alluded to what they had said the day before.

He spoke without notes; at least, none have ever been found. His speech began in a quiet smolder and ended ablaze with passion. A Baptist clergyman present wrote of the orator’s crescendo, “The tendons of his neck stood out white and rigid, like whipcords. His voice rose louder and louder, until the walls of the building and all within them seemed to shake and rock in its tremendous vibrations. Finally his pale face and glaring eyes became terrible to look upon. Men leaned forward in their seats with the heads strained forward, their faces pale and their eyes glaring like the speaker’s…. When he sat down, I felt sick with excitement.” No applause; no known reply; Richard Henry Lee seconded the resolutions; Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Nelson were reported to have spoken in favor. The vote was called for and taken; the resolutions carried by a narrow margin of five, and the American Revolution in the largest colony was under way.

With “This is no time for ceremony,” the speaker goes right to the heart of the matter: “freedom or slavery.” His rhetorical approach is one of loaded question and scathing reply. Q.: “Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation?” A.: “These are the implements of war and subjugation….” Q.: “Shall we try argument?” A.: “Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years.”

The past pleas to the crown are listed in an active parallel construction: “We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated….” The answers are recounted in parallel also, but in the passive, leaving George III out of it: “Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded….”

When Henry says, “An appeal to arms and the God of Hosts is all that is left us,” on top of his earlier refusal to commit “an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of heaven,” he is directly referring to a euphemism put forward a century before: English philosopher John Locke, in advancing the courageous idea that man had natural, God-given rights, was presuming to say that these superseded the divine right of kings, but—to save his life—couched his justification for revolution to unseat an unjust monarch in the phrase “an appeal to heaven.” This idea under-girded the philosophy Jefferson expressed later in the Declaration of Independence, and the religious image was used by the fiery Henry in calling for what he never named: revolution.

He then knocks down the arguments used against the revolutionaries. “They tell us, sir, that we are weak….” He answers that time is not on the colonists’ side, that the king will grow stronger, but that “the battle…
is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.” The men gathered in the church could fairly hear echoes of Ecclesiastes 9:11: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong….” And then he adds the crusher: there is no real choice when the alternatives are fighting for liberty or submission to slavery. “The war is inevitable,” he concludes, but not in despair, “—and let it come!”

In the peroration, he flays his audience with rhetorical questions, three short and then one long, setting up his answer choosing death rather than slavery. Note the breath, or beat, provided by “I know not what course others may take”; it enables the orator to deliver the punch line with such added force that it echoes down through history.

One small question: Is this what Patrick Henry really said? We know he spoke that day; we know he made a powerful impact with his speech; but we do not know if the speech that has come down to us is the speech he gave. No notes; no manuscript then or later; no contemporaneous account. The first publication of the speech, in 1816, came forty-one years after the Richmond convention, taken from William Wirt’s then forthcoming biography of Patrick Henry, who died in 1799. Evidence that the final line was accurate comes from the slogan on the flag of the militia that subsequently served under him: “Liberty or Death.” (One rebel wag noted he preferred a less severe “Liberty or Be Crippled.”)

In a doctoral dissertation on the authenticity of the Wirt transcript, Stephen T. Olsen—using traditional methods of historical research as well as computer analysis of texts—argues that sometime between 1805 and 1815 biographer Wirt elicited a reconstituted transcript from a friend, federal judge St. George Tucker, who claimed to have been a spectator in the church when Henry delivered his speech. Other scholarship may refute this one day, but until then, my own judgment is that Patrick Henry made a rousing speech that day that did conclude with the line about liberty or death; that a generation later, to respond to the wishes of his friend writing a biography of the patriot, Judge Tucker recalled what he could and made up the rest. If that is so, Judge Tucker belongs among the ranks of history’s best ghostwriters. Here is the Henry/Tucker/Wirt transcript in full:

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MR. PRESIDENT:

No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope that it will not be thought disrespectful to those
gentlemen, if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve. This is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.