Lion of Liberty

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Clay bust of Patrick Henry by
“itinerant Italian sculptor” in 1788.
(RED HILL MUSEUM COLLECTION, PATRICK HENRY
MEMORIAL FOUNDATION, BROOKNEAL, VA)

My deepest thanks to Karen Gorham and Edith C. Poindexter of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation at Patrick Henry's Red Hill home, in Brookneal, Virginia. Karen Gorham is director at Red Hill, and Edith Poindexter was, until her recent retirement, curator and genealogist there for many years. Both are superb historians and were generous in sharing their encyclopedic knowledge of Henry, his family, and his times. In addition, both ladies were gracious enough to vet the final manuscript to ensure its accuracy. Ms. Poindexter also shared important research materials that shed new light on Patrick Henry's life and family, while Ms. Gorham provided me with several key illustrations and a number of essential research materials. I must add, as well, that both ladies deserve the thanks of all Americans for their important work at the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation in Brookneal, Virginia.

I am also most grateful to John P. Kaminski, one of America's premier (and busiest) scholars, who, with his usual generosity, was kind enough to vet this manuscript. Historian, author, educator, lecturer, documentary editor, and patriot, John P. Kaminski is founder and director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution. He is also responsible for producing one of the nation's most important historical treasures:
The
Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
, and I am honored by his friendship.

I want to express my deepest thanks as well to the many gracious folks at my publisher, Da Capo Press of the Perseus Books Group, who work so hard and expertly behind the scenes and seldom receive public acknowledgment for the beautiful books they help produce and market. Among them are Lissa Warren, Director of Publicity; Kevin Hanover, Director of Marketing and the wonderful sales force for the Perseus Books Group; Sean Maher in marketing; assistant editor Jonathan Crowe; project editors Renee Caputo and Cisca Schreefel; copy editor Anais Scott; proofreader Laura Keenan; indexer Robie Grant; and designer Trish Wilkinson.

Finally, my deepest thanks to my editor, Robert Pigeon, executive editor at Da Capo Press, for the time and effort he put into improving this manuscript, and to my friend and literary agent, Edward W. Knappman, of New England Publishing Associates.

 

Author's Note: Spellings and grammar in the eighteenth-century letters and manuscripts cited in this book have, where appropriate, been modernized to clarify syntax without altering the intent of the original authors. Readers may find the original spellings in works cited in the endnotes and bibliography at the back of the book. Regarding the depictions of Patrick Henry, the wide and sometimes incongruous differences in the portraits and sculptures result in part from the degenerating effects of malaria as he aged. A second reason, however, is that Henry only sat for four portraits during his lifetime—two miniatures, the sketches by Latrobe on page 250, and the clay bust on the frontispiece. Subsequent portraits shown in this book were made long after his death from the two miniatures and include distortions by artists who never actually saw Henry. The clay bust, however, “was considered a perfect likeness [at the time],” according to Patrick Henry's friend, Judge John Tyler.

May 29, 1736.
Patrick Henry born in Hanover County, Virginia.

1752.
Opens store with brother William; fails one year later.

1754.
Marries Sarah Shelton; begins farming.

1757.
House burns down; farm fails; he opens a new store.

1759.
Economic depression closes store; he moves into tavern; tends bar, studies law.

1760.
Passes law exams; begins practice.

1763.
Gains fame in “Parsons' Cause” case.

1765.
Elected to House of Burgesses; Stamp Act Speech, May 29.

1767.
Moves to “Scotchtown” plantation; wife Sarah suffers depression.

1774.
Delegate to Continental Congress.

1775.
“Liberty or Death” speech, March 23; Virginia's commander in chief; wife Sarah dies.

1776.
Resigns military command; returns to state assembly; Virginia declares independence; helps write state constitution; champions religious liberty and end to slave trade; elected Virginia's first governor; leads war effort.

1777.
Elected to second term as governor; organizes Virginia Navy; sends troops against British in Illinois, Indiana, the Carolinas; marries Dorothea Dandridge.

1778.
Elected to third term; exposes plot to oust Washington; uncovers corruption behind Valley Forge miseries.

1779-1784.
Leader, Virginia Assembly; champions restoration of British trade, return of Tories; intermarriage of whites and Indians.

1784.
Elected governor a fourth time.

1785.
Threatens secession over Mississippi River navigation rights; reelected governor; rejects stronger confederation; supports farmer tax protests; nation faces anarchy.

1786.
Daughters marry; his views on women, marriage, slavery; declines another term as governor.

1787.
Refuses to attend Constitutional Convention; prophesies tyranny under national government.

1788.
Leads fight against ratification; demands Bill of Rights and limits on federal powers; resumes law practice.

1791.
Quits politics for full-time private law practice; landmark British Debts Case.

1792.
Land speculations; Yazoo scandal.

1794-1796.
Declines appointments as U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other federal posts.

1799.
Returns to politics; recaptures Assembly seat; Dorothea gives birth to her eleventh child—his seventeenth—lives four days.

June 6, 1799.
Patrick Henry dies at sixty-three. Buried at Red Hill, Charlotte County, Virginia.

“As this government stands,” Patrick Henry thundered, “I despise and abhor it. . . . I speak as one poor individual—but when I speak, I speak the language of thousands. If I am asked what is to be done when a people feel themselves intolerably oppressed, my answer is . . . ‘overturn the government!'”

Henry's roar of exhortation was not aimed at Britain; it was aimed at the United States, as the thirteen former British colonies considered whether to adopt a new constitution. As he had done a decade earlier in his famed cry for “liberty or death,” Henry once again roared for the rights of free men to govern themselves with as few restrictions from government as possible. His roar would reverberate through the ages of American history to this very day.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten as the
first
of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, for revolution against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much freedom as possible from government—American as well as British. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.
¹

As first governor of Virginia—then the most important colony in America—Henry became the most important civilian leader of the Revolutionary War, ensuring troops and supplies for Washington's Continental Army and engineering the American victory over British and Indian forces in the West that brought present-day Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky into the Union. Without Patrick Henry, there might never have been a revolution, independence, or United States of America.

A champion of religious freedom, Henry fought to end slave importation and was the true father of the Bill of Rights. Recognized in his day as America's greatest orator and lawyer, Henry bitterly opposed big national governments—American as well as British. He sought, instead, to unite American states in an “amicable” confederation that left each state free to govern itself as it saw fit, but ready to unite with its neighbors in defense against a common enemy. A bitter foe of the Constitution, he predicted that its failure to limit federal government powers would restore the very tyranny that had provoked the revolution against Britain. He warned that the Constitution as written failed to include a bill of rights to guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, redress of grievances, and other basic individual rights.

Although the First Congress passed some of Henry's amendments to protect individual liberties, it rejected his demands to impose strict limits on federal powers and safeguard state sovereignty. His struggle for the rights of states to govern themselves sowed the seeds of secession in the South and subsequent growth of the large intrusive federal government that Henry so despised. Within months of taking office, Congress enacted a national tax without the consent of state legislatures—as Parliament had with the Stamp Act in 1765. In 1794, President Washington fulfilled Henry's prophesy of presidential tyranny by sending troops into Pennsylvania to suppress protests against federal taxation—as Britain's Lord North had done in Boston in 1774.