Lion of Liberty (5 page)

Another witness said that spectators looked at each other “in disbelief” when he began his presentation. Then, “attracted by some strong gesture, struck by some majestic attitude, fascinated by the spell of his eye, the charm of his emphasis . . . they could look away no more. In less than twenty minutes, they might be seen in every part of the house . . . in death-like silence, their features fixed in amazement and awe, all their senses listening and riveted upon the speaker, as if to catch the least strain of some heavenly visitant.”
⁶

In the midst of his dramatic performance, Henry also presented constitutional arguments. He argued that the British government represented a compact between the king and his people, by which the former provided protection in exchange for obedience and support. Either party's refusal to fulfill its obligation, Henry declared, automatically released the other party from its obligations. Henry called the Twopenny Act necessary for the economic survival of the people. By annulling the act, the king had failed to fulfill his obligation to protect the people—indeed, “he had degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all right to his subjects' obedience to his order of annulment.”
⁷

“Treason!” cried Maury's attorney.

“Treason!” cried clergymen in the audience.

“The gentleman has spoken treason!” Maury's lawyer shouted as he stood to address the court. “I am astonished that your worships can hear it without emotion or any mark of dissatisfaction.”
⁸

But Henry's oration had transfixed the justices as much as other spectators, and they remained silent as Henry ignored the interruption and continued—this time shifting his attack from the crown to the clergy. In refusing to abide by the Twopenny Act, the established church had abdicated one of its primary responsibilities to enforce obedience to the laws. “When clergy cease to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry, and may justly strip them of their appointments,” he declared. Instead of damages, he cried out, Mr. Maury deserved to be punished with signal severity.

With each phrase, Henry stripped away the veneer of reverence for the clergy that had suppressed the anger of country folk toward the church for generations. Citing “the natural rights” of Virginia freemen to keep the benefits of their labor, he so fired up farmer hatred of the Anglican Church that the clergymen who had come to support Reverend Maury “fled from the house in precipitation and terror.” A long, satisfying silence followed, after which Patrick Henry intoned a soft-spoken warning to the jury that the court had already ruled for Reverend Maury in the clergyman's first trial—that he was indeed entitled to compensation, but “excepting they were disposed to rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks, he hoped
they would not let slip the opportunity . . . of making such an example of him as might hereafter be a warning to himself and his brethren, not to have the temerity, for the future, to dispute the validity of such laws. ...” Henry told the jury that the law required them to award Maury damages, but it had no obligation to award him more than a farthing.

Silence followed as the jury trooped out. After less than five minutes of deliberation, its members returned and awarded Reverend Maury one penny.

In the explosion of whoops, yells, and cheers that followed, Maury's lawyer shouted for a mistrial, but the justices dismissed the motion unanimously—setting off an even louder explosion of cheers as spectators hoisted Henry on their shoulders and carried him out of the courthouse in triumph.

Chapter 3

Patrick Henry was not unaware of his astonishing—almost frightening—gift to move men's minds, and, evidently guilt-stricken by the wounds he had inflicted on Reverend Maury, he sought out the injured priest to atone for his conduct in court.

“He apologized to me for what he had said,” Maury recounted bitterly in a letter to an English friend, “alleging that his sole view in engaging in the cause, and in saying what he had was to render himself popular.”

Some Anglican clergymen pressed the royal governor to prosecute Henry for treason, but the governor refused to risk his popularity with
planters by involving himself in controversy that had no clear-cut legal resolution.

Except for Maury and the Anglican clergy, Patrick Henry's victory in the Parsons' Cause added to the joys of the 1763 Christmas season in Hanover County, which was still celebrating Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War. Earlier in the year, the Treaty of Paris had forced France to cede most of its territory on the North American mainland east of the Mississippi to Britain and opened the way for Virginians to settle western lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, as far north as the Great Lakes. Many Virginians argued that Virginia went beyond the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean (see Map 1, page 8).

Although some parsons continued their efforts to collect what they deemed was their due while the Twopenny Act was in effect, Henry's victory set a precedent that other Virginia courts refused to overturn. Henry's triumph propelled his name across the colonies and over the ocean to London. Hailed as the most eloquent lawyer in America, he became the champion of small farmers, adding 164 new clients and handling 555 cases in the year following the Parsons' Cause. Each court appearance saw him hone his rhetorical weapons and slice his opponents' arguments with increasingly deadly precision. He used every rhetorical device he could find or invent. On clear days, he embraced the sunshine and lifted jurors' hearts; on grey days he pointed to the clouds and rain to provoke their tears; and on the darkest days, he saw omens of destruction in the heavens that left jurors cowering in fear as he cited each thunderclap or lightning bolt as nothing less than “the wrath of God.”

“Whenever he rose to speak,” said the losing attorney in the Parsons' Cause, “although it might be on so trifling a subject as a summons and petition for twenty shillings, I was obliged to lay down my pen and could not write another word until the speech was finished.”
²

After the 1764 elections, Henry's friend and neighbor Nathaniel West Dandridge contested his defeat in a close contest for the House of Burgesses and retained Henry as counsel before the Committee on Privileges and Elections at the colonial assembly, in the capitol at Williamsburg. As Henry entered the stately House of Burgesses and peered into the assem-bly
hall where committee members awaited, he fixed his eyes on one of the seats and determined to make it his own.

The Capitol in Williamsburg, where Patrick Henry sat as a member of the House of Burgesses under British rule and the House of Delegates after Virginia declared independence from Britain.
(FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY DRAWING)

“The proud airs of aristocracy, added to the dignity of that truly August body, were enough to have deterred any man possessing less firmness and independence of spirit than Mr. Henry,” Henry's friend Judge John Tyler recalled.

Henry lost his plea for Dandridge, but his plain, farmer's work clothes, his occasional—and carefully measured—country twang, his long dramatic pauses, his self-deprecation in the face of “learned” judges or opponents, and his occasional appeals to heaven became his standard rhetorical instruments, designed simultaneously to lower juror expectations and arouse their sympathies before startling them with a thunderous—and brilliant—exposition of irrefutable truths. He left courtroom spectators stunned, breathless, helpless—in effect, captives.

In the wake of the Parsons' Cause, vestrymen from across the colony trooped to the hill country to plead with Henry to defend them against clergymen who refused to accept the Parsons' Cause verdict. Henry defeated the claims of every parson he faced, including those of his own uncle, Reverend Patrick Henry. In the end, the clergymen succeeded only in stirring up dissent against the church—and the crown, for sustaining the church with a universal tax on every landowner, regardless of religious convictions.

In 1764, Sarah Henry's father sold the Hanover Tavern, and Patrick Henry sold their farm for £350, to which he added £250 from legal fees to purchase 1,700 acres just north of Hanover town, but close enough for him to walk to court, his musket slung over his shoulder to pick off small game for Sarah's table. A one-and-a-half-story wooden structure, his house had three large rooms on the main floor and two upstairs, with the kitchen in a separate outbuilding to prevent fires from burning the house. Other outbuildings included a pantry, a smokehouse, a woodshed, and a spare room for the boys to use if guests needed their quarters in the main house. “His furniture was all of the plainest sort,” his long-time friend and brother-in-law Samuel Meredith remarked. “They consisted of necessities only; nothing for show or ornament.”
⁴

Popular resentment against the Anglican clergy generated by the Parsons' Cause continued to increase in the winter and spring of 1765, when news arrived that Britain's Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, the first direct tax Parliament had ever imposed on American colonists. For generations,
Parliament had only collected indirect “hidden” taxes such as import duties, and allowed each colony's elected legislature to impose direct taxes such as sales taxes and property taxes to pay costs of colonial administration.

Although England had won the Seven Years' War, her victory left the government nearly bankrupt, with a national debt of £130 million (nearly $8 billion today) and £300,000 in annual costs of military garrisons to protect American colonists against Indian attacks. To pay for the garrisons, Parliament raised taxes at home first, but the increases plunged 40,000 Englishmen into debtor's prisons and provoked widespread antitax riots. Threatened with a national uprising, Parliament rescinded some tax increases at home and compensated by raising duties on America's imports and exports—and extending the reach of the British Stamp Tax to the colonies. Parliament—and, indeed, most Englishmen—believed Americans should pay for their own military protection, and the stamp tax seemed the most innocuous way to do so. In effect for decades in England, the stamp tax required the purchase and affixment of one or more revenue stamps—often worth less than a penny—on all legal documents (wills, deeds, marriage certificates, bills of lading, purchase orders, etc.), newspapers and periodicals, liquor containers, decks of playing cards, and a host of other industrial and consumer goods. All but negligible when added to the cost of any individual item, it nevertheless amounted to a considerable—and reliable—revenue source for the government when collections from the stamps on tens of thousands of documents and products poured into the treasury. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Grenville estimated that stamp tax collections in America would reap about £60,000 a year, or about 20 percent of troop costs there.