by Myron Magnet
But beyond these practical considerations is the moral evil. How can slave owners believe that “our fellow-creatures . . . are no longer to be considered as created in the image of God as well as ourselves, and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature?” Those who profess Christianity ought to live up to its precepts. It’s time, he concluded, to “convince the world that we know and practise our true interests, and that we pay a proper regard to the dictates of justice and humanity.”36 This, remember, was more than a century before the Civil War.
If this wasn’t enough to rile up his fellow burgesses, he then attacked their popular and powerful longtime speaker, John Robinson, also the colony’s treasurer. Beyond the fact that Robinson had no legal right to hold both these offices at once, the real problem, R.H. charged, was that he seemed to be cooking the colony’s books. Beginning in 1760, R.H. demanded annual audits, which by 1763 turned up a troubling discrepancy. But only when Robinson died in 1765 did the whole truth emerge. Though as treasurer he was supposed to burn the old paper currency turned in for new notes, he simply lent out the old money to friends—£100,000 worth to assorted oligarchs. Robinson’s illicit expansion of the money supply explained the mystery R.H. had been trying to solve: Why was inflation skyrocketing? But by the time he got his answer, Parliament had responded to Robinson’s debasement of the currency by barring the colonies from issuing paper money, hamstringing the American economy.37
By then, however, a vast geopolitical upheaval had remade the world—an upheaval that began with Thomas Lee’s forming the Ohio Company in 1749 and that led, after a remarkable rippling outward of events in the Old World and the New, to American independence. The French had their own designs on the vast territory that the Virginians claimed, and in direct response to the Ohio Company’s charter, they sent soldiers from Canada into the Ohio Valley to plant lead plaques warning that this land was their land. In 1753, Virginia’s governor dispatched twenty-one-year-old George Washington (born four and a half miles up the road from Stratford at idyllic Pope’s Creek) to find out what the French were doing and to tell them that the region was “so notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great Britain” that they should clear out. When Washington reported back home that, au contraire, the French planned to fortify the whole valley, the governor sent troops to build his own fort where the Allegheny and Monongahela merge to form the Ohio at present-day Pittsburgh, but the French drove them off and made the strategic fort their own. Sent to evict them in 1754, Washington fought two skirmishes, one a mistake and one a defeat—and ignited the French and Indian War, the first true world war.38
It began with a string of British losses, led by a full-scale British army attempt to retake the fort that ended in a rout. Then the French launched their own ferocious countercampaign. In 1756 they took Fort Oswego, on Lake Ontario; in 1757 Fort William Henry on Lake George, pushing British America’s western frontier as far east as Albany. Even worse, on the European front, they defeated King George II’s son the Duke of Cumberland in Germany and forced Britain to cede the king’s beloved Hanover.39
With the war at its darkest, Secretary of State William Pitt the Elder told his cabinet colleagues, “I can save this country, and nobody else can.” After a couple of false starts, the watchful, melancholy-eyed fifty-year-old piled victory upon victory. In 1758, the skilled young officers he had named to top army commands, backed up by the huge navy he was enlarging daily, took the great Canadian fortress of Louisbourg, retook Fort Oswego and the fort at Pittsburgh, and by miraculous heroism seized Quebec, the hub of French might in America. By 1759, when the British took Montreal and the sugar islands of the West Indies, they had ended French power in the New World—and, pronounced nineteenth-century naval historian A. T. Mahan, the “kingdom of Great Britain had become the British Empire.”40
And then in 1760, after a thirty-three-year reign, King George II died, and his twenty-two-year-old grandson, the pigheaded martinet George III, pushed aside the victory-crowned Pitt, and pushed aside as well Pitt’s Walpolean vision of a free, fast-growing British America—already with a third the population of Britain—pouring out a cornucopia of riches on the Mother Country. George III had other ideas: after the war ended in 1763, he was determined to make the colonists help pay for the army that Britain had decided to leave in the colonies. Trouble was, now that Pitt had ended the French threat in North America, the colonists no longer needed Britain’s protection, and they certainly didn’t want to pay for it.41
THE NEW KING’S POLICY sparked all Richard Henry Lee’s pugnacity. He instantly grasped how opposed it was to the Walpole-Pitt vision of an empire based on entrepreneurship and freedom. When Parliament began putting the new policy into effect in 1764, tightening enforcement of Britain’s sugar and molasses tax in the colonies (ruinous to New England’s rum industry), R.H. wrote that Britain seemed resolved to deprive Americans of such “essential principles of the British constitution [as] the free possession of property, the right to be governed by laws made by our representatives, and the illegality of taxation without consent.”
Perhaps people who had done Britain some great injury might deserve such treatment, but certainly not “brave adventurous Britons, who originally conquered and settled these countries, through great dangers to themselves and benefit to the mother country.” The result was bound to be war, R.H. saw eleven years before the Revolution broke out. “Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty,” he wrote, in time “may produce a fatal resentment of parental care being converted into tyrannical usurpation.”42
It’s hard to imagine a more orthodox conservative radicalism than this. It is, as R.H. put it succinctly to the pro-America Lord Shelburne a few years later, merely the “manly assertion, of social privileges founded in reason, guaranteed by the English constitution, and rendered sacred by a possession of near two hundred years.”43 It is the assertion, he wrote a neighbor in 1765, of “the most palpable privileges of human nature, the legal rights of America, and the constitutional freedom of British Subjects.”44 After all, he explained in an article at that time, the colonists’ ancestors received an additional legal guarantee of their constitutional rights when they came to America: the king, “knowing what great benefit it would be to England, to settle this country, and what great dangers the first settlers must meet with, did give them . . . a charter, that they and their children, and all who came after them, should hold their liberty and property, as the people of England did.”45
George III forcing tea down the throat of America by Paul Revere
Private Collection / Peter Newark Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library
This is the radicalism of a British-educated British subject, steeped in the culture of British constitutional liberty, asserting that, even in the colonies, Britons never will be slaves, as the then-new song put it. But now Britain threatened to reduce the colonists to “Egyptian bondage,” R.H. protests in letter after letter, “deprived of every glorious distinction that marks the Man from the Brute.”46
It is not surprising that a man who’d thought deeply about the differences between slavery and freedom would be among the first to abhor the tendency of the new policy, as would a man proud that his tough and determined ancestors had forged out of a wilderness a mighty engine of trade and wealth for the British Empire. More personally, who would be quicker to feel “a fatal resentment of parental care being converted into tyrannical usurpation” than a man whose brother had wrongly deprived him and his siblings of what their father had bequeathed them?
I WISH I COULD report that Richard Henry never lapsed from this clear-sightedness. He did, though—badly. Six months after he condemned the 1764 Sugar Act, he wrote a London acquaintance that if Parliament passed its proposed Stamp Act, he’d like the job of collecting the tax in Virginia. By the time someone else got the post, he realized how wrong he’d been to seek it. But his application, which came back to bite him, was
part of his continual, anxious search for extra money. He liked good wine and “Havana segars,” but he had the income of a younger son. He augmented the rent from his lands and the produce of his Chantilly plantation by working as an agent for his brother Philip’s tobacco warehouse and later for his older brother William’s London-based shipping business, which he once even suggested should deal in slaves before he dropped the idea as unprofitable.47 Always strapped, he sent his sons to college in England, because, at £30 a year, it was a lot cheaper than the £100 Princeton or Harvard charged. (William and Mary, cheaper even than England, was out of the question, because “there, so little attention is paid either to the learning, or the morals of the boys.”)48
But this lapse aside, R.H. stepped to the front rank of Patriot leaders, and in his doings and reflections you can watch the inexorable unfolding of the Revolution with vivid clarity. When the Stamp Act took effect in March 1765, he spearheaded Virginia’s opposition, part of a wave of protest and mob violence that swept the colonies. Heading an angry demonstration and penning a fierce denunciation, he pushed the tax collector to resign, though not before that officer disclosed R.H.’s earlier application for the job, prompting a red-faced public explanation.49 In February 1766, R.H. organized the Westmoreland Association to punish anyone who tried to administer or obey the act, since it “does absolutely direct the property of the people to be taken from them, without their consent.” And he led an obstreperous mob threatening to pillory and jail a neighbor who had promised compliance with the act. The affrighted neighbor recanted and apologized.50
In response to the upheaval, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act that same month, while reasserting, however, in a Declaratory Act, its right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” since they “are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain”—fighting words that R.H. flung back at Britain a decade later.
While things were exploding in the public arena, they were exploding in R.H.’s private life too. He was out shooting swans one wintry day in 1768—they still abound in the Elysian inlets around Stratford, among hundreds of noisy geese and, overhead, the occasional bald eagle—when his gun blew up, blowing the four fingers off his left hand. Ever after, he wore a specially made black silk glove to cover his disfigurement. In time, he practiced gesturing dramatically with it, which, with his Roman nose, high forehead, tall, gaunt frame, aristocratic bearing, and fluent eloquence graced with classical allusions, added to his command as an orator. Shortly after the accident, his wife caught pneumonia and died very suddenly, at only thirty, leaving him with four young children.51 “I have been so covered with affliction this past winter,” he wrote his brother Arthur, “that I have thought but little of any thing but my own unhappiness.”52
A year later, however, he remarried. His new wife, Anne Pinkard, herself recently widowed, proved “a most tender, attentive, and fond mother” to his children, he wrote, and between 1770 and 1782 he had five more babies with her.53 After the first, he wrote with grim jocularity to his brother William of his money worries, “oppressed as I am with a numerous family. Five—children already, another far advanced on the stocks, with a teeming little Wife, are circumstances sufficiently alarming.”54 But he was a kind and loving parent, happy at his “prattling fireside,” where “I have heared every little story and settled all points.”55 His letters vibrate with concern for his boys studying in England and anxious inquiries about buying annuities to protect his girls.56
His was a characteristically American style of reasoning, spare-the-rod child-rearing, common in Virginia even then, and aimed at raising self-governing citizens. “The power of his rebuke, and the influence of his parental authority and affection,” his grandson relates, were enough to make his children behave. After a gentle paternal reprimand, one of his sons “went into the house crying, and when asked by his mother, ‘what was the matter,’ he replied, ‘My father has been talking to me about consequences.’”57 As R.H. wrote much later, “Force and opinion seem to be the two ways alone, by which men can be governed[;] the latter appears the most proper, for a free people”—a precept as applicable to children as to grown-ups.58
AS THE CRISIS with Britain unfolded, R.H. took the lead in uniting the colonies in their opposition, to forestall Britain’s Machiavellian strategy of “conquest, by division,” he explained.59 So when Parliament imposed the 1765 Quartering Act on New York, for example, it assumed that the other colonies, relieved to have escaped the expense and danger of a standing army in their midst, would keep silent. But “a prudent man,” R.H. writes, “should lend his assistance to extinguish the flames, which had invaded the house of his next door neighbour, and not coldly wait, until the flames had reached his own.”60 He was the first to suggest, writing in 1768 to Philadelphia lawyer and pamphleteer John Dickinson, that the colonies should form committees of correspondence to inform and support one another, and that individual members should keep in touch privately, too.61
In this spirit, after Bostonians rioted in the wake of the new Townshend Act duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea, and Britain sent in troops to overawe the town later in 1768, R.H. wrote Dickinson again, more sharply. Why, he wanted to know, was Pennsylvania standing by “silent, when the Liberty of America is thus dangerously invaded . . . and when a Union of the whole must infallibly establish the public freedom and security?” Our silence, he warned, will be “deemed a tacit giving up of our Rights, and an acknowledgement that the British Parliament may at pleasure tax the unrepresented Americans.”62 He himself organized a Virginia boycott of British imports, one of a number in the colonies that within a year slashed sales by up to two-thirds.63 By the time Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in April 1770, except for the tax on tea, R.H. scoffed at the move as too little, too late.64
JOHN ADAMS was right to say that the “Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people,” but now the idea began to turn into reality. As Britain threatened to subvert the basic constitutional right to trial by a jury of one’s peers, R.H. added Bostonian Samuel Adams to his circle of conspirators-by-correspondence. In early 1773, apologizing for writing to a stranger, he hoped that “to be firmly attached to the cause of liberty . . . renders proper, the most easy communication of sentiment” among those whom tyrants aim to oppress. The Sugar Act had already proposed to try customs-evasion cases in non-jury vice-admiralty courts, but now something worse seemed in store. When a particularly obnoxious British revenue schooner, the Gaspée, ran aground on a Narragansett Bay sandbar, Rhode Islanders had rowed out and burned her to the waterline while wounding her captain. Royal authorities, rumor had it, planned to send the suspects to England for trial, where by definition they could have no jury of their peers. Was this true? R.H. asked Adams. If so, “I hope it will never be permitted to take place, while a spark of virtue, or one manly sentiment remains in America”—just the kind of warlike murmuring that was spreading fast.65
Bostonians displayed manly sentiment aplenty at the end of 1773 by dumping into their harbor a shipload of tea not just unconstitutionally taxed but now also under an onerous monopoly. As Bostonians braced for retaliation, R.H. asked Samuel Adams to alert the Virginia legislature when the blow fell, so we can all be “cool, firm, and united,” especially necessary since R.H.’s younger brother Arthur had just reported from London that “There is a persuasion here, that America will see, without interposition, the ruin of Boston. It is of the last importance to the general cause, that your conduct should prove this opinion erroneous. If once it is perceived that you may be attacked and destroyed, by piecemeal, actum est, every part will, in its turn, feel the vengeance which it would not unite to repel, and a general slavery or ruin must ensue.”66
The retaliation, in the 1774 Coercive Acts, was fierce, closing Boston Harbor and imposing quasi-martial law. The British commanding general became also governor of Massachusetts, empowered to appoint legislators and judg
es and take over public buildings as barracks. “No shock of Electricity could more suddenly and universally move,” Richard Henry wrote Arthur of the legislature’s response that June. “Astonishment, indignation, and concern seized on all.” He got the legislators to declare a day of fasting and prayer in protest—the kind of tactic that changed minds and hearts—and he called for an expansion of the trade embargo to include exports as well as imports, now that “the dirty Ministerial Stomach is daily ejecting its foul contents upon us.” He also began to agitate for a colonies-wide congress.67
IN SEPTEMBER the First Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia. As the leading radical firebrands, R.H., his brother Frank, and their fellow Virginian Patrick Henry, along with the Boston cousins Samuel and John Adams, stoked defiance. They convinced Congress to endorse the just-issued Resolves of Suffolk County in Massachusetts, whose impassioned language invokes the Pilgrims in recalling how the British “of old persecuted, scourged, and exiled our fugitive parents” and also echoes Locke in recalling that the colonists owe the Crown allegiance only because of a “compact,” which, by implication, the king is breaking. The incendiary Resolves call on the county—which includes Boston—to ignore the Coercive Acts and to pay no attention to the new, unconstitutional courts but instead to settle disputes by arbitration, to treat anyone who accepts office in the new, illegitimate legislature as an enemy, to take a British hostage for every Patriot leader the army arrests, and to set up a militia that trains every week, captained by “inflexible friends to the rights of the people.”68
