Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  By the 1720s, the planters dominated all aspects of political and economic life in Virginia, even as new European immigrants sought to penetrate the ranks of the colony’s aristocrats. The elite gentry represented a tiny fraction of the population—maybe no more than 5 percent of whites—yet that social stratum was in fact permeable at its bottom, open to those with good luck and connections. Scots like John Henry (as opposed to the masses of Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland) came in relatively small numbers to America in the colonial era, and most were professionals and businessmen who could realistically aspire to entrepreneurial success. Some Scots sought opportunity in the Virginia backcountry, usually related to the burgeoning tobacco trade. Scottish merchants played a major role in shipping tobacco, which by the 1760s accounted for more than 80 percent of all Scottish imports from mainland North America.7

  John Henry was one of the early Scottish immigrants to recognize the opportunities in Chesapeake tobacco farming. He came from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he attended but failed to graduate from college. The reasons that John left college are lost to history, but certainly the pull of prosperity in America helped lure him away from his books. Soon after leaving the university, he secured passage to Virginia, arriving in Hanover County because of a connection there with John Syme (pronounced “sim”), an influential planter.

  The American backcountry was not so far back in those days. Hanover County was about sixty miles inland from the new colonial capital at Williamsburg, and just north of the future capital at Richmond, founded in 1737, a year after Patrick’s birth. Hanover lay in the Piedmont region of Virginia, well to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, both of which were true nether regions of Virginia where European settlers had just begun to trickle in. The original residents of the area encompassing Hanover County were Pamunkey and Chickahominy Indians, who, like most Native Americans, faced calamity from European diseases and dislocation from English settlements.

  Hanover County was carved out of New Kent County in 1720 and named for the family of Britain’s King George I. When Queen Anne died in 1714, the Hanovers, Protestant Christians originally from Germany, rescued the British monarchy from the prospect of a Catholic ruler. Anne had no surviving children, but British law required that the crown be held by a Protestant, which led the government to pass over more than fifty Catholics with closer blood relations to Anne and make George the king of England. The county received the name of the house of Hanover as a sign of affection for England and its Protestant king. At this time, there was no hint of the anti-monarchical sentiments that Patrick Henry, Hanover County’s favorite son, would trumpet a generation later.

  The county that became John Henry’s new home was fertile and hilly, prime terrain for tobacco and many edible crops. An American Continental soldier visiting Hanover in 1781, hungry from marching, was delighted to forage on the county’s abundant watermelons, “the best and finest I have ever seen. This country is full of them; they have large patches of two and three acres of them.” He observed that African-American slaves had small garden plots in Hanover, with “great quantities of snaps and collards.” Tobacco became the economic mainstay staple of the county, as it was for the colony itself. Patrick Henry would grow up during another boom period in the crop, with the total volume of tobacco exported to Britain rising more than 250 percent between 1725 and 1775. Already by the 1720s, the average person in England smoked about two pounds of tobacco per year.8

  For several years John Henry toiled on Syme’s plantation. Then in 1731, his fortunes changed. Syme died, widowing his attractive young wife, Sarah. In 1734, John married Sarah, winning not just the widow’s hand but also Syme’s estate and Sarah’s connections to the gentry. Now possessed of over 7,000 acres of land, John Henry became an up-and-coming figure, connected to the old Virginia aristocracy. He continued to acquire land throughout central Virginia, and held a variety of political and military posts. A man who had left Scotland seven years earlier with little more than an incomplete education and a strong ambition now was a fully rooted member of the burgeoning colony. For his son Patrick, John Henry’s success would represent the possibilities America availed to an individual with drive and dreams. At times, his father’s success would also be something of a reprimand.

  ON MAY 29, 1736, Sarah Henry gave birth to Patrick, the second of eleven children born to the Henrys. Patrick was named for John’s older brother, who had become a Church of England parson after graduating from college in Scotland. The Reverend Patrick Henry had also emigrated from Scotland to Virginia, and in 1736 he became the rector of St. Paul’s Parish in Hanover County; his brother John became a vestryman, a member of the council that governed the affairs of the parish and levied local taxes to support it. They exercised considerable power over those under their watch. Publicly supported religion meant a great deal to the Henry family. They were convinced that a virtuous society required tax-funded churches and the vigilance of parsons and vestrymen like the Henry brothers.9

  Patrick Henry received an education that was, for a scion of the new gentry, modest. He learned to read, write, and count at a small common school he attended until he was ten years old. Thereafter, he received no other formal schooling at all—no preparatory academy existed in Hanover until 1778—but as he began his teenage years, he learned Latin, Greek, and advanced mathematics from his father. An autodidact like many of his day, Patrick read deeply in ancient and modern history, no doubt focusing on the heroes of Greek and Roman antiquity and their counterparts in British and European history since the Protestant Reformation. He was hardly uneducated, especially in the liberal arts, but the relative informality of Henry’s home education did not herald the emergence of a great statesman. Nevertheless, the close attention he received from his father made him sensitive to the great principles of the British and Western traditions that defined themselves around Christian faith, the liberty espoused by well-known British opposition figures such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and the concept of virtue, which for an eighteenth-century Anglo-American meant a moral disposition committed to the public good. At his death, Henry possessed about two hundred books—an impressive number for a man of the era—on law, Christianity, and history, with some classical texts in Latin and Greek.10

  From this array of sources—literary, cultural, and religious—Henry derived a worldview that was pervasively Christian, with a heavy dose of ancient Greek and Roman influences. Among the foundational beliefs of this worldview was the imperfection of mankind. His King James Bible repeatedly affirmed that (in the words of Paul’s letter to the Romans) “there is none righteous, no, not one.” Likewise, Henry knew that, in a classic lesson of man’s flawed nature, the golden era of the Roman republic had disintegrated into political intrigue, chaos, and civil war. Julius Caesar (assassinated by rivals in 44 BCE) was only the best known casualty of the republic’s fall. Rome’s turmoil had led inexorably to the rise of the emperors, including notorious tyrants such as Caligula and Nero. Concentrated power could not be trusted in the hands of fallible men. Henry knew that he, too, was fallible. Throughout his life, as family man, farmer, lawyer, and politician, he earnestly sought—not always with complete success—to stay on the path of uprightness.

  From his reading, from absorbing his father’s principles, and through the very air he breathed in a Virginia populated by people who had escaped an Old World rife with conflict, oppression, and lack of individual opportunity, Patrick Henry believed that the imperfection of men made fragile the kind of liberty he and his family enjoyed. It was in the nature of human beings, he learned, always to grasp for what was not theirs, seeking dominion over others in a way that threatened the common good and undermined the stability of the state. Good government took the realities of human nature into account by balancing power between the interests and branches within it, yet even the best government was subject to corruption. To young Patrick Henry, the men of a republic (in his era, women would normally not have been inclu
ded in this political framework) were summoned to elect to office men of virtue, then monitor them to forestall any advances toward tyranny. Public officials were bound to act in the best interests of the republic as a whole, not to bolster their personal fortunes or to aggrandize the power or riches of their cronies. The best public servants did not need to hang on to political power, nor did they aspire to a career in politics. When the people no longer urgently needed their services, men of integrity would step away from the political arena, retiring, like Roman heroes of old, to private life on the farm. Those who sought to glorify themselves through government should be voted out. Or, in extreme cases, they should be overthrown.

  The ground of good government was good men. Henry’s father also taught his son to cherish the individual virtues of integrity, industriousness, and independence. No one could ever achieve these qualities perfectly, but over time they could form the essential substance of a person’s character. According to John Henry and the thinkers who influenced him, men could cultivate the great virtues by practicing Christian devotions, studying the heroes of history, and behaving honorably among their peers. Such ideas were prevalent in Britain and America at the time, forming the ethical system of the colonies. In 1773, Philip Vickers Fithian, a tutor at the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, would observe that the men “best esteemed and most applauded” in the colony were those who attended to their work with honesty and diligence. Fithian averred that widespread indebtedness had alerted Virginians to the dangers of overconsumption, inspiring “the people of fortune who are the pattern of all behavior here, to be frugal, and moderate.” Hard work and moderation would lead not only to prosperity, but also to personal independence from the undue influences of others. No man could master a gentleman of virtue. This moral vision, instilled in Patrick Henry by his father and his times, would drive Henry throughout his career. 11

  Virtue in action, however, was fraught with tension in the world of colonial Virginia. For example, self-determination was ironically connected with luxury and consumption. The genteel families of Virginia displayed their independence from outside influence through their ability to wear, eat, and own what they wanted. Autonomy as a virtue would be harder to exercise for those Virginians leading hardscrabble lives—people whose livelihoods relied on the munificence of others and who were of a lower economic class than those who could afford the trappings of gentility.

  More happily, virtuous independence did not mean that a man of means could not have some fun—entertainment was a critical part of the social world of the planters. Patrick Henry loved the typical recreations of colonial Virginia youths, especially hunting. One contemporary recalled that Henry was “remarkably fond of his gun.” He relished music and dancing, and played the flute and violin. He liked reading, but not all of his books were as serious as the historical works his father taught him. As a young man, Henry enjoyed the comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, as well), which he would read for hours while lying on his bed.12

  With this range of pastimes, Patrick fit right in with the festive culture of eighteenth-century Hanover County. Gentlemen and middling planters loved a good party, as was evidenced in a newspaper notice published the year of Henry’s birth. “On Tuesday next, (being St. Andrew’s Day [November 30],) some merry disposed gentlemen of [Hanover County], design to celebrate that festival, by setting up diverse prizes to be contended for in the following manner, (to wit,) a neat hunting saddle, with a fine broad cloth housing, fringed and flowered, etc. to be run for (the quarter,) by any number of horses and mares: A fine [Italian] Cremona fiddle to be played for, by any number of country fiddlers . . . with diverse other considerable prizes, for dancing, singing, football play, jumping, wrestling, etc. particularly a fine pair of silk stockings to be given to the handsomest maid upon the green, to be judged of by the company.” These events typified genteel Virginia: racing, fiddling, wrestling, and even a beauty pageant. A boastful newspaper advertisement publicizing a similar event the following year made clear that these events were not to become drunken brawls. “Hanover County is large, well seated, and inhabited by a considerable number of gentlemen, merchants, and creditable planters, who, being desirous of cultivating friendship, and innocent mirth, proposed an annual meeting of the best sort, of both sexes.” The elite tobacco planters—the “best sort”—were the primary funders of the entertainments, but middling planters such as John Henry were welcome as well.13

  Europeans had long scheduled such revelries to coincide with the end of the harvest, but St. Andrew’s Day had a special appeal to the Scots of the Virginia backcountry, because St. Andrew was the patron saint of Scotland. The 1737 ad made clear that organizers held the celebration on St. Andrew’s Day to include Scottish immigrants, such as John Syme and John Henry, in order to “commemorate the patron of their country.” Some of the great Tidewater planters resented the new Scottish merchants and farmers, viewing the Scots as competitors in the tobacco industry. But backcountry Hanover County planters seemed to have few qualms about making the Symes and Henrys part of their circle.14

  The St. Andrew’s Day festival captures the kind of life Virginia planters relished: a life of financial independence and leisurely recreation spent with people of honor, people of their own kind. Others would do the hard work of the tobacco fields for them. But the day-to-day demands of running tobacco farms belied the ideal, not just for laborers but for the plantation owners themselves. The planters, one historian has noted, “had obligations to meet, debts to pay, judgments to make about slaves and servants, not to mention the worry and time involved with the purchase of new lands, the quality of tobacco, and the ordering of expensive manufactured goods from Great Britain.” Those responsibilities consumed the daily lives of Virginians—and none would be more preoccupied with them than Patrick Henry. Throughout his adult life, he feverishly sought to maintain his economic independence. Privileged as he was, his was no life of ease.15

  FROM THE START, John Henry wanted to put Patrick on a path to self-sufficiency. Despite the boy’s evident intellectual talents, John Henry did not send his son to college. Colleges traditionally trained clergymen, only recently becoming a destination for aspiring lawyers and politicians. Instead, at fifteen years old, Patrick began working as a clerk for a local store owner. Although we don’t know who ran this store, Scotsmen were opening many country stores in and around Hanover County in the 1740s and ’50s. During these decades, Americans of the backcountry became more connected to the economy of the British Empire, often because of small-time merchants, such as the one for whom the teenage Patrick worked. Store owners in the outposts of colonial Virginia were allied closely with local farmers like the Henrys. The merchants would buy tobacco, often exchanging it for such goods as clothes, food, and dining ware that they shipped in from overseas. The backcountry Scottish merchants often worked for Glasgow-based firms, which allowed them to circumvent the local growers’ dependence on Tidewater planters. Stores would commonly extend generous lines of credit to farmers to secure more business and to capitalize on good years for the tobacco crop. One Scotsman wrote that anyone who wanted to open a retail shop should “have it well provided with all sorts of commodities proper for clothing and family-use; and the greater variety he has, the better.” Farmers flocked to stores that offered the best variety of products and generous lines of credit. These small stores could be very lucrative, but their business model also entailed substantial risk. Favorable credit terms attracted customers, but farmers who failed to pay loans back on time could put the store out of business. 16

  Patrick and his older brother, William, personally discovered the dangers of running a country store when they opened their own in 1752. Their father purchased a stock of goods for them to sell, and they operated the store near the Pamunkey River in Hanover County, in the hope that the area’s commercial traffic would support their enterprise. Patrick managed the business, a responsibility that may have fallen
to him because of his brother’s dissolute living. At least in these early years, William had reputedly charted a “wild and dissipated course of life.” But despite their plans and presumably their father’s guidance, the Henrys soon found themselves swamped with defaulted loans. They had to shut down the store after only a year.17

  Patrick, a broke eighteen-year-old, was not a particularly attractive candidate for marriage, but in his case love triumphed over the gentry’s preoccupation with property and marital alliances. In fall 1754, he wed sixteen-year-old Sarah Shelton. Her home was only a few miles from Patrick’s, and the two likely met during visits there. Both of them were a bit young to marry, but they seem to have fallen in love and become engaged despite the reservations of both sets of parents. Sarah’s family background was similar to Patrick’s. Her father owned significant property in Hanover and Louisa Counties. Tradition holds that they were married in the parlor of Sarah’s farmhouse in a ceremony conducted by Patrick’s uncle and namesake. As a dowry, Sarah’s father granted them a three hundred–acre farm and six slaves. 18

  Patrick Henry was thus, at the tender age of eighteen, a slave owner. Taking custody of those first six bound African-Americans began Henry’s anxious, lifelong relationship with slaves and slavery. Though he had been reared in a slaveholding household, he now bore the economic and moral responsibility for maintaining other human beings as property. He numbered among the vast majority of slave owners in counties like Hanover who held about twenty slaves or less. Many had only a few slaves, or only one, and of course, many whites owned no slaves at all. The planter with the largest number of slaves in Hanover, according to a census of the 1780s, was Thomas Nelson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, with 208 bound African-Americans. Henry, who steadily purchased slaves as he acquired more land, and who also received more slaves in a second dowry (he remarried in 1777 following Sarah’s death), would go on to bequeath sixty-seven slaves in his will, making him a fairly substantial slave owner for the time. Henry readily admitted that slavery was socially, economically, and morally problematic. If men of virtue were supposed to be industrious, then what did this mean about a man who had others to do his work for him? Virginians also believed that slavery bred vicious habits among both the owners and the owned.19