Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  Many white Virginians like Henry wrestled with slavery’s ethical implications for the slave owner. On the eve of the Revolution, a witty satirist, an obscure Scottish immigrant named James Reid, exposed the ugly tensions between Virginia’s gentlemanly ideals of virtue and slavery. Elite Virginians really did not expect their class of “esquires” to exhibit morality, but only to own land and African-Americans, Reid declared. Thus, the “vicious, rich gentleman differs in nothing from his ignorant, vicious, poor Negro, but in the color of his skin.” This was an explosive claim for a white Virginian to make in 1769, and it revealed that at least some people recognized the great friction between the stated principles and the actual practice of the tobacco lords. How could the young white gentleman cultivate virtue, Reid asked, when he received the title of “esquire” simply by inheriting slaves?

  Before a boy knows his right hand from his left, can discern black from white, good from evil, or knows who made him, or how he exists, he is a gentleman. Before he is capable to be his own master, he is told that he is master of others; and he begins to command without ever having learned to obey. As a gentleman therefore it would derogate greatly from his character, to learn a trade; or to put his hand to any servile employment.

  Reid found no reason to respect these “esquires,” a word that derived, Reid claimed with a wink, from the term “ass-queer.”20

  Slavery bred not only poor morals but also violence. The turbulent consequences of slave owning appeared everywhere in colonial Virginia. For example, only months after Henry’s birth, Joseph Peace, a planter in Hanover County, petitioned the Virginia legislature for compensation because “one of his slaves who had murdered another of them, afterwards hanged himself.” The legislature commonly gave financial assistance or compensation to masters of slaves who were executed for capital crimes; perhaps Peace thought he could win some compensation even though his murdering slave killed himself instead of waiting for execution, the punishment sure to follow his crime. Maintaining the Virginia slave system could be a grisly business indeed.21

  Owning slaves allowed Henry to farm tobacco—the beginning of a lifelong livelihood, and one he never liked very much. Over time he came to realize that raising tobacco was an essential element of his pursuit of financial independence. But the vagaries of the tobacco economy only exacerbated the ironies inherent in Henry’s notions of virtue. If tobacco was the most obvious path to great riches, it could also trap planters into vicious cycles of debt. By definition, debt entailed dependency. Virginia planters had to sell their tobacco on consignment to English shippers, meaning that the planters would receive payment only when the tobacco sold, at prices dictated by European markets. Lean harvests meant little tobacco to sell, while bumper crops could depress prices. No planter or exporter could anticipate economic fluctuations in Europe. Meanwhile, no matter whether the market for their product was good or bad, Virginia planters had to keep buying supplies, equipment, and slaves to maintain their acreage, in addition to purchasing new lands for expanded production. Sometimes they also indulged in luxury items: crystal, china, wine, and the like, which could deepen their debt, especially in lean times. Planters often found themselves indebted to English merchants with little hope of paying off their balance for years. Virginians, it seemed had a unique penchant for accruing debt: of the four million pounds sterling owed to British creditors by colonists at the beginning of the Revolution, half were the responsibility of Virginia planters.22

  Patrick Henry would be haunted his entire lifetime by the specter of debt. And no one more vividly exemplified for him the planter’s descent into debt than his own half-brother, John Syme Jr. Indeed, Henry spent much of his life trying to avoid having Syme’s debilitating financial troubles affect him. By 1753, the twenty-four-year-old Syme had already fallen far into debt to his English creditors. He kept promising his Bristol tobacco firm that he would catch up, but his purchases routinely exceeded the value of his crop. Hoping to produce himself out of debt, he bought more slaves and land, but it did not help. Neither did his purchases of luxury items. In the 1760s, when the English merchants stopped extending his credit, Syme became delusional, imagining that they were trying to destroy him financially. Syme could not fathom how he could ever get out of debt without obtaining more credit. He asked his creditors whether “you are endeavoring to ruin me, at a time, when friends ought to be assisting?” But Syme never caught up, and at his death in 1796, he still owed $54,000 to the tobacco merchants.23

  But a planter did not need to be profligate to accrue financial obligations he could not meet. Even the assiduously responsible George Washington, with whom Henry would become an ally and friend during their tenure in the Virginia legislature, became entangled in debt. Within two years of Washington’s marriage to the widowed Martha Custis in 1759, he found himself owing 2,000 pounds to his tobacco agent in London. New family expenses had added to the persistent needs of the farm, such that his orders “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by marriage, nay more,” Washington lamented.24

  Like Washington, Henry discovered that, far from bringing security, farming could lead to the edge of ruin. Three years after his wedding to Sarah, his farmhouse burned, leaving him and his family living in an overseer’s cabin on the property. Patrick, who yearned to escape exclusive dependence on farm income anyway, took the opportunity to sell some of his slaves and use the revenue to buy stock for another country store. But as Henry struggled once again to sell enough merchandise and secure payment on his loans to farmers, his business met the same fate as the first. It formally closed in 1760 (although it had already shut down by the end of 1759), leaving Henry standing behind the bar at his father-in-law’s tavern, pouring drinks and wondering how he would pay off debts to his former suppliers.25

  THE PROBLEMS AT HENRY’S second store were undoubtedly exacerbated by the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, which had troubled Virginia’s frontier since 1754, threatening farmers’ lands and lives and disrupting transatlantic credit systems. The conflict had begun when Virginia’s governor sent twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington into western Pennsylvania with a small militia to try to dislodge French troops from a new set of forts in the Ohio River valley. The principal irritant was Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio River.

  As his troops entered the region south of Fort Duquesne, Washington became aware of a French patrol shadowing his men. He had secured the help of a Seneca Indian chief named Tanaghrisson, who helped Washington track and surround the French soldiers encamped in a small glen. After a brief firefight, the French surrendered. Washington began negotiating with the French, whose commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, had been wounded in the battle. While Washington spoke with a translator, Tanaghrisson approached Jumonville and declared, “Tu n’es pas encore mort, mon père” (“Thou art not yet dead, my father”). Then he suddenly brandished his hatchet and sank it into the French officer’s skull. The chief bathed his hands in Jumonville’s brains, and other Indians set upon the wounded French, scalping and killing most of them before Washington could stop the carnage. Amid the aftermath of the slaughter, the dismayed Virginian could not imagine that the killing of Jumonville would precipitate a world war and, in an indirect way, set the stage for the rise of the new American nation.26

  Although Washington’s complicity in the massacre seemed incidental, French officials were outraged and sent troops to capture Washington and his soldiers. The young commander built a ramshackle fort that was quickly overwhelmed by French forces and their allied Indian tribes in July 1754. This loss, and Washington’s retreat, focused the British government’s attention on the burgeoning conflict in America; it also became the first in a series of humiliating losses Britain would suffer. The British failed to reverse these defeats until 1758, when the tide began to turn in their favor. In the meantime, frontier settlements in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania faced sporadic attacks by Native
Americans allied with the French. By fall 1755, more than a hundred Virginia settlers had died in local assaults.

  American colonists such as Patrick Henry and his fellow settlers in Hanover County saw the Seven Years’ War in religious as well as military terms. For decades, the British and French had fought a series of imperial wars that always had religious implications, pitting Protestants against Catholics. Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian pastor in Hanover whose evangelical ministry much affected Henry and his family, preached thunderously of the spiritual and military threat that American colonists perceived in the French and Indians. Speaking in 1755 to a newly raised Hanover militia company, he reminded the soldiers that the colony’s frontier settlers faced the prospect of murder by “all the horrid arts of Indian and Popish torture” and painted a lurid picture of depredations committed by the vicious Indians: “See yonder! the hairy scalps, clotted with gore! the mangled limbs! the ript-up women! the heart and bowels, still palpitating with life, smoking on the ground!” For Davies, the Indians were devils in human form.27

  Yet as fearsome as the Indians were, Davies suggested that the French represented a threat even more diabolical. He challenged Hanover’s soldiers to defend Virginia’s religion and liberty against “Popish slavery, tyranny and massacre.” Davies went on to imply that Virginia’s sins had opened the floodgates of God’s wrath against them in war. If the colonists wanted to be spared from “the infernal horrors of Popery, and the savage tyranny of a mongrel race of French and Indian conquerors,” they should repent and turn back to God.28

  These pervasive anti-Catholic sentiments, and the troubles associated with the war, touched troops and noncombatants alike. Patrick Henry never served with the American troops in the Seven Years’ War, but he almost certainly attended militia musters in Hanover—they were all-community affairs—where he could have listened to Davies’s sermons. Though combat never spilled into Hanover County, the war directly affected Henry due to its negative effects on Virginia’s economy, which was already debilitated in the mid-1750s by years of drought. Although Britain began to take control of the war in 1759, when Quebec City fell to British general James Wolfe, the war still hurt local merchants such as Henry, who struggled to recover loans and secure reasonable prices for trade goods. British success in the war did not come soon enough to save Henry’s store. His misfortunes continued to accumulate.29

  A LONG STRING OF FAILURES had brought Henry to his encounter with Thomas Jefferson at Christmas in 1759. He had lost his farm, his store, and even his house; he and his family lived at his father-in-law’s tavern. Henry was an adept and good-humored barkeeper, and he fit the mold of the southern backcountry man by often going barefoot and playing the violin for guests at the tavern. No one at the time expressed dismay that Henry worked at an establishment serving liquor, because even the traditional Christians in Henry’s family would not have balked at social drinking. Being between jobs as he was, the financially strapped young father (by 1759, he and Sarah already had two children, Patsey and John) would have been expected to help in his family’s business.30

  Henry knew he could not make bartending a profession, however. After a cold winter of discontent and decision, he gave up on shopkeeping, too, and in the spring of 1760, he headed to Williamsburg to apply for a law license. It was a wise move for Henry, who would come to depend on income from both the law and farming to achieve his ambition of financial security. Pursuing his dual careers, Henry was following the example of many of Virginia’s elite gentlemen, who often worked in law and politics while still growing tobacco (or having their slaves grow it for them). Patrick Henry’s new friend Thomas Jefferson was the most immediate exemplar of this powerful convergence of training in law, politics, and farming. Henry’s legal aspirations could have turned out as badly as his business ventures. He had no formal training in the law and apparently spent little time studying for the bar exam. Jefferson recalled that Henry had prepared for six weeks, while others remembered he spent six to eight months studying. In any case, his preparations were self-directed, informal, and brief.

  The impromptu quality of Henry’s preparation in law may not have been as unusual as it seems, because in the mid-1700s, law was just becoming a distinct profession in America. Lawyers would fully emerge as the chief political leaders of the country only during the American Revolution. No law schools existed in America at the time Patrick Henry first began reading his law books. Many of America’s most distinguished lawyers, including Henry’s fellow Virginian and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, had limited training before their admission to the bar.31

  When Henry arrived in Williamsburg in 1760, it had been the capital of Virginia for sixty-one years, and when the colonial assembly was not in session, the town had about a thousand white and black residents. Its layout essentially consisted of one thoroughfare—Duke of Gloucester Street—which ran about a mile from west to east, with the College of William and Mary at one end, and the capitol at the other. When the politicians were in town, Williamsburg buzzed with activity. A French visitor there described a scene of closely linked business, politics, and pleasure: “In the daytime people hurrying back and forwards from the capitol to the taverns, and at night, carousing and drinking in one chamber and box and dice [backgammon] in another, which continues till morning commonly.” Although Henry would leave almost no impression on Williamsburg on this first visit, he would soon become its most controversial politician.32

  The structure of Virginia colonial government practically guaranteed conflict between the elected House of Burgesses and the royally appointed governor. The Virginia House of Burgesses, first assembled in Jamestown in 1619, was America’s oldest legislative body. The Burgesses essentially functioned as the equivalent of Britain’s House of Commons, with landowning Virginians selecting its members. The Burgesses stubbornly represented the interests of the people, or at least the planters, much to the chagrin of the royal government. New taxes filling the royal coffers were particularly distasteful to the Burgesses. “The mob of this country,” wrote one Virginia governor, “have generally chosen representatives of their own class, who as their principal recommendation have declared their resolution to raise no tax on the people, let the occasion be what it will.” The Crown believed the American colonies should serve the economic interests of England, whereas the Burgesses thought the Crown should serve the economic interests of Virginia.33

  The governors of Virginia often served in absentia, leaving the day-to-day administration of the colony to their lieutenant governor and the royal council while they attended to responsibilities in London or elsewhere. The governor’s council, the third branch of the colony’s government, served several purposes (at least in a titular fashion): they were the upper house of the assembly (like England’s House of Lords), the chief advisers to the governor, and the supreme court of the colony (the General Court), before which Patrick Henry would make some of his most spectacular defenses of American liberty. In all, eighteenth-century Virginia had a relatively typical colonial government, with the Burgesses gaining more governing experience and popular credibility as the century wore on.34

  Henry’s mission in Williamsburg in 1760 was not political but personal: he had to convince the colony’s legal examining board to give him a license to practice. The board was formidable, including John Randolph, the colony’s attorney general; his brother Peyton Randolph, also a former attorney general who would become president of the First Continental Congress; and George Wythe, who would become a law professor at William and Mary. These men could not have imagined that the unpolished young man before them would soon burst into their ranks and challenge their political supremacy.

  The day of his examination, Patrick Henry came before them as a lowly supplicant, and he was nearly turned away because of his ignorance of the law. John Randolph seems to have initially refused even to interview Henry, but the young man persisted, and Randolph began to quiz him, firing questions at him on matte
rs legal and historical, vital and arcane. He found Henry deficient in his knowledge of Virginia law, but in philosophy, natural law, and especially history, the aspiring lawyer from Hanover showed surprising depth of insight. “If your industry be only half equal to your genius,” Randolph told him, “I augur that you will do well, and become an ornament and an honour to your profession.” Henry got his license. Other than marrying Sarah, it was his first true accomplishment.35

  Henry’s relative success as a lawyer, as compared to his failures as a merchant and farmer, resulted not only from luck but also from natural aptitude. Business plans and bookkeeping were not Henry’s forte, but his sociability, his autodidactic education, and his incipient oratorical skills positioned him perfectly to practice law. His local connections and rhetorical charms might have given him a solid career as a country lawyer. However, rural Virginia would not remain his only stage. His religious and political experiences also endowed him with a moral earnestness that would transform him into America’s most dynamic critic of British tyranny.

  2

  “THE INFATUATION OF NEW LIGHT”

  The Great Awakening and the Parsons’ Cause

  ON DECEMBER 1, 1763, twenty-seven-year-old Patrick Henry stepped into the political arena for the first time. The occasion was a lawsuit brought in Hanover County by the Reverend James Maury, who had sued to recoup salary lost because of a 1758 Virginia law—the Two Penny Act—mandating that the colony pay its Anglican clergy in cash rather than in tobacco, as it had conventionally done. The Virginia clergy protested the Two Penny Act through intermediaries in London, and the Privy Council (the king’s advisers responsible for colonial affairs) overturned it in 1759. Encouraged by this royal support, several parsons sued in Virginia for back pay, because they believed that the legislature paid less in cash than the actual value of tobacco, which was rising rapidly due to repeated droughts. Young Henry served as the defense lawyer for the parish’s vestrymen, who would have to supply any extra salary the jury awarded. Remarkably, the presiding justice in Maury’s case was Patrick’s father, John. John agreed that the Virginia law reducing the clergy’s salaries was null and void, but it was up to the jury to decide what, if any, recompense Maury was due.