Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  Henry handled his debut at Hanover’s redbrick courthouse in what would become his characteristic style. Shouldering past the matter at hand, he went straight to more profound legal issues, decrying the king’s disregard for the basic rights of Virginians. Henry declared from the lawyers’ bar that the Two Penny Act was indeed legitimate because it served the general interests of the people. The king had violated his sacred compact with the people when he negated a just law enacted by the legislature. Escalating the importance of the issue to unanticipated heights, Henry exclaimed that “a King, by annulling or disallowing laws of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerates into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience.” Thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence, in a defense that exhibited his already well-honed beliefs about the people’s rights, Henry was defining the ultimately irreconcilable conflict between the king’s power and the colonists’ liberties.

  The brazenness of his attack was shocking. Maury’s attorney shouted that Henry had “spoken treason.” Other gentlemen observers in the crowded courtroom muttered their agreement. But Henry was undeterred. Despite his devotion to his Anglican faith, he denounced its priestly representatives, such as Maury, as “enemies of the community” because they sought personal gain at the expense of the parish. Maury himself was disgusted that this upstart “little pettyfogging attorney” would insult the Crown and the clergy in this manner, but Henry knew his true audience was a jury of Virginians. He had obviously tapped into popular resentment against the pillars and prerogatives of Anglo-American society.1

  Patrick Henry was speaking to Virginians whose religious ideas and associations had been transformed over the previous twenty years by a broad and profound movement. The Great Awakening had begun to undermine the dominance of the Anglican clergy in Virginia society, as new Presbyterian and Baptist churches challenged the officially established government denomination for adherents. Now even prominent Anglican laymen such as Henry were joining the assault on traditional church power. Because of the Anglican Church’s established political status, confronting its clergy had implications far greater than the payment of back salaries or even the government’s support of one denomination over another. The Parsons’ Cause, as it came to be known, revealed tensions in central Virginia that would soon erupt into broader conflict across the colonies.

  IN THE 1740S, THE GREAT AWAKENING began rumbling through Virginia. The series of revivals of religion surged across Britain, the European continent, and the American colonies, centering on New England, but touching all areas of the Atlantic seaboard and intensifying in the South through the 1750s and 1760s. In 1743, brash revivalists began preaching in Hanover County, much to the disgust of Patrick Henry’s uncle and namesake, the Anglican rector of St. Paul’s Parish. These evangelical preachers reviled the Anglicans and their tax-supported church, suggesting that they taught a lukewarm gospel. For the revivalists, religiosity and morality were not enough for Christians: instead, they focused on the experience of personal conversion, or being “born again.” Some of the new preachers even hinted that certain of the Anglican parsons had never truly put their faith in Jesus for salvation. Pastor Patrick Henry thought that the evangelicals only whipped crowds into a religious frenzy, reporting that they screamed at their congregations that they all were “damn’d double damn’d, whose [souls] are in hell, though they are alive on earth, lumps of hellfire, incarnate devils, 1000 times worse than devils.” An alarmed Pastor Henry envisioned these wild preachers shouting and beating their pulpits until their frightened audience fell into convulsions. The Virginia government should stop these dangerous men, he declared. The Henry family was caught in the middle of the first major uprising against traditional authorities in colonial America.2

  Though Pastor Henry loathed the new preachers, the evangelicals had an entirely different effect on Patrick Henry’s mother, Sarah. Despite the fact that her husband was a vestryman at St. Paul’s, Sarah found Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies’s preaching irresistible, and she joined his maverick congregation. Henry family tradition holds that Sarah would take twelve-year-old Patrick to Davies’s meetings, demanding that he repeat the biblical text and essence of the sermon to her afterward. Although Patrick Henry never left the Anglican Church and apparently never experienced the gut-wrenching conversion these dissenters idealized, he was profoundly influenced by Pastor Davies’s sermons, his moral exhortations, and his focus on the rights and responsibilities of the individual Christian.

  The evangelicals may have influenced Henry’s style of living, too. As an adult, he undoubtedly lived in a more austere manner than other planters, such as his half-brother John Syme and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom became mired in debt thanks largely to their taste for luxury. More than the average planter, Henry struggled with the fear of debt and financial dependency—a fear fostered partly by the evangelicals’ insistence that the elite gentry were “tutored in debauchery,” as one critic put it.3

  Henry later insisted that Davies was not only the best preacher he had encountered, but also the “greatest orator he ever heard.” The evangelical preachers employed emotional appeals delivered in a language deeply familiar to the people: the idiom of the Bible. Pastors such as Davies affirmed religious experiences of common Virginians; they did not need book learning to know God. Davies even took his gospel message to the slaves, a group typically neglected by the Anglican establishment. Anglicans emphasized the people’s duty to attend the church’s services, but the evangelical “dissenters” emphasized that the people should have a right to pursue their own spiritual happiness, regardless of what the authorities told them. This challenge to religious authority prepared the way for the crisis with Britain that began in the 1760s. Because of the Great Awakening, evangelical Americans already had plenty of experience in standing up to the state.4

  We cannot understand Patrick Henry without acknowledging the Great Awakening’s effect on him. The passion and power of the revivals shaped Henry’s speaking style, which in turn accounted for much of his political influence. Henry’s early unfortunate experiences with farming and shopkeeping helped him understand that to achieve success, he required a public stage. Davies gave him a master class in the art of verbal persuasion, and Henry would implement that art in the world of law, politics, and revolution.

  The Great Awakening taught Henry a vital lesson in individual rights and state power. The religious revival, and the Anglican backlash against it, helped Henry understand the extent of the state’s persecution of dissenting Christians and the need to end it. But Henry remained torn by the implications of the evangelical uprising in Virginia. Though the revivalists tutored Henry in his populist style of resistance, he never fully shed the Anglican commitment to state-supported religion. The Great Awakening helped prepare Henry for his revolt against British authority, but two decades later, he could not accept the consequences of that revolt when it challenged any state support for churches.

  Virginia was not imbued with a specific religious mission, as were the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut, but the Chesapeake colony’s founders still placed Christianity at the symbolic center of their venture. When the Virginia Company was incorporated in 1606, King James I proclaimed that the new colony would help spread the Christian gospel to the original people of North America, those who “as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.” As England’s “defender of the faith,” the king commanded that the gospel be supported in Virginia by the Anglican Church. The colony’s laws shielded orthodox belief and practice, with harsh punishments for sins such as Sabbath-breaking and heresy. According to colonial statute, blasphemers would have a thick needle thrust through their tongues.5

  Although these laws largely went unenforced, Virginians in the 1600s took it as a tenet of government that their colony was officially Anglican and that preachers from other Christian denominations should not just remain legal
ly disadvantaged, but be banned as well. Laws passed in the mid-seventeenth century explicitly codified the colony’s hostility toward Puritans, Quakers, and Baptists. A law in the early 1660s threatened fines against the Baptists, who, “out of the new-fangled conceits of their own heretical inventions, refuse to have their children baptized.” Virginia authorities mandated respect for traditional Anglican Church practices, such as infant baptism. Likewise, no person could preach, baptize, or marry people without having been ordained by an Anglican bishop.6

  The 1689 Act of Toleration in England, passed as one of the repercussions of the Glorious Revolution that safeguarded Protestant possession of the throne, alleviated some of the discrimination against dissenters. Nevertheless, the act emphasized “toleration,” not acceptance. It committed England (and presumably the colonies) to tolerating dissenters’ existence, but it did not require the government to extend them full freedom of religion. The first non-Anglican who qualified to preach in Virginia under the Toleration Act was Francis Makemie, a Presbyterian pastor who successfully applied for a pastoral license in 1699. However, toleration for Makemie and other non-Anglican clerics did not include the right to do whatever they wished. Dissenters had to apply for official permission to preach or set up new congregations. They could not publicly criticize the Anglican establishment. Most important, preachers and their congregants still had to pay taxes to support the Anglican Church, regardless of whether they financially supported their own minister.7

  The grudging toleration the act afforded would suffice until evangelicals began to challenge the Anglican Church in the 1740s. As their numbers grew, they became a potent force, and their religious passion matched their awareness of their political oppression. The First Great Awakening had begun in 1734 in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the parish of the great evangelical leader Jonathan Edwards, who reported that his sleepy Puritan town had experienced a “glorious alteration,” with hundreds of new converts feeling their hearts overwhelmed with vital faith. Those attending his packed services were “in tears while the word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love,” he declared. Although the colonies had seen episodes of religious excitement in previous years, never before had churches witnessed so many people experience conversion at one time. The height of the Awakening came in 1740–1743, centered in New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.8

  In Virginia, the evangelical uprising first manifested itself in the Henrys’ own Hanover County, in 1739, when Patrick Henry was just three years old. A devout bricklayer there named Samuel Morris, frustrated with the lack of spiritual fervor in the Anglican Church, began publicly reciting the sermons of the era’s great itinerant Anglican preacher, George Whitefield. According to Presbyterian minister David Rice, who was born in Hanover three years before Patrick Henry (and who by virtue of his religious denomination was not an entirely objective observer of the Anglican Church), the state of religious faith and practice in Hanover County before the Great Awakening was “extremely low and discouraging. The established clergy were many of them notoriously profligate in their lives, and very few of them preached, or appeared to understand, the Gospel of Christ.” Whatever the state of the clergy in those years, it was clear that many people in Hanover County were ready for the vivid new message of the evangelicals.9

  George Whitefield had recently captivated both Britain and America with his passionate rhetoric and outdoor services, where tens of thousands would gather to hear him preach. Even though Whitefield was an Anglican parson, he cooperated with evangelical believers in all denominations, much to the consternation of many of his Anglican superiors. Whitefield came to Williamsburg in 1739. Although his Hanover County admirer, Samuel Morris, failed to see the great revivalist in person, he seized upon the growing excitement of the Great Awakening and began setting up religious meetings apart from the Anglican Church. Virginia authorities repeatedly fined Morris for holding separate meetings, but he would not stop. Moreover, by 1743, he was encouraging Presbyterian evangelists from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to visit Hanover County. These preachers had trained at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania’s “Log College,” an evangelical seminary and forerunner to the College of New Jersey (in Princeton).

  Patrick Henry’s uncle was not alone in his fear of the radical effects of the evangelicals’ preaching. Anglicans raged against these itinerant preachers because they intruded upon the turf of Anglican parishes and exhibited no respect for the established pastor’s authority. The Presbyterian meetings in Hanover also shook with ecstatic fervor that no Virginia Anglican could countenance; some of the preachers even publicly attacked the Anglican clergy for their spiritual lethargy. In response, the state authorities, who did not believe that the principle of religious toleration required them to indulge such extremists, repeatedly charged the evangelicals with holding unauthorized meetings. To the elite Virginia Anglicans who dominated colonial and local government, the revivalists threatened their church and the sanctity of its parish system. Virginia’s governor, William Gooch, insisted that the state suppress these ministers who were “under the pretended infatuation of new light, extraordinary impulse, and such like fanatical and enthusiastic knowledge.” In the eighteenth century, “enthusiasm” implied religious frenzy.10

  Pastor Henry’s consternation at the Great Awakening climaxed when George Whitefield himself visited Hanover in 1745 and requested permission to preach at St. Paul’s Church. Henry tried to force Whitefield to meet with him before giving his approval, presumably to inquire about the itinerant’s intentions, but Whitefield refused. Instead, the preacher simply showed up at the church Sunday morning, bringing a huge crowd with him. Henry decided to let Whitefield preach, as long as he also performed the Anglican liturgy. Whitefield agreed. Henry worried that if he refused to let Whitefield preach, he would have simply gone out to the churchyard. “All the people to a man had a great desire to hear the famous Whit[e]field,” Henry lamented. Anglican clerics had never faced this kind of treatment before, with Whitefield bypassing them and colonial officials to appeal directly to the people for support. The Great Awakening in Hanover County, as in many places in America, stirred a profound change not only in the locus of faith but in the nexus of political action. The center of authority slowly moved from politicians and parsons to the people.11

  THE ARRIVAL OF SAMUEL DAVIES in Hanover County in 1747 gave heft to the fledgling evangelical movement in Virginia. Like Francis Makemie nearly fifty years before, Davies secured a license from the government to preach in several Virginia counties. Nevertheless, Parson Henry tried to paint him as a subversive fanatic. To him, Davies and the other revivalists were simply trying to “screw up the people to the greatest heights of religious frenzy.” Although some of the early Presbyterians in Virginia’s Great Awakening did manifest a frighteningly radical style, Davies sought to cast himself as an unobjectionable moderate to win the favor of the Virginia authorities.12

  Davies became the Virginia dissenters’ most articulate defender, arguing that the Act of Toleration required the colonial governments to provide licenses to preach wherever the people demanded it. After local Anglicans like Parson Henry accused him of “intrusive schismatical itinerations,” Davies appealed to the bishop of London in 1752 to vindicate himself and his dissenting colleagues. Davies denied that he denigrated the Anglican clerics or recruited Anglicans to become Presbyterians. He only preached the essentials of the gospel, he declared, and the light of truth drew new converts to his churches. Could the bishop blame him for this? The colonial government, after granting him licenses to preach in four Virginia counties, balked at his requests to preach more widely and to open new churches. Davies insisted that his followers were spread over several counties and needed meetinghouses close to them. How could Virginians claim to tolerate the dissenters, if they would not allow them to meet? Davies stayed in Hanover for eleven years, from the time Patrick Henry was twelve to twenty-three years old—during his transition into maturity and ma
rriage until just before he embarked on his legal career. In 1759 Davies became the president of the College of New Jersey, where he replaced Jonathan Edwards, who had died of smallpox shortly after his tenure in Princeton began. Davies would not live long as college president, either, dying in 1761 at the age of thirty-eight.13

  The influence on Patrick Henry of Davies and other evangelicals would become clearer as his career developed. Although Henry never abandoned the Anglican denomination (which, in America, later came to be called the Episcopal Church), he proved himself a foe of Anglican political power in the colony, and a friend to the dissenters’ liberty. Unlike the more radical evangelicals, however, Henry could not accept the full disestablishment of the Anglican Church; he believed that a godly republic had to support religion. He was content with distributing taxes to multiple denominations but could not countenance Virginia’s rejection of public support for religion altogether.