Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  Henry also came to follow the model of Davies and George Whitefield in his method of popular appeal. Just like the instigators of the Great Awakening, Henry and other populist patriot leaders of the American Revolution challenged established authority by employing direct appeals to the people in their own language. Other patriots would root their arguments in the new philosophy of the Enlightenment, but Henry relied on simpler emotional persuasion that roused the people with moral fervor. Some observers thought Patrick Henry the patriot spoke like a gospel preacher.14

  But what of Henry’s own faith? Later in life Henry wondered whether he had adopted all the style of Davies and the revivalists but not enough of the substance of their preaching. It is difficult to discern how passionately Henry held his own faith as a young adult, because (as was typical of many of his Virginia colleagues, including George Washington and James Madison) he was reticent in defining his own devotion to Christ. We may certainly conjecture, given his background in the Great Awakening and career-long emphasis on religion and virtue, that Henry’s own piety was quiet but steady, and a source for his fundamental beliefs about human dignity, rights, and virtue.

  Like many of the other founders of the American nation, Henry may have emphasized the social effects of religion more than his own practice of it. He did not attend church consistently as an adult. Nevertheless, he was an avid reader of religious books and pamphlets, and even personally distributed some Christian texts later in life. One of these, Soame Jenyns’s A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, offered an Enlightenment-style defense of traditional Christianity by appealing to the ethical excellence of Jesus’s teachings. Jenyns, a lawyer and member of the British Parliament, did not deny the legitimacy of the Bible’s prophecies and miracles, but he thought that the ethics promulgated by Jesus were the firmest basis on which to make a case for the supernatural origins of Christianity. Such a perfect system of virtue could not have been invented by mere men, Jenyns argued, but “must have been effected by the supernatural interposition of divine power and wisdom.” Henry was one of many Americans who regarded Jenyns’s method as a sure way to defend Christianity in an enlightened age; A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion went through many editions in the 1780s and ’90s, including two in Richmond, Virginia. As governor, Henry would arrange for hundreds of copies of Jenyns’s book to be printed and distributed at his own expense.15

  Henry’s brother-in-law also recalled that Patrick’s favorite book on religion was Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Published in London in 1744, The Rise and Progress of Religion was one of the most influential evangelical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In advising his readers on how to know whether they had experienced a saving conversion, Doddridge prayed that his book would rescue readers from “the madness of a sinful state” and bring them to a true knowledge of God. Patrick Henry’s esteem for this book would suggest that evangelical faith made a deep, personal impression on him. Perhaps Henry privately experienced something like the kind of conversion that Doddridge, Davies, and Whitefield advocated, but we do not know for sure. It is clear from Henry’s reading habits, however, that he was no deist or skeptic like Thomas Jefferson. He accepted a traditional form of Christianity that was woven into the culture of eighteenth-century Anglo-America.16

  Given Henry’s background, we may readily understand his brother-in-law’s assessment that Henry was “through life a warm friend of the Christian religion. He was an Episcopalian, but very friendly to all the sects—particularly the Presbyterian.” Henry never accepted his uncle Patrick’s doctrinaire, ugly hostility toward non-Anglicans. He valued Christian devotion across denominations. Henry and most of the Revolutionary generation believed that a republic needed religion to preserve virtue, honesty, and independence lest it trespass into amoral individualism and a degenerate complacency. An ethically directionless people would eventually succumb to the enticements of a tyrant, Henry feared.17

  Even as he would espouse state support for religion, he would also evince growing doubt about Anglicanism as the exclusively established church of Virginia. Henry remained committed to his Anglican faith, but he became convinced that religion could be used as a political tool to oppress not only Presbyterians, but all Virginians. His growing concern prepared him for his first episode of public resistance against encroaching British power: defending Hanover County in the Parsons’ Cause.

  BECAUSE HE BELIEVED in the public importance of religion, it may seem strange that Patrick Henry’s first great political cause involved reducing the parsons’ publicly supported income. But Henry reflected an increasing hostility toward the Anglican clergy among the lay leaders of the church. During the Great Awakening, Anglican vestrymen became increasingly frustrated with ineffective clergy, who seemed unable to counter the surge of evangelical fervor. Virginia also struggled to recruit native-born parsons, leading it to accept a number of ministers from Scotland, such as Patrick Henry’s uncle. A number of these British-born parsons appeared to be as concerned with financial gain as pastoral care. Some ministers were also exposed for gross immorality, which further damaged the standing of clergy in Virginia society.

  Conflict between Anglican clergy and laymen intensified in the mid-1750s because of disputes regarding the parsons’ salaries. Virginia had taken the lead in the Seven Years’ War, beginning with George Washington’s ill-fated expedition in 1754, and suffered financially as a result. Nevertheless, the clergy felt they deserved more compensation for their services, and in 1755 some of them brought a petition to the legislature, the House of Burgesses, asking for a pay raise. The petition was summarily rejected.

  Far from raising the priests’ salaries, the House of Burgesses passed the first Two Penny Act in 1755, which temporarily substituted a cash payment of two pence per pound of tobacco for the priests’ normal supply of actual tobacco. (Tobacco was commonly used as currency in Virginia.) But in 1755 tobacco was valued at more than two pence per pound, so this represented a pay cut. Parsons’ salaries were not the only cost-saving casualties of the Two Penny Act, but they did seem an easy target because of the public animosity toward the clergy. Some parsons tried to organize official protests against the 1755 act, but the populace largely approved of the reduction and felt it was justified due to the colony’s military and financial crises—a situation exacerbated by poor tobacco harvests. James Maury himself wrote that although the Two Penny Act caused him serious financial hardship, he thought that “each individual must expect to share in the misfortunes of the community to which he belongs.”18

  Tensions between the clergy and lay authorities continued to escalate in the late 1750s. The behavior of the clergy riled many of the Anglican faithful. They clashed with the governor in 1757 over the status of the Reverend John Brunskill of King William County, who was reported to have committed “monstrous immoralities” in his parish. According to the governor, Brunskill had engaged in many bizarre acts, including tying up his wife “by the legs to the bed post, and cutting her in a cruel manner by knives.” It was uncertain whether this kind of disciplinary case fell under political or religious jurisdiction, but Virginia’s governor decided to act. After a trial, he removed Brunskill from his pastorate. Other ministers came to Brunskill’s defense, not necessarily because they believed him to be innocent, but because they rejected the governor’s authority over church affairs. Their assertion of clerical independence did not improve the parsons’ standing before a skeptical public, however. Virginians thought the parsons had defended Brunskill to protect their own power, despite his grievous offenses.19

  The conflict between lay Anglicans and the parsons came to a head with the passage of a second Two Penny Act in 1758. A convention representing about half of the colony’s seventy ministers commissioned an appeal to London authorities to overturn the pay cut. The clergy complained that the act created “distressful, various, and uncertain” circumstances for them, while also
more provocatively asserting that the act “interferes with the royal prerogative.” The Crown had instructed Virginia’s popular governor, Francis Fauquier, not to alter any royally approved laws, such as the one establishing clerical salaries, without permission. The bishop of London aggravated tensions when he characterized the Two Penny Act as treason against the Crown.20

  The parsons’ appeal and bishop’s tirade raised the stakes of the Two Penny Act above mere finances and made it an issue of imperial authority, convincing the Privy Council to annul the act. The Crown’s decision produced a sharp reaction from Virginia’s defenders. Open verbal and physical assaults on the clergy and the bishop of London commenced with Landon Carter’s A Letter to the Right Reverend Father in God, the Lord B—p of L—n. Carter was a prominent planter of Richmond County, and an Anglican layman, but he had fallen out with his own parish minister, William Kay, who claimed that Carter had bullied him over his sermons. After a particularly pointed homily decrying spiritual pride, Carter denounced Parson Kay, claiming that the jeremiad was a thinly veiled attack on him. Carter cursed at Kay and tried to beat him. Carter reportedly swore he would take revenge against Kay and go on to “clip the wings of the whole clergy, in this colony.”21

  The controversy over the Two Penny Act steeled Carter’s resolve to assert the authority of Virginia’s laymen over the clergy. The planter maintained that the Two Penny Act was a just reaction to the humanitarian crisis in the colony, a set of dire economic conditions for which the clergy apparently had no sympathy. His pamphlet excoriated the bishop of London, warning Virginians that the bishop intended to take Britain back to the time, prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when “priesthood and cruelty were the inseparable enemies of British liberty.” (The colonists had viewed James II, who was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, with particular fear and disdain, because he tried to tighten imperial control over the colonists, and because he was Roman Catholic.) Carter believed God had given Britain its Protestant monarchs, beginning with King William and Queen Mary, the successors to James II, to protect Britons from “diabolical schemes of merciless bigotry.” He did not blame the aging King George II (who died in 1760, to be replaced by his grandson King George III) for misunderstanding the nature of the dispute: officials like the bishop, he asserted, meant to deceive the king into violating the colonists’ liberties, as the clergy did in annulling the Two Penny Act.22

  Richard Bland’s Letter to the Clergy of Virginia also presented the clergy as plotting against the colonists’ liberties. Bland, a planter and Anglican vestryman from Prince George County, had his share of controversies with the clergy, including one that resulted in the dismissal of the Reverend John Camm from the faculty of the College of William and Mary. Camm, whom Governor Fauquier described as a “turbulent man who delights to live in a flame,” represented the Virginia clergy in London in their appeal of the Two Penny Act. When Camm returned, proudly bearing the veto of the Two Penny Act to the governor’s palace in Williamsburg, Fauquier was disgusted. The governor was appointed by the Crown, to be sure, but like many royal governors before him, he still felt that he needed flexibility to respond to local conditions. He did not want to wait on approval from London to make moves such as the Two Penny Act. As Camm waved the veto in his face, Fauquier summoned his slaves and pointed at the intruder: “Look at that gentleman and be sure to know him again,” he said, “and under no circumstances permit him to revisit the palace.” Camm and the clergy had exacerbated their bad reputations, even among those closest to the Crown.23

  In his pamphlet excoriating the clergy, Richard Bland represented Camm and his fellow ministers as “Romish Inquisitors” who “carry on their insidious practices in the dark, lest the daylight should discover the iniquity of their transactions.” Both Bland and Carter drew on deep cultural wells of anti-Catholicism that dated back to the Protestant Reformation. Virginia Protestants responded readily to the notion that Roman Catholicism represented the epitome of corrupt spiritual power, and the parsons’ appeal to the king seemed tainted with that kind of venality. Bland bristled at the notion that the Two Penny Act evidenced disloyalty to Britain. Ironically, he believed the clergy were pushing the colonists toward “a thought of withdrawing their dependency from the British throne.” To Bland, enforcing royal supremacy would reduce the colonists to political slavery. But he speculated that they might declare independence before that happened.24

  The House of Burgesses, for its part, saw London’s nullification of the Two Penny Act as more evidence of the British government’s insensitivity to the colony’s needs. Swiftly changing economic conditions, such as fluctuations in the price of tobacco, required nimble responses from the Virginia government. Getting approval from London could take months, long after action was required. “Many unavoidable changes in our circumstances do frequently happen,” the Burgesses protested, “which require the immediate assistance of the legislature before it is possible for us at so great a distance to make any application to your Majesty.” But the king’s counselors rejected their petition on appeal—this was just the way the colonial system worked, Virginia’s legislators were told. The Burgesses did not have the discretion to change royally sanctioned laws.25

  A year before Henry took on the case, the furor over the Parsons’ Cause became more intense when priests began suing in Virginia county courts to recoup salary lost under the Two Penny Act. Parson Alexander White sued in King William County in 1762, but the court struggled to seat a proper jury. In the end, so many of the gentry refused to appear for service that the jury “consisted at last of ordinary planters some of whom we found after had declared beforehand what they would do,” reported an Anglican official. White lost the case.26

  The court in Maury’s case also encountered problems in assembling a qualified jury, much to Maury’s dismay. Several gentlemen declined to serve, so the sheriff, in Maury’s words, “went among the vulgar herd” to corral jurors. Maury complained that not only had he not heard of many of the jurors before, but that several of them were dissenters “of that denomination called New Lights.” One of these New Lights was Samuel Morris, the bricklayer who had originally started the evangelical meetings in Hanover County. The parson knew that these evangelicals would oppose him, but when he protested the composition of the jury, Patrick Henry rose to its defense; these jurors were honest men, he insisted. From the start, Reverend Maury thought the case was rigged against him.27

  The trial took place at the Hanover County courthouse, a distinguished brick building less than twenty-five years old. Earlier Virginia courthouses had often amounted to little more than wooden shacks, but Hanover’s edifice reflected the growing sophistication and prestige of Virginia’s legal system. Its most distinctive feature was the brick arcade across its front and sides. On court days the courthouse became a hive of activity, as did the adjacent tavern of Henry’s father-in-law, where the new lawyer had labored until recently.

  The courtroom for the Parsons’ Cause case was packed. An early nineteenth-century rendering of the scene shows Henry addressing the clerk and jury from a slightly raised lawyers’ bar, with the rest of the chamber jammed with observers, including a couple of mischievous-looking children. It was a standing-room-only event, perfectly suited for Henry’s oratorical tastes. Now the young attorney would test the potential of his rhetorical powers.28

  Maury thought Patrick Henry’s behavior in the case was revolting. The parson’s account is the best contemporary record of the trial, even though he may have exaggerated Henry’s legal pyrotechnics. Henry seems to have come into the trial prepared, or even recruited by the vestrymen, to do the “dirty Jobb” (as Maury called it) of accusing the Anglican clergy of helping the Crown expand imperial power. At one point, Henry addressed the court for almost an hour on the ominous implications of the king’s annulment of a legitimate law.

  Henry’s attack on the clergy illuminated his view of what the state’s proper establishment of the church should represent. State
-supported clergy should encourage obedience to good civil laws, he argued. In this case, Henry declared, the parsons not only failed to perform their duty, but also actively disobeyed the law themselves—which gave the state the right to strip clergy of their civil appointments. Henry thundered that Maury deserved not reimbursement but punishment for undermining the colony’s assembly. If the jury did not wish to “rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks,” he thundered, then they should make an example of Maury. Such a judgment would make other clergymen think twice before challenging the true legal authority over the people of Virginia: their colonial government.29

  Henry’s appeal worked wonderfully, and the “vulgar herd” relished the chance to throw’s Maury lawsuit back in his face. When the verdict came, the jury awarded James Maury a grand total of one penny in damages.

  Maury dubiously claimed that Henry had apologized to him after the trial, saying that he had given his juror-rousing speech only to “render himself popular.” Whatever Henry actually said to him, Maury concluded that the fiery-tongued young lawyer had chosen celebrity over honor, pandering to the people who relished his trampling of church and crown.30

  A disgusted John Camm publicly skewered Henry and Richard Bland in the aftermath of the trial, accusing Bland of attacking the king’s integrity; if such an established politician would dare challenge the Crown, he thought, it was no wonder an “obscure lawyer” from Hanover would tell a jury that the king “had forfeited the allegiance of the people of Virginia.” For Camm, Maury’s trial was a farce, and no doubt he felt the same when the General Court of Virginia—which handled cases related to imperial law—decided against Camm himself in a similar case. Camm, always eager to defend the clergy’s prerogatives, appealed to London’s Privy Council to overturn the General Court’s decision. He found no sympathy from them the second time around. By that time, in 1767, the British government had bigger problems to deal with in America than John Camm’s salary.31