Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  In its 1768 session, the House of Burgesses passed a remonstrance—a statement of grievances—reemphasizing its opposition to taxation without representation. Henry, still torn between tending to his personal affairs and representing Louisa County in Williamsburg, did not attend. He was apparently surveying lands in western Virginia he had recently acquired from his father-in-law.

  Over the course of the next year, the colonists’ resolve to stop importing British goods escalated the conflict over the Townshend Program. Massachusetts circulated a letter among the other colonial legislatures calling for concerted action against the duties, which the British secretary of state for the American colonies ordered revoked, but the colonial legislature in Boston overwhelmingly rejected the directive. The imperial governor of Massachusetts subsequently dissolved the legislature, and the British insisted that the other legislatures ignore Massachusetts’s “flagitious attempt to disturb the public peace,” or face dissolution themselves.3

  Patrick Henry and his fellow Burgesses refused to comply with the British administration’s order. In May 1769, four years after the Stamp Act resolutions, the legislature (with Henry now in attendance) adopted resolutions that would frustrate the efficacy of the Townshend Program. In addition to protesting taxation by any legislature other than the Burgesses, the House passed a resolution supporting Massachusetts’s circular letter. Anticipating retribution from London, they also opposed Parliament’s proposed new extension of treason laws to the colonies, which might have brought accused traitors from America to England for trial.

  A committee of delegates, including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, quickly drafted a remonstrance against the Townshend Program, which the House unanimously adopted. The declaration reiterated the colonists’ continuing devotion to the king, and their hope that George III would intervene on America’s behalf against a despotic Parliament. In the fawning yet sincere rhetoric of the era, the Burgesses presumed to “prostrate ourselves at the foot of your royal throne, beseeching your majesty, as our king and father, to avert from your faithful and loyal subjects of America, those miseries which must necessarily be the consequence of such measures.”

  The Burgesses closed their entreaty by reminding the king that Americans prayed for him daily, wishing “that your Majesty’s reign may be long and prosperous over Great Britain, and all your dominions; and that after death your Majesty may taste the fullest fruition of eternal bliss, and that a descendant of your illustrious house may reign over the extended British empire until time shall be no more.” At this point in their conflict with Britain, Virginians assumed their devotion to the monarchy would eventually assuage the conflict between the colonists and Parliament. Appeals to the king did not cool this feud, however, and Virginia’s governor dissolved the defiant Burgesses immediately after they passed Henry and Lee’s remonstrance.4

  Although Henry’s most spectacular acts as a political instigator would occur in 1765 and 1775, the Burgesses’ stubborn denunciations of the Townshend Program showed how in the intervening years his radicalism had spread even to previously reticent members such as Washington. In the lead-up to the Revolution, Henry’s zeal opened up possibilities never before imaginable for his fellow colonists, from denouncing the king as a tyrant to calling for a military struggle against the empire. But the time for war had not yet arrived. As it had with the Stamp Act, Parliament eventually repealed most of the Townshend Duties, but the underlying crisis of authority festered.

  HENRY CONTINUED TO HAVE PLENTY to do beyond his duties in Williamsburg. Like most American officials in the colonial era, he never intended to make government service a career. Henry had high political ambitions that drove his pursuit of office and fueled his penchant for controversy, but he also remained an active lawyer, land speculator, and family man, and would return to those roles repeatedly in life, often forgoing opportunities for greater political involvement in favor of tending to private business. Henry was very devoted to his children—his third child, William, was born in 1763, and his fourth, Anne, in 1767. He would maintain an engaged paternal relationship with the children even after they became adults, keeping up an avid correspondence with them about family matters. Henry could never envision himself serving continuously in office; like Washington, he viewed political life with ambivalence. It was noble to serve, but it caused difficulty for his family and his finances.

  By the early 1770s, practicing law seemed the most promising way for Henry to bolster his finances. Ever since his star-making turn in the Parsons’ Cause, Henry had developed a sizeable legal practice in Hanover and Louisa Counties. In 1769, he began practicing before the General Court of Virginia, a more prestigious venue than the county courts. Working in the General Court also gave him even more access to the established political leaders of the colony, such as Robert Carter Nicholas, a longtime Burgess, and since 1766, the treasurer of the colony, who would turn over his law practice to Henry in 1773 when his duties as treasurer prevented him from maintaining his caseload. Nicholas initially offered the work to Thomas Jefferson, who declined. The General Court did not always provide a steady income, however. Jefferson, Henry, and other lawyers who worked in the General Court apparently found it difficult to make ends meet there; they published a notice in the Virginia Gazette in 1773 announcing that they would no longer accept cases from clients who did not pay their whole fee in advance.5

  Henry loved arguing cases before a jury. Sometimes he could win marginal cases just by appealing to the hearts of jurors. Even though he and Jefferson were still friends at this point, Jefferson thought that Henry’s courtroom pyrotechnics evaded the hard principles of the law. In comments on a marriage case concerning an annulment and dowry rights in 1773, Jefferson wrote that “Henry for the plaintiff avoided, as was his custom, entering the lists of the law, running wild in the field of fact.” Yet Henry won the case. There was more than a hint of jealousy in Jefferson’s dismissive comment: he could never stir a jury’s emotions like Henry. The differences in sensibility and legal values between the two men would not fracture their friendship, however, until well into the Revolutionary War, when Jefferson’s questionable behavior as governor, and a subsequent legal investigation initiated by Henry, would nearly ruin Jefferson’s reputation.6

  In retrospect, real estate seemed a more risky path to financial security than law, but Henry followed the lead of his father and father-in-law in buying and selling land in the west. (The “west,” to Henry, was central and western Virginia.) Often the lands were in locations uncertain to their sellers and buyers, encompassing territory traditionally used by Native Americans. Nevertheless, up-and-coming colonists like Henry believed that western land deals offered the potential for significant profits. Land was traditionally associated with independence in British culture. Tobacco also depleted soils quickly, requiring access to new areas for cultivation.

  In 1765, the year of the Stamp Act crisis, Henry received 1,700 acres in Louisa County from his father as repayment of a loan. This land, on Roundabout Creek, became the Henry family residence for six years; he built a modest home of one and a half stories there, with three rooms downstairs and one upstairs. John Shelton, his father-in-law, also became a source of major land acquisitions for Henry. In 1766, Henry helped save Shelton from bankruptcy by purchasing about 3,400 acres of land from him on separate tracts in southwest Virginia. Henry bought the land unseen and had difficulty locating the tracts when he went surveying. When he did find them, he realized that Cherokees occupied them, but eventually he arranged for the government to acknowledge his claims to that acreage. Aggressive American attempts to remove the Cherokees from their traditional lands would not culminate until seventy years later, with the Trail of Tears. As governor of Virginia during the Revolution, Henry repeatedly assured the Cherokees that Virginia wanted to ally with them against their Native American rivals and that “his heart and the hearts of all the Virginians are still good toward the Cherokees.” Henry’s assurances did not keep Virgi
nia out of a vicious war with the Cherokees, a conflict that would begin in 1776.7

  Henry sensed the opportunities waiting for land speculation in America’s interior, especially in the Ohio River valley region. Henry and his business associates were planning to settle English families in the Kentucky territory, negotiating to relocate Native Americans when necessary. In one of his earliest surviving letters, written to the Scottish immigrant William Fleming, who was surveying lands in Kentucky where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers met, Henry encouraged Fleming to keep a diary while on his journey, so that detailed information on the characteristics of that vast region could be “printed in order to invite our countrymen to become settlers. The task is arduous, to view that vast forest, describe the face of the country and such of the rivers, creeks, etc., as present themselves to view is a work of much trouble, hazard, and fatigue, and will in my judgment entitle you to the favorable notice of every gentleman engaged in the scheme.” Henry and other leading Virginians, such as Washington, continued to acquire land in the west, even as that region descended into chaotic violence between new colonial settlers and Native Americans in the early 1770s.8

  By 1771, Henry’s land speculations and legal work allowed him to move up from the modest home at Roundabout to a genteel mansion at Scotchtown, in Hanover County. He apparently acquired the house and 1,000-acre tract from John Payne, the father of Dolley Madison; the future First Lady had lived briefly at the plantation as a young girl. The house had sixteen rooms and several outbuildings. It was one of the largest mansions in Virginia at the time.9

  An ad describing Scotchtown said it was “remarkable for producing the finest sweet scented tobacco.... The soil is also exceeding good for wheat, and there are several swamps and parcels of low grounds on it, that will suit for meadows. There is on it a large commodious dwelling house with eight rooms on one floor, and a very large passage, pleasantly situated, and all convenient outhouses, also a good water grist mill; and there are three plantations cleared sufficient to work twenty or thirty hands, under good fences, with Negro quarters, tobacco houses, etc.” Henry’s purchase of this estate was a sign that he fully belonged to the gentility.10

  At Scotchtown, Henry continued working to establish his financial independence. He increasingly grew grain along with tobacco, following the lead of planters such as Washington, who had already switched the fields of Mount Vernon from tobacco to wheat, hemp, and flax by 1766, and by the mid-1780s Washington was planting as many as sixty different crops. Tobacco had become less appealing and lucrative, and not only because it exhausted the soil. The planters’ debts to the English tobacco merchants and creditors escalated across Virginia in the 1760s, convincing many that agricultural diversity was in order. Wheat seemed a more virtuous crop than tobacco, anyway. Jefferson wrote that tobacco was “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness. Those employed in it are in a continued state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support. Little food of any kind is raised by them, so that the men and animals on these farms are badly fed, and the earth is rapidly impoverished.” Wheat required less labor, and thus fewer slaves. Altogether, it seemed like an advantageous change for Virginia’s economy and society.11

  Yet Henry did not always find wheat a guaranteed moneymaker—sometimes thanks less to the vagaries of the crop than the irresponsibility of a family member. In 1776, just before the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, he would sell almost four hundred bushels of wheat to his financially delinquent half-brother, John Syme. But Henry discovered later that Syme had not given him credit for at least half of his wheat deliveries, making “most gross errors in crediting my crop’s wheat.” In 1785, the accounting problems with Syme lingered, and Henry noted in a financial memo that “I think certainly I owe him nothing.... I am willing to be even, but owing nothing.” Meanwhile, Syme continued to enjoy the life of the Virginia gentleman, racing horses and consuming luxury goods. If even his half-brother was willing to cheat him, Henry mused, how could he ever hope to achieve financial security?12

  HIS INCREASING LAND, POWER, AND WEALTH—and his persistent pursuit of personal independence—led Henry to acquire more slaves. Sarah’s dowry had included six slaves, and by the late 1780s Henry owned sixty-six African-Americans on his various properties. Anglo-Americans, particularly in the southern colonies, largely took slavery for granted and did not blink at its scenes of human bondage and severe punishments. The day of Henry’s Stamp Act speech in the House of Burgesses, for instance, the bodies of three African-Americans convicted of robbing a leading politician were hanging outside on Williamsburg’s gallows. They served as a grisly reminder to slaves of their subservient place in Virginia society.13

  Planters like Henry knew that keeping slaves was an invitation to violent resistance. Members of the southern elite incessantly worried about how to maintain power over their slaves, and prevent them from revolting or running away. Their fear often led them to inflict lurid and grotesque punishments against unruly slaves, especially runaways. A 1705 slave code allowed masters to apply to county courts for permission to cut off body parts of repeat offenders. The Virginia assembly hoped that these punishments would dissuade other African-Americans from thinking of running away. Masters and their overseers meted out vicious punishments with some regularity. The village of Negro Foot near Henry’s Roundabout plantation, for example, apparently got its name when someone put a slave’s dismembered foot on a pike in the area in 1733. Placing body parts on pikes was not new in English history. As early as the conquest of Ireland, the English had routinely displayed the heads and other appendages of their vanquished enemies as a warning not to revolt. The gruesome cautionary punishments could make for some harsh contrasts: the tiny hamlet of present-day Negro Foot lies on Patrick Henry Road in Hanover County.14

  White Virginians’ occasional recourse to the dismemberment of slaves had not abated in 1769—the year the Propositions and Grievances Committee in the House, of which Patrick Henry was a member, considered an amendment to a 1748 act controlling the behavior of servants and slaves. That act had reauthorized the county courts to “direct the [non-lethal] dismembering of slaves, who are notoriously guilty of going abroad in the night, or running away, and laying out, and who cannot be reclaimed by the common methods of punishment.” In 1769 the House decided to amend the act, having decided that its enforcement was “often disproportioned to the offence, and contrary to the principles of humanity.” But the new law provided only one new restriction on dismembering: a ban on castration, except in the case of attempted rape of a white woman by a slave.15

  Virginia planters knew they had to keep a tight rein on slaves, who could rise up at any moment in localized violence or massive insurrection. Large-scale rebellion was highly uncommon—the task of organizing far-flung slaves and the threat of crushing retaliation made such revolts unlikely. But Virginia whites had witnessed enough slave uprisings to be scared into imposing draconian punishments. In 1730, hundreds of blacks participated in an insurrection around Norfolk, resulting in the hanging of thirty or more slave leaders. The slaves reportedly timed the revolt to begin on Sunday morning, when many whites would be in church and unarmed. Subsequently the governor ordered that when attending church, the colony’s militiamen should “carry with them their arms to prevent any surprise thereof in their absence when slaves are most at liberty.” Even during worship, white masters could not quite find relief from the fear of slave insurrection.16

  Local fights could also turn into minor revolts. In 1769, a newspaper report recounted how slaves on the Hanover County plantation of Bowler Cocke turned against a demanding overseer and his assistant, who was attacked with an ax and severely beaten. After escaping, the assistant summoned an armed posse of whites, who confronted the defiant slaves at a barn. The slaves, said the article’s white author, “rushed upon them with a desperate fury, armed with clubs and staves; one of them knocked down a white man, and was going to repeat the blow to finish him, which one of the
[white] boys seeing, leveled his piece, discharged its contents into the fellow’s breast, and brought him to the dust . . . the battle continued desperate, but another of the Negroes having his head almost cut off with a broad sword, and five of them being wounded, the rest fled.” We cannot know to what extent the white men involved had provoked these attacks, but reports like this one confirmed white Virginians’ conviction that by keeping slaves, they were sitting on a powder keg. Too many violent punishments—such as dismemberments—might elicit rebellion, but too much leniency might open the door for runaways or outright resistance.17

  Many Virginia elites viewed slavery as a threat not only to their safety but to their own virtue as well. By the late 1760s, some of the colony’s leaders had also begun to fear that the colonists’ dependence on slave labor might breed lazy, debauched tendencies among the planters. Beyond such concerns, the rising number of slaves was also negatively affecting the economy. Virginians had begun to accumulate a surplus of slaves, some of whom they sold to planters of the lower South. Restricting further imports could both limit the slave population, which would offer some protection against possible slave revolts, and raise the prices for slaves at market. The Burgesses knew they could not ban the importation of slaves without London’s approval, however, and in 1772 they petitioned the king directly for permitting such a ban.