The petition revealed not only the Burgesses’ growing reservations about the slave trade but also their continuing devotion to the king. Their confidence in the monarch’s tender care for the colonies, they wrote, led the Burgesses to “look up to the throne, and implore your Majesty’s paternal assistance in averting a calamity of a most alarming nature.” The delegates, most of them slave owners, however benevolent, did not linger on the contradictions inherent in the inhuman nature of the transatlantic slave trade—the very commerce that had always delivered the slaves whose continuing arrivals they now sought to curtail. They expressed fear that continued importations could threaten the security of the colonies. They also noted that more slaves meant fewer “useful inhabitants,” or free white workers whose incomes would support the empire. The Burgesses, including Patrick Henry, unanimously approved the petition, complete with its affirmation of Virginia’s loyalty to the “best of kings,” George III.18
In 1772, even as the colonies stood at the edge of the second, more acute phase of the revolutionary crisis, most Americans remained convinced of George III’s fatherly kindness toward them, and could present such appeals to him wholeheartedly. The corrosion of George III’s reputation soon accelerated, assisted in part by the king’s lack of attention to petitions like this one. The king’s failure to reply to the House’s appeal would merit notice in Jefferson’s draft version of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In a long section on slavery (subsequently deleted by the Continental Congress), Jefferson wrote that the king had suppressed “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” in slaves. The Crown’s refusal to allow the colonies to restrict the importation of slaves gave colonists some basis for the otherwise dubious claim that Britain had forced slavery on white Americans.19
PATRICK HENRY VEHEMENTLY SUPPORTED the restriction on the slave trade. Like many Virginia slave masters, he expressed frank personal reservations about slaveholding in a supposed land of liberty. Soon after the Burgesses sent their petition against the slave trade to the king, Henry received an antislavery book by the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet as a gift from Virginia Quaker leader Robert Pleasants. In reply to Pleasants, Henry wrote a remarkable reflection on slavery:It is not a little surprising that Christianity, whose chief excellence consists in softening the human heart, in cherishing and improving its finer feelings, should encourage a practice so totally repugnant to the first impression of right and wrong. What adds to the wonder is that this abominable practice has been introduced in the most enlightened ages.... Is it not amazing, that at a time, when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty, that in such an age, and such a country we find men, professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle and generous; adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty. . . .
Would any one believe that I am a master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I cannot justify it....
I believe a time will come when an option will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Every thing we can do is to improve it, if it happens in our day, if not, let us transmit to our descendants together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence for slavery. If we cannot reduce this wished for reformation to practice, let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity, it is the furthest advance we can make toward justice.20
Henry believed that the principles of the Bible, as well as new ideals of liberty becoming popular in Europe and America, contradicted slaveholding. He hoped that Americans’ commitment to liberty would put the institution on a path to extinction. Ever concerned with the moral character of Virginia society, Henry worried that slavery prevented the development of a republic of independent, virtuous freeholders. James Madison shared this concern, privately calling slavery “unrepublican.” Slaveholding encouraged vicious behavior by the planters against their weaker, victimized laborers. Henry commended the Quakers for leading this moral cause. He took personally their fervent injunction against slavery, worrying that he was hypocritically keeping slaves for his convenience when every moral gauge told him it was wrong. 21
Henry so heartily applauded the Quakers for their abolitionism that Pleasants and others believed that the famous orator might serve as their political champion. Radical Quakers had long promoted antislavery principles, much earlier than most other Christians in Britain and America, and were often scorned by other colonists for their controversial views. Pleasants recommended a number of Virginia politicians, including “particularly our friend Patrick Henry,” to Anthony Benezet in 1774, when Henry was going to Benezet’s Philadelphia for the meeting of the Continental Congress. Another Quaker correspondent was even more effusive in his 1774 description of Henry as “a real half Quaker . . . in religious matters a saint but the very devil in politics—a son of thunder—Boanerges.” This writer portrayed Henry as a serious Christian who practiced politics with such religious zeal that he was like the disciples James and John, whom Jesus renamed Boanerges—the “Sons of Thunder”—in the Gospel of Mark.22
With the Continental Congress so focused on resistance to the Intolerable Acts, harsh measures that came in 1774 in reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Henry did not advocate in Philadelphia for the abolition of slavery, but Quaker activists continued to hope that the “half Quaker” would join their cause. New Jersey Quaker Samuel Allinson wrote to Henry in late 1774 to argue that the slavery issue had never deserved more attention “than at a time when many or all the inhabitants of North America are groaning under unconstitutional impositions destructive of their liberty.” Allinson speculated that the crisis with Britain might represent divine judgment on America for the practice of slavery; he warned Henry that God would not bless the colonists’ fight for their political liberty if they continued to deny the slaves the more basic right of freedom from chains. After Henry became governor of Virginia, Robert Pleasants continued to correspond with him, asking Henry to consider a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery in the state.23
The Quakers may well have been disappointed with Henry. He never freed his own slaves—not even at his death—much less became an abolitionist. When the Revolution began, Henry grew more concerned with controlling the slave population of Virginia than promoting abolition. The Quakers also tended toward Loyalism, which created a wedge of suspicion between them and patriot leaders. In 1778, Henry had to mediate between Congress and a group of Pennsylvania Quakers detained in Winchester, Virginia, because of suspected treachery against the American cause. Whatever sympathies Henry ever had for antislavery sentiment certainly dissipated with the onset of hostilities with Britain.24
Although Henry’s poignant letter to Pleasants may surprise us because of its candor, his sentiments against slavery reflected those of several other leading Virginians of the time, including Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson declared in Notes on the State of Virginia that human liberty was a gift from God and, like the Quakers, suggested that Americans provoked God’s wrath because of their embrace of slavery. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson wrote, and “that his justice cannot sleep forever.” At the same time, however, Jefferson feared the consequences of emancipation, believing that it might unleash a horrific race war in the South. For Jefferson, freedom for slaves might have represented a long-term ideal, but the logistical difficulties, financial disruptions, and potential violence he anticipated prevented planters like him from taking emancipation seriously or, ultimately, enacting it in their own lives.25
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Henry’s fellow Virginian George Mason would deepen the contradiction inherent in the position of southern slave masters who lamented American slavery. In a debate over Congress’s power over slavery, Mason warned that slavery would cause God to curse America: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. Th
ey bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.” Like Henry and many other patriots, Mason saw a direct relationship between a nation’s moral characteristics and its future welfare. Yet, like Henry and others, Mason never liberated any of his slaves. At the time these founders lived, it was conventional for leading southerners to criticize slavery, but those kinds of sentiments would no longer be acceptable in the proslavery white South sixty years later. If indeed the Revolution presented an opportunity to phase out slavery in the South, that window closed because planters like Henry indulged fears, rationalizations, and racial prejudices that barred the consistent application of the ideal of universal liberty they espoused.26
THE PLANTERS MIGHT NOT SEEK immediate freedom for their slaves, but they zealously agitated for freedom from parliamentary taxation. Their efforts were successful, at least in the short term. The colonial boycotts of the late 1760s helped convince royal officials to repeal most of the Townshend Duties. Five months after dissolving Virginia’s assembly for endorsing Massachusetts’s effort to resist the Townshend Program, the imperial governor reconvened the House of Burgesses. He informed them that the taxes would soon be repealed and that the Parliament did not intend to pass any new taxes for raising revenue from the colonists. The Burgesses responded with a conciliatory address to the governor and king, expressing gratitude for the policy change and renewing “the strongest assurances of our uninterrupted and most inviolable attachment to the sacred person and government of our royal sovereign.”27
In early 1770, Parliament did repeal most of the Townshend Duties, except for the tax on tea. This action dulled resistance in the colonies, even though the Virginia boycott was renewed in June 1770 with the promise that its adherents would continue to refuse to import British goods until the Townshend Duties were “totally repealed.” The boycott in Virginia lost much of its force during 1770, however, and it did not reenergize even after news of the Boston Massacre that March, when tensions over the presence of the standing army in Boston finally boiled over and redcoats opened fire on a crowd of colonists, killing five. Ironically, for about three years after the massacre, Massachusetts, Virginia, and the rest of the colonies entered a season of relative quiet, even though none of the fundamental constitutional problems between the colonists and the Crown had been resolved.28
As the colony enjoyed a brief respite from imperial controversy, the rest of the key players in Virginia’s rebellion were coming into place. In 1769, the twenty-six-year-old Jefferson joined Henry as a member of the House of Burgesses. Born seven years after Henry, Jefferson had also become a planter and lawyer. Jefferson grew up in Albemarle County, some seventy miles to the west of Hanover. His family was more deeply connected to Virginia’s elite gentry than Henry’s, and he received the best education possible, including a degree from the College of William and Mary. As a postgraduate student, Jefferson was studying law at William and Mary when he witnessed Henry’s Stamp Act speech in 1765. Jefferson had inherited significant land holdings in Albemarle County when his father died in 1757, including the land on which Jefferson would build his famous home, Monticello. But like Henry, Jefferson did not restrict himself to farming, so he began practicing law in 1767, and in late 1768 Albemarle County elected him to the House of Burgesses. The two men were very different lawyers. In court, the contrasts in their personalities shined through, as Edmund Randolph remembered: “Mr. Jefferson drew copiously from the depths of the law, Mr. Henry from the recesses of the human heart.” Jefferson believed in the power of ideas, Henry in the power of persuasion.29
We know relatively little about the activities of Henry—or of Jefferson—during the early 1770s, except that for Henry it was a time of significant personal reflections on slavery, because of the 1772 petition to the king and the 1773 letter to Robert Pleasants. In late 1770, Virginia’s relatively congenial governor, Norborne Berkeley, died and was replaced by John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, who would preside over the colony as its relationship with Britain disintegrated. The assembly met once in 1771, and again in 1772, and dealt primarily with local affairs, except for the petition on slave imports. Jefferson did not even attend the February 1772 session, having just married his wife, Martha, a month earlier, on New Year’s Day.
But in early 1773, when the Burgesses gathered in Williamsburg, open tension between Britain and the colonies resurfaced. Local problems between Governor Dunmore and the assembly were themselves combustible, but the chief event igniting tensions between Britain and the colonies was the 1772 burning of the British schooner Gaspee in Rhode Island. This aggressive customs vessel had been harassing merchant ships off the New England coast, trying to catch smugglers. When the Gaspee ran aground during a pursuit, unidentified Rhode Islanders boarded the ship under the cover of night, removed the crew—shooting the ship’s lieutenant in the groin during the scuffle—and burned the boat.
The Gaspee affair opened another critical front in the contest over British constitutional authority in the colonies. Furious, the British government commissioned an investigation of the brazen attack. Although they could not determine who had burned the vessel, London officials gave the commission authority to send any suspects back to England for trial. To colonists, this move jeopardized their time-honored right to trial by a jury of peers.
As it had in 1765, Virginia led the resistance in this phase of the imperial crisis. Thomas Jefferson recalled that the news of the Gaspee commission had roused some of the more radical members of the assembly to action. “Not thinking our old and leading members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required,” Jefferson, Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and others met in a private room at the Raleigh Tavern and drafted a proposal to form a committee of correspondence to monitor the British government’s actions. In resolutions the young men got the House of Burgesses to adopt in March 1773, the legislature declared that in light of ominous reports of designs to deprive them of their constitutional rights (referring obliquely to the Gaspee commission), it would appoint a committee to “obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings of administration, as may relate to, or affect the British colonies in America.” The committee would also correspond with other American colonies on shared imperial concerns. Although the group included such cautious senior members as chairman Peyton Randolph, it also featured the instigators: Henry, Jefferson, and Lee.30
Massachusetts used a similar committee of correspondence to stir resistance in its hinterlands, and Virginia’s committee helped build intercolonial cooperation. Richard Henry Lee had proposed the idea of such an organization as early as 1768 to John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, recommending that “a private correspondence should be conducted between the lovers of liberty in every province.” The creation of Virginia’s committee set the plan in motion. It would be the first step toward framing a separate American government.31
Shortly after the Burgesses formed the committee of correspondence, Parliament miscalculated colonial sentiment by passing the 1773 Tea Act. The measure was primarily intended to rescue the struggling East India Company by giving it a monopoly on the tea trade in America. The net effect would be to lower the price of tea in the colonies, but sensitive colonists interpreted it as another attempt by Parliament to assert the right to tax the colonies, and many American merchants realized they would lose their right to sell tea because of the East India Company’s monopoly. In Boston, the furor over the act led to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, in which radicals raided ships and dumped about £10,000 of tea into Boston Harbor.
When the Virginia assembly met again, in May 1774, Parliament had already retaliated for the Tea Party by passing the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port to commercial traffic until the value of the destroyed tea had been recovered. Open attacks on th
e Port Bill would be reserved until the end of Virginia’s legislative session; the Burgesses knew that any official complaints would lead to their dissolution by the governor. George Mason told a friend that as plans proceeded behind the scenes to protest the Port Bill, Henry reasserted himself as Virginia’s chief patriot orator. In a vivid description of Henry’s role, Mason wrote:Matters of that sort here are conducted and prepared with a great deal of privacy, and by very few members; of whom Patrick Henry is the principal. At the request of the gentlemen concerned, I have spent an evening with them upon the subject, where I had an opportunity of conversing with Mr. Henry, and knowing his sentiments; as well as hearing him speak in the house since, on different occasions.
Mason had come to know Henry well. He was awed by Henry’s rhetorical talents and portrayed him as a man of classic public virtue (and Mason would seem to have no reason to be obsequious in a personal letter not directed to Henry):He is by far the most powerful speaker I ever heard. Every word he says not only engages but commands the attention; and your passions are no longer your own when he addresses them. But his eloquence is the smallest part of his merit. He is in my opinion the first man upon this continent, as well in abilities as public virtues, and had he lived in Rome about the time of the first Punic War, when the Roman people had arrived at their meridian glory, and their virtue not tarnished, Mr. Henry’s talents must have put him at the head of that glorious commonwealth.32
For a patriot like Mason, comparing Henry to the leading citizens of ancient Rome was the highest form of praise. To him, Henry’s courageous oratory revealed his commitment to both freedom and virtue.
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