There are many moments in Henry’s life for which we might wish for better documentation. The “Liberty or Death” speech is probably the most significant of those points. Amazingly, we do not have a contemporary text of it, even though it is one of the most celebrated and stirring orations in American history. One of Patrick Henry’s charms was an apparent lack of concern for his personal legacy. Unlike most of the major founders, he made almost no effort to preserve his papers, or texts of his major speeches. For historians, this lack of attention to the autobiographical record causes peculiar problems. What record we do have for the “Liberty or Death” speech is a version published in 1816 by William Wirt, a Virginia politician who became attorney general under President James Monroe. Wirt corresponded widely with associates of Henry to craft his biography Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry and seems to have depended heavily on the recollections of Virginia judge St. George Tucker for the wording of the speech. The speech’s content seems consistent with Henry’s style and radical ideology, so we can be confident that the essence of the text came from the original.14
“Liberty or Death” relied heavily upon biblical references for its persuasive power. These are easily missed now, but they would have been familiar to the audience at the Virginia Convention, who grew up in the Bible-soaked culture of colonial America. Several phrases came directly from the prophet Jeremiah. For example, Henry warned that British assurances of benevolent intentions would “prove a snare to your feet” (Jeremiah 18:22). He worried that Virginians would become like those “who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not” (Jeremiah 5:21). And he warned that “gentlemen may cry, peace, peace—but there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).15
Henry also explained his suspicion of the British by referencing his own worldview regarding the natural human tendency to engage in deceptive behavior. He had “but one lamp by which his feet were guided; and that was the lamp of experience.” The British had given the colonists no reason to trust them, he declared, other than assurances of goodwill, and he warned that behind those assurances, the British were really like the disciple Judas, who had sold out Jesus to his enemies. “Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss,” he cautioned.16
For Patrick Henry, there could be no compromise, no false peace. At the conclusion of the speech, Henry thundered that the time for war had come. “We must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us! . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” With this, Henry lifted his arms and cried, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”17
IN THE DIMMED LIGHT cast from two centuries past, we may forget how audacious the “Liberty or Death” speech was. Henry’s words shocked some and horrified others. While Edmund Randolph thought the speech “blazed so as to warm the coldest heart,” a Virginia Tory grumbled that “you never heard anything more infamously insolent than P. Henry’s speech.”18
For the climactic words of his speech, Henry recalled the play Cato, A Tragedy by Joseph Addison. Originally published in London in 1713, Addison’s play was one of the most popular and enduring in the colonies, opening in Philadelphia in 1749 in a performance by the first professional American drama company. Cato, one of the heroes of Roman antiquity, was revered by colonists for his opposition to political corruption and the power of Julius Caesar. In the play, Cato declared:It is not now a time to talk of ought
But chains, or conquest; liberty, or death.
Appeals to classical antiquity allowed Patriots like Henry to argue for the historic rectitude of resisting encroaching power and corruption. Cato and Brutus had done it, and so should the Americans.19
To Henry, the crisis had become a “question of freedom or slavery.” By liberally using biblical rhetoric, Henry drew on his Christian heritage and evangelical style to place the Virginians’ struggle in a providential frame. Fighting against Britain required more than pragmatic justifications. Moderation at such a time would be an offense not just to the people of Virginia but also to God.
Henry acknowledged the power of the British armed forces, but he believed that waiting to fight would only weaken the American position as the British continued to concentrate their troops on the colonies’ shores. The conspiracy against their liberty would grow more insidious. If they fought, he proclaimed, God would be on their side. “Three millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. . . . Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat, sir, let it come!”20
These words resound with Henry’s ultimate expression of Christian republicanism. For founders like him, republican ideology, which trumpeted both the value and fragility of liberty, would have been incomplete if not expressed with Christian zeal. Some elite founders privately held unorthodox beliefs about the Christian God, but patriots like Henry who had more traditional faith used Christian themes to mobilize the people at large. One of Henry’s critics lamented that Henry was “so infatuated, that he goes about I am told, praying and preaching amongst the common people.” Henry, along with most rank-and-file patriots, entered the war against Britain with the conviction that God would defend the liberty of the righteous.21
Henry also believed, along with most patriots, that God moved in the affairs of nations. The notion that “a just God presides over the destinies of nations” would have resonated at the Virginia Convention and among founders as diverse as Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. But to Henry, God did not simply bless America because it was America. God defended the liberty of the righteous, while confounding the plans of oppressive nations such as Britain. Henry would have added—and did indeed declare later in the war—that if America lost its virtue, then it risked forgoing the blessing of God. This was a constant refrain among many revolutionaries and a theme that also hearkened back to the warnings of Jeremiah and other biblical prophets.
THE CONVENTION WAS CONVINCED. It adopted Henry’s resolutions and made him the chair of a committee entrusted with developing a strategy to arm the colony. Under the committee’s plan, the counties would form volunteer militia companies that would respond in case of military emergency. Each militiaman, “clothed in a hunting shirt by way of uniform,” would be supplied with a gun, ammunition, and a tomahawk. Patriot soldier Dr. George Gilmer, of the Albemarle County volunteers, vowed “never to bury the tomahawk until liberty shall be fixed on an immoveable basis through the whole Continent.” These rustic fighters, with their fearsome appearance, would not have to wait long to see action.22
The convention selected the same seven men who served in the first Continental Congress to serve in the second, which would gather in Philadelphia in May. All of them, including Henry, received strong support from the other delegates. Thomas Jefferson was chosen as an alternate. Although moderates like Peyton Randolph continued to exercise great influence, all signs pointed toward the establishment of a separate Virginia government and military to resist the British. Events of the next month would hardly slow the momentum.
On March 28, Governor Dunmore issued a proclamation forbidding, by order of the king, the election of delegates to the Continental Congress—three days after the convention had elected Henry and his colleagues to attend the meeting in Philadelphia. Undeterred, Dunmore insisted that government officials stop the appointment of delegates to a gathering the British deemed the latest in a series of illegitimate acts by an increasingly unreasonable crowd of colonists. The conflict drew its first blood in April 1775 at Lexington, Massachusetts, where the British military commander General Thomas Gage sought to ar
rest rebel leaders and to seize arms held at Concord. In the early morning of April 19, the Massachusetts militia, warned by Paul Revere’s network of spies, faced down the redcoat army on the town green of Lexington. No one knows who shot first, but the “shot heard ’round the world” would begin the armed conflict that became the American Revolution. The British then met a fierce resistance at Concord and were forced to retreat to Boston, suffering almost three hundred casualties. Lord Dunmore knew the Virginia Convention had called for its counties to organize militias like those in Massachusetts (although he seemed not yet to know about the events at Lexington and Concord). He ordered marines on the royal schooner Magdalen to take a cache of gunpowder held in Williamsburg and remove it to a ship waiting outside of Norfolk before the colonists could steal it. In the early morning of April 21, a small group of British troops loaded fifteen half-barrels of gunpowder into a wagon the governor provided. Someone raised an alarm, but the soldiers successfully fled Williamsburg with the powder.23
A mob began to gather in Williamsburg, threatening to attack the governor’s palace. No attack came, as moderate leaders calmed the crowd and the city government prepared a sober address to the governor. In addition to decrying the seizure of the gunpowder and demanding its return, the city’s complaint also focused on the possibility of slave uprisings, rumors of which had swept up and down the James River the week before. “We have too much reason to believe,” the city leaders wrote, “that some wicked and designing persons have instilled the most diabolical notions into the minds of slaves, and that, therefore, the utmost attention to our internal security is become the more necessary.” The Virginians were imagining nightmarish scenarios of the British disarming the colonists just at the moment of a great slave insurrection. Or worse, Lord Dunmore might encourage the slaves to revolt to stop the colonists’ resistance. Dunmore was keenly aware of these fears, and immediately after removing the powder, he threatened to fulfill white Virginians’ worst dreams by declaring freedom for the slaves.24
Many Virginians saw his threat, along with the fighting in Massachusetts, as the final phase of the plot to destroy the colonists’ liberties. Some of the volunteer militia companies, only recently called up by Henry’s resolutions, began to assemble for a march on Williamsburg. The Albemarle County militia departed from Charlottesville, prepared to “demand satisfaction of Dunmore for the powder, and his threatening to fix his standard and call over the negroes.” Moderate leaders, such as Peyton Randolph, began circulating letters forbidding these companies to assault the capital.25
One militia company the moderates could not stop was Patrick Henry’s, the volunteers of Hanover County. Henry had returned to Hanover from Richmond and helped organize the militia by giving a passionate speech, as one participant recalled, “pointing out the necessity of our having recourse to arms in defense of our rights.” Many volunteered for the company. Henry knew the gunpowder episode presented a new opportunity to radicalize the population against the British. He told his cousin George Dabney that Dunmore’s action was a “fortunate circumstance, which would rouse the people from North to South. You may in vain mention the duties to them upon tea and these things they will say do not affect them, but tell them of the robbery of the magazine and that the next step will be to disarm them, and they will be then ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.” Henry summoned the Hanover volunteers to recapture the gunpowder. Understandably, some moderates criticized his plan as “imprudent and impolitic,” but the Hanover County committee approved the plan, and Henry became commander of the company. Perhaps chastened by the mounting pressure against him from fellow Virginians, he decided to seek reimbursement for the gunpowder from royal officials. He extracted a promise of such compensation from Carter Braxton, a moderate patriot who had been dispatched by the governor as a peacemaker.26
Henry sent the receipt of payment to Virginia’s treasurer, Robert Carter Nicholas, assuring him that if the public treasury needed protection from plundering by Dunmore, the Hanover militia would gladly provide it. Nicholas replied that “he had no apprehension of the necessity or propriety of the proffered service.” In taking charge of his own militia to confront Dunmore, Henry had clearly begun to test the limits of the Virginia moderates’ tolerance. The Hanover volunteers returned home, awaiting further instructions after Henry’s attendance at the second meeting of the Continental Congress.27
Responses to Henry’s expedition were mixed. Hesitant Virginians agonized that the colonists might not be able to avoid violence and popular unrest in pursuing rights and redress from Britain. “A True Patriot,” writing in the Virginia Gazette, acknowledged that Dunmore’s actions were wrongheaded, but he chastised the volunteers for acting without proper government authority. Unchecked zeal for liberty and wild rumors about British intentions were threatening the rule of law, and Henry’s acts might become as “pernicious in their consequences as they were intended to be salutary,” the True Patriot worried. From the royal perspective, Henry had become a rebel and a terrorist, and on May 6, Dunmore issued a proclamation denouncing him and his followers: “I have been informed, from undoubted authority, that a certain Patrick Henry, of the County of Hanover, and a number of deluded followers, have taken up arms, chosen their officers, and styling themselves an independent company, have marched out of their county, encamped, and put themselves in a posture of war . . . to the great terror of all his majesty’s faithful subjects, and in open defiance of law and government.” Dunmore warned Virginians not to give any aid to Henry and his ruffians.28
Other Virginians congratulated Henry and the Hanover volunteers, however. From Orange County, a committee chaired by James Madison deplored Dunmore’s seizure of the gunpowder. Fifteen years younger than Henry, Madison was the son of an elite tobacco-growing family from northern Virginia. He had graduated from the College of New Jersey at Princeton only in 1771, where he studied political philosophy under the renowned Presbyterian pastor and scholar John Witherspoon. In 1775, the twenty-four-year-old Madison was just emerging as a political leader in Orange County. His committee declared that the fighting in Massachusetts represented an attack on Virginia as well, further justifying Henry’s actions. The battles at Lexington and Concord were “sufficient warrant to use violence and reprisal, in all cases where it may be expedient for our security and welfare.” To radical patriots, threats of violence like Henry’s had become necessary because of the British government’s flagrant actions against them.29
In the days after Dunmore denounced him, Henry remained unapologetic. He scoffed at Dunmore’s claim that the gunpowder belonged to the royal government. “His Majesty can have no right to convert the houses or other conveniences necessary for our defense into repositories for engines of our destruction,” Henry wrote. He hoped most Virginians would support him, despite the grumblings of moderates, and even hinted that in light of events in Massachusetts, “greater reprisals” could have been justified but that he had declined to pursue them. With such missives, Henry was positioning himself not only as a resistance leader but as a commander of a rebellion.30
By the second week of May, Henry had departed for the Second Continental Congress, accompanied by an armed escort to prevent his arrest. His cheering guards sent him across the Potomac, while “committing him to the gracious and wise disposer of all human events, to guide and protect while contending for a restitution of our dearest rights and liberties.” Henry’s supporters believed that God had raised up Henry and other patriot leaders to face this crisis, and would protect them accordingly. The controversy in Virginia continued to worsen in Henry’s absence, and Dunmore abandoned Williamsburg in June, taking refuge on a British frigate near Yorktown.31
We do not have detailed records of Henry’s activities at the Second Continental Congress, but the relative silence about his impact there seems to confirm Thomas Jefferson’s later assertion that Henry played only a supporting role. Jefferson had joined the Congress (replacing Peyton Randolph, who returned to
Virginia to help manage the crisis there), and he found Henry “to be a silent, and almost un-meddling member.” Jefferson portrayed Henry as at his best when he was debating fundamental issues of liberty and freedom; he did not shine when it came to deliberating over the policies and elements of the new government the Congress had set itself to institute. Henry was a visionary motivator, not a man of organization. As he participated in planning the independent government, Henry was competent, but easily bored.32
Moderates at the Second Continental Congress pushed through one more attempt at reconciliation, the “Olive Branch Petition” that reaffirmed loyalty to the king despite the fighting in Massachusetts, and Dunmore’s seizure of Virginia’s gunpowder. Henry undoubtedly squirmed in frustration as the Congress passed the last-ditch appeal to the British, but he may have recognized that it was useful to have the colonies on record as favoring reconciliation, if possible.
Even as it offered the possibility of peace, Congress planned for war. The delegates created the Continental army, naming George Washington commander in chief of the American forces. Divisions within the Congress at this point ran along moderate and radical lines, not regional ones, with Washington facing opposition from some Virginia delegates, especially Edmund Pendleton, who believed Washington’s appointment would signal eagerness for armed conflict beyond Massachusetts. The Virginia moderates supported Artemas Ward of Massachusetts as the top general, to direct a war they hoped would stay in New England. Samuel and John Adams supported Washington not only because of his experience and dignity, but also to raise up a Southern patriot commander, helping to make this an American war.
With characteristic humility, Washington wrote to his brother that he had “embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect and from whence, perhaps, no safe harbour is to be found. I have been called upon by the unanimous voice of the colonies to take the command of the Continental Army—an honour I neither sought after, nor desired, as I am thoroughly convinced that it requires greater abilities, and much more experience, than I am master of.” Henry enthusiastically supported his colleague Washington out of personal loyalty developed during a decade of legislative service together. The choice also complemented Henry’s growing partnership with the Massachusetts radicals.33
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