Shortly after the day of prayer, the attack on Virginia finally came. On May 8, 1779, a fleet of about thirty ships entered the Chesapeake Bay and unloaded a couple thousand British troops, who attacked Portsmouth and Suffolk, seizing and destroying supplies valued in the millions of pounds sterling. For the first time in three years, as many as 1,500 slaves fled to the British. A week after the invasion began, Henry issued a proclamation calling for county lieutenants to raise militias and proceed to the eastern counties to counter the attack. He lamented how the British had committed “horrid ravages and depredations, such as plundering and burning houses, killing and carrying away stock of all sorts, and exercising other abominable cruelties and barbarities,” warning that they were likely to devastate the rest of Virginia with this kind of violence. The assembly also sent out calls for help to Congress and neighboring states, a move Henry did not like. “Will it not disgrace our country thus to cry out for aid against this band of robbers?” he asked Richard Henry Lee. “However, the assembly have done it and I must submit.” The British seemed to have choked off Virginia’s seafaring connection to the rest of the colonies, but the attack was a raid, not an invasion, and the British departed on May 24, before Virginians could mount a serious resistance. The British naval commander, George Collier, wanted to remain in Portsmouth and perhaps launch an invasion of Virginia, but commander in chief Henry Clinton overruled him and ordered the withdrawal, concerned that the Continentals might be planning an attack on New York.
The British withdrawal was particularly well-timed, for Henry had come to the end of his third term as governor and was constitutionally required to step down. Some Virginians criticized Henry’s performance as the state’s chief executive. St. George Tucker wrote that if the new governor, Thomas Jefferson, “should tread in the steps of his predecessor, there is not much to be expected from the brightest talents. Did the enemy know how very defenseless we are at present, a very small addition to their late force would be sufficient to commit the greatest ravages throughout the country.” Tucker may have been right about Virginia’s military weakness, but Henry was not constitutionally empowered to fix the problems of recruitment and supplies. The governor himself would have insisted that Virginia’s fate depended less on soldiers than on the virtue and public spirit of the people, which lagged as the war ground on. Henry never placed unconditional confidence in the people; he believed that the welfare of the state—and of the nation—was contingent on their moral courage.35
Some Virginians wanted Henry to continue as governor, but he felt it was better to observe the three-term constitutional restriction and retire. He was worn out and had suffered from poor health most of the spring of 1779. The assembly thanked their governor “for his faithful discharge of that important trust, and his uniform endeavors to promote the true interests of this state and of all America.” Henry, Dorothea, their family, and their slaves soon left for his new Leatherwood plantation, near the North Carolina border, a few miles east of present-day Martinsville. He had done his best to fulfill the promise of American independence in wartime, but as he left Williamsburg, the fate of Virginia and America remained highly uncertain.36
8
“VIRTUE HAS TAKEN ITS DEPARTURE”
The War’s End and a New Virginia
HENRY’S RETIREMENT TO HIS LEATHERWOOD FARM did not brighten his outlook on the war. He wrote to Governor Thomas Jefferson in February 1780 lamenting the state’s fierce inflation and its indulgence of Loyalist actions subverting the war effort. “Tell me,” he implored Jefferson, “do you remember any instance where tyranny was destroyed and freedom established on its ruins, among a people possessing so small a share of virtue and public spirit? I recollect none.” How could Virginians hope to win this war, when so many seemed greedy, selfish, and irresolute?
The worries Henry expressed plagued all of Virginia’s leaders in the last years of the war. The difficulties in recruitment, combined with soaring prices, rampant fraud and price gouging, persistent outbreaks of Loyalist resistance, and bickering in Congress all seemed to evidence a deep crisis of virtue. The rapid pace of inflation led panicky merchants to raise prices in anticipation of even more inflation, making everything ridiculously expensive and debilitating the state’s capacity to supply its militia or the Continental army. Henry’s anxieties were “principally occasioned by the depreciation of our money,” he told Jefferson. The legislature could respond only by printing more money, which in the long run just made things worse.1
Commitment to the war effort had faltered. Some people seemed more interested in frittering away their time gambling and making a quick profit than defeating the British. Washington’s stepson John Parke Custis told the general that even with jacked-up bounties to entice recruits, he doubted the army could meet its quotas. “Our money is so depreciated, and the minds of the people are so depraved, by gaming and every other species of vice, that virtue seems to have taken his departure from Virginia, in general; and, it is with much real concern and shame that I confess there are but very few of my countrymen who deserve the glorious appellation of virtuous.”2
The weary Washington agreed, disgusted at the unscrupulous merchants who tried to profit from the desperation of the Continental army: “There is such a thirst for gain, and such infamous advantages taken to forestall, & engross those articles which the army cannot do without, thereby enhancing the cost of them to the public fifty or a hundred percent, that it is enough to make one curse their own species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism.”3
Despite the grim circumstances facing the state, Henry feared that his own failing health would prevent him from serving Virginia much longer. Indeed, he speculated to Jefferson that he might die—perhaps from another bout with malarial symptoms—before the next meeting of the legislature in May 1780. He wished his old colleague health and prosperity, and signed his 1780 letter “your affectionate friend and obedient servant”—but soon their friendship would enter a season of bitter frost, just when Virginians faced the most dangerous phase of the war.4
Henry still did not view himself as a professional politician, and he had resolved to step away from government, at least for a time. “A long and painful attention to public matters obliges me to go for awhile into retirement which is equally necessary to my health, finances, and domestic affairs,” he wrote shortly after leaving the governor’s mansion. Six years of unrelenting service as a legislator, colonel, and governor had taken their toll on Henry and his assets. It is likely that his time in the governor’s office—as well as the rapidly rising prices in the state—had sent Henry into debt again, a condition he loathed. The legislature soon chose him as a representative to the Confederation Congress, but he refused to serve, intent upon recovering his health and personal prosperity. The national political stage held little appeal for him. He always seemed to fight against indebtedness, and his land speculations rarely produced the kind of profit he hoped. Dorothea was pregnant with their second child. Henry’s desire to make his family financially secure in this time of economic instability would undercut his ability to serve his state, distracting him when Virginia badly needed him to step forward once more.5
Yet Henry found it difficult to remove himself from Virginia politics. He served in the state legislature again during the 1780 session, speaking in opposition to a congressional plan designed to revalue Continental currency and implement new state taxes. Henry and many leading southern politicians opposed the plan, claiming it would boost the northern states’ economies at the expense of the southern states, and Henry’s oratory clinched the assembly’s vote against it. But when Henry left the legislature early in June, apparently returning to Leatherwood to continue his convalescence, supporters of the plan managed to get the assembly to adopt the congressional scheme. It would not be the last time Henry would prematurely assume legislative victory.6
The depredations of war loomed over Virginia, even as legislators futilely tried to stabilize the economy.
The British, having been stymied in the North, decided to try their fortune in the South, where the population was thought to be friendlier to the empire. In early April 1780, they laid siege to Charleston, a city that lay on a narrow neck of land between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, trapping American troops, including Virginians who had just arrived as reinforcements. After a month of bombardment, the great southern port was reduced to a smoldering ruin, and its residents faced squalor and starvation. Charleston finally surrendered on May 12. About 1,400 Virginians were among the 5,500 American troops captured there. In terms of dead and captured soldiers, it would be America’s worst defeat of the war.7
The loss of Charleston was followed in August by the humiliating defeat of Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, at Camden, South Carolina. When he engaged British General Lord Cornwallis’s army, the typically unreliable state militias serving under Gates collapsed. Gates himself abandoned the field almost as quickly as the militiamen; mounting a swift horse, he made it sixty miles north to Charlotte, North Carolina, by nightfall. Gates was blamed for the defeat and replaced soon thereafter. Until patriot victories at Kings Mountain and Cowpens stopped his progress through South Carolina, Cornwallis seemed well on his way to securing the lower South.
Virginians feared being caught in a pincer movement between Cornwallis and the notorious Benedict Arnold, who had been a patriot hero at the Battle of Saratoga but in 1779—enticed by bribes and the promise of more respectful treatment—had secretly defected to the British. Earlier in 1780, he had almost succeeded in betraying West Point, New York, his last post as a Continental officer, to the British. Now working openly as a redcoat officer, Arnold invaded Tidewater Virginia in late December 1780 and moved unopposed up the James River, reaching the new capital at Richmond—which had been presumed safer from enemy attack than Williamsburg—on January 5, 1781. As governor, Thomas Jefferson had done little to prepare Richmond for the attack. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, Jefferson was more consumed with the prospect of a British and Native American attack from the west, and he offered to send General George Rogers Clark extra supplies and upward of 1,000 Virginia militiamen. But the western attack did not materialize, even as Arnold’s force cruised south from New York.8
Arnold was under orders only to capture the key town of Portsmouth, Virginia, but as was his tendency, he went against commands and sought to capture the state’s patriot government. Jefferson received reports of a fleet in Chesapeake Bay on New Year’s Day 1781, but he was not sure of the fleet’s origins (was it French or British?). For the next couple of days, Jefferson attended to personal business and serenely sought advice and intelligence on the appearance of the navy ships. The delay worsened the unfolding disaster, and when Jefferson finally called up the militia after two days, they were no match for Arnold’s 1,000 well-trained soldiers.9
When Arnold began the invasion, Richmond had been the state capital for only nine months, and the town remained little more than a frontier village, with about six hundred residents, about half of them slaves. Jefferson and his family, including a sickly five-week-old daughter, fled the city and went to Charlottesville as Arnold’s army captured Richmond. Although Arnold soon withdrew to Portsmouth, Virginians were horrified that the British could so easily penetrate the heart of the state.10
IN FEBRUARY, WHEN LORD CORNWALLIS also began advancing toward the North Carolina border with Virginia, Continental General Nathanael Greene (Horatio Gates’s replacement) looked to Patrick Henry to recruit volunteers for the state’s defense. Henry and others still found it difficult to summon new soldiers, but at the battle of Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, in March, the majority of Greene’s troops were Virginians. Inspired by successful tactics used at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, Greene had placed the North Carolina militia on his front line, but when Cornwallis’s redcoats began their assault, many of the militia ran. They fled, according to one of their officers, like “a flock of sheep frightened by dogs.” Others stayed to fire at close range, but soon the fighting bogged down on the forested battlefield. Cornwallis, recognizing that this battle would decide the fate of his army, coldly ordered an artillery assault on the confused field. The British mowed down both redcoats and patriots in the bloody chaos. This strategy succeeded, but it was costly; the British lost twice the number of troops as the Americans. Cornwallis’s Pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse convinced him to move into Virginia and unite with the branch of British army that had successfully invaded that state. His men were exhausted, and Cornwallis was “tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures.” In May, he arrived in Petersburg, south of Richmond.11
Angered by the surging strength of the British and ever-faltering recruitment efforts in Virginia, Henry thought Congress and the northern states had forgotten about the South once the war turned in that direction. In the assembly in March, Henry served on a committee that drafted a furious remonstrance to Congress. It was not adopted because news unexpectedly arrived that part of the Continental army would soon make its way to Virginia, but the document nevertheless revealed Henry’s mood in these anxious months: “Virginia, then, impoverished by defending the Northern department, exhausted by the Southern war, now finds the whole weight of it on her shoulders.... Straining every nerve in present defense, pressed with a great hostile army, and threatened with a greater—beset with enemies both savage and disciplined—the Assembly of Virginia do, in behalf of their State and in behalf of the common cause, in the most solemn manner summon the other States to their assistance.... If they are denied, the consequences be on the heads of those who refuse them.” Frustrated as he was, Henry would become even more disturbed over Congress’s reluctance to aid Virginia in the coming years.12
If Henry was angry about Virginia’s perilous state, Thomas Jefferson had become truly desperate, so much so that in late May, he plaintively wrote to George Washington, asking him to return with his army to deliver his fellow Virginians. “Your appearance among them I say would restore full confidence of salvation, and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible.” Jefferson knew his own reticent personality had no such power to rally Virginia’s citizens, and he dreaded the consequences if the British were allowed to rampage through the state.13
For the time being, Washington remained in the North, hoping to recapture New York. The British moved through Virginia almost unopposed. Days after Jefferson’s letter to Washington, the infamous British Colonel Banastre Tarleton rode his cavalry into Charlottesville, where the assembly had fled the advancing redcoats. A year earlier, Tarleton had earned his nickname, “Bloody Ban,” for refusing to give quarter to captured Virginia Continentals at the Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina, and many of Tarleton’s patriot prisoners were hacked to death with sabers. Now Tarleton galloped into Charlottesville, nearly capturing Jefferson, Henry, and the rest of the state’s leadership. Only the quick actions of a patriot scout who raised the alarm avoided total calamity for the governor and legislators.
The assemblymen fled farther westward, to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, while Jefferson narrowly escaped from his Monticello home at Charlottesville. With his term about to expire, Jefferson informed legislators that he would no longer serve as governor and that they should appoint a replacement for him. Then he took off for the safety of his isolated Poplar Forest plantation, far to the south, in the wooded hills near present-day Lynchburg. Thanks to Jefferson’s unexpected departure, for about a week Virginia essentially had no leader. On paper, his time of service was over, but abandoning his post at this critical juncture was nothing short of cowardly.14
Faced with a dire emergency and the flight of its elected leader, the assembly met in Staunton and considered appointing a replacement governor with extraordinary powers similar to those they allowed Henry in late 1776. According to an account written many years later, Henry was one of the principal advocates of this action, seconding the motion for it and asserting in the debate that “it was
immaterial with him whether the officer proposed was called a dictator, or governor with enlarged powers, or by any other name, yet surely an officer armed with such powers was necessary to restrain the unbridled fury of a licentious enemy.” No doubt Henry and his supporters were reacting to Jefferson’s untimely exodus, seeking to reassert the authority of executive leadership, but ultimately the move for a governor with dictatorial powers was defeated. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson would criticize the assembly’s debate over installing a wartime commander, failing to recognize that his own lack of leadership had brought Henry and the assembly to a point of utter panic. Moreover, it is hard to imagine what kind of role Jefferson imagined for Washington when he had recently asked him to return, if not as some kind of military dictator. A few weeks later, in mid-June, Richard Henry Lee explicitly asked Congress to give Washington these kind of “dictatorial powers” in Virginia, acidly noting that Jefferson’s resignation had left his own state “in the moment of its greatest danger without government, abandoned to the arts and the arms of the enemy.” Jefferson himself clearly favored Lee’s proposal, but by the time he published Notes, he had changed his tune about the virtue of empowering an executive to save Virginia.15
Although the assembly did not name a dictator, it did grant the new governor, Thomas Nelson, broad powers like the ones given to Henry in 1776. Nelson had been serving as a militia commander, and the legislature gave him authority to call out the militia at will, seize supplies, and detain suspected Loyalists. They also resolved that no further aid be sent out of state to help the Continental army while Virginia remained under direct assault. Excoriating Congress for its neglect of Virginia, the assembly adopted a complaint it had commissioned Henry to write. Despite his private doubts about Virginians’ moral courage, he painted the citizens of his home state as heroic and beleaguered: “the sufferings of a virtuous people, who now feel everything that a cruel, vindictive, and enraged enemy can inflict, compel us to make the demand [for aid], and justice ensures a compliance with it on the part of Congress.”16
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