Henry also struck out against Jefferson for his conduct as governor. At Henry’s instigation, George Nicholas made a motion that the House of Delegates inquire into Jefferson’s service as governor to determine what misdeeds, if any, had occurred. At its December meeting, at a time when military victory had turned the state’s mood from vindictive to celebratory, the assembly thought better of trying to humiliate Jefferson, clearing him of charges of cowardice and thanking him for his devoted service. Nevertheless, Jefferson seethed with anger toward Henry. Nicholas was not to blame for this outrageous investigation, Jefferson wrote to another legislator. “The trifling body [Nicholas] who moved this matter was below contempt; he was more an object of pity. His natural ill-temper was the tool worked by another hand. He was like the minnows which go in and out of the fundament of the whale. But the whale himself was discoverable enough by the turbulence of the water under which he moved.” 17
Stung by the very suggestion that he might have behaved dishonorably, Jefferson wrote a lugubrious letter to James Monroe, likely intended for circulation among Virginia politicians, suggesting that since the assembly had hurt him so badly, he would take his political talents away forever to his mountain retreat at Monticello. The investigation “inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.” Jefferson’s loathing of Henry would fester for decades, only moderating long after Henry’s death.18
Henry seems to have spent most of the second half of 1781 at Leatherwood. His criticism of Jefferson’s flight from Charlottesville notwithstanding, he was not particularly engaged in political affairs in these months. Once again, we are left to wish for more of Henry’s thoughts, for we know almost nothing of his reaction when a surprising shift in the winds of war produced the final battle in Virginia, and of the Revolution.
Continental troops reinforced their numbers in Virginia in early June, and in late July, Cornwallis received orders from British commander in chief Henry Clinton to hold the Tidewater region. Cornwallis decided to entrench at Yorktown. Washington and his army left New York to meet a French fleet headed for the Chesapeake Bay, and at the end of September a large combined force of French and American troops laid siege to Yorktown. Short supplies and epidemic disease ravaged Cornwallis’s camp, with escaped Virginia slaves who had hoped to fight for the British enduring the brunt of the horrors. Cornwallis began expelling blacks infected with smallpox, leaving them to be captured by the Americans, or simply collapse and die in the woods around Yorktown. After the siege, one Pennsylvania soldier observed, “Negroes lie about, sick and dying, in every stage of the small pox. Never was in so filthy a place.” The hopes and lives of runaway African-Americans became casualties of the war.19
The Americans and French bombarded the British position at Yorktown, sending Cornwallis and his officers running for cover along the York River’s edge. Finally, on October 14, Washington’s twenty-six-year-old chief of staff, Alexander Hamilton, led a bold assault on the British line, and the humiliated Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. The struggle for independence, which had begun with Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act speech in Williamsburg in 1765, had been won sixteen years later, only a few miles to the east of the site of that famous oration, in the riverine lands of the Tidewater.
PATRICK HENRY FOUGHT CONTINUING ILLNESS as he recuperated from his long service as governor and Revolutionary leader, receiving a leave of absence from the legislature in November 1781. Surely he was delighted at Cornwallis’s surrender. The mood among his victorious friends was captured in a letter he received in May 1782 from General Horatio Gates, who congratulated Henry for his part in America’s peace and independence. “Now the glorious opportunity approaches,” Gates wrote, “when upon the broad basis of civil liberty, may be established, the happiness of the present generation and their posterity.” Henry would soon be far less sanguine than Gates that the new nation had the virtue it needed to meet that opportunity.20
Gates also expressed hope for “equal liberty” to spread throughout the land, and Virginia took a halting step in that direction in 1782 when the legislature passed a law permitting private manumissions of slaves. Previously, any masters wishing to free their slaves would have to appeal to the state. It had become embarrassingly obvious during the war that the British offered slaves better prospects for freedom than the Americans did. Newer evangelical churches, such as those of the Methodists and the Baptists, often put pressure on members to free their enslaved workers. Some masters in Virginia wished to set their slaves free in their wills, or by some gradual process. Now owners could free their slaves by submitting a legal request to a county court.
Although journal records do not exist for this assembly session, biographers have assumed Patrick Henry supported the bill. Many white Virginians did not; the assembly received more than 1,000 anti-manumission petitions claiming that the new law would encourage unrest. About 10,000 slaves would be manumitted under this law before it was amended in 1806, but its effects were less than revolutionary: many masters used the law only to free a favorite slave, not to free their slaves en masse. Those Virginia slaves manumitted during these twenty-four years represented about only 3 percent of the state’s total slave population, which in 1790 was just under 300,000. With legislators worried about the burgeoning free black population, the 1806 amendment required that any freed slaves leave the state, which functionally ended the state’s more progressive policy.21
In 1782, as the nation settled into an uneasy peacetime, Henry reentered public life, seeking to use his position in the legislature to put Virginia on solid ground economically—and morally. Sometimes his economic and moral imperatives clashed, as they did around the thorny issue of repaying debts to British creditors. The 1783 Treaty of Paris that officially concluded the war stipulated that lawfully contracted debts be paid back to creditors on both sides of the Atlantic, but Henry resisted, countering James Madison’s arguments by protesting that the British had not yet vacated their military posts in the Great Lakes region. Only when the British withdrew from their American forts should Virginians and other Americans pay their debts, Henry maintained. The issue would fester until the War of 1812.22
Taking priority in Henry’s view was debt relief for the struggling people of post-Revolutionary Virginia, including planters large and small. Thanks to the vagaries of their agricultural economy, Southside Virginians—residents of the state’s south-central region, where Henry now lived—carried a disproportionate individual debt burden, an encumbrance Henry knew well from enduring the bankruptcies of his youth and watching his dissolute half-brother John Syme struggle financially. But Henry hated the thought that his supporters would be forced to repay the British, no matter if their debts arose from legitimate transactions or even undisciplined consumption of luxury goods.
This issue did not inspire Henry’s finest hour. Avoiding the payment of legitimate debts was not consistent with his career-long emphasis on virtue. Even friends such as George Mason challenged the ethics of Henry’s position. Writing to Henry in May 1783, Mason implored him to use the opportunity of independence to establish moral foundations for the republic. “Whether our independence shall prove a blessing or a curse, must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness,” Mason cautioned. Based on Virginians’ performance during the war, Mason himself was not particularly hopeful about the future. He knew that some Virginians wondered why they had fought the war if they still had to pay their debts to the enemy they had vanquished. In Mason’s view, Virginians had served in the Revolution “not to avoid our just debts, or cheat our creditors; but to rescue our country from the oppression and tyranny of the British government, and to secure the rights and liberty of ourselves, and our posterity.” Mason was surprised to find Henry on the other side of the issue. Henry’s lifelong championing of virtue was sincere, but as a planter preoccupied with maintaining his own prosperity, he also factored financial considerations into his policymaking and his worldview.23
Henry saw no point in holding a grudge against the Loyalists; in his view, Virginia needed as many industrious settlers as it could get. For Henry, the end of the war offered America a chance to become the “asylum for liberty” that Tom Paine’s Common Sense had envisioned. Asserting that if America opened her doors, the free peoples of Europe would flow in, Henry declaimed, “They see here a land blessed with natural and political advantages, which are not equaled by those of any other country upon earth—a land on which a gracious Providence has emptied the horn of abundance.... They see a land in which liberty hath taken up her abode—that liberty, whom they had considered as a fabled goddess, existing only in the fancies of poets—they see her here a real divinity—her altars rising on every hand throughout these happy states—her glories chanted by three millions of tongues—and the whole region smiling under her blessed influence.” There was no need to fear British Loyalists, Henry assured the legislators. “Shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?” But even Henry’s oratory could not persuade the legislature. It passed a bill prohibiting the Tories’ return.25
With the end of the war, Henry and his fellow political leaders also had to address an emerging issue that would beset the new nation from its beginnings into its maturity: the balance between a stronger national government and the power of the states. The Articles of Confederation—which had structured America’s government since the beginning of the war—provided no power to tax, a constraint that made sense given that the country’s controversy with Britain had centered on taxation. Why substitute American taxes for British ones? But Henry had witnessed, and indeed had been engaged in, Washington’s struggle to supply his army because of the Congress’s inability to raise funds directly. In the late stages of the Revolution, some policymakers had proposed an impost on imported goods. All the states would have to give their assent to such a plan for it to go into effect. Now, as the thirteen states struggled to define themselves as a single entity, the issue of national taxation gripped the Virginia legislature. Henry wavered in his opinion of the impost. He understood that the national government needed to generate more revenue, but he was concerned that the government would abuse its power to tax.
Jefferson thought that Henry instinctively opposed expanding the power of Congress, but he would later suggest that Henry was inclined to support the impost because of a developing rivalry with Richard Henry Lee, who opposed the plan. The friendship between the two men would grow strained because of the dispute over the impost, with Lee preferring that Virginia strictly comply with congressional requisitions rather than submit to the impost, and Henry originally disagreeing. Their debate fueled a larger rivalry between Lee and Henry’s ally, John Tyler Sr., over the position of the Speaker of the House of Delegates. Lee won the Speaker’s chair in 1780, only to lose it the next year to Tyler, who presided from 1781 to 1784. But the dynamic between the two men changed when a compromise was reached on a modified, broadly acceptable impost, and Lee was reelected to Congress in 1784, which led Lee to write Henry in frank but welcoming terms about their friendship in late 1784. “We are placed now,” he said, “pretty nearly in the same political relation under which our former correspondence was conducted; if it shall prove as agreeable to you to revive it, as you were then pleased to say it was to continue it, I shall be happy in contributing my part.” They did indeed revive their friendship, setting the stage for their work together as anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution.26
Jefferson scoffed at Henry’s indecision on the impost, writing to Madison that “Henry as usual is involved in mystery: should the popular tide run strongly in either direction, he will fall in with it.” We might give Henry a bit more credit than Jefferson did. Henry knew Congress needed more revenue to support legitimate national projects, but he also feared that giving it any power to tax might lead the national government to disregard the prerogatives of the states and ruin the economy. Henry’s initial enthusiasm for the impost waned as he began to suspect that Madison and Alexander Hamilton had more in mind than a modest tax. Hamilton had risen to prominence as Washington’s senior aide-de-camp during the war, and he was emerging as a leading politician in New York and a promoter of national power. To counter Hamilton’s suggestion in early 1783 that federal tax authority was his ultimate goal, Henry proposed a complex system ensuring that Virginia would not have to pay more than its fair share of the impost duties. Consideration of the impost, both in Virginia and elsewhere, soon became paralyzed in debate.27
Henry still wished to make the Confederation government more stable without destroying the independence of the states. Madison, Henry, and others met in Richmond in May 1784 and agreed that Madison would draw up a “plan for giving greater power to the federal government and that Mr. Henry should support it on the floor.” For his part, Henry reportedly “saw ruin inevitable unless something was done” to bolster the national government’s authority. Nothing came of this meeting, however.28
Madison never shared Jefferson’s bitterness toward Henry. He was, in general, better able than Jefferson to distinguish political issues from the personal. The two men never had the kind of falling-out that Henry did with Jefferson. But as time went on, it became increasingly difficult for Madison and Henry to compromise on national authority over the states. Henry’s fight against Britain taught him that the dangers of consolidated national power outweighed its benefits, a belief corroborated for him by seeing how little Virginia ever benefited from the national government, even in the state’s darkest hours. Madison shared with Hamilton a belief that America was destined to become a great nation. It could never embrace that destiny, however, without a nimble national government. The contradictory visions of these two Virginians were bound to clash.
BEYOND HIS CONCERNS WITH THE ECONOMY, Henry remained committed to promoting virtue in Virginia. Independence would be worth nothing if Virginia degenerated into immorality, selfishness, and vice. To Henry, only one institution could adequately support virtue, and that was the church.
At the beginning of the Revolution, Virginia stopped providing financial support to the Anglican Church, and its parishes suffered badly during the war, the financial privation exacerbated by the church’s traditional association with Britain. Other churches struggled, too. The militant Methodists had been hurt by their association with Loyalism; their English founder, John Wesley, had opposed the patriot cause. The Baptists were surging toward a massive outbreak of revivals in 1785, but as of 1783, they were not that publicly influential. The outlook for religion in Virginia was bleak.
Henry believed the state should resume public funding for religion, but he knew Virginia would never go back to one exclusive, established church. Instead, he became the champion of a so-called general assessment for religion. Under this system, people would have to pay taxes to support a church of their choice. For Henry and the assessment’s many supporters, this arrangement honored both the public importance of religion and the realities of Christian pluralism in the state. He introduced a bill declaring that “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to c
orrect the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned [pastors], ... and it is judged that such provision may be made by the legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians.”29
The general assessment plan is one of the main reasons Henry is not more widely esteemed as a Founder, for in this debate, he seems to have diverted from the progressive flow of history. Jefferson and Madison’s campaign for disestablishment and religious freedom—leading ultimately to Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom and the First Amendment’s religion clauses—pioneered the church-state system that most Americans have embraced. Yet Henry was as much an activist for religious liberty as were Madison and Jefferson. He had opposed the clerics’ claims for lost salary in the Parsons’ Cause, supported the rights of Baptists and other dissenters, and championed the religion article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Henry had consistently sought to bolster the rights of religious dissenters and enshrine religious pluralism in law. His general assessment plan would have transitioned Virginia from having a single state church to offering multiple options, ensuring not a strict separation of church and state, but robust religious diversity.30
Henry was not alone in his advocacy for a general assessment. Other prominent Virginia leaders, such as George Washington and Richard Henry Lee, backed it as well. Lee wrote to Madison in 1784 cautioning him that “refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer in our country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute something to its support.” Washington thought Christians should be made to support what they professed to believe. Most defenders of the assessment also agreed that tax exemptions could be given for non-Christians.31
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