Even Thomas Jefferson expressed doubts about the Constitution, writing to Madison from France that “I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” He shared Henry and Mason’s concerns about the government’s clout, especially the authority assigned to the president. But Jefferson’s personal attachment to Madison led him to mute his concerns, reserving his efforts to advocate for the adoption of a Bill of Rights after ratification—amendments he hoped would sufficiently restrain the national government’s powers. Unlike Jefferson, Henry was hardly inclined to do Madison any political favors. His opposition to the Constitution was surely influenced by his rivalry and animosity with these other Founders, but ultimately it arose from a deep political conviction that the new government did not honor the spirit of the Revolution.10
IN VIRGINIA, THE FIRST ORDER of business was considering Congress’s request for the states to hold conventions to ratify the Constitution. No one, including Henry, opposed such a convention, but Henry insisted that the meeting have the option of proposing amendments to the Constitution before a final vote on ratification. A report in the House of Delegates (Henry had been elected a delegate from Prince Edward County in summer 1787) recorded his perspective: “No man, [Henry] said, was more truly federal than himself. But he conceived that if this resolution was adopted, the convention would only have it in their power to say, that the new plan should be adopted, or rejected; and that, however defective it might appear to them, they would not be authorized to propose amendments.” Defenders of the Constitution opposed the call for amendments, wanting instead an up-or-down vote on the government, because they felt allowing individual states to propose amendments would turn into a quagmire. How could the states possibly consider all the amendments that would likely be offered? The only way would be a second constitutional convention, a scenario Madison desperately wanted to avoid.11
In the debate over how to handle ratification, the Federalists spoke in favor of a resolution calling for a convention “according to the recommendation of Congress,” to which Henry offered an amendment authorizing the convention to propose constitutional amendments. John Marshall—then a thirty-two-year-old lawyer from Richmond—intervened and proposed that the House call a ratifying convention which would allow “free and ample discussion” of the Constitution, a motion the House approved unanimously. Whether that discussion would allow the suggestion of amendments prior to final approval was left ambiguous.12
In a letter to Jefferson in December 1787, Madison set forth the three parties in Virginia that would debate the Constitution. One, led by Washington and himself, included those who wanted to adopt the Constitution with no amendments. The second group, among them Governor Edmund Randolph and George Mason, favored the Constitution but sought amendments protecting the rights of the states and of individuals. The third party advocated for amendments but did not really want to adopt the Constitution. Their leader was Henry. “Mr. Henry is the great adversary who will render the event precarious,” Madison wrote. “He is I find with his usual address, working up every possible interest, into a spirit of opposition.” Madison believed that Henry and his allies wanted to preserve the existing Confederation government, or perhaps even break up the American union into sectional confederacies.13
Madison and his colleagues Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had already begun campaigning for ratification by publishing their Federalist essays in New York in October 1787, making a compelling case for the new Constitution. Madison fully conceded the dangers of consolidated federal authority, but he argued that the Constitution accounted for the threat of tyranny in government by separating the powers of the government vertically (between states and the nation) and horizontally (among the government’s branches). He called the new government a “compound republic,” in which authority was “first divided between two distinct governments [state and national], and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people,” Madison concluded.14
Patrick Henry, who remained at Leatherwood through most of late 1787 and the first half of 1788, waged nothing like the public campaign of Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist. Nevertheless, Prince Edward County elected him as a delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention, and his opponents feared that he was working behind the scenes to defeat the Constitution. John Blair Smith, a Presbyterian pastor in Prince Edward County, president of Hampden-Sydney College, and supporter of the Constitution, wrote to Madison accusing Henry of leading a dirty political campaign against the new government. “That gentleman has descended to lower artifice and management upon the occasion than I thought him capable of.... It grieves me to see such great natural talents abused to guilty purposes,” Smith wrote. He believed that Henry was stirring up the people of the southern and western counties with rumors that the Constitution would finalize the surrender of the Mississippi River to Spain and that it would allow the Federalists to implement a national establishment of religion. Smith considered the latter assertion particularly ironic, given Henry’s support for Virginia’s general assessment for religion.15
Some Federalists heard that Henry was proposing that Virginia go it alone as an independent nation. While this might seem an unlikely prospect in retrospect, Virginia was the largest state in the Union (with about 750,000 people, including slaves), and it commanded great influence in the world agricultural trade. Edward Carrington, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, told Thomas Jefferson in April 1788 that Henry was implying that a breakup of the Union was possible. Henry ostensibly proposed dividing the country into three confederacies. Carrington hoped that Henry’s plan would go nowhere and that Virginians would fear the consequences of disunion more than any undesirable features of the new government.16
When Henry departed for the ratifying convention in Richmond in late May 1788, eight states had already approved the Constitution, just short of the nine required for adoption. (Unlike most states that elected delegates to ratifying conventions, obstreperous Rhode Island had overwhelmingly rejected the Constitution by a popular referendum in March.) Most of the states had ratified by strong majorities, but Massachusetts had only narrowly voted for the Constitution and had recommended a slate of amendments to Congress. The eight states voting prior to Virginia had given momentum to ratification, and Henry and the other anti-federalists at the convention believed they were the last defense against unconditional acceptance of this powerful government.
Henry was convinced that a large majority of Virginians opposed the unamended Constitution, and that in his beloved adopted home of Southside Virginia, as many as nine in ten were opposed. But he worried about the composition of the ratifying convention, for “the friends and seekers of power, have, with their usual subtlety wriggled themselves into the choice of the people.” Federalists and anti-federalists were in roughly equal numbers at the meeting.17
Madison, surprisingly, had to be convinced to participate in the Virginia convention. He thought that perhaps propriety dictated that the framers of the Constitution should not take part in the ratification assemblies. He also did not like the idea of traveling back from New York, where Congress was in session, to Virginia. But Washington and others succeeded in impressing upon him that he simply had to be at the convention and that he might not even be elected as a delegate if he did not return to Virginia immediately. Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, expressed the sentiments of many Federalists when he wrote that Madison was “the only man in this state who can effectually combat the influence of Mason and Henry.” The stage was set for the great confrontation between Henry and Madison that had been brewing for years.18
This was to be the last political battle of Patrick Henry’s career. It required him to defend the American Revolution by opposing the Constitution. Americans had fought for their independence from an abusive political regime—the British monarchy—and now James Madison and Alexander Hamilton meant to put Americ
ans back under a strong executive, only four years after the peace treaty with Britain. To Henry this was a repudiation of all the liberties he and other patriots had fought for. America had many problems following the Revolution, he acknowledged, but Henry hardly believed that creating a monstrous national government was the solution. Many had died to free them from such a regime. Going back represented a betrayal of the Revolution.19
RICHMOND, STILL A RELATIVELY new town, had about 2,000 residents—under normal circumstances. But people flooded into Richmond that June, some to participate in the convention, others looking to hawk their goods or just to be part of the excitement. “Richmond is exceedingly crowded and many of no principle and desperate fortunes are attending there,” wrote one worried Federalist, James Duncanson. The convention quickly relocated from the statehouse to the more capacious New Theatre to accommodate the throngs of people. “A great proportion of them [are] Antifederalists,” wrote Duncanson, “and clamorous in their opposition out of doors, ready to pursue any desperate step countenanced by their party.” Patrick Henry and George Mason were doing all they could to stoke the fears of this rabble, the Federalist writer declared; they would readily sacrifice the American union to their “wicked and ambitious views.”20
Henry may have refused to attend the Philadelphia convention, but at the Virginia ratifying assembly, his personality blazed in all its power and glory. He became the “master of ceremonies,” as one recent historian put it. Thankfully, the Virginia convention appointed a good stenographer; its records may provide the most accurate accounts of any of Henry’s major speeches. Although supporters and opponents both agreed that they should examine the Constitution point by point, proceeding through the document in sequence, Henry would repeatedly commandeer the floor for epic speeches about an array of concerns. George Mason insisted that the convention not try to rush ratification, for “the curse denounced by the divine vengeance, will be small, compared to what will justly fall upon us, if from any sinister views we obstruct the fullest inquiry.” Mason and Henry would prove a formidable duo at the convention.21
George Nicholas, a delegate from Albemarle County, opened the proceedings by asserting that under the Constitution, Virginians would have “all the security which a people sensible and jealous of their liberties can wish for.” Nicholas and Henry had worked together in 1781 to initiate the investigation of Thomas Jefferson’s behavior as governor, but now they could not have been further apart, as indicated by Henry’s opening speech, which followed Nicholas’s. He countered by saying that the proposed Constitution was not simply wrongheaded but a threat to the republic itself. He was willing to stake his reputation on opposing this change, for he was the chief defender of Virginia’s liberty. “I consider myself as the servant of the people of this commonwealth, as a sentinel over their rights, liberty, and happiness,” he reminded the convention. “I conceive the republic to be in extreme danger. If our situation be thus uneasy, whence has arisen this fearful jeopardy? It arises from this fatal system—it arises from a proposal to change our government:—a proposal that goes to the utter annihilation of the most solemn engagements of the states.... A wrong step made now will plunge us into misery, and our Republic will be lost.”22
Why, he demanded, did the Philadelphia convention presume to speak as “We, the People, instead of We, the States?” This Constitution ignored the role of the states, Henry believed. Diffuse, state-based political power was an essential safeguard of liberty. “States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated national government of the people of all the states.” The word “consolidated” appeared repeatedly in anti-federalist attacks on the Constitution. Too much power in too few hands was by definition dangerous to republican liberty. Madison, of course, denied that the new government entailed a total consolidation of power, avowing he had carefully framed checks and balances within the government to prevent the rise of tyranny. But Henry disagreed. Only a small group of men, not “the people,” had forged this dubious frame of government, Henry cautioned. They had no popular or legal authority to do what they had done, far surpassing their assigned duty to amend the Articles of Confederation.23
A number of speakers argued against Henry’s characterization of the Constitution, and one of them challenged the ethics of Henry’s strategy in fighting it. Henry Lee, known as “Light Horse Harry” for his work as a cavalry officer during the Revolution, threw aside Virginia’s reverence for its aging patriot hero. Henry, he suggested, was a fearmonger. “The éclat and brilliancy which have distinguished [Henry], the honors with which he has been dignified, and the brilliant talents which he has so often displayed, have attracted my respect and attention. On so important an occasion and before so respectable a body, I expected a new display of his powers of oratory: But instead of proceeding to investigate the merits of the new plan of government, the worthy character informed us of horrors which he felt, of apprehensions in his mind, which make him tremblingly fearful of the fate of the commonwealth: Mr. Chairman, was it proper to appeal to the fear of this House?”24
Indignant, Henry shot to his feet and gave his longest speech at the convention. Fear for the republic’s fate was justified, he warned. America’s liberty was tenuous, at risk of being sacrificed in the name of national power. His voice booming over the packed galleries ringing the “spacious and airy” wooden hall, he reminded the convention of his long experience in such matters, summoning them to the days of the Stamp Act: “Liberty [is] the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else.... The time has been, when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American: But suspicions have gone forth—suspicions of my integrity—publicly reported that my professions are not real—23 years ago I was supposed a traitor to my country: I was then said to be a bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country: I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger: But, Sir, a number of people of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true.” Throughout his career, Henry would be attacked and ridiculed for opposing national government authority—both British and American.25
Central to the debate over governmental power was the issue of a strong national military. The promoters of the Constitution made much of the ostensible threat posed by Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786–87. This uprising of poverty-stricken farmers against foreclosure courts, while relatively minor in scale, had become a symbol of America’s need for a more robust military to protect it from domestic and foreign enemies. Washington lamented the chaos spawned by Shays and concluded from the episode that “mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government.” But Henry doubted the significance of the rebellion, reminding the convention that the Confederation government had possessed sufficient strength to defeat the British during the Revolution. One admirer wrote that Henry “obviated the mighty bugbears raised to frighten and intimidate the weak and wavering into a speedy and implicit adoption.” Shays was chief among those bugbears.26
Henry believed that the convention’s quest for a more powerful military reflected no real insecurity, but revealed instead the Federalists’ nationalistic dream of American glory. History showed that the search for glory often cost a people their rights, Henry declared. “Those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power and splendor, have also fallen a sacrifice, and been the victims of their own folly: While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom. My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights.” The Constitution’s defenders had taken America’s independence as a license to forge an empire, according to Henry. The Federalists, he warned, believed that “some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things: When the Am
erican spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, Sir, was then the primary object.” Empire building required power, but leaders possessed of consolidated power could not be trusted to preserve liberty.27
Challenging Madison’s claim that the separate branches of government and the federated combination of national and state authority would safeguard against an aggregation of power, Henry averred that the Constitution allowed the government to control the governed, with little hope of controlling itself. The Philadelphia convention foolishly assumed that all politicians would be virtuous men, and to a Christian republican like Henry, who was well aware of the human capacity to sin, this was a fatal error. “Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism: there will be no checks, no real balances, in this government: what can avail your specious imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances?” Nothing could check a national government entrusted with vast military might and the unlimited authority to tax.28
Indeed, Henry declaimed, the Constitution represented an outright repudiation of the Revolution: “Here is a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain. It is as radical, if in this transition, our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states be relinquished: and cannot we plainly see, that this is actually the case? The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change.”29
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