Patrick Henry

by Thomas S. Kidd

  Writing to Washington shortly after the convention, Madison predicted his opponent’s next steps. “Mr. Henry declared previous to the final question that although he should submit as a quiet citizen, he should seize the first moment that offered for shaking off the yoke in a constitutional way. I suspect the plan will be to engage two-thirds of the legislatures in the task of undoing the work; or to get a Congress appointed in the first instance that will commit suicide on their own authority.” Madison was correct, as Henry planned to push for a second national convention to secure amendments, and to unite Virginians against the Constitution until adequate amendments were adopted.50

  During the fall meeting of the Virginia House of Delegates, Henry attacked Madison and helped prevent his election by the legislature to the U.S. Senate. A correspondent told Madison that “Mr. Henry on the floor exclaimed against your political character and pronounced you unworthy of the confidence of the people in the station of Senator. That your election would terminate in producing rivulets of blood throughout the land.” Regardless of whether this account was exaggerated, Henry’s verbal assault on Madison had its intended effect: Madison came in third in the Senate election, behind two anti-federalists. Henry also passed a plan recommending a second constitutional convention. In its message to the Confederation Congress, the Virginia legislature reminded the friends of the Constitution that their objections to the new government were “deduced from principles which have been established by the melancholy example of other nations.” They would not be satisfied until major changes were made to the document.51

  Washington and Madison remained deeply concerned about Henry’s influence. Washington still thought Henry’s sway in the legislature was “unpropitious to federal measures.” Henry might have been the great enemy of kings, but to Washington, his power in Virginia seemed monarchical. “He has only to say let this be Law—and it is Law,” Washington lamented to Madison.52

  Despite his successes, Henry remained pessimistic. His mood was captured in a November 1788 letter to Richard Henry Lee, one of the Virginians chosen as senator over Madison. Although he believed that a majority of Virginians supported the proposed amendments, Henry did not know what fate they might meet in Congress. “I firmly believe the American union depends on the success of amendments,” he told Lee. Henry hinted that if the amendments failed, he might move to North Carolina, which had refused to ratify the Constitution, a defeat probably influenced by Henry. For the time being, North Carolina remained outside the new union. That state’s resistance might herald the advent of a southern confederacy, separate from the northern-dominated nation.53

  Federalist anger at Henry surged in late 1788, when Henry faced a scathing series of editorials against him in the Virginia Independent Chronicle. The author, “Decius,” accused Henry of all manner of chicanery, most of it centered on charges that in decrying the Constitution he had pursued a personal financial agenda cloaked in the language of republican liberty. In all his dealings, Henry’s “first and fixed determination was to get money,” Decius wrote, highlighting Henry’s engagement in land speculation; he argued that the end of state sovereignty would also mean the end of sweetheart land deals for Henry. Decius warned Virginians not to subject themselves to this “little tyrant’s despotism.” As we have seen, there may have been substance to Decius’s charges with regard to Henry’s land speculations as governor: his motives did not always seem entirely pure. Extending that argument to his motives for opposing the Constitution was dubious, however.54

  Though several of his sympathizers rose to his defense in the papers, Henry seems not to have taken Decius too seriously. He jokingly noted that Decius was “not lucky enough to hit upon one charge that is warranted by truth. How lucky it is that he knew me no better, for I know of many deficiencies in my own conduct.” He believed that leading Federalists would publicly disown Decius’s opinions, although they had probably encouraged the anonymous author. Henry classed Decius among “the political understrappers who ever follow the footsteps of power and whine and fawn or snarl a bark as they are bid.” 55

  Undeterred by the growing hostility toward him, Henry focused on keeping James Madison out of not just the Senate but also the House of Representatives, believing as he did that anti-federalists could not trust Madison to promote serious amendments to the Constitution. The legislature put Madison’s home county in an anti-federalist–leaning district, forcing the sickly Madison, suffering from hemorrhoids, to traverse the bumpy roads to Virginia from the capital in New York to campaign for election against James Monroe. Among the most critical groups for Madison to win over were the Baptists. They were inclined to vote for Monroe unless Madison could convince them that he would support a religious-freedom amendment as part of the Bill of Rights. Madison wrote to Baptist pastor George Eve in January 1789, assuring him that he now supported amending the Constitution. The first Congress should pursue “the most satisfactory provisions for all essential rights, particularly the rights of conscience in the fullest latitude,” he said. Madison’s promises helped to woo the Baptists; pastors such as Eve actively campaigned for him. Madison defeated Monroe fairly handily and returned to New York to deliver on his campaign promise.56

  Now all Henry could do was wait for news from the first Congress convened under the new system of government. Not only had he failed to defeat the Constitution and to add amendments prior to ratification, but he had also failed even to get a second convention called to consider amendments. Still, Madison was promising that he would promote amendments as soon as the Congress gathered in New York. Henry would not be pleased with the process, or with the content of the amendments. Nevertheless, he and the anti-federalists’ relentless pressure against the Constitution would soon result in the Bill of Rights, where Americans find their most basic rights enshrined.

  10

  “TO CARE FOR THE CRAZY MACHINE”

  Reconciling with the Republic

  IN 1794, PATRICKHENRY ACQUIREDhis final home, Red Hill, in south-central Virginia. His years there hardly resembled the peaceful retirement of a man whose life’s work was nearing completion. The one-and-a-half-story farmhouse at Red Hill resonated with the voices of children. He and Dorothea—who was approaching forty—still had five boys and three girls age sixteen and younger living with them. They were a source of great happiness for Patrick and Dorothea, yet three other children had died between 1791 and 1794—two older ones from his marriage to Sarah, and seventeen-month-old Richard, who died in 1793. Like so many eighteenth-century families, Patrick and Dorothea had many children, and they knew well the pain of a child’s death.

  Motivated in part by his familiarity with grief, Henry was a doting, concerned father. Retirement from politics meant more time with his children. Visitors reportedly “caught him lying on the floor with a group of these little ones climbing over him in every direction, or dancing around him with obstreperous mirth to the tune of his violin, while the only contest seemed to be who could make the most noise.” In the fall of 1794, Patrick notified his adult daughter Betsey that another baby, Winston, had been born earlier that year. “I must give out the law and plague myself no more with business, sitting down with what I have,” he wrote. “For it will be sufficient employment to see after my little flock, and the management of my plantation.” Staying out of debt, and staying out of politics, meant freedom to be with his family in the idyll of Red Hill, which he called “one of the garden spots of the world.”1

  Henry always struggled to maintain income to cover his expenses. For his family’s sake, he dreaded insolvency. Despite his reference to the “plague” of business, he still quietly dreamed of striking it rich in western land deals. Although Henry remained in the Virginia assembly until 1791, in 1789 his attention returned to law and land speculation. But as his letter to Betsey indicated, he also wished to be clear of his legal practice and land deals altogether.

  Some thought that as Henry tried to gain financial security, he descended into cor
ruption. A hostile Federalist passed near Henry’s home in Prince Edward County in 1791 and noted that Henry “is now making a great deal of money by large fees of £50 or £100 for clearing horse thieves and murderers, which has lost him much of the great reputation he enjoyed in his neighborhood.... I am told that he will travel hundreds of miles for a handsome fee to plead for criminals, and that his powers of oratory are so great he generally succeeds.” Regardless of whether this critic exaggerated Henry’s work with known criminals, there is no doubt that Henry spent his final decade bolstering his finances—as well as contending with repeated illnesses and fevers. Henry had retired as the most influential leader in Virginia at a time when George Washington’s influence was moving to the national stage, yet he still did not consider himself a professional politician or lifelong government official. He had plenty of opportunities to jump back into state or national government, but he chose not to, except in one instance at the very end of his life.2

  EVEN IN HIS ABSENCE, Henry exerted a powerful influence on the politics of Virginia and the emerging nation. James Madison still feared that Henry would stir up opposition to the new Constitution, if it were to remain unamended. Madison’s colleague in the House, Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, thought Madison was “constantly haunted with the ghost of Patrick Henry.” Instead of stubbornly resisting the anti-federalist critique of the Constitution, Madison wisely decided to preempt Henry by promoting a slate of amendments in the first Congress. These new articles did not seriously reduce the power of the national government, as Henry desired, but instead primarily articulated rights upon which the government should not infringe.3

  His opponents continually believed Henry was plotting to obstruct every step of the formation of the new government. Rumors briefly circulated that the anti-federalists would try to elect Henry president, with New York’s anti-federalist leader George Clinton as vice president. (Under the original system for electing the president, state-appointed electors would cast two votes for president. The top vote-getter would become president, and the second-place finisher would become vice president.) A Connecticut newspaper lamented that “although the grateful voice of Americans cries aloud—Our beloved WASHINGTON shall be the first President of our rising empire;—yet it is lamentably affirmed, that the anti-federal party . . . have secretly combined to oppose his election to the President’s chair: His Excellency’s competitor, proposed by these dukes of the rueful countenance, is Patrick Henry!!!” But any thoughts of Henry becoming president were quickly abandoned, with all sentiment pointing to the election of George Washington.4

  If Washington’s victory was a foregone conclusion, John Adams’s selection as vice president was not. Although Adams was an old friend, Henry preferred George Clinton as a counterweight to Washington. A worried Madison wrote to Jefferson in December 1788, telling him that the “enemies to the government, at the head and the most inveterate of whom, is Mr. Henry, are laying a train for the election of Governor Clinton.” As a presidential elector from Virginia, Henry cast his presidential votes for Washington and Clinton, but Adams received the second-most votes to Washington and became vice president.5

  In the first Congress, Madison kept his word and introduced a slate of amendments that, in revised form, would become the Bill of Rights. His primary motive was to soothe the fears of anti-federalists, such as Henry. “It will be a desirable thing to extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehensions,” he said when he proposed the amendments in June 1789, “that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.” Madison reminded the House that certain patriotic, respected Americans opposed the Constitution because of an understandable zeal for liberty. The Congress should take their concerns to heart and specifically state those rights the Constitution was meant to protect. Both sides believed that Madison was only trying to throw “a tub to the whale,” a saying that referred to a tactic of sailors trying to distract a whale that threatened their ship. Henry was Madison’s whale.6

  Madison’s amendments borrowed from the statements of rights proposed in the ratifying conventions, especially Virginia’s. His original nineteen amendments were revised into twelve, which passed in Congress. In 1791, ten of them were ratified in the states. These amendments focused on the rights of Americans and restrictions of the national government’s activities. Henry was not satisfied with the Bill of Rights, however. It made no serious structural modifications in the government itself. Henry was especially disappointed that the president’s power was not constrained. Writing to his ally Richard Henry Lee in August 1789, he said the amendments proposed “will tend to injure rather than to serve the cause of liberty—provided they go no further.... See how rapidly power grows. How slowly the means of curbing it! That the President is to be accountable for the general success of government is precisely the principle of every despotism.” The amendments sounded good, but to Henry, without significant reductions in the government’s strength, they only masked the political monstrosity the Constitution had created.7

  Henry was not the only one disappointed with the Bill of Rights. Richard Henry Lee wrote back to Henry from Congress in September to report that the anti-federalists had been outmaneuvered. Trying to get Virginia’s more substantive, government-limiting amendments adopted was futile: “We might as well have attempted to move Mount Atlas upon our shoulders. In fact, the idea of subsequent amendments was delusion altogether.... Some valuable rights are indeed declared, but the powers that remain are very sufficient to render them nugatory at pleasure.” Virginia’s other senator, William Grayson, wrote to say proposed amendments were “good for nothing.”8

  Agreeing that they should generate opposition to the amendments in Virginia, Lee and William Grayson wrote to the state legislature in September 1789 expressing frustration at the amendments’ limitations. “It is impossible for us not to see the necessary tendency to consolidated empire in the natural operation of the Constitution if no further amended than now proposed,” they warned. Henry advocated for a legislative resolution detailing the deficiencies of the Constitution and proposed amendments. But his momentum had faltered. Henry’s rival Edward Carrington, a former Continental army officer and staunch Federalist, told Madison that Henry “made a speech to the House, but it not appearing to take well, it was never stirred again.” The Virginia House and Senate struggled to agree on the proper approach to the amendments and postponed deliberations. When Virginia finally ratified the amendments in 1791, the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution.9

  The weary Henry actually left the House before the debates on the amendments were over. In one case, this absence resulted in an anti-federalist defeat on a question decided by one vote. Edmund Randolph believed that Henry had returned to Prince Edward County “in discontent, that the present Assembly is not so pleasant as the last.” Henry knew he had lost his battle with Madison and that continued resistance was pointless. As he told Betsey (his twenty-year-old daughter, to whom he often confided his inner thoughts in his later years), he was also not physically well, and continued to feel the pressures of family obligations.10

  AFTER 1789, HENRY BEGAN to accept the reality of the new government. He knew the ratification process had given it popular legitimacy. But he also entertained occasional visions of another republic, separate from Madison’s new creation. Perhaps he could find a refuge in the distant reaches of the South. Ever the land speculator, Henry remained involved with schemes to purchase western lands. In late 1789, Henry and other Virginians received a grant from the state of Georgia giving them ownership of eleven million acres, an area encompassing what would become northern Mississippi. This “Yazoo” grant, so named for the river that flowed through it, was intended primarily as a moneymaking endeavor. But Henry and his colleagues, many of them angry about the new national government, also quietly speculated that Yazoo might combine with other disaffected areas of the new Southwest t
o create an independent republic. Joseph Martin, Henry’s old friend and western agent, remarked in late 1788 that he intended to leave the United States and recruit hundreds of families to the Tombigbee River, the eastern border of the Yazoo grant, creating a population that might be the nucleus of a new nation. 11

  In early 1790, Henry wrote in remarkably frank terms to Richard Henry Lee about his separatist intentions for the Yazoo settlements. Assuming that Lee had heard of the purchase, he asked, “If our present system grows into tyranny is not a frontier possession most eligible? And a central one most to be dreaded? . . . A comfortable prospect of the issue of the new system would fix me here for life. A contrary one sends me southwestward.” Henry saw the new Southwest as a potential sanctuary for anti-federalists, should their worst fears about the new government come to pass. Virginia’s anti-federalist Congressman Theodorick Bland congratulated Henry for the purchase, calling it “an asylum from tyranny whenever it may arise.”12

  Henry also believed that the white settlers already living in the frontier Southwest should be able to organize on their own terms. Congress should not decide for them. So Henry recoiled when he received word that North Carolina’s legislature had ceded to Congress its far western lands—the area known as Franklin, in the future state of Tennessee—for the purpose of turning it into a new state. Giving the land to Congress instead of ceding political control to the citizens of the western territory, North Carolina’s action seemed like a capitulation to federal authority, and a fulfillment of his predictions about the encroaching power of Congress. By accepting the cession, the Congress would “sanction the most manifest violation of rights that can be committed,” Henry wrote. It was one thing for popular assemblies to ratify the Constitution, but another for the settlers of the unorganized west to be forced into the centralized American republic.13