Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  On May 29, 1765, his twenty-ninth birthday, Henry startled the House by asking for recognition and, as older burgesses demanded that he sit, he proposed five resolutions that they shouted down as preposterous. The first three were harmless enough, reiterating the principle that colonists were entitled to “all the privileges, franchises, and immunities . . . possessed by the people of Great Britain.” The fourth resolution declared speciously that “taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom. ...” In fact, few British subjects had any say over taxes, although Virginia, as Henry stated correctly in his fourth resolution, had “uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being . . . governed by their own Assembly in the article of their [direct] taxes. ...”14

  The last Henry resolution was the most preposterous, and provocative, of all, and he was too well versed in British law by then not to have realized it. Inspired, perhaps, by the overwhelming popular support he had received in the Parsons’ Cause, he evidently saw opposition to taxes as a way to ensure and even broaden that support. In his fifth resolution, he declared that “the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes . . . upon the inhabitants of this colony, and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons . . . other than the General Assembly . . . has a manifest tendency to destroy British and American freedom.”15

  Their faces reddening with rage as Henry read his resolutions, House elders erupted in fury, calling out to him to be silent and sit down. They were not used to airing their disputes in public. They normally settled “difficulties” quietly, behind closed doors in a private room at Raleigh Tavern. They saw Henry as a threat not only to their own leadership but to their profitable ties to the mother country. As Henry realized, his resolutions not only violated House protocol, they represented the first colonial opposition to British law.

  The most heated of the debates revolved around the fifth resolution, with Henry raging against the tyranny of the Stamp Act and warning, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third. ...”

  “Treason, sir!” the aging Speaker interrupted.

  “Treason!” shouted the older burgesses one after another, some standing to shake their fists at the insolent renegade. “Treason! Treason!”

  An idealized painting of Patrick Henry delivering his oration denouncing the Stamp Act in 1765, with a warning to King George III that “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell. ...” (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPH)

  Henry arched his back and stood as tall as his height permitted until the shouting faded.

  “ . . . and George the Third,” he boomed in defiance, “may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it!”16

  The House erupted in a cacophony of angry shouts and jubilant cheers. “Violent debates ensued,” Henry recalled. “Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me. After a long and warm contest, the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only.”17 With many older members out of the Assembly making preparations to adjourn for summer, populists and young uplanders commanded a bare majority of the forty-one members present, and they forced through the vote approving Henry’s resolutions—with George Washington and, most surprisingly, Richard Henry Lee among them. Both Washington and Lee were Tidewater planters with huge properties of more than 20,000 acres each. Although Washington had married into the Tidewater aristocracy, Lee was born to a family of great wealth for many generations and, like his peers, went to England for his higher education. He was so integrated in Virginia’s British establishment that he had applied for the post as distributor of stamps and collector of stamp revenues for the British government. After hearing Henry’s condemnation of the Stamp Act, however, he realized, as did Washington, that the act would undermine the rights of all Virginians, the wealthy planters as well as Henry’s uplanders. Lee and Washington immediately abandoned the pro-British bloc of burgesses and became two of Patrick Henry’s staunchest political allies, with Lee resigning his ties to stamp distribution. Thomas Jefferson explained why:I attended the debate at the door of the lobby of the House of Burgesses, and heard the splendid display of Mr. Henry’s talents as a popular orator. They were great indeed; such as I have never heard from any other man. . . . By these resolutions and his manner of supporting them, Mr. Henry took the leadership out of the hands of those who had theretofore guided the proceedings of the House. ...18

  Henry had two additional resolutions that called for outright disobedience of the Stamp Act, but he decided he had gone far enough with his first five resolutions and stopped short of espousing revolution—for the moment.

  “Mr. Henry plucked the veil from the shrine of parliamentary omnipotence,” Edmund Randolph wrote. “It was judicious in Mr. Henry to suspend his resolutions . . . until a day or two before the close of the session. At this stage of business those who would be most averse . . . had retired. Those who were left behind . . . clung to Mr. Henry.”19

  Outraged by what he considered nothing less than a coup d’état, Speaker Robinson acted swiftly to reassert his authority and that of senior members by recalling absent burgesses to the House for the next morning’s session. When the House reconvened, Robinson’s aristocrats, led by Edmund Pendleton, took control and moved to erase the resolutions from the public record. All the burgesses strained their necks looking for Henry to protest, but he was nowhere to be seen. In fact, after stirring the political pot to a boil the previous afternoon, he had disappeared into the crowd outside the House, slipped away to the stable to find his horse and trotted off on the road to Hanover County, indistinguishable in the stream of farmers riding home from market.

  “Mr. Henry,” an Anglican minister reported to the Bishop of London, “is gone quietly into the upper parts of the country to recommend himself to his constituents by spreading treason and enforcing firm resolutions against the authority of the British Parliament.”20

  Henry’s absence startled the entire House of Burgesses. Even more startling were the votes of Lee and Washington and younger Tidewater planters, who rebelled against their elders by joining Henry’s uplanders in defeating Pendleton’s omnibus motion to erase all of Henry’s resolves from the record. Although senior burgesses managed to remove the most virulent resolutions, their efforts came too late. Before leaving Williamsburg the previous day, Henry had given the editor of the Virginia Gazette all seven resolutions to copy, and, under a news-sharing agreement among newspaper printers in most of the colonies, he had already sent them on their way to newspapers across America. The entire continent soon heard the lion’s roar.

  “The alarm spread . . . with astonishing quickness,” Henry chuckled, “and the ministerial party were overwhelmed. The great point of resistance to British taxation was universally established in the colonies.”21 The royal governor responded to Henry’s resolves by abruptly dissolving the House of Burgesses on June 1, without the usual ceremony or closing speech. He would not reconvene the House for a year.

  A week later, Henry’s resolves appeared in the Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper; by mid-June they were in the Philadelphia, New York, and Boston papers, and by early August, in the Scottish and British press. Newspaper publishers in Britain were at one with American publishers in despising the Stamp Act, which required them to put a stamp on every copy they sold. With each publication of Henry’s resolves, exaggerations, misinterpretations, and copying errors transformed them into nothing less than a call to revolution. His sixth resolution, according to the Maryland Gazette, declared that Virginians were “not bound to yield obedience to any Law or Ordinance whatsoever, designed to impose Taxation upon them, other than the Laws or Ordinances of the General Assembly . . . ” and his seventh resolution called anyone who supported Parliament’s efforts to tax Virginians “AN ENEMY TO THIS HIS MAJESTY’S COLONY.”22

  The Boston Gazette als
o printed all seven of what they called Henry’s original resolutions, but claimed, in addition, that Virginia had adopted them all intact—a lie planted by Samuel Adams.

  With or without lies, publication of Henry’s resolutions fired up colonist antipathy toward British government intrusion in their affairs and Parliament’s efforts to tax them, directly or indirectly. Stamp Act opponents rallied in every city, forming secret societies called the Sons of Liberty.

  “The flame is spread through all the continent,” Virginia’s royal governor Francis Fauquier warned his foreign minister in London, “and one colony supports another in their disobedience to superior powers.”23 Governor Sir Francis Bernard of Massachusetts agreed, warning the ministry that Henry’s resolutions had sounded “an alarm bell to the disaffected.”24

  After reading Henry’s resolutions in the Boston Gazette, the Massachusetts Assembly called on all colonies to send delegates to an intercolonial congress to be held in New York City in October, one month before the Stamp Act was to take effect.

  Having sparked the fires of rebellion across the colonies, however, Henry remained curiously absent from the turmoil he had created, having vanished into the Piedmont hills to attend to the mundane tasks of raising and supporting his family. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Henry derived far less pleasure from the pomp, power, and formality of the capital than he did from the sense of freedom he felt in his fields at home and the joys he derived from his children. After planting his grain and tobacco, he set to work expanding his law practice—and his family. He was already father of three—a daughter and two younger sons—and his wife was pregnant again. To accommodate his growing family, he began building a new, larger, and more comfortable home on the 1,700-acre parcel of land he had bought from his father in Louisa County, just west of Hanover County.

  On a hill above the South Anna River on Roundabout Creek, it overlooked a broad valley checkered with grain and tobacco fields, interspersed with uncleared stretches of forests thick with game. Although a few wealthier planters had built ostentatious pseudo-English structures such as nearby “Roundabout Castle,” Henry would have none of it. His was to be traditional hill-country rustic: a one-and-a-half-story structure built of rough, hand-hewn lumber, with three large rooms downstairs and two upstairs, and the usual outbuildings surrounding the house. Hewing to hill-country tradition, Henry paid his carpenter and mason a mixture of cash, corn, livestock feed, and rum that he had received as fees from his own clients—including a twenty-five-gallon barrel of rum from one of the vestrymen in the Parsons’ Cause.

  In contrast to Tidewater burgesses such as George Washington, hill-country burgesses seldom brought their wives to Williamsburg. Their homes lay several days distance over rough roads and often narrow trails that made travel by horse difficult and travel by wagon a bone-shattering experience that few women could or would tolerate. With only babies and slaves as daily companions, however, Sarah Henry grew noticeably despondent, often teetering on the edge of madness. Even Henry’s exuberant fiddling failed to cheer her. More and more, her oldest child, ten-year-old Martha, intervened to look after the younger children.25

  At the beginning of August, the British government published the names of the colonial distributors who would sell tax stamps. With Henry’s resolves still echoing across the colonies, Bostonians—particularly hard hit by the economic downturn—snapped as one. Debts had piled high; there was no work; shops had closed. With nothing left for rent or food, some tramped off into the wilderness, hoping to stumble on some unfortunate beast whose flesh and hide might provide sustenance and clothing.

  On the morning of August 14, a straw effigy of Boston’s designated stamp collector, the wealthy Tory merchant Andrew Oliver, dangled from the limb of an oak tree on High Street. Immediately dubbed the Liberty Tree, it drew an ever-thickening crowd, which metamorphosed into an angry mob. At day’s end, a rougher crowd of waterfront workers and laborers set to drinking courtesy of Sam Adams and raged out of control, pulling down the effigy and carrying it to the governor’s office, chanting, “Liberty, Property, and No Stamps.” Growing in number, they moved toward a half-finished brick building that Oliver owned near the waterfront, which they believed would house the tax offices. The mob clawed it down, then surged off on the road to Oliver’s beautiful estate and began stoning the windows. Unsatisfied, they beheaded and burned the straw effigy, cried for a hangman’s rope, and broke down the mansion’s doors. When they realized that Oliver and his family had fled, they set fire to the magnificent furniture, art, and other contents of the house. The governor ordered the militia summoned, but the drummers who normally sounded the alarm were part of the mob, as were many of the militiamen.

  A few days later, a second mob gathered around a bonfire, drank themselves into a frenzy, and marched to the home of a marshal of the vice-admiralty court to burn it down. Wiser than most targeted victims, he saved his home—and life—by guiding mob leaders to a tavern and buying them a barrel of punch. Another mob, however, was on its way to the home of Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a prominent Boston merchant who was a direct descendant of Anne Hutchinson, the early-seventeenth-century religious leader. One of the architectural jewels of North America, Hutchinson’s Inigo Jones-style residence bore Ionic pilasters on its façade and a delicate cupola atop its roof. The mob broke down its massive doors and, room by room, set fires in each, and destroyed everything, including Hutchinson’s legendary collection of manuscripts—many of them significant public papers documenting the history of Massachusetts. It took the mob three hours to dislodge the cupola from the roof and tumble it onto the huge fire below.

  The violence in Boston set off an epidemic of violence across the colonies, spreading first to Newport, then to New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. A mob in Newport, Rhode Island, built a gallows for the designated stamp collector, who fled to a British warship in the harbor and promised to resign. As rioting spread, stamp officers resigned in New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and even offshore in the Bahamas. In New York City, a mob of about 2,000 protestors marched through the city, broke open the governor’s coach house, and seized his ornate gilded coach and three other vehicles. After seating effigies of the governor and royal officials, they paraded the carriages through town, hung the effigies on a makeshift galley, and burned all the vehicles.

  Delegates from eight colonies responded to the Massachusetts call for an intercolonial congress in New York. New Hampshire, North Carolina, Georgia, and, most noticeably, Virginia—the most important colony—failed to respond or send delegates. In the case of Virginia, the governor had dismissed the House of Burgesses before word of the congress arrived. Speaker Robinson eventually received the invitation, but was far too loyal to the crown to do anything but discard it.

  Although physically absent from the Stamp Act Congress, Henry was nonetheless there, as delegates continually cited his seven resolutions. After eleven days of deliberations, the congress approved a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances of the Colonists in America,” with fourteen resolutions that condemned the Stamp Act for depriving colonists of the right of taxation by consent, which it called “essential to freedom.” With moderates outnumbering radicals, however, the Congress stopped short of embracing Henry’s positions and asserted, instead, that colonists “glory in being the subjects of the best of kings. . . . That we esteem our connection with . . . Great Britain as one of the great blessings. ...” It concluded with an obsequious assertion that “subordination to the parliament is universally acknowledged.”26 Even the whimper that ended the declaration could not coax a single delegate to risk treason by penning his name on the document. The only signature that appeared was that of the paid clerk.

  Boston’s Otis was furious as he stomped out of the meeting to begin the ride home. Once there, he strode into the colonial assembly in Boston and shouted a challenge to Lord Grenville—by then prime minister—
to duel on the floor of the House of Commons in London, to determine whether the colonies were to be free or enslaved by British tyranny. Royal Governor Hutchinson responded by calling Otis “more fit for a madhouse than the House of Representatives.”27

  After the Stamp Act Congress, Henry’s words permeated the debates in every legislature, slipping off every tongue as easily as scriptural passages and provoking adoption of similar resolutions in eight colonies. British authorities recognized they would now need an army to enforce the Stamp Act. “Mr. Henry,” Jefferson declared, “gave the first impulse to the ball of the revolution.”28 Without knowing it, Patrick Henry’s outrage at government taxation had provoked a war for independence that would free his countrymen from British rule.

  Chapter 4

  We Are Slaves!

  As the effective date approached for the Stamp Act to go into effect, Patrick Henry’s new friend and political ally, planter Richard Henry Lee, of Westmoreland County, put his name and fortune at risk by calling on Virginians to boycott all things British until Parliament repealed the Act. In what was essentially an act of treason, more than one hundred Virginia planters signed Lee’s Westmoreland Protests and inspired similarly prominent men in other colonies to follow suit. Some 200 merchants in New York City, 250 in Boston, and 400 in Philadelphia pledged to stop importing all but a select list of goods from England until Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Boston’s leading merchant banker John Hancock warned his London agent that “the people of this country will never suffer themselves to be made slaves of by a submission to the damned act.”1