Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  As spectators sat at attention to watch the master swordsman at work, Henry would launch a series of devastating thrusts:I know, sir, how well it becomes a liberal man and a Christian to forget and forgive.

  Our mild and holy system of religion inculcates an admirable maxim of forbearance.

  In considering this subject, it will be necessary to define what a debt is.

  These and other arguments, of course, had nothing to do with the central question of the case, but his presentation left judges, juries, and spectators transfixed, often in tears, and usually prepared to decide in Henry’s favor when he finally dispensed with rhetoric and presented his legal argument in short, pithy, logical declarations that resisted refutation. He was not only a great orator, he was a great lawyer—so great, in fact, that Robert Carter Nicholas, the renowned attorney who had examined Henry when he applied for a law license, turned over his General Court practice to Henry when Nicholas became colony treasurer.

  Henry’s first cousin, Judge Edmund Winston, asserted that Henry “did not lose in comparison with any man . . . in reasoning on general principles . . . and I never heard that he betrayed a want of legal knowledge. It will naturally be asked, ‘How was this possible?’ To which I can only answer that without much labor he acquired that information which in the case of other men is the result of painful research. I have been told in Mr. Henry’s family that he employed a considerable part of his life in reading.”13

  If Henry proved indomitable before the General Court, he was even more overpowering in jury trials. “His power over juries was something wonderful,” his grandson recounted, “and as a criminal lawyer he had no equal. He understood the human character so perfectly; knew so well all its strength and all its weakness . . . that he never failed to take them, either by stratagem or storm. Hence he was, beyond doubt, the ablest defender of criminals in Virginia, and will probably never be equaled again.”14

  More than most lawyers, Henry knew his jurors well. Indeed, he was one with them, having lived with them as a boy, fishing, hunting, and roaming the Piedmont hills together. Most resented oppressive laws and government restrictions that limited their “natural rights” to hunt, fish, farm, and, indeed, live as they saw fit. They cared less about legal technicalities and entitlements of the powerful than they did about justice for the weak and powerless. Henry disarmed the powerful and empowered the weak and defenseless.

  With his booming practice came wealth, which he used to expand his land holdings—often speculating with colleagues from the House of Burgesses. Only land, not money, represented wealth in Patrick Henry’s America. Any bank could—and, indeed, did—print paper money, but land was “real” estate, producing income from crops, timber, the pelts and flesh of wildlife, and, sometimes, ore. After the Stamp Act controversy, the royal governor sought to restore good relations with burgesses by offering them extensive land grants in the West for token investments. A wave of settlers had washed across the West after the French and Indian War, and George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and other burgesses poured their money into the governor’s land offerings, some of which stretched west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes over present-day Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Henry’s maternal cousins, the Winstons, snapped up 50,000 acres, and Henry bought 5,000 acres along the upper James River, along with some lands on the Mississippi River. He joined a group of burgesses in purchasing 50,000 acres along the Ohio River that they divided into hundred-acre parcels for resale to 500 families. His interest in the West intensified after his sister Anne married Colonel William Christian, the son of a prominent merchant in Staunton, the county seat of Augusta County in the Shenandoah Mountains. As other relatives moved west, Henry rode out to visit many of them and usually returned with saddlebags full of commissions to represent them in the House of Burgesses and General Court. He quickly became spokesman in the House of Burgesses for much of the West.

  In May 1767, Henry turned thirty-one and Britain’s Parliament again intruded into the lives of Americans. Tax riots had forced Parliament to placate English farmers by reducing property taxes 25 percent, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend believed he could do what his predecessor George Grenville had failed to do: make colonists pay the costs of British government operations in America, including costly efforts to stop the smuggling trade. He gave no thought to taxing the profligate British nobility or reducing the king’s £800,000-a-year allowance (about $50 million today). Townshend’s opponents argued against sowing more seeds of discontent in America, but those seeking to avenge the humiliation of the Stamp Act repeal insisted that the colonies had usurped powers of the king by granting amnesty to Stamp Act rioters.

  At the end of June, Parliament passed the first of four Townshend Acts, which imposed duties on American imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea, worth about £40,000 a year for “defraying the charge of the administration of justice and the support of the civil government.” A second act transferred responsibility for paying colonial governors and judges from colonial assemblies to the British government. And another Townshend Act called for transport of defendants in the colonies to offshore admiralty courts for trials without juries.

  Infuriated by the new laws, merchants in Boston and other port cities called for a selective boycott of British goods. “It is surprising to me,” wrote Boston merchant John Hancock in an angry letter to his London supplier, “that so many attempts are made on your side to cramp our trade, new duties every day increasing. In short we are in a fair way of being ruined. We have nothing to do but unite and come under a solemn agreement to stop importing any goods from England.”15

  Virginia’s George Washington agreed. “I think the Parliament of Great Britain,” he complained to a British merchant, “hath no more right to put their hands in my pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money. ...”16

  To sustain their boycott, Boston merchants, led by John Hancock, took a step towards commercial independence by setting up manufacturies to produce goods that British laws had previously forced them to buy from England—clothing, jewelry, cordage, and similar easy-to-make staples. A month later, the Pennsylvania Chronicle and Virginia Gazette published the first of twelve stirring essays by John Dickinson, a London-educated lawyer and member of the Pennsylvania Assembly who had drafted the final declaration of the Stamp Act Congress. Printed in twenty of the twenty-six newspapers in the thirteen colonies, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania provoked protests against further parliamentary legislation affecting the colonies. The Letters called British taxes unconstitutional and charged Parliament with bleeding the colonial economy. “If Britain can order us to come to her for necessities . . . and can order us to pay what taxes she pleases before . . . we land them here, we are . . . slaves,” Dickinson argued. He then attacked the second of the Townshend Acts that stripped colonial assemblies of financial control over judges and governors:Is it possible to form an idea of slavery more complete, more miserable, more disgraceful, than that of a people where justice is administered, government exercised . . . AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PEOPLE, and yet WITHOUT THE LEAST DEPENDENCE AMONG THEM. . . . If we can find no relief from this infamous situation . . . we may bow down our necks, and with all the stupid serenity of servitude, to any drudgery which our lords and masters shall please to command.17

  After the appearance of Dickinson’s Letters, Rhode Island and New York joined the Massachusetts boycott, and the Massachusetts Assembly petitioned the king to repeal the Townshend Acts “as violations of their sacred rights as Englishmen of being taxed only by representatives of their own free election.” Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut issued their own petitions, with Virginia also sending a circular letter urging other colonies to support the Massachusetts boycott. In their petition to the king, Virginia burgesses used Henry’s arguments in the Stamp Act resolutions, calling the Townshend taxes “internal to all intents and purposes” and t
herefore unconstitutional.18 By the end of 1767, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Hampshire, South Carolina, North Carolina, and New York had each petitioned the king to repeal the Townshend Acts. Far from considering repeal, however, King George ordered stricter enforcement of the acts in rebellious colonies.

  At sunset on May 9, 1768, John Hancock’s small sloop Liberty sailed into Boston harbor after crossing the Atlantic from Madeira with what appeared to be a shipload of wine. Darkness forced customs inspectors to postpone their inspection until morning, but when they went to board at dawn the next day, they found the ship bobbing high in the water, its hold more than three-quarters empty and the remaining cargo not subject to duties. A month later, a fifty-gun British man-of-war, the Romney, sailed into Boston harbor, its captain thundering to all within earshot, “The town is a blackguard town and ruled by mobs . . . and, by the eternal God, I will make their hearts ache before I leave.”

  As British press gangs swarmed ashore to terrorize the waterfront, a detachment of marines boarded the Liberty and tied her fast to the Romney. A mob of about five hundred gathered on the wharf and pelted the marines with paving stones ripped from the streets, but the Romney towed the Liberty out of range. The mob refocused its attack on customs officials, beating them as they ran to their houses. They caught one and dragged him through the streets, pelting him with rocks and filth, then turned and smashed the windows of his house. Another group at the harbor burned the customs officer’s boat. As the royal governor prepared to flee, he sent an urgent message to General Thomas Gage who ordered ten regiments to march on Boston “to rescue the Government out of the hands of a trained mob.”19

  In contrast to its response in Boston, the British government sought to calm and, indeed, ingratiate itself with the people of Virginia, America’s largest and richest colony. As its new royal governor, it sent Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt, a personal friend of the king and self-professed “friend to decency and moderation.”20 Although personally bankrupt because of his gambling addiction, he arrived aboard a seventy-four-gun Royal Navy ship of the line, with a maximum amount of pomp, ceremony, and cannon blasts intended to flatter Virginians by showing how high they ranked in Britain’s estimation. On board was a coach of state and six magnificent white Percheron drays to carry the new governor from pierside to Williamsburg and transport him about the capital. When the House of Burgesses gathered for their first session on May 8, Botetourt emerged from the palace in a gold-threaded ceremonial robe, climbed into his coach, and rode slowly down the town’s main boulevard, Duke of Gloucester Street, toward the House of Burgesses, waving his hand patronizingly and nodding serenely to his new constituents. Later in the day, he entertained more than four dozen government officials and burgesses, including Patrick Henry, at a lavish dinner at the ornate Governor’s Palace. As a chamber orchestra entertained his guests, he engaged in jovial conversations, proclaiming himself one with Virginia’s colonials.

  Apart from Botetourt’s appearance, the opening session of the House of Burgesses that year was notable for the first appearance of a burgess from Albemarle County in the Piedmont—a tall, freckle-faced redhead named Thomas Jefferson. No stranger in Williamsburg, Jefferson had studied three years at the College of William and Mary and studied law under burgess George Wythe. Once admitted to the House, he immediately drifted to the side of Patrick Henry and the other young radicals.

  “The exact conformity of our political opinions,” Jefferson recalled, “strengthened our friendship, and, indeed, the old leaders of the House being substantially firm, we had not after this any differences of opinion . . . on matters of principles, though sometimes on matters of form.”21 Jefferson called Henry “far above all in maintaining the spirit of the Revolution. His influence was most extensive with the members from the upper counties, and his boldness and their votes overawed and controlled the more timid aristocratic gentlemen of the lower part of the state.” As puzzled as most of his contemporaries by the magic of Patrick Henry’s eloquence, Jefferson questioned whether “it should be called eloquence.” Calling it “peculiar,” Jefferson described Henry’s oratory as “impressive and sublime, beyond what can be imagined . . . while he was speaking, it always seemed directly to the point. When he had spoken . . . it produced a great effect, and I myself had been highly delighted and moved, but I have asked myself when he ceased, what the devil has he said?”22

  A week after it had convened, the House of Burgesses adopted four resolutions written by Henry, Lee, Blair, Nicholas, George Mason, and Benjamin Harrison, with Henry presenting them in an eloquent address that reiterated colonist rights to tax themselves and petition the king for redress of grievances. They condemned as unconstitutional the creation of admiralty courts to try colonials beyond the borders of their own colonies, without juries and without the right to call witnesses. To the astonishment of the burgesses, the jolly royal governor, who had befriended and entertained them in the palace a week earlier, summarily dissolved the House. “I have heard of your resolves,” he declared in somber tones, “and augur ill of their effect.”23 With that, he ordered sentries to clear the chamber and, with guns at the ready, they escorted Henry and the other burgesses into the streets and shut down representative government in Virginia.

  The Raleigh Tavern was Williamsburg’s most elegant restaurant. Its beautiful Apollo Ballroom was the site of major civic events and magnificent dances. Patrick Henry and the other burgesses repaired to the Apollo Room after the royal governor Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt, dismissed the House of Burgesses in 1774 after the House protested the repressive British Townshend Acts. (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRINT)

  Infuriated by the governor’s evident hypocrisy, Henry and the others marched out and reconvened in the Apollo Room at Raleigh Tavern. After reconfirming their resolutions, they voted unanimously to enlarge the partial boycott into a total ban on British imports and to send this warning to Parliament: “An attack, made on one of our sister colonies . . . is an attack on all British America. ...”24 In a final decision—again, unanimous—they ordered a round of drinks . . . and another . . . until they had toasted and emptied their glasses thirteen times.

  “To some,” Richard Henry Lee explained to British secretary of state Earl of Shelburne, “the proceedings may appear the overflowings of a seditious and disloyal madness, but your lordship’s just and generous attachment to the proper rights and liberties of mankind will discover in them nothing more than a necessary assertion of social privileges founded in reason ... and rendered sacred by a possession of near two hundred years.”25

  Chapter 5

  To Recover Our Just Rights

  As they had after Henry’s Stamp Act resolutions, North Carolina, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island joined Virginia in boycotting British imports. Britain felt the effects immediately, and British merchants joined reform-minded political leaders in demanding that Parliament repeal the Townshend Acts. Too many members of Parliament, however, represented single-family “pocket boroughs” and underpopulated “rotten boroughs,” leaving them with no inclination or motives to respond to popular demands—in either the colonies or England. While the king “plumes himself upon the security of his crown,” warned an anonymous critic in the Virginia Gazette, “he should remember that, as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost in another.”1

  The disruptions in trade with Britain affected every American, including Patrick Henry. Like most farmers, he cleared new fields to grow hemp and flax for making cloth and clothes for himself and his family. Henry installed spinning wheels and a loom and began wearing Virginia cloth made on his own plantation. By the end of 1769, the effects of colony-wide home manufacturing helped cut imports from Britain nearly 40 percent, from about £2.2 million to just over £1.3 million.

  Early in 1770, an ugly confrontation between British soldiers and the Sons of Liberty in New York City left both sides with cuts and bruises, but no fatalities. Boston was the scene of ugl
ier incidents though—many, the result of Boston’s unruly street children pelting Redcoats and suspected Redcoat sympathizers with snowballs. When a small mob broke down the door of a Tory shopkeeper, a friend came to his help and fired his musket at the mob, wounding a nineteen-year-old and killing an eleven-year-old. “Young as he was,” the Boston Gazette proclaimed, “he died in his country’s cause.”2

  Rabble-rouser Samuel Adams turned the boy’s funeral into the largest ever held in America—an enormous mass mourning of a martyr that stretched more than a half mile, with more than four hundred, carefully groomed, angelic children leading the coffin and 2,000 mourners walking behind, followed by thirty chariots and chaises.

  “Mine eyes have never beheld such a funeral,” John Adams all but sobbed. “This shows there are more lives to spend if wanted in the service of their country. It shows too that the faction is not yet expiring—that the ardor of people is not to be quelled by the slaughter of one child and wounding of another.”3

  Relations between Boston colonists and British troops deteriorated badly. The air filled with a constant staccato of catcalls and cries of “Lobster, Lobster!” at passing British Redcoats. Fights erupted between “lobsters” and waterfront thugs, the latter often goaded (and surreptitiously remunerated) by Samuel Adams. On the evening of March 5, belligerent bands of laborers and soldiers roamed the streets, only narrowly avoiding conflict until nine o’clock that evening, when a young barber’s apprentice provoked a sentry at the customs house. The sentry knocked the boy down and sent him off screaming for help. A crowd of boys gathered and pelted the sentry with snowballs, shouting, “Kill him, kill him.” A crowd of men joined in. Suddenly the town’s church bells began to peal; townsmen rushed from their homes thinking a fire had broken out; mobs surged through the streets. Hearing of the sentry’s predicament, Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the day, led a squad of six privates and a corporal to the scene, their muskets unloaded but bayonets fixed, with orders to escort the sentry into the customs house, away from the mob’s missiles and taunts. By the time they reached the sentry’s post, small gangs had swept in from all directions. A mob of waterfront thugs made it impossible for Preston to march away. Volleys of ice, oyster shells, and stones rained on the troops, with one of the rocks finding its mark. A soldier fell, staggered to his feet, loaded his rifle, and fired into the crowd. A second soldier loaded his weapon and fired a hole into the skull of one of the attackers. Before his body hit the ground a volley of shots left two others dead and eight wounded. Two of the injured later died of their wounds.