Henry paused . . .
I know of no way to judge the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the past ten years to justify the hopes with which these gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House? Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir. . . . Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? . . . Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer . . .
Henry’s voice rose . . .
We have petitioned—we have remonstrated—we have supplicated—we have prostrated ourselves before the throne . . . we have been spurned, with contempt from the foot of the throne. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free . . . we must fight!
I repeat it, sir: We must fight! 9
Henry paused again, staring heavenwards at the roof beams of the church. The delegates sat in stunned silence, many believing they had heard a voice as from heaven uttering the words, ‘We must fight,’ as the doom of Fate . . . He stood silently, as if in prayer. The tension of his listeners building, awaiting an inevitable eruption.
Gentlemen may cry peace, but there is no peace. . . .
His voice grew louder. . . . The walls of the building and all within seemed to shake and rock in its tremendous vibrations. . . .
The war is actually begun! The next gale from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms!
... thunder. . . .
Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it the gentlemen wish? What would they have?
After a solemn pause, he stood . . . like an embodiment of helplessness . . . his form was bowed . . . a condemned galley slave . . . with fetters, awaiting his doom. . . .
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
He raised his eyes and chained hands toward heaven and prayed . . .
Forbid it, Almighty God!
He then turned toward the timid loyalists . . . quaking at the penalties of treason . . . and bent his form yet nearer to the earth . . . with his hands still crossed . . . he seemed to be weighed down with . . . chains . . . transformed into hopeless . . . humiliation . . . under the iron heel of military despotism. . . .
I know not what course others may take, but as for me . . .
He arose proudly . . . the words hissed through his clenched teeth while his body was thrown back . . . every muscle and tendon was strained against the fetters which bound him, and, with his countenance distorted with agony and rage . . . his arms were hurled apart . . . the links of his chains were scattered to the winds . . . his countenance radiant . . . he stood erect and defiant . . . the sound of his voice . . . the loud, clear, triumphant notes . . .
Interior of St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, where the Virginia House of Delegates met on March 23, 1775, and heard Patrick Henry deliver his stirring “liberty-or-death” cry for revolution against Britain. Henry stood in the third pew in the left-central section of the assembly. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Give me liberty! . . .
... the word ‘liberty’ echoed through the building . . . he let his left hand fall powerless to his side and clenched an ivory letter opener in his right hand firmly, as if holding a dagger . . . aimed at his breast. . . .
... or give me death.10
... a blow upon the left breast with the right hand . . . seemed to drive the dagger to the patriot’s heart.11
The audience sat in stunned silence, unable to think, let alone speak or applaud. Patrick Henry’s “blow upon the left breast,” and, indeed, his “loud, clear triumphant notes,” resounded beyond the walls of Richmond’s Anglican church across the colony and continent—across the sea. “Henry was thought . . . to speak as man was never known to speak before,” Edmund Randolph noted. “Patrick Henry, born in obscurity . . . rousing the genius of his country and binding a band of patriots together to hurl defiance at the tyranny of so formidable a nation as Great Britain.”
After delegates had caught their collective breaths, the convention passed Henry’s resolutions and appointed a committee to prepare a plan for “embodying, arming, and disciplining” the Virginia militia. On March 27, after only a week, the convention adjourned, but in every county across the state, men and boys sewed the words “Liberty or death” on their shirt fronts and rode to their county courthouses to join local militias and fight the British. By then, Virginians and the other American colonists were aware that King George and the British government had rejected the petition of the First Continental Congress. Lord Dartmouth, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, sent blanket orders to royal governors and commanding generals in America to use whatever means necessary to enforce the Coercive Acts in Massachusetts and “arrest the principal actors and abettors.”12
On April 18, 1775, General Gage sent troops out of Boston to destroy a militia arsenal in Concord, while a detachment went to Lexington, where British spies reported that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were hiding after fleeing Boston. Patriot spies fanned out across the countryside to warn of the approach of British troops, with Paul Revere reaching Lexington at midnight—in time to warn Adams and Hancock and allow them to flee. As the British approached Lexington, militia captain John Parker positioned about 200 minutemen—almost half the town’s population—in two lines on the green, one behind the other. They ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-five and included eight pairs of fathers and sons who stood side by side to face the dreaded Redcoats.
While the main British force marched to Concord five miles distant, Major John Pitcairn led a detachment of seven hundred troops into Lexington, convinced that “one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns will set everything to rights.”13 Pitcairn ordered the Patriots to remain where they were, lay down their arms, and prepare to surrender. When some of the minutemen broke ranks and ran for cover behind nearby stone walls, Pitcairn ordered his men to move against them. Amidst the confusion and shouting that followed, a shot rang out—“the shot heard around the world.”
When the firing ceased, eight minutemen, including Parker, lay dead and ten lay wounded. The minutemen managed to wound only one British soldier and Pitcairn’s horse, but they had triggered a revolution that would send the world’s greatest empire into irreversible decline.
As the main British force in Concord searched in vain for Patriot arms, minutemen attacked a platoon of British soldiers guarding Concord’s North Bridge. Realizing the Patriots had removed most of the arsenal, the British commander ordered his men to return to Lexington. On the way, however, they met a growing rain of sniper fire. Minuteman ranks had swelled into thousands. Musket barrels materialized behind every tree, every boulder, every stone wall. Facing annihilation unless they returned to Boston, the isolated platoon abandoned plans to search for Hancock and Adams and stepped up their pace to double time. Although General Lord Hugh Percy met them in Lexington with 1,000 more Redcoats, the minuteman force had grown to 4,000. They came from everywhere, with town after town sending 100, 200, or however many men they could muster to rally around their fellow countrymen. Had there been a supreme commander to organize them, they would have wiped out the British force. As it was, their relentless, albeit uncoordinated, assault left 73 British soldiers dead, 174 wounded, and 26 missing before the expedition returned to Boston. The Patriots suffered 49 dead, 42 wounded, and 5 missing. The decimated British troops wreaked revenge in every town, looting and burning houses, bayoneting anyone who stood in their way, civilian or military.
As the British troops retreated, a member of parliament asserted that Americans “would not fight,” that “they would never dare face an English army, and did not possess any of the qual
ifications . . . to make a good soldier.” In Boston, however, Lord Percy conceded, Whosoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men among them who knew very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians, and this country being much covered with wood and hill is very advantageous for their method of fighting.14
The Patriot propaganda machine that Samuel Adams had organized in and around Boston sent riders like Paul Revere across the colonies to herald the Lexington victory and heighten American Anglophobia with tales of alleged British atrocities. Besides accusing the British of setting fires to homes, shops, and barns in Lexington, Adams told newspapers that the British hadpillaged almost every house they passed, breaking and destroying doors, windows, glasses . . . and carrying off clothing and other valuable effects. It appeared to be their design to burn and destroy all before them. . . . But the savage barbarity exercised upon the bodies of our brethren who fell is almost incredible. Not content with shooting down the unarmed, aged, and infirm, they disregarded the cries of the wounded, killing them without mercy, and mangling their bodies in the most shocking manner.15
The propaganda had its desired effects, inflaming passions and provoking hundreds, at first, then thousands of colonists from farms, villages and cities across New England to gather their arms and rally to the side of the minuteman force outside Boston. As their numbers swelled to more than 10,000, they took up positions on the hills around Boston, thus confining the British troops in the city with Boston’s civilian population.
The day after the fighting at Lexington, Virginia Governor Dunmore ordered a squadron of marines from a schooner in the James River to march into Williamsburg while the town slept and seize the contents of the Powder Horn, a curious, eight-sided militia arsenal with a cone-shaped roof, in which the local militia stored its gunpowder. By dawn the marines had loaded all fifteen half-barrels of powder on board the Magdalen and, in effect, left the local militia defenseless against assault by renegade Indians or rebel slaves. As word of the marine action spread through town, an angry mob formed in front of the governor’s palace to demand return of the powder. In seclusion and unwilling to address a mob of commoners, Dunmore sent word that marines had seized the powder to put down an incipient slave rebellion. When the growing mob hooted down the governor’s first emissary, he sent a second message threatening to free the slaves and organize them into an army that would “lay the town in ashes.”16
As Dunmore menaced Williamsburg, Patrick Henry was at Scotchtown saddling up for the ride north to the Second Continental Congress on May 10. When he learned of the raid on the Powder Horn, he changed plans and rode to Hanover Courthouse to rally volunteers for an assault on Williamsburg and the governor.
“A blow must be struck at once,” he shouted, “before an overwhelming force should enter the colony.” Calling the governor’s action at the Powder Horn a “fortunate circumstance,” he predicted it would end the people’s “habitual deference . . . towards the governor. . . . You may in vain mention . . . the duties on tea and so on. These things . . . do not affect them. But tell them of the robbery of the magazine and that the next step will be to disarm them, and they will then be ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.”17
Before setting off with his company towards Williamsburg, Henry worked his men into a frenzy, telling them the moment had come “to decide whether they chose to live free . . . or become hewers of wood and drawers of water for these lordlings.”18 Telling them they were “striking the first blow in this colony in the great cause of American liberty,” he urged them to move quickly, “that their enemies in this colony were now few and weak—that it would be easy for them, by a rapid and vigorous movement, to compel the restoration of the powder . . . or to make a reprisal on the king’s revenues . . . which would fairly balance the account. ...”19
As Henry’s company advanced towards Williamsburg, Governor Dunmore ordered cannons emplaced on the green surrounding the palace and sent his wife and children to safety on the British man-of-war Fowey. Henry, meanwhile, dispatched a sixteen-man detachment to the royal treasurer’s home to demand £330 in payment for the stolen military stores. If he refused, the men were to take him hostage. With Dunmore’s cannons trained on the heart of Williamsburg and the Fowey’s guns ready to fire on Yorktown, the treasurer acceded to Henry’s demands to save “the many innocent persons who would suffer by [Henry’s] entrance into Williamsburg. ...”20 The money arrived at Henry’s camp the following day, May 7, and he pledged to give it to the Virginia Assembly to buy more powder for the militia. Dunmore declared Henry a traitor and, with that knowledge, Henry let out a roar of defiance and ordered his troops to return to their farms in Hanover.
Although Henry’s Powder Horn expedition drew no blood, it proved as effective in stirring the passions of the South against the British as the Boston Massacre had been in the North. Before he ended his adventure, his own force had grown to more than 150 men, while 5,000 other Virginians across the state streamed into their county courthouses to volunteer, wearing shirts emblazoned with the new state motto: Liberty or Death.
After returning to Scotchtown to fetch his wardrobe, Henry set off for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to the cheers of his men who saluted him “with repeated huzzas.”21 He did not arrive until May 18, eight days after Congress had convened and too late to win committee appointments of any consequence. New faces were in the hall: Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and George Clinton of New York, among others. Lyman Hall had come from Georgia, which had not sent a representative to the previous congress. Although Congress had invited “the Oppressed Inhabitants of Canada” to send delegates, none had appeared, and, by the time Henry took his seat, word reached Philadelphia that thousands of British troops were massing to sail for America. Congress acted swiftly, resolving on May 26 that “these colonies be immediately put into a state of defense.” Five days later, a provincial congress in North Carolina declared independence from Britain.
On June 14, Congress voted to incorporate the Massachusetts troops besieging Boston into a new Continental Army and resolved to raise six companies of riflemen in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to reinforce the troops in Boston. The following day, June 15, Congress elected Virginia’s George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army—a shrewd appointment that John Adams had engineered to ensure Virginia’s continuing support of the war. With Washington its selection, Congress put what was largely a northern army in the hands of not only the most experienced military commander, but a Virginian, whose political influence would ensure southern backing for the war.
On June 16, Washington accepted command, declared his intention to serve without pay, and rode off to war—too late, however, to prevent a needless slaughter of American troops near Boston. After proclaiming martial law, the British spotted Patriots building a small fort atop Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula across the harbor from Boston. British ships landed 2,400 troops onto the peninsula on June 17 and laid a barrage on the hilltop to protect Redcoats edging up the slope. A murderous rain of Patriot fire forced the British to retreat, however. A second attempt to scale the hill met with similar results. On the third attempt, the British threw off their heavy backpacks and charged up the hill, bayonets fixed. The firing from the top gradually diminished—and then ceased. The Americans had run out of powder. The British overran the hilltop, then assaulted and captured neighboring Bunker Hill. When they were done, 100 dead Americans and 267 wounded lay strewn across the two hilltops, but the assault had cost the British 1,045 casualties and elevated their American victims to martyrdom. Bunker Hill became a cause célèbre across the colonies for both Patriots and Loyalists.
Early in July, Congress adopted two important resolutions by Philadelphia’s John Dickinson. The so-called Olive Branch Petition on July 5 reasserted American allegiance to King George III and petition
ed him to prevent further hostile acts against colonists while negotiators formulated a plan for reconciliation. In the second resolution the following day—“Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms”—Congress rejected independence but asserted American willingness to die rather than be enslaved.
Chapter 8
“Don’t Tread on Me”
When Congress adjourned on August 2, 1775, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson all but galloped south to Williamsburg. Lord Dunmore had already fled the Governor’s Palace to a British man-of-war and threatened to send his marines to crush opposition to British rule. Ten days later, on June 17, 1775, the colony’s former burgesses ignored Dunmore’s threats and assumed control of government, ending 175 years of British control. They voted to raise three regiments of 1,000 men each to defend the colony against British troops in the east and five companies of eighty-five men each to guard western borders against Indian attacks. Although Henry’s followers nominated him commander in chief, veteran officers of the French and Indian War objected strongly to the selection of someone with no military rank or experience as their commander. Despite his immense popularity, Henry won election by only one vote over Hugh Mercer, an older Scotsman with battlefield experience in the French and Indian War. While Mercer stomped off angrily to join the Continental Army under Washington, William Woodford, another veteran of the French and Indian War, agreed to take command of the Second Regiment, while Henry took over the First Regiment, along with the title of commander in chief of Virginia forces. To prevent emergence of a military dictator, the Virginia Convention established a civilian Committee of Safety, led by old Edmund Pendleton, with supreme command of the military.
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