Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Parson Maury had clearly chosen well in his attorney—Peter Lyons, a charming Irishman who weighed three hundred pounds but was renowned for his refined courtroom manner. The arithmetic of the case hadn’t been challenged, which meant that the damages hearing would be only a formality. A deputy sheriff named Thomas Johnson could expect a steep fine for not collecting the quota of tobacco due Parson Maury.

  The hearing was only three weeks away, and Johnson had no hope of hiring a distinguished lawyer to represent him. In desperation, he turned to the judge’s son, a young man who had recently taken up the law after failing at everything else. Would this untried lawyer accept fifteen shillings to do his best against Parson Maury and Peter Lyons? Patrick Henry said that he would.

  —

  Maury’s former student, Thomas Jefferson, knew Patrick Henry but wasn’t much impressed by him. They had met in December 1759, during a Christmas house party at the estate of Colonel Nathaniel West Dandridge. Jefferson had just finished his studies at Maury’s school and was headed for William and Mary College in Williamsburg. Patrick Henry was between failures. He had tried farming, and twice he had tried keeping a store. The best that could be said of those attempts was that he had never been declared bankrupt. But at the colonel’s party he was showing no sign of discouragement.

  Thomas Jefferson, gangling and judgmental at sixteen, watched grudgingly as Patrick Henry made himself popular with the other guests. Although he was his elder by only seven years, Henry was married and a father and seemed much older to Thomas. That made his conduct all the more unseemly—being so passionate about dancing and so eager to please. Henry didn’t seem interested in engaging young Jefferson in serious conversation, and Thomas found his manners somewhat coarse.

  A few months later, though, Patrick Henry sought out Thomas on the William and Mary campus with astonishing news. Henry had been reading a lawbook at home between the hours he helped out at his father-in-law’s tavern. Now he had come to Williamsburg to ask the legal examiners to license him as a lawyer. One had to admire his nerve. For generations, Virginia families had sent their sons to London to study law at the Inns of Court. Young men who couldn’t afford that expense apprenticed themselves for many months with an established lawyer. Here came Patrick Henry announcing that he had borrowed a copy of Coke upon Littleton—the text that James Otis had read and cursed for years. After six weeks of glancing through it, Henry considered himself qualified to open a law office.

  Thomas didn’t know then that Henry enjoyed playing the rustic. From boyhood he had loved to hunt ducks and geese along the Pamunky River, and at eleven and twelve, while other children were anchored in school, he had roamed the countryside. Redhaired and blue-eyed, he had grown into a boy who liked to exaggerate his rural accent. “Naiteral parts,” he would say, “is better than all the larnin’ on yearth.” But in his teens a different Patrick emerged, tutored at home by his Scottish father and by his uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who taught him Latin and Greek along with his catechism. By fifteen Patrick was lying on his bed reading for hours, and the next year, when he was sent to work at his first store, he discovered the joys of conversation. Customers commented that the young clerk seemed beguiled by the thrust and parry of any argument and determined not to let his job get in the way of a good debate.

  One day, stretched full length on a sack of salt, he was arguing with his friends when a customer entered the store and asked, “Have you any salt, sir?”

  Henry broke off talking only long enough to shake his head. “Just sold the last peck.”

  Henry hadn’t let Thomas Jefferson see his serious side or Thomas had chosen to ignore it. Jefferson certainly didn’t hold out much hope for Henry’s success with the examiners. A candidate for the bar could pick the men to test him, and Thomas knew the lawyers Henry had chosen. They included the Randolph brothers—Peyton, who had studied in London at the Inner Temple, and John, who had studied at Gray’s Inn. Another examiner, Robert Carter Nicholas, was related to the “King” Carter who held three hundred thousand acres of Virginia land. Most distinguished of all was George Wythe, the lawyer with whom Jefferson hoped one day to serve his apprenticeship.

  The four men did not sit as a board, and there were no written tests. Instead, each lawyer interviewed the applicant in his chambers. Afterward at least two of them had to agree to sign his license. As Patrick Henry went off on his rounds, his appearance tended to work against him. He was tall but rather stooped, and his forehead beetled noticeably. Early in life, his red hair had become a scant fringe, and in public he usually wore a wig. His clothes were cheap and he wore them carelessly. But Henry’s eyes were lively under their long lashes, and he had a habit of paying close attention. His jaw was big, his teeth flashing, and his wide mouth always seemed ready to stretch into a grin. Combined with the flash to his eyes, the half-smile gave Henry a considerable appeal.

  It was appeal wasted on George Wythe. He asked Henry a few questions, refused to sign his license and bowed him out of his office. John Randolph was also put off by the young man’s lack of polish, but he sensed an original mind and let the examination stretch to several hours. Randolph saw that Henry knew nothing about municipal law, but when they took up natural law and general history his arguments were bold and strong. At one point, challenging his interpretation of the common law, Randolph said, “You defend your opinions well, sir, but now to the law and the testimony.”

  He led Henry to a shelf of books and paged through one of them. “You have never seen these books,” Randolph said, “nor this principle of law. Yet you are right and I am wrong. And from this lesson you have given me—you must excuse me for saying it—I will never trust to appearance again.”

  Randolph added that if Patrick Henry’s hard work matched his gifts, he could become a valuable member of the legal profession.

  That may simply have been a gracious way of yielding to the inevitable, since Randolph seemed to believe that Henry had already obtained the necessary two signatures. In fact he had only one, extorted from kindly Robert Carter Nicholas after much importuning and Henry’s solemn promise to study more law when he returned to Hanover. Thomas Jefferson said afterward that the Randolph brothers had signed Henry’s license with as much reluctance as good manners permitted them to show. But he granted that while both men lamented Henry’s ignorance, they agreed that he was a young man of genius.

  License in hand, Henry began to build a lucrative practice in Hanover. Virginia had once considered barring all lawyers from the colony because so many of them were unskilled and money-hungry, and at the time Henry opened his office a law forbade lawyers from charging exorbitant fees. Lawyers like the Randolphs were winning respect for the profession, however, and over the next three years Henry carved out a place for himself by representing the poor and the dispossessed. His sympathy came naturally to Henry, who, marrying at eighteen, had been as poor as most of his clients. His bride, Sarah, had been no better off, and between the two sets of parents the newlyweds had received only a tiny farm at a spot called Pine Slash and half a dozen slaves to help them work it. When the house burned down, Henry had sold the slaves to finance one of his unprofitable stores. As a shopkeeper he had learned the perils of depending on tobacco for a living: he was never paid until the crop came in.

  Yet Henry was willing to argue on behalf of the Two Penny Act and the profit it brought to Virginia’s richest planters. Until Parson Maury sued, those tobacco growers had been selling one of their best crops in history at fifty shillings per hundredweight and paying off their debts to tradesmen and the clergy at a rate of sixteen shillings. But the Anglican parsons also represented a ruling class in the colony, which was enough to set Henry against them. The Great Awakening that spread over New England had also reached tiny Hanover, Virginia, and as Patrick was growing up his mother and grandfather had become New Lights, dissenters from the established church. They had taken Patrick to hear a prominent evangelist, Samuel Davies, who argued that freemen
should never be taxed to support a religion they might abhor. The Anglicans found Davies’ style of preaching tasteless and loud, but to Patrick the oratory was a revelation.

  —

  On the Monday morning of James Maury’s hearing for damages, twenty fellow parsons appeared at the small brick courthouse in Hanover to await vindication. Wealthy planters from nearby counties, or parishes, had also come, dressed in velvet and with their hair fashionably powdered. The lesser planters wore homespun, and the townspeople showed up in the sort of leather breeches and coarse linen shirts Patrick Henry wore when he wasn’t in court. Today, he had put on a black robe and the court wig that improved his sallow appearance. On his way into the courthouse, he met his uncle and asked him not to attend the hearing. The Reverend Henry asked why.

  “Because, sire,” said Patrick Henry, “I fear that I shall be too much overawed by your presence to be able to do my duty to my clients. Besides, sire, I shall be obliged to say some hard things of the clergy, and I am very unwilling to give pain to your feelings.”

  His uncle advised Henry that speaking ill of the clergy would do more harm to him than to them. He didn’t think his presence should matter—but since his nephew was asking him so earnestly to leave, Pastor Henry reined his horse about and rode home.

  Inside the courtroom, Patrick’s father, Colonel John Henry, took his seat as the presiding judge. He was one of the few men around Hanover who had been to college, and the judgeship had come to him by default. Many of his townsmen could barely write; women and slaves got no schooling at all. Judge Henry sent the sheriff out to summon twelve gentlemen to serve as jurors. When he returned, Parson Maury was indignant at the choices. Apparently the sheriff had gone to the one tavern where qualified gentlemen were known to congregate, but the first man had asked to be excused and the sheriff hadn’t approached the others. He had gone instead to the town green, where another gentleman also begged off. Then, Parson Maury complained afterward, “he went out among the vulgar herd.” Surveying the sheriff’s candidates, Maury protested that they were neither men of substance nor loyal Anglicans. Patrick Henry insisted that they were all honest men and got them sworn in at once. The spectators knew the reason for his haste. Three jurors were New Lights, and one of them was also Patrick Henry’s cousin.

  After the acrimony over the jury, the trial itself opened tamely. Peter Lyons was entirely at his ease as he summed up the verdict from the previous month. Lyons spoke pleasantly to his opposing counsel and called him “young Pat.”

  Rising for the defense, Patrick Henry submitted a receipt to show that in 1758 Parson Maury had accepted one hundred and forty-four pounds as his year’s salary. He said nothing else, and when he sat down the crowd was disappointed. Lyons concluded his argument by demonstrating that except for the discredited Two Penny Act, the parson would have received four hundred and fifty pounds. He called on the jury to award Maury three hundred British pounds in back pay for the year 1758. Pressing that claim, Lyons praised the Anglican clergy long and reverently.

  When Henry’s turn came, he got to his feet slowly, bowed to the bench and ambled over to the jurors. His first words came falteringly, and after Lyons’ assured performance a lost cause looked doomed still further. Townspeople who liked Henry looked away from him, and the parsons on their bench were seen exchanging smiles. One onlooker thought that Judge Henry seemed ready to slide under his seat from shame.

  Then Patrick Henry underwent a transformation. His mind seemed to turn on and generate heat until he began to glow. His shoulders straightened, and he looked for the first time as though he might be six feet tall. His movements had become graceful, even elegant, but when he turned his eyes on the jurors they saw lightning in them. One man swore afterward that Henry’s voice had made his hair stand on end and his blood run cold.

  Parson Maury was appalled by the beginning of Henry’s harangue, which he considered only a barrage of irrelevant precedents aimed at confusing the jury. But then Patrick Henry went beyond all decency. He announced that a king and his people had a binding contract. The king was duty bound to protect the people, and they were pledged to obey him. The Two Penny Act of 1758 had been good and valid legislation. When King George II did not approve it, he had given evidence of misrule. Whenever that happened, a king ceased to be the father of his people and degenerated into a tyrant.

  At that point, Peter Lyons rose from his chair. “The gentleman has spoken treason,” Lyons said, “and I am astonished that your worships can hear it without emotion or any mark of dissatisfaction.”

  From around the room came murmurs of support: “Treason!” “Treason!”

  The bench refused to interrupt. One juror nodded vigorously at Henry, who rounded now on the parsons. Was a clergyman supposed to set an example of selfishness? Should he want more than his brother outside the church? When a parson became grasping or worldly, was he serving God or serving himself? Shame on greed! said Henry. But especially, shame on pulpit greed!

  “We have heard a great deal,” he went on, “about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy. But how is this manifested? . . . Do they feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Oh, no, gentlemen!

  “These rapacious harpies would, were their power equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoe-cake, from the widow and her orphan children her last milch cow! The last bed—nay, the last blanket—from the lying-in woman!”

  That picture of a mother shivering as she gave birth set the parsons to muttering among themselves. Then they rose from their seats and filed out to the courtyard. Henry went on for almost an hour. In conclusion, he pointed out that the jurors weren’t obliged to award any damages at all. But if they chose to do so, let the damages be nominal. He suggested a farthing.

  After Peter Lyons had spoken again, the jurors went out to deliberate. A moment later, they were back. They had decided that to award a farthing would be insulting to Parson Maury. Instead, they awarded four times more—one penny.

  There was uproar in the court. As the sheriff demanded order and Lyons called for a retrial, spectators lifted Patrick Henry to their shoulders and carried him out to the courtyard. There he sought out James Maury and apologized for any offense he might have given. This time, Henry’s habit of deprecating himself may have provoked him into going too far. Maury told a friend later that Henry had admitted that his only reason for taking the case was to make himself popular. You see, Maury added bitterly, that here is a man who thinks the ready road to popularity is to trample on religion and on the prerogatives of the king.

  For the next few weeks Virginia’s other parsons discussed their options, but they wound up doing nothing. Within a year, Patrick Henry added a hundred and sixty-four new clients to his practice. He had defended the richest men in the colony and made himself the people’s hero. It was the same paradox James Otis had discovered when he took the side of wealthy smugglers and became the most popular man in Boston. Otis and Henry had each learned that it only increased their popularity to have gentlemen opposing them with cries of “Treason!”

  In London, George Grenville had concocted a plan for increasing Britain’s revenues. The Seven Years’ War had swelled the nation’s debt to 130 million pounds, and now Grenville’s advisers were arguing that to protect the colonies England must maintain an army of twenty thousand soldiers in America. Grenville cut their estimate in half, but the expense would still amount to another 220,000 pounds each year. From his service as chancellor of the exchequer, Grenville knew that the colonists could be cunning in evading taxes, but he believed that the time had come for them to bear a fair share of their own defense. In March 1764 he introduced a new schedule of taxes in the House of Commons. The most important was the Sugar Act, which cut the duty on foreign molasses from sixpence a gallon to threepence. But, for the first time, it would be rigorously collected.

  The attractive idea of taxing the colonies had glimmered before. In 1759, William Pitt, the Great Common
er, had been annoyed that some colonial legislatures were being slow to appropriate funds for the war and had asked the governor of Virginia what he thought about levying a direct tax that would bypass them. When the governor wrote back that such a tax was sure to set off a protest, Pitt had dropped the idea. Even earlier, direct taxes had been recommended to Sir Robert Walpole at a time when his popularity was lagging. Walpole had also rejected the thought. “What!” he had said. “I have old England against me, and do you think I will have New England likewise?” He had offered to bequeath the plan to any successor with more courage than he had. Walpole had been willing to overlook America’s rampant smuggling because he calculated that England always got back whatever money the colonies earned, by way of the British goods they had to import. “This is taxing them more agreeably to their own constitution,” Walpole had said, “and ours.”

  When reports of Grenville’s new taxes reached America, the first resistance came from the king’s own party. Governor Bernard warned Parliament that even threepence on molasses was too much. He said that the merchants were predicting that the new tax would kill commerce in Massachusetts.

  Grenville rejected the American protests. Smugglers already paid as much as a penny and a half per gallon on molasses to bribe tax collectors to overlook their shipments. Even with that expense, their trade was flourishing. The merchants could certainly afford another penny and a half to make their business legitimate and assist the mother country. The Massachusetts agent in London, Jasper Mauduit, argued that a tax of one penny would cause no protest and would even generate more revenue than the higher one. But Grenville was convinced of his figures, and Parliament went along without debate. Members added a warning that England might later defray its expenses in America by levying certain stamp duties.