Dec. 1, 1763—The verdict had already been decided, with only damages to be determined, and the attorney about to address the jury—a 27-year-old of careless appearance, with a history of one failed profession after another behind him—made a distinctly unprepossessing appearance. But by the time Patrick Henry was finished, the audience was spellbound, word had spread of his oratorical powers, and the career of one of the great firebrands of the American Revolution had begun in earnest.
“The Parson’s Cause” not only won Henry his first significant public notice, however, but represented a signpost in the American movement toward separation of church and state. It brought into question the system of public funding for the Anglican Church. Two decades later, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom would be passed, and within another five years the separation of church and state would be enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The case in which Henry made his mark stemmed from the manner in which ministers of the Church of England were paid by Virginia colonists. From the colony’s founding, Anglican ministers received their pay through tobacco. When prices for this much-desired commodity boomed, they benefited; when low, they were forced to scrimp, save and do without.
It sounds to me a little like getting pay in the form of stock—living high on the hog, so to speak, in a bull market, but groaning when it hits the skids.
Now, if they had wanted, colonists could have used an analogy that these men of the cloth would have understood: “During the Seven Fat Years, make sure you save for the Seven Lean Years.”
Notice I say “understood,” not “appreciated,” because, like anyone else, the ministers didn’t like living in uncertainty. So another payment approach was tried, beginning in 1748: setting annual salaries for ministers at 16,000 pounds of tobacco, which they could sell for what they could get.
But a spell of bad crops led the Virginia House of Burgesses to tinker with the formula again. Now paper money became the preferred form of ministerial payment, at a fixed price per pound of tobacco. The so-called “Two Penny Act” did not please the ministers at all.
The Anglican ministers were not awfully popular—particularly so with colonists who weren’t members of the church but were still obligated to pay for their upkeep and maintenance, like the increasingly numerous Baptists and Presbyterians. The legislature, listening to their views, wouldn’t allow the ministers any traction on the issue. Nor would the governor. So the divines took their case to the King’s Council in London, which not only agreed with them but said they could sue for damages in Virginia’s courts.
One of the many ministers who looked to the courts for redress was a Dublin-born minister, the Rev. James Maury, who had the distinction not only of teaching three U.S. Presidents and five signers of the Declaration of Independence (the lessons evidently never took with one pupil, the fiercely anti-clerical Jefferson) but also of being the grandfather of the great 19th-century oceanographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury. The Court of Hanover County sided with Maury, setting Dec. 1, 1763 as the date for determining how much he would be owed.
The Hanover County tax collector, Thomas Johnson, was in a bind—doubly so now since his attorney, now that he’d lost the case, was leaving the mop-up work to his young friend, Patrick Henry.
To call Henry a late bloomer would be doing him far more justice than he deserved. He had a fine mind, all right, but family finances prevented him from attending college. He failed at keeping a country store, failed at farming, failed at keeping another country store. He finally succeeded in obtaining a law degree, but put off going full-tilt into practice, on the advice of an associate who urged him to read more widely in his new discipline. Henry didn’t mind, since it meant he could yack with friends to his heart’s content.
And so, a ne’er-do-well was trying to get Johnson from being taken to the cleaners. Everyone expected it, including other Anglican parsons who crowded into the Hanover County Courthouse, expecting to see what would be established as a baseline for their own suits. They didn’t even worry that Henry’s father John was presiding at the trial: Henry Sr. had a brother who was a minister, and besides, there wasn’t even a doubt of the verdict—now it would all be a division of the spoils.
As young Henry began his defense, all their suspicions seemed to be confirmed. He started “with apparent embarrassment and some awkwardness,” according to his biographer, William Wirt. Think Joe Pesci at the start of My Cousin Vinny (one of my favorite comedies, incidentally).
Can you imagine how John Henry must have felt while beholding his son’s stumbling performance? Maybe something like this: I taught you Latin, Greek and mathematics for five years. I know we were poor and I couldn’t afford anything better for you, but please—don’t embarrass your old man in front of this crowd!
And then, something remarkable occurred: Young Henry found his groove and didn’t let up. It even manifested itself physically, as his posture straightened and his eyes flashed. Maury’s lawyer left him an opening by requesting triple damages and praising the Anglican Church. Big mistake!
We’ve been ruined by C-Span to accept the most meager porridge as oratory. If you want a real stemwinder of an address, see what Henry does with this notion of a reverent crew:
We have heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy, but how is this manifested? Do they manifest their zeal in the cause of religion and humanity by practicing the mild and benevolent precepts of the Gospel of Jesus? Do they feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Oh, no, gentlemen! Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these rapacious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoecake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow! The last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in woman!
Then the young lawyer turned to the king. “A King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people degenerated into a Tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience,” he said.
Think of what’s happening here: a Southern answer to James Otis, a young Massachusetts attorney who’d resigned from the office of Advocate General for his colony so he could represent merchants being prosecuted under the Writs of Assistance. And it was not merely the wisdom of Parliament being called into question—it’s the King’s. The intellectual foundations of rebellion were being set.
The jurors could render a monetary judgment for Rev. Maury, Henry said, but they need not give him more than a farthing.
The effect of all this was electric. The jurors sat slackjawed at the young attorney’s audacity, so stunned by his eloquence that they awarded Rev. Maury only a penny.
Ironically, an attorney who made his name through opposition to religious authority would become associated in his later years with a conservatism derived from his own personal piety. The statute of religious freedom passed with the help of Jefferson and Madison, as I explained in a prior post, arose in opposition to Governor Henry’s plan for a general tax assessment on all freeholders to support churches and schools. In the late 1790s, alarmed by the French Revolution’s anticlerical tendencies, he was lured out of retirement to enter the political arena again.
But all of that was still a long way in the future. In 1763, the buzz was all about this young attorney, who, as a result of the Parsons’ Cause, would gain not only an enhanced legal practice but a political following fervent enough to win him election to the House of Burgesses. This was the first real hint of the man who would become known as “the Son of Thunder” for utterances such as “If this be treason, make the most of it!” and “Give me liberty and give me death.”
For a particularly intriguing take on this seminal moment in the early career of the great orator, I urge you to look at this post from the blog "Diana’s Golden Apples."
“The Parson’s Cause” not only won Henry his first significant public notice, however, but represented a signpost in the American movement toward separation of church and state. It brought into question the system of public funding for the Anglican Church. Two decades later, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom would be passed, and within another five years the separation of church and state would be enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The case in which Henry made his mark stemmed from the manner in which ministers of the Church of England were paid by Virginia colonists. From the colony’s founding, Anglican ministers received their pay through tobacco. When prices for this much-desired commodity boomed, they benefited; when low, they were forced to scrimp, save and do without.
It sounds to me a little like getting pay in the form of stock—living high on the hog, so to speak, in a bull market, but groaning when it hits the skids.
Now, if they had wanted, colonists could have used an analogy that these men of the cloth would have understood: “During the Seven Fat Years, make sure you save for the Seven Lean Years.”
Notice I say “understood,” not “appreciated,” because, like anyone else, the ministers didn’t like living in uncertainty. So another payment approach was tried, beginning in 1748: setting annual salaries for ministers at 16,000 pounds of tobacco, which they could sell for what they could get.
But a spell of bad crops led the Virginia House of Burgesses to tinker with the formula again. Now paper money became the preferred form of ministerial payment, at a fixed price per pound of tobacco. The so-called “Two Penny Act” did not please the ministers at all.
The Anglican ministers were not awfully popular—particularly so with colonists who weren’t members of the church but were still obligated to pay for their upkeep and maintenance, like the increasingly numerous Baptists and Presbyterians. The legislature, listening to their views, wouldn’t allow the ministers any traction on the issue. Nor would the governor. So the divines took their case to the King’s Council in London, which not only agreed with them but said they could sue for damages in Virginia’s courts.
One of the many ministers who looked to the courts for redress was a Dublin-born minister, the Rev. James Maury, who had the distinction not only of teaching three U.S. Presidents and five signers of the Declaration of Independence (the lessons evidently never took with one pupil, the fiercely anti-clerical Jefferson) but also of being the grandfather of the great 19th-century oceanographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury. The Court of Hanover County sided with Maury, setting Dec. 1, 1763 as the date for determining how much he would be owed.
The Hanover County tax collector, Thomas Johnson, was in a bind—doubly so now since his attorney, now that he’d lost the case, was leaving the mop-up work to his young friend, Patrick Henry.
To call Henry a late bloomer would be doing him far more justice than he deserved. He had a fine mind, all right, but family finances prevented him from attending college. He failed at keeping a country store, failed at farming, failed at keeping another country store. He finally succeeded in obtaining a law degree, but put off going full-tilt into practice, on the advice of an associate who urged him to read more widely in his new discipline. Henry didn’t mind, since it meant he could yack with friends to his heart’s content.
And so, a ne’er-do-well was trying to get Johnson from being taken to the cleaners. Everyone expected it, including other Anglican parsons who crowded into the Hanover County Courthouse, expecting to see what would be established as a baseline for their own suits. They didn’t even worry that Henry’s father John was presiding at the trial: Henry Sr. had a brother who was a minister, and besides, there wasn’t even a doubt of the verdict—now it would all be a division of the spoils.
As young Henry began his defense, all their suspicions seemed to be confirmed. He started “with apparent embarrassment and some awkwardness,” according to his biographer, William Wirt. Think Joe Pesci at the start of My Cousin Vinny (one of my favorite comedies, incidentally).
Can you imagine how John Henry must have felt while beholding his son’s stumbling performance? Maybe something like this: I taught you Latin, Greek and mathematics for five years. I know we were poor and I couldn’t afford anything better for you, but please—don’t embarrass your old man in front of this crowd!
And then, something remarkable occurred: Young Henry found his groove and didn’t let up. It even manifested itself physically, as his posture straightened and his eyes flashed. Maury’s lawyer left him an opening by requesting triple damages and praising the Anglican Church. Big mistake!
We’ve been ruined by C-Span to accept the most meager porridge as oratory. If you want a real stemwinder of an address, see what Henry does with this notion of a reverent crew:
We have heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy, but how is this manifested? Do they manifest their zeal in the cause of religion and humanity by practicing the mild and benevolent precepts of the Gospel of Jesus? Do they feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Oh, no, gentlemen! Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these rapacious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoecake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow! The last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in woman!
Then the young lawyer turned to the king. “A King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people degenerated into a Tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience,” he said.
Think of what’s happening here: a Southern answer to James Otis, a young Massachusetts attorney who’d resigned from the office of Advocate General for his colony so he could represent merchants being prosecuted under the Writs of Assistance. And it was not merely the wisdom of Parliament being called into question—it’s the King’s. The intellectual foundations of rebellion were being set.
The jurors could render a monetary judgment for Rev. Maury, Henry said, but they need not give him more than a farthing.
The effect of all this was electric. The jurors sat slackjawed at the young attorney’s audacity, so stunned by his eloquence that they awarded Rev. Maury only a penny.
Ironically, an attorney who made his name through opposition to religious authority would become associated in his later years with a conservatism derived from his own personal piety. The statute of religious freedom passed with the help of Jefferson and Madison, as I explained in a prior post, arose in opposition to Governor Henry’s plan for a general tax assessment on all freeholders to support churches and schools. In the late 1790s, alarmed by the French Revolution’s anticlerical tendencies, he was lured out of retirement to enter the political arena again.
But all of that was still a long way in the future. In 1763, the buzz was all about this young attorney, who, as a result of the Parsons’ Cause, would gain not only an enhanced legal practice but a political following fervent enough to win him election to the House of Burgesses. This was the first real hint of the man who would become known as “the Son of Thunder” for utterances such as “If this be treason, make the most of it!” and “Give me liberty and give me death.”
For a particularly intriguing take on this seminal moment in the early career of the great orator, I urge you to look at this post from the blog "Diana’s Golden Apples."
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