Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, on the Use Americans Make of Their Blessings)

“Whether this [American independence] will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable.—Righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation. Reader! whoever thou art, remember this; and in thy sphere, practise virtue thyself, and encourage it in others.”—American lawyer and patriot Patrick Henry (1732-1799), in the concluding lines of a note found with his will after his death, quoted in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817)

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, on Judging the Future by the ‘Lamp of Experience’)

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”—Virginia orator, governor, and revolutionary patriot Patrick Henry (1736-1799), speech to the Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775, in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, 9th ed., pp. 138–39 (1836, reprinted 1970).

Flashback, January 1786: Jefferson, Madison Team on Religious Freedom Statute

Capping a decade-long effort, Thomas Jefferson (pictured) finally succeeded in getting Virginia to enact a statute of religious freedom that would later serve as a model for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of conscience. But the measure only passed in January 1786 with the help of the younger man who steered it through the legislature, James Madison.

Jefferson regarded the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as so key to his legacy that it was one of only three achievements he wished carved on his gravestone on the grounds of his Monticello estate.(The others were writing the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia--not serving as America's first Secretary of State, or its third President.)

If Jefferson was the architect of religious freedom in the new republic, then Madison was the contractor engaged in translating his blueprint into reality. The latter would play a similar role over the next two decades, assisting Jefferson in forming an opposition party to the economic plans of Alexander Hamilton, in secretly co-writing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions against the Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts, and in acting as Secretary of State through Jefferson’s two terms as President.

Their collaboration began in the 1770s, at a time when religious agitation was echoing the larger mercantile and political unrest convulsing Virginia. In 1774, “Dissenting” ministers—at that point, Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist sects—had been harassed, even beaten and jailed, in the colony. 

In what became Madison’s first important cause, petitions began to arrive at the legislature calling for the “Disestablishment” of the Anglican Church. Two years later, at Virginia’s revolutionary convention, Jefferson joined with Madison in trying to excise all “emoluments and privileges” from religion. But they could only succeed in replacing the phrase “fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” with “free exercise of religion.”

Jefferson particularly felt at a loss in debating the measure, because his weak voice could not advance his powerful words. (For the rest of his career, he tried, whenever possible, to avoid public speaking—even sending the State of the Union summary to Congress in written form, a practice continued by other Presidents until Woodrow Wilson broke with tradition more than a century later.) Thus was joined what he would call "the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged."

The impetus for the eventually successful legislation came in 1784, when Governor Patrick Henry called for taxing Virginians to support the promotion of Christianity. His proposal, which soon garnered widespread support (including from the likes of "Light-Horse Harry" Lee and George Washington), called for individuals to designate the denomination, or even the specific church, that their tax dollars would fund. Those who didn't want to support religion could even elect to put their tax dollars toward education in general.

Madison felt that, seemingly as liberal as this seemed, it was still too intrusive, because the same state authority that could direct funds to any Christian sect could later turn around and designate a particular Christian sect. He lost the original fight in the legislature against Henry, but in the hiatus that followed, rallied opposition to the plan with a powerfully argued “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." With Henry’s proposal now allowed to quietly die in the legislature, Madison seized the moment to reintroduce Jefferson’s measure.

Even then, much like his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, some clauses were stripped away from the three-paragraph statute, including:

*“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds”;

*[God] “manifested his supreme will that free it [the mind] shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint”;

*[God chose] “but to extend it [his plan] by its influence on reason alone”; and that

*“the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”

The deletions revolve around the notion that religious belief depends on reason, an idea that perhaps, to many, smacked too much of Jefferson’s deism. One passage that survived the cuts, in fact, would have been understood by the Protestant legislators as a not-so-subtle jab at Roman Catholicism: “the impious presumption of legislators...[who] have assumed dominion over the faith of others...hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world.”

Jefferson is not my favorite among the Revolutionary War generation. His hypocrisy as a slaveowner is only one of a number of ways in which his political and personal judgment was deficient. He also recognized far too late the damage done by France’s Reign of Terror; blustered about taking Canada with little more than a squadron of gunboats, leaving the United States unprepared when it did invade its northern neighbor in the War of 1812; secretly funded attacks on Hamilton and even George Washington, then denied he had done so; and planted the seeds of secession with his contention, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, that states could nullify federal legislation.

As Jefferson did so often in his political writing, he fashioned a coherent, persuasive brief on the proper role of church and state, only to nearly undo it all with rhetoric that his allies had to water down. The Statute, in fact, contributed to the misperception that he was an atheist.

That did not accurately describe Jefferson’s religious feelings, but they were complicated enough that he realized they could be misconstrued, so he discussed his spiritual search with only a few intimates. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, another deist, he did not believe, more or less, that virtually all religions had good points and deserved his money. As a spiritual corollary to his notion that that government was best which governed least, he felt that that religion was best with the least number of priests. “There would never have been an infidel if there had never been a priest,” he wrote to Mrs. Samuel Smith. Four years before his death, he wrote another confidant, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”

Jefferson could foresee an end to multiple religious sects, but not a day when America could let go of slavery, the “wolf [held] by the ears.” He was wrong on both counts. Yet he correctly saw the egalitarian value of educational institutions and libraries, and, early on, grasped the value and necessity of state non-interference with religion.

In one sense, Jefferson’s defense of religious freedom ultimately helped to preserve the foremost physical embodiment of his legacy. Each year, thousands make the pilgrimage to Monticello, his neoclassically inspired mansion in Virginia’s Piedmont region. What hardly anyone realizes is that it was a near-run thing whether the estate would sink into irretrievable ruin following his death in 1826—and that one of the only reasons it survived was because two of its subsequent owners could not forget the debt of gratitude they owed the author of the religious freedom statute for helping to create a space where they could live out their Jewish faith without fear of harassment or persecution.

Strapped for money, Jefferson could not maintain Monticello in the last few years before his death, leaving the grounds in what several observers saw as “slovenly” conditions. Charlottesville druggist James Barclay, upon buying the property from Jefferson’s daughter, allowed it to continue to deteriorate. It took Lt. (later Commodore) Uriah P. Levy, who bought Monticello from Barclay in 1834, and his nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, to stop the estate’s decay and restore it to at least something like its old grandeur.

Uriah Levy’s admiration for Jefferson was unconditional: “I consider Thomas Jefferson to be one of the greatest men in history, the author of the Declaration and an absolute democrat. He serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans. He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life."

Had Lt. Levy known of Jefferson’s private views, he might have experienced something like the surprise I had in Providence in mid-fall, when I discovered that that earlier champion of religious tolerance, Roger Williams, had been scathing in his views on Catholics. In Jefferson’s case, he regarded Jewish ideas of God and his attributes as “degrading and injurious,” and their ethics “often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality” and “repulsive and anti-social as respecting other nations.”

At the same time, Jefferson was not anti-Semitic; he was merely submitting Judaism to the same skeptical focus he trained on all religions, and particularly any in which a mediating minister was involved. But he did think that any person was free to believe as exactly as they might wish, no matter how illogical or wrongheaded he personally might regard it. 

As he put it, in most succinct and memorable form, in Notes on the State of Virginia: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, Starting a Revolution)

"Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third - ["Treason!" cried the Speaker] - may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." – Patrick Henry, Speech on the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of Burgesses, May 30, 1765

As I indicated in a post from a year and a half ago, it took a comparatively long time—into his late twenties, actually—before Patrick Henry (1736-1799) began to find his way in life, as a foe of entrenched privilege, in “The Parsons’ Cause,” a case involving public funding for Anglican ministers—and one of the significant early milestones in the American separation of church and state. In a sense, he found his way by finding his voice, in an address to the jury that won Henry a reputation for eloquence.

Now look at the above quote—perhaps the orator’s most famous, after “Give me liberty or give me death.” Posterity has given him a reputation as one of the firebrands of the period leading up to the American Revolution, but there’s another quality that strikes me in this: a sense of cool improvisation.

Interruptions in the middle of a speech can catch almost anyone off-guard, especially a new legislator who had only taken his seat nine days before, as was the case here.

But Henry was not only unruffled by the outburst from the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, but delivered an almost astonishing comeback line. He was used to thinking on his feet, able to spin a web of words from the sketchiest of notes, as he had done the day before—245 years ago today—when he took seven resolutions scrawled on the blank leaf of a law book and put them before the House of Burgesses.

Perhaps King George III, his ministers, and Parliament thought that their subjects would grumble about the Stamp Act, which required the colonists to pay a tax on every piece of paper they used. Henry’s Stamp Act Resolves, however, introduced a mere two months after the legislation passed (remember that, in those days, it took far longer for news to travel across the ocean), put them on notice that they were profoundly mistaken, and had now stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Nowadays, Henry’s speech has taken on additional historical interest, for a reason many would not have dreamed of years ago: the question of how he expressed his controversial thoughts, and if he even backed away from it.

There were, of course, no electronic devices to record verbatim what speakers said. Moreover, as I indicated above, Henry tended to talk extemporaneously. Even his “Give me liberty or give me death” address was a reconstruction by an early biographer, William Wirt.

A more recent biographer, University of Pennsylvania historian Richard Beeman, has sifted through the available documentary records about “If this be treason” and, intriguingly, found one contemporary eyewitness who claimed that, almost immediately after blurting out his statement, Henry hastened to assure the House that he remained a loyal subject of the crown. Doing so, I would suspect, would predispose this group of conservative aristocrats to look more kindly on resolutions that, after all, were rooted in established British rights, such as the right to be taxed by one’s representatives.

Beeman’s biography has been well-received and his research sounds extensively painstaking. On the other hand, there are other reasons to suppose that the traditional account of Henry’s words might not be not that far off the mark.

1) In his summation in the Parsons’ Cause case, Henry had already called into question the moral authority of the King and his ministers to force the Virginia colonists to fund Anglican ministers: “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.” Would he have muted his opposition to a measure even more egregious?

2) Henry might not have cared that much for putting conservatives into the right frame of mind to listen to his arguments. He introduced his resolutions, after all, when many were away from Williamsburg. All he needed was 24% of members to reach a quorum. The group ended up passing four of the seven resolutions he introduced.

3) Another eyewitness retained a vivid memory of what he heard. Thomas Jefferson, then a 22-year-old student at William and Mary College, happened to be standing in the doorway of the House of Burgesses during Henry’s electrifying address. Years later, political differences would convert Henry and Jefferson from allies into foes.

But even after this point had been reached, Jefferson still remembered Henry’s opposition as blunt and full-throated. "I well remember the cry of treason," Jefferson wrote afterward, "the pause of Mr. Henry at the name of George III, and the presence of mind with which he closed his sentence, and baffled the charge vociferated."

Years later, Jefferson would have had every reason to deprecate Henry’s utterance, if he could have done so. He didn’t, suggesting that knowledge of it was so well-known that to dispute its impact would have been laughable.

Ten years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry had let the British government know, in no uncertain terms, that opposition to its meddling in colonial affairs would not be confined to Massachusetts. Ten years before Lexington, he had fired his own rhetorical shot heard 'round the world.

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, On Liberty)

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”—Patrick Henry (1736-1799), Speech to Virginia delegates, March 23, 1775, St. John’s Church, Richmond, Va., urging them to vote for his resolution putting the colony “into a posture of defense...embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient for that purpose.”

This Day in Colonial History (Patrick Henry Seizes the Public Stage)

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."

This Day in Constitutional History (Patrick Henry Demands a Bill of Rights)

June 16, 1788 – With approval of the new Constitution of the United States hanging in the balance, one of its most formidable opponents, Patrick Henry, exercised his considerable oratorical powers in denouncing it at the Virginia Ratification Convention as an assault on the rights of individuals and states. So potent was his criticism that one of his most strenuous objections—to the lack of a “bill of rights” in the Constitution—required immediate redress to secure passage.

At the same time, Henry’s opposition demonstrates one of the enduring factors in American political history: more often than not, it’s personality clashes, not ideological differences, that make for the most poisonous relationships. Think Bobby Kennedy and LBJ, FDR and Al Smith in the 1930s, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama today.

Henry vs. Jefferson and Madison: The Personal Becomes the Political

Henry’s chief adversary at the Virginia Ratification Convention was James Madison. As the great friend and chief political ally of Thomas Jefferson, Madison caught residual flak that would have normally hit the Sage of Monticello. As it happened, though both Henry and Jefferson voiced words that have been memorized ever since by schoolchildren (“Give me liberty or give me death!” and “All men are created equal”), they fell out during the American Revolution.

The young Jefferson listened enthralled to Henry’s speeches in the Virginia House of Burgesses, echoing comparing his utterances to Homer. The two men’s relationship, however, deteriorated late in the war, when the legislature, at former governor Henry’s strong urging, launched an inquiry into whether Jefferson had adequately prepared Virginia for the British invasion that year. Jefferson survived the inquiry, but his resentment—and Henry’s—lingered.

Three years later, a new cause for argument sprang up between Jefferson and Henry—now back as governor. The religiously devout Henry had called for a general tax assessment on all freeholders to support churches and schools, but Madison convinced the legislature to pass instead Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom.

Nearly a decade later, Jefferson paid a new, younger rival, Alexander Hamilton, the highest of inadvertent compliments by calling him “a host unto himself” who needed to be stopped. Madison paid a similar backhanded compliment by pushing Henry’s candidacy for governor.

You might be thinking this was a particularly kind way of thanking the great American patriot for his service to the cause. No such thing. What Madison was really after was to get Henry kicked upstairs, into an office where he could not sway legislators 24/7, as he used to do.

Henry and the Constitution: “I Smell a Rat”

When it came time for a constitutional convention, Madison could not ignore the state’s most popular vote-getter, so Henry was invited to attend as a delegate. Henry responded tersely, with another utterance that has become part of the American idiom: “I smell a rat.”

The “rat” in this case was the Constitution, designed to replace Articles of Confederation, the form of government used by the rebels after declaring independence. The war revealed its near-fatal weaknesses in multiple ways, and precious few people wanted it left intact. The more radical attendees at the convention wanted it scrapped; others, such as Henry, preferred to mend, rather than end, it.

By the end of May 1788, the Constitution’s proponents, the Federalists, had gained the approval of eight state ratifying conventions. The rest of the going, however, was by no means a sure thing. It took Rhode Island and North Carolina nearly two years to ratify, and even then they only did so after Congress agreed to send 12 amendments to the states for ratification. (Of course, only 10 ended up being approved in this original group.)

The battleground states became New Hampshire, Virginia and New York. Historians’ best guesses are that Federalists and Anti-Federalists were in a dead heat in New Hampshire and Virginia, while in New York the Federalists were outnumbered by more than two to one.

Because of the lack of speed of communication during that time, the Virginia delegates did not realize until several weeks later that New Hampshire had assured passage of the Constitution by the required nine states by voting affirmatively on June 21. I

n another sense, however, it didn’t matter. The new union could certainly survive without Rhode Island and might even make it without North Carolina. Without the two largest states of New York and Virginia, however, the new form of government would be dealt a crushing, maybe fatal, blow.

The Virginia Ratification Convention: Clash of Titans

The Federalists and Anti-Federalists fielded a host of future luminaries on each side. Arguing affirmatively with Madison for the Constitution were future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Marshall and Governor Edmund Randolph, later to become George Washington’s Attorney General and Secretary of State. Lining up behind Henry in opposition were George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights (who refused to sign the finished Constitution) and future President James Monroe.

Once again, Henry showed why he was a dangerous adversary in political battle. Even before he really got going, he already had the ratification convention in an uproar by refusing to abide by the delegates’ initial agreement to debate the document point by point. No, he insisted, it must be considered in totality.

Then Henry made it personal: Wasn’t Governor Randolph being “inconsistent” by refusing to sign the Constitution when he had the choice to do so in Philadelphia as a delegate?

Randolph’s response was about as effective as John Kerry’s claim, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” With eight states ratifying it and the country in crisis, why not close ranks, Randolph pleaded nervously? In the meantime, didn’t he deserve an apology from Henry for his “aspersions and his insinuations”?

The Old Spellbinder Works His Magic Again

Nothing doing. Somewhat stooped at six feet tall, wearing spectacles, Henry could still command attention when his blue eyes came alive. Jefferson might have been the inventor of the democratic engine and Madison its ace mechanic, but Henry was its Richard Petty.

Even before the orator said a word, noted Madison, a simple gesture of his could undo an hour’s work of his opponents. And when that confident voice rose, boomed and fell – well, let’s just say it was a far cry from Madison, who, on more than one occasion, according to an account of the proceedings, “spoke too low to be understood.” (After one particularly strenuous debate, Madison took to his bed for the following three days.)

Henry poured scorn on the Constitution for its centralized government that opened the way to dictatorship. Among other points, he charged that the Constitution:

* lacked adequate checks and balances
* gave the central government the power of direct taxation
* opened the central government to the possibility of tyrants.

In all, Henry spoke on 18 out of the 23 days at the ratification convention, comprising a quarter of all speeches recorded. On June 16 alone, four speeches took on different weaknesses he saw in the Constitution: the Army, the militia, the District of Columbia, and, most consequentially, the perils of a republic without a bill of rights:

“The officers of Congress may come upon you now, fortified with all with all the terrors of paramount federal authority. Excisemen may come in multitudes; for the limitation of their numbers no man knows. They may, unless the general government be restrained by a bill of rights, or some similar restriction, go into your cellars and rooms, and search, ransack, and measure, every thing you eat, drink, and wear.”

Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia vividly recounts Henry’s impact in a quote from delegate Hugh Grigsby, who noted that one of his fellow listeners “involuntarily felt his wrists to assure himself that the fetters were not already pressing his flesh. The gallery on which he was sitting seemed to become dark as a dudgeon.”

When the final vote came, Henry had lost, but by only an 89-79 margin. I would argue that his loss was the American people’s gain. To swing votes away from Henry, Madison had to agree to introduce a Bill of Rights at the first available opportunity in the new Congress.

Once More Into the Breach

Henry’s call for a second Constitutional Convention, to repair the mistakes made the first time, fell on deaf ears. With his health uncertain and his family obligations increasing, he needed to attend to clients who were willing to pay for his spellbinding oratory before jurors.

For a long time, Henry also saw no necessity to join a government whose form he opposed, so he turned down offers by George Washington to become a justice of the Supreme Court and secretary of state. However, though his sympathy for Federalism didn’t increase markedly, his antipathy for Jefferson and Madison did.

The French Revolution’s growing anti-clericalism (in Henry’s view, its atheistic tendencies) and the Democratic-Republicans’ defense of the regime lured the Virginian out of retirement. In a stance that represented something of a 180-degree turn in his previous thinking, he opposed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (created anonymously by Jefferson and Madison as means to interpose state authority against the Alien and Sedition Acts) as threats to the federal authority he had long feared.

Preceding Washington by more than a decade in his loathing for virtually all things Jeffersonian, Henry now proved amenable to the old general’s appeals to re-enter the political arena by running again for the Virginia state legislature as a Federalist. Henry’s stance alienated that not-inconsiderable portion of his old political base that now belonged to Jefferson and Madison, but he managed to win the election.

Yet the stress of the campaign broke his already fragile health, and like Washington he died in 1799—in this case, reconciled, if only by certain longstanding personal antagonisms, to a form of government on which he had once rained rhetorical thunderbolts. Tim Russert, may he rest in peace, had he been alive at the creation of the republic, would undoubtedly have read one of the Son of Thunder’s old soundbites and asked him to explain his current seeming inconsistency.

Don't Ask, "What Would Patrick Do?"

Patrick Henry’s battle over the Constitution illustrates the truth of the adage often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself—it rhymes.” In other words, certain present and past circumstances may seem similar, but their differences require our scrutiny.

Specifically, the issues raised by Henry about the role of the federal government remain as alive today as in his own time. The Bill of Rights that he advocated has helped immeasurably in protecting the rights of individuals, though it is an open question whether Henry would welcome federal courts’ growing willingness to apply the protections of amendments to the constitution to state as well as federal law.

Nevertheless, it’s dangerous to ask “What would Patrick (or George, or Thomas, or James) do?” Henry’s career vividly illustrates how personal differences can mix with purely ideological arguments, even ones, such as his with Madison and the Federalists, conducted at the highest intellectual levels. Though they prided themselves – and continue to be regarded as such by a grateful posterity—as the most rational of men, the Founding Fathers were also led inevitably, by the forces of pride and resentment, into political battles that neither they nor we could have foreseen by a cold, hard reading of their early speeches and actions.