Madison and Jefferson by Nancy Isenberg, Andrew Burstein Read Free Book Online Page B

reach.” He reminded the colonists that they were vulnerable to Indian uprisings too.
    Henry never made it to Williamsburg. The leaders of the Virginia Convention convinced him not to proceed, having arranged a truce of sorts in which the governor agreed to compensate the colonists for the gunpowder. Still bent on retribution, Dunmore declared Henry an outlaw, which only made Henry more of a hero; county after county rallied to his defense. When he set out for Philadelphia to resume his seat in the Continental Congress, three companies decked out in full military dress escorted him to the Maryland border. Through one intemperate act, the colonial governor had ensured that his chief rival became Virginia’s champion.
    Having watched these events unfold, Madison wrote William Bradford a detailed account. Fully aware that most of Virginia’s leadership disapproved of Henry’s action, he wholeheartedly sided with Henry for his resolute effort “to procure redress.” In “the most spirited parts of the country,” Madison said, Henry’s boldness had “gained him much honor” among the citizenry.
    He himself was one of those citizens, drafting an address to express thanks to Henry, which he and his father both signed as ranking members of the Orange County Committee of Safety. In this message to the public, published in the
Virginia Gazette
, Madison contended that Henry had the right to use “violence and reprisal” even if vengeance was his sole motivation. Conditions had changed with the “blow struck” at Lexington and Concord. The time for reconciliation was past. 24
    At this historic moment, then, Madison’s thinking was closest to Henry’s, setting him apart from Jefferson and Pendleton, who saw Henry asa man of impulse unable to resist responding to Dunmore’s provocations. Sizing up the magazine incident, Pendleton concluded that “the Sanguine are for rash measures without consideration, the Flegmatic to avoid that extreme are afraid to move at all, while a third Class take the middle way” toward a “Steddy tho Active Point of defense.” Henry’s boldness had shifted the balance of power away from the middle ground. Jefferson echoed this view in a letter to William Small, his college mathematics professor, now living in England. He worried that Dunmore had unleashed the “almost ungovernable fury of the people,” which no one but the “more intelligent people” of Virginia could temper. In Jefferson’s mind, Henry deserved no thanks. 25
    Young Madison had no fear of popular passions and no wish to restrain Henry. He was so deep in the marchers’ column and so uncomfortable with Jefferson and the moderates that he bought into a rumor that the half-blind sixty-five-year-old Richard Bland, in Congress at Philadelphia, had “turned traitor” after having been offered a lucrative job by the British. “We all know age is no stranger to avarice,” Madison charged, willing even to believe that the venerable Benjamin Franklin had returned from fruitless negotiations in London no longer worthy of the patriots’ trust. “Indeed it appears to me that the bare suspicion of his guilt amounts very nearly to a proof of its reality,” Madison stated, jumping to conclusions well at odds with his later reputation for reasoned analysis. 26
    Dunmore’s real transgression—his most inflammatory act—was the undisguised “malice,” as Madison termed it, of threatening to incite a slave uprising. Virginians were not taken by surprise, however. Rumors had been circulating that the design of the British administration all along was to pass an act freeing slaves and servants so that they could then take arms against the Americans. Congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee believed that Americans should free their slaves before the British did. Months before Dunmore revealed his plans, Madison had written to Bradford that he feared an insurrection. There had been a meeting of slaves (“a few … unhappy