Patrick Henry by Thomas S. Kidd Read Free Book Online

INTRODUCTION
    â€œThe Nefarious and Highly Criminal” Patrick Henry Patrick Henry in American Memory

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    P ATRICK HENRY’S CAREER was celebrated the most for his speeches. His performances summoned the memory of ancient heroes of the Greek and Roman republics who rallied their citizens to a noble and urgent cause with orations that changed history and made history themselves. But one of Henry’s speeches thunders above his others in American patriotic memory: the address to the Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond in 1775, when he shamed reluctant colonial delegates into taking defensive measures against the British. Tension between crown and colonists was at a historic high, and many Americans expected war to begin shortly. Some Virginia delegates continued to push for reconciliation with Britain, which to Henry seemed cowardly. “We must fight! I
repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us!” he declared, his voice echoing in the rafters of the white clapboard church, the only building in Richmond large enough to hold the delegates. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” With this, Henry raised his arms and bellowed, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” 1
    The speech represented Henry as “his pure self,” said future Virginia governor Edmund Randolph. “It blazed so as to warm the coldest heart. In the sacred place of meeting, the church, the imagination had no difficulty to conceive, when he launched forth in solemn tones various causes of scruple against oppressors, that the British king was lying prostrate from the thunder of heaven.” Without a doubt, Henry’s rousing call to arms was the most electrifying speech of the Revolution. 2
    There was, however, another, lesser-known speech that framed Henry’s remarkable career, a speech that revealed a different but no less fervent aspect of Henry’s belief in political liberty. It came thirteen years later, at the Virginia convention tasked with evaluating the new U.S. Constitution, and accepting or rejecting the charter that would bind Americans into a firmer union. The vote among the delegates for ratification would be very close. Henry warned that in his mind’s eye he could see angels watching, “reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America, and consequent happiness or misery of mankind—I am led to believe that much of the account on one side or the other, will depend on what we now decide.” 3
    But here is the surprise: Henry was an anti-federalist. He believed that Americans would secure their own destruction if they ratified the Constitution.

    With its stirring summons to “liberty or death,” Henry’s 1775 oration fits easily into American patriotic history. It is more difficult to account for Henry’s opposition to the Constitution, because it leads us to confront a less familiar, and more problematic and enduring question raised by the American Revolution: Now that the people had won liberty, how might it be preserved? No one deserved more credit for the Revolution than Henry, and that fact alone makes his life a compelling one to study. But by 1788, Henry had begun to fear that the Revolution was in deep trouble. For him, the Constitution was no culmination of the Revolution. Ratifying the Constitution betrayed the Revolution because it threatened to forfeit America’s freedom.
    Some Federalists—supporters of the Constitution—truly loathed Henry for his opposition to the Constitution. The French writer St. John de Crèvecoeur, a longtime resident of New York and vehement Federalist, wrote to a friend from Virginia that the “nefarious and highly criminal P.