Patrick Henry by Thomas S. Kidd Read Free Book Online Page A

Henry” was trying to destroy the incipient Union. “Now is the critical hour and which in Virginia remarkable from the opinion of Mr. Henry the fate of America seems now to depend.” If the Constitution failed there, Crèvecoeur believed, “the flames of civil war I am persuaded will be first kindled in your country, for both parties are and will be still more incensed against each other.” 4
    The fifty-two-year-old Henry was used to these kinds of accusations. He had heard them for most of his adult life, beginning with his legislative resolutions against the Stamp Act in 1765, the action that inaugurated the Revolutionary crisis with Britain. “Twenty-three years ago,” Henry mused, “I was supposed a traitor to my country: I was then said to be a bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country.” And here he was again—a man first among patriots, denounced as a turncoat. 5

    In his final speech at the Richmond ratifying convention, Henry evoked a vision of monitory angelic figures, to emphasize the gravity of Virginia’s decision. The vote over ratification was an epochal moment in the history of human liberty, Henry declared. “I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.—I see it—I feel it.—I see beings of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision.” As he pleaded with his colleagues not to shackle themselves by consenting to this powerful new government, a howling storm arose outside the hall. Thunder crashed; delegates took cover under tables. Henry’s first biographer wrote that the “spirits whom he had called, seemed to have come at his bidding.” And yet when the vote was cast, Henry lost. Virginia—and the United States—embraced the Constitution. 6
    Patrick Henry always wondered whether Americans had the moral and political fortitude to safeguard the American Revolution. To him, the Revolution promised a return to the best kind of republic: a virtuous society with robust local governments. In his view, and the view of many other patriots, moral dissipation and consolidated political power set the stage for tyranny. From his own education in the classics, he knew that republics had fallen many times throughout history. Henry had witnessed, and eloquently decried, the tyranny that had threatened the American colonies from 1765 to 1775 and incited a revolution. In 1788, with the war for independence won, Henry believed that the new republic was in peril again. Although he would reconcile himself tentatively to the outcome of ratification, Henry never got over the feeling that when Virginia approved the Constitution, the Revolution was lost. This patriot believed that he had helped America win its independence, only to find the legacy of the Revolution forsaken by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
    Can we still place Henry in the pantheon of leading Founders if
he opposed the Constitution? Can a sincere patriot question the Constitution itself, the document that has ostensibly become the bedrock of national freedom? Whatever we think of his resistance to the “more perfect union” embraced by other patriots, Henry’s opposition to the Constitution was born out of the cause that defined his career, an unshakeable commitment to liberty.

EPILOGUE
    â€œMourn Virginia Mourn!”
    The Legacy of Patrick Henry
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    PATRICK HENRY REMAINED a controversial figure literally until the day he died. Even as Henry was passing from this life, the rabidly Republican Vermont Gazette published an attack accusing him of being in thrall to the Federalists. Responding to rumors that Henry might replace Adams as the Federalist candidate for president in the 1800 election, the writer suggested that Federalists had manipulated the great patriot in his old age: “his mind no longer quick to the apprehension of worldly deceit, the