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

insuspicious temper of his dotage, or second childhood has made him a dupe.” To the end, the mere possibility of Henry’s return to the national political stage made news and caused consternation across the country. 1
    Along with his critics, Henry still had many friends and admirers, as revealed in his obituary in the Virginia Gazette :
    Mourn Virginia Mourn! Your Henry is gone! Ye friends to liberty in every clime, drop a tear. No more will his social feelings spread delight through his happy house. No more will his edifying example dictate to his numerous offspring the sweetness of virtue and the majesty of patriotism....
    Farewell, first-rate patriot, farewell! As long as our rivers flow, or mountains stand—so long will your excellence and worth be the theme of homage and endearment, and Virginia, bearing in mind her loss, will say to rising generations, imitate my HENRY. 2
    This eulogy captured the great themes in Henry’s career: liberty, virtue, and patriotism.
    Henry’s death might have been expected to cool political animosity toward him among Virginia Republicans, but even months later, at the end of 1799, the bitterness lingered. In the Virginia House of Delegates, a resolution honoring Henry for his unsurpassed eloquence in the cause of liberty and virtue, and sanctioning the placement of a marble bust of Henry in the legislative hall, was tabled by a significant majority. 3
    Time and Republican ascendancy did soothe some bad feelings toward Henry. By the early nineteenth century, he had begun to develop his now-familiar posthumous reputation as the greatest orator of the Revolution. This portrait was definitively painted by William Wirt’s admiring 1817 biography, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry , which focused much more on Henry’s natural brilliance as a speaker than the content of his thought. Wirt’s Henry was a wondrous phenomenon, the “Orator of Nature” who spurred the Revolution by his prodigious talents alone. The book was hugely successful, with twenty-five editions published by 1871. 4
    Wirt corresponded extensively with Henry’s old nemesis Jefferson about the biography. Jefferson was exceedingly frank in his assessment. Jefferson admitted that the two men had been friends until
1781, when they parted ways politically and personally. Jefferson commended Henry as the “greatest orator that ever lived.” He credited Henry for being “the man who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution.” But his negative views of Henry were blistering. He considered Henry “avaricious and rotten hearted. His two great passions were the love of money and of fame, but when these came into competition the former predominated.” Wirt latched on to Jefferson’s admiring quotations for the biography, but he omitted the bad ones. The posthumous exaltation of such Founders as Henry and Washington often meant that bitter feelings and questions about character had to be excised from the historical record. (No one, until recently, received as whitewashed biographical treatments as Jefferson himself.) But Jefferson was deeply irritated with Wirt’s hagiographic treatment of Henry; the former president was still complaining about the book among guests at Monticello as late as 1824. 5
    Americans have always revered Henry for his brilliant oratory. The focus on Henry’s speeches, especially the “Liberty or Death” speech, resulted from the unanimous testimony that he was an unequaled political speaker. But the celebration of Henry’s oratory may have also resulted from a certain discomfort with the content of his thought, especially his opposition to the Constitution.
    Americans did not entirely forget about Henry’s ideas, however. Especially in the era of the Civil War, partisans on both sides of the conflict employed Henry and his beliefs to support their own causes. Hinton Rowan Helper, a native North