Patrick Henry (2 page)

 

WHEN PATRICK HENRY'S FATHER, John, arrived in America in 1727, Virginia was 120 years old, the oldest of England's surviving North American colonies. The original Jamestown settlers had dreamed of gold and quick riches, but they found colonizing this new land much harder than they could have imagined. They endured famine and disease, and engaged in brutal conflicts with local Native Americans affiliated with the great chief Powhatan. One starving settler killed and ate his wife, for which he himself was burned at the stake.

By the late 1610s, Virginians began to turn to tobacco as their economic salvation. Native Americans had smoked tobacco long before Europeans arrived in the New World, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European colonists began to ship the crop back to Europe. When smoked or chewed, tobacco releases the powerful compound nicotine, a drug that produced just as pleasant, potentially addictive sensations then as it does today. Virginia had excellent soil for growing tobacco, and once cured by drying, the crop would
easily ship to European markets. The growth of tobacco output from the Chesapeake colonies not only rescued the new colony from disaster but also brought prosperity to its growers, expanding from sixty thousand pounds in 1620 to twenty-eight million pounds by the 1680s.
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Who would undertake the hot and blistering work of growing and harvesting the brown gold of tobacco? Virginians needed workers to man its fields, but the tobacco barons did not originally rely on the labor of African slaves. In early seventeenth-century Virginia, whites came as indentured servants, with relatively small numbers of African-Americans serving as slaves. The white servants accepted indenture in exchange for passage to the New World, hoping that if they lived beyond the term of their contracted labor, they might even acquire land themselves. The black slaves had no such hope.

But for many, even hope turned to horror. Early Virginia was a charnel house. Neither whites nor blacks could expect to live long after their arrival. They died in droves from disease and in fights with local Native Americans. In time, as tobacco became profitable and conditions in the colony's fields became less deadly, more poor whites in England scrambled to get on ships bound for Virginia, drawn by the illusory promise of wealth. So many destitute whites poured in that some elite settlers feared that the colony had become “a sink to drain England of her filth and scum,” as one Virginian put it in 1676.
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The white servants who lived long enough to earn freedom from indenture (usually a term of seven years or less) often found themselves unable to achieve their dream of independence. Pushed farther and farther into the backcountry to find available land, they normally lived in windowless, dirt-floor shacks and tended hastily cleared fields dotted with burned stumps of trees. The poor farmers resented the tidewater “planters,” as the tobacco nobles became known. Yet they hated Native Americans even
more, because they perceived the region's original settlers to be standing in the way of security and prosperity. Compounding the predicament of small tobacco farmers, in the 1660s tobacco prices began to drop precipitously, thanks to the growing number of producers, but British-appointed authorities still maintained high taxes on their small plots of land. Callous British officials in London aggravated the situation with the Navigation Acts, which required farmers to ship their tobacco only to England, on English ships, and made tobacco surpluses even more acute. The colony began to boil with instability.

In 1676, a hundred years before America's independence, Virginia erupted into a civil war known as Bacon's Rebellion. Angry white settlers found a leader in young Nathaniel Bacon, a recent arrival from England and a relative of Virginia's governor, William Berkeley. Though most members of the elite sided with the Virginia government, Bacon sympathized with the plight of the poor colonists; he viewed Berkeley as a weak leader and saw an opportunity to gain power for the oppressed farmers and himself at the expense of Native Americans. Bacon and his followers—a “Rabble Crue,” Berkeley's supporters called them—began indiscriminately attacking Native Americans, both foes and former friends. When Bacon refused to end the unsanctioned attacks, Berkeley declared him a rebel against the colony. Bacon then turned his forces against Berkeley and the capital at Jamestown, which he burned to the ground in September 1676. But when Bacon abruptly died of the “bloody flux,” or dysentery, the rebellion fizzled. Thereafter, Virginia stabilized and flourished, partly because the colonial assembly significantly reduced taxes on the poor farmers. Indentured servants spurned Virginia and increasingly gravitated to newer English colonies, such as Pennsylvania, making the problem of the landless poor whites less severe.
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The shrinking pool of white workers had tragic consequences. Virginia planters began to import more African slaves to work the
tobacco fields. In 1700, the 13,000 Africans in Virginia represented 13 percent of the colony's population, but by 1750, their numbers were up to 150,000, or 40 percent of its inhabitants. (The white population in Virginia also grew rapidly, from 90,000 in 1700 to 225,000 in 1750.) Whites now perceived slaves, land, and tobacco as the keys to economic success and personal independence. Race divided eighteenth-century Virginia in a way that it had not a century earlier.

Young Patrick Henry, a child of the mid-eighteenth century, grew up in a world of relatively new, yet deep-seated racism. To the white planters, the burgeoning black population—the very people whose captive presence ensured the elites' prosperity—seemed to them alien and menacing: they arrived from west Africa not speaking English, they were not Christians (aside from a handful of whom had already been converted to Roman Catholicism, which Virginia Protestants did not count as Christianity), and they often had filed teeth, plaited hair, and ritual scarring. As never before, whites were now deeming blacks to be intrinsically inferior to their owners, suitable only for the servile labor to which they were condemned. A host of new laws codified the cultural separation between whites and blacks. For example, interracial marriage was explicitly banned, as was sex between white women and black men. (The law remained significantly silent on sex between white men and black women.)

By the 1720s, the planters dominated all aspects of political and economic life in Virginia, even as new European immigrants sought to penetrate the ranks of the colony's aristocrats. The elite gentry represented a tiny fraction of the population—maybe no more than 5 percent of whites—yet that social stratum was in fact permeable at its bottom, open to those with good luck and connections. Scots like John Henry (as opposed to the masses of Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland) came in relatively small numbers to America in the colonial era, and most were professionals and businessmen who could realistically aspire to entrepreneurial success. Some Scots
sought opportunity in the Virginia backcountry, usually related to the burgeoning tobacco trade. Scottish merchants played a major role in shipping tobacco, which by the 1760s accounted for more than 80 percent of all Scottish imports from mainland North America.
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John Henry was one of the early Scottish immigrants to recognize the opportunities in Chesapeake tobacco farming. He came from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he attended but failed to graduate from college. The reasons that John left college are lost to history, but certainly the pull of prosperity in America helped lure him away from his books. Soon after leaving the university, he secured passage to Virginia, arriving in Hanover County because of a connection there with John Syme (pronounced “sim”), an influential planter.

The American backcountry was not so far back in those days. Hanover County was about sixty miles inland from the new colonial capital at Williamsburg, and just north of the future capital at Richmond, founded in 1737, a year after Patrick's birth. Hanover lay in the Piedmont region of Virginia, well to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, both of which were true nether regions of Virginia where European settlers had just begun to trickle in. The original residents of the area encompassing Hanover County were Pamunkey and Chickahominy Indians, who, like most Native Americans, faced calamity from European diseases and dislocation from English settlements.

Hanover County was carved out of New Kent County in 1720 and named for the family of Britain's King George I. When Queen Anne died in 1714, the Hanovers, Protestant Christians originally from Germany, rescued the British monarchy from the prospect of a Catholic ruler. Anne had no surviving children, but British law required that the crown be held by a Protestant, which led the government to pass over more than fifty Catholics with closer blood relations to Anne and make George the king of England. The county received the name of the house of Hanover as a sign
of affection for England and its Protestant king. At this time, there was no hint of the anti-monarchical sentiments that Patrick Henry, Hanover County's favorite son, would trumpet a generation later.

The county that became John Henry's new home was fertile and hilly, prime terrain for tobacco and many edible crops. An American Continental soldier visiting Hanover in 1781, hungry from marching, was delighted to forage on the county's abundant watermelons, “the best and finest I have ever seen. This country is full of them; they have large patches of two and three acres of them.” He observed that African-American slaves had small garden plots in Hanover, with “great quantities of snaps and collards.” Tobacco became the economic mainstay staple of the county, as it was for the colony itself. Patrick Henry would grow up during another boom period in the crop, with the total volume of tobacco exported to Britain rising more than 250 percent between 1725 and 1775. Already by the 1720s, the average person in England smoked about two pounds of tobacco per year.
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For several years John Henry toiled on Syme's plantation. Then in 1731, his fortunes changed. Syme died, widowing his attractive young wife, Sarah. In 1734, John married Sarah, winning not just the widow's hand but also Syme's estate and Sarah's connections to the gentry. Now possessed of over 7,000 acres of land, John Henry became an up-and-coming figure, connected to the old Virginia aristocracy. He continued to acquire land throughout central Virginia, and held a variety of political and military posts. A man who had left Scotland seven years earlier with little more than an incomplete education and a strong ambition now was a fully rooted member of the burgeoning colony. For his son Patrick, John Henry's success would represent the possibilities America availed to an individual with drive and dreams. At times, his father's success would also be something of a reprimand.

ON MAY 29, 1736, Sarah Henry gave birth to Patrick, the second of eleven children born to the Henrys. Patrick was named for John's older brother, who had become a Church of England parson after graduating from college in Scotland. The Reverend Patrick Henry had also emigrated from Scotland to Virginia, and in 1736 he became the rector of St. Paul's Parish in Hanover County; his brother John became a vestryman, a member of the council that governed the affairs of the parish and levied local taxes to support it. They exercised considerable power over those under their watch. Publicly supported religion meant a great deal to the Henry family. They were convinced that a virtuous society required tax-funded churches and the vigilance of parsons and vestrymen like the Henry brothers.
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Patrick Henry received an education that was, for a scion of the new gentry, modest. He learned to read, write, and count at a small common school he attended until he was ten years old. Thereafter, he received no other formal schooling at all—no preparatory academy existed in Hanover until 1778—but as he began his teenage years, he learned Latin, Greek, and advanced mathematics from his father. An autodidact like many of his day, Patrick read deeply in ancient and modern history, no doubt focusing on the heroes of Greek and Roman antiquity and their counterparts in British and European history since the Protestant Reformation. He was hardly uneducated, especially in the liberal arts, but the relative informality of Henry's home education did not herald the emergence of a great statesman. Nevertheless, the close attention he received from his father made him sensitive to the great principles of the British and Western traditions that defined themselves around Christian faith, the liberty espoused by well-known British opposition figures such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and the concept of virtue, which for an eighteenth-century Anglo-American meant a moral disposition committed to the public good. At his death, Henry possessed
about two hundred books—an impressive number for a man of the era—on law, Christianity, and history, with some classical texts in Latin and Greek.
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From this array of sources—literary, cultural, and religious—Henry derived a worldview that was pervasively Christian, with a heavy dose of ancient Greek and Roman influences. Among the foundational beliefs of this worldview was the imperfection of mankind. His King James Bible repeatedly affirmed that (in the words of Paul's letter to the Romans) “there is none righteous, no, not one.” Likewise, Henry knew that, in a classic lesson of man's flawed nature, the golden era of the Roman republic had disintegrated into political intrigue, chaos, and civil war. Julius Caesar (assassinated by rivals in 44 BCE) was only the best known casualty of the republic's fall. Rome's turmoil had led inexorably to the rise of the emperors, including notorious tyrants such as Caligula and Nero. Concentrated power could not be trusted in the hands of fallible men. Henry knew that he, too, was fallible. Throughout his life, as family man, farmer, lawyer, and politician, he earnestly sought—not always with complete success—to stay on the path of uprightness.