Patrick Henry (34 page)

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a series of authors tried to expand or modify Wirt's admiring portrait of Henry. This patriotic trend began with Henry's grandson, a man tellingly named William Wirt Henry. A prominent historian, lawyer, and Confederate veteran, Henry published in 1891 a three-volume set titled
Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches
, which, while imperfect, remains the best published collection of Henry's papers. Since William Wirt Henry's compilation, scholars and popular writers have fought back and forth, with the academics seeking to deconstruct myths about Henry that the popularizers promptly restore. The historian Bernard Mayo noted fifty years ago that of all the major Founders,
Henry presented the most perplexing disjunction between popular and scholarly interpretations.
⁹

In recent years, both the political Left and Right have appropriated the image of Henry as a radical dissenter. Much of this use of Henry, of course, is based only on current applications of the ringing phrase “Give me liberty or give me death.” Henry is a favorite of the contemporary Tea Party, a movement that reacted against President Barack Obama's massive increases in domestic spending and became the biggest news story of the 2010 election cycle. One sign at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, read “Give me liberty, not debt.”

No matter how much they venerate Henry's defense of American liberty, few Americans today, Tea Partiers or otherwise, take seriously Henry's fundamental criticisms of the Constitution. Unlike Henry, the conservatives who cite him would defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights—at least as they were originally intended, if not as they have been interpreted—as the best guarantees of our liberties. Certainly, after ratification, Henry came to advocate a strict interpretation of the Constitution as the only hope for restraining the national government. But he always worried that in establishing such a strong national authority, Madison and Hamilton had created a kind of Frankenstein's monster, destined to grow uncontrollably and eventually to become tyrannical. As welcome as the Bill of Rights was to anti-federalists such as Henry, those amendments did not address the fundamental issue of the national government's expansive powers.

Henry has also become a hero to many Christian conservatives, who see him as a defender of both Christian virtue and liberty. In 2000, the conservative activist and homeschooling advocate Michael Farris founded Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. One of the college's dorms is even named Red Hill, after Henry's last home. Many homeschoolers see Patrick Henry as one of their own, because he was tutored by his Christian family at home and yet
achieved great heights in the public sphere. Henry is an attractive figure to those Christian conservatives interested in sustaining the image of America as a Christian nation, because among the major Founders, he probably held some of the most committed Christian beliefs. Certainly as compared to Washington, Madison, and especially Jefferson, Henry made his sympathy toward traditional Christianity widely known. A serious Anglican with stirring memories of the Great Awakening, he possessed religious beliefs that were orthodox for his time. Although he was not an evangelical (in the sense that he did not emphasize the need for a conversion experience), he had abundant sympathy for the dissenting Protestants of Virginia, with his oratory profoundly influenced in style and substance by the evangelical preachers of his era.

At times, advocates of a Christian perspective on America's founding have gone to extremes in recruiting Henry to their cause. In particular, a widely circulated quotation erroneously attributed to Henry has him declaring, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!” David Barton of the WallBuilders organization once used this quote regularly in writings and speeches, but in 2000 he issued a statement in which he described this and a number of other Founders' quotes as “unconfirmed.” Barton's retraction has hardly slowed the use of the quotation; it still appears all over the Internet and in books such as David Limbaugh's
Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
.
¹⁰

We do not need such apocryphal quotes to establish that Henry's political thought was based on Christian principles. If anything, Henry's faith seems to have become even stronger and more heartfelt over time. In his will, drafted in 1798, he wrote of his bequests that “this is all the inheritance I can give to my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich
indeed.” But we should also remember that Henry was very much a man of his time, and he had his shortcomings. He struggled with issues common to those who function as private individuals and public figures, such as the tension between political service and personal gain, and the typical ethical conundrums of lawyers who defend clients who are almost certainly guilty. Like many other Christians of his time, Henry worked to reconcile his religious principles with owning slaves. In the same will in which he prayed for his family's eternal inheritance, Henry did not manumit his slaves; instead, he declared that his slaves should be divided equally among his remaining family. In the inventory of Henry's estate, taken a year later, we see his sixty-seven slaves: men, women, and children with names like Tom, Pegg, and Anny.
¹¹

 

ASSESSING WHAT THE FOUNDERS would think about contemporary issues is always a difficult, if not foolhardy, enterprise. Academic historians normally refuse to engage in such speculation. But it is no great leap to imagine that Patrick Henry would fundamentally object to nearly every feature of today's titanic national government. This statement is not to place Henry on either side of today's political spectrum: he would disapprove equally of the massive, top-down social programs championed by the Left, the globetrotting military power championed by the Right, and the bailouts of financial companies championed by a majority of national politicians in 2008. Unlike many of his Christian conservative admirers today, he would not approve of America's recent ventures associated with the War on Terrorism, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, a conflict that has become America's longest war. Henry would probably find that today's America has almost nothing in common with the republic of liberty he envisioned in 1776. On one hand, the national government has seemingly burst all bounds of power on the domestic and international stages, and on the other, the notion of a virtuous
republic has been almost entirely abandoned in favor of what people of Henry's age would have called “license.” To him, consolidated political power and ethical license historically triggered the loss of true liberty and the rise of moral and political tyranny.

If Henry were to travel through time to ascend the rostrum in the Virginia House of Delegates, or to address Philadelphia's Independence Hall, or to let his voice resound again into the rafters of St. John's Church, where he demanded liberty or death, he would no doubt exhort us to reconsider the value of public morality. He would caution us not just about the usual hot-button social and cultural issues, but also regarding matters such as greed and financial deception, issues that lay at the heart of America's financial meltdown that began in 2008. True freedom, he might warn us, lies not in doing whatever we want. Freedom is doing what we should do, for the sake of community and the republic.

Of course, Henry was not a perfect model of the virtues he trumpeted, even in the specific area of personal finances. (We might well imagine Henry, ever the speculator, investing in the infamous credit default swaps that helped cause our recent recession.) But if he did not always live up to his own lofty standards, we should remember that an inconsistency between the utterly laudable principles espoused and the life actually lived is an ethical problem common among mere mortals, including the leading Founders.

Surveying our country's current state of affairs, Henry might also advise us to consider the ways in which we have traded the accountability and responsiveness of diffuse, local governments for the intrusive might of national government. He might warn us that national power makes for an effective empire, not good government. A big government does not tend to safeguard our liberty, either, as we have witnessed on the ragged edges of the Bush and Obama administrations' prosecution of the War on Terrorism. Intrusive body scanning at airports, warrantless wiretapping, rendition of terrorism suspects to
secret prisons, and torture are only examples of the sorts of misdeeds to be expected from a mammoth government and military that seemingly can do whatever it wants. What James Madison called the Constitution's “parchment barriers,” intended to restrict the government's growth, seem ever more feeble against the power of our massive federal system.
¹²

In America, Henry's memory has taken on a vague, patriotic cast that fails to capture his fractious yet exemplary life. The “real” Henry was branded a traitor and apostate on multiple occasions by his many enemies, including Thomas Jefferson. His vision of the American republic was not a matter of sentiment and grand words and gestures; it was grounded in virtue, religious faith, and responsive local government. Standing against his fellow Founders James Madison and Thomas Jefferson at almost every turn in the 1780s and '90s, and steadfastly opposing the adoption of the Constitution, he was the boldest of patriots. As a country, we may have chosen national power over decentralized government and individualistic freedom over virtue. But in 1776, Patrick Henry's ideals of liberty, religion, a moral society, small government, and local politics were essential principles upon which America was built.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my colleagues and friends in Baylor University's history department and Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, including David Bebbington, Jeff Hamilton, Barry Hankins, Philip Jenkins, Byron Johnson, and Rodney Stark; at Basic Books/Perseus Books Group, including Lara Heimert, Alex Littlefield, Caitlin Graf, Katy O'Donnell, Michelle Welsh-Horst, Antoinette Smith, and Adam Eaglin; and my agent and friend Giles Anderson. Thanks to David Groff for his stellar editing work; to Thomas Buckley, Jeff Polet, and my Baylor assistant Thomas DeShong for reading the manuscript and saving me from a host of errors; to Karen Gorham at the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation for research assistance, as well as the staffs at the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia Special Collections, the Library of Virginia, and other repositories of Henry papers; and to the Earhart Foundation for supporting the project with a summer stipend. As always, I am so thankful for the unfailing love and support from
my wife, Ruby Kidd; my sons, Jonathan and Josh; and my mother, Nancy Kidd. I am dedicating the book to my father, Michael Kidd, who passed away unexpectedly before the book's completion. I hope that this small gesture conveys my gratefulness for his legacy in my life.

NOTES

Patrick Henry: Patrick Henry in American Memory

1
William Wirt,
Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry,
15th ed. (New York, 1857), 140–42.

2
Edmund Randolph,
History of Virginia
, ed. Arthur H. Shaffer (Charlottesville, VA, 1970), 212.

3
Patrick Henry, speech of June 24, 1788, in
Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
, ed. John P. Kaminski and Gaspare J. Saladino (Madison, WI, 1993), 10:1506.

4
St. Jean de Crèvecoeur to William Short, June 10, 1788, in ibid., 10:1592.

5
Ibid., 9:952.

6
“The Virginia Convention, June 24, 1788,” in ibid., 10:1506, 1511.

Patrick Henry and Backcountry Virginia

1
George Willison,
Patrick Henry and His World
(Garden City, NY, 1969), 31–35.

2
Jefferson quoted in William Wirt Henry,
Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches
(New York, 1891), 1:18; Lauren F. Winner,
A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia
(New Haven, CT, 2010), 130. I have silently modernized the spelling and punctuation of eighteenth-century prose throughout the book.

3
Jefferson quoted in Henry,
Patrick Henry
, 1:18; Richard R. Beeman,
Patrick Henry: A Biography
(New York, 1974), 7.

4
James Horn, “Tobacco Colonies: The Shaping of English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” in
The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century
, ed. Nicholas Canny (New York, 1998), 183.

5
Nicholas Spencer to Lord Culpeper, August 6, 1676, quoted in Edmund S. Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York, 1975), 236.

6
“Rabble Crue” quote from Morgan,
American Slavery
, 258.

7
Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Jack P. Greene,
Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History
(Charlottesville, VA, 1994), 262; Jacob Price, “The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–1775,”
William and Mary Quarterly
3rd series, 11, no. 2 (April 1954): 179.

8
William Feltman,
The Journal of Lieut. William Feltman
(Philadelphia, 1853), 10; Jack P. Greene,
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 85–86; Anthony S. Parent Jr.,
Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 186.