Patrick Henry (6 page)

Patrick Henry's uncle was not alone in his fear of the radical effects of the evangelicals' preaching. Anglicans raged against these itinerant preachers because they intruded upon the turf of Anglican parishes and exhibited no respect for the established pastor's authority. The Presbyterian meetings in Hanover also shook with ecstatic fervor that no Virginia Anglican could countenance; some of the preachers even publicly attacked the Anglican clergy for their spiritual lethargy. In response, the state authorities, who did not believe that the principle of religious toleration required them to indulge
such extremists, repeatedly charged the evangelicals with holding unauthorized meetings. To the elite Virginia Anglicans who dominated colonial and local government, the revivalists threatened their church and the sanctity of its parish system. Virginia's governor, William Gooch, insisted that the state suppress these ministers who were “under the pretended infatuation of new light, extraordinary impulse, and such like fanatical and enthusiastic knowledge.” In the eighteenth century, “enthusiasm” implied religious frenzy.
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Pastor Henry's consternation at the Great Awakening climaxed when George Whitefield himself visited Hanover in 1745 and requested permission to preach at St. Paul's Church. Henry tried to force Whitefield to meet with him before giving his approval, presumably to inquire about the itinerant's intentions, but Whitefield refused. Instead, the preacher simply showed up at the church Sunday morning, bringing a huge crowd with him. Henry decided to let Whitefield preach, as long as he also performed the Anglican liturgy. Whitefield agreed. Henry worried that if he refused to let Whitefield preach, he would have simply gone out to the churchyard. “All the people to a man had a great desire to hear the famous Whit[e]field,” Henry lamented. Anglican clerics had never faced this kind of treatment before, with Whitefield bypassing them and colonial officials to appeal directly to the people for support. The Great Awakening in Hanover County, as in many places in America, stirred a profound change not only in the locus of faith but in the nexus of political action. The center of authority slowly moved from politicians and parsons to the people.
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THE ARRIVAL OF SAMUEL DAVIES in Hanover County in 1747 gave heft to the fledgling evangelical movement in Virginia. Like Francis Makemie nearly fifty years before, Davies secured a license from the government to preach in several Virginia counties. Nevertheless, Parson Henry tried to paint him as a subversive fanatic. To him,
Davies and the other revivalists were simply trying to “screw up the people to the greatest heights of religious frenzy.” Although some of the early Presbyterians in Virginia's Great Awakening did manifest a frighteningly radical style, Davies sought to cast himself as an unobjectionable moderate to win the favor of the Virginia authorities.
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Davies became the Virginia dissenters' most articulate defender, arguing that the Act of Toleration required the colonial governments to provide licenses to preach wherever the people demanded it. After local Anglicans like Parson Henry accused him of “intrusive schismatical itinerations,” Davies appealed to the bishop of London in 1752 to vindicate himself and his dissenting colleagues. Davies denied that he denigrated the Anglican clerics or recruited Anglicans to become Presbyterians. He only preached the essentials of the gospel, he declared, and the light of truth drew new converts to his churches. Could the bishop blame him for this? The colonial government, after granting him licenses to preach in four Virginia counties, balked at his requests to preach more widely and to open new churches. Davies insisted that his followers were spread over several counties and needed meetinghouses close to them. How could Virginians claim to tolerate the dissenters, if they would not allow them to meet? Davies stayed in Hanover for eleven years, from the time Patrick Henry was twelve to twenty-three years old—during his transition into maturity and marriage until just before he embarked on his legal career. In 1759 Davies became the president of the College of New Jersey, where he replaced Jonathan Edwards, who had died of smallpox shortly after his tenure in Princeton began. Davies would not live long as college president, either, dying in 1761 at the age of thirty-eight.
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The influence on Patrick Henry of Davies and other evangelicals would become clearer as his career developed. Although Henry never abandoned the Anglican denomination (which, in America, later came to be called the Episcopal Church), he proved himself a
foe of Anglican political power in the colony, and a friend to the dissenters' liberty. Unlike the more radical evangelicals, however, Henry could not accept the full disestablishment of the Anglican Church; he believed that a godly republic had to support religion. He was content with distributing taxes to multiple denominations but could not countenance Virginia's rejection of public support for religion altogether.

Henry also came to follow the model of Davies and George Whitefield in his method of popular appeal. Just like the instigators of the Great Awakening, Henry and other populist patriot leaders of the American Revolution challenged established authority by employing direct appeals to the people in their own language. Other patriots would root their arguments in the new philosophy of the Enlightenment, but Henry relied on simpler emotional persuasion that roused the people with moral fervor. Some observers thought Patrick Henry the patriot spoke like a gospel preacher.
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But what of Henry's own faith? Later in life Henry wondered whether he had adopted all the style of Davies and the revivalists but not enough of the substance of their preaching. It is difficult to discern how passionately Henry held his own faith as a young adult, because (as was typical of many of his Virginia colleagues, including George Washington and James Madison) he was reticent in defining his own devotion to Christ. We may certainly conjecture, given his background in the Great Awakening and career-long emphasis on religion and virtue, that Henry's own piety was quiet but steady, and a source for his fundamental beliefs about human dignity, rights, and virtue.

Like many of the other founders of the American nation, Henry may have emphasized the social effects of religion more than his own practice of it. He did not attend church consistently as an adult. Nevertheless, he was an avid reader of religious books and pamphlets, and even personally distributed some Christian texts later in
life. One of these, Soame Jenyns's
A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
, offered an Enlightenment-style defense of traditional Christianity by appealing to the ethical excellence of Jesus's teachings. Jenyns, a lawyer and member of the British Parliament, did not deny the legitimacy of the Bible's prophecies and miracles, but he thought that the ethics promulgated by Jesus were the firmest basis on which to make a case for the supernatural origins of Christianity. Such a perfect system of virtue could not have been invented by mere men, Jenyns argued, but “must have been effected by the supernatural interposition of divine power and wisdom.” Henry was one of many Americans who regarded Jenyns's method as a sure way to defend Christianity in an enlightened age;
A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
went through many editions in the 1780s and '90s, including two in Richmond, Virginia. As governor, Henry would arrange for hundreds of copies of Jenyns's book to be printed and distributed at his own expense.
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Henry's brother-in-law also recalled that Patrick's favorite book on religion was Philip Doddridge's
The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul
. Published in London in 1744,
The Rise and Progress of Religion
was one of the most influential evangelical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In advising his readers on how to know whether they had experienced a saving conversion, Doddridge prayed that his book would rescue readers from “the madness of a sinful state” and bring them to a true knowledge of God. Patrick Henry's esteem for this book would suggest that evangelical faith made a deep, personal impression on him. Perhaps Henry privately experienced something like the kind of conversion that Doddridge, Davies, and Whitefield advocated, but we do not know for sure. It is clear from Henry's reading habits, however, that he was no deist or skeptic like Thomas Jefferson. He accepted a traditional form of Christianity that was woven into the culture of eighteenth-century Anglo-America.
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Given Henry's background, we may readily understand his brother-in-law's assessment that Henry was “through life a warm friend of the Christian religion. He was an Episcopalian, but very friendly to all the sects—particularly the Presbyterian.” Henry never accepted his uncle Patrick's doctrinaire, ugly hostility toward non-Anglicans. He valued Christian devotion across denominations. Henry and most of the Revolutionary generation believed that a republic needed religion to preserve virtue, honesty, and independence lest it trespass into amoral individualism and a degenerate complacency. An ethically directionless people would eventually succumb to the enticements of a tyrant, Henry feared.
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Even as he would espouse state support for religion, he would also evince growing doubt about Anglicanism as the exclusively established church of Virginia. Henry remained committed to his Anglican faith, but he became convinced that religion could be used as a political tool to oppress not only Presbyterians, but all Virginians. His growing concern prepared him for his first episode of public resistance against encroaching British power: defending Hanover County in the Parsons' Cause.

 

BECAUSE HE BELIEVED in the public importance of religion, it may seem strange that Patrick Henry's first great political cause involved reducing the parsons' publicly supported income. But Henry reflected an increasing hostility toward the Anglican clergy among the lay leaders of the church. During the Great Awakening, Anglican vestrymen became increasingly frustrated with ineffective clergy, who seemed unable to counter the surge of evangelical fervor. Virginia also struggled to recruit native-born parsons, leading it to accept a number of ministers from Scotland, such as Patrick Henry's uncle. A number of these British-born parsons appeared to be as concerned with financial gain as pastoral care. Some ministers were also exposed for gross immorality, which further damaged the standing of clergy in Virginia society.

Conflict between Anglican clergy and laymen intensified in the mid-1750s because of disputes regarding the parsons' salaries. Virginia had taken the lead in the Seven Years' War, beginning with George Washington's ill-fated expedition in 1754, and suffered financially as a result. Nevertheless, the clergy felt they deserved more compensation for their services, and in 1755 some of them brought a petition to the legislature, the House of Burgesses, asking for a pay raise. The petition was summarily rejected.

Far from raising the priests' salaries, the House of Burgesses passed the first Two Penny Act in 1755, which temporarily substituted a cash payment of two pence per pound of tobacco for the priests' normal supply of actual tobacco. (Tobacco was commonly used as currency in Virginia.) But in 1755 tobacco was valued at more than two pence per pound, so this represented a pay cut. Parsons' salaries were not the only cost-saving casualties of the Two Penny Act, but they did seem an easy target because of the public animosity toward the clergy. Some parsons tried to organize official protests against the 1755 act, but the populace largely approved of the reduction and felt it was justified due to the colony's military and financial crises—a situation exacerbated by poor tobacco harvests. James Maury himself wrote that although the Two Penny Act caused him serious financial hardship, he thought that “each individual must expect to share in the misfortunes of the community to which he belongs.”
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Tensions between the clergy and lay authorities continued to escalate in the late 1750s. The behavior of the clergy riled many of the Anglican faithful. They clashed with the governor in 1757 over the status of the Reverend John Brunskill of King William County, who was reported to have committed “monstrous immoralities” in his parish. According to the governor, Brunskill had engaged in many bizarre acts, including tying up his wife “by the legs to the bed post, and cutting her in a cruel manner by knives.” It was uncertain
whether this kind of disciplinary case fell under political or religious jurisdiction, but Virginia's governor decided to act. After a trial, he removed Brunskill from his pastorate. Other ministers came to Brunskill's defense, not necessarily because they believed him to be innocent, but because they rejected the governor's authority over church affairs. Their assertion of clerical independence did not improve the parsons' standing before a skeptical public, however. Virginians thought the parsons had defended Brunskill to protect their own power, despite his grievous offenses.
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The conflict between lay Anglicans and the parsons came to a head with the passage of a second Two Penny Act in 1758. A convention representing about half of the colony's seventy ministers commissioned an appeal to London authorities to overturn the pay cut. The clergy complained that the act created “distressful, various, and uncertain” circumstances for them, while also more provocatively asserting that the act “interferes with the royal prerogative.” The Crown had instructed Virginia's popular governor, Francis Fauquier, not to alter any royally approved laws, such as the one establishing clerical salaries, without permission. The bishop of London aggravated tensions when he characterized the Two Penny Act as treason against the Crown.
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The parsons' appeal and bishop's tirade raised the stakes of the Two Penny Act above mere finances and made it an issue of imperial authority, convincing the Privy Council to annul the act. The Crown's decision produced a sharp reaction from Virginia's defenders. Open verbal and physical assaults on the clergy and the bishop of London commenced with Landon Carter's
A Letter to the Right Reverend Father in God, the Lord B—p of L—n
. Carter was a prominent planter of Richmond County, and an Anglican layman, but he had fallen out with his own parish minister, William Kay, who claimed that Carter had bullied him over his sermons. After a particularly pointed homily decrying spiritual pride, Carter denounced Parson
Kay, claiming that the jeremiad was a thinly veiled attack on him. Carter cursed at Kay and tried to beat him. Carter reportedly swore he would take revenge against Kay and go on to “clip the wings of the whole clergy, in this colony.”
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