Patrick Henry (8 page)

Henry's electoral success also undoubtedly came from lucky timing. Circumstances allowed him to make his mark in the Parsons' Cause just as his legal career was taking off. But even more critically, he had won a delegate's seat at the outset of the imperial crisis in America. Having proved himself a man who never shied away from controversy, Henry introduced resolutions protesting Parliament's new Stamp Act only nine days after entering the House.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ATRICK HENRY'S 1765 SPEECH denouncing the Stamp Act is shrouded in myth and embellishment. Accounts of his JL famous address rely on ill-remembered retellings given decades later, after Henry had entered the pantheon of patriotic heroes. But one person in attendance, an anonymous French traveler, did record the scene for posterity: “One of the members [of the House of Burgesses] stood up and said he had read that in former times Tarquin and Julius had their Brutus, Charles had his Cromwell, and he did not doubt but some good American would stand up, in favour of his country.” The speaker's implication was unmistakable, radical, even treasonous: Patrick Henry was implying that the king should be assassinated.

When Henry made that outrageous assertion, murmurs from members sitting on straight-backed benches floated across the wood-paneled chamber. The Speaker of the House, John Robinson, instantly grasped the gravity of the freshman Burgess's statement. He
stood from his canopied armchair and declared that Henry had spoken treason. Henry immediately recanted his not very oblique call to kill the king, but he did not shirk from his central assertion—the need to defend liberty. He would, he said, “show his loyalty to his majesty King George the third, at the expense of the last drop of his blood, but what he said must be attributed to the interest of his country's dying liberty which he had at heart.” The Speaker accepted his apology and the grumblings in the chamber abated, though eyebrows presumably remained raised.
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A dubious tradition holds that Henry defiantly responded to the speaker's charge of treason with the rejoinder that “if this be treason, make the most of it!” The line, the second–most famous utterance that history has ascribed to Patrick Henry, is almost certainly apocryphal. Its original source is uncertain, but the motive behind the myth is understandable: the words seemed like something the Patrick Henry who is known to history would indeed have said. Yet we do not need to insert this line to appreciate the audacity of Henry's oration. Opposing the Stamp Act's edict that Americans would have to pay taxes on a host of printed goods, he sought to push the legislators further than they would go, then half heartedly retracted his brazen words, citing his overwrought passion for America's liberty. Some thought Henry had cleverly played “on the line of treason, without passing it,” as Edmund Pendleton would later write to James Madison. Without a doubt, at a time when Americans were just starting to articulate opposition to the Crown's aggressive laws, if not to the Crown itself, Patrick Henry's deep sensitivity to threats against liberty had already radicalized him, well before most other Revolutionary leaders.
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Present that day for Henry's incendiary, history-making speech was Thomas Jefferson. The twenty-two-year-old William and Mary law student stood at the door of the chamber and watched “the splendid display of Mr. Henry's talents as a popular orator. They
were great indeed; such as I have never heard from any other man.” Jefferson remembered vividly how the cry of treason rang through the chamber, and how Henry cleverly backed away from his comparison of George III to Julius Caesar, and thus “baffled the charge [of treason] vociferated.” Jefferson regarded him with admiration and perhaps trepidation. This man, he thought, could say nearly anything and get away with it.
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HOW HAD AMERICA AND BRITAIN arrived at this unprecedented level of tension? The crisis over the Stamp Act emerged from wrenching changes brought about in both Britain and America by the Seven Years' War. That conflict had begun eleven years earlier, in 1754, when George Washington unwillingly presided over the massacre of French troops in western Pennsylvania. The Seven Years' War had saved British American colonists from the French threat in North America. But it had created a crushing debt for the British government. Such paralyzing obligations can lead to drastic measures. The national debt in Britain soared from 72 million pounds sterling in 1755 to 130 million in 1764.

In the aftermath of the war, the British also maintained an expensive standing army in America, to fend off possible new attacks from the French as well as from Native Americans. In 1763 an outbreak of violence associated with Pontiac's Rebellion—attacks by the Ottawa Indian leader on British installations—showed the wisdom of the continuing British military presence. With the end of the French political influence in the Great Lakes region, the British had adopted a more belligerent policy toward Native Americans, curtailing the “gift giving” of essential supplies that had traditionally soothed relations between Native Americans and Europeans in the backcountry. The reduction pushed some Indians into desperate measures. Allied Indian forces attacked British forts across the Great Lakes region. Pontiac's forces besieged Fort Detroit, slaughtering men,
women, and children they found nearby. In one battle, the Indians shot a British commander dead, then cut out his heart, decapitated him, and placed his head on a pike in their camp. Such killings steeled the British determination to keep an army in America to face these fearsome threats—even as the 10,000 troops required would drain an additional 220,000 pounds sterling a year from British coffers.
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British officials understandably looked to the American colonists to share some of the financial burden. Historically, the colonists had largely owed only customs duties, not taxes, to Britain. Through bribery and smuggling, Americans often evaded those duties on imported goods. Resistance to British taxation had already been building for some years. Before the Seven Years' War, the colonial assemblies (including the House of Burgesses) developed independent streaks. They did not take kindly to parliamentary mandates, especially regarding money—an attitude that pointed to how much the nature of the British government had changed since the founding of the earliest colonies, especially Virginia, in the seventeenth century. Most notably, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 had affirmed Parliament's supremacy in England, but Parliament's authority in the colonies was never as clear. Decades of relative inattention by the British government had allowed the American legislatures' pride and stubbornness to grow unchecked.

The funding crisis left by the Seven Years' War brought into the open the latent tensions between Parliament and the colonial assemblies. British Prime Minister George Grenville, convinced that Americans were not paying their fair share for the protection and upkeep of the colonies, tried to shut down the elaborate system of corruption existing within the customs network. In the Sugar Act of 1764, Parliament imposed a new set of duties on imported cloth, sugar, coffee, and wine. The act's biggest effect was to reduce the duty on West Indian molasses from sixpence to threepence a gallon. Grenville anticipated that the lower duty on molasses, combined
with effective enforcement of the law, would discourage smuggling and generate revenue for the British treasury.

Although the Sugar Act was explicitly intended to raise tax revenue, colonists interpreted this legislation as a regulation of trade across the empire, a power that most of them would agree belonged to Parliament, not to colonial legislatures. But Parliament was also considering a stamp tax—that is, a duty on all manner of printed goods used in the colonies, including court documents, college diplomas, land deeds, contracts, playing cards, pamphlets, newspapers, and almanacs. Each of these would now have to be produced on paper bearing a stamp of the British treasury. That paper would be sold by stamp agents.

This prospect elicited the cry of “no taxation without representation” : colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia declared that only their representatives, in their own assemblies, had the right to tax them. The House of Burgesses, for example, asserted in messages to the king and Parliament in 1764 that “it is essential to British liberty that laws imposing taxes on the people ought not to be made without the consent of representatives chosen by themselves.” Despite the moderate protests against the Sugar Act, Grenville and British politicians did not appreciate the colonists' obstinacy. The Americans showed insensitivity to the budget crisis, and resistance to Parliament's supremacy. Yet while rumblings of resistance had begun, in 1764 the reaction to the Sugar Act remained relatively quiet. Grenville suggested that the colonists might avert a direct tax in 1765 if their assemblies raised sufficient revenue on their own, but he doubted the colonies would follow through on their obligation to help. By 1765, the stamp tax had become as much a test of British authority as a way to address the empire's budget deficit. Ben Franklin, recently arrived in London as an agent for Pennsylvania, commented that “we might well have hindered the sun's setting” as prevented the act's adoption.
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The colonists had defenders in Parliament. One of the most articulate, Colonel Isaac Barré, replied indignantly when another member suggested that the colonists were acting like ungrateful children. Barré, a veteran of the Seven Years' War, declared that the American “Sons of Liberty” had established flourishing colonies in America despite Britain's neglect of them. “They have nobly taken up arms in your defense,” he proclaimed, “have exerted a valor amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defense of a country, whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still.” Barré represented a minority opinion in the chamber, however, and in early 1765 Parliament easily passed the Stamp Act.
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The consequences of the act would reverberate throughout the colonies, with most people feeling the pinch. The Stamp Act's rates were not extraordinarily high, but they were intrusive, a literal and daily mark reminding the colonists of Parliament's authority over their finances. The act also provided for enforcement of taxation through British admiralty courts, which had no juries. Parliament was asserting the right to tax the colonists without their direct consent, and to try them without the benefit of a jury of peers if they refused to pay. Many colonists, after enjoying decades of relative independence, saw the Stamp Act as a disturbing assault on their rights. A headline in a Boston newspaper screamed “THE STAMP ACT!!!!!!” with a notice below it demanding that all persons with outstanding debts to the paper's publisher pay up before the act went into effect in November.
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As the storm approached, the staid House of Burgesses slumbered. In theory, the colonies' most venerable elective assembly represented the interests of the people of Virginia—or at least the planters—against the power of the British government, an authority embodied
in the person of Virginia's royally appointed governor, but by 1765, it had become something of a clique with a select number of wealthy planters typically dominating the chamber's proceedings. Its elite were not inclined to challenge the authority of another legislative body, especially a House of Commons whose procedural rules and very meeting hall were the model for their own. Sometimes the chamber's business was less than scintillating: among the first statutes the House passed when Patrick Henry entered the body in May was a bill “to prevent the raising of hogs, and suffering them to run at large, in the town of Richmond.” But the House was starting to simmer with new political talent, as well: from northern Virginia, Richard Henry Lee and George Washington, both four years older than Henry, were elected to the House in 1758. In the coming years, the two men would develop enduring (though not untested) political friendships with Henry, as they all helped lead Virginia—and the nation—forward against Britain.
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In the House, Henry dove right into controversy over the prospect of new taxation and the issues it presented. Even before the Stamp Act was debated, he opposed a plan offered by the Speaker to establish a public office that would offer low-interest loans to financially strapped tobacco farmers. Henry viewed the loan office as an attempt to bail out rich planters who had recklessly gotten themselves in debt by spending on luxuries. “Is it proposed, then,” Henry asked, “to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance, by filling his pockets with money?” According to Thomas Jefferson, Henry attacked the idea with “bold, grand and overwhelming eloquence,” but the upstart delegate was unsuccessful in blocking the bill. Henry saw no need for reticence, despite his freshman status in the august body. To him, the public loan office represented corruption and cronyism, just at the time when Virginia needed the moral courage to stand against the Stamp Act.
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HENRY RECALLED THAT HE WROTE Virginia's resolutions against the Stamp Act “alone, unadvised, and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law-book.” He introduced them on his twenty-ninth birthday, May 29, 1765. Strangely, no one knows exactly how many resolutions Henry wrote against the Stamp Act, but we can be sure of at least five. During his lifetime, Henry made little attempt to preserve most of his personal papers, but presumably because he proudly recognized their role in inciting the American Revolution, he did leave behind a copy of the five resolutions, preserving them alongside his will. The first four, which are also recorded in the journals of the House, essentially restated the colonists' opposition to taxation without representation. The two initial resolutions asserted that the colonists enjoyed the same “liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities” as the people of Britain. Their colonial status did not imply inferior rights, the document declared. The third and fourth resolutions argued that accepting levies enacted by one's own representatives alone “is the only security against a burdensome taxation, and the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom.” To Henry and the colonists, not only did the Stamp Act impose a burdensome tax, but it also represented an offense against their liberty as Britons.
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