“He has since been chosen a representative for one of the counties, in which character he has lately distinguished himself in the House of Burgesses on occasion of the arrival of an act of Parliament for stamp duties, while the Assembly was sitting. He blazed out in a violent speech against the authority of Parliament and the king, comparing his majesty to a Tarquin, a Cæsar, and a Charles the First, and not sparing insinuations that he wished another Cromwell would arise. He made a motion for several outrageous resolves, some of which passed and were again erased as soon as his back was turned.… Mr. Henry, the hero of whom I have been writing, is gone quietly into the upper parts of the country to recommend himself to his constituents by spreading treason and enforcing firm resolutions against the authority of the British Parliament.”[86]
Such was Patrick Henry’s introduction to the upper spheres of English society,—spheres in which his name was to become still better known as time rolled on, and for conduct not likely to efface the impression of this bitter beginning.
As to his reputation in the colonies outside of Virginia, doubtless the progress of it, during this period, was slow and dim; for the celebrity acquired by the resolutions of 1765 attached to the colony rather than to the person. Moreover, the boundaries of each colony, in those days, were in most cases the boundaries likewise of the personal reputations it cherished. It was not until Patrick Henry came forward, in the Congress of 1774,[Pg 88] upon an arena that may be called national, that his name gathered about it the splendor of a national fame. Yet, even before 1774, in the rather dull and ungossiping newspapers of that time, and in the letters and diaries of its public men, may be discovered an occasional allusion showing that already his name had broken over the borders of Virginia, had traveled even so far as to New England, and that in Boston itself he was a person whom people were beginning to talk about. For example, in his Diary for the 22d of July, 1770, John Adams speaks of meeting some gentlemen from Virginia, and of going out to Cambridge with them. One of them is mentioned by name as having this distinction,—that he “is an intimate friend of Mr. Patrick Henry, the first mover of the Virginia resolves in 1765.”[87] Thus, even so early, the incipient revolutionist in New England had got his thoughts on his brilliant political kinsman in Virginia.
But it was chiefly within the limits of his own splendid and gallant colony, and among an eager and impressionable people whose habitual hatred of all restraints turned into undying love for this dashing champion of natural liberty, that Patrick Henry was now instantly crowned with his crown of sovereignty. By his resolutions against the Stamp Act, as Jefferson testifies, “Mr. Henry took the lead out of the hands of those who had heretofore guided the proceedings of the House,[Pg 89] that is to say, of Pendleton, Wythe, Bland, Randolph, and Nicholas.”[88] Wirt does not put the case too strongly when he declares, that “after this debate there was no longer a question among the body of the people, as to Mr. Henry’s being the first statesman and orator in Virginia. Those, indeed, whose ranks he had scattered, and whom he had thrown into the shade, still tried to brand him with the names of declaimer and demagogue. But this was obviously the effect of envy and mortified pride.… From the period of which we have been speaking, Mr. Henry became the idol of the people of Virginia.”[89]
FOOTNOTES:
[73] See this view supported by Wirt, in his life by Kennedy, ii. 73.
[74] Gordon, Hist. of Am. Rev. i. 131.
[75] Frothingham, Rise of the Republic, 178-181.
[76] Cited in Frothingham, 181.
[77] Oxenbridge Thacher.