[230] Grigsby, Va. Conv. of 1776, 151, 152.
CHAPTER XII
INDEPENDENCE
Upon this mortifying close of a military career which had opened with so much expectation and even éclat, Patrick Henry returned, early in March, 1776, to his home in the county of Hanover,—a home on which then rested the shadow of a great sorrow. In the midst of the public engagements and excitements which absorbed him during the previous year, his wife, Sarah, the wife of his youth, the mother of his six children, had passed away. His own subsequent release from public labor, however bitter in its occasion, must have brought to him a great solace in the few weeks of repose which he then had under his own roof, with the privilege of ministering to the happiness of his motherless children, and of enjoying once more their loving companionship and sympathy.
But in such a crisis of his country’s fate, such a man as Patrick Henry could not be permitted long to remain in seclusion; and the promptness and the heartiness with which he was now summoned back into the service of the public as a civilian, after the recent humiliations of his military [Pg 190] career, were accented, perhaps, on the part of his neighbors, by something of the fervor of intended compensation, if not of intended revenge. For, in the mean time, the American colonies had been swiftly advancing, along a path strewn with corpses and wet with blood, towards the doctrine that a total separation from the mother-country,—a thing hitherto contemplated by them only as a disaster and a crime,—might after all be neither, but on the contrary, the only resource left to them in their desperate struggle for political existence. This supreme question, it was plain, was to confront the very next Virginia convention, which was under appointment to meet early in the coming May. Almost at once, therefore, after his return home, Patrick Henry was elected by his native county to represent it in that convention.
On Monday morning, the 6th of May, the convention gathered at Williamsburg for its first meeting. On its roll of members we see many of those names which have become familiar to us in the progress of this history,—the names of those sturdy and well-trained leaders who guided Virginia during all that stormy period,—Pendleton, Cary, Mason, Nicholas, Bland, the Lees, Mann Page, Dudley Digges, Wythe, Edmund Randolph, and a few others. For the first time also, on such a roll, we meet the name of James Madison, an accomplished young political philosopher, then but four years from the inspiring instruction of President Witherspoon at Princeton. But while a few [Pg 191] very able men had places in that convention, it was, at the time, by some observers thought to contain an unusually large number of incompetent persons. Three days after the opening of the session Landon Carter wrote to Washington:—
“I could have wished that ambition had not so visibly seized so much ignorance all over the colony, as it seems to have done; for this present convention abounds with too many of the inexperienced creatures to navigate our bark on this dangerous coast; so that I fear the few skilful pilots who have hitherto done tolerably well to keep her clear from destruction, will not be able to conduct her with common safety any longer.”[231]
The earliest organization of the House was, on the part of the friends of Patrick Henry, made the occasion for a momentary flash of resentment against Edmund Pendleton, as the man who was believed by them to have been the guiding mind of the Committee of Safety in its long series of restraints upon the military activity of their chief. At the opening of the convention Pendleton was nominated for its president,—a most suitable nomination, and one which under ordinary circumstances would have been carried by acclamation. Thomas Johnson, however, a stanch follower of Patrick Henry, at once presented an opposing candidate; and although Pendleton was elected, he was not elected without a contest, or without this significant hint that the fires of indignation against [Pg 192] him were still burning in the hearts of a strong party in that house and throughout the colony.
The convention lasted just two months lacking a day; and in all the detail and drudgery of its business, as the journal indicates, Patrick Henry bore a very large part. In the course of the session, he seems to have served on perhaps a majority of all its committees. On the 6th of May, he was made a member of the committee of privileges and elections; on the 7th, of a committee “to bring in an ordinance to encourage the making of salt, saltpetre, and gunpowder;” on the 8th, of the committee on “propositions and grievances;” on the 21st, of a committee “to inquire for a proper hospital for the reception and accommodation of the sick and wounded soldiers;” on the 22d, of a committee to inquire into the truth of a complaint made by the Indians respecting encroachments on their lands; on the 23d, of a committee to bring in an ordinance for augmenting the ninth regiment, for enlisting four troops of horse, and for raising men for the defence of the frontier counties; on the 4th of June, of a committee to inquire into the causes for the depreciation of paper money in the colony, and into the rates at which goods are sold at the public store; on the 14th of June, of a committee to prepare an address to be sent by Virginia to the Shawanese Indians; on the 15th of June, of a committee to bring in amendments to the ordinance for prescribing a mode of punishment for the enemies of [Pg 193] America in this colony; and on the 22d of June, of a committee to prepare an ordinance “for enabling the present magistrates to continue the administration of justice, and for settling the general mode of proceedings in criminal and other cases.” The journal also mentions his frequent activity in the House in the presentation of reports from some of these committees: for example, from the committee on propositions and grievances, on the 16th of May, on the 22d of May, and on the 15th of June. On the latter occasion, he made to the House three detailed reports on as many different topics.[232]
Of course, the question overshadowing all others in that convention was the question of independence. General Charles Lee, whose military duties just then detained him at Williamsburg, and who was intently watching the currents of political thought in all the colonies, assured Washington, in a letter written on the 10th of May, that “a noble spirit” possessed the convention; and that the members were “almost unanimous for independence,” the only disagreement being “in their sentiments about the mode.”[233] That Patrick Henry was in favor of independence hardly needs to be mentioned; yet it does need to be mentioned that he was among those who disagreed with some of his associates “about the mode.” While he was as eager and as resolute for independence as [Pg 194] any man, he doubted whether the time had then fully come for declaring independence. He thought that the declaration should be so timed as to secure, beyond all doubt, two great conditions of success,—first, the firm union of the colonies themselves, and secondly, the friendship of foreign powers, particularly of France and Spain. For these reasons, he would have had independence delayed until a confederation of the colonies could be established by written articles, which, he probably supposed, would take but a few weeks; and also until American agents could have time to negotiate with the French and Spanish courts.