“That a committee of four be appointed to wait on Major General Gates, and to assure him of the high regard and esteem of this House; that the remembrance of his former glorious services cannot be obliterated by any reverse of fortune; but that this House, ever mindful of his great merit, will omit no opportunity of testifying to the world the gratitude which, as a member of [Pg 278] the American Union, this country owes to him in his military character.”[319]
On the 2d of January, 1781, the last day of the session, the House adopted, on Patrick Henry’s motion, a resolution authorizing the governor to convene the next meeting of the legislature at some other place than Richmond, in case its assembling in that city should “be rendered inconvenient by the operations of an invading enemy,”[320] a resolution reflecting their sense of the peril then hanging over the State.
Before the legislature could again meet, events proved that it was no imaginary danger against which Patrick Henry’s resolution had been intended to provide. On the 2d of January, 1781, the very day on which the legislature had adjourned, a hostile fleet conveyed into the James River a force of about eight hundred men under command of Benedict Arnold, whose eagerness to ravage Virginia was still further facilitated by the arrival, on the 26th of March, of two thousand men under General Phillips. Moreover, Lord Cornwallis, having beaten General Greene at Guilford, in North Carolina, on the 15th of March, seemed to be gathering force for a speedy advance into Virginia. That the roar of his guns would soon be heard in the outskirts of their capital, was what all Virginians then felt to be inevitable.[Pg 279]
Under such circumstances, it is not strange that a session of the legislature, which is said to have been held on the 1st of March,[321] should have been a very brief one, or that when the 7th of May arrived—the day for its reassembling at Richmond—no quorum should have been present; or that, on the 10th of May, the few members who had arrived in Richmond should have voted, in deference to “the approach of an hostile army,”[322] to adjourn to Charlottesville,—a place of far greater security, ninety-seven miles to the northwest, among the mountains of Albemarle. By the 20th of May, Cornwallis reached Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of Richmond; and shortly afterward, pushing across the James and the Chickahominy, he encamped on the North Anna, in the county of Hanover. Thus, at last, the single county of Louisa then separated him from that county in which was the home of the governor of the State, and where was then convened its legislature,—Patrick Henry himself being present and in obvious direction of all its business. The opportunity to bag such game, Lord Cornwallis was not the man to let slip. Accordingly, on Sunday, the 3d of June, he dispatched a swift expedition under Tarleton, to surprise and capture the members of the legislature, “to seize on the person of the governor,” and “to spread on his route devastation and terror.”[323] In this entire scheme, doubtless,[Pg 280] Tarleton would have succeeded, had it not been that as he and his troopers, on that fair Sabbath day, were hurrying past the Cuckoo tavern in Louisa, one Captain John Jouette, watching from behind the windows, espied them, divined their object, and mounting a fleet horse, and taking a shorter route, got into Charlottesville a few hours in advance of them, just in time to give the alarm, and to set the imperiled legislators a-flying to the mountains for safety.
Then, by all accounts, was witnessed a display of the locomotive energies of grave and potent senators, such as this world has not often exhibited. Of this tragically comical incident, of course, the journal of the House of Delegates makes only the most placid and forbearing mention. For Monday, June 4, its chief entry is as follows: “There being reason to apprehend an immediate incursion of the enemy’s cavalry to this place, which renders it indispensable that the General Assembly should forthwith adjourn to a place of greater security; resolved, that this House be adjourned until Thursday next, then to meet at the town of Staunton, in the county of Augusta,”—a town thirty-nine miles farther west, beyond a chain of mountains, and only to be reached by them or their pursuers through difficult passes in the Blue Ridge. The next entry in the journal is dated at Staunton, on the 7th of June, and, very properly, is merely a prosaic and business-like [Pg 281] record of the reassembling of the House according to the adjournment aforesaid.[324]
But as to some of the things that happened in that interval of panic and of scrambling flight, popular tradition has not been equally forbearing; and while the anecdotes upon that subject, which have descended to our time, are very likely decorated by many tassels of exaggeration and of myth, they yet have, doubtless, some slight framework of truth, and do really portray for us the actual beliefs of many people in Virginia respecting a number of their celebrated men, and especially respecting some of the less celebrated traits of those men. For example, it is related that on the sudden adjournment of the House, caused by this dusty and breathless apparition of the speedful Jouette, and his laconic intimation that Tarleton was coming, the members, though somewhat accustomed to ceremony, stood not upon the order of their going, but went at once,—taking first to their horses, and then to the woods; and that, breaking up into small parties of fugitives, they thus made their several ways, as best they could, through the passes of the mountains leading to the much-desired seclusion of Staunton. One of these parties consisted of Benjamin Harrison, Colonel William Christian, John Tyler, and Patrick Henry. Late in the day, tired and hungry, they stopped their horses at the door of a small hut, in a gorge of the hills, and asked for food. An old woman,[Pg 282] who came to the door, and who was alone in the house, demanded of them who they were, and where they were from. Patrick Henry, who acted as spokesman of the party, answered: “We are members of the legislature, and have just been compelled to leave Charlottesville on account of the approach of the enemy.” “Ride on, then, ye cowardly knaves,” replied she, in great wrath; “here have my husband and sons just gone to Charlottesville to fight for ye, and you running away with all your might. Clear out—ye shall have nothing here.” “But,” rejoined Mr. Henry, in an expostulating tone, “we were obliged to fly. It would not do for the legislature to be broken up by the enemy. Here is Mr. Speaker Harrison; you don’t think he would have fled had it not been necessary?” “I always thought a great deal of Mr. Harrison till now,” answered the old woman; “but he’d no business to run from the enemy,” and she was about to shut the door in their faces. “Wait a moment, my good woman,” urged Mr. Henry; “you would hardly believe that Mr. Tyler or Colonel Christian would take to flight if there were not good cause for so doing?” “No, indeed, that I wouldn’t,” she replied. “But,” exclaimed he, “Mr. Tyler and Colonel Christian are here.” “They here? Well, I never would have thought it;” and she stood for a moment in doubt, but at once added, “No matter. We love these gentlemen, and I didn’t suppose they would ever run away from the British; but since they have, they shall [Pg 283] have nothing to eat in my house. You may ride along.” In this desperate situation Mr. Tyler then stepped forward and said, “What would you say, my good woman, if I were to tell you that Patrick Henry fled with the rest of us?” “Patrick Henry! I should tell you there wasn’t a word of truth in it,” she answered angrily; “Patrick Henry would never do such a cowardly thing.” “But this is Patrick Henry,” said Mr. Tyler, pointing to him. The old woman was amazed; but after some reflection, and with a convulsive twitch or two at her apron string, she said, “Well, then, if that’s Patrick Henry, it must be all right. Come in, and ye shall have the best I have in the house.”[325]
The pitiless tongue of tradition does not stop here, but proceeds to narrate other alleged experiences of this our noble, though somewhat disconcerted, Patrick. Arrived at last in Staunton, and walking through its reassuring streets, he is said to have met one Colonel William Lewis, to whom the face of the orator was then unknown; and to have told to this stranger the story of the flight of the legislature from Albemarle. “If Patrick Henry had been in Albemarle,” was the stranger’s comment, “the British dragoons never would have passed over the Rivanna River.”[326]
The tongue of tradition, at last grown quite reckless, perhaps, of its own credit, still further relates [Pg 284] that even at Staunton these illustrious fugitives did not feel entirely sure that they were beyond the reach of Tarleton’s men. A few nights after their arrival there, as the story runs, upon some sudden alarm, several of them sprang from their beds, and, imperfectly clapping on their clothes, fled out of the town, and took refuge at the plantation of one Colonel George Moffett, near which, they had been told, was a cave in which they might the more effectually conceal themselves. Mrs. Moffett, though not knowing the names of these flitting Solons, yet received them with true Virginian hospitality: but the next morning, at breakfast, she made the unlucky remark that there was one member of the legislature who certainly would not have run from the enemy. “Who is he?” was then asked. Her reply was, “Patrick Henry.” At that moment a gentleman of the party, himself possessed of but one boot, was observed to blush considerably. Furthermore, as soon as possible after breakfast, these imperiled legislators departed in search of the cave; shortly after which a negro from Staunton rode up, carrying in his hand a solitary boot, and inquiring earnestly for Patrick Henry. In that way, as the modern reporter of this very debatable tradition unkindly adds, the admiring Mrs. Moffett ascertained who it was that the boot fitted; and he further suggests that, whatever Mrs. Moffett’s emotions were at that time, those of Patrick must have been, “Give me liberty, but not death.”[327]
[Pg 285] Passing by these whimsical tales, we have now to add that the legislature, having on the 7th of June entered upon its work at Staunton, steadily continued it there until the 23d of the month, when it adjourned in orderly fashion, to meet again in the following October. Governor Jefferson, whose second year of office had expired two days before the flight of himself and the legislature from Charlottesville, did not accompany that body to Staunton, but pursued his own way to Poplar Forest and to Bedford, where, “remote from the legislature,”[328] he remained during the remainder of its session. On the 12th of June, Thomas Nelson was elected as his successor in office.[329]
It was during this period of confusion and terror that, as Jefferson alleges, the legislature once more had before it the project of a dictator, in the criminal sense of that word; and, upon Jefferson’s private authority, both Wirt and Girardin long afterward named Patrick Henry as the man who was intended for this profligate honor.[330] We need not here repeat what was said, in our narrative of the closing weeks of 1776, concerning this terrible posthumous imputation upon the public and private character of Patrick Henry. Nearly everything which then appeared to the discredit of this charge in connection with the earlier date, is equally applicable [Pg 286] to it in connection with the later date also. Moreover, as regards this later date, there has recently been discovered a piece of contemporaneous testimony which shows that, whatever may have been the scheme for a dictatorship in Virginia in 1781, it was a great military chieftain who was wanted for the position; and, apparently, that Patrick Henry was not then even mentioned in the affair. On the 9th of June, 1781, Captain H. Young, though not a member of the House of Delegates, writes from Staunton to Colonel William Davies as follows: “Two days ago, Mr. Nicholas gave notice that he should this day move to have a dictator appointed. General Washington and General Greene are talked of. I dare say your knowledge of these worthy gentlemen will be sufficient to convince you that neither of them will, or ought to, accept of such an appointment.… We have but a thin House of Delegates; but they are zealous, I think, in the cause of virtue.”[331] Furthermore, the journal of that House contains no record of any such motion having been made; and it is probable that it never was made, and that the subject never came before the legislature in any such form as to call for its notice.