Finally, with respect to both the dates mentioned by Jefferson for the appearance of the scheme, Edmund Randolph has left explicit testimony to the effect that such a scheme never had any substantial existence at all: “Mr. Jefferson, in his [Pg 287] Notes on Virginia, speaks with great bitterness against those members of the Assembly in the years 1776 and 1781, who espoused the erection of a dictator. Coming from such authority, the invective infects the character of the legislature, notwithstanding he has restricted the charge to less than a majority, and acknowledged the spotlessness of most of them.… The subject was never before them, except as an article of newspaper intelligence, and even then not in a form which called for their attention. Against this unfettered monster, which deserved all the impassioned reprobation of Mr. Jefferson, their tones, it may be affirmed, would have been loud and tremendous.”[332]
For its autumn session, in 1781, the legislature did not reach an organization until the 19th of November,—just one month after the surrender of Cornwallis. Eight days after the organization of the House, Patrick Henry took his seat;[333] and after a service of less than four weeks, he obtained leave of absence for the remainder of the session.[334] During 1782 his attendance upon the House seems to have been limited to the spring session. At the organization of the House, on the 12th of May, 1783, he was in his place again, and during that session, as well as the autumnal one, his attendance was close and laborious. At both sessions of the House in 1784 he was present and in full force;[Pg 288] but in the very midst of these employments he was interrupted by his election as governor, on the 17th of November,—shortly after which, he withdrew to his country-seat in order to remove his family thence to the capital.
In the course of all these labors in the legislature, and amid a multitude of topics merely local and temporary, Patrick Henry had occasion to deal publicly, and under the peculiar responsibilities of leadership, with nearly all the most important and difficult questions that came before the American people during the later years of the war and the earlier years of the peace. The journal of the House for that period omits all mention of words spoken in debate; and although it does occasionally enable us to ascertain on which side of certain questions Patrick Henry stood, it leaves us in total ignorance of his reasons for any position which he chose to take. In trying, therefore, to estimate the quality of his statesmanship when dealing with these questions, we lack a part of the evidence which is essential to any just conclusion; and we are left peculiarly at the mercy of those sweeping censures which have been occasionally applied to his political conduct during that period.[335]
On the assurance of peace, in the spring of 1783, perhaps the earliest and the knottiest problem which had to be taken up was the one relating to that vast body of Americans who then bore the [Pg 289] contumelious name of Tories,—those Americans who, against all loss and ignominy, had steadily remained loyal to the unity of the British empire, unflinching in their rejection of the constitutional heresy of American secession. How should these execrable beings—the defeated party in a long and most rancorous civil war—be treated by the party which was at last victorious? Many of them were already in exile: should they be kept there? Many were still in this country: should they be banished from it? As a matter of fact, the exasperation of public feeling against the Tories was, at that time, so universal and so fierce that no statesman could then lift up his voice in their favor without dashing himself against the angriest currents of popular opinion and passion, and risking the loss of the public favor toward himself. Nevertheless, precisely this is what Patrick Henry had the courage to do. While the war lasted, no man spoke against the Tories more sternly than did he. The war being ended, and its great purpose secured, no man, excepting perhaps Alexander Hamilton, was so prompt and so energetic in urging that all animosities of the war should be laid aside, and that a policy of magnanimous forbearance should be pursued respecting these baffled opponents of American independence. It was in this spirit that, as soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities, he introduced a bill for the repeal of an act “to prohibit intercourse with, and the admission of British subjects into” Virginia,[336]—language [Pg 290] well understood to refer to the Tories. This measure, we are told, not only excited surprise, but “was, at first, received with a repugnance apparently insuperable.” Even his intimate friend John Tyler, the speaker of the House, hotly resisted it in the committee of the whole, and in the course of his argument, turning to Patrick Henry, asked “how he, above all other men, could think of inviting into his family an enemy from whose insults and injuries he had suffered so severely?”
In reply to this appeal, Patrick Henry declared that the question before them was not one of personal feeling; that it was a national question; and that in discussing it they should be willing to sacrifice all personal resentments, all private wrongs. He then proceeded to unfold the proposition that America had everything out of which to make a great nation—except people.
“Your great want, sir, is the want of men; and these you must have, and will have speedily, if you are wise. Do you ask how you are to get them? Open your doors, sir, and they will come in. The population of the Old World is full to overflowing; that population is ground, too, by the oppressions of the governments under which they live. Sir, they are already standing on tiptoe upon their native shores, and looking to your coasts with a wishful and longing eye.… But gentlemen object to any accession from Great Britain, and particularly to the return of the British refugees. Sir, I feel no objection to the return of those deluded [Pg 291] people. They have, to be sure, mistaken their own interests most wofully, and most wofully have they suffered the punishment due to their offences. But the relations which we bear to them and to their native country are now changed. Their king hath acknowledged our independence. The quarrel is over. Peace hath returned, and found us a free people. Let us have the magnanimity, sir, to lay aside our antipathies and prejudices, and consider the subject in a political light. Those are an enterprising, moneyed people. They will be serviceable in taking off the surplus produce of our lands, and supplying us with necessaries during the infant state of our manufactures. Even if they be inimical to us in point of feeling and principle, I can see no objection, in a political view, in making them tributary to our advantage. And, as I have no prejudices to prevent my making this use of them, so, sir, I have no fear of any mischief that they can do us. Afraid of them? What, sir [said he, rising to one of his loftiest attitudes, and assuming a look of the most indignant and sovereign contempt], shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?”[337]
In the same spirit he dealt with the restraints on British commerce imposed during the war,—a question similar to the one just mentioned, at least in this particular, that it was enveloped in the angry prejudices born of the conflict just ended. The journal for the 13th of May, 1783, has this entry: “Mr. Henry presented, according to order, a bill ‘to repeal the several Acts of Assembly for [Pg 292] seizure and condemnation of British goods found on land;’ and the same was received and read the first time, and ordered to be read a second time.” In advocating this measure, he seems to have lifted the discussion clear above all petty considerations to the plane of high and permanent principle, and, according to one of his chief antagonists in that debate, to have met all objections by arguments that were “beyond all expression eloquent and sublime.” After describing the embarrassments and distresses of the situation and their causes, he took the ground that perfect freedom was as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it was to the health and vigor of citizenship. “Why should we fetter commerce? If a man is in chains, he droops and bows to the earth, for his spirits are broken; but let him twist the fetters from his legs, and he will stand erect. Fetter not commerce, sir. Let her be as free as air; she will range the whole creation, and return on the wings of the four winds of heaven, to bless the land with plenty.”[338]
Besides these and other problems in the foreign relations of the country, there remained, of course, at the end of the war, several vast domestic problems for American statesmanship to grapple with,—one of these being the relations of the white race to their perpetual neighbors, the Indians. In the autumn session of 1784, in a series of efforts said to have been marked by “irresistible earnestness and eloquence,” he secured the [Pg 293] favorable attention of the House to this ancient problem, and even to his own daring and statesmanlike solution of it. The whole subject, as he thought, had been commonly treated by the superior race in a spirit not only mean and hard, but superficial also; the result being nearly two centuries of mutual suspicion, hatred, and slaughter. At last the time had come for the superior race to put an end to this traditional disaster and disgrace. Instead of tampering with the difficulty by remedies applied merely to the surface, he was for striking at the root of it, namely, at the deep divergence in sympathy and in interest between the two races. There was but one way in which to do this: it was for the white race to treat the Indians, consistently, as human beings, and as fast as possible to identify their interests with our own along the entire range of personal concerns,—in property, government, society, and, especially, in domestic life. In short, he proposed to encourage, by a system of pecuniary bounties, the practice of marriage between members of the two races, believing that such ties, once formed, would be an inviolable pledge of mutual friendship, fidelity, and forbearance, and would gradually lead to the transformation of the Indians into a civilized and Christian people. His bill for this purpose, elaborately drawn up, was carried through its second reading and “engrossed for its final passage,” when, by his sudden removal from the floor of the House to the governor’s chair, the measure was [Pg 294] deprived of its all-conquering champion, and, on the third reading, it fell a sacrifice to the Caucasian rage and scorn of the members.
It is proper to note, also, that during this period of service in the legislature Patrick Henry marched straight against public opinion, and jeoparded his popularity, on two or three other subjects. For example, the mass of the people of Virginia were then so angrily opposed to the old connection between church and state that they occasionally saw danger even in projects which in no way involved such a connection. This was the case with Patrick Henry’s necessary and most innocent measure “for the incorporation of all societies of the Christian religion which may apply for the same;” likewise, his bill for the incorporation of the clergy of the Episcopal Church; and, finally, his more questionable and more offensive resolution for requiring all citizens of the State to contribute to the expense of supporting some form of religious worship according to their own preference.
Whether, in these several measures, Patrick Henry was right or wrong, one thing, at least, is obvious: no politician who could thus beard in his very den the lion of public opinion can be accurately described as a demagogue.