As regards his attitude toward that great business, we need, first of all, to clear away some obscurity which has gathered about the question of his habitual views respecting the relations of the several States to the general government. It has been common to suppose that, even prior to the movement for the new Constitution, Patrick Henry had always been an extreme advocate of the rights of the States as opposed to the central authority [Pg 304] of the Union; and that the tremendous resistance which he made to the new Constitution in all stages of the affair prior to the adoption of the first group of amendments is to be accounted for as the effect of an original and habitual tendency of his mind.[347] Such, however, seems not to have been the case.
In general it may be said that, at the very outset of the Revolution, Patrick Henry was one of the first of our statesmen to recognize the existence and the imperial character of a certain cohesive central authority, arising from the very nature of the revolutionary act which the several colonies were then taking. As early as 1774, in the first Continental Congress, it was he who exclaimed: “All distinctions are thrown down. All America is thrown into one mass.” “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.” In the spring of 1776, at the approach of the question of independence, it was he who even incurred reproach by his anxiety to defer independence until after the basis for a general government should have been established, lest the several States, in separating from England, should lapse into a separation from one another also. As governor of Virginia from 1776 to 1779, his official correspondence with the president of Congress, with the board of war, and with the general of the army is pervaded by proofs of [Pg 305] his respect for the supreme authority of the general government within its proper sphere. Finally, as a leader in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1780 to 1784, he was in the main a supporter of the policy of giving more strength and dignity to the general government. During all that period, according to the admission of his most unfriendly modern critic, Patrick Henry showed himself “much more disposed to sustain and strengthen the federal authority” than did, for example, his great rival in the House, Richard Henry Lee; and for the time those two great men became “the living and active exponents of two adverse political systems in both state and national questions.”[348] In 1784, by which time the weakness of the general government had become alarming, Patrick Henry was among the foremost in Virginia to express alarm, and to propose the only appropriate remedy. For example, on the assembling of the legislature, in May of that year, he took pains to seek an early interview with two of his prominent associates in the House of Delegates, Madison and Jones, for the express purpose of devising with them some method of giving greater strength to the Confederation. “I find him,” wrote Madison to Jefferson immediately after the interview, “strenuous for invigorating the federal government, though without any precise plan.”[349] A more detailed account of the same interview was sent to Jefferson by another correspondent.[Pg 306] According to the latter, Patrick Henry then declared that “he saw ruin inevitable, unless something was done to give Congress a compulsory process on delinquent States;” that “a bold example set by Virginia” in that direction “would have influence on the other States;” and that “this conviction was his only inducement for coming into the present Assembly.” Whereupon, it was then agreed between them that “Jones and Madison should sketch some plan for giving greater power to the federal government; and Henry promised to sustain it on the floor.”[350] Finally, such was the impression produced by Patrick Henry’s political conduct during all those years that, as late as in December, 1786, Madison could speak of him as having “been hitherto the champion of the federal cause.”[351]
Not far, however, from the date last mentioned Patrick Henry ceased to be “the champion of the federal cause,” and became its chief antagonist, and so remained until some time during Washington’s first term in the presidency. What brought about this sudden and total revolution? It can be explained only by the discovery of some new influence which came into his life between 1784 and 1786, and which was powerful enough to reverse entirely the habitual direction of his political thought and conduct. Just what that influence was can now be easily shown.[Pg 307]
On the 3d of August, 1786, John Jay, as secretary for foreign affairs, presented to Congress some results of his negotiations with the Spanish envoy, Gardoqui, respecting a treaty with Spain; and he then urged that Congress, in view of certain vast advantages to our foreign commerce, should consent to surrender the navigation of the Mississippi for twenty-five or thirty years,[352]—a proposal which, very naturally, seemed to the six Southern States as nothing less than a cool invitation to them to sacrifice their own most important interests for the next quarter of a century, in order to build up during that period the interests of the seven States of the North. The revelation of this project, and of the ability of the Northern States to force it through, sent a shock of alarm and of distrust into every Southern community. Moreover, full details of these transactions in Congress were promptly conveyed to Governor Henry by James Monroe, who added this pungent item,—that a secret project was then under the serious consideration of “committees” of Northern men, for a dismemberment of the Union, and for setting the Southern States adrift, after having thus bartered away from them the use of the Mississippi.[353]
On the same day that Monroe was writing from New York that letter to Governor Henry, Madison was writing from Philadelphia a letter to Jefferson. Having mentioned a plan for strengthening the Confederation, Madison says:—[Pg 308]
“Though my wishes are in favor of such an event, yet I despair so much of its accomplishment at the present crisis, that I do not extend my views beyond a commercial reform. To speak the truth, I almost despair even of this. You will find the cause in a measure now before Congress, … a proposed treaty with Spain, one article of which shuts the Mississippi for twenty or thirty years. Passing by the other Southern States, figure to yourself the effect of such a stipulation on the Assembly of Virginia, already jealous of Northern politics, and which will be composed of thirty members from the Western waters,—of a majority of others attached to the Western country from interests of their own, of their friends, or their constituents.… Figure to yourself its effect on the people at large on the Western waters, who are impatiently waiting for a favorable result to the negotiation with Gardoqui, and who will consider themselves sold by their Atlantic brethren. Will it be an unnatural consequence if they consider themselves absolved from every federal tie, and court some protection for their betrayed rights?”[354]
How truly Madison predicted the fatal construction which in the South, and particularly in Virginia, would be put upon the proposed surrender of the Mississippi, may be seen by a glance at some of the resolutions which passed the Virginia House of Delegates on the 29th of the following November:—
“That the common right of navigating the river Mississippi, and of communicating with other nations through that channel, ought to be considered as the [Pg 309] bountiful gift of nature to the United States, as proprietors of the territories watered by the said river and its eastern branches, and as moreover secured to them by the late revolution.
“That the Confederacy, having been formed on the broad basis of equal rights, in every part thereof, to the protection and guardianship of the whole, a sacrifice of the rights of any one part, to the supposed or real interest of another part, would be a flagrant violation of justice, a direct contravention of the end for which the federal government was instituted, and an alarming innovation in the system of the Union.”[355]
One day after the passage of those resolutions, Patrick Henry ceased to be the governor of Virginia; and five days afterward he was chosen by Virginia as one of its seven delegates to a convention to be held at Philadelphia in the following May for the purpose of revising the federal Constitution. But amid the widespread excitement, amid the anger and the suspicion then prevailing as to the liability of the Southern States, even under a weak confederation, to be slaughtered, in all their most important concerns, by the superior weight and number of the Northern States, it is easy to see how little inclined many Southern statesmen would be to increase that liability by making this weak confederation a strong one. In the list of such Southern statesmen Patrick Henry must henceforth be reckoned; and, as it was never his nature to do anything tepidly or by halves, his [Pg 310] hostility to the project for strengthening the Confederation soon became as hot as it was comprehensive. On the 7th of December, only three days after he was chosen as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention, Madison, then at Richmond, wrote concerning him thus anxiously to Washington:—