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American Statesmen

PATRICK HENRY

BY

MOSES COIT TYLER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

[Pg iv]

COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY MOSES COIT TYLER
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY MOSES COIT TYLER AND HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JEANNETTE G. TYLER
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

[Pg v]

PREFACE

In this book I have tried to embody the chief results derived from a study of all the materials known to me, in print and in manuscript, relating to Patrick Henry,—many of these materials being now used for the first time in any formal presentation of his life.

Notwithstanding the great popular interest attaching to the name of Patrick Henry, he has hitherto been the subject of but one memoir founded on original investigation, and that, of course, is the Life by William Wirt. When it is considered, however, that Wirt’s book was finished as long ago as the year 1817,—before the time had fairly come for the publication of the correspondence, diaries, personal memoranda, and official records of every sort, illustrating the great period covered by Patrick Henry’s career,—it will be easy to infer something as to the quantity and the value of those printed materials bearing upon the subject, which are now to be had by us, but which were not within the reach of Wirt. Accordingly, in his lack of much of the detailed [Pg vi] testimony that then lay buried in inaccessible documents, Wirt had to trust largely to the somewhat imaginative traditions concerning Patrick Henry which he found floating in the air of Virginia; and especially to the supposed recollections of old people,—recollections which, in this case, were nearly always vague, not always disinterested, often inaccurate, and generally made up of emotional impressions rather than of facts. Any one who will take the trouble to ascertain the enormous disadvantages under which Wirt wrote, and which, as we now know, gave him great discouragement, will be inclined to applaud him for making so good a book, rather than to blame him for not making a better one.

It is proper for me to state that, besides the copious printed materials now within reach, I have been able to make use of a large number of manuscripts relating to my subject. Of these may be specified a document, belonging to Cornell University, written by a great-grandson of Patrick Henry, the late Rev. Edward Fontaine, and giving, among other things, several new anecdotes of the great orator, as told to the writer by his own father, Colonel Patrick Henry Fontaine, who was much with Patrick Henry during the later years of his life. I may add that, through the kindness of the Hon. William Wirt Henry of [Pg vii] Richmond, I have had access to the manuscripts which were collected by Wirt for the purposes of his book, but were only in part used by him. With unstinted generosity, Mr. Henry likewise placed in my hands all the papers relating to his illustrious grandfather, which, during the past thirty years or more, he has succeeded in bringing together, either from different branches of the family, or from other sources. A portion of the manuscripts thus accumulated by him consists of copies of the letters, now preserved in the Department of State, written by Patrick Henry, chiefly while governor of Virginia, to General Washington, to the president of Congress, to Virginia’s delegation in Congress, and to the Board of War.

In the very front of this book, therefore, I record my grateful acknowledgments to Mr. William Wirt Henry; acknowledgments not alone for the sort of generosity of which I have just spoken, but for another sort, also, which is still more rare, and which I cannot so easily describe,—his perfect delicacy, while promoting my more difficult researches by his invaluable help, in never once encumbering that help with the least effort to hamper my judgment, or to sway it from the natural conclusions to which my studies might lead.

Finally, it gives me pleasure to mention that, in the preparation of this book, I have received [Pg viii] courteous assistance from Mr. Theodore F. Dwight and Mr. S. M. Hamilton of the library of the Department of State; from the Rev. Professor W. M. Hughes, of Hobart College; and from the Rev. Stephen H. Synnott, rector of St. John’s, Ithaca.

M. C. T.

Cornell University, 3 June, 1887.

[Pg ix]

PREFACE
TO REVISED EDITION

I have gladly used the opportunity afforded by a new edition of this book to give the text a minute revision from beginning to end, and to make numerous changes both in its substance and in its form.

During the eleven years that have passed since it first came from the press, considerable additions have been made to our documentary materials for the period covered by it, the most important for our purpose being the publication, for the first time, of the correspondence and the speeches of Patrick Henry and of George Mason, the former with a life, in three volumes, by William Wirt Henry, the latter also with a life, in two volumes, by Kate Mason Rowland. Besides procuring for my own pages whatever benefit I could draw from these texts, I have tried, while turning over very frequently the writings of Patrick Henry’s contemporaries, to be always on the watch for the means of correcting any mistakes I may have made concerning him, whether as to fact or as to opinion.

[Pg x]In this work of rectification I have likewise been aided by suggestions from many persons, of whom I would particularly mention the Right Rev. Joseph Blount Cheshire, Jr., D. D., Bishop of North Carolina, and Mr. William Wirt Henry.

M. C. T.

Cornell University, 31 March, 1898

[Pg xi]

CONTENTS

[Pg 1]
[ToC]

PATRICK HENRY

CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS

On the evening of October 7, 1732, that merry Old Virginian, Colonel William Byrd of Westover, having just finished a journey through King William County for the inspection of his estates, was conducted, for his night’s lodging, to the house of a blooming widow, Mistress Sarah Syme, in the county of Hanover. This lady, at first supposing her guest to be some new suitor for her lately disengaged affections, “put on a Gravity that becomes a Weed;” but so soon as she learned her mistake and the name of her distinguished visitor, she “brighten’d up into an unusual cheerfulness and Serenity. She was a portly, handsome Dame, of the Family of Esau, and seem’d not to pine too much for the Death of her Husband, who was of the Family of the Saracens.… This widow is a person of a lively & cheerful Conversation, with much less Reserve than most of her Countrywomen. It becomes her very well, and [Pg 2] sets off her other agreeable Qualities to Advantage. We tost off a Bottle of honest Port, which we relisht with a broil’d Chicken. At Nine I retir’d to my Devotions, And then Slept so Sound that Fancy itself was Stupify’d, else I shou’d have dreamt of my most obliging Landlady.” The next day being Sunday, “the courteous Widow invited me to rest myself there that good day, and go to Church with Her, but I excus’d myself by telling her she wou’d certainly spoil my Devotion. Then she civilly entreated me to make her House my Home whenever I visited my Plantations, which made me bow low, and thank her very kindly.”[1]

Not very long after that notable visit, the sprightly widow gave her hand in marriage to a young Scotchman of good family, John Henry, of Aberdeen, a protégé and probably a kinsman of her former husband; and continuing to reside on her estate of Studley, in the county of Hanover, she became, on May 29, 1736, the mother of Patrick Henry.

Through the lineage of both his parents, this child had some claim to an inheritance of brains. The father, a man of firm and sound intellect, had been liberally educated in Scotland; among the country gentlemen of his neighborhood in Virginia, he was held in high esteem for superior intelligence and character, as is shown by the positions he long held of county surveyor, colonel of his regiment, and presiding judge of the county court; while he [Pg 3] could number among his near kinsmen at home several persons of eminence as divines, orators, or men of letters,—such as his uncle, William Robertson, minister of Borthwick in Mid Lothian and afterward of the Old Greyfriars’ Church in Edinburgh; his cousin, David Henry, the successor of Edward Cave in the management of the “Gentleman’s Magazine;” and especially his cousin, William Robertson, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and author of the “History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V.” Moreover, among the later paternal relatives of Patrick Henry may be mentioned one person of oratorical and forensic genius very brilliant and in quality not unlike his own. Patrick Henry’s father was second cousin to that beautiful Eleanor Syme of Edinburgh, who, in 1777, became the wife of Henry Brougham of Brougham Hall, Westmoreland. Their eldest son was Lord Brougham, who was thus the third cousin of Patrick Henry. To some it will perhaps seem not a mere caprice of ingenuity to discover in the fiery, eccentric, and truculent eloquence of the great English advocate and parliamentary orator a family likeness to that of his renowned American kinsman; or to find in the fierceness of the champion of Queen Caroline against George IV., and of English anti-slavery reform and of English parliamentary reform against aristocratic and commercial selfishness, the same bitter and eager radicalism that burned in the blood of him who, on this side of the Atlantic, [Pg 4] was, in popular oratory, the great champion of the colonies against George III., and afterward of the political autonomy of the State of Virginia against the all-dominating centralization which he saw coiled up in the projected Constitution of the United States.[2]

Those, however, who knew the mother of Patrick Henry, and her family, the Winstons, were accustomed to think that it was from her side of the house that he derived the most characteristic traits not only of his genius, but of his disposition. The Winstons of Virginia were of Welsh stock; a family marked by vivacity of spirit, conversational talent, a lyric and dramatic turn, a gift for music and for eloquent speech, at the same time by a fondness for country life, for inartificial pleasures, for fishing and hunting, for the solitude and the unkempt charms of nature. It was said, too, of the Winstons that their talents were in excess of their ambition or of their energy, and were not brought into use except in a fitful way, and under the stimulus of some outward and passing occasion. They seem to have belonged to that very considerable class of persons in this world of [Pg 5] whom more might have been made. Especially much talk used to be heard, among old men in Virginia, of Patrick Henry’s uncle, his mother’s own brother, William Winston, as having a gift of eloquence dazzling and wondrous like Patrick’s, nay, as himself unsurpassed in oratory among all the great speakers of Virginia except by Patrick himself.[3]

The system of education prevailing in Virginia during Patrick Henry’s early years was extremely simple. It consisted of an almost entire lack of public schools, mitigated by the sporadic and irregular exercise of domestic tuition. Those who could afford to import instruction into their homes got it, if they desired; those who could not, generally went without. As to the youthful Patrick, he and education never took kindly to each other. From nearly all quarters the testimony is to this effect,—that he was an indolent, dreamy, frolicsome creature, with a mortal enmity to books, supplemented by a passionate regard for fishing-rods and shot-guns; disorderly in dress, slouching, vagrant, unambitious; a roamer in woods, a loiterer on river-banks; having more tastes and aspirations in common with trappers and frontiersmen than with the toilers of civilized life; giving no hint nor token, by word or act, of the possession of any intellectual gift that could raise him above mediocrity, or even up to it.

During the first ten years of his life, he seems [Pg 6] to have made, at a small school in the neighborhood, some small and reluctant progress into the mysteries of reading, writing, and arithmetic; whereupon his father took personal charge of the matter, and conducted his further education at home, along with that of other children, being aided in the task by the very competent help of a brother, the Rev. Patrick Henry, rector of St. Paul’s parish, in Hanover, and apparently a good Scotch classicist. In this way our Patrick acquired some knowledge of Latin and Greek, and rather more knowledge of mathematics,—the latter being the only branch of book-learning for which, in those days, he showed the least liking. However, under such circumstances, with little real discipline, doubtless, and amid plentiful interruptions, the process of ostensible education went forward with the young man; and even this came to an end by the time that he was fifteen years old.

At that age, he was duly graduated from the domestic schoolroom into the shop of a country tradesman hard by. After an apprenticeship there of a single year, his father set him up in trade, joining with him in the conduct of a country store his elder brother, William, a youth more indolent, if possible, as well as more disorderly and uncommercial, than Patrick himself. One year of this odd partnership brought the petty concern to its inevitable fate. Just one year after that, having attained the ripe age of eighteen, and being then [Pg 7] entirely out of employment, and equally out of money, Patrick rounded out his embarrassments, and gave symmetry to them, as it were, by getting married,—and that to a young woman quite as impecunious as himself. The name of this damsel was Sarah Shelton; her father being a small farmer, and afterward a small tavern-keeper in the neighborhood. In the very rashness and absurdity of this proceeding on the part of these two interesting young paupers, irresistibly smitten with each other’s charms, and mutually resolved to defy their own helplessness by doubling it, there seems to have been a sort of semi-ludicrous pathos which constituted an irresistible call for help.

The parents on both sides heard the call, and by their joint efforts soon established the young couple on a little farm near at hand, from which, by their own toil, reënforced by that of half a dozen slaves, they were expected to extort a living. This experiment, the success of which depended on exactly those qualities which Patrick did not then possess,—industry, order, sharp calculation, persistence,—turned out as might have been predicted. At the end of two years he made a forced sale of some of his slaves, and invested the proceeds in the stock of a country store once more. But as he had now proved himself to be a bad farmer, and a still worse merchant, it is not easy to divine by what subtle process of reasoning he had been able to conclude that there would be any improvement in his circumstances by getting out of agriculture and back into merchandise. [Pg 8]

When he undertook this last venture he was still but a youth of twenty. By the time that he was twenty-three, that is, by the autumn of 1759, he had become convinced that his little store was to prove for him merely a consumer of capital and a producer of bad debts; and in view of the necessity of soon closing it, he had ample excuse for taking into consideration what he should do next. Already was he the happy father of sundry small children, with the most trustworthy prospect of a steady enlargement and multiplication of his paternal honors. Surely, to a man of twenty-three, a husband and a father, who, from the age of fifteen, had been engaged in a series of enterprises to gain his livelihood, and had perfectly failed in every one of them, the question of his future means of subsistence must have presented itself as a subject of no little pertinence, not to say urgency. However, at that time Patrick seems to have been a young fellow of superabounding health and of inextinguishable spirits, and even in that crisis of his life he was able to deal gayly with its problems. In that very year, 1759, Thomas Jefferson, then a lad of sixteen, and on his way to the College of William and Mary, happened to spend the Christmas holidays at the house of Colonel Nathan Dandridge, in Hanover, and there first met Patrick Henry. Long afterward, recalling these days, Jefferson furnished this picture of him:—

“Mr. Henry had, a little before, broken up his store, or[Pg 9] rather it had broken him up; but his misfortunes were not to be traced either in his countenance or conduct.” “During the festivity of the season I met him in society every day, and we became well acquainted, although I was much his junior.… His manners had something of coarseness in them. His passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry. He excelled in the last, and it attached every one to him.”[4]

Shortly after Jefferson left those hilarious scenes for the somewhat more restrained festivities of the little college at Williamsburg, Patrick succeeded in settling in his own mind what he was going to do next. He could not dig, so it seemed, neither could he traffic, but perhaps he could talk. Why not get a living by his tongue? Why not be a lawyer?

But before we follow him through the gates of that superb profession,—gates which, after some preliminary creaking of the hinges, threw open to him the broad pathway to wealth, renown, unbounded influence,—let us stop a moment longer on the outside, and get a more distinct idea, if we can, of his real intellectual outfit for the career on which he was about to enter.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Byrd Manuscripts, ii. 79, 80.

[2] I have from private sources information that Brougham was aware of his relationship to Patrick Henry, and that in recognition of it he showed marked attentions to a grand-nephew of Patrick Henry, the late W. C. Preston, of South Carolina, when the latter was in England. Moreover, in his Life and Times, i. 17, 18, Brougham declares that he derived from his maternal ancestors the qualities which lifted him above the mediocrity that had always attached to his ancestors on the paternal side.

[3] Wirt, 3.

[4] In a letter to Wirt, in 1815, Life of Henry, 14, 15; also Writings of Jefferson, vi. 487, 488, where the letter is given, apparently, from the first draft.

[Pg 10]
[ToC]

CHAPTER II
WAS HE ILLITERATE?

Concerning the quality and extent of Patrick Henry’s early education, it is perhaps impossible now to speak with entire confidence. On the one hand there seems to have been a tendency, in his own time and since, to overstate his lack of education, and this partly, it may be, from a certain instinctive fascination which one finds in pointing to so dramatic a contrast as that between the sway which the great orator wielded over the minds of other men and the untrained vigor and illiterate spontaneity of his own mind. Then, too, it must be admitted that, whatever early education Patrick Henry may have received, he did, in certain companies and at certain periods of his life, rather too perfectly conceal it under an uncouth garb and manner, and under a pronunciation which, to say the least, was archaic and provincial. Jefferson told Daniel Webster that Patrick Henry’s “pronunciation was vulgar and vicious,” although, as Jefferson adds, this “was forgotten while he was speaking.”[5] Governor John Page “used to relate, on the testimony of his own ears,” that Patrick [Pg 11] Henry would speak of “the yearth,” and of “men’s naiteral parts being improved by larnin’;”[6] while Spencer Roane mentions his pronunciation of China as “Cheena.”[7] All this, however, it should be noted, does not prove illiteracy. If, indeed, such was his ordinary speech, and not, as some have suggested, a manner adopted on particular occasions for the purpose of identifying himself with the mass of his hearers, the fact is evidence merely that he retained through his mature life, on the one hand, some relics of an old-fashioned good usage, and, on the other, some traces of the brogue of the district in which he was born, just as Edmund Pendleton used to say “scaicely” for scarcely, and as John Taylor, of Caroline, would say “bare” for bar; just as Thomas Chalmers always retained the brogue of Fifeshire, and Thomas Carlyle that of Ecclefechan. Certainly a brogue can never be elegant, but as it has many times coexisted with very high intellectual cultivation, its existence in Patrick Henry does not prove him to have been uncultivated.

Then, too, it must be remembered that he himself had a habit of depreciating his own acquaintance with books, and his own dependence on them. He did this, it would seem, partly from a consciousness that it would only increase his hold on the sympathy and support of the mass of the people of Virginia if they should regard him as absolutely one of themselves, and in no sense raised [Pg 12] above them by artificial advantages. Moreover, this habit of self-depreciation would be brought into play when he was in conversation with such professed devourers of books as John Adams and Jefferson, compared with whom he might very properly feel an unfeigned conviction that he was no reader at all,—a conviction in which they would be quite likely to agree with him, and which they would be very likely to express. Thus, John Adams mentions that, in the first intimacy of their friendship begun at the Congress of 1774, the Virginian orator, at his lodgings, confessed one night that, for himself, he had “had no public education;” that at fifteen he had “read Virgil and Livy,” but that he had “not looked into a Latin book since.”[8] Upon Jefferson, who of course knew Henry far longer and far more closely, the impression of his disconnection from books seems to have been even more decided, especially if we may accept the testimony of Jefferson’s old age, when his memory had taken to much stumbling, and his imagination even more to extravagance than in his earlier life. Said Jefferson, in 1824, of his ancient friend: “He was a man of very little knowledge of any sort. He read nothing, and had no books.”[9]

On the other hand, there are certain facts concerning Henry’s early education and intellectual habits which may be regarded as pretty well established. [Pg 13] Before the age of ten, at a petty neighborhood school, he had got started upon the three primary steps of knowledge. Then, from ten to fifteen, whatever may have been his own irregularity and disinclination, he was member of a home school, under the immediate training of his father and his uncle, both of them good Scotch classical scholars, and one of them at least a proficient in mathematics. No doubt the human mind, especially in its best estate of juvenile vigor and frivolity, has remarkable aptitude for the repulsion of unwelcome knowledge; but it can hardly be said that even Patrick Henry’s gift in that direction could have prevented his becoming, under two such masters, tolerably well grounded in Latin, if not in Greek, or that the person who at fifteen is able to read Virgil and Livy, no matter what may be his subsequent neglect of Latin authors, is not already imbued with the essential and indestructible rudiments of the best intellectual culture.

It is this early initiation, on the basis of a drill in Latin, into the art and mystery of expression, which Patrick Henry received from masters so competent and so deeply interested in him, which helps us to understand a certain trait of his, which puzzled Jefferson, and which, without this clue, would certainly be inexplicable. From his first appearance as a speaker to the end of his days, he showed himself to be something more than a declaimer,—indeed, an adept in language. “I have been often astonished,” said Jefferson, “at his [Pg 14] command of proper language; how he obtained the knowledge of it I never could find out, as he read little, and conversed little with educated men.”[10] It is true, probably, that we have no perfect report of any speech he ever made; but even through the obvious imperfections of his reporters there always gleams a certain superiority in diction,—a mastery of the logic and potency of fitting words; such a mastery as genius alone, without special training, cannot account for. Furthermore, we have in the letters of his which survive, and which of course were generally spontaneous and quite unstudied effusions, absolutely authentic and literal examples of his ordinary use of words. Some of these letters will be found in the following pages. Even as manuscripts, I should insist that the letters of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry’s letters the nameless felicity which, even with great natural endowments, is only communicable by genuine literary culture in some form. Where did Patrick Henry get such literary culture? The question can be answered only by pointing to that painful drill in Latin which the book-hating boy [Pg 15] suffered under his uncle and his father, when, to his anguish, Virgil and Livy detained him anon from the true joys of existence.

Wirt seems to have satisfied himself, on evidence carefully gathered from persons who were contemporaries of Patrick Henry, that the latter had received in his youth no mean classical education; but, in the final revision of his book for publication, Wirt abated his statements on that subject, in deference to the somewhat vehement assertions of Jefferson. It may be that, in its present lessened form, Wirt’s account of the matter is the more correct one; but this is the proper place in which to mention one bit of direct testimony upon the subject, which, probably, was not known to Wirt. Patrick Henry is said to have told his eldest grandson, Colonel Patrick Henry Fontaine, that he was instructed by his uncle “not only in the catechism, but in the Greek and Latin classics.”[11] It may help us to realize something of the moral stamina entering into the training which the unfledged orator thus got that, as he related, his uncle taught him these maxims of conduct: “To be true and just in all my dealings. To bear no malice nor hatred in my heart. To keep my hands from picking and stealing. Not to covet other men’s goods; but to learn and labor truly to get my own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.”[12]

Under such a teacher Patrick Henry was so [Pg 16] thoroughly grounded, at least in Latin and Greek grammar, that when, long afterward, his eldest grandson was a student in Hampden-Sidney College, the latter found “his grandfather’s examinations of his progress in Greek and Latin” so rigorous that he dreaded them “much more than he did his recitations to his professors.”[13] Colonel Fontaine also states that he was present when a certain French visitor, who did not speak English, was introduced to Governor Henry, who did not speak French. During the war of the Revolution and just afterwards a similar embarrassment was not infrequent here in the case of our public men, among whom the study of French had been very uncommon; and for many of them the old colonial habit of fitting boys for college by training them to the colloquial use of Latin proved to be a great convenience. Colonel Fontaine’s anecdote implies, what is altogether probable, that Patrick Henry’s early drill in Latin had included the ordinary colloquial use of it; for he says that in the case of the visitor in question his grandfather was able, by means of his early stock of Latin words, to carry on the conversation in that language.[14]

This anecdote, implying Patrick Henry’s ability to express himself in Latin, I give for what it may be worth. Some will think it incredible, and that impression will be further increased by the fact that Colonel Fontaine names Albert Gallatin as the visitor with whom, on account of his ignorance [Pg 17] of English, the conversation was thus carried on in Latin. This, of course, must be a mistake; for, at the time of his first visit to Virginia, Gallatin could speak English very well, so well, in fact, that he went to Virginia expressly as English interpreter to a French gentleman who could not speak our language.[15] However, as, during all that period, Governor Henry had many foreign visitors, Colonel Fontaine, in his subsequent account of that particular visitor, might easily have misplaced the name without thereby discrediting the substance of his narrative. Indeed, the substance of his narrative, namely, that he, Colonel Fontaine, did actually witness, in the case of some foreign visitor, such an exhibition of his grandfather’s good early training in Latin, cannot be rejected without an impeachment of the veracity of the narrator, or at least of that of his son, who has recorded the alleged incident. Of course, if that narrative be accepted as substantially true, it will be necessary to conclude that the Jeffersonian tradition of Patrick Henry’s illiteracy is, at any rate, far too highly tinted.

Thus far we have been dealing with the question of Patrick Henry’s education down to the time of his leaving school, at the age of fifteen. It was not until nine years afterward that he began the study of the law. What is the intellectual record of these nine years? It is obvious that they were years unfavorable to systematic training of any [Pg 18] sort, or to any regulated acquisition of knowledge. During all that time in his life, as we now look back upon it, he has for us the aspect of some lawless, unkempt genius, in untoward circumstances, groping in the dark, not without wild joy, towards his inconceivable, true vocation; set to tasks for which he was grotesquely unfit; blundering on from misfortune to misfortune, with an overflow of unemployed energy and vivacity that swept him often into rough fun, into great gusts of innocent riot and horseplay; withal borne along, for many days together, by the mysterious undercurrents of his nature, into that realm of reverie where the soul feeds on immortal fruit and communes with unseen associates, the body meanwhile being left to the semblance of idleness; of all which the man himself might have given this valid justification:—

“I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”

Nevertheless, these nine years of groping, blundering, and seeming idleness were not without their influence on his intellectual improvement even through direct contact with books. While still a boy in his teens, and put prematurely to uncongenial attempts at shopkeeping and farmkeeping, he at any rate made the great discovery that in books and in the gathering of knowledge from books could be found solace and entertainment; in short, he then acquired a taste for reading. No one pretends that Patrick Henry ever became a [Pg 19] bookish person. From the first and always the habit of his mind was that of direct action upon every subject that he had to deal with, through his own reflection, and along the broad primary lines of common sense. There is never in his thought anything subtle or recondite,—no mental movement through the media of books; but there is good evidence for saying that this bewildered and undeveloped youth, drifting about in chaos, did in those days actually get a taste for reading, and that he never lost it. The books which he first read are vaguely described as “a few light and elegant authors,”[16] probably in English essays and fiction. As the years passed and the boy’s mind matured, he rose to more serious books. He became fond of geography and of history, and he pushed his readings, especially, into the history of Greece and of Rome. He was particularly fascinated by Livy, which he read in the English translation; and then it was, as he himself related it to Judge Hugh Nelson, that he made the rule to read Livy through “once at least in every year during the early part of his life.”[17] He read also, it is apparent, the history of England and of the English colonies in America, and especially of his own colony; for the latter finding, no doubt, in Beverley [Pg 20] and in the grave and noble pages of Stith, and especially in the colonial charters given by Stith, much material for those incisive opinions which he so early formed as to the rights of the colonies, and as to the barriers to be thrown up against the encroaching authority of the mother country.

There is much contemporaneous evidence to show that Patrick Henry was throughout life a deeply religious person. It certainly speaks well for his intellectual fibre, as well as for his spiritual tendencies, that his favorite book, during the larger part of his life, was “Butler’s Analogy,” which was first published in the very year in which he was born. It is possible that even during these years of his early manhood he had begun his enduring intimacy with that robust book. Moreover, we can hardly err in saying that he had then also become a steady reader of the English Bible, the diction of which is stamped upon his style as unmistakably as it is upon that of the elder Pitt.

Such, I think it may fairly be said, was Patrick Henry when, at the age of twenty-four, having failed in every other pursuit, he turned for bread to the profession of the law. There is no evidence that either he or any other mortal man was aware of the extraordinary gifts that lay within him for success in that career. Not a scholar surely, not even a considerable miscellaneous reader, he yet had the basis of a good education; he had the habit of reading over and over again a few of the best books; he had a good memory; he had an [Pg 21] intellect strong to grasp the great commanding features of any subject; he had a fondness for the study of human nature, and singular proficiency in that branch of science; he had quick and warm sympathies, particularly with persons in trouble,—an invincible propensity to take sides with the under-dog in any fight. Through a long experience in offhand talk with the men whom he had thus far chiefly known in his little provincial world,—with an occasional clergyman, pedagogue, or legislator, small planters and small traders, sportsmen, loafers, slaves and the drivers of slaves, and, more than all, those bucolic Solons of old Virginia, the good-humored, illiterate, thriftless Caucasian consumers of tobacco and whiskey, who, cordially consenting that all the hard work of the world should be done by the children of Ham, were thus left free to commune together in endless debate on the tavern porch or on the shady side of the country store,—young Patrick had learned somewhat of the lawyer’s art of putting things; he could make men laugh, could make them serious, could set fire to their enthusiasms. What more he might do with such gifts nobody seems to have guessed; very likely few gave it any thought at all. In that rugged but munificent profession at whose outward gates he then proceeded to knock, it was altogether improbable that he would burden himself with much more of its erudition than was really necessary for a successful general practice in Virginia in his time, or that he would permanently content himself with less.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 585.

[6] Randall, Life of Jefferson, i. 20.

[7] MS.

[8] Works of John Adams, ii. 396.

[9] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 585.

[10] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 585.

[11] MS.

[12] MS.

[13] MS.

[14] MS.

[15] Henry Adams, Life of Gallatin, 59, 60.

[16] Wirt, 9.

[17] Wirt, 13. This is the passage on which Jefferson, in his extreme old age, made the characteristically inaccurate comment: “His biographer says, ‘He read Plutarch every year.’ I doubt if he ever read a volume of it in his life.” Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 585.

[Pg 22]
[ToC]

CHAPTER III
BECOMES A LAWYER

Some time in the early spring of 1760, Thomas Jefferson, then a lad in the College of William and Mary, was surprised by the arrival in Williamsburg of his jovial acquaintance, Patrick Henry, and still more by the announcement of the latter that, in the brief interval since their merrymakings together at Hanover, he had found time to study law, and had actually come up to the capital to seek an admission to the bar.

In the accounts that we have from Henry’s contemporaries respecting the length of time during which he was engaged in preparing for his legal examination, there are certain discrepancies,—some of these accounts saying that it was nine months, others six or eight months, others six weeks. Henry himself told a friend that his original study of the law lasted only one month, and consisted in the reading of Coke upon Littleton and of the Virginia laws.[18]

Concerning the encounter of this obscure and raw country youth with the accomplished men who examined him as to his fitness to receive a license [Pg 23] to practice law, there are three primary narratives,—two by Jefferson, and a third by Judge John Tyler. In his famous talk with Daniel Webster and the Ticknors at Monticello, in 1824, Jefferson said: “There were four examiners,—Wythe, Pendleton, Peyton Randolph, and John Randolph. Wythe and Pendleton at once rejected his application; the two Randolphs were, by his importunity, prevailed upon to sign the license; and, having obtained their signatures, he again applied to Pendleton, and after much entreaty, and many promises of future study, succeeded also in obtaining his. He then turned out for a practicing lawyer.”[19]

In a memorandum[20] prepared nearly ten years before the conversation just mentioned, Jefferson described somewhat differently the incidents of Henry’s examination:—

“Two of the examiners, however, Peyton and John Randolph, men of great facility of temper, signed his license with as much reluctance as their dispositions would permit them to show. Mr. Wythe absolutely refused. Rob. C. Nicholas refused also at first; but on repeated importunities, and promises of future reading, he signed. These facts I had afterwards from the gentlemen themselves; the two Randolphs acknowledging he was very ignorant of law, but that they perceived him to be a young man of genius, and did not doubt he would soon qualify himself.”[21]

[Pg 24]Long afterward, and when all this anxious affair had become for Patrick Henry an amusing thing of the past, he himself, in the confidence of an affectionate friendship, seems to have related one remarkable phase of his experience to Judge John Tyler, by whom it was given to Wirt. One of the examiners was “Mr. John Randolph, who was afterwards the king’s attorney-general for the colony,—a gentleman of the most courtly elegance of person and manners, a polished wit, and a profound lawyer. At first, he was so much shocked by Mr. Henry’s very ungainly figure and address, that he refused to examine him. Understanding, however, that he had already obtained two signatures, he entered with manifest reluctance on the business. A very short time was sufficient to satisfy him of the erroneous conclusion which he had drawn from the exterior of the candidate. With evident marks of increasing surprise (produced, no doubt, by the peculiar texture and strength of Mr. Henry’s style, and the boldness and originality of his combinations), he continued the examination for several hours; interrogating the candidate, not on the principles of municipal law, in which he no doubt soon discovered his deficiency, but on the laws of nature and of nations, on the policy of the feudal system, and on general history, which last he found to be his stronghold. During the very short portion of the examination which was devoted to the common law, Mr. Randolph dissented, or affected to dissent, from one of Mr. Henry’s answers, [Pg 25] and called upon him to assign the reasons of his opinion. This produced an argument, and Mr. Randolph now played off on him the same arts which he himself had so often practiced on his country customers; drawing him out by questions, endeavoring to puzzle him by subtleties, assailing him with declamation, and watching continually the defensive operations of his mind. After a considerable discussion, he said, ‘You defend your opinions well, sir; but now to the law and to the testimony.’ Hereupon he carried him to his office, and, opening the authorities, said to him: ‘Behold the force of natural reason! You have never seen these books, nor this principle of the law; yet you are right and I am wrong. And from the lesson which you have given me (you must excuse me for saying it) I will never trust to appearances again. Mr. Henry, if your industry be only half equal to your genius, I augur that you will do well, and become an ornament and an honor to your profession.’”[22]

After such an ordeal at Williamsburg, the young man must have ridden back to Hanover with some natural elation over his success, but that elation not a little tempered by serious reflection upon his own deficiencies as a lawyer, and by an honest purpose to correct them. Certainly nearly everything that was dear to him in life must then have risen before his eyes, and have incited him to industry in the further study of his profession.[Pg 26]

At that time, his father-in-law had become the keeper of a tavern in Hanover; and for the next two or three years, while he was rapidly making his way as a general practitioner of the law in that neighborhood, Patrick seems occasionally to have been a visitor at this tavern. It was in this way, undoubtedly, that he sometimes acted as host, especially in the absence of his father-in-law,—receiving all comers, and providing for their entertainment; and it was from this circumstance that the tradition arose, as Jefferson bluntly expressed it, that Patrick Henry “was originally a barkeeper,”[23] or, as it is more vivaciously expressed by a recent writer, that “for three years” after getting his license to practice law, he “tended travelers and drew corks.”[24]

These statements, however, are but an exaggeration of the fact that, whenever visiting at the tavern of his father-in-law, he had the good sense and the good feeling to lend a hand, in case of need, in the business of the house; and that no more than this is true may be proved, not only from the written testimony of survivors,[25] who knew him in those days, but from the contemporary records, carefully kept by himself, of his own earliest business as a lawyer. These records show that, almost at once after receiving his license to practice law, [Pg 27] he must have been fully occupied with the appropriate business of his profession.

It is quite apparent, also, from the evidence just referred to, that the common history of his life has, in another particular, done great injustice to this period of it. According to the recollection of one old man who outlived him, “he was not distinguished at the bar for near four years.”[26] Wirt himself, relying upon the statements of several survivors of Patrick Henry, speaks of his lingering “in the background for three years,” and of “the profits of his practice” as being so inadequate for the supply of even “the necessaries of life,” that “for the first two or three years” he was living with his family in dependence upon his father-in-law.[27] Fortunately, however, we are not left in this case to grope our way toward the truth amid the ruins of the confused and decaying memories of old men. Since Wirt’s time, there have come to light the fee-books of Patrick Henry, carefully and neatly kept by him from the beginning of his practice, and covering nearly his entire professional life down to old age.[28] The first entry in these books is for September, 1760; and from that date onward to the end of the year 1763,—by which time he had suddenly sprung into great professional prominence by his speech in “the Parsons’ Cause,”—he is found to have charged [Pg 28] fees in 1185 suits, besides many other fees for the preparation of legal papers out of court. From about the time of his speech in “the Parsons’ Cause,” as his fee-books show, his practice became enormous, and so continued to the end of his days, excepting when public duties or broken health compelled him to turn away clients. Thus it is apparent that, while the young lawyer did not attain anything more than local professional reputation until his speech against the parsons, he did acquire a very considerable practice almost immediately after his admission to the bar. Moreover, so far from his being a needy dependent on his father-in-law for the first two or three years, the same quiet records show that his practice enabled him, even during that early period, to assist his father-in-law by an important advance of money.

The fiction that Patrick Henry, during the first three or four years of his nominal career as a lawyer, was a briefless barrister,—earning his living at the bar of a tavern rather than at the bar of justice,—is the very least of those disparaging myths, which, through the frailty of human memory and the bitterness of partisan ill-will, have been permitted to settle upon his reputation. Certainly, no one would think it discreditable, or even surprising, if Patrick Henry, while still a very young lawyer, should have had little or no practice, provided only that, when the practice did come, the young lawyer had shown himself to have been a good one. It is precisely this honor [Pg 29] which, during the past seventy years, has been denied him. Upon the evidence thus far most prominently before the public, one is compelled to conceive of him as having been destitute of nearly all the qualifications of a good lawyer, excepting those which give success with juries, particularly in criminal practice: he is represented as ignorant of the law, indolent, and grossly negligent of business,—with nothing, in fact, to give him the least success in the profession but an abnormal and quite unaccountable gift of persuasion through speech.

Referring to this period of his life, Wirt says:—

“Of the science of law he knew almost nothing; of the practical part he was so wholly ignorant that he was not only unable to draw a declaration or a plea, but incapable, it is said, of the most common or simple business of his profession, even of the mode of ordering a suit, giving a notice, or making a motion in court.”[29]

This conception of Henry’s professional character, to which Wirt seems to have come reluctantly, was founded, as is now evident, on the long-suppressed memorandum of Jefferson, who therein states that, after failing in merchandise, Patrick “turned his views to the law, for the acquisition or practice of which however, he was too lazy. Whenever the courts were closed for the winter session, he would make up a party of poor hunters of his neighborhood, would go off with them to the piny woods of [Pg 30] Fluvanna, and pass weeks in hunting deer, of which he was passionately fond, sleeping under a tent before a fire, wearing the same shirt the whole time, and covering all the dirt of his dress with a hunting-shirt. He never undertook to draw pleadings, if he could avoid it, or to manage that part of a cause, and very unwillingly engaged but as an assistant to speak in the cause. And the fee was an indispensable preliminary, observing to the applicant that he kept no accounts, never putting pen to paper, which was true.”[30]

The last sentence of this passage, in which Jefferson declares that it was true that Henry “kept no accounts, never putting pen to paper,” is, of course, now utterly set aside by the discovery of the precious fee-books; and these orderly and circumstantial records almost as completely annihilate the trustworthiness of all the rest of the passage. Let us consider, for example, Jefferson’s statement that for the acquisition of the law, or for the practice of it, Henry was too lazy, and that much of the time between the sessions of the courts was passed by him in deer-hunting in the woods. Confining ourselves to the first three and a half years of his actual practice, in which, by the record, his practice was the smallest that he ever had, it is not easy for one to understand how a mere novice in the profession, and one so perfectly ignorant of its most rudimental forms, could have earned, during that brief period, the fees which he [Pg 31] charged in 1185 suits, and in the preparation of many legal papers out of court, and still have been seriously addicted to laziness. Indeed, if so much legal business could have been transacted within three years and a half, by a lawyer who, besides being young and incompetent, was also extremely lazy, and greatly preferred to go off to the woods and hunt for deer while his clients were left to hunt in vain for him, it becomes an interesting question just how much legal business we ought to expect to be done by a young lawyer who was not incompetent, was not lazy, and had no inordinate fondness for deer-hunting. It happens that young Thomas Jefferson himself was just such a lawyer. He began practice exactly seven years after Patrick Henry, and at precisely the same time of life, though under external circumstances far more favorable. As a proof of his uncommon zeal and success in the profession, his biographer, Randall, cites from Jefferson’s fee-books the number of cases in which he was employed until he was finally drawn off from the law into political life. Oddly enough, for the first four years of his practice, the cases registered by Jefferson[31] number, in all, but 504. It should be mentioned that this number, as it includes only Jefferson’s cases in the General Court, does not indicate all the business done by him during those first four years; and yet, even with this allowance, we are left standing rather helpless before the problem presented by [Pg 32] the fact that this competent and diligent young lawyer—whom, forsooth, the rustling leaves of the forest could never for once entice from the rustle of the leaves of his law-books—did nevertheless transact, during his own first four years of practice, probably less than one half as much business as seems to have been done during a somewhat shorter space of time by our poor, ignorant, indolent, slovenly, client-shunning and forest-haunting Patrick.

But, if Jefferson’s charge of professional indolence and neglect on the part of his early friend fares rather ill when tested by those minute and plodding records of his professional employments which were kept by Patrick Henry, a fate not much more prosperous overtakes Jefferson’s other charge,—that of professional incompetence. It is more than intimated by Jefferson that, even had Patrick been disposed to engage in a general law practice, he did not know enough to do so successfully by reason of his ignorance of the most ordinary legal principles and legal forms. But the intellectual embarrassment which one experiences in trying to accept this view of Patrick Henry arises from the simple fact that these incorrigible fee-books show that it was precisely this general law practice that he did engage in, both in court and out of court; a practice only a small portion of which was criminal, the larger part of it consisting of the ordinary suits in country litigation; a practice which certainly involved the drawing of [Pg 33] pleadings, and the preparation of many sorts of legal papers; a practice, moreover, which he seems to have acquired with extraordinary rapidity, and to have maintained with increasing success as long as he cared for it. These are items of history which are likely to burden the ordinary reader with no little perplexity,—a perplexity the elements of which are thus modestly stated by a living grandson of Patrick Henry: “How he acquired or retained a practice so large and continually increasing, so perfectly unfit for it as Mr. Jefferson represents him, I am at a loss to understand.”[32]

As we go further in the study of this man’s life, we shall have before us ample materials for dealing still further and still more definitely with the subject of his professional character, as that character itself became developed and matured. Meantime, however, the evidence already in view seems quite enough to enable us to form a tolerably clear notion of the sort of lawyer he was down to the end of 1763, which may be regarded as the period of his novitiate at the bar. It is perfectly evident that, at the time of his admission to the bar, he knew very little of the law, either in its principles or in its forms: he knew no more than could have been learned by a young man of genius in the course of four weeks in the study of Coke upon Littleton, and of the laws of Virginia. If, now, we are at liberty to suppose that his study of the [Pg 34] law then ceased, we may accept the view of his professional incompetence held up by Jefferson; but precisely that is what we are not at liberty to suppose. All the evidence, fairly sifted, warrants the belief that, on his return to Hanover with his license to practice law, he used the next few months in the further study of it; and that thenceforward, just so fast as professional business came to his hands, he tried to qualify himself to do that business, and to do it so well that his clients should be inclined to come to him again in case of need. Patrick Henry’s is not the first case, neither is it the last one, of a man coming to the bar miserably unqualified for its duties, but afterward becoming well qualified. We need not imagine, we do not imagine, that he ever became a man of great learning in the law; but we do find it impossible to believe that he continued to be a man of great ignorance in it. The law, indeed, is the one profession on earth in which such success as he is proved to have had, is impossible to such incompetence as he is said to have had. Moreover, in trying to form a just idea of Patrick Henry, it is never safe to forget that we have to do with a man of genius, and that the ways by which a man of genius reaches his results are necessarily his own,—are often invisible, are always somewhat mysterious, to the rest of us. The genius of Patrick Henry was powerful, intuitive, swift; by a glance of the eye he could take in what an ordinary man might spend hours in toiling for; his memory held [Pg 35] whatever was once committed to it; all his resources were at instant command; his faculty for debate, his imagination, humor, tact, diction, elocution, were rich and exquisite; he was also a man of human and friendly ways, whom all men loved, and whom all men wanted to help; and it would not have been strange if he actually fitted himself for the successful practice of such law business as was then to be had in Virginia, and actually entered upon its successful practice with a quickness the exact processes of which were unperceived even by his nearest neighbors.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Wirt, 16.

[19] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 584.

[20] First printed in the Philadelphia Age, in 1867; and again printed, from the original manuscript, in The Historical Magazine, August, 1867, 90-93. I quote from the latter.

[21] Jefferson’s memorandum, Hist. Mag. for August, 1867, 90.

[22] Wirt, 16, 17.

[23] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 584.

[24] McMaster, Hist. of U. S. i. 489.

[25] I have carefully examined this testimony, which is still in manuscript.

[26] Judge Winston, MS.

[27] Wirt, 18, 19.

[28] These fee-books are now in the possession of Mr. William Wirt Henry, of Richmond.

[29] Wirt, 18.

[30] Hist. Mag. for 1867, 93.

[31] Randall, Life of Jefferson, i. 47, 48.

[32] William Wirt Henry, Character and Public Career of Patrick Henry, 3.

[Pg 36]
[ToC]

CHAPTER IV
A CELEBRATED CASE

Thus Patrick Henry had been for nearly four years in the practice of the law, with a vigor and a success quite extraordinary, when, late in the year 1763, he became concerned in a case so charged with popular interest, and so well suited to the display of his own marvellous genius as an advocate, as to make both him and his case immediately celebrated.

The side upon which he was retained happened to be the wrong side,—wrong both in law and in equity; having only this element of strength in it, namely, that by a combination of circumstances there were enlisted in its favor precisely those passions of the multitude which are the most selfish, the most blinding, and at the same time the most energetic. It only needed an advocate skilful enough to play effectively upon these passions, and a storm would be raised before which mere considerations of law and of equity would be swept out of sight.

In order to understand the real issue presented by “the Parsons’ Cause,” and consequently the essential weakness of the side to the service of [Pg 37] which our young lawyer was now summoned, we shall need to turn about and take a brief tour into the earlier history of Virginia. In that colony, from the beginning, the Church of England was established by law, and was supported, like any other institution of the government, by revenues derived from taxation,—taxation levied in this case upon nearly all persons in the colony above the age of sixteen years. Moreover, those local subdivisions which, in the Northern colonies, were called towns, in Virginia were called parishes; and accordingly, in the latter, the usual local officers who manage the public business for each civil neighborhood were called, not selectmen or supervisors, as at the North, but vestrymen. Among the functions conferred by the law upon these local officers in Virginia was that of hiring the rector or minister, and of paying him his salary; and the same authority which gave to the vestry this power fixed likewise the precise amount of salary which they were to pay. Ever since the early days of the colony, this amount had been stated, not in money, which hardly existed there, but in tobacco, which was the staple of the colony. Sometimes the market value of tobacco would be very low,—so low that the portion paid to the minister would yield a sum quite insufficient for his support; and on such occasions, prior to 1692, the parishes had often kindly made up for such depreciation by voluntarily paying an extra quantity of tobacco.[33][Pg 38] After 1692, however, for reasons which need not now be detailed, this generous custom seems to have disappeared. For example, from 1709 to 1714, the price of tobacco was so low as to make its shipment to England, in many instances, a positive loss to its owner; while the sale of it on the spot was so disadvantageous as to reduce the minister’s salary to about £25 a year, as reckoned in the depreciated paper currency of the colony. Of course, during those years, the distress of the clergy was very great; but, whatever it may have been, they were permitted to bear it, without any suggestion, either from the legislature or from the vestries, looking toward the least addition to the quantity of tobacco then to be paid them. On the other hand, from 1714 to 1720, the price of tobacco rose considerably above the average, and did something towards making up to the clergy the losses which they had recently incurred. Then, again, from 1720 to 1724, tobacco fell to the low price of the former period, and of course with the same results of unrelieved loss to the clergy.[34] Thus, however, in the process of time, there had become established, in the fiscal relations of each vestry to its minister, a rough but obvious system of fair play. When the price of tobacco was down, the parson was expected to suffer the loss; when the price of tobacco was up, he was allowed to enjoy the gain. Probably it did not then occur to any one that a majority of the good people of [Pg 39] Virginia could ever be brought to demand such a mutilation of justice as would be involved in depriving the parson of the occasional advantage of a very good market, and of making up for this by always leaving to him the undisturbed enjoyment of every occasional bad one. Yet it was just this mutilation of justice which, only a few years later, a majority of the good people of Virginia were actually brought to demand, and which, by the youthful genius of Patrick Henry, they were too well aided in effecting.

Returning now from our brief tour into a period of Virginian history just prior to that upon which we are at present engaged, we find ourselves arrived at the year 1748, in which year the legislature of Virginia, revising all previous regulations respecting the hiring and paying of the clergy, passed an act, directing that every parish minister should “receive an annual salary of 16,000 pounds of tobacco, … to be levied, assessed, collected, and paid” by the vestry. “And if the vestry of any parish” should “neglect or refuse to levy the tobacco due to the minister,” they should “be liable to the action of the party grieved … for all damages which he … shall sustain by such refusal or neglect.”[35] This act of the colonial legislature, having been duly approved by the king, became a law, and consequently was not liable to repeal or even to suspension except by the king’s approval. Thus, at the period now reached, there [Pg 40] was between every vestry and its minister a valid contract for the annual payment, by the former to the latter, of that particular quantity of tobacco,—the clergy to take their chances as to the market value of the product from year to year.

Thus matters ran on until 1755, when, by reason of a diminished crop of tobacco, the legislature passed an option law,[36] virtually suspending for the next ten months the Act of 1748, and requiring the clergy, at the option of the vestries, to receive their salaries for that year, not in tobacco, but in the depreciated paper currency of the colony, at the rate of two pence for each pound of tobacco due,—a price somewhat below the market value of the article for that year. Most clearly this act, which struck an arbitrary blow at the validity of all contracts in Virginia, was one which exceeded the constitutional authority of the legislature; since it suspended, without the royal approval, a law which had been regularly ratified by the king. However, the operation of this act was shrewdly limited to ten months,—a period just long enough to accomplish its object, but too short for the royal intervention against it to be of any direct avail. Under these circumstances, the clergy bore their losses for that year with some murmuring indeed, but without any formal protest.[37]

Just three years afterward, in 1758, the legislature, with even less excuse than before, passed an [Pg 41] act[38] similar to that of 1755,—its force, however, being limited to twelve months. The operation of this act, as affecting each parish minister, may be conveyed in very few words. In lieu of what was due him under the law for his year’s services, namely, 16,000 pounds of tobacco, the market value of which for the year in question proved to be about £400 sterling, it compelled him to take, in the paper money of the colony, the sum of about £133. To make matters still worse, while the tobacco which was due him was an instant and an advantageous medium of exchange everywhere, and especially in England whence nearly all his merchant supplies were obtained, this paper money that was forced upon him was a depreciated currency even within the colony, and absolutely worthless outside of it; so that the poor parson, who could never demand his salary for any year until six full months after its close, would have proffered to him, at the end, perhaps, of another six months, just one third of the nominal sum due him, and that in a species of money of no value at all except in Virginia, and even in Virginia of a purchasing value not exceeding that of £20 sterling in England.[39]

Nor, in justification of such a measure, could it be truthfully said that there was at that time in the colony any general “dearth and scarcity,”[40] or [Pg 42] any such public distress of any sort as might overrule the ordinary maxims of justice, and excuse, in the name of humanity, a merely technical violation of law. As a matter of fact, the only “dearth and scarcity” in Virginia that year was “confined to one or two counties on James River, and that entirely owing to their own fault;”[41] wherever there was any failure of the tobacco crop, it was due to the killing of the plants so early in the spring, that such land did not need to lie uncultivated, and in most cases was planted “in corn and pease, which always turned to good account;”[42] and although, for the whole colony, the crop of tobacco “was short in quantity,” yet “in cash value it proved to be the best crop that Virginia had ever had” since the settlement of the colony.[43] Finally, it was by no means the welfare of the poor that “was the object, or the effect, of the law;” but it was “the rich planters” who, first selling their tobacco at about fifty shillings the hundred, and then paying to the clergy and others their tobacco debts at the rate of sixteen shillings the hundred, were “the chief gainers” by the act.[44]

Such, then, in all its fresh and unadorned rascality, was the famous “option law,” or “two-penny act,” of 1758: an act firmly opposed, on its first appearance in the legislature, by a noble [Pg 43] minority of honorable men; an act clearly indicating among a portion of the people of Virginia a survival of the old robber instincts of our Norse ancestors; an act having there the sort of frantic popularity that all laws are likely to have which give a dishonest advantage to the debtor class,—and in Virginia, unfortunately, on the subject of salaries due to the clergy, nearly all persons above sixteen years of age belonged to that class.[45]

At the time when this act was before the legislature for consideration, the clergy applied for a hearing, but were refused. Upon its passage by the two houses, the clergy applied to the acting governor, hoping to obtain his disapproval of the act; but his reply was an unblushing avowal of [Pg 44] his determination to pursue any course, right or wrong, which would bring him popular favor. They then sent one of their own number to England, for the purpose of soliciting the royal disallowance of the act. After a full hearing of both sides, the privy council gave it as their opinion that the clergy of Virginia had their “certain remedy at law;” Lord Hardwicke, in particular, declaring that “there was no occasion to dispute about the authority by which the act was passed; for that no court in the judicature whatever could look upon it to be law, by reason of its manifest injustice alone.”[46] Accordingly, the royal disallowance was granted. Upon the arrival in Virginia of these tidings, several of the clergy began suits against their respective vestries, for the purpose of compelling them to pay the amounts then legally due upon their salaries for the year 1758.

Of these suits, the first to come to trial was that of the Rev. Thomas Warrington, in the County Court of Elizabeth City. In that case, “a jury of his own parishioners found for him considerable damages, allowing on their oaths that there was above twice as much justly due to him as the act had granted;”[47] but “the court hindered him from immediately coming at the damages, by judging the act to be law, in which it is thought they were influenced more by the fear of giving offense to their superiors, than by their own opinion of the [Pg 45] reasonableness of the act,—they privately professing that they thought the parson ought to have his right.”[48]

Soon afterward came to trial, in the court of King William County, the suit of the Rev. Alexander White, rector of St. David’s parish. In this case, the court, instead of either sustaining or rejecting the disallowed act, simply shirked their responsibility, “refused to meddle in the matter, and insisted on leaving the whole affair to the jury;” who being thus freed from all judicial control, straightway rendered a verdict of neat and comprehensive lawlessness: “We bring in for the defendant.”[49]

It was at this stage of affairs that the court of Hanover County reached the case of the Rev. James Maury, rector of Fredericksville parish, Louisa; and the court, having before it the evidence of the royal disallowance of the Act of 1758, squarely “adjudged the act to be no law.” Of course, under this decision, but one result seemed possible. As the court had thus rejected the validity of the act whereby the vestry had withheld from their parson two thirds of his salary for the year 1758, it only remained to summon a special jury on a writ of inquiry to determine the damages thus sustained by the parson; and as this was a very simple question of arithmetic, the counsel for the defendants expressed his desire to withdraw from the case. [Pg 46]

Such was the situation, when these defendants, having been assured by their counsel that all further struggle would be hopeless, turned for help to the enterprising young lawyer who, in that very place, had been for the previous three and a half years pushing his way to notice in his profession. To him, accordingly, they brought their cause,—a desperate cause, truly,—a cause already lost and abandoned by veteran and eminent counsel. Undoubtedly, by the ethics of his profession, Patrick Henry was bound to accept the retainer that was thus tendered him; and, undoubtedly, by the organization of his own mind, having once accepted that retainer, he was likely to devote to the cause no tepid or half-hearted service.

The decision of the court, which has been referred to, was rendered at its November session. On the first day of the session in December, the order was executed for summoning a select jury “to examine whether the plaintiff had sustained any damages, and what.”[50] Obviously, in the determination of these two questions, much would depend on the personal composition of the jury; and it is apparent that this matter was diligently attended to by the sheriff. His plan seems to have been to secure a good, honest jury of twelve adult male persons, but without having among them a single one of those over-scrupulous and intractable people who, in Virginia, at that time, were still technically described as gentlemen. [Pg 47] With what delicacy and efficiency he managed this part of the business was thus described shortly afterward by the plaintiff, of course a deeply interested eye-witness:—

“The sheriff went into a public room full of gentlemen, and told his errand. One excused himself … as having already given his opinion in a similar case. On this, … he immediately left the room, without summoning any one person there. He afterwards met another gentleman … on the green, and, on saying he was not fit to serve, being a church warden, he took upon himself to excuse him, too, and, as far as I can learn made no further attempts to summon gentlemen.… Hence he went among the vulgar herd. After he had selected and set down upon his list about eight or ten of these, I met him with it in his hand, and on looking over it, observed to him that they were not such jurors as the court had directed him to get,—being people of whom I had never heard before, except one whom, I told him, he knew to be a party in the cause.… Yet this man’s name was not erased. He was even called in court, and had he not excused himself, would probably have been admitted. For I cannot recollect that the court expressed either surprise or dislike that a more proper jury had not been summoned. Nay, though I objected against them, yet, as Patrick Henry, one of the defendants’ lawyers, insisted they were honest men, and, therefore, unexceptionable, they were immediately called to the book and sworn.”[51]

Having thus secured a jury that must have been reasonably satisfactory to the defendants, the hearing [Pg 48] began. Two gentlemen, being the largest purchasers of tobacco in the county, were then sworn as witnesses to prove the market price of the article in 1759. By their testimony it was established that the price was then more than three times as much as had been estimated in the payment of paper money actually made to the plaintiff in that year. Upon this state of facts, “the lawyers on both sides” proceeded to display “the force and weight of the evidence;” after which the case was given to the jury. “In less than five minutes,” they “brought in a verdict for the plaintiff,—one penny damages.”[52]

Just how the jury were induced, in the face of the previous judgment of that very court, to render this astounding verdict, has been described in two narratives: one by William Wirt, written about fifty years after the event; the other by the injured plaintiff himself, the Rev. James Maury, written exactly twelve days after the event. Few things touching the life of Patrick Henry can be more notable or more instructive than the contrast presented by these two narratives.

On reaching the scene of action, on the 1st of December, Patrick Henry “found,” says Wirt,—

“on the courtyard such a concourse as would have appalled any other man in his situation. They were not people of the county merely who were there, but visitors from all the counties to a considerable distance around. The decision upon the demurrer had produced a violent ferment [Pg 49] among the people, and equal exultation on the part of the clergy, who attended the court in a large body, either to look down opposition, or to enjoy the final triumph of this hard fought contest, which they now considered as perfectly secure.… Soon after the opening of the court the cause was called.… The array before Mr. Henry’s eyes was now most fearful. On the bench sat more than twenty clergymen, the most learned men in the colony.… The courthouse was crowded with an overwhelming multitude, and surrounded with an immense and anxious throng, who, not finding room to enter, were endeavoring to listen without in the deepest attention. But there was something still more awfully disconcerting than all this; for in the chair of the presiding magistrate sat no other person than his own father. Mr. Lyons opened the cause very briefly.… And now came on the first trial of Patrick Henry’s strength. No one had ever heard him speak,[53] and curiosity was on tiptoe. He rose very awkwardly, and faltered much in his exordium. The people hung their heads at so unpromising a commencement; the clergy were observed to exchange sly looks with each other; and his father is described as having almost sunk with confusion, from his seat. But these feelings were of short duration, and soon gave place to others of a very different character. For now were those wonderful faculties which he possessed, for the first time developed; and now was first witnessed that mysterious and almost supernatural transformation of appearance, which the fire of his own eloquence never failed to work in him. For as his mind rolled along, and began to [Pg 50] glow from its own action, all the exuviæ of the clown seemed to shed themselves spontaneously. His attitude, by degrees, became erect and lofty. The spirit of his genius awakened all his features. His countenance shone with a nobleness and grandeur which it had never before exhibited. There was a lightning in his eyes which seemed to rive the spectator. His action became graceful, bold, and commanding; and in the tones of his voice, but more especially in his emphasis, there was a peculiar charm, a magic, of which any one who ever heard him will speak as soon as he is named, but of which no one can give any adequate description. They can only say that it struck upon the ear and upon the heart, in a manner which language cannot tell. Add to all these, his wonder-working fancy, and the peculiar phraseology in which he clothed its images: for he painted to the heart with a force that almost petrified it. In the language of those who heard him on this occasion, ‘he made their blood run cold, and their hair to rise on end.’

“It will not be difficult for any one who ever heard this most extraordinary man, to believe the whole account of this transaction which is given by his surviving hearers; and from their account, the court house of Hanover County must have exhibited, on this occasion, a scene as picturesque as has been ever witnessed in real life. They say that the people, whose countenance had fallen as he arose, had heard but a very few sentences before they began to look up; then to look at each other with surprise, as if doubting the evidence of their own senses; then, attracted by some strong gesture, struck by some majestic attitude, fascinated by the spell of his eye, the charm of his emphasis, and the [Pg 51] varied and commanding expression of his countenance, they could look away no more. In less than twenty minutes, they might be seen in every part of the house, on every bench, in every window, stooping forward from their stands, in death-like silence; their features fixed in amazement and awe; all their senses listening and riveted upon the speaker, as if to catch the least strain of some heavenly visitant. The mockery of the clergy was soon turned into alarm; their triumph into confusion and despair; and at one burst of his rapid and overwhelming invective, they fled from the house in precipitation and terror. As for the father, such was his surprise, such his amazement, such his rapture, that, forgetting where he was, and the character which he was filling, tears of ecstasy streamed down his cheeks, without the power or inclination to repress them.

“The jury seem to have been so completely bewildered, that they lost sight not only of the Act of 1748, but that of 1758 also; for, thoughtless even of the admitted right of the plaintiff, they had scarcely left the bar, when they returned with a verdict of one penny damages. A motion was made for a new trial; but the court, too, had now lost the equipoise of their judgment, and overruled the motion by an unanimous vote. The verdict and judgment overruling the motion were followed by redoubled acclamations, from within and without the house. The people, who had with difficulty kept their hands off their champion from the moment of closing his harangue, no sooner saw the fate of the cause finally sealed, than they seized him at the bar; and in spite of his own exertions, and the continued cry of order from the sheriffs and the court, they bore him out of the courthouse, and raising him on their shoulders, [Pg 52] carried him about the yard, in a kind of electioneering triumph.”[54]

At the time when Wirt wrote this rhapsody, he was unable, as he tells us, to procure from any quarter a rational account of the line of argument taken by Patrick Henry, or even of any other than a single topic alluded to by him in the course of his speech,—they who heard the speech saying “that when it was over, they felt as if they had just awaked from some ecstatic dream, of which they were unable to recall or connect the particulars.”[55]

There was present in that assemblage, however, at least one person who listened to the young orator without falling into an ecstatic dream, and whose senses were so well preserved to him through it all that he was able, a few days afterward, while the whole occasion was fresh in his memory, to place upon record a clear and connected version of the wonder-working speech. This version is to be found in a letter written by the plaintiff on the 12th of December, 1763, and has been brought to light only within recent years.

After giving, for the benefit of the learned counsel by whom the cause was to be managed, on appeal, in the general court, a lucid and rather critical account of the whole proceeding, Maury adds:—

“One occurrence more, though not essential to the [Pg 53] cause, I can’t help mentioning.… Mr. Henry, mentioned above (who had been called in by the defendants, as we suspected, to do what I some time ago told you of), after Mr. Lyons had opened the cause, rose and harangued the jury for near an hour. This harangue turned upon points as much out of his own depth, and that of the jury, as they were foreign from the purpose,—which it would be impertinent to mention here. However, after he had discussed those points, he labored to prove ‘that the Act of 1758 had every characteristic of a good law; that it was a law of general utility, and could not, consistently with what he called the original compact between the king and people … be annulled.’ Hence he inferred, ‘that a king, by disallowing acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience.’ He further urged ‘that the only use of an established church and clergy in society, is to enforce obedience to civil sanctions, and the observance of those which are called duties of imperfect obligation; that when a clergy ceases to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry, and may justly strip them of their appointments; that the clergy of Virginia, in this particular instance of their refusing to acquiesce in the law in question, had been so far from answering, that they had most notoriously counteracted, those great ends of their institution; that, therefore, instead of useful members of the state, they ought to be considered as enemies of the community; and that, in the case now before them, Mr. Maury, instead of countenance, and protection, and damages, very justly deserved to be punished with signal severity.’ And then he perorates to the following [Pg 54] purpose, ‘that excepting they (the jury) were disposed to rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks, he hoped they would not let slip the opportunity which now offered, of making such an example of him as might, hereafter, be a warning to himself and his brethren, not to have the temerity, for the future, to dispute the validity of such laws, authenticated by the only authority which, in his conception, could give force to laws for the government of this colony,—the authority of a legal representative of a council, and of a kind and benevolent and patriot governor.’ You’ll observe I do not pretend to remember his words, but take this to have been the sum and substance of this part of his labored oration. When he came to that part of it where he undertook to assert ‘that a king, by annulling or disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience,’ the more sober part of the audience were struck with horror. Mr. Lyons called out aloud, and with an honest warmth, to the Bench, ‘that the gentleman had spoken treason,’ and expressed his astonishment, ‘that their worships could hear it without emotion, or any mark of dissatisfaction.’ At the same instant, too, amongst some gentlemen in the crowd behind me, was a confused murmur of ‘treason, treason!’ Yet Mr. Henry went on in the same treasonable and licentious strain, without interruption from the Bench, nay, even without receiving the least exterior notice of their disapprobation. One of the jury, too, was so highly pleased with these doctrines, that, as I was afterwards told, he every now and then gave the traitorous declaimer a nod of approbation. After the court was adjourned, he apologized to me for what he [Pg 55] had said, alleging that his sole view in engaging in the cause, and in saying what he had, was to render himself popular. You see, then, it is so clear a point in this person’s opinion that the ready road to popularity here is to trample under foot the interests of religion, the rights of the church, and the prerogatives of the crown.”[56]

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 12.

[34] Perry, Hist. Coll. 316, 317.

[35] Hening, Statutes at Large, vi. 88, 89.

[36] Ibid. vi. 568, 569.

[37] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 508, 509.

[38] Hening, Statutes at Large, vii. 240, 241.

[39] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 467, 468.

[40] As was alleged in Richard Bland’s Letter to the Clergy, 17.

[41] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 467.

[42] Ibid. i. 466.

[43] Ibid. i. 465, 466.

[44] Meade, Old Families of Virginia, i. 223.

[45] In the account here given of these Virginia “option laws,” I have been obliged, by lack of space, to give somewhat curtly the bald results of rather careful studies which I have made upon the question in all accessible documents of the period; and I have not been at liberty to state many things, on both sides of the question, which would be necessary to a complete discussion of the subject. For instance, among the motives to be mentioned for the popularity of laws whose chief effects were to diminish the pay of the established clergy, should be considered those connected with a growing dissent from the established church in Virginia, and particularly with the very human dislike which even churchmen might have to paying in the form of a compulsory tax what they would have cheerfully paid in the form of a voluntary contribution. Perhaps the best modern defense of these laws is by A. H. Everett, in his Life of Henry, 230-233; but his statements seem to be founded on imperfect information. Wirt, publishing his opinion under the responsibility of his great professional and official position, affirms that on the whole question, “the clergy had much the best of the argument.” Life of Henry, 22.

[46] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 510.

[47] Ibid. i. 513, 514.

[48] Ibid. i. 496, 497.

[49] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 497.

[50] Maury, Mem. of a Huguenot Family, 419.

[51] Maury, Mem. of a Huguenot Family, 419, 420.

[52] Ibid. 420.

[53] This cannot be true except in the sense that he had never before spoken to such an assemblage or in any great cause.

[54] Wirt, 23-27.

[55] Ibid. 29.

[56] Maury, Mem. of a Huguenot Family, 418-424, where the entire letter is given in print for the first time.

[Pg 56]
[ToC]

CHAPTER V
FIRST TRIUMPHS AT THE CAPITAL

It is not in the least strange that the noble-minded clergyman, who was the plaintiff in the famous cause of the Virginia parsons, should have been deeply offended by the fierce and victorious eloquence of the young advocate on the opposite side, and should have let fall, with reference to him, some bitter words. Yet it could only be in a moment of anger that any one who knew him could ever have said of Patrick Henry that he was disposed “to trample under foot the interests of religion,” or that he had any ill-will toward the church or its ministers. It is very likely that, in the many irritations growing out of a civil establishment of the church in his native colony, he may have shared in feelings that were not uncommon even among devout churchmen there; but in spite of this, then and always, to the very end of his life, his most sacred convictions and his tenderest affections seem to have been on the side of the institutions and ministers of Christianity, and even of Christianity in its historic form. Accordingly, both before and after his great speech, he tried to indicate to the good men whose legal [Pg 57] claims it had become his professional duty to resist, that such resistance must not be taken by them as implying on his part any personal unkindness. To his uncle and namesake, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who was even then a plaintiff in a similar suit, and whom he had affectionately persuaded not to remain at the courthouse to hear the coming speech against the pecuniary demands of himself and his order, he said “that the clergy had not thought him worthy of being retained on their side,” and that “he knew of no moral principle by which he was bound to refuse a fee from their adversaries.”[57] So, too, the conciliatory words, which, after the trial, he tried to speak to the indignant plaintiff, and which the latter has reported in the blunt form corresponding to his own angry interpretation of them, after all may have borne the better meaning given to them by Bishop Meade, who says that Patrick Henry, in his apology to Maury, “pleaded as an excuse for his course, that he was a young lawyer, a candidate for practice and reputation, and therefore must make the best of his cause.”[58]

These genial efforts at pacification are of rather more than casual significance: they are indications of character. They mark a distinct quality of the man’s nature, of which he continued to give evidence during the rest of his life,—a certain sweetness of spirit, which never deserted him through [Pg 58] all the stern conflicts of his career. He was always a good fighter: never a good hater. He had the brain and the temperament of an advocate; his imagination and his heart always kindled hotly to the side that he had espoused, and with his imagination and his heart always went all the rest of the man; in his advocacy of any cause that he had thus made his own, he hesitated at no weapon either of offence or of defence; he struck hard blows—he spoke hard words—and he usually triumphed; and yet, even in the paroxysms of the combat, and still more so when the combat was over, he showed how possible it is to be a redoubtable antagonist without having a particle of malice.

Then, too, from this first great scene in his public life, there comes down to us another incident that has its own story to tell. In all the roar of talk within and about the courthouse, after the trial was over, one “Mr. Cootes, merchant of James River,” was heard to say that “he would have given a considerable sum out of his own pocket rather than his friend Patrick should have been guilty of a crime but little, if any thing, inferior to that which brought Simon Lord Lovat to the block,”—adding that Patrick’s speech had “exceeded the most seditious and inflammatory harangues of the Tribunes of Old Rome.”[59] Here, then, thus early in his career, even in this sorrowful and alarmed criticism on the supposed error of [Pg 59] his speech, we find a token of that loving interest in him and in his personal fate, which even in those days began to possess the heartstrings of many a Virginian all about the land, and which thenceforward steadily broadened and deepened into a sort of popular idolization of him. The mysterious hold which Patrick Henry came to have upon the people of Virginia is an historic fact, to be recognized, even if not accounted for. He was to make enemies in abundance, as will appear; he was to stir up against himself the alarm of many thoughtful and conservative minds, the deadly hatred of many an old leader in colonial politics, the deadly envy of many a younger aspirant to public influence; he was to go on ruffling the plumage and upsetting the combinations of all sorts of good citizens, who, from time to time, in making their reckonings without him, kept finding that they had reckoned without their host. But for all that, the willingness of this worthy Mr. Cootes of James River to part with his money, if need be, rather than his friend Patrick should go far wrong, seems to be one token of the beginning of that deep and swelling passion of love for him that never abated among the mass of the people of Virginia so long as Patrick lived, and perhaps has never abated since.

It is not hard to imagine the impulse which so astonishing a forensic success must have given to the professional and political career of the young advocate. Not only was he immediately retained [Pg 60] by the defendants in all the other suits of the same kind then instituted in the courts of the colony, but, as his fee-books show, from that hour his legal practice of every sort received an enormous increase. Moreover, the people of Virginia, always a warm-hearted people, were then, to a degree almost inconceivable at the North, sensitive to oratory, and admirers of eloquent men. The first test by which they commonly ascertained the fitness of a man for public office, concerned his ability to make a speech; and it cannot be doubted that from the moment of Patrick Henry’s amazing harangue in the “Parsons’ Cause,”—a piece of oratory altogether surpassing anything ever before heard in Virginia,—the eyes of men began to fasten upon him as destined to some splendid and great part in political life.

During the earlier years of his career, Williamsburg was the capital of the colony,—the official residence of its governor, the place of assemblage for its legislature and its highest courts, and, at certain seasons of the year, the scene of no little vice-regal and provincial magnificence.

Thither our Patrick had gone in 1760 to get permission to be a lawyer. Thither he now goes once more, in 1764, to give some proof of his quality in the profession to which he had been reluctantly admitted, and to win for himself the first of a long series of triumphs at the colonial capital,—triumphs which gave food for wondering talk to all his contemporaries, and long lingered in the [Pg 61] memories of old men. Soon after the assembling of the legislature, in the fall of 1764, the committee on privileges and elections had before them the case of James Littlepage, who had taken his seat as member for the county of Hanover, but whose right to the seat was contested, on a charge of bribery and corruption, by Nathaniel West Dandridge. For a day or two before the hearing of the case, the members of the house had “observed an ill-dressed young man sauntering in the lobby,” apparently a stranger to everybody, moving “awkwardly about … with a countenance of abstraction and total unconcern as to what was passing around him;” but who, when the committee convened to consider the case of Dandridge against Littlepage, at once took his place as counsel for the former. The members of the committee, either not catching his name or not recalling the association attaching to it from the scene at Hanover Court House nearly a twelvemonth before, were so affected by his rustic and ungainly appearance that they treated him with neglect and even with discourtesy; until, when his turn came to argue the cause of his client, he poured forth such a torrent of eloquence, and exhibited with so much force and splendor the sacredness of the suffrage and the importance of protecting it, that the incivility and contempt of the committee were turned into admiration.[60] Nevertheless, it appears from the journals of the House that, whatever may have [Pg 62] been the admiration of the committee for the eloquence of Mr. Dandridge’s advocate, they did not award the seat to Mr. Dandridge.

Such was Patrick Henry’s first contact with the legislature of Virginia,—a body of which he was soon to become a member, and over which, in spite of the social prestige, the talents, and the envious opposition of its old leaders, he was promptly to gain an ascendancy that constituted him, almost literally, the dictator of its proceedings, so long as he chose to hold a place in it. On the present occasion, having finished the somewhat obscure business that had brought him before the committee, it is probable that he instantly disappeared from the scene, not to return to it until the following spring, when he came back to transact business with the House itself. For, early in May, 1765, a vacancy having occurred in the representation for the county of Louisa, Patrick Henry, though not then a resident in that county, was elected as its member. The first entry to be met with in the journals, indicating his presence in the House, is that of his appointment, on the 20th of May, as an additional member of the committee for courts of justice. Between that date and the 1st of June, when the House was angrily dissolved by the governor, this young and very rural member contrived to do two or three quite notable things—things, in fact, so notable that they conveyed to the people of Virginia the tidings of the advent among them of a great political [Pg 63] leader, gave an historic impulse to the series of measures which ended in the disruption of the British Empire, and set his own name a ringing through the world,—not without lively imputations of treason, and comforting assurances that he was destined to be hanged.

The first of these notable things is one which incidentally throws a rather painful glare on the corruptions of political life in our old and belauded colonial days. The speaker of the House of Burgesses at that time was John Robinson, a man of great estate, foremost among all the landed aristocracy of Virginia. He had then been speaker for about twenty-five years; for a long time, also, he had been treasurer of the colony; and in the latter capacity he had been accustomed for many years to lend the public money, on his own private account, to his personal and political friends, and particularly to those of them who were members of the House. This profligate business had continued so long that Robinson had finally become a defaulter to an enormous amount; and in order to avert the shame and ruin of an exposure, he and his particular friends, just before the arrival of Patrick Henry, had invented a very pretty device, to be called a “public loan office,”—“from which monies might be lent on public account, and on good landed security, to individuals,” and by which, as was expected, the debts due to Robinson on the loans which he had been granting might be “transferred to the public, and his deficit thus [Pg 64] completely covered.”[61] Accordingly, the scheme was brought forward under nearly every possible advantage of influential support. It was presented to the House and to the public as a measure eminently wise and beneficial. It was supported in the House by many powerful and honorable members who had not the remotest suspicion of the corrupt purpose lying at the bottom of it. Apparently it was on the point of adoption when, from among the members belonging to the upper counties, there arose this raw youth, who had only just taken his seat, and who, without any information respecting the secret intent of the measure, and equally without any disposition to let the older and statelier members do his thinking for him, simply attacked it, as a scheme to be condemned on general principles. From the door of the lobby that day there stood peering into the Assembly Thomas Jefferson, then a law student at Williamsburg, who thus had the good luck to witness the début of his old comrade. “He laid open with so much energy the spirit of favoritism on which the proposition was founded, and the abuses to which it would lead, that it was crushed in its birth.”[62] He “attacked the scheme … in that style of bold, grand, and overwhelming eloquence for which he became so justly celebrated afterwards. He carried with him all the members of the upper counties, and left a minority composed merely of [Pg 65] the aristocracy of the country. From this time his popularity swelled apace; and Robinson dying four years after, his deficit was brought to light, and discovered the true object of the proposition.”[63]

But a subject far greater than John Robinson’s project for a loan office was then beginning to weigh on men’s minds. Already were visible far off on the edge of the sky, the first filmy threads of a storm-cloud that was to grow big and angry as the years went by, and was to accompany a political tempest under which the British Empire would be torn asunder, and the whole structure of American colonial society wrenched from its foundations. Just one year before the time now reached, news had been received in Virginia that the British ministry had announced in parliament their purpose to introduce, at the next session, an act for laying certain stamp duties on the American colonies. Accordingly, in response to these tidings, the House of Burgesses, in the autumn of 1764, had taken the earliest opportunity to send a respectful message to the government of England, declaring that the proposed act would be deemed by the loyal and affectionate people of Virginia as an alarming violation of their ancient constitutional rights. This message had been elaborately drawn up, in the form of an address to the king, a memorial to the House of Lords, and a remonstrance to the Commons;[64] the writers being a committee composed [Pg 66] of gentlemen prominent in the legislature, and of high social standing in the colony, including Landon Carter, Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and even Peyton Randolph, the king’s attorney-general.

Meantime, to this appeal no direct answer had been returned; instead of which, however, was received by the House of Burgesses, in May, 1765, about the time of Patrick Henry’s accession to that body, a copy of the Stamp Act itself. What was to be done about it? What was to be done by Virginia? What was to be done by her sister colonies? Of course, by the passage of the Stamp Act, the whole question of colonial procedure on the subject had been changed. While the act was, even in England, merely a theme for consideration, and while the colonies were virtually under invitation to send thither their views upon the subject, it was perfectly proper for colonial pamphleteers and for colonial legislatures to express, in every civilized form, their objections to it. But all this was now over. The Stamp Act had been discussed; the discussion was ended; the act had been decided on; it had become a law. Criticism upon it now, especially by a legislative body, was a very different matter from what criticism upon it had been, even by the same body, a few months before. Then, the loyal legislature of Virginia had fittingly spoken out, concerning the contemplated act, its manly words of disapproval and of [Pg 67] protest; but now that the contemplated act had become an adopted act—had become the law of the land—could that same legislature again speak even those same words, without thereby becoming disloyal,—without venturing a little too near the verge of sedition,—without putting itself into an attitude, at least, of incipient nullification respecting a law of the general government?

It is perfectly evident that by all the old leaders of the House at that moment,—by Peyton Randolph, and Pendleton, and Wythe, and Bland, and the rest of them,—this question was answered in the negative. Indeed, it could be answered in no other way. Such being the case, it followed that, for Virginia and for all her sister colonies, an entirely new state of things had arisen. A most serious problem confronted them,—a problem involving, in fact, incalculable interests. On the subject of immediate concern, they had endeavored, freely and rightfully, to influence legislation, while that legislation was in process; but now that this legislation was accomplished, what were they to do? Were they to submit to it quietly, trusting to further negotiations for ultimate relief, or were they to reject it outright, and try to obstruct its execution? Clearly, here was a very great problem, a problem for statesmanship,—the best statesmanship anywhere to be had. Clearly this was a time, at any rate, for wise and experienced men to come to the front; a time, not for rash counsels, nor for spasmodic and isolated [Pg 68] action on the part of any one colony, but for deliberate and united action on the part of all the colonies; a time in which all must move forward, or none. But, thus far, no colony had been heard from: there had not been time. Let Virginia wait a little. Let her make no mistake; let her not push forward into any ill-considered and dangerous measure; let her wait, at least, for some signal of thought or of purpose from her sister colonies. In the meanwhile, let her old and tried leaders continue to lead.

Such, apparently, was the state of opinion in the House of Burgesses when, on the 29th of May, a motion was made and carried, “that the House resolve itself into a committee of the whole House, immediately to consider the steps necessary to be taken in consequence of the resolutions of the House of Commons of Great Britain, relative to the charging certain stamp duties in the colonies and plantations in America.”[65] On thus going into committee of the whole, to deliberate on the most difficult and appalling question that, up to that time, had ever come before an American legislature, the members may very naturally have turned in expectation to those veteran politicians and to those able constitutional lawyers who, for many years, had been accustomed to guide their deliberations, and who, especially in the last session, had taken charge of this very question of the Stamp Act. It will not be hard for us to imagine the [Pg 69] disgust, the anger, possibly even the alarm, with which many may have beheld the floor now taken, not by Peyton Randolph, nor Richard Bland, nor George Wythe, nor Edmund Pendleton, but by this new and very unabashed member for the county of Louisa,—this rustic and clownish youth of the terrible tongue,—this eloquent but presumptuous stripling, who was absolutely without training or experience in statesmanship, and was the merest novice even in the forms of the House.

For what precise purpose the new member had thus ventured to take the floor, was known at the moment of his rising by only two other members,—George Johnston, the member for Fairfax, and John Fleming, the member for Cumberland. But the measureless audacity of his purpose, as being nothing less than that of assuming the leadership of the House, and of dictating the policy of Virginia in this stupendous crisis of its fate, was instantly revealed to all, as he moved a series of resolutions, which he proceeded to read from the blank leaf of an old law book, and which, probably, were as follows:—

“Whereas, the honorable House of Commons in England have of late drawn into question how far the General Assembly of this colony hath power to enact laws for laying of taxes and imposing duties, payable by the people of this, his majesty’s most ancient colony: for settling and ascertaining the same to all future times, the House of Burgesses of this present General Assembly have come to the following resolves:— [Pg 70]

“1. Resolved, That the first adventurers and settlers of this, his majesty’s colony and dominion, brought with them and transmitted to their posterity, and all other his majesty’s subjects, since inhabiting in this, his majesty’s said colony, all the privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain.

“2. Resolved, That by two royal charters, granted by king James the First, the colonists aforesaid are declared entitled to all the privileges, liberties, and immunities of denizens and natural born subjects, to all intents and purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the realm of England.

“3. Resolved, That the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what taxes the people are able to bear, and the easiest mode of raising them, and are equally affected by such taxes themselves, is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, and without which the ancient constitution cannot subsist.

“4. Resolved, That his majesty’s liege people of this most ancient colony have uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their own Assembly in the article of their taxes and internal police, and that the same hath never been forfeited, or any other way given up, but hath been constantly recognized by the kings and people of Great Britain.

“5. Resolved, therefore, That the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony; and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons whatsoever, other than the General Assembly aforesaid, has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.[Pg 71]

“6. Resolved, That his majesty’s liege people, the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws or ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid.

“7. Resolved, That any person who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons, other than the General Assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his majesty’s colony.”[66]

No reader will find it hard to accept Jefferson’s statement that the debate on these resolutions was “most bloody.” “They were opposed by Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, Nicholas, Wythe, and all the old members, whose influence in the House had till then been unbroken.”[67] There was every reason, whether of public policy or of private feeling, why the old party leaders in the House should now bestir themselves, and combine, and put forth [Pg 72] all their powers in debate, to check, and if possible to rout and extinguish, this self-conceited but most dangerous young man. “Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me,” said Patrick himself, long afterward. Logic, learning, eloquence, denunciation, derision, intimidation, were poured from all sides of the House upon the head of the presumptuous intruder; but alone, or almost alone, he confronted and defeated all his assailants. “Torrents of sublime eloquence from Mr. Henry, backed by the solid reasoning of Johnston, prevailed.”[68]

It was sometime in the course of this tremendous fight, extending through the 29th and 30th of May, that the incident occurred which has long been familiar among the anecdotes of the Revolution, and which may be here recalled as a reminiscence not only of his own consummate mastery of the situation, but of a most dramatic scene in an epoch-making debate. Reaching the climax of a passage of fearful invective, on the injustice and the impolicy of the Stamp Act, he said in tones of thrilling solemnity, “Cæsar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the Third [‘Treason,’ shouted the speaker. ‘Treason,’ ‘treason,’ rose from all sides of the room. The orator paused in stately defiance till these rude exclamations were ended, and then, rearing [Pg 73] himself with a look and bearing of still prouder and fiercer determination, he so closed the sentence as to baffle his accusers, without in the least flinching from his own position,]—and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”[69]

Of this memorable struggle nearly all other details have perished with the men who took part in it. After the House, in committee of the whole, had, on the 29th of May, spent sufficient time in the discussion, “Mr. Speaker resumed the chair,” says the Journal, “and Mr. Attorney reported that the said committee had had the said matter under consideration, and had come to several resolutions thereon, which he was ready to deliver in at the table. Ordered that the said report be received to-morrow.” It is probable that on the morrow the battle was renewed with even greater fierceness than before. The Journal proceeds: [Pg 74] “May 30. Mr. Attorney, from the committee of the whole House, reported according to order, that the committee had considered the steps necessary to be taken in consequence of the resolutions of the House of Commons of Great Britain, relative to the charging certain stamp duties in the colonies and plantations in America, and that they had come to several resolutions thereon, which he read in his place and then delivered at the table; when they were again twice read, and agreed to by the House, with some amendments.” Then were passed by the House, probably, the first five resolutions as offered by Henry in the committee, but “passed,” as he himself afterward wrote, “by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only.”

Upon this final discomfiture of the old leaders, one of their number, Peyton Randolph, swept angrily out of the house, and brushing past young Thomas Jefferson, who was standing in the door of the lobby, he swore, with a great oath, that he “would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote.”[70] On the afternoon of that day, Patrick Henry, knowing that the session was practically ended, and that his own work in it was done, started for his home. He was seen “passing along Duke of Gloucester Street, … wearing buckskin breeches, his saddle bags on his arm, leading a lean horse, and chatting with Paul Carrington, who walked by his side.”[71]

[Pg 75]That was on the 30th of May. The next morning, the terrible Patrick being at last quite out of the way, those veteran lawyers and politicians of the House, who had found this young protagonist alone too much for them all put together, made bold to undo the worst part of the work he had done the day before; they expunged the fifth resolution. In that mutilated form, without the preamble, and with the last three of the original resolutions omitted, the first four then remained on the journal of the House as the final expression of its official opinion. Meantime, on the wings of the wind, and on the eager tongues of men, had been borne, past recall, far northward and far southward, the fiery unchastised words of nearly the entire series, to kindle in all the colonies a great flame of dauntless purpose;[72] while Patrick [Pg 76] himself, perhaps then only half conscious of the fateful work he had just been doing, travelled homeward along the dusty highway, at once the jolliest, the most popular, and the least pretentious man in all Virginia, certainly its greatest orator, possibly even its greatest statesman.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Wirt, 24.

[58] Meade, Old Families and Churches of Va. i. 220.

[59] Maury, Mem. of a Huguenot Fam. 423.

[60] Wirt, 39-41.

[61] Mem. by Jefferson, in Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91.

[62] Jefferson’s Works, vi. 365.

[63] Mem. by Jefferson, in Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91.

[64] These documents are given in full in the Appendix to Wirt’s Life of Henry, as Note A.

[65] Jour. Va. House of Burgesses.

[66] Of this famous series of resolutions, the first five are here given precisely as they are given in Patrick Henry’s own certified copy still existing in manuscript, and in the possession of Mr. W. W. Henry; but as that copy evidently contains only that portion of the series which was reported from the committee of the whole, and was adopted by the House, I have here printed also what I believe to have been the preamble, and the last two resolutions in the series as first drawn and introduced by Patrick Henry. For this portion of the series, I depend on the copy printed in the Boston Gazette, for July 1, 1765, and reprinted in R. Frothingham, Rise of the Republic, 180 note. In Wirt’s Life of Henry, 56-59, is a transcript of the first five resolutions as given in Henry’s handwriting: but it is inaccurate in two places.

[67] Mem. by Jefferson, in Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91.

[68] Mem. by Jefferson, in Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91. Henry was aided in this debate by Robert Munford, also, and by John Fleming: W. W. Henry, Life, Corr. and Speeches of P. Henry, i. 82n.

[69] For this splendid anecdote we are indebted to Judge John Tyler, who, then a youth of eighteen, listened to the speech as he stood in the lobby by the side of Jefferson. Edmund Randolph, in his History of Virginia, still in manuscript, has a somewhat different version of the language of the orator, as follows: “‘Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles the First, his Cromwell, and George the Third’—‘Treason, Sir,’ exclaimed the Speaker; to which Mr. Henry instantly replied, ‘and George the Third, may he never have either.’” The version furnished by John Tyler is, of course, the more effective and characteristic; and as Tyler actually heard the speech, and as, moreover, his account is confirmed by Jefferson who also heard it, his account can hardly be set aside by that of Randolph who did not hear it, and was indeed but a boy of twelve at the time it was made. L. G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, i. 56; Wirt, 65.

[70] Mem. by Jefferson, Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91.

[71] Campbell, Hist. Va. 542.

[72] The subject of the Virginia resolutions presents several difficulties which I have not thought it best to discuss in the text, where I have given merely the results of my own rather careful and repeated study of the question. In brief, my conclusion is this: That the series as given above, consisting of a preamble and seven resolutions, is the series as originally prepared by Patrick Henry, and introduced by him on Wednesday, May 29, in the committee of the whole, and probably passed by the committee on that day; that at once, without waiting for the action of the House upon the subject, copies of the series got abroad, and were soon published in the newspapers of the several colonies, as though actually adopted by the House; that on Thursday, May 30, the series was cut down in the House by rejection of the preamble and the resolutions 6 and 7, and by the adoption of only the first five as given above; that on the day after that, when Patrick Henry had gone home, the House still further cut down the series by expunging the resolution which is above numbered as 5: and that, many years afterwards, when Patrick Henry came to prepare a copy for transmission to posterity, he gave the resolutions just as they stood when adopted by the House on May 30, and not as they stood when originally introduced by him in committee of the whole on the day before, nor as they stood when mutilated by the cowardly act of the House on the day after. It will be noticed, therefore, that the so-called resolutions of Virginia, which were actually published and known to the colonies in 1765, and which did so much to fire their hearts, were not the resolutions as adopted by the House, but were the resolutions as first introduced, and probably passed, in committee of the whole; and that even this copy of them was inaccurately given, since it lacked the resolution numbered above as 3, probably owing to an error in the first hurried transcription of them. Those who care to study the subject further will find the materials in Prior Documents, 6, 7; Marshall, Life of Washington, i. note iv.; Frothingham, Rise of the Republic, 180 note; Gordon, Hist. Am. Rev., i. 129-139; Works of Jefferson, vi. 366, 367; Wirt, Life of Henry, 56-63; Everett, Life of Henry, 265-273, with important note by Jared Sparks in Appendix, 391-398. It may be mentioned that the narrative given in Burk, Hist. Va., iii. 305-310, is untrustworthy.

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CHAPTER VI
CONSEQUENCES

Seldom has a celebrated man shown more indifference to the preservation of the records and credentials of his career than did Patrick Henry. While some of his famous associates in the Revolution diligently kept both the letters they received, and copies of the letters they wrote, and made, for the benefit of posterity, careful memoranda concerning the events of their lives, Patrick Henry did none of these things. Whatever letters he wrote, he wrote at a dash, and then parted with them utterly; whatever letters were written to him, were invariably handed over by him to the comfortable custody of luck; and as to the correct historic perpetuation of his doings, he seems almost to have exhausted his interest in each one of them so soon as he had accomplished it, and to have been quite content to leave to other people all responsibility for its being remembered correctly, or even remembered at all.

To this statement, however, a single exception has to be made. It relates to the great affair described in the latter part of the previous chapter.

Of course, it was perceived at the time that [Pg 78] the passing of the Virginia resolutions against the Stamp Act was a great affair; but just how great an affair it was, neither Patrick Henry nor any other mortal man could tell until years had gone by, and had unfolded the vast sequence of world-resounding events, in which that affair was proved to be a necessary factor. It deserves to be particularly mentioned that, of all the achievements of his life, the only one which he has taken the pains to give any account of is his authorship of the Virginia resolutions, and his successful championship of them. With reference to this achievement, the account he gave of it was rendered with so much solemnity and impressiveness as to indicate that, in the final survey of his career, he regarded this as the one most important thing he ever did. But before we cite the words in which he thus indicated this judgment, it will be well for us to glance briefly at the train of historic incidents which now set forth the striking connection between that act of Patrick Henry and the early development of that intrepid policy which culminated in American independence.

It was on the 29th of May, 1765, as will be remembered, that Patrick Henry moved in the committee of the whole the adoption of his series of resolutions against the Stamp Act; and before the sun went down that day, the entire series, as is probable, was adopted by the committee. On the following day, the essential portion of the series was adopted, likewise, by the House. But what [Pg 79] was the contemporary significance of these resolutions? As the news of them swept from colony to colony, why did they so stir men’s hearts to excitement, and even to alarm? It was not that the language of those resolutions was more radical or more trenchant than had been the language already used on the same subject, over and over again, in the discussions of the preceding twelve months. It was that, in the recent change of the political situation, the significance of that language had changed. Prior to the time referred to, whatever had been said on the subject, in any of the colonies, had been said for the purpose of dissuading the government from passing the Stamp Act. But the government had now passed the Stamp Act; and, accordingly, these resolutions must have been meant for a very different purpose. They were a virtual declaration of resistance to the Stamp Act; a declaration of resistance made, not by an individual writer, nor by a newspaper, but by the legislature of a great colony; and, moreover, they were the very first declaration of resistance which was so made.[73]

This it is which gives us the contemporary key to their significance, and to the vast excitement produced by them, and to the enormous influence they had upon the trembling purposes of the colonists at that precise moment. Hence it was, as a sagacious writer of that period has told us, that [Pg 80] merely upon the adoption of these resolves by the committee of the whole, men recognized their momentous bearing, and could not be restrained from giving publicity to them, without waiting for their final adoption by the House. “A manuscript of the unrevised resolves,” says William Gordon, “soon reached Philadelphia, having been sent off immediately upon their passing, that the earliest information of what had been done might be obtained by the Sons of Liberty.… At New York the resolves were handed about with great privacy: they were accounted so treasonable, that the possessors of them declined printing them in that city.” But a copy of them having been procured with much difficulty by an Irish gentleman resident in Connecticut, “he carried them to New England, where they were published and circulated far and wide in the newspapers, without any reserve, and proved eventually the occasion of those disorders which afterward broke out in the colonies.… The Virginia resolutions gave a spring to all the disgusted; and they began to adopt different measures.”[74]

But while the tidings of these resolutions were thus moving toward New England, and before they had arrived there, the assembly of the great colony of Massachusetts had begun to take action. Indeed, it had first met on the very day on which Patrick Henry had introduced his resolutions into the committee of the whole at Williamsburg. On [Pg 81] the 8th of June, it had resolved upon a circular letter concerning the Stamp Act, addressed to all the sister colonies, and proposing that all should send delegates to a congress to be held at New York, on the first Tuesday of the following October, to deal with the perils and duties of the situation. This circular letter at once started upon its tour.

The first reception of it, however, was discouraging. From the speaker of the New Jersey assembly came the reply that the members of that body were “unanimously against uniting on the present occasion;” and for several weeks thereafter, “no movement appeared in favor of the great and wise measure of convening a congress.” At last, however, the project of Massachusetts began to feel the accelerating force of a mighty impetus. The Virginia resolutions, being at last divulged throughout the land, “had a marked effect on public opinion.” They were “heralded as the voice of a colony.… The fame of the resolves spread as they were circulated in the journals.… The Virginia action, like an alarum, roused the patriots to pass similar resolves.[75] “On the 8th of July, “The Boston Gazette” uttered this most significant sentence: “The people of Virginia have spoken very sensibly, and the frozen politicians of a more northern government say they have spoken treason.”[76] On the same day, in that [Pg 82] same town of Boston, an aged lawyer and patriot[77] lay upon his death bed; and in his admiration for the Virginians on account of these resolves, he exclaimed, “They are men; they are noble spirits.”[78] On the 13th of August, the people of Providence instructed their representatives in the legislature to vote in favor of the congress, and to procure the passage of a series of resolutions in which were incorporated those of Virginia.[79] On the 15th of August, from Boston, Governor Bernard wrote home to the ministry: “Two or three months ago, I thought that this people would submit to the Stamp Act. Murmurs were indeed continually heard; but they seemed to be such as would die away. But the publishing of the Virginia resolves proved an alarm bell to the disaffected.”[80] On the 23d of September, General Gage, the commander of the British forces in America, wrote from New York to Secretary Conway that the Virginia resolves had given “the signal for a general outcry over the continent.”[81] And finally, in the autumn of 1774, an able loyalist writer, looking back over the political history of the colonies from the year of the Stamp Act, singled out the Virginia resolves as the baleful cause of all the troubles that had then come upon the land. “After it was known,” said he, “that the Stamp [Pg 83] Act was passed, some resolves of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, denying the right of Parliament to tax the colonies, made their appearance. We read them with wonder; they savored of independence; they flattered the human passions; the reasoning was specious; we wished it conclusive. The transition to believing it so was easy; and we, and almost all America, followed their example, in resolving that Parliament had no such right.”[82]

All these facts, and many more that might be produced, seem to point to the Virginia resolutions of 1765 as having come at a great primary crisis of the Revolution,—a crisis of mental confusion and hesitation,—and as having then uttered, with trumpet voice, the very word that was fitted to the hour, and that gave to men’s minds clearness of vision, and to their hearts a settled purpose. It must have been in the light of such facts as these that Patrick Henry, in his old age, reviewing his own wonderful career, determined to make a sort of testamentary statement concerning his relation to that single transaction,—so vitally connected with the greatest epoch in American history.

Among the papers left by him at his death was one significantly placed by the side of his will, carefully sealed, and bearing this superscription: “Inclosed are the resolutions of the Virginia Assembly in 1765, concerning the Stamp Act. Let my executors open this paper.” On opening the [Pg 84] document, his executors found on one side of the sheet the first five resolutions in the famous series introduced by him; and on the other side, these weighty words:—

The within resolutions passed the House of Burgesses in May, 1765. They formed the first opposition to the Stamp Act, and the scheme of taxing America by the British parliament. All the colonies, either through fear, or want of opportunity to form an opposition, or from influence of some kind or other, had remained silent. I had been for the first time elected a Burgess a few days before; was young, inexperienced, unacquainted with the forms of the House, and the members that composed it. Finding the men of weight averse to opposition, and the commencement of the tax at hand, and that no person was likely to step forth, I determined to venture; and alone, unadvised, and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law book, wrote the within.[83] Upon offering them [Pg 85] to the House, violent debates ensued. Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me by the party for submission. After a long and warm contest, the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only. The alarm spread throughout America with astonishing quickness, and the ministerial party were overwhelmed. The great point of resistance to British taxation was universally established in the colonies. This brought on the war, which finally separated the two countries, and gave independence to ours.

Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable. Righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation.

Reader! whoever thou art, remember this; and in thy sphere practice virtue thyself, and encourage it in others.

P. Henry.[84]

But while this renowned act in Patrick Henry’s life had consequences so notable in their bearing on great national and international movements, it is interesting to observe, also, its immediate effects on his own personal position in the world, and on [Pg 86] the development of his career. We can hardly be surprised to find, on the one hand, that his act gave deep offence to one very considerable class of persons in Virginia,—the official representatives of the English government, and their natural allies, those thoughtful and conscientious colonists who, by temperament and conviction, were inclined to lay a heavy accent on the principle of civil authority and order. Of course, as the official head of this not ignoble class, stood Francis Fauquier, the lieutenant-governor of the colony; and his letter to the lords of trade, written from Williamsburg a few days after the close of the session, contains a striking narrative of this stormy proceeding, and an almost amusing touch of official undervaluation of Patrick Henry: “In the course of the debate, I have heard that very indecent language was used by a Mr. Henry, a young lawyer, who had not been above a month a member of the House, and who carried all the young members with him.”[85] But a far more specific and intense expression of antipathy came, a few weeks later, from the Reverend William Robinson, the colonial commissary of the Bishop of London. Writing, on the 12th of August, to his metropolitan, he gave an account of Patrick Henry’s very offensive management of the cause against the parsons, before becoming a member of the House of Burgesses; and then added:—[Pg 87]

“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.

[78] Works of John Adams, x. 287.

[79] Frothingham, 181.

[80] Cited by Sparks, in Everett, Life of Henry, 396.

[81] Frothingham, Rise of the Republic, 181.

[82] Daniel Leonard, in Novanglus and Massachusettensis, 147, 148.

[83] As the historic importance of the Virginia resolutions became more and more apparent, a disposition was manifested to deny to Patrick Henry the honor of having written them. As early as 1790, Madison, between whom and Henry there was nearly always a sharp hostility, significantly asked Edmund Pendleton to tell him “where the resolutions proposed by Mr. Henry really originated.” Letters and Other Writings of Madison, i. 515. Edmund Randolph is said to have asserted that they were written by William Fleming; a statement of which Jefferson remarked, “It is to me incomprehensible.” Works, vi. 484. But to Jefferson’s own testimony on the same subject, I would apply the same remark. In his Memorandum, he says without hesitation that the resolutions “were drawn up by George Johnston, a lawyer of the Northern Neck, a very able, logical, and correct speaker.” Hist. Mag. for 1867, 91. But in another paper, written at about the same time, Jefferson said: “I can readily enough believe these resolutions were written by Mr. Henry himself. They bear the stamp of his mind, strong, without precision. That they were written by Johnston, who seconded them, was only the rumor of the day, and very possibly unfounded.” Works, vi. 484. In the face of all this tissue of rumor, guesswork, and self-contradiction, the deliberate statement of Patrick Henry himself that he wrote the five resolutions referred to by him, and that he wrote them “alone, unadvised, and unassisted,” must close the discussion.

[84] Verified from the original manuscript, now in possession of Mr. W. W. Henry.

[85] Cited by Sparks, in Everett, Life of Henry, 392.

[86] Perry, Hist. Coll. i. 514, 515.

[87] Works of John Adams, ii. 249.

[88] Works of Jefferson, vi. 368.

[89] Life of Henry, 66.

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CHAPTER VII
STEADY WORK

From the close of Patrick Henry’s first term in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the spring of 1765, to the opening of his first term in the Continental Congress, in the fall of 1774, there stretches a period of about nine years, which, for the purposes of our present study, may be rapidly glanced at and passed by.

In general, it may be described as a period during which he had settled down to steady work, both as a lawyer and as a politician. The first five years of his professional life had witnessed his advance, as we have seen, by strides which only genius can make, from great obscurity to great distinction; his advance from a condition of universal failure to one of success so universal that his career may be said to have become within that brief period solidly established. At the bar, upon the hustings, in the legislature, as a master of policies, as a leader of men, he had already proved himself to be, of his kind, without a peer in all the colony of Virginia,—a colony which was then the prolific mother of great men. With him, therefore, the period of training and of tentative [Pg 91] struggle had passed: the period now entered upon was one of recognized mastership and of assured performance, along lines certified by victories that came gayly, and apparently at his slightest call.

We note, at the beginning of this period, an event indicating substantial prosperity in his life: he acquires the visible dignity of a country-seat. Down to the end of 1763, and probably even to the summer of 1765, he had continued to live in the neighborhood of Hanover Court House. After coming back from his first term of service in the House of Burgesses, where he had sat as member for the county of Louisa, he removed his residence into that county, and established himself there upon an estate called Roundabout, purchased by him of his father. In 1768 he returned to Hanover, and in 1771 he bought a place in that county called Scotch Town, which continued to be his seat until shortly after the Declaration of Independence, when, having become governor of the new State of Virginia, he took up his residence at Williamsburg, in the palace long occupied by the official representatives of royalty.

For the practice of his profession, the earlier portion of this period was perhaps not altogether unfavorable. The political questions then in debate were, indeed, exciting, but they had not quite reached the ultimate issue, and did not yet demand from him the complete surrender of his life. Those years seem to have been marked by great professional activity on his part, and by considerable [Pg 92] growth in his reputation, even for the higher and more difficult work of the law. Of course, as the vast controversy between the colonists and Great Britain grew in violence, all controversies between one colonist and another began to seem petty, and to be postponed; even the courts ceased to meet with much regularity, and finally ceased to meet at all; while Patrick Henry himself, forsaking his private concerns, became entirely absorbed in the concerns of the public.

The fluctuations in his engagements as a lawyer, during all these years, may be traced with some certainty by the entries in his fee-books. For the year 1765, he charges fees in 547 cases; for 1766, in 114 cases; for 1767, in 554 cases; for 1768, in 354 cases. With the next year there begins a great falling off in the number of his cases; and the decline continues till 1774, when, in the convulsions of the time, his practice stops altogether. Thus, for 1769, there are registered 132 cases; for 1770, 94 cases; for 1771, 102 cases; for 1772, 43 cases; for 1773, 7 cases; and for 1774, none.[90]

The character of the professional work done by him during this period deserves a moment’s consideration. Prior to 1769, he had limited himself to practice in the courts of the several counties. In that year he began to practice in the general court,—the highest court in the colony,—where of course were tried the most important and difficult causes, and where thenceforward he had [Pg 93] constantly to encounter the most learned and acute lawyers at the bar, including such men as Pendleton, Wythe, Blair, Mercer, John Randolph, Thompson Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert C. Nicholas.[91]

There could never have been any doubt of his supreme competency to deal with such criminal causes as he had to manage in that court or in any other; and with respect to the conduct of other than criminal causes, all purely contemporaneous evidence, now to be had, implies that he had not ventured to present himself before the higher tribunals of the land until he had qualified himself to bear his part there with success and honor. Thus, the instance may be mentioned of his appearing in the Court of Admiralty, “in behalf of a Spanish captain, whose vessel and cargo had been libeled. A gentleman who was present, and who was very well qualified to judge, was heard to declare, after the trial was over, that he never heard a more eloquent or argumentative speech in his life; that Mr. Henry was on that occasion greatly superior to Mr. Pendleton, Mr. Mason, or any other counsel who spoke to the subject; and that he was astonished how Mr. Henry could have acquired such a knowledge of the maritime law, to which it was believed he had never before turned his attention.”[92] Moreover, in 1771, just two years from the time when Patrick Henry began practice in the General Court, Robert C. Nicholas,[Pg 94] then a veteran member of the profession, “who had enjoyed the first practice at the bar,” had occasion to retire, and began looking about among the younger men for some competent lawyer to whom he might safely intrust the unfinished business of his clients. He first offered his practice to Thomas Jefferson, who, however, was compelled to decline it. Afterward, he offered it to Patrick Henry, who accepted it; and accordingly, by public advertisement, Nicholas informed his clients that he had committed to Patrick Henry the further protection of their interests,[93]—a perfectly conclusive proof, it should seem, of the real respect in which Patrick Henry’s qualifications as a lawyer were then held, not only by the public but by the profession. Certainly such evidence as this can hardly be set aside by the supposed recollections of one old gentleman, of broken memory and unbroken resentment, who long afterward tried to convince Wirt that, even at the period now in question, Patrick Henry was “wofully deficient as a lawyer,” was unable to contend with his associates “on a mere question of law,” and was “so little acquainted with the fundamental principles of his profession … as not to be able to see the remote bearings of the reported cases.”[94] The expressions here quoted are, apparently, Wirt’s own paraphrase of the statements which were made to him by Jefferson, and which, in many of their [Pg 95] details, can now be proved, on documentary evidence, to be the work of a hand that had forgot, not indeed its cunning, but at any rate its accuracy.

As to the political history of Patrick Henry during this period, it may be easily described. The doctrine on which he had planted himself by his resolutions in 1765, namely, that the parliamentary taxation of unrepresented colonies is unconstitutional, became the avowed doctrine of Virginia, and of all her sister colonies; and nearly all the men who, in the House of Burgesses, had, for reasons of propriety, or of expediency, or of personal feeling, opposed the passage of his resolutions, soon took pains to make it known to their constituents that their opposition had not been to the principle which those resolutions expressed. Thenceforward, among the leaders in Virginian politics, there was no real disagreement on the fundamental question; only such disagreement touching methods as must always occur between spirits who are cautious and spirits who are bold. Chief among the former were Pendleton, Wythe, Bland, Peyton Randolph, and Nicholas. In the van of the latter always stood Patrick Henry, and with him Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, the Pages, and George Mason. But between the two groups, after all, was surprising harmony, which is thus explained by one who in all that business had a great part and who never was a laggard:—

“Sensible, however, of the importance of unanimity [Pg 96] among our constituents, although we often wished to have gone faster, we slackened our pace, that our less ardent colleagues might keep up with us; and they, on their part, differing nothing from us in principle, quickened their gait somewhat beyond that which their prudence might of itself have advised, and thus consolidated the phalanx which breasted the power of Britain. By this harmony of the bold with the cautious, we advanced with our constituents in undivided mass, and with fewer examples of separation than, perhaps, existed in any other part of the union.”[95]

All deprecated a quarrel with Great Britain; all deprecated as a boundless calamity the possible issue of independence; all desired to remain in loyal, free, and honorable connection with the British empire; and against the impending danger of an assault upon the freedom, and consequently the honor, of this connection, all stood on guard.

One result, however, of this practical unanimity among the leaders in Virginia was the absence, during all this period, of those impassioned and dramatic conflicts in debate, which would have called forth historic exhibitions of Patrick Henry’s eloquence and of his gifts for conduct and command. He had a leading part in all the counsels of the time; he was sent to every session of the House of Burgesses; he was at the front in all local committees and conventions; he was made a member of the first Committee of Correspondence; and all these incidents in this portion of his life [Pg 97] culminated in his mission as one of the deputies from Virginia to the first Continental Congress.

Without here going into the familiar story of the occasion and purposes of the Congress of 1774, we may briefly indicate Patrick Henry’s relation to the events in Virginia which immediately preceded his appointment to that renowned assemblage. On the 24th of May, 1774, the House of Burgesses, having received the alarming news of the passage of the Boston Port Bill, designated the day on which that bill was to take effect—the first day of June—“as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, devoutly to implore the Divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war; to give us one heart and one mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American rights; and that the minds of his majesty and his parliament may be inspired from above with wisdom, moderation, and justice, to remove from the loyal people of America all cause of danger, from a continued pursuit of measures pregnant with their ruin.”[96] Two days afterward, the governor, Lord Dunmore, having summoned the House to the council chamber, made to them this little speech:—

“Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the House of Burgesses, I have in my hand a paper published by order of your House, conceived in such terms as reflect highly upon his majesty and the Parliament of Great Britain,[Pg 98] which makes it necessary for me to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly.”[97]

At ten o’clock on the following day, May 27, the members of the late House met by agreement at the Raleigh Tavern, and there promptly passed a nobly-worded resolution, deploring the policy pursued by Parliament and suggesting the establishment of an annual congress of all the colonies, “to deliberate on those general measures which the united interests of America may from time to time require.”[98]

During the anxious days and nights immediately preceding the dissolution of the House, its prominent members held many private conferences with respect to the course to be pursued by Virginia. In all these conferences, as we are told, “Patrick Henry was the leader;”[99] and a very able man, George Mason, who was just then a visitor at Williamsburg, and was admitted to the consultations of the chiefs, wrote at the time concerning him: “He is by far the most powerful speaker I ever heard.… But his eloquence is the smallest part of his merit. He is, in my opinion, the first man upon this continent, as well in abilities as public virtues.”[100]

[Pg 99] In response to a recommendation made by leading members of the recent House of Burgesses, a convention of delegates from the several counties of Virginia assembled at Williamsburg, on August 1, 1774, to deal with the needs of the hour, and especially to appoint deputies to the proposed congress at Philadelphia. The spirit in which this convention transacted its business is sufficiently shown in the opening paragraphs of the letter of instructions which it gave to the deputies whom it sent to the congress:—

“The unhappy disputes between Great Britain and her American colonies, which began about the third year of the reign of his present majesty, and since, continually increasing, have proceeded to lengths so dangerous and alarming as to excite just apprehensions in the minds of his majesty’s faithful subjects of this colony that they are in danger of being deprived of their natural, ancient, constitutional, and chartered rights, have compelled them to take the same into their most serious consideration; and being deprived of their usual and accustomed mode of making known their grievances, have appointed us their representatives, to consider what is proper to be done in this dangerous crisis of American affairs.

“It being our opinion that the united wisdom of North America should be collected in a general congress of all the colonies, we have appointed the honorable Peyton Randolph, Esquire, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, and Edmund Pendleton, Esquires, deputies to represent this colony in the said congress, to be held at [Pg 100] Philadelphia on the first Monday in September next. And that they may be the better informed of our sentiments touching the conduct we wish them to observe on this important occasion, we desire that they will express, in the first place, our faith and true allegiance to his majesty King George the Third, our lawful and rightful sovereign; and that we are determined, with our lives and fortunes, to support him in the legal exercise of all his just rights and prerogatives; and however misrepresented, we sincerely approve of a constitutional connection with Great Britain, and wish most ardently a return of that intercourse of affection and commercial connection that formerly united both countries; which can only be effected by a removal of those causes of discontent which have of late unhappily divided us.… The power assumed by the British Parliament to bind America by their statutes, in all cases whatsoever, is unconstitutional, and the source of these unhappy differences.”[101]

The convention at Williamsburg, of which, of course, Patrick Henry was a member, seems to have adjourned on Saturday, the 6th of August. Between that date and the time for his departure to attend the congress at Philadelphia, we may imagine him as busily engaged in arranging his affairs for a long absence from home, and even then as not getting ready to begin the long journey until many of his associates had nearly reached the end of it.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] MS.

[91] Wirt, 70, 71.

[92] Wirt, 71, 72.

[93] Randall, Life of Jefferson, i. 49; Wirt, 77.

[94] Wirt, 71.

[95] Jefferson’s Works, vi. 368.

[96] 4 Am. Arch. i. 350.

[97] Campbell, Hist. Va. 573.

[98] 4 Am. Arch. i. 350, 351. The narrative of these events as given by Wirt and by Campbell has several errors. They seem to have been misled by Jefferson, who, in his account of the business (Works, i. 122, 123), is, if possible, rather more inaccurate than usual.

[99] Campbell, Hist. Va. 573.

[100] Mason to Martin Cockburn, Va. Hist. Reg. iii. 27-29.

[101] The full text of this letter of instructions is given in 4 Am. Arch. i. 689, 690. With this should be compared note C. in Jefferson’s Works, i. 122-142.

[Pg 101]
[ToC]

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

On the morning of Tuesday, the 30th of August, Patrick Henry arrived on horseback at Mt. Vernon, the home of his friend and colleague, George Washington; and having remained there that day and night, he set out for Philadelphia on the following morning, in the company of Washington and of Edmund Pendleton. From the jottings in Washington’s diary,[102] we can so far trace the progress of this trio of illustrious horsemen, as to ascertain that on Sunday, the 4th of September, they “breakfasted at Christiana Ferry; dined at Chester;” and reached Philadelphia for supper—thus arriving in town barely in time to be present at the first meeting of the Congress on the morning of the 5th.

John Adams had taken pains to get upon the ground nearly a week earlier; and carefully gathering all possible information concerning his future associates, few of whom he had then ever seen, he wrote in his diary that the Virginians were said to “speak in raptures about Richard Henry Lee [Pg 102] and Patrick Henry, one the Cicero, and the other the Demosthenes, of the age.”[103]

Not far from the same time, also, a keen-witted Virginian, Roger Atkinson, at his home near Petersburg, was writing to a friend about the men who had gone to represent Virginia in the great Congress; and this letter of his, though not meant for posterity, has some neat, off-hand portraits which posterity may, nevertheless, be glad to look at. Peyton Randolph is “a venerable man … an honest man; has knowledge, temper, experience, judgment,—above all, integrity; a true Roman spirit.” Richard Bland is “a wary, old, experienced veteran at the bar and in the senate; has something of the look of old musty parchments, which he handleth and studieth much. He formerly wrote a treatise against the Quakers on water-baptism.” Washington “is a soldier,—a warrior; he is a modest man; sensible; speaks little; in action cool, like a bishop at his prayers.” Pendleton “is an humble and religious man, and must be exalted. He is a smooth-tongued speaker, and, though not so old, may be compared to old Nestor,—

‘Experienced Nestor, in persuasion skilled,
Words sweet as honey from his lips distilled.’”

But Patrick Henry “is a real half-Quaker,—your brother’s man,—moderate and mild, and in religious matters a saint; but the very devil in politics; a son of thunder. He will shake the [Pg 103] Senate. Some years ago he had liked to have talked treason into the House.”[104]

Few of the members of this Congress had ever met before; and if all had arrived upon the scene as late as did these three members from Virginia, there might have been some difficulty, through a lack of previous consultation and acquaintance, in organizing the Congress on the day appointed, and in entering at once upon its business. In fact, however, more than a week before the time for the first meeting, the delegates had begun to make their appearance in Philadelphia; thenceforward with each day the arrivals continued; by Thursday, the 1st of September, twenty-five delegates, nearly one half of the entire body elected, were in town;[105] and probably, during all that week, no day and no night had passed without many an informal conference respecting the business before them, and the best way of doing it.

Concerning these memorable men of the first Continental Congress, it must be confessed that as the mists of a hundred years of glorifying oratory and of semi-poetic history have settled down upon them, they are now enveloped in a light which seems to distend their forms to proportions almost superhuman, and to cast upon their faces a gravity that hardly belongs to this world; and it may, perhaps, help us to bring them and their work somewhat nearer to the plane of natural human [Pg 104] life and motive, and into a light that is as the light of reality, if, turning to the daily memoranda made at the time by one of their number, we can see how merrily, after all, nay, with what flowing feasts, with what convivial communings, passed those days and nights of preparation for the difficult business they were about to take in hand.

For example, on Monday, the 29th of August, when the four members of the Massachusetts delegation had arrived within five miles of the city, they were met by an escort of gentlemen, partly residents of Philadelphia, and partly delegates from other colonies, who had come out in carriages to greet them.

“We were introduced,” writes John Adams, “to all these gentlemen, and most cordially welcomed to Philadelphia. We then rode into town, and dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were, we could not resist the importunity to go to the tavern, the most genteel one in America. There we were introduced to a number of other gentlemen of the city, … and to Mr. Lynch and Mr. Gadsden, of South Carolina. Here we had a fresh welcome to the city of Philadelphia; and after some time spent in conversation, a curtain was drawn, and in the other half of the chamber a supper appeared as elegant as ever was laid upon a table. About eleven o’clock we retired.

“30, Tuesday. Walked a little about town; visited the market, the State House, the Carpenters’ Hall, where the Congress is to sit, etc.; then called at Mr. Mifflin’s, a grand, spacious, and elegant house. Here we had much conversation with Mr. Charles Thomson, who is … the Sam Adams of Philadelphia, the life of the [Pg 105] cause of liberty, they say. A Friend, Collins, came to see us, and invited us to dine on Thursday. We returned to our lodgings, and Mr. Lynch, Mr. Gadsden, Mr. Middleton, and young Mr. Rutledge came to visit us.

“31, Wednesday. Breakfasted at Mr. Bayard’s, of Philadelphia, with Mr. Sprout, a Presbyterian minister. Made a visit to Governor Ward of Rhode Island, at his lodgings. There we were introduced to several gentlemen. Mr. Dickinson, the Farmer of Pennsylvania, came in his coach with four beautiful horses to Mr. Ward’s lodgings, to see us.… We dined with Mr. Lynch, his lady and daughter, at their lodgings, … and a very agreeable dinner and afternoon we had, notwithstanding the violent heat. We were all vastly pleased with Mr. Lynch. He is a solid, firm, judicious man.

“September 1, Thursday. This day we breakfasted at Mr. Mifflin’s. Mr. C. Thomson came in, and soon after Dr. Smith, the famous Dr. Smith, the provost of the college.… We then went to return visits to the gentlemen who had visited us. We visited a Mr. Cadwallader, a gentleman of large fortune, a grand and elegant house and furniture. We then visited Mr. Powell, another splendid seat. We then visited the gentlemen from South Carolina, and, about twelve, were introduced to Mr. Galloway, the speaker of the House in Pennsylvania. We dined at Friend Collins’ … with Governor Hopkins, Governor Ward, Mr. Galloway, Mr. Rhoades, etc. In the evening all the gentlemen of the Congress who were arrived in town, met at Smith’s, the new city tavern, and spent the evening together. Twenty-five members were come. Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and the city of New York were not arrived.[Pg 106]