6 “If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It!”

ON MARCH 20, 1775, PATRICK HENRY TOOK HIS SEAT IN ST. JOHN’S CHURCH in Richmond as a representative in a convention that had been called to devise Virginia’s approach to the ongoing tensions with Great Britain. Lantern-jawed and heavy-browed, Henry was six feet tall and imposing. He walked with a pronounced stoop, as if bearing a heavy load he wanted everyone to know about. He affected an unschooled manner of speaking, and seemed to relish playing the role of avatar for the common man. But any ponderousness in his gravelly voice was quickly eclipsed by the quicksilver humor that flashed in his speech like sunlight on water.¹

When a debate began about whether or not Virginia should support more independence for the colony of Jamaica, Henry saw an opportunity to advance a more militant vision of colonial freedom. He abruptly stood and introduced resolutions declaring the right to a “well-regulated militia” and asking the convention to put Virginia into an immediate state of defense.

His resolutions sparked a firestorm in the chamber. Their voices rising like thunder, Tory delegates shouted that his ideas were too provocative toward the British. Henry rose in response. “And what have we to oppose them?” he asked sarcastically. “Shall we try argument? Sire, we have been trying that for the last ten years.”

He was attacking reason itself. The men had the vertiginous sensation of riding along with him into battle. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace,” he declared, looking around with flashing eyes. “But there is no peace.” He resonantly pronounced his verdict: “The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it the gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased as the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God!”

And then he came to the deathless proclamation that would ring centuries later: “I know now what course others may take. But as for me,” he declared, “give me liberty or give me death!”

For a moment, the men around Henry were suspended in time. Edmund Randolph later wrote that Henry’s oratory “blazed so as to warm the coldest heart”—that he was “thought in his attitude to resemble St. David, while preaching at Athens, and to speak as man was never known to speak before.” His gathered force—his posture, the broad embrace of his arms, the gravelly tone of his voice, his anger, his stark challenge to them—united to make him seem above their time somehow, as if he were emanating from, or perhaps driving, history itself.

The entranced delegates voted for the resolutions and to appoint a committee to arm the colony and elected Henry chair. His transition from lawyer to orator to revolutionary was fully in motion.2 News of the “liberty or death” speech quickly spread. James Madison was electrified.

Who was the man who had delivered America’s most famous declaration regarding political freedom, regarding revolution itself?

THE STORY OF HENRY’S REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT WENT BACK AT LEAST A decade, to May 29, 1765, when he rose before his fellow members of the Virginia House of Burgesses. The men watching him didn’t know Henry well; as a first-term delegate, he would not ordinarily have traveled in their social circles. He seemed to have a grittier background than them. Most were wealthy and accomplished. Four out of five had already served as justices of the peace, and nearly half had a college education. Half were related by birth or marriage to the “First Families of Virginia”—the Randolphs, Carters, Beverlys, and Lees. But Henry, they knew, had been largely educated at home by his father, had then worked as a bumptious tavern keeper, and only afterward took a rocky path to the law and then politics.

They also knew that five years earlier, in his quest to become a licensed attorney, Henry had been examined by a panel of four preeminent lawyers, including George Wythe, Virginia’s foremost lawyer, and two of the famous Randolphs. Henry only passed the examination over great reluctance from two of the examiners, and despite his manifest ignorance of the laws, because of what the other two called his obvious genius, his powers of “natural reason.”³

They were about to learn just what that meant.

One after the other, Henry introduced five resolutions defying Great Britain’s hated Stamp Act, which levied new taxes on all printed paper goods. He declared that Virginia’s General Assembly possessed the “only and sole exclusive Right and Power” to lay such taxes. In turn, several of the men rose to attack Henry’s motives, his evident ambition, and his recklessness.

Henry, rising to defend his resolutions, said angrily, “Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third—” Henry’s inflammatory words likened the British king to an emperor about to be deposed, alarming many of the wealthy men watching him, who rather liked their reassuring British ancestry. Suddenly, the Speaker of the House, John Robinson, interrupted—standing up, pointing at Henry, and shouting, “Treason! Treason!”

But the rumpled younger man ignored Robinson. “—and George the Third may profit by their example,” he continued. “If this be treason,” Henry pronounced, “make the most of it!”

Like lightning, his proclamation clarified the stark contrast between the revolutionaries and the Tories. And it succeeded. His resolution passed narrowly over bitter opposition from the same men who had called him a traitor. His fame quickly began to spread throughout Virginia, and then to the other states.

A mob burned a stamp distributor in effigy in Boston, and another group of men destroyed the coach of New York’s lieutenant governor. Stamps were looted and burned in piles around the colonies.4 In the following months, a French traveler who heard Henry’s “treason” speech observed that “if the least Injury was offered” to Henry, that the “whole inhabitants” would “stand by him to the last Drop of their blood.”⁵ A century and a half later, Woodrow Wilson would write that Henry’s speech was the “first words of a revolution, and no man ever thought just the same after he had read them.”⁶

But while he made many friends, he made enemies as well.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, FOR ONE, KNEW HENRY WELL. THE TWO MEN HAD been opposing lawyers in central Virginia courts for several years, and while Jefferson admired Henry’s oratorical gifts, he disliked him personally. When the courts adjourned for winter, Jefferson satirically recalled that Henry would “make up a party of poor hunters of his neighborhood” and “go off with them to the piney woods of 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.”7

Jefferson found this pose inauthentic, and egregiously so. After all, Henry was deeply familiar with elite Virginia society, even if he chose not to join it. His father, John, had attended King’s College in Scotland, receiving a classical education and achieving a deep familiarity with Horace.⁸ Henry’s maternal grandfather probably was related to the Duke of Marlborough, while his maternal grandmother belonged to the prosperous French Huguenots who settled near the James River.⁹ Henry’s aunt Lucy—his mother’s sister—was the grandmother of Dolley Madison. His great-uncle, in fact, was Donald Robertson, Madison’s tutor.¹⁰

Henry’s father was a prosperous plantation owner as well as a colonel in his local militia.¹¹ He tutored his son at home, where he learned Latin, Shakespeare, and ancient history and mythology. Henry read Virgil and Livy in Latin when he was fifteen years old. Decades later, he would easily allude to Rhadamanthus and Nero in speeches.¹²

His father constantly pushed Patrick to become self-sufficient. When he was sixteen, John Henry put him and his brother William to work, giving them Indian spices, coffee, tea, molasses, wool, silk, and cloth to stock a household goods store. But the store was shunned by the wealthy—it only succeeded among the poorest customers. Henry, laughing and telling stories at the counter, came to regard them as his adoptive people, but they were not enough to sustain him. Business dried up, the store closing within a year. Two years later, when he was nineteen, he married the sixteen-year-old Sarah Shelton in a lavish, raucous ceremony featuring powdered wigs, high stockings, and hoop skirts, guest drunk on mint juleps and eggnog.¹³

The couple moved into a cottage named Pine Slash, where Henry defiantly farmed for tobacco with his own hands—unheard of for the descendant of a prosperous and well-educated home. The wealthy laughed at the classically educated young man hoeing alongside his own slaves. A surveyor described the couple as “obscure, unknown, and almost unpitied.”¹⁴ A fire then destroyed the cottage, along with just about everything Henry had earned and built. Undaunted, he sold some of his slaves, rebuilt the house, and purchased goods to start a new store. Ever gregarious, he talked on and on with his customers.

Thomas Jefferson met Henry that winter, during Christmas festivities. Jefferson, then seventeen, would later say of Henry, “His manners had something of coarseness in them; his passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry. He excelled in the last, and it attracted every one to them.”15 The next year, the store failed. Henry decided to head into the law, and then into politics, where he enjoyed considerably more success with his storekeeper persona.

His true genius was resonating with his audience, communing with the tender feelings that unite people despite education and sophistication. He gradually adopted a severe persona; contemporaries described his appearance as “grave, penetrating, and marked with the strong lineaments of deep reflection.”¹⁶ He had, in the words of one biographer, a “Roman cast,” with piercing blue eyes that could change to a deep gray, a strong nose, a high and straight forehead, a heavy brow, long, black eyelashes, and dark eyebrows that made his eyes seem especially penetrating.¹⁷ He had begun balding when young, but that didn’t seem to affect his confidence one iota. On the contrary, overweening assurance became his forte.

He honed in on people’s passions—their hopes and fears, their infatuation with the battle between good and evil, their vulnerability to his charisma. He could talk a jury into anything. A friend described his “perfect command of a strong and musical voice, which he raised or lowered at pleasure, and modulated so as to fall in with any given chord of the human heart.”¹⁸ Once, a man watching Henry’s performance from an upper gallery became “so much enchanted with his eloquence” that he accidentally spurted tobacco juice on the heads of the members of the House.¹⁹

Henry’s warmth had an animal element; he drew others toward him. After his death, Thomas Jefferson would say, “I think he was the best humored man in society I almost ever knew and the greatest orator that ever lived.” In Jefferson’s view, it was Henry’s “consummate knowledge of the human heart” that allowed him to “attain a degree of popularity with the people at large never perhaps equaled.” But even after death, Jefferson derided Henry as “avaricious” and “rotten hearted” and possessed of “two great passions”—the love of money and of fame.²⁰

Patrick Henry inspired great love and great hate, sometimes all at once, sometimes even in the same person. And so it would be with James Madison, who began, at first, with love.

AFTER HIS “GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH” SPEECH, HENRY returned to Virginia, hurling himself into building the volunteer militia company in his home county of Hanover. His law practice suffered, his cases flagging and revenues dropping. And then tragedy struck.

His wife, Sarah, suddenly developed a “strange antipathy” to both Henry and their children. Doctors soon declared her insane. Henry, distraught, brought her to Williamsburg for advanced treatment, but the doctors there were unable to quiet her disturbance. Henry’s friends pled with him to institutionalize her in a newly constructed insane asylum in Williamsburg, but he refused. Instead, he installed her in an “airy, sunny” room in his house’s half-basement. She died after several horrible months, in early 1775.21 And so Henry was catapulted into the American Revolution not only by the hated British, but by his need to escape misery.

His moment arrived on April 20, 1775, when Virginia’s British puppet executive, Lord Dunmore, stunned the Commonwealth by suddenly seizing fifteen half-barrels of gunpowder from the colony’s magazine in Williamsburg. He ordered his men to carry the kegs onto a ship of war anchored off the shore. The result was a firestorm in war-ready Virginia.

Six hundred armed men quickly assembled in Fredericksburg. Although the assembly included notables like George Washington, Edmund Pendleton, and Richard Henry Lee, it still collapsed into bickering volleys about the potential backlash of an attack. Some men shouted in favor of a march to Williamsburg to retrieve the powder and, in Madison’s words, “revenge the insult.” Others worried about provoking an armed conflict too early. A letter from Randolph was read out loud, advising that Dunmore would yield the powder when it was needed. The gathering soon dispersed.²²

The temporizing infuriated Henry. He returned home to Hanover County, where he convinced his local militia to take up arms and challenge Dunmore to yield the gunpowder directly. At the head of the company, Henry left that very evening.

Word of the country lawyer rebel spread quickly. Back in Montpelier, Madison longed to throw himself into the action. The nearby Albemarle County militia had missed the Fredericksburg meeting, but Madison brashly decided to join Henry to “enforce an immediate delivery of the powder, or die in the attempt.” Madison and his brother Francis secured permission from the Orange Committee for Public Safety (led by his father) to join the Albemarle Committee. The young men left on horseback the next day, rushing along the road to Albemarle County.23

Meanwhile, Henry made astonishingly fast progress—too fast for the Madisons to catch up. Confronting Dunmore and his troops, Henry succeeded in convincing Dunmore to pay Virginia 330 pounds in exchange for the gunpowder. To the angry colonials, eager for a practical sign of progress against the British, that achievement felt like the first victory of an infant rebellion.

On his victorious return from Williamsburg, Henry collided with an eager company from Albemarle County, and a slender young man named James Madison. Despite his apparent shyness, Madison introduced himself to Henry with the same directness that had so impressed Witherspoon. Talking to Henry, he learned that he would soon be traveling to Philadelphia, and he asked Henry whether he would deliver a letter to Bradford for him. The older man agreed.

Henry took the letter along with him on the long road to Philadelphia and handed it to Bradford. Opening the sealed envelope, Bradford read his friend’s description of the bulky older man who had served as letter-carrier. Henry’s decision, Madison said, had already followed his signal pattern. It had “been contrary to the opinion” of the other delegates and would be “disapproved of by them,” Madison wrote. But Henry had gained “great honor in the most spirited parts of the Country.” Those “spirited parts” would stick with Henry for years to come.

As for those who disagreed with Henry’s bold action—specifically the wealthy doves whose business interests would suffer from British reprisals—Madison had much harsher words. Theirs was a “pusillanimity,” he spat, “little comporting with their professions or the name of Virginian.”²⁴

RETURNING HOME, MADISON URGED THE ORANGE COUNTY COMMITTEE on Public Safety to write an official commendation of Patrick Henry. They readily agreed, publishing a declaration that complimented Henry’s “seasonable and spirited proceedings.” Either Madison or his father—or both—inserted an aside zealously declaring the recent British aggression in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, a “hostile attack on this and every other colony, and a sufficient warrant to use violence and reprisal, in all cases where it may be expedient for our security and welfare.”

Madison was enthusiastically heading into war. He took to the road to hand deliver the document to Henry himself.²⁴ Just two days later, Henry responded, grateful for the “Approbation of your Committee,” assuring them that he had only been motivated by “Zeal for the public Good,” and promising to print copies of the resolution.25

For Madison, the rough orator seemed to be a natural face for America’s revolution. Little did Madison suspect that just when the revolution would most need to evolve, Henry would refuse. Madison, in the end, would be left to defend the republic—from Henry.