THE NEXT DAY, MONDAY, HUNDREDS OF POLITICIANS AND HANGERS-ON flooded the city for the beginning of the legislative session. Many crowded into the New Academy to watch the debate that day. They knew the ratifying convention was close to concluding. Although many believed the Federalists had the upper hand, suspense still swirled around last-minute anti-Federalist stratagems. Henry, of course, had no intention to disappoint.
As the session got under way, the burly man rose to attack Madison’s faith in men. Approaching the nerve center of Madison’s Constitution—the country’s reliance on statesmen like James Madison himself—he was more cutting than ever. The new country, Henry declared, would be an “empire of men and not of laws.” “Their wisdom and integrity may preserve you,” but “should they prove ambitious, and designing, may they not flourish and triumph upon the ruins of their country?” he darkly predicted.1
But the attack did not seem to be resonating with the audience, many of whom skeptically stared back at Henry with open disinterest in this line of reasoning—perhaps because Madison himself did not appear to be “ambitious, and designing” in the slightest.
Henry seemed to notice he was losing his grip on the assembly. But trapped on a path of his own making, he plunged ahead. In a last-gasp attempt to recapture the crowd, he inflated his rhetoric to the bursting point. The “whole history of human nature,” Henry shouted, could not produce a government like the one envisioned in the new Constitution. “A constitution, sir, ought to be like a beacon held up to the public eye so as to be understood by every man.” But the product of Philadelphia, he said, was as obfuscatory as the minds of the elitists who had contrived it. It “cannot be understood,” he protested. It was “calculated to lay prostrate the states.” He stormed that the Constitution took away the right to a trial by one’s peers and that British debtors would even be “ruined by being dragged to the federal court!”2
General Adam Stephen, who had courageously commanded Virginia’s Fourth battalion in battle at Portsmouth,3 rose to try to stop Henry’s stampede. Henry, he said angrily, was trying to “frighten us” by “his bugbears and hobgoblins.”4 Scandalized, the crowd whispered.
George Nicholas then stood to attack Henry’s obstructionism. Henry had “objected to the whole” of the Constitution, he observed derisively. If he had his way, not a single part of the Constitution would pass. And then Nicholas moved in for the Federalists’ kill.
His clear voice echoing around the whole hall, Nicholas boldly suggested that Henry himself had gotten rich off the confederacy—that his “large possessions” were “not easily to account for.”5 Those who live by the sword die by it. Just as Henry seemed to have wanted, the debate had crossed from a heated exchange about ideas to the raw ad hominem terrain that Madison had always so studiously avoided. But the move now was to Henry’s decided disadvantage.
Henry quickly and loudly barked that he “hoped the honorable gentleman meant nothing personal.”6 He protested that such “personal insinuations” and attempts to “wound my private reputation” were “improper.” On the particular charge of his personal wealth, he sputtered that he could “tell how I came by what I have” but that Nicholas had “no right to make that enquiry of me.”
Despite his windy front, the brutal offensive seemed to puncture Henry’s usually buoyant self-confidence. He seemed confused, on his heels, and pled, “If I have offended in private life, or wounded the feelings of any man, I did not intend it.”
Nicholas smoothly accepted Henry’s defense and his apology, stating that he “did not mean any resentment.”7 But the damage to Henry, it seemed, had been done.
MASON BURST OUT WITH A SHRILL LITANY AGAINST THE “DANGERS” that “must arise” from the “insecurity of our rights and privileges” in “several parts” of the Constitution. He ominously invoked “alarming consequences,” adding that he had “dreaded popular resistance to its operation.”8 That was the equivalent of threatening a rebellion, and Henry Lee stood, infuriated, to assail opinions “so injurious to our country.” He accused Mason, through the “dreadful picture” he had drawn, of having pursued the “very means to bring into action, the horrors which he deprecates.” Mason—a “character so venerable and estimable,” he said, was risking the “dreadful curse” of “impious scenes.” The assembly, Lee announced, must collectively condemn fearmongering, through the firmness and fortitude that the country demanded.9
The eve of the epochal vote was nigh. Nerves were fraying, tempers boiling, pulses racing, and even Madison could not guess with any real certainty what would happen.
THE FINAL ACT OF THE CONVENTION WAS NOW AT HAND. THE FORCES were arrayed, the personalities opposed, the decision imminent, and all the cards more or less played. But that did not stop the anti-Federalists from attempting to halt the Federalists’ momentum through sheer muscle. Henry—who clearly now recognized his side was losing—stood. “I exhort gentlemen to think seriously, before they ratify this constitution,” he said with a pleading note in his voice, to make a “feeble effort to get amendments after adoption.”10
Alluding to Madison’s proposal for amendments after ratification, Henry castigated Madison’s attempt to “amuse the committee.” “I know his candor,” he said, gesturing at his adversary. Madison’s idea, he declared with spite, was “dreadful.” “Do you enter into a compact of government first, and afterwards settle the terms of the government?” That idea, he sneered, was “most abhorrent.” It would “stab” the country’s “repose.”11
Henry then brusquely dismissed the idea that he would advocate for secession. He instead hurled that suspicion back onto his adversary’s narrow shoulders. It was, Henry declared, Madison who threatened the union. “If gentlemen fear disunion,” he charged, the “very thing they advocate will inevitably produce it.”12
Randolph, looking hard at Henry, rose to defend his friend. The previous day, he said angrily, Henry had promised to “submit, and that there should be peace.” Randolph exclaimed, “What a sad reverse today!” He then threw down the greatest gauntlet of the convention, demanding that Henry pledge, once and for all, not to lead a movement to secede from the union.
The room waited with unbearable tension. Would Henry submit to the government, or would he not?
Pushing himself to his feet, Henry at last gave Madison the answer he had been striving for during all the draining months before. He would not, he said, have anything to do with secession. He would, he said, remain in the New Academy and vote. And afterward, he sighed, “I will have no business here.”13
The gathered men must have expelled a collective gasp of relief. But Henry still had not yielded on his amendment strategy, and Randolph pressed his advantage. Even prior amendments, he asserted, would “bid a long farewell to the union.”14 A majority of the assembly seemed to agree. But Madison knew the Federalists could not savor victory until he himself hauled the necessary votes into his quarter. He rose.
“MR. CHAIRMAN,” HE BEGAN, “NOTHING HAS EXCITED MORE ADMIRATION in the world, than the manner in which free governments have been established in America.” America was the “first instance from the creation of the world” where the world had observed free citizens “deliberating on a form of government.” He again came back to statesmen. The young nation had elected leaders who “possessed their confidence, to determine union, and give effect to it.”
He explained that the new Constitution had bottled the lightning of the Revolution, proving that Americans could “peaceably, freely and satisfactorily” create a general government. The accomplishment was extraordinary, considering the country’s “diversity of opinions, and interests,” and that the union was not “cemented or stimulated by any common danger.”15 Virginia, said Madison, could not rebuff the eight other states that had already ratified the Constitution. Such a rejection would be a “mortification.” It would force the other states to think they had “done wrong.”16 Chaos would result if the “contrariety” in Virginia convention were to contaminate the nation as a whole.17
He pleaded with the audience to defer to the divine. He viewed the Constitution, he declared emotionally, as “one of the most fortunate events that ever happened in human nature.” Nearing the end of his exhausting, enervating campaign, he was becoming intimately, intensely personal on the floor. “I cannot, without the most excruciating apprehensions, see a possibility of losing its blessings.” He admitted that it gave him “infinite pain to reflect” that the Constitution could be “blasted by a rejection.”18 Henry’s proposal for prior amendments was simply “pregnant with dreadful dangers,” and he could “never consent” to it.19
Spent, he sat down. It was now left to Henry—revolutionary hero, first governor, Madison’s former chief—to take one final stab at Madison’s quiet and urgent eloquence.
Henry would not disappoint.
PATRICK HENRY STOOD. ALL OF THE PROCEEDINGS HAD BEEN A PROLOGUE to this moment, and he seemed to savor the drama. He gestured at young Madison with distaste: “He tells you of important blessings which he imagines will result to us and mankind in general from the adoption of this system.” He tremulously announced, “I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.” Looking skyward, he added, “I see it—I feel it—I see beings of a higher order anxious concerning our decision.” Those “intelligent beings which inhabit the aetherial mansions” who determine the “final consummation of all human things,” would determine the “consequence happiness or misery of mankind.” Henry had evidently decided to spend the residue of his political capital all at once, relying exclusively on his authority.
Glaring at the collected men around him, he reminded them that this great question depended on “what we now decide.” The men in the room were not only determining their own happiness. They were performing on the world stage, he informed them, with “all nations” eagerly watching. “We have it in our power,” he shouted, “to secure the happiness of one half of the human race!”
At that moment, an enormous thunderstorm again descended with fury on the New Academy. Gusts of wind swirled around the building and, with the alarming sound of muskets firing, the doors slammed shut. Blinding lightning bolts flashed through the windows, revealing the anxiety on the delegates’ faces in white flashes. Vast glassy sheets of rain raked the building. Thunder crashed so loudly that nobody could hear anyone speak, and the wooden structure actually rocked.20 Years later, a Federalist recalled the scene describing “those terrific pictures which the imaginations of Dante and Milton have drawn of those angelic spirits that, shown of their celestial brightness, had met in council to war with the hosts of heaven.” Henry stood before the men as if he was “rising on the wings of the tempest” and “seizing on the artillery of Heaven.”21 Eventually, the storm put the assembly in such a state of disorder that Henry could not even continue speaking.22
The session was quickly called to a close. When the sun reappeared and the house returned to order, the force of Henry’s provocation seemed to have dissipated like the storm itself. It was as if the tempest was a purging of Henry’s passions, not an apotheosis of them. In the squall’s wake, Madison seemed to have taken control. He stood to respond to attacks on the practicability of amendments after ratification, and calmly explained that the Constitution would be able to resolve any amendment problems through its own mechanisms. He said that he himself would support amendments that were not dangerous. He was at once anticipating the campaign he would shortly lead for the Bill of Rights, while removing the sting of the most venomous remaining suspicions about their absence in the Constitution.23 The assembly then adjourned.