18
“NO KING BUT KING JESUS!”
George III—here was a monarch whose ego demanded total submission to the throne. For a long time he had been waiting for an opportunity to deal with the independent spirit of America. Scarcely had England concluded a peace treaty with France in 1763, than George decided that the time had come. His first step was to increase the size of the British force garrisoned in America, left there to discourage a fresh outbreak of the French and Indian War. The king more than doubled it, from 3,100 troops to 7,500. The colonies saw no need for this increase, but the colonies had no say in the matter.
The cost of garrisoning these troops would be approximately 200,000 pounds sterling per annum—a staggering sum. And since it was for the protection of the colonies, the Crown decided that the colonies should pay for it, through the imposition of various acts and duties. First, the old Navigation Acts were strictly enforced. Customs commissioners were sent to the colonies to collect duties, but these commissioners turned out to be appallingly corrupt. All revenues raised went to pay the salaries of their large staffs of political cronies. The cost of garrisoning had not even begun to be met.
Then new tariffs were imposed. The most galling was the Stamp Act of 1765, which declared that every legal document had to have a stamp of the British government on it in order to be official. But infuriating as this was, it was nothing compared to the Townshend Acts of 1767, imposing duties on glass, lead, tea, paper, and so forth. Nor was there now any pretense of paying the cost of the British garrison; these revenues went toward paying for England’s global adventures.
The commissioners reported that the mood in America was ugly and getting uglier—to the point where they now began to fear for their physical safety. At their request, General Thomas Gage and two more regiments were dispatched to Boston in 1768.
As usual, American opinion on this mounting crisis was largely shaped by the ministers. These men of God who were American-born and not in Crown colonies (such as Georgia and Virginia) were becoming nearly unanimous in their support of resistance. Thanks to the Great Awakening, there was now a whole new generation of committed clergy salted throughout America, many of them ministers of considerable spiritual depth and maturity.
As the list of “intolerable acts” mounted, so did the remonstrations against them—almost as if the ministers had George III in the front row of their congregations and were trying to make him see the error of his ways. Many of their sermons were duly printed in town newspapers, but if the King saw them, he took no notice. Like Pharaoh, to whom many sermons likened him, his heart was hard and growing harder.
Americans were now being taxed for the mother country’s own revenue, while at the same time being denied the basic right of all English citizens to representation in the government levying the taxes. For the King to ignore this right, guaranteed by the Magna Carta, meant that he was literally putting himself above the law.
Still, despite the exhortations of firebrand Patriots like Samuel Adams of Boston and Patrick Henry of Virginia, the colonists’ resistance remained reluctant and minimal. People of wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic could foresee the inevitable fruit of the Crown’s present policy, but they were praying that this fruit would not come to pass.
Even among the hierarchy of the Anglican Church, which stood only to gain from the suppression of American resistance, there were people of conscience who were courageous enough to risk all in order to speak out on behalf of the Americans. Jonathan Shipley, bishop of Saint Asaph, had this to say to his colleagues in the House of Lords in 1774:
At present we force every North American to be our enemy, and the wise and moderate at home must soon begin to suffer by the madness of our rulers. . . . It is a strange idea we have taken up, to cure their resentments by increasing their provocation. . . . Now the spirit of blindness and infatuation is gone forth. We are hurrying wildly on, without any fixed design, without any important object. We pursue a vain phantom of unlimited sovereignty which was not made for men, and reject the solid advantages of a moderate, useful and intelligent authority. That just God, whom we have all so deeply offended, can hardly inflict a severer national punishment than by committing us to the natural consequences of our own conduct. Indeed, in my opinion, a blacker cloud never hung over the island.1
In America, as noted, resistance to oppression had been a favorite topic in Yankee pulpits for more than a century. Indeed, a quarter of a century before Paul Revere’s night ride, one of its most articulate (albeit increasingly liberal) proponents, Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, preached:
“It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers. . . . When [magistrates] rob and ruin the public, instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare, they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen.”2
Fifteen years later, the hated Stamp Act brought forth this response from Mayhew:
The king is as much bound by his oath not to infringe the legal rights of the people, as the people are bound to yield subjection to him. From whence it follows that as soon as the prince sets himself up above the law, he loses the king in the tyrant. He does, to all intents and purposes, un-king himself by acting out of and beyond that sphere which the constitution allows him to move in, and in such cases he has no more right to be obeyed than any inferior officer who acts beyond his commission. The subject’s obligation to allegiance then ceases, of course, and to resist him is no more rebellion than to resist any foreign invader . . . it is making use of the means, and the only means, which God has put into their power for mutual and self-defense.3
And when the Stamp Act was repealed shortly thereafter, Mayhew had more to say:
God gave the Israelites a king in His anger, because they had not sense and virtue enough to like a free commonwealth, and to have Himself for their king. That the Son of God came down from heaven to make us “free indeed,” and that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” this made me conclude that freedom was a great blessing. . . . And who knows, our liberties being thus established, but that on some future occasion, when the kingdoms of earth are moved and roughly dashed one against another . . . we, or our posterity, may even have the great felicity and honor to “save much people alive,” and keep Britain herself from ruin!
Nor was Mayhew the first to prophesy that one day Americans might be the salvation of the mother country that was seeking to oppress them. Cotton Mather had put it in spiritual terms in his Magnalia:
But behold, ye European churches, there are golden candlesticks in the midst of this outer darkness; unto the upright children of Abraham, here hath arisen light in darkness. And let us humbly speak it, it shall be profitable for you to consider the light which from the midst of this outer darkness is now to be darted over unto the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.4
As George III and his ministers relentlessly increased the pressure that was calculated to bring the colonists to their knees, the rhetoric from American pulpits had also increased. In 1767 Josiah Quincy’s sermon was printed in the Boston Gazette: “In defense of our civil and religious rights, with the God of armies on our side, we fear not the hour of trial; though the hosts of our enemies should cover the field like locusts, yet the sword of the Lord and Gideon shall prevail.”5
The tempo had been steadily building. The rest of the world watched with fascination the battle shaping up between Britain and the foremost jewel in her crown of empire. As Du Chatelet, France’s ambassador in England, wrote privately to his minister of foreign affairs in March of 1768:
I please myself with the thought that [open conflict] is not so far off as some imagine. . . . The ties that bind America to England are three-fourths broken. It must soon throw off the yoke. To make themselves independent, the inhabitants want nothing but arms, courage and a chief. . . . Perhaps this man exists; perhaps nothing is wanting but happy circumstances to place him upon a great theatre.6
Even as these words were being penned, in Virginia a veteran colonel and gentleman farmer named George Washington had quietly stated at Mount Vernon, his beautiful home on the Potomac, “Whenever my country calls upon me, I am ready to take my musket on my shoulder.”
And in the following month, from New York, had come this word from a well-known attorney named William Livingston:
Courage, Americans. . . . The finger of God points out a mighty empire to your sons. The savages of the wilderness were never expelled to make room for idolators and slaves. The land we possess is the gift of heaven to our fathers, and Divine Providence seems to have decreed it to our latest posterity. . . . The day dawns in which the foundation of this mighty empire is to be laid, by the establishment of a regular American Constitution. . . . before seven years roll over our heads, the first stone must be laid.
Livingston’s words appeared in the New York Gazette in April 1768; exactly seven years later “the shot heard round the world” was fired on Lexington Green.
In September 1768 it was the Boston Gazette’s turn: “If an army should be sent to reduce us to slavery, we will put our lives in our hands and cry to the Judge of all the earth. . . . Behold—how they come to cast us out of this possession which Thou hast given us to inherit. Help us, Lord, our God, for we rest on Thee, and in Thy name we go against this multitude.”7
Several years later the Townshend Acts were mercifully repealed, and for the next three years there was something akin to peace. The vast majority on both sides were hoping that it would last. Yet it was not a real peace born of a desire for reconciliation or the resolution of points of difference. It was as fleeting and deceptive as the calm before the storm.
In reality, nothing had changed. In 1772, a Rhode Islander traveling in England wrote to his friend Ezra Stiles, rector of Yale College: “You will often hear the following language, ‘Damn those fellows! We shall never do anything with them, till we root out that cursed Puritanic spirit!’”8
All over New England, town meetings were issuing declarations in a veritable litany of protest. Nor had smallness of size mitigated against boldness of sentiment. In December 1772, tiny Chatham, out on the “elbow” of Cape Cod, declared that its townspeople held their “civil and religious principles to be the sweetest and essential part of their lives, without which the remainder was scarcely worth preserving.”9
In like spirit, the new year of 1773 was rung in by the people of Marlborough proclaiming unanimously that “Death is more eligible than slavery. A free-born people are not required by the religion of Jesus Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their laws and liberties. . . . [We] implore the Ruler above the skies, that He would make bare His arm in defense of His Church and people, and let Israel go.”
It is interesting to note that no longer were exhortations coming exclusively from the pulpits and a few zealous Patriots; the broad mass of the people had taken up the torch and were carrying it forward on their own.
And now even a governor, Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, had spoken out in defense of freedom: “It is hard to break connections with our mother country, but when she strives to enslave us, the strictest union must be dissolved. . . . ‘The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice; let the multitudes of isles be glad thereof’—the accomplishment of such noble prophecies is at hand.”10
Nearly all the Crown-appointed governors, however, remained submitted to their king, and one had written to the Board of Trade in England: “If you ask an American, who is his master? He will tell you he has none, nor any governor but Jesus Christ.”11 Which may have given rise to the cry that was soon passed up and down the length of America by the Committees of Correspondence: “No king but King Jesus!”12
The Committees of Correspondence were a sort of networking organization, conceived almost simultaneously by Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia as a way for the Patriots in different colonies to communicate with one another. Adams further described their purpose as setting forth “the rights of the colonists . . . as men, as Christians, and as subjects,” and added that these rights were “best understood by reading and carefully studying . . . the New Testament.”13
Samuel (he did not appreciate being called Sam) Adams had been born into a strict Calvinist family and imbued with a strong Christian faith. He certainly didn’t look the part of a hero. It would have been difficult to find him in a crowd—he was of average height and appearance and wore plain, simple clothes. John Adams, who was not given to hyperbole, wrote glowingly of his cousin that “he was a man of refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners, real as well as professed piety, and a universal good character.”14
After graduating with honors from Harvard College in 1740, Samuel seemed headed for the ministry, but that plan fell by the wayside when his brewmaster father turned the brewery over to him.
Fortunately for America, Adams had no heart or talent for making beer. But when the crisis with Britain began to ferment, he found his true calling as a Patriot leader and political writer. His speechmaking abilities were mediocre at best, but as a political strategist and writer, he was brilliant. When he argued on paper for American rights against British oppression, he was powerful, logical, and convincing. As the struggle against Great Britain intensified, Adams followed the spiritual example of his Puritan forebears by regularly taking days of prayer and fasting “to seek the Lord,” as he put it.
They bore fruit—more and more articles and pamphlets were produced under different pseudonyms. After nightly family devotions, when his wife Elizabeth had gone to bed, Adams wrote by candlelight. Often she was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of his quill pen scratching.
Samuel Adams was humble about his writing, believing that “political writing was to be as selfless as politics itself, designed to promote its cause, not its author.”15 He would have been amazed to learn that one day Americans would bestow on him the title Father of the American Revolution.
The British were quick to recognize the threat of his leadership, and they came to call him “the chief rabble-rouser.” They considered Adams the primary agitator for American independence in the northern colonies, just as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee were in Virginia. Later, after Lexington and Concord, when Military Governor Thomas Gage would make a last-ditch attempt to avert all-out war by announcing a general pardon for all who would reaffirm their allegiance to the Crown, he exempted two men. Under no circumstances would Samuel Adams or John Hancock be given a pardon. And when the news reached England of the outbreak of hostilities, people referred to the conflict as “Mr. Adams’s War.”
Samuel Adams’s leadership of the Patriot cause in Boston had begun to create serious problems for Governor Hutchinson in 1765. The British colonial ministry, learning that Adams was poor, suggested to Hutchinson that he attempt to bribe Adams into quietude. The Governor responded to the ministry: “Such is the obstinacy and inflexible disposition of the man, that he can never be conciliated by any office or gift whatever.”16
Yet despite the networking efforts of the Massachusetts and Virginia Patriots, the colonies remained disjointed and compartmentalized in terms of any concerted action. A political cartoon of the day reflected this, picturing a snake in thirteen sections, with the caption DON’T TREAD ON ME!
This is exactly what a willful, obtuse, and vindictive Crown did. The Patriots needed only one major crisis to unite America in resistance to British oppression. That crisis turned out to be the tempest that was brewing in American teapots.
When the hated Townshend Acts had been repealed in 1770, the one commodity left untouched was tea. Americans were still paying a tax of three pence for every pound that was imported. So popular was tea drinking in the colonies that Patriot orator James Otis was afraid that people might “part with all their liberties, and religion, too, rather than renounce it.” Instead of renouncing it, the colonists smuggled in Dutch tea and avoided British tea altogether. When Britain’s largest tea distributor, the East India Company, was brought to the brink of bankruptcy, Parliament granted it a monopoly on the tea trade. In turn, the East India Company slashed the price of tea to a point well below what Americans were paying for Dutch tea. But the three-pence tax remained in force.
And this tax was the problem for Samuel Adams and other Patriot leaders. If the colonists paid the duty, they would be acknowledging the right of Parliament to levy taxes on them, which they were not about to do.
Vehement protest meetings erupted in Pennsylvania and New York, whose merchants had smuggled vast amounts of tea from the Dutch. In Massachusetts an agitated citizenry issued defiant statements and wrote fiery articles for the papers. Women formed Daughters of Liberty groups and pledged that they would not drink English tea.
The issue was forced when the Dartmouth sailed into Boston harbor on November 28 and docked at Griffin’s Wharf with a cargo of English tea. It was soon followed by tea ships Eleanor and Beaver. The Sons of Liberty, another band of Patriots created by Samuel Adams, posted an armed guard around the ships to prevent British customs officials from unloading them.
Samuel Adams was hoping that the ship captains would simply sail back to England, but British law was clear that they could not do that unless the proper duties had been paid on the cargoes, even if those cargoes were never unloaded. Furthermore, if the duties were not paid within twenty days, the governor could order the British troops stationed in the harbor to seize the cargoes and turn them over to the customs officials to be sold.
In the next two weeks the town twice asked Governor Hutchinson to return the ships to England. Thinking that he had finally gained the upper hand over his archenemy, Samuel Adams, he responded each time that he would be happy to do so once the duties were paid.
He had underestimated Adams. On December 16 the renowned Patriot convened a town meeting in Faneuil Hall. When more than five thousand people showed up, the meeting was moved to historic Old South Meeting House, the same church in which Increase Mather had preached defiance of Charles II a century earlier. The captain of the Dartmouth was sent for the third time to Governor Hutchinson, to ask permission to take his cargo of tea back to England.
Hours passed, filled with speeches that kept the crowd in a fever of excitement. At last, just as darkness was falling, the captain came through the church doors and announced that the Governor had once again denied his request.
Samuel Adams arose immediately, and in ringing tones proclaimed: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!”
At that prearranged signal, forty or fifty Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, gave a few war whoops and quickly left for Griffin’s Wharf, followed by most of the people at the meeting. As they filed out of the church, the voice of prominent merchant John Rowe rang out: “Who knows how tea will mix with salt water?”
While the townspeople watched, the “Indians” and about a hundred other men climbed on board the three ships. For the next four hours, working in total silence, they opened 342 boxes of tea and dumped their contents in the harbor. Going home that night, they grimly joked that they had turned Boston harbor into a teapot.
It had all been done in perfect order; the Patriots even replaced the locks they had broken before the ships sailed for home.
When the news of the Boston Tea Party reached England, a furious Parliament ignored those who were counseling caution and retaliated. The Port Act closed the port of Boston to all commerce as of June 1, 1774, which in effect promised to ruin Boston financially by imposing near-siege conditions. Customs houses were shut down, local courts were suspended, and British warships were dispatched to blockade Boston harbor.
Then, in a series of laws, meant as a warning to all the colonies of what would happen to those who resisted the Crown’s authority, Parliament authorized British troops to seize empty buildings for their quarters and refused to allow American courts to try British soldiers.
These Intolerable Acts, as they came to be known, soon had precisely the opposite effect that Parliament intended. Stunned outrage swept America. The first colony to send physical aid was South Carolina, which shipped two hundred barrels of rice to the port closest to Boston and pledged eight hundred more. In North Carolina the sum of two thousand pounds was raised in a few days. A vessel was donated to carry provisions, and the crew volunteered to sail her without pay. Lord North, the British Prime Minister, had scoffed at the idea of Americans uniting, likening their attempt at union to a rope of sand. “It is a rope of sand that will kill him,” declared the citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Windham, Connecticut, sent 258 sheep, and in Delaware plans were made for sending relief annually. Maryland and Virginia contributed liberally. George Washington personally subscribed fifty pounds (more than $13,000 in 2009 dollars).17
By August, the men of Pepperrell, Massachusetts, had already sent many wagonloads of rye. Their leader, William Prescott, undoubtedly summed up the feelings of numerous Americans when he wrote to the men of Boston:
We heartily sympathize with you, and are always ready to do all in our power for your support, comfort and relief, knowing that Providence has placed you where you must stand the first shock. We consider that we are all embarked in [the same boat] and must sink or swim together. We think if we submit to these regulations, all is gone. Our forefathers passed the vast Atlantic, spent their blood and treasure, that they might enjoy their liberties, both civil and religious, and transmit them to their posterity. Their children have waded through seas of difficulty, to leave us free and happy in the enjoyment of English privileges. Now if we should give them up, can our children rise up and call us blessed? . . . Let us all be of one heart, and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. And may He, of His infinite mercy, grant us deliverance out of all our troubles.18
Samuel Adams quickly reported on the events in Massachusetts to Committees of Correspondence throughout the colonies and was delighted by the supportive responses he received. “The Boston Port bill suddenly wrought a union of the Colonies which could not be brought about by the industry of years,” he noted.
Adams wrote a resolution urging economic sanctions against Britain, which prompted another attempt to bribe him into inaction. General Gage, who had replaced Hutchinson as governor, sent Colonel Fenton to Adams with the message that any benefits Adams might request would be granted to him if he would just stop creating resistance to the royal government. He was reminded that the governor had the power to have him arrested and sent to England to stand trial for treason (the penalty for which was hanging) and that he could avoid that unpleasantness and make himself quite rich in the bargain if he would just cease and desist.
After listening politely to Colonel Fenton, Samuel Adams replied: “I have long since made my peace with the King of kings! No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country. Tell Governor Gage, it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him, no longer to insult the feelings of an already exasperated people.”19
American resistance to British tyranny was stiffening, and it was firmly anchored in the trust that the God who had brought the Pilgrims and Puritans to the New World would not abandon their descendants. On March 6, 1774, Patriot leader John Hancock gave what had become the annual memorial speech on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Hearing him, one can see why he was the other Patriot for whom there could be no British pardon:
I have . . . confidence that the present noble struggle for liberty will terminate gloriously for America. And let us play the man for our God, and for the cities of our God; whilst we are using the means in our power, let us humbly commit our righteous cause to the great Lord of the Universe . . . let us joyfully leave our concerns in the hands of Him who raises up and puts down the empires and kingdoms of the earth as He pleases.20
New York called for another General Congress, similar to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, at which nine of the thirteen colonies had been represented. This time, with the crisis at the boiling point, all the colonies sent delegates, except Georgia, which was facing trouble with Creek Indians on her borders and needed help from British soldiers.
Samuel Adams was an obvious choice to represent Massachusetts at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and he was quickly chosen, along with his cousin John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, James Bowdoin, and Thomas Cushing. Adams’s friends, aware that his shabby attire would not reflect well on the Bay Colony, prepared a surprise for him. One night there was a knock at the door as the Adams family was eating dinner. When Samuel opened the door, he found a well-known tailor asking to take his measurements but unwilling to reveal who had sent him. The tailor was followed by a cobbler, a shirtmaker, and other shopkeepers; and several days later a large trunk was delivered to the Adams’s home. When the Congress convened in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, Samuel Adams entered the meeting sporting a handsome suit, new shoes, a brand new wig, a cocked hat, a gold-handled cane, and a red cloak.21
The other fifty delegates who gathered in Carpenters Hall had been equally well chosen. Virginia, for instance, was represented by George Washington, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, and several others. Here was assembled the cream of American leadership—people such as William Livingston of New Jersey, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, John Sullivan of New Hampshire, John Jay of New York, Caesar Rodney of Delaware, William Hooper of North Carolina, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Henry Middleton of South Carolina, and Samuel Chase of Maryland.
On the second day, Thomas Cushing, a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans, made a motion that Congress be opened with prayer. What happened next was recorded in a letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail:
It was opposed by Mr. Jay of New York and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious sentiments—some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists—[they thought] that we could not join in the same act of worship.”
What immediately followed seems to the authors to be the hand of God at work:
Mr. Samuel Adams arose and said that he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from any gentleman of piety and virtue who was at the same time a friend to his country. He was a stranger in Philadelphia, but had heard that Mr. Duché deserved that character, and therefore he moved that Mr. Duché, an Episcopal clergyman, might be desired to read prayers to Congress tomorrow morning. The motion was seconded, and passed in the affirmative.
Samuel Adams’s wise counsel had cut through all possible sectarian conflicts and united the delegates before the throne of God. Duché did, in fact, appear the next morning and read Psalm 35, the appointed reading in the Anglican lectionary. The Founding Fathers’ reverence for the Bible was revealed by John Adams’s next comment: “I never saw a greater effect produced upon an audience. It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that morning.” (Perhaps due to a false rumor that the British had bombarded the town of Boston).
Adams’s letter continued:
After this, Mr. Duché, unexpected to everybody, struck out into extemporary prayer which filled the bosom of every man present. I must confess I never heard a better prayer or one so well pronounced with such fervor, such ardor, such earnestness and pathos, and in language so elegant and sublime. . . . They prayed fervently for America, for Congress, for the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and especially for the town of Boston. It has had an excellent effect upon everybody here.22
When those who would come to be called our Founding Fathers met to deal with the mounting conflict with Great Britain, their first act was to seek the guidance of God.
Before adjourning, the Congress passed a Declaration of Rights and agreed to meet again in May 1775 unless the colonies’ grievances had been redressed by that date.
In October, Massachusetts held a Provincial Congress. Its President, John Hancock, who would represent his colony at the Second Continental Congress, declared:
We think it is incumbent upon this people to humble themselves before God on account of their sins, for He hath been pleased in His righteous judgment to suffer a great calamity to befall us, as the present controversy between Great Britain and the Colonies. [And] also to implore the Divine Blessing upon us, that by the assistance of His grace, we may be enabled to reform whatever is amiss among us, that so God may be pleased to continue to us the blessings we enjoy, and remove the tokens of His displeasure, by causing harmony and union to be restored between Great Britain and these Colonies.23
Two things stand out here: First, the basic Puritan response of seeking for sin at the outset of hard times was still intact among the members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, who had truly given themselves to God. Second, these same leaders were still hoping and praying for a peaceful resolution and would enter into active resistance only with the greatest reluctance.
Once committed, however, their dedication would be total. That same Congress addressed the inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay as follows: “Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual. . . . Continue steadfast, and with a proper sense of your dependence on God, nobly defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us.”24
In their resistance to British tyranny, the Massachusetts Patriots were so confident that they were defending their God-given rights, and thereby were justified in His eyes, that the famous Liberty Tree flag bore the inscription “An Appeal to God,” and the flag of the Massachusetts navy would proclaim “An Appeal to Heaven.”
As the pivotal year of 1775 unfolded, the second Virginia Revolutionary Convention gathered in March at St. John’s Church in Richmond with Peyton Randolph presiding. All of Virginia’s leading Patriots were present, including thirty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry.
Brought to faith in Jesus Christ under the powerful preaching of Samuel Davies, the Presbyterian evangelist of Virginia and the Carolinas during the First Great Awakening, Patrick Henry was a faithful and devout Christian and an outstanding lawyer. Henry’s insights into human nature gained from his faith, combined with a rare gift of oratory, gave him great influence over juries. His first biographer, William Wirt Henry, wrote that he was “beyond doubt, the ablest defender of criminals in Virginia.”25
Two groups of Virginia citizens were unfortunately regarded as criminals and were mistreated as such—Baptists and Quakers. Because the Anglican Church was the official established church in the colony, authorities looked the other way when Baptists and Quakers were assaulted by mobs, stoned, and whipped. Dissenter preachers were even arrested and imprisoned for merely proclaiming the Gospel.
As a lover of liberty, Patrick Henry could not stand idly by in the face of vicious religious persecution. He became one of the dissenters’ staunchest defenders, once riding fifty miles out of his way to volunteer his services to some Baptists jailed in Spotsylvania. Walking into the courtroom on the day of the trial, he listened to the judges present the charge of disturbing the peace and then asked to see the indictment.
Glancing at it, he looked up in astonishment. “Did I hear it distinctly, or was it a mistake of my own?” he asked the court. “Did I hear an expression, as of a crime, that these men, whom your worships are about to try for misdemeanor, are charged with”—he peered closely at the indictment, —“what? With preaching the Gospel of the Son of God?”
He held the document aloft and waved it around three times. Then lifting his arms toward heaven, Henry simply said, “Great God!” And then he exclaimed, “Great God!” Finally, he thundered, “Preaching the Gospel of the Son of God—Great God!”
In the wake of the prosecution’s inability to make any response, the case was dropped.26
As incidents of British tyranny mounted in the colonies, Henry became an outspoken Patriot, notably denouncing Parliament in 1765 during what was termed a “most bloody debate” over the Stamp Act Resolves he had authored. Thomas Jefferson said his eloquence was “such as I never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.”27
In subsequent years, Henry’s agitation for American independence in the Virginia Assembly made him an obvious choice for the colony’s delegation to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. There he quickly established a reputation as one of America’s most ardent advocates of independence.
Now, after several days of discussion, as the Virginia Convention met at St. John’s Church on the morning of March 23, Henry proposed a motion that the colony “be immediately put into a posture of defense” and draw up a plan for arming a “well-regulated militia.” Although the motion was quickly seconded by Richard Henry Lee, several delegates denounced it vehemently, saying that it went too far.
Finally, Henry rose to address the Convention in defense of his motion. According to eyewitness accounts of what followed, Henry began his speech calmly.28
The question before the house . . . is nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery. . . . Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope . . . [but] I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry, for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house. . . . We have petitioned . . . we have supplicated—we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of ministry and parliament. . . . Our petitions have been slighted . . . our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. . . . There is no longer any room for hope.
Every eye in the house was riveted upon Patrick Henry. He now began speaking with an intensity of passion and power that has seldom been equaled in American oratory:
If we wish to be free . . . we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts, is all that is left us! They tell us, sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? . . . Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? . . . We are not weak.
The tendons on his neck stood out as Henry’s voice rose.
Three millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty . . . are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
As his voice clearly hurled this challenge, Henry stood with head bowed and wrists crossed as if manacled, slumped in the attitude of a condemned slave.
After a pause he lifted up his eyes and chained hands and cried aloud toward heaven: “Forbid it, Almighty God!”
Then, kneeling with his hands still crossed, he bent toward the floor, seemingly weighed down with additional chains of British oppression. After remaining in that posture for a long moment, he stood proudly to his feet, and struggling against his bonds, spat out the words through clenched teeth: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me . . .”
Throwing his arms wide open as if to hurl the binding chains from him, with a radiant face Henry thundered,“Give me liberty!”
When the echo of his words had died, he let his left hand fall limply to his side, and with clenched fist, as if holding the point of a dagger to his breast, pronounced fearlessly, “Or give me death!”
As he spoke the last word, he smote his breast with his fist, as if driving the dagger into his heart.29
For many seconds no one spoke; the delegates hardly dared to breathe. An observer noted that had Henry but given the word, the entire assembly would have rushed out of the building into battle. Thomas Marshall, father of the future Chief Justice of the United States, spoke for every person who heard the speech when he praised it as “one of the most bold, vehement, and animated pieces of eloquence that [has] ever been delivered.”30