Patrick Henry

“ 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. ”

“ Whatever may have been the impression formed of Patrick Henry as a mere orator by his associates in that Congress, nothing can be plainer than that those men carried with them to their homes that report of him as a man of extraordinary intelligence, integrity, and power, which was the basis of his subsequent fame for many years among the American people. ”

“ Home of Patrick Henry During His Last Two Terms as Governor of Virginia.
We call this amusing, and so it was to those who knew Patrick Henry. He was a lawyer, to be sure, but one who knew almost nothing about the law and had never made a public speech in his life. He was only twenty-seven years of age, and those years had gone over him mainly in idleness. In his boyhood days he had spent his time in fishing, hunting, dancing, and playing the fiddle, instead of working on his father's farm. As he grew older he liked sport too much and work too little to make a living. ”

“ Mr. Smith ridicules Henry's speech and action and voice. The emotion which the great Virginian stirred in the breasts of his backwoodsmen seems very absurd to this cultured Englishman. The bowing and changes of countenance and gesticulating of the orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to us who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme or of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence.
Matthew Arnold had the best pair of intellectual eyes of our time. ”

“ During his childhood and youth Patrick Henry was remarkable for indolence and a love of recreation—consequently, he arrived at manhood with a limited education and unaccustomed to industry. His native talents were not developed, his mind was not cultivated, nor his genius expanded, until after he was a husband and a father. ”

“ They believed that their most important earthly rights were in danger. They longed for a leader with vigor, promptitude, courage, caring less for technical propriety than for justice, and not afraid to say so, by word or deed, to Lord Dunmore and to Lord Dunmore’s master. Such a leader they thought they saw in Patrick Henry. Accordingly, even on his march homeward from Doncastle’s Ordinary, the heart of Virginia began to go forth to him in expressions of love, of gratitude, and of homage, such as no American colonist perhaps had ever before received. ”

“ I live much retired, amidst a multiplicity of blessings from that Gracious Ruler of all things, to whom I owe unceasing acknowledgments for his unmerited goodness to me; and if I was permitted to add to the catalogue one other blessing, it should be, that my countrymen should learn wisdom and virtue, and in this their day to know the things that pertain to their peace. Farewell.
I am, dear Sir, yours,
Patrick Henry. [466]
The appeal from Archibald Blair, which evoked this impressive letter, had suggested to the old statesman no effort which could not be made in his retirement. ”

“ A man stands before you—it is no time for fine phrasing—no time for pose or platitude. Self-consciousness is swallowed up in purpose. He is as calm as the waters above the Rapids of Niagara, as composed as a lioness before she makes her spring. Intensity measures itself in perfect poise. And Patrick Henry arises to speak. Those who love the man pray for him in breathless silence, and the many who hate him in their hearts curse him. Pale faces grow paler, throats swallow hard, hands clutch at nothing, and open and shut in nervous spasms. It is the hour of fate.
Patrick Henry speaks ”

“ Fierce was the tempest of indignation which followed the annunciation of its enactment, and throughout the colonies the hearts of the people beat as with one pulsation. Sectional differences were forgotten. The bold notes of defiance uttered in New England and New York were caught up and echoed with manifold vehemence in Virginia. Patrick Henry, the idle boy of Hanover, had just burst from the chrysalis of obscurity, and was enchanting his countrymen with the brilliancy of his eloquence. ”

“ Every immortal speech ever given has been an appeal from the law of man to the Higher Law.
Patrick Henry was twenty-seven—the same age that Wendell Phillips was when he discovered himself. No one had guessed the genius of the man—least of all his parents. He himself did not know his power. The years that had gone had been fallow years—years of failure—but it was all a getting together of his forces for the spring. Relaxation is the first requisite of strength. ”

“ In this alone, it is apparent, consisted the real priority and offensiveness of Patrick Henry’s position as a revolutionary statesman on the 23d of March, 1775. In this alone were his resolutions “premature.” The very men who opposed them because they were to be understood as closing the door against the possibility of peace, would have favored them had they only left that door open, or even ajar. But Patrick Henry demanded of the people of Virginia that they should treat all further talk of peace as mere prattle; that they should seize the actual situation by a bold grasp of it in front ”

“ A speech in Hanover Court House in defence of the people against a suit of the parish clergy gave him sudden fame. As grave of face as Samuel Adams, as careless of his attire, tall and lean, stamped with the seal of the speaker and the thinker, Patrick Henry at nine-and-twenty was already a very different man from the youth who five years earlier seemed destined to be but a Jack of all trades and master of none, an unsuccessful trader, an unsuccessful farmer, whose chief accomplishments in life were hunting and fishing, dancing and riding. ”

“ Patrick Henry was then followed by John Jay, who seems to have closed the debate, and whose allusion to what his immediate predecessor had said gives us some hint of the variations in Revolutionary opinion then prevailing among the members, as well as of the advanced position always taken by Patrick Henry:—
“‘Could I suppose that we came to frame an American constitution, instead of endeavoring to correct the faults in an old one, I can’t yet think that all government is at an end. ”

“ Patrick Henry, one of the delegates for this colony, escorted by a number of respectable young gentlemen, volunteers from this and King William and Caroline counties, set out to attend the General Congress. They proceeded with him as far as Mrs. Hooe’s ferry, on the Potomac, by whom they were most kindly and hospitably entertained, and also provided with boats and hands to cross the river; and after partaking of this lady’s beneficence, the bulk of the company took their leave of Mr. Henry, saluting him with two platoons and repeated huzzas. ”

“ Patrick Henry was born in 1736, died 1799, the same year that Washington "passed away;" and like his, this life can speak for itself. He was the most famous orator of the Revolution. He said, "give me liberty or give me death!" He also said, "We must fight. An appeal to arms and to the god of battles is all that is left us. I repeat it, sir, we must fight." Another saying of his was, "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III—may profit by their example." Again, "The people, and only the people, have a right to tax the people." ”

“ The story of the personal life of Patrick Henry during those stern and agitating months is lighted up by the mention of his marriage, on the 9th of October, 1777, to Dorothea Dandridge, a granddaughter of the old royal governor, Alexander Spotswood,—a lady who was much younger than her husband, and whose companionship proved to be the solace of all the years that remained to him on earth. ”

“ It is not only unhistoric in nearly all the very few alleged facts of the narrative, but it does great injustice to Patrick Henry by representing him virtually as a mere declaimer, as an ill-instructed though most impressive rhapsodist in debate, and as without any claim to the character of a serious statesman, or even of a man of affairs ”

“ Furthermore, as soon as possible after breakfast, these imperiled legislators departed in search of the cave; shortly after which a negro from Staunton rode up, carrying in his hand a solitary boot, and inquiring earnestly for Patrick Henry. In that way, as the modern reporter of this very debatable tradition unkindly adds, the admiring Mrs. Moffett ascertained who it was that the boot fitted; and he further suggests that, whatever Mrs. Moffett’s emotions were at that time, those of Patrick must have been, “Give me liberty, but not death.” ”

“ Yet, even with this explanation, the truth remains [Pg 188] that Patrick Henry, as commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces, never was permitted to take command, or to see any real service in the field, or to look upon the face of an armed enemy, or to show, in the only way in which it could be shown, whether or not he had the gifts of a military leader in action. As an accomplished and noble-minded Virginian of our own time has said:—
“It may be doubted whether he possessed those qualities which make a wary partisan, and which are so often possessed in an eminent degree by uneducated men. ”

“ Whether, in these several measures, Patrick Henry was right or wrong, one thing, at least, is obvious: no politician who could thus beard in his very den the lion of public opinion can be accurately described as a demagogue.
With respect to those amazing gifts of speech by which, in the House of Delegates, he thus repeatedly swept all opposition out of his way, and made people think as he wished them to do, often in the very teeth of their own immediate interests [Pg 295] or prepossessions, an amusing instance was mentioned, many years afterward, by President James Madison. ”

“ McGuire, Patrick Henry, was born in the city of Pittsburg, County of Allegheny, State of Pennsylvania, August 13, 1869, the ninth child and sixth son of Patrick McGuire and Margaret Wheeler, both Irish immigrants who came to this country about the year 1849, settled and were married in the city of Philadelphia, and came to Pittsburg about the year 1860. Two years after his birth, his folks moved to the city of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where they lived until he was twenty years of age ”

“ 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. ”

“ Patrick Henry was chosen to represent Virginia on the latter committee, [113] —a position not likely to have been selected for a man who, however eloquent he may have seemed, had not also shown business-like and lawyer-like qualities.
The Congress kept steadily at work from Monday, the 5th of September, to Wednesday, the 26th of October,—just seven weeks and two days. Though not a legislative body, it resembled all legislative bodies then in existence, in the fact that it sat with closed doors, and that it gave to the public only such results as it chose to give. ”

“ Two of the sisters of Patrick Henry—Lucy, who married Valentine Wood, and Jane, who married Colonel Samuel Meredith—were members of Davies' congregations.
At the age of fifteen Patrick Henry was placed, about the year 1751, in a store, to learn the mercantile business, and after a year so passed the father set up William, an elder brother, and Patrick together in trade. There is reason to believe that his alleged aversion to books and his indolence, have been exaggerated by Wirt's artistic romancing. There is no royal road to learning; men do not acquire knowledge by intuition. ”

“ Patrick Henry, of course, who was the supreme popular orator of our history and who drew his strength from his perfect knowledge of the public mind and heart, might have been expected to make appeals based on this general fear. But when such men as George Mason and William Grayson, who belonged to Virginia's highest classes and who were carefully educated men of conservative temper, did the same thing, we see how deep and strong was the general feeling against any central National power. ”

“ It would, indeed, be an odd thing, and a source of no little disturbance to many minds, if such should turn out to be the case, and if we should have to conclude that an apocryphal speech written by Wirt, and attributed by him to Patrick Henry fifteen years after the great orator’s death, had done more to perpetuate the renown of Patrick Henry’s oratory than had been done by any and all the words actually spoken by the orator himself during his lifetime. ”

“ 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. ”