Patrick Henry’s last speech

Here is a story for Independence Day which, though not about Independence Day, concerns two of the heroes of American Independence, George Washington and Patrick Henry. It’s about the time when Washington persuaded Henry, then old and sick, to come out of retirement and fight the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, written in 1798 by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, which claimed that a state could declare an act of Congress null and void. I do not take a position here on the substance of this freighted issue, for, though I have always been a Washingtonian not a Jeffersonian, in our age the warnings of the Jeffersonians have been borne out in full, with the federal judiciary becoming a dictatorial body that has destroyed and continues to destroy the constitutional self-government of the states. There is therefore something to be said for the idea that the states may need to resist gross encroachments by the federal government and courts when the Constitution gives them no other recourse, and, in fact, various states both north and south have successfully done so from time to time over the course of our history without causing a breakdown of the laws and Constitution. At the same time, however, the strident, even extreme, language in which the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves were written, including scarcely veiled threats of “dissolution,” would seem to justify Washington’s and Henry’s intense anxiety for the survival of the Union.

This stirring episode is from Burton J. Hendrick’s highly interesting book, Bulwark of the Republic: A Biography of the Constitution, 1937, pp. 139-42. It lends itself very well to being read aloud.

This effort to weaken the Constitution served at least one good purpose, for it gave Washington a final opportunity to testify his allegiance to that instrument. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions also brought another early patriot to Washington’s side—that Patrick Henry who had refused to attend the Constitutional Convention and had nearly persuaded Virginia not to ratify its achievement. Modern writers who enjoy picturing Patrick Henry as a foe of the Constitution overlook the last days of this life when he threw himself upon its side and, with his virtually dying breath, called on all good Americans to come to its support.

As was to be expected, Washington, now spending his last year at Mount Vernon, saw the danger. He had already parted with Jefferson. The letter Jefferson had written Philip Mazzei in 1796 was published in 1797. In this Jefferson pictured the veteran of Yorktown as one of those monarchists who were seeking to bind the nation to Great Britain. Never had Jefferson exercised his “felicity” at phrase-making so disastrously. One can imagine Washington’s feelings as he read the lines that were destined to a wretched immortality: “It would give you a fever were I to name you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” Washington never wrote or spoke to Jefferson after reading that sentence. But there came one solace in these final years in a new companionship with Patrick Henry. The last episode in the lives of these two great Revolutionists discloses them ranged side by side in opposition to the Jefferson-Madison program of nullification. Patrick Henry’s hostility to the “new plan” [the Constitution] underwent a change as a result of its administration under Washington. All the dreadful consequences of adoption that Henry had foreseen in the Virginia Convention had not come true. The President had not been transformed into a Nero, or even into a “Polish king”; America had entered on a new period of prosperity; nor had liberty vanished from the land. The adoption of the first ten amendments had done much to reconcile Henry to the “new form.” The affectionate and loyal man was also much offended by the attacks of Jeffersonians on his old Virginia friend, and he detested the Democratic societies as cordially as did Washington himself. Though many attempts, engineered by Light Horse Harry Lee, to attach the orator officially to the new administration failed … the declinations were framed in words that disclosed a most friendly attitude toward the Federal Party. “I should be unworthy of the character of a Republican,” Henry wrote, October 16, 1795, refusing to become Secretary of State, “if I withheld from the government my best and most zealous efforts because in its adoption I opposed it in its unamended form. And I do most cordially execrate the conduct of those men who lose sight of the public interest from personal motives.” Though unable, from ill-health and advancing years, to accept a post, a crisis might arrive, he intimated in a letter written in 1795, that would call him again into public service. “If my country is destined in my day to encounter the horrors of anarchy, every power of body and mind which I possess will be exerted in support of the government under which I live and which has been fully sanctioned by my countrymen.”

“The horrors of anarchy,” Washington believed, would be the necessary outcome of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. That the Antifederal forces would bring them forward again in the next session of the Virginia House of Delegates was well understood. In searching for ways of circumventing the enemy, Washington’s mind turned to this promise made by Patrick Henry three years before. Here was his chance to redeem it. On the fifteenth of January 1799, Washington therefore wrote Henry one of the most vigorous letters of his life, and one of the most denunciatory. It was a fierce arraignment of the Jefferson party and its attempt to emasculate the Constitution. “It would be a waste of time,” the letter began, “to attempt to bring to the view of a person of your observation and discernment the endeavors of a certain party among us to disquiet the public mind with unfounded alarms—to arraign every act of the administration—to set the people at variance with the government—and to embarrass all its measures. Equally useless would it be to predict what must be the inevitable consequences of such a policy, if it cannot be arrested.” What a spectacle, Washington said, their Virginia then represented! Their delegates in the state legislature and in Congress were seeking to destroy the Union! “Torturing every act of their government by constructions they will not bear, into attempts to infringe and trample upon the Constitution with a view to introduce monarchy!” “When measures are systematically and perniciously pursued, which must eventually dissolve the Union … ought characters who are best able to rescue their country from the pending evil to remain at home? Rather, ought they not to come forward, and by their talents and influence, stand in the breach which such conduct has made in the peace and happiness of this country and oppose the widening of it?” Therefore, would not Patrick Henry stand as candidate for the Virginia General Assembly at the coming elections so that, on the floor, he could fight these measures? “My fears that the tranquillity of the Union is hastening to an awful crisis” was Washington’s explanation for making this appeal to a man who, as all Virginians knew, was then on the brink of the grave.

The response to this appeal came at Charlotte Courthouse in early March, 1799. A huge crowd gathered, for Patrick Henry had announced that he would address his fellow citizens on that day. After declining to be Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States, he had acceded to Washington’s request, and was about to ask his neighbors to elect him to the state legislature. Excitement was intense, for Madison, William Giles, John Taylor, and George Nicholas, knowing what a struggle this portended at Richmond, had announced their candidacies, in order to pit their united strength against the man whom Jefferson had described as “the greatest orator who ever lived.” The hero worship bestowed by the crowd on Henry that morning indicated the importance of his intercession. When the speaker arose, his weakness was manifest. His face was colorless and careworn, his whole frame shaky, his voice, at the beginning, cracked and tremulous. In a few minutes, however, the Henry of the old Virginia House of Burgesses sprang from this emaciated shell. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were denounced with all the vehemence that had once been visited on King George. These proceedings filled him “with apprehension and alarm … they had planted thorns upon his pillow … the state had quitted the sphere in which she had been placed by the Constitution … in daring to pronounce upon the validity of Federal laws she had gone out of her jurisdiction.” All the old-time gesticulations were once more pressed into service. Just as, in the Richmond speech of 1775, Henry had dropped on his knees, raised his palms to heaven, and cried, “Give me liberty or give me death,” so now again he clasped his hands and waved his body back and forth, the audience unconsciously swaying in unison. “Let us trust God,” Henry declaimed, “and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.” Charlotte Courthouse, where this speech was made, is situated less than thirty miles from Appomattox, and from this spot, seventy years afterward, were heard the guns that forced Lee’s surrender. Patrick Henry seemed to have divined all this as the inescapable outcome of the Virginia Resolutions. “Such opposition on the part of Virginia”—this was his parting message to his countrymen—“to the acts of the general government must beget their enforcement by military power,” and this would produce “civil war.”

At the end of his oration, Henry literally fell into the arms of bystanders and was carried almost lifeless into a near-by tavern. Two months afterward he was dead. He was overwhelmingly elected to the House of Delegates, but was never able to take his seat. And Washington in December also died. Thus the last act of these two leaders of 1776 was a joint effort to preserve the Constitution….

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 03, 2005 10:42 PM | Send