Patrick Henry (11 page)

By 1771, Henry's land speculations and legal work allowed him to move up from the modest home at Roundabout to a genteel mansion at Scotchtown, in Hanover County. He apparently acquired the house and 1,000-acre tract from John Payne, the father of Dolley Madison; the future First Lady had lived briefly at the plantation as a young girl. The house had sixteen rooms and several outbuildings. It was one of the largest mansions in Virginia at the time.
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An ad describing Scotchtown said it was “remarkable for producing the finest sweet scented tobacco.... The soil is also exceeding good for wheat, and there are several swamps and parcels of low grounds on it, that will suit for meadows. There is on it a large commodious
dwelling house with eight rooms on one floor, and a very large passage, pleasantly situated, and all convenient outhouses, also a good water grist mill; and there are three plantations cleared sufficient to work twenty or thirty hands, under good fences, with Negro quarters, tobacco houses, etc.” Henry's purchase of this estate was a sign that he fully belonged to the gentility.
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At Scotchtown, Henry continued working to establish his financial independence. He increasingly grew grain along with tobacco, following the lead of planters such as Washington, who had already switched the fields of Mount Vernon from tobacco to wheat, hemp, and flax by 1766, and by the mid-1780s Washington was planting as many as sixty different crops. Tobacco had become less appealing and lucrative, and not only because it exhausted the soil. The planters' debts to the English tobacco merchants and creditors escalated across Virginia in the 1760s, convincing many that agricultural diversity was in order. Wheat seemed a more virtuous crop than tobacco, anyway. Jefferson wrote that tobacco was “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness. Those employed in it are in a continued state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support. Little food of any kind is raised by them, so that the men and animals on these farms are badly fed, and the earth is rapidly impoverished.” Wheat required less labor, and thus fewer slaves. Altogether, it seemed like an advantageous change for Virginia's economy and society.
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Yet Henry did not always find wheat a guaranteed moneymaker—sometimes thanks less to the vagaries of the crop than the irresponsibility of a family member. In 1776, just before the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, he would sell almost four hundred bushels of wheat to his financially delinquent half-brother, John Syme. But Henry discovered later that Syme had not given him credit for at least half of his wheat deliveries, making “most gross errors in crediting my crop's wheat.” In 1785, the accounting problems with Syme lingered, and Henry noted in a financial memo that
“I think certainly I owe him nothing.... I am willing to be even, but owing nothing.” Meanwhile, Syme continued to enjoy the life of the Virginia gentleman, racing horses and consuming luxury goods. If even his half-brother was willing to cheat him, Henry mused, how could he ever hope to achieve financial security?
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HIS INCREASING LAND, POWER, AND WEALTH—and his persistent pursuit of personal independence—led Henry to acquire more slaves. Sarah's dowry had included six slaves, and by the late 1780s Henry owned sixty-six African-Americans on his various properties. Anglo-Americans, particularly in the southern colonies, largely took slavery for granted and did not blink at its scenes of human bondage and severe punishments. The day of Henry's Stamp Act speech in the House of Burgesses, for instance, the bodies of three African-Americans convicted of robbing a leading politician were hanging outside on Williamsburg's gallows. They served as a grisly reminder to slaves of their subservient place in Virginia society.
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Planters like Henry knew that keeping slaves was an invitation to violent resistance. Members of the southern elite incessantly worried about how to maintain power over their slaves, and prevent them from revolting or running away. Their fear often led them to inflict lurid and grotesque punishments against unruly slaves, especially runaways. A 1705 slave code allowed masters to apply to county courts for permission to cut off body parts of repeat offenders. The Virginia assembly hoped that these punishments would dissuade other African-Americans from thinking of running away. Masters and their overseers meted out vicious punishments with some regularity. The village of Negro Foot near Henry's Roundabout plantation, for example, apparently got its name when someone put a slave's dismembered foot on a pike in the area in 1733. Placing body parts on pikes was not new in English history. As early as the conquest of Ireland, the English had routinely displayed the
heads and other appendages of their vanquished enemies as a warning not to revolt. The gruesome cautionary punishments could make for some harsh contrasts: the tiny hamlet of present-day Negro Foot lies on Patrick Henry Road in Hanover County.
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White Virginians' occasional recourse to the dismemberment of slaves had not abated in 1769—the year the Propositions and Grievances Committee in the House, of which Patrick Henry was a member, considered an amendment to a 1748 act controlling the behavior of servants and slaves. That act had reauthorized the county courts to “direct the [non-lethal] dismembering of slaves, who are notoriously guilty of going abroad in the night, or running away, and laying out, and who cannot be reclaimed by the common methods of punishment.” In 1769 the House decided to amend the act, having decided that its enforcement was “often disproportioned to the offence, and contrary to the principles of humanity.” But the new law provided only one new restriction on dismembering: a ban on castration, except in the case of attempted rape of a white woman by a slave.
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Virginia planters knew they had to keep a tight rein on slaves, who could rise up at any moment in localized violence or massive insurrection. Large-scale rebellion was highly uncommon—the task of organizing far-flung slaves and the threat of crushing retaliation made such revolts unlikely. But Virginia whites had witnessed enough slave uprisings to be scared into imposing draconian punishments. In 1730, hundreds of blacks participated in an insurrection around Norfolk, resulting in the hanging of thirty or more slave leaders. The slaves reportedly timed the revolt to begin on Sunday morning, when many whites would be in church and unarmed. Subsequently the governor ordered that when attending church, the colony's militiamen should “carry with them their arms to prevent any surprise thereof in their absence when slaves are most at liberty.” Even during worship, white masters could not quite find relief from the fear of slave insurrection.
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Local fights could also turn into minor revolts. In 1769, a newspaper report recounted how slaves on the Hanover County plantation of Bowler Cocke turned against a demanding overseer and his assistant, who was attacked with an ax and severely beaten. After escaping, the assistant summoned an armed posse of whites, who confronted the defiant slaves at a barn. The slaves, said the article's white author, “rushed upon them with a desperate fury, armed with clubs and staves; one of them knocked down a white man, and was going to repeat the blow to finish him, which one of the [white] boys seeing, leveled his piece, discharged its contents into the fellow's breast, and brought him to the dust . . . the battle continued desperate, but another of the Negroes having his head almost cut off with a broad sword, and five of them being wounded, the rest fled.” We cannot know to what extent the white men involved had provoked these attacks, but reports like this one confirmed white Virginians' conviction that by keeping slaves, they were sitting on a powder keg. Too many violent punishments—such as dismemberments—might elicit rebellion, but too much leniency might open the door for runaways or outright resistance.
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Many Virginia elites viewed slavery as a threat not only to their safety but to their own virtue as well. By the late 1760s, some of the colony's leaders had also begun to fear that the colonists' dependence on slave labor might breed lazy, debauched tendencies among the planters. Beyond such concerns, the rising number of slaves was also negatively affecting the economy. Virginians had begun to accumulate a surplus of slaves, some of whom they sold to planters of the lower South. Restricting further imports could both limit the slave population, which would offer some protection against possible slave revolts, and raise the prices for slaves at market. The Burgesses knew they could not ban the importation of slaves without London's approval, however, and in 1772 they petitioned the king directly for permitting such a ban.

The petition revealed not only the Burgesses' growing reservations about the slave trade but also their continuing devotion to the king. Their confidence in the monarch's tender care for the colonies, they wrote, led the Burgesses to “look up to the throne, and implore your Majesty's paternal assistance in averting a calamity of a most alarming nature.” The delegates, most of them slave owners, however benevolent, did not linger on the contradictions inherent in the inhuman nature of the transatlantic slave trade—the very commerce that had always delivered the slaves whose continuing arrivals they now sought to curtail. They expressed fear that continued importations could threaten the security of the colonies. They also noted that more slaves meant fewer “useful inhabitants,” or free white workers whose incomes would support the empire. The Burgesses, including Patrick Henry, unanimously approved the petition, complete with its affirmation of Virginia's loyalty to the “best of kings,” George III.
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In 1772, even as the colonies stood at the edge of the second, more acute phase of the revolutionary crisis, most Americans remained convinced of George III's fatherly kindness toward them, and could present such appeals to him wholeheartedly. The corrosion of George III's reputation soon accelerated, assisted in part by the king's lack of attention to petitions like this one. The king's failure to reply to the House's appeal would merit notice in Jefferson's draft version of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In a long section on slavery (subsequently deleted by the Continental Congress), Jefferson wrote that the king had suppressed “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” in slaves. The Crown's refusal to allow the colonies to restrict the importation of slaves gave colonists some basis for the otherwise dubious claim that Britain had forced slavery on white Americans.
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PATRICK HENRY VEHEMENTLY SUPPORTED the restriction on the slave trade. Like many Virginia slave masters, he expressed frank personal
reservations about slaveholding in a supposed land of liberty. Soon after the Burgesses sent their petition against the slave trade to the king, Henry received an antislavery book by the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet as a gift from Virginia Quaker leader Robert Pleasants. In reply to Pleasants, Henry wrote a remarkable reflection on slavery:

Henry believed that the principles of the Bible, as well as new ideals of liberty becoming popular in Europe and America, contradicted slaveholding. He hoped that Americans' commitment to
liberty would put the institution on a path to extinction. Ever concerned with the moral character of Virginia society, Henry worried that slavery prevented the development of a republic of independent, virtuous freeholders. James Madison shared this concern, privately calling slavery “unrepublican.” Slaveholding encouraged vicious behavior by the planters against their weaker, victimized laborers. Henry commended the Quakers for leading this moral cause. He took personally their fervent injunction against slavery, worrying that he was hypocritically keeping slaves for his convenience when every moral gauge told him it was wrong.
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Henry so heartily applauded the Quakers for their abolitionism that Pleasants and others believed that the famous orator might serve as their political champion. Radical Quakers had long promoted antislavery principles, much earlier than most other Christians in Britain and America, and were often scorned by other colonists for their controversial views. Pleasants recommended a number of Virginia politicians, including “particularly our friend Patrick Henry,” to Anthony Benezet in 1774, when Henry was going to Benezet's Philadelphia for the meeting of the Continental Congress. Another Quaker correspondent was even more effusive in his 1774 description of Henry as “a real half Quaker . . . in religious matters a saint but the very devil in politics—a son of thunder—Boanerges.” This writer portrayed Henry as a serious Christian who practiced politics with such religious zeal that he was like the disciples James and John, whom Jesus renamed Boanerges—the “Sons of Thunder”—in the Gospel of Mark.
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