Patrick Henry (18 page)

Mason, Henry, and the other delegates were coming under considerable pressure to make a statement on religious freedom in the Declaration of Rights. After much debate, the committee concluded “that religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.” James Madison, who loathed the persecution of the Baptists, drafted this article. He also had Henry introduce an amendment to the article that seemed to imply disestablishment of the Anglican Church, asserting that “no man or class of men ought on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities.” When other delegates challenged him, however, Henry denied that this amendment was intended to end state support for the Anglican Church, although that probably was Madison's goal. Henry, unlike Madison, saw no inconsistency between state support for religion and religious freedom.
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The convention formally approved the Declaration of Rights on June 12. The document was a momentous articulation of the human rights upon which government should not intrude. Virginia had
adopted these articles, Edmund Randolph explained, so that “in all the revolutions of time, of human opinion, and of government, a perpetual standard should be erected, around which the people might rally and by a notorious record be forever admonished to be watchful, firm, and virtuous.”
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The convention, led by George Mason, also established a new state constitution, in which the lower house of the legislature, now called the House of Delegates, held most of the power. Henry was concerned that the proposed constitution gave too little authority to the governor. The convention apparently feared the dangers of executive power, having just entered a war against one of the world's most powerful monarchs. But Henry believed that war required stronger executive power, and in the debates over the document, he insisted that the governor needed veto power over legislation. Henry declared that under the new constitution, the governor would be a “mere phantom,” dependent on the will of the legislators. Henry's position on the governorship is somewhat strange, given that he would oppose the new federal Constitution in 1788 partly based on the expansive executive power it gave the president. But his stance also signaled Henry's fundamental pragmatism: compared with Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams, Henry was always more concerned about responding to current circumstances than maintaining ideological purity.
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On June 29, the same day they unanimously adopted the new constitution, the delegates voted for the commonwealth's first governor. Ironically, they chose Henry, the chief critic of the new governor's office. Whatever reluctance he may have felt, Henry accepted the position. Believing that “the lasting happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human species” was at stake in the war, he knew the state needed effective leadership more than ever.
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Because Henry remained the most popular politician in Virginia, and a favorite of Virginia's military, his election as governor garnered
public support for the new government. Moderates may have also seen his election as a way of controlling Henry. It would not be the last time they would remove him from the legislature by making him governor. When the first legislature convened that fall, they chose Henry's archenemy, Edmund Pendleton, as the first Speaker of the House of Delegates, which arguably was the most powerful position in the government. But legislative power—the ability to control the processes of government—is not the only kind of power. Henry's personality would prove hard to contain, even in the governor's mansion.
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L
ANDON CARTER, ONE OF VIRGINIA'S most wealthy and reactionary planters, knew Henry had won the governorship fair and square, so he resolved to mourn the “destructive tendency in secret.” But then, on July 13, Carter received exciting news: Patrick Henry had died! Carter deemed this development “particularly favourable by the hand of Providence.” Unfortunately for Carter and for Henry's other opponents, it turned out that the governor was only sick, not dead.
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Moderate Virginians were hardly thrilled to have Patrick Henry as governor. They saw him as an extremist, and extremism in such a volatile moment was the last thing they thought Virginia needed. Of course, other Virginians were delighted with Henry's election. The soldiers of the First and Second Regiments, among his staunchest supporters, praised him as the ideal governor: “Uninfluenced by private ambition, regardless of sordid interest, you have uniformly pursued the general good of your country,” they told him.
Henry wrote back and reminded them that as heavy a burden as the governor's office might be, “to you is assigned the glorious task of saving, by your valour, all that is dear to mankind.” He encouraged them to fight on for Virginia's deliverance.
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Even as Henry chafed at the constitutional limitations imposed on the governor's office, he became the public face of Virginia during its first three years of independence. The House of Delegates possessed most of the state's legislative authority, but they were in session only part of the year, with Henry administering the war effort year-round, a job he relished because of the close connection he had forged with the military. The British had begun to focus their attention on invading New York City, and the royal governor, Dunmore, having lost control of Virginia, left the state in August 1776. Rumors circulated that Dunmore might return to Virginia at the head of a large British army, but this threat did not materialize.
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As indicated by the erroneous reports of his death, Henry struggled badly with his health during the summer and fall of 1776, which distracted him from the daunting challenges he still faced. As the delegates to the Continental Congress drafted, redrafted, and then approved the Declaration of Independence that July in Philadelphia, Patrick Henry was falling seriously ill. He was sworn in as governor on July 6 and quickly left Williamsburg to recuperate at home. Henry's medical troubles would become an issue for the rest of his life. It is often difficult to discern what specifically was wrong with him, medical care and diagnoses being essentially medieval in that era, even for the elite, but the timing of his sickness suggests a malaria-related fever that he might have contracted in Williamsburg. As would become his standard practice during the summer, Henry retreated to Scotchtown, which stood on relatively high ground, away from swampy lowlands and mosquitoes. Bedridden, Henry slowly recovered, and the
Virginia Gazette
reported happily in August that “our worthy governor . . . is so much recovered from his late
severe indisposition that he walks out daily.” The newspaper hoped he could return to the capital soon, which Henry was indeed able to do.
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Arriving in Williamsburg in September, Henry confronted a dire military situation, with little power to respond to the setbacks American forces were experiencing in the northern states. He and Washington exchanged letters shortly after the general's nearly disastrous flight from New York City. The British had abandoned Boston in March 1776 and then attacked New York beginning on August 22. Washington's army staged a defense of Brooklyn Heights, but because Washington had divided his army between Long Island and Manhattan, he was nearly overwhelmed by the British, evacuating his remaining soldiers with no time to spare. Henry reported to Washington some victories against the Cherokees on the western frontier of Virginia, where, despite Henry's amicable statements toward the Indians, troops from the southern states would prosecute a brief, nasty war with them until a preliminary peace was signed in April 1777. Henry also worried that the British might be planning a naval invasion of the state. Lord Dunmore and his British troops had left Virginia for New York, but patriot leaders worried he would eventually return with a much larger force. Henry had heard about Washington's narrow escape from Brooklyn. “I trust every virtuous man will be stimulated by it to fresh exertions,” he wrote.
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Washington responded with urgency, declaring that he needed a regular army to fight the British—a well-trained and committed national military. He was disgusted with the state militias, “who from an utter disregard of all discipline and restraint among themselves are but too apt to infuse the like spirit into others.” In the aftermath of the Battle of Long Island, whole militia regiments had deserted Washington, to his horror. The militiamen might be fit to fight Indians in isolated frontier skirmishes, Washington wrote, but he warned Henry not to depend on them should a British invasion
come. In September, the Congress had authorized a recruitment campaign to bolster Washington's Continental army with soldiers who would serve for the duration of the war. Virginia was instructed to deliver fifteen battalions, and Washington urged Henry to do whatever he could to produce the officers and soldiers he needed.
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General Washington was desperate. As his army fled through New York and New Jersey in the fall of 1776, the patriots faced their darkest hour. Tom Paine, serving in the Continental army, penned the famous lines “These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
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Alarmed by Washington's letter and frustrated at the constitutional limitations of his office, Henry became convinced that the crisis was so urgent that he needed special wartime powers to raise and supply troops for the national army and for Virginia's own defense in case of an invasion. Recruitment had gone badly earlier in the year, not least because of resentment among the troops and potential soldiers over Henry's treatment by the Committee of Safety. Many Virginians also feared that enlisting would mean serving in the Continental army outside of Virginia, with little guarantee of supplies, payment, or success. In December, the House of Delegates gave Henry the broad authority he sought to make requisitions, pay for supplies, order troop movements, and raise additional battalions. Jealous of its prerogatives, the legislature limited the term of his mandate to only a few months. The delegates warned Henry that “this departure from the constitution of government, being in this instance founded only on the most evident and urgent necessity, ought not hereafter to be drawn into precedent.” Virginia was already wrestling with the problems of a weak governor's position in wartime.
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Thomas Jefferson was among those unhappy with the legislature's authorization. Five years later, he would assert that Henry and the
delegates were trying to create “a dictator, invested with every power legislative, executive, and judiciary, civil and military, of life and death, over our persons and over our properties.” By any standard, his claim was an exaggeration. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that Henry did often support strengthening the governorship. He did not abuse his power during the emergency, and his bid made sense given the intense panic among the patriots in December 1776, when it seemed that all could be lost. His brief expansion of executive authority was a pragmatic move, yet it is one that contradicted his later opposition to executive power granted under the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps Henry reasoned that a temporary but robust expansion of power (placed in his own responsible hands, of course) could be justified due to the greater threat to liberty the British army presented.
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Even with the governor's expanded command, enlarging the army continued to prove extremely difficult. Beyond the rampant inflation that encouraged speculators to gouge the army with high prices for basic supplies, agents from other states were also recruiting soldiers from Virginia, driving up costs for the bounties that the state paid enlistees and reducing the number of available men. Disease was also ravaging the soldiers who had already enlisted. “The terrors of the smallpox, added to the lies of deserters and want of necessaries, are fatal objections to the continental service,” Henry wrote to Richard Henry Lee. Washington agreed with Henry that fear of smallpox was keeping many from enlisting, but instead of turning to short-term volunteers, he suggested that Henry move forward with more aggressive inoculation campaigns. Henry sympathized with these tactics: he himself had received inoculation (the intentional introduction of a mild strain of smallpox, to promote immunity) from Dr. Benjamin Rush while in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress. Washington had already ordered Virginia troops to receive inoculation as soon as they enlisted.
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In December 1776, some relief did come for Washington, when his army scored a great symbolic victory at the Battle of Trenton in New Jersey. On Christmas night, the general's weary force crossed the Delaware River in the midst of a blizzard of sleet, surprising and capturing a garrison of 1,500 Hessian troops, mercenaries hired by the British to fight in the war. Washington pulled off another win a week later at Princeton, New Jersey, helping to convince Americans that the war was worth carrying forward.

Trenton and Princeton were valuable victories, but they hardly solved the problems of enlisting soldiers. The difficulty in recruitment created tension between Henry and Washington, who had very different views of how best to fill the ranks of the army. Henry asked Washington in March 1777 to approve a plan that would allow him to return to raising volunteers for six- to eight-month terms. He had recently recruited such volunteers from the western parts of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and he thought they could supply their own firearms and clothing. He also suggested that these volunteer companies could choose their own captains.
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