Patrick Henry (31 page)

Henry's repeated refusals to assume national office resulted not only from his financial fears, but also from a growing concern over his family's health. He felt like he was constantly dodging death, and of course it was constantly stalking his children. Each summer, Virginia would be ravaged by dysentery (or “the flux”), a malady that could cause violent, bloody diarrhea and was often fatal. “The flux has been very near us, but, it has pleased God, we escaped it,” Henry told Betsey in 1793. Shortly after declining the Senate seat and ambassadorship, he informed his daughter that the flux was again plaguing the area and that many of his slaves were suffering from the “ague,” or malarial fever, an illness he knew well from his frequent bouts in the past. Henry feared leaving his family behind for long durations when mortal illnesses could seize any of them at any moment.
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The offers from Lee and Washington reveal how much political influence Patrick Henry retained even in retirement. By 1794–95,
both Washington's Federalists and the emerging Republican Party of Jefferson dreamed of enticing him out of his repose to support their side. Because of the instability caused by the French Revolution as well as growing tension with Britain, America had entered its most dire international crisis since the Revolution. Bitterness that lingered after the Revolution, along with the British navy's seizure of ostensibly neutral American ships, led Republicans to clamor for war. But Washington and the Federalists loathed both the idea of war with Britain and any renewed alliance with a France that had descended into murderous chaos, with former King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette among the tens of thousands guillotined. Federalists warned that another war with Britain would wreck the fledgling American economy just as it was finding its strength. America depended on Britain for three-quarters of its foreign trade.

Henry had a personal stake in peace; he feared that war would create an economic catastrophe that would ruin his chances of getting out of debt through land sales. Once again, the line between Henry's personal finance and his politics blurred. Washington dispatched John Jay—notorious for his role in the negotiations with Spain over the Mississippi in the mid-1780s—to London in 1794 to avert a military clash. In this situation, Henry's endorsement of the Federalists or the Republicans would carry a great deal of political weight, as he maintained his national reputation as an independent-minded patriot. Even Jefferson briefly tried to reconcile with Henry in early 1795, asking a common friend to assure Henry that he harbored no bad feelings toward him.
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It was Washington, however, who made the most strenuous efforts to recruit Henry. The offers of a Senate seat and ambassadorship were followed, finally, by an invitation in 1795 to become secretary of state. Washington knew that if Henry accepted the post, it would facilitate the nation's reception of the Jay Treaty, which the Senate approved in mid-1795, granting America favorable
trade status with Britain and aligning the new nation diplomatically with the kingdom from which it had so recently won its freedom. Yet it failed to address some of the key grievances remaining from the Revolution, such as British compensation for slaves they took from Americans during the war. The treaty was sure to alienate the French, Britain's inveterate enemies. It led to a final break in the relationship between George Washington and James Madison, and further energized Madison's Republican Party. Although early reaction to the treaty was mixed in the North, it sparked general outrage in the South. One poem printed in a Virginia newspaper recommended that Americans “spurn the base born child, the imp of slavery begot in hell.” Rumors swirled that the treaty might yet again lead Virginia to consider seceding from the Union.
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Throughout the uproar about the Jay Treaty, Henry maintained silence. His reticence explains Washington's interest in making him secretary of state. If Henry was not opposed to the Jay Treaty, then recruiting him to the cabinet would be a major coup. One adviser told Washington that bringing Henry on board would devastate the Republican movement: “a more deadly blow could not be given to the faction in Virginia, and perhaps elsewhere, that that gentleman's acceptance of the office in question, convinced as we are of the sentiments he must carry with him. So much have the opposers of the government held him up as their oracle, even since he has ceased to respond to them, that any event, demonstrating his active support to government, could not but give the party a severe shock.” That October, Washington made the offer, stating his case as forcefully as possible, in language he knew Henry would understand. The crisis at hand, Washington wrote, would “decide whether order and good government shall be preserved, or anarchy and confusion ensue.” He assured Henry that he did not intend to pursue an alliance with Britain or any other European nation beyond the limited bonds the
treaty set forth, and that all he sought was America's continued independence and welfare.
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Henry was flattered by Washington's offer, but he still did not accept. He gave the usual reasons: he and Dorothea had eight children of their own, with yet another on the way, and he feared going to Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, where his family would be exposed to smallpox and yellow fever. Henry himself was in relatively poor health, and recent crop losses added to the “derangement” of his finances. Ever since he was a young man, the necessity of boosting his finances often had taken him out of the public arena, but never had personal contingencies distracted him from a more significant role. On the other hand, Henry was hardly alone: he was the fourth of five men who refused Washington's offer before Washington finally found a taker in Timothy Pickering, his secretary of war. One of the others who declined, Massachusetts's Rufus King, professed that he had no interest in becoming another object of the “foul and venomous shafts of calumny” increasingly directed at the government.
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Henry insisted to the president that his refusal had nothing to do with any animosity between him and Washington. Nor did he harbor continuing resentment toward the government under the new Constitution. “Believe me sir, I have bid adieu to Federal and Antifederal ever since the adoption of the present government, and in the circle of my friends [I] have often expressed my fears of disunion amongst the states from [a] collision of interests, but especially from the baneful effects of faction. In that case the most I can say is that if my country is destined in my day to encounter the horrors of anarchy, every power of mind and body which I possess will be exerted in support of the government under which I live and which has been fairly sanctioned by my countrymen. I should be unworthy [of] the character of a republican or an honest man, if I withheld my best and most zealous efforts, because I opposed the Constitution in its unaltered form.”
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Henry hinted at his resistance to the Jay Treaty with Britain only at the end of the letter. He told Washington that if “evil, instead of good, grows out of the measures you adopt,” he hoped people would judge Washington's motives fairly. Although Henry had opposed Washington on the Constitution, and although he clearly had doubts about the Jay Treaty, his respect for Washington would never allow him to break publicly with the president.
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The Jay Treaty was harmful to the nation, Henry thought, but its negotiation and adoption accorded with the tenets Madison had set out in the Constitution. In a 1796 letter to Betsey, Henry made clear that although he did not approve of the treaty—“a very bad one indeed”—he thought it hypocritical for Madison and supporters of the Constitution to deny the president and Senate's exclusive right to make treaties. Republicans in Congress were trying to stop the House of Representatives from funding appropriations required to enforce the treaty, which would effectively give the House a voice in its ratification. But Henry had no sympathy for such intrigues; Madison, he believed, was simply reaping what he had sown.
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Despite Henry's repeated refusals, offers for public service persisted. Harry Lee continued to tell Washington that Henry might be willing to accept some kind of appointment. In December 1795, Lee invited Henry to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, an office recently made vacant by John Jay's resignation. (Jay, remarkably, had served simultaneously as chief justice and special envoy to Great Britain.) Henry hesitated to respond, to the growing irritation of George Washington, who did not like offering positions to people not certain to accept. After waiting two weeks for a response, Washington scolded Lee and told him that the delay was “embarrassing in the extreme.” He had other appointments waiting to be made, and the Supreme Court's meeting was only weeks away. Henry ultimately declined. Amazingly, he still crossed Washington's
mind as a possible successor to James Monroe as ambassador in Paris in July 1796, although he was sure Henry would never accept the position.
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Thomas Jefferson was convinced that Washington was offering these positions even though he knew Henry would refuse. The Federalists, he thought, wanted to create the impression that Henry was on their side. “Most assiduous court is paid to P.H.,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe. “He has been offered every thing which they knew he would not accept.” As Washington's frustration with Lee showed, however, the president actually wanted Henry in the administration and was not much interested in making symbolic job offers. He saw Henry as a relatively nonpartisan figure on foreign affairs, neither strongly anti-French nor pro-French, who would not jeopardize the administration's official policy of neutrality. Of course, Henry had no fondness for the British. He expected that the British would renew their oppression of the United States whenever the opportunity presented itself.
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BUT THE FRENCH WERE HARDLY an acceptable ally, either. Henry was increasingly worried about the emerging anti-Christian implications of the French Revolution, as well as the deistic attacks on Christianity that many of that revolution's friends championed. Increasingly serious about his own faith, Henry believed more fervently than ever that a strong republic needed robust religion to preserve it from corruption, turmoil, and violence.

Many traditional Christians in the United States had initially welcomed the French Revolution as a movement akin to their own, and one that would undermine the long-despised Catholic Church. But the French Revolution began to take an ugly anti-Christian turn in 1792, with the massacre of hundreds of priests and the conversion of some churches into Temples of Reason.

To many observers, the anti-Christianism of the French Revolution coincided with the rise of a militant new deism in America, a surge symbolized and incited by the 1794 publication of Thomas Paine's
The Age of Reason
. This book by the former hero of the American Revolution attacked traditional Christianity as a tool of political oppression. Here was Paine's deistic creed:

Paine's assault found an eager audience in the United States. Although it was originally published in France, where Paine had gone to support the Revolution,
The Age of Reason
appeared in seventeen American editions between 1794 and 1796.
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The rising anti-Christian spirit of the French Revolution and the threat of deism confirmed that Henry could never align with America's pro-French Jeffersonian party. Aside from his personal history with Jefferson, and his political battles with Madison, Henry increasingly believed that he needed to defend traditional Christianity against Francophile deism. That meant keeping his distance from Jefferson's party, if not openly siding with the Federalists.
His deepening concern for Christian fidelity was reflected in a lengthy 1796 letter to Betsey:

Despite his occasionally inconsistent application of virtue in his land deals and legal practice, Henry continued to believe that the success of the republic depended upon the power of virtue, which he saw as rooted in traditional religion. For Henry, the publication of Paine's
Age of Reason
was troubling because it essentially encouraged public sinfulness. Once freed from the restraints of the Bible and morality, he believed, skeptical Americans would naturally pursue selfishness and immorality. As he said in his letter to Betsey, Henry worried that he had not sufficiently identified himself as a practicing, traditional Christian: