Patrick Henry (33 page)

Increasingly unwell in recent years, Henry had grown sicker in early March, before the offer of the French appointment arrived, when he had taken a twenty-mile trip to the Charlotte County courthouse to deliver a speech supporting his election to the legislature. The records of that speech are not very reliable, but it seems certain that the feeble Henry denounced the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and the peril to the Union. It is less clear what he said regarding the Alien and Sedition Acts; he probably expressed regret over their adoption but advised the audience that disunion was not the solution, at least not at that time. One source records Henry as saying that “the Alien and Sedition Laws were only the fruit of that Constitution the adoption of which he opposed.” Henry won the election because of the strength of his personal popularity, and his mediating position on the Virginia Resolution and the Alien and Sedition Acts.
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Thomas Jefferson, who only a few years before had tried to reconcile with his old nemesis, was disgusted with Henry's election and his affiliation with the Federalists. Henry's “apostasy must be unaccountable to those who do not know all the recesses of his heart,”
he wrote. Jefferson must have counted himself as among those who understood Henry's heart. His characterization of Henry's election as “apostasy” has framed the historical discussion of Henry's views in the 1790s. If we accept Jefferson's view that Henry's election as a Federalist represented an embrace of that party's national crusade against free speech and the campaign against America's former allies in France, then Henry had turned his back on states' rights, even tacitly accepting the Alien and Sedition Acts.
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Although Henry's journey from anti-federalist to Federalist might have appalled Jefferson, it is important to remember that the political alignments of 1799 were completely different from those of 1788. In the intervening decade, Henry accepted the process by which the Constitution had been adopted, and he was inclined to embrace stronger national government as part of the price Virginia should pay for having ratified the Constitution. His change of view was partly motivated also by personal feeling; Henry's old battles with Madison and Jefferson colored his political opinions. Since the early 1780s, if Thomas Jefferson was in favor of something, Henry was likely to be against it. And the feeling was mutual. Beyond such considerations, however, we have to remember that Henry was a pragmatist. His 1799 position was not the first permutation in his stance toward the role and strength of government; he had supported a more powerful governor's office in Virginia during the Revolution.

For Henry, the biggest change of circumstances since ratification was the pressing threat of French anti-Christianism. Henry had come to see French deism and atheism as the greatest menaces to the republic, and if fighting the advocates of France meant tolerating the more dubious policies of the Washington and Adams administrations, so be it. Henry was not an ideological purist, but neither was he an apostate. For him, local government best cultivated the virtuous republic, which was his ultimate priority. To Henry in the late 1780s, the greatest threat to republican government was
the Constitution, but once the new form of government was adopted, he believed he should work within its framework to maintain the nation's liberty. Madison had promised that the government possessed sufficient balance among its branches, and between state and national sovereignty, to preserve liberty, insisting to his anti-federalist critics that the powers of the national government were strictly limited. Madison also delivered on his promise to add the Bill of Rights, which further restrained the national government. Ironically, by the late 1790s, Henry seemed more willing to accede to the power of the national government, while Madison and Jefferson were pursuing radical actions to check governmental might. Madison, then, had changed course as dramatically as Henry. Madison was the person most responsible for crafting the formidable new government; now he was doing all he could to impede it.

By the late 1790s, Henry had turned his attention away from the threat of the national government to the assault on traditional virtue and religion associated with the French Revolution. For Henry, a broadly construed Constitution was a structural hazard to liberty, but French heresy was a moral poison that would ruin the republic. The Constitution, as amended, represented a potential risk, but Paine's and Jefferson's skepticism was a clear and present danger. Henry could countenance expanded national power under Washington and Adams, if they kept the French menace at bay. But Henry's ideal republic still featured strong local government and a virtuous people: those twin priorities always anchored Henry's political principles.

Henry hoped to defend those beliefs one last time in the Virginia legislature, but he never got his chance. His chronic illnesses and fevers escalated when he suffered an intestinal disruption that may have been associated with kidney stones, or “the gravel.” Dorothea recalled that when Henry died on June 6, 1799, “he met death with firmness, and in full confidence that through the merits of a bleeding Savior that his sins would be pardoned.”

Patrick Henry preceded Washington in death by seven months. The political lives of Jefferson and Madison, on the other hand, still had a long course to run: in just a year and a half they would begin a combined sixteen-year tenure in the president's office, with Jefferson's triumph over John Adams. In a last jab at his great nemesis, Dorothea wrote, “I wish the great Jefferson and all the heroes of the deistical party could have seen my ever dear and honored husband pay his last debt to nature.” Henry was sixty-three years old.
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PATRICK HENRY REMAINED a controversial figure literally until the day he died. Even as Henry was passing from this life, the rabidly Republican
Vermont Gazette
published an attack accusing him of being in thrall to the Federalists. Responding to rumors that Henry might replace Adams as the Federalist candidate for president in the 1800 election, the writer suggested that Federalists had manipulated the great patriot in his old age: “his mind no longer quick to the apprehension of worldly deceit, the insuspicious temper of his dotage, or second childhood has made him a dupe.” To the end, the mere possibility of Henry's return to the national political stage made news and caused consternation across the country.
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Along with his critics, Henry still had many friends and admirers, as revealed in his obituary in the
Virginia Gazette
:

This eulogy captured the great themes in Henry's career: liberty, virtue, and patriotism.

Henry's death might have been expected to cool political animosity toward him among Virginia Republicans, but even months later, at the end of 1799, the bitterness lingered. In the Virginia House of Delegates, a resolution honoring Henry for his unsurpassed eloquence in the cause of liberty and virtue, and sanctioning the placement of a marble bust of Henry in the legislative hall, was tabled by a significant majority.
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Time and Republican ascendancy did soothe some bad feelings toward Henry. By the early nineteenth century, he had begun to develop his now-familiar posthumous reputation as the greatest orator of the Revolution. This portrait was definitively painted by William Wirt's admiring 1817 biography,
Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry
, which focused much more on Henry's natural brilliance as a speaker than the content of his thought. Wirt's Henry was a wondrous phenomenon, the “Orator of Nature” who spurred the Revolution by his prodigious talents alone. The book was hugely successful, with twenty-five editions published by 1871.
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Wirt corresponded extensively with Henry's old nemesis Jefferson about the biography. Jefferson was exceedingly frank in his assessment. Jefferson admitted that the two men had been friends until
1781, when they parted ways politically and personally. Jefferson commended Henry as the “greatest orator that ever lived.” He credited Henry for being “the man who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution.” But his negative views of Henry were blistering. He considered Henry “avaricious and rotten hearted. His two great passions were the love of money and of fame, but when these came into competition the former predominated.” Wirt latched on to Jefferson's admiring quotations for the biography, but he omitted the bad ones. The posthumous exaltation of such Founders as Henry and Washington often meant that bitter feelings and questions about character had to be excised from the historical record. (No one, until recently, received as whitewashed biographical treatments as Jefferson himself.) But Jefferson was deeply irritated with Wirt's hagiographic treatment of Henry; the former president was still complaining about the book among guests at Monticello as late as 1824.
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Americans have always revered Henry for his brilliant oratory. The focus on Henry's speeches, especially the “Liberty or Death” speech, resulted from the unanimous testimony that he was an unequaled political speaker. But the celebration of Henry's oratory may have also resulted from a certain discomfort with the content of his thought, especially his opposition to the Constitution.

Americans did not entirely forget about Henry's ideas, however. Especially in the era of the Civil War, partisans on both sides of the conflict employed Henry and his beliefs to support their own causes. Hinton Rowan Helper, a native North Carolinian and celebrated antislavery author, cited Henry to open a chapter on southern antislavery sentiment in his best-selling
Impending Crisis of the South
(1857). Helper noted that Henry and the other major Virginia Founders lamented the immorality of slavery. If those patriots were living in 1857, Helper speculated that there was “scarcely a slaveholder between the Potomac and the mouth of the Mississippi, that
would not burn to pounce upon them with bludgeons, bowie-knives and pistols!” He believed the new southern slave masters were so blindly devoted to what had become euphemized as “the peculiar institution” that they had turned their backs on the antislavery tradition of Henry and the other southern Founding Fathers. One could certainly find antislavery statements from early in Henry's career, but Helper exaggerated the extent of Henry's revulsion, which never took hold in action against slavery.
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Conversely, Confederate apologists used Henry's memory to highlight what they saw as the deficiencies of the Constitution and its disempowerment of the states. Especially after the war, southerners pointed to Henry's speeches at the Virginia ratifying convention to demonstrate that potential for the national government's domination was built into the Constitution itself. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, wrote admiringly of Henry in his
Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States
. Henry “possessed one of those wonderful minds which, by a sort of instinct or supernatural faculty, scents the approaches of power, even in the distance. This instinct, or far-seeing superhuman endowment, prompted him to sound the alarm when the Constitution was at first presented to him.” Stephens asserted, however, that Henry feared future misapplications of the Constitution, rather than its original intent. But other Confederates took a more negative view of the Constitution itself. Their perspective was probably closer to Henry's than Stephens's was. Henry's descendant Patrick Henry Fontaine, writing in the pro-southern
DeBow's Review
in 1870, argued that all of Henry's predictions about the Constitution's dangers had come true. To Fontaine, Henry had spoken prophetically at the ratifying convention: “He saw clearly that the Constitution was artfully framed to place the sovereign power of the United States in the hands of a majority of the people of the great consolidated government, which would absorb the
rights of the several states.” Fontaine believed that Henry, more than any other prominent southerner, grasped the way the Constitution imperiled the principles of the Revolution. In his estimation, Henry was the greatest statesman of all the Founders, certainly above Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton, and even above the beloved Washington. To Fontaine, Henry had won primacy in that pantheon precisely because he maintained ideological consistency as both a patriot and an anti-federalist.
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Fontaine's opinions of Henry as an anti-federalist were those of an unvarnished Confederate, yet he was right to say that Henry did indeed oppose the Constitution because he perceived the new government as a betrayal of the Revolution. However, most observers—even sympathetic biographers—have agreed with the historian and U.S. senator from Indiana, Albert J. Beveridge, who in 1900 said that although Henry was sincere in his opposition to the Constitution, his sincerity did not make him right. To Beveridge, Henry was struggling against America's national destiny, “the onward forces which were making of the American people the master nation of the world.” For many Americans who were aware of the entire trajectory of his public life, the Henry of historical memory became a great patriot who briefly lost his way in the late 1780s.
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