Lion of Liberty

It was quite natural, then, that spectators flocked to Hanover County Courthouse on December 1, 1763, for the inaugural courtroom appearance of the Reverend Henry's nephew, Patrick Henry Jr., as defense lawyer in a major case. Although he had spent three years practicing mostly "paper law" (deeds, wills, and such) and defending petty thieves, this was his first appearance in the theatrical setting of a major courtroom case. Headlined in the press as the "Parsons' Cause," the case had far-reaching religious and political implications for both Virginia and Mother England, where the official Church of England supported itself by taxing landowners in each parish, regardless of whether they were Anglicans or not. In the Parsons' Cause, a Church of England priest sued the vestrymen and landowners of his parish—almost all of them small farmers—for failure to pay all their taxes in 1758. If Henry lost the case, many would lose their homes and lands.

Henry had started well enough, shooting to his feet to object when appropriate, and successfully countering his opponents' objections during jury selection, and he'd done well enough during the main trial. But now it was time for his closing argument, and, as an eerie stillness settled over the courtroom, he moved to center stage, bowed his head, and stared at the floor. Seconds went by . . . a minute . . . then another. . . . He seemed at a loss for words. Inquietude spread across the room; spectators exchanged puzzled looks with one another, shifting in their seats uncomfortably. The plaintiff's attorney broke into a snide grin; defendants groaned, and Patrick Henry's father—the presiding judge—slumped in his chair in embarrassment—his expectations for his son all but crushed.

Judge John Henry finally shook his head in despair and prepared to pound his gavel and end his son's travail with a summary judgment for the plaintiff. It was a difficult moment. . . .

Neither he nor the rest of Henry's family could understand why twenty-seven-year-old Patrick was flirting with failure again—as he had in three previous careers—twice as a storekeeper and once as a farmer. He was intelligent, hard-working, cheerful, personable, learned, extremely talented in innumerable ways and, above all, he came from solid, well-educated, hard-working, and successful Scottish and Welsh stock.

The judge, his father, had been born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to a devoutly Anglican family "more respected for their good sense and superior education than for their riches."¹ At fifteen, John Henry had won a Latin composition prize and a scholarship to Aberdeen University, where he spent four years before emigrating to the United States at the behest of John Syme, a boyhood friend and Aberdeen schoolmate. Young Syme had sailed to America three years earlier and grew rich growing tobacco and speculating in land. His education, erudition, and wealth propelled him into Virginia's highest social and political circles—and such sinecures as a militia colonelcy and membership in the House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature. At Syme's urging, John Henry followed his friend to America in 1727, learned surveying and, in partnership with Syme, began speculating in land. Surveying skills were essential in Virginia, where tobacco crops consumed soil nutrients after four to six years and forced planters to find virgin lands in which to plant new crops. Speculators joined the search, of course, and those who were first to claim virgin lands reaped the most profits reselling claims to planters.

Within four years, John Henry had accumulated more than 15,000 acres in three counties, including a 1,200-acre plantation in Hanover County, about sixty miles upriver from Virginia's capital at Williamsburg. In 1731, John Syme died, and after letting two years elapse in the interest of decency, Henry married Syme's "most attractive" widow, Sarah. Of Welsh descent, she was a devout Presbyterian, and brought a dowry of 6,000 acres to the marriage, along with a step-son, John Syme, Jr. Although John Henry scorned her religion, he tolerated his wife's heresy in silence, given all the other benefits she brought to their marriage.

"A person of a lively and cheerful conversation," with "remarkable intellectual gifts" and "an unusual command of language," Sarah traced her lineage to two of Virginia's oldest, most accomplished families—the Winstons and Dabneys—who welcomed John Henry into Hanover County's ruling circle by arranging his appointments as a vestryman of the Church of England, chief justice of the county court, and colonel of the militia. As a vestryman and chief justice, John Henry became one of Hanover County's most powerful figures—only nine years after his arrival in America. To reinforce his authority he maneuvered relatives into six of the twelve county judgeships and his older brother, Reverend Patrick Henry, into the pulpit of St. Paul's Anglican church. With his brother governing its spiritual life and John Henry its political life, Hanover County evolved into nothing less than a Henry family fiefdom.

John and Sarah Henry had nine children—two sons and seven daughters—of whom the oldest was William, born in 1735 and named for Sarah Henry's father William Winston. Patrick Henry—named for his priestly uncle—followed a year later, on May 29, 1736. In 1750, with a third child on the way, the Henry family moved from what had been the Syme home into a larger house twenty-two miles from Richmond on an elevation—"Mount Brilliant"—by the South Anna River, where Patrick Henry, the future lawyer, would spend his formative years.

Patrick Henry grew up "an indolent, dreamy, frolicsome creature," according to William Wirt, a family friend, who said the boy harbored

Although Wirt called Henry's "aversions to study . . . invincible, and his faculties benumbed by indolence,"³ one of Henry's boyhood friends portrays him as simply a normal country boy. "He was remarkably fond of fun . . . but his fun was innocent, and I never discovered in any one action of his childhood or youth the least spice of ill-nature or malevolence; he was remarkably fond of hunting, fishing, and playing on the violin."⁴

Henry's future brother-in-law, Samuel Meredith, who was four years older and lived nearby, remembered him as

Fiddling, of course, was one of the most popular pastimes in early America. Fiddlers such as Henry seldom read music, relying instead on memory and improvisational skills to learn the tunes they played. He also learned to play the flute, English guitar, and harpsichord.

Like most country boys, he learned to fish in his early years, and, by the time he was ten, his father had taught him to shoot a muzzle-loading musket with unfailing accuracy—and add tasty small game to the family fare. Like most literate parents in the colonies, the Henrys taught their two boys to read, write, and calculate, using the Scriptures and a variety of literature and periodicals. John Henry taught his sons Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, and science—and the histories of Rome, England, and the American colonies. Sarah improved their skills in reading and writing and exposed them to English literature. "He was delighted with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," one friend recalled. "I have known him to read several hours together, lying with his back upon a bed. He had a most retentive memory, making whatever he read his own."⁶

By the time Patrick Henry was fifteen, he and his brother had read the Odyssey in Greek, mastered Horace, Virgil, and Livy in Latin, and conversed well enough in colloquial Latin to chat with educated Europeans who could not speak English.

Despite his fine education, Patrick Henry grew up with the coarse mountain accent of the wild country boys that lived nearby. "Mr. Henry was remarkably well acquainted with mankind," his son-in-law Judge Spencer Roane explained. "This faculty arose from mingling freely with mankind and from a keen sense of observation. . . . Nothing escaped his attention."⁷

Unlike Tidewater Virginians, Piedmonters were a secular lot, chafing under taxes they had to pay to the Anglican Church, resenting restrictions on non-Anglican religious practices, hating government agents, and mocking both royalty and nobility in the bawdy folk tunes they sang at local taverns. Although baptized in the Anglican Church of his father and uncle, Patrick Henry also attended his mother's Presbyterian services, where he learned the differences between autocracy and democracy. Anglicans pledged unquestioned allegiance to the king and the Bishop of London, who appointed all parish priests; Presbyterians governed their own churches and elected their own ministers. It was the Presbyterian Church that "nourished . . . his partiality for the dissenters of the Established Church," according to Edmund Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson and scion of one of Virginia's oldest and most powerful families. "From a repetition of . . . the history of their sufferings," Randolph said, Henry began "descanting . . . on the martyrs in the cause of liberty."⁸ By attending two churches, Henry received a broad-based religious education, learning of the infallibility of King and Church in his father's Anglican church and the fallibility of King and Church in his mother's Presbyterian church.

When Patrick Henry turned fifteen, John Henry lacked the money to send his son to an English or Scottish university, but reasoned that a university education would be of little practical use in the West. He sent young Patrick to work in a country store to learn how to run a business. A year later he helped Patrick and William open a store of their own, where Virginia's complex barter economy put the boys at an immediate disadvantage. Ninety-five percent of Americans lived on farms and bought what they needed with a jug of whiskey, a bag of grain, a piglet, a chicken, a land certificate, or a personal note. By the end of their first year, the Henry boys had accumulated a stack of IOUs, but no liquid assets to replenish their merchandise, and they went out of business.

In the fall of 1754, Patrick Henry, now eighteen, married sixteen-year-old Sarah Shelton, a girl he had known since early childhood. Sarah's grandfather was a bookseller and the first publisher of the Virginia Gazette. Her father was not only a successful Hanover County planter, he owned the thriving inn and tavern opposite the Hanover County Courthouse, on the Stage Road from Fredericksburg to Williamsburg. After Patrick Henry's uncle married them, Sarah's father gave the newlyweds a 300-acre farm adjoining his own, along with six slaves. From the beginning, however, their lives on the farm seemed destined for disaster. Years of successive tobacco crops had depleted soil nutrients and left the land yielding low-quality weed. In 1757, Henry harvested only 6.5 bushels of tobacco, for which he received just over £10 pounds ($610 today) at market. Making matters worse, their six slaves were mere boys—children of recently imported slaves. Unskilled and unable to speak English, they were of little use to Patrick, who nonetheless had to feed, clothe, and house them—while he himself performed the "labor on his farm with his own hands," according to his grandson.⁹

Nor was Sarah's life any easier. Within a year, their first child, Martha, was born. A boy, John, followed the next year, and a third—another boy, William—was on his way in 1757 when fire consumed their farmhouse and its contents. Patrick, Sarah, and the children moved into an empty cabin and tried to halt their financial free fall. Patrick sold his slaves to furnish the cabin and buy a stock of goods to open another store, then hired a clerk to tend the store while he worked the fields and Sarah tended the children and kitchen garden.

He could not have picked a worse time to open a store: A drought had devastated the area's harvest and left farmers without means to buy necessities, let alone extras or luxuries. At the end of his first year, Patrick Henry had collected a mere £10. During the first half of his second year, only twenty-six customers set foot in the store. In debt himself, without capital to buy more inventory, with a wife, a newborn, and two other children to feed, he closed the store and moved his family into the attic of his father-in-law's inn, across the road from the Hanover County Courthouse. In exchange for room and board, Henry tended bar and entertained customers with his fiddle, hiring an overseer to continue wringing whatever he could out of the farmland.

In the winter of 1759-1760, Patrick went by himself to several Christmas celebrations to search for job opportunities, leaving Sarah alone at home to mind the children—a lonely, isolated role she would play almost without variation the rest of her life.

"My acquaintance with Mr. Henry commenced in the winter of 1759- 1760," Thomas Jefferson recalled. On his way to enroll at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was spending his Christmas holidays on the 6,000-acre Hanover plantation of the wealthy shipbuilder Nathaniel West Dandridge, a son-in-law of the colonial governor and a cousin of George Washington's fiancée, Martha Dandridge Custis. A neighbor of John Henry, Dandridge was a close friend of the judge, and young Patrick "was at home as one of the family," according to Jefferson.