Patrick Henry (27 page)

A number of speakers argued against Henry's characterization of the Constitution, and one of them challenged the ethics of Henry's strategy in fighting it. Henry Lee, known as “Light Horse Harry” for his work as a cavalry officer during the Revolution, threw aside Virginia's reverence for its aging patriot hero. Henry, he suggested,
was a fearmonger. “The éclat and brilliancy which have distinguished [Henry], the honors with which he has been dignified, and the brilliant talents which he has so often displayed, have attracted my respect and attention. On so important an occasion and before so respectable a body, I expected a new display of his powers of oratory: But instead of proceeding to investigate the merits of the new plan of government, the worthy character informed us of horrors which he felt, of apprehensions in his mind, which make him tremblingly fearful of the fate of the commonwealth: Mr. Chairman, was it proper to appeal to the fear of this House?”
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Indignant, Henry shot to his feet and gave his longest speech at the convention. Fear for the republic's fate was justified, he warned. America's liberty was tenuous, at risk of being sacrificed in the name of national power. His voice booming over the packed galleries ringing the “spacious and airy” wooden hall, he reminded the convention of his long experience in such matters, summoning them to the days of the Stamp Act: “Liberty [is] the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else.... The time has been, when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American: But suspicions have gone forth—suspicions of my integrity—publicly reported that my professions are not real—23 years ago I was supposed a traitor to my country: I was then said to be a bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country: I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger: But, Sir, a number of people of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true.” Throughout his career, Henry would be attacked and ridiculed for opposing national government authority—both British and American.
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Central to the debate over governmental power was the issue of a strong national military. The promoters of the Constitution made
much of the ostensible threat posed by Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786–87. This uprising of poverty-stricken farmers against foreclosure courts, while relatively minor in scale, had become a symbol of America's need for a more robust military to protect it from domestic and foreign enemies. Washington lamented the chaos spawned by Shays and concluded from the episode that “mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government.” But Henry doubted the significance of the rebellion, reminding the convention that the Confederation government had possessed sufficient strength to defeat the British during the Revolution. One admirer wrote that Henry “obviated the mighty bugbears raised to frighten and intimidate the weak and wavering into a speedy and implicit adoption.” Shays was chief among those bugbears.
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Henry believed that the convention's quest for a more powerful military reflected no real insecurity, but revealed instead the Federalists' nationalistic dream of American glory. History showed that the search for glory often cost a people their rights, Henry declared. “Those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power and splendor, have also fallen a sacrifice, and been the victims of their own folly: While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom. My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights.” The Constitution's defenders had taken America's independence as a license to forge an empire, according to Henry. The Federalists, he warned, believed that “some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things: When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, Sir, was then the primary object.” Empire building required power, but leaders possessed of consolidated power could not be trusted to preserve liberty.
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Challenging Madison's claim that the separate branches of government and the federated combination of national and state
authority would safeguard against an aggregation of power, Henry averred that the Constitution allowed the government to control the governed, with little hope of controlling itself. The Philadelphia convention foolishly assumed that all politicians would be virtuous men, and to a Christian republican like Henry, who was well aware of the human capacity to sin, this was a fatal error. “Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism: there will be no checks, no real balances, in this government: what can avail your specious imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances?” Nothing could check a national government entrusted with vast military might and the unlimited authority to tax.
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Indeed, Henry declaimed, the Constitution represented an outright repudiation of the Revolution: “Here is a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain. It is as radical, if in this transition, our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states be relinquished: and cannot we plainly see, that this is actually the case? The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change.”
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TO HENRY, THE PROBLEMS within the Constitution did not simply require the addition of a Bill of Rights but a tangible weakening of the proposed national government. The office of president particularly worried Henry. The Articles of Confederation provided no executive office, and the Revolution had ostensibly rejected the principle of monarchy. Yet in the Constitution, Americans were asked to accept a strong executive office that, to Henry, smacked of a kingship. “The Constitution is said to have beautiful features,” he proclaimed, “but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful: among other deformities, it
has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy: and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your President may easily become King.”
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Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists sneered at this kind of accusation. “Calculating upon the aversion of the people to monarchy,” Hamilton wrote in
The Federalist
, “they have endeavoured to enlist all their jealousies and apprehensions in opposition to the intended president of the United States; not merely as the embryo, but as the full grown progeny of that detested parent.” Hamilton reminded opponents that the president was fundamentally unlike a king in his accountability to the people and to the other branches of government. Kings were not elected to four-year terms, and they did not face the threat of impeachment for criminal behavior. The president could veto legislation, but Congress could override his vetoes. His senior appointments required the approval of the Senate. He could not dominate the government or neglect the wishes of the people, the Federalists argued.
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Henry did not trust these assurances. His primary concern was the president's command of the armed forces. Inevitably, a person elected president would use the military to run roughshod over the republic. “The President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke.” (At this point, the stenographer apparently began struggling to keep up with Henry's torrent of criticism against the president, finally noting in parenthesis that “Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President's enslaving America.”) Henry could not fathom why Americans, having just rejected the British king, would replace him with a president, a king in everything but name.
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The Federalists saw the Constitution as the only way to save the American Union, but Henry saw it as the primary threat to that
union. He went so far as to suggest that since the majority of American states had already accepted the Constitution, secession might be Virginia's only remaining option. Not that he opposed a union of the states: Henry recognized the advantages of a properly confederated country. But a unified nation was not his top priority. “The first thing I have at heart is American liberty; the second thing is American Union.” So Henry flatly declared that unless the Constitution was radically amended, Virginians should never accept it, and they should consider leaving the Union unless their concerns were addressed.
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Henry was not alone among Americans in considering secession from the Union an option in the face of a tyrannical government, either in the Revolutionary era or in the future. (The patriots had, after all, just seceded from the British Empire because they believed that the king and Parliament had become oppressive.) He raised the prospect of secession even before the Constitution's adoption. Seven decades later, acting on similar anxieties, the leaders of the South would follow through on this long-standing principle.

 

AS THE CONVENTION WORE ON, Henry became rambling and slightly desperate. Henry probably knew he was fighting a losing battle, at least on the question of ratification. He was also personally distracted. Reportedly he received news in the middle of a long address that Dorothea had given birth to Alexander, their sixth child together. In a rare glimpse of his personal feelings during the summer of 1788, Henry wrote to his daughter Elizabeth Aylett on June 11, telling her that personal and political matters were filling him with turmoil. The birth of his child and the proceedings at the convention deprived him of “any peace of mind 'til I can get home.” Another mouth to feed! thought the fifty-two-year-old Henry. Yet here he was battling again in the legislative arena, instead of making money and taking care of his family.
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Although the sentiment at the convention was clearly turning toward ratification, the Federalists remained alarmed by Henry's vehement and eloquent opposition. A letter published in northern newspapers claimed that Henry was only trying to “move the passions of the ignorant.” Governor Randolph complained that if the convention allowed Henry's loquacious speeches to continue, it would take six months to decide the question instead of six weeks. As the supporters of the Constitution sought to counter Henry's arguments, Randolph played an essential role; for even though he had refused to sign the Constitution at the convention, he now believed that Virginia had no choice but to ratify it and trust that the Congress would amend it. Refusing to ratify would mean disunion, according to Randolph, a price that he—unlike Henry—was not willing to pay.
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James Madison listened to Henry and seethed. This plan of government, so carefully wrought in Philadelphia, did not deserve these kinds of gratuitous attacks, he thought. But Madison found that he could not say much more than what he had already said in
The Federalist
, especially because he was quite ill. What he called a “bilious attack” rendered him weak and mostly silent. He did occasionally reply directly to Henry's fulminations, as on June 6, when he lamented to the delegates that Henry was only appealing to fear: “We ought not to address our arguments to the feelings and passions, but to those understandings and judgments which were selected by the people of this country, to decide this great question, by a calm and rational investigation.” Madison also challenged Henry's contention that there was no crisis under the Articles of Confederation; the calling of the Constitutional Convention reflected a consensus that major modifications were needed in the national government.
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Henry was not persuaded. He asserted that the Constitution represented a betrayal of the people of Virginia. He bristled at Edmund
Randolph, who in an earlier speech had spoken of the common people as a “herd,” not capable of ruling themselves, rebuking Randolph for his incautious statement denigrating the citizens whom Henry believed he championed. Randolph did not try to defend himself, saying instead that he used the term “herd” only to describe the very multitude of people in the state. His was a common use of the term at the time, but to Henry, its disrespectful tone spoke of the dangers of this Constitution, which he feared would reduce common Virginians “from respectable independent citizens, to abject, dependent subjects or slaves.” Once again, Henry clamored only for the freedom and independence of white citizens, making no public association between the enslavement he feared for his fellow free Virginians and the slavery they practiced; he intimately knew but did not mention the awful realities of the slavery already in Virginia's midst.
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Once again he raised the question of the Mississippi River, saying that a breakup of the Union would not happen “unless a Constitution be adopted which will enable the government to plant enemies on our backs.” Approving the Constitution would mean losing the Mississippi, because a majority of northern states would be willing to cede control of the river to the Spanish. He firmly believed that the northern states would not protect the navigation rights of southerners, to whom it mattered most. (On this point, Henry was soon proven wrong, as the national Congress passed resolutions in September repudiating Jay's Mississippi treaty and asserting America's right to navigate the river. This was part of Congress's effort to garner support for the Constitution from southerners.) He cited the Mississippi debate as a prime example of the danger of trusting in the benevolence of politicians. “Did we not know of the fallibility of human nature, we might rely on the present structure of this government” to protect the interests of the southern states, he warned. “But the depraved nature of man is well known.”
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