Patrick Henry (3 page)

From his reading, from absorbing his father's principles, and through the very air he breathed in a Virginia populated by people who had escaped an Old World rife with conflict, oppression, and lack of individual opportunity, Patrick Henry believed that the imperfection of men made fragile the kind of liberty he and his family enjoyed. It was in the nature of human beings, he learned, always to grasp for what was not theirs, seeking dominion over others in a way that threatened the common good and undermined the stability of the state. Good government took the realities of human nature into account by balancing power between the interests and branches within it, yet even the best government was subject to corruption. To young Patrick Henry, the men of a republic (in his era, women would normally not have been included in this political
framework) were summoned to elect to office men of virtue, then monitor them to forestall any advances toward tyranny. Public officials were bound to act in the best interests of the republic as a whole, not to bolster their personal fortunes or to aggrandize the power or riches of their cronies. The best public servants did not need to hang on to political power, nor did they aspire to a career in politics. When the people no longer urgently needed their services, men of integrity would step away from the political arena, retiring, like Roman heroes of old, to private life on the farm. Those who sought to glorify themselves through government should be voted out. Or, in extreme cases, they should be overthrown.

The ground of good government was good men. Henry's father also taught his son to cherish the individual virtues of integrity, industriousness, and independence. No one could ever achieve these qualities perfectly, but over time they could form the essential substance of a person's character. According to John Henry and the thinkers who influenced him, men could cultivate the great virtues by practicing Christian devotions, studying the heroes of history, and behaving honorably among their peers. Such ideas were prevalent in Britain and America at the time, forming the ethical system of the colonies. In 1773, Philip Vickers Fithian, a tutor at the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, would observe that the men “best esteemed and most applauded” in the colony were those who attended to their work with honesty and diligence. Fithian averred that widespread indebtedness had alerted Virginians to the dangers of overconsumption, inspiring “the people of fortune who are the pattern of all behavior here, to be frugal, and moderate.” Hard work and moderation would lead not only to prosperity, but also to personal independence from the undue influences of others. No man could master a gentleman of virtue. This moral vision, instilled in Patrick Henry by his father and his times, would drive Henry throughout his career.
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Virtue in action, however, was fraught with tension in the world of colonial Virginia. For example, self-determination was ironically connected with luxury and consumption. The genteel families of Virginia displayed their independence from outside influence through their ability to wear, eat, and own what they wanted. Autonomy as a virtue would be harder to exercise for those Virginians leading hardscrabble lives—people whose livelihoods relied on the munificence of others and who were of a lower economic class than those who could afford the trappings of gentility.

More happily, virtuous independence did not mean that a man of means could not have some fun—entertainment was a critical part of the social world of the planters. Patrick Henry loved the typical recreations of colonial Virginia youths, especially hunting. One contemporary recalled that Henry was “remarkably fond of his gun.” He relished music and dancing, and played the flute and violin. He liked reading, but not all of his books were as serious as the historical works his father taught him. As a young man, Henry enjoyed the comic novel
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, as well), which he would read for hours while lying on his bed.
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With this range of pastimes, Patrick fit right in with the festive culture of eighteenth-century Hanover County. Gentlemen and middling planters loved a good party, as was evidenced in a newspaper notice published the year of Henry's birth. “On Tuesday next, (being St. Andrew's Day [November 30],) some merry disposed gentlemen of [Hanover County], design to celebrate that festival, by setting up diverse prizes to be contended for in the following manner, (to wit,) a neat hunting saddle, with a fine broad cloth housing, fringed and flowered, etc. to be run for (the quarter,) by any number of horses and mares: A fine [Italian] Cremona fiddle to be played for, by any number of country fiddlers . . . with diverse other considerable prizes, for dancing, singing, football play, jumping, wrestling, etc.
particularly a fine pair of silk stockings to be given to the handsomest maid upon the green, to be judged of by the company.” These events typified genteel Virginia: racing, fiddling, wrestling, and even a beauty pageant. A boastful newspaper advertisement publicizing a similar event the following year made clear that these events were not to become drunken brawls. “Hanover County is large, well seated, and inhabited by a considerable number of gentlemen, merchants, and creditable planters, who, being desirous of cultivating friendship, and innocent mirth, proposed an annual meeting of the best sort, of both sexes.” The elite tobacco planters—the “best sort”—were the primary funders of the entertainments, but middling planters such as John Henry were welcome as well.
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Europeans had long scheduled such revelries to coincide with the end of the harvest, but St. Andrew's Day had a special appeal to the Scots of the Virginia backcountry, because St. Andrew was the patron saint of Scotland. The 1737 ad made clear that organizers held the celebration on St. Andrew's Day to include Scottish immigrants, such as John Syme and John Henry, in order to “commemorate the patron of their country.” Some of the great Tidewater planters resented the new Scottish merchants and farmers, viewing the Scots as competitors in the tobacco industry. But backcountry Hanover County planters seemed to have few qualms about making the Symes and Henrys part of their circle.
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The St. Andrew's Day festival captures the kind of life Virginia planters relished: a life of financial independence and leisurely recreation spent with people of honor, people of their own kind. Others would do the hard work of the tobacco fields for them. But the day-to-day demands of running tobacco farms belied the ideal, not just for laborers but for the plantation owners themselves. The planters, one historian has noted, “had obligations to meet, debts to pay, judgments to make about slaves and servants, not to mention the worry and time involved with the purchase of new lands, the quality of
tobacco, and the ordering of expensive manufactured goods from Great Britain.” Those responsibilities consumed the daily lives of Virginians—and none would be more preoccupied with them than Patrick Henry. Throughout his adult life, he feverishly sought to maintain his economic independence. Privileged as he was, his was no life of ease.
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FROM THE START, John Henry wanted to put Patrick on a path to self-sufficiency. Despite the boy's evident intellectual talents, John Henry did not send his son to college. Colleges traditionally trained clergymen, only recently becoming a destination for aspiring lawyers and politicians. Instead, at fifteen years old, Patrick began working as a clerk for a local store owner. Although we don't know who ran this store, Scotsmen were opening many country stores in and around Hanover County in the 1740s and '50s. During these decades, Americans of the backcountry became more connected to the economy of the British Empire, often because of small-time merchants, such as the one for whom the teenage Patrick worked. Store owners in the outposts of colonial Virginia were allied closely with local farmers like the Henrys. The merchants would buy tobacco, often exchanging it for such goods as clothes, food, and dining ware that they shipped in from overseas. The backcountry Scottish merchants often worked for Glasgow-based firms, which allowed them to circumvent the local growers' dependence on Tidewater planters. Stores would commonly extend generous lines of credit to farmers to secure more business and to capitalize on good years for the tobacco crop. One Scotsman wrote that anyone who wanted to open a retail shop should “have it well provided with all sorts of commodities proper for clothing and family-use; and the greater variety he has, the better.” Farmers flocked to stores that offered the best variety of products and generous lines of credit. These small stores could be very lucrative, but their business model also entailed substantial risk. Favorable
credit terms attracted customers, but farmers who failed to pay loans back on time could put the store out of business.
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Patrick and his older brother, William, personally discovered the dangers of running a country store when they opened their own in 1752. Their father purchased a stock of goods for them to sell, and they operated the store near the Pamunkey River in Hanover County, in the hope that the area's commercial traffic would support their enterprise. Patrick managed the business, a responsibility that may have fallen to him because of his brother's dissolute living. At least in these early years, William had reputedly charted a “wild and dissipated course of life.” But despite their plans and presumably their father's guidance, the Henrys soon found themselves swamped with defaulted loans. They had to shut down the store after only a year.
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Patrick, a broke eighteen-year-old, was not a particularly attractive candidate for marriage, but in his case love triumphed over the gentry's preoccupation with property and marital alliances. In fall 1754, he wed sixteen-year-old Sarah Shelton. Her home was only a few miles from Patrick's, and the two likely met during visits there. Both of them were a bit young to marry, but they seem to have fallen in love and become engaged despite the reservations of both sets of parents. Sarah's family background was similar to Patrick's. Her father owned significant property in Hanover and Louisa Counties. Tradition holds that they were married in the parlor of Sarah's farmhouse in a ceremony conducted by Patrick's uncle and namesake. As a dowry, Sarah's father granted them a three hundred–acre farm and six slaves.
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Patrick Henry was thus, at the tender age of eighteen, a slave owner. Taking custody of those first six bound African-Americans began Henry's anxious, lifelong relationship with slaves and slavery. Though he had been reared in a slaveholding household, he now bore the economic and moral responsibility for maintaining other human beings as property. He numbered among the vast majority
of slave owners in counties like Hanover who held about twenty slaves or less. Many had only a few slaves, or only one, and of course, many whites owned no slaves at all. The planter with the largest number of slaves in Hanover, according to a census of the 1780s, was Thomas Nelson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, with 208 bound African-Americans. Henry, who steadily purchased slaves as he acquired more land, and who also received more slaves in a second dowry (he remarried in 1777 following Sarah's death), would go on to bequeath sixty-seven slaves in his will, making him a fairly substantial slave owner for the time. Henry readily admitted that slavery was socially, economically, and morally problematic. If men of virtue were supposed to be industrious, then what did this mean about a man who had others to do his work for him? Virginians also believed that slavery bred vicious habits among both the owners and the owned.
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Many white Virginians like Henry wrestled with slavery's ethical implications for the slave owner. On the eve of the Revolution, a witty satirist, an obscure Scottish immigrant named James Reid, exposed the ugly tensions between Virginia's gentlemanly ideals of virtue and slavery. Elite Virginians really did not expect their class of “esquires” to exhibit morality, but only to own land and African-Americans, Reid declared. Thus, the “vicious, rich gentleman differs in nothing from his ignorant, vicious, poor Negro, but in the color of his skin.” This was an explosive claim for a white Virginian to make in 1769, and it revealed that at least some people recognized the great friction between the stated principles and the actual practice of the tobacco lords. How could the young white gentleman cultivate virtue, Reid asked, when he received the title of “esquire” simply by inheriting slaves?

Reid found no reason to respect these “esquires,” a word that derived, Reid claimed with a wink, from the term “ass-queer.”
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Slavery bred not only poor morals but also violence. The turbulent consequences of slave owning appeared everywhere in colonial Virginia. For example, only months after Henry's birth, Joseph Peace, a planter in Hanover County, petitioned the Virginia legislature for compensation because “one of his slaves who had murdered another of them, afterwards hanged himself.” The legislature commonly gave financial assistance or compensation to masters of slaves who were executed for capital crimes; perhaps Peace thought he could win some compensation even though his murdering slave killed himself instead of waiting for execution, the punishment sure to follow his crime. Maintaining the Virginia slave system could be a grisly business indeed.
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Owning slaves allowed Henry to farm tobacco—the beginning of a lifelong livelihood, and one he never liked very much. Over time he came to realize that raising tobacco was an essential element of his pursuit of financial independence. But the vagaries of the tobacco economy only exacerbated the ironies inherent in Henry's notions of virtue. If tobacco was the most obvious path to great riches, it could also trap planters into vicious cycles of debt. By definition, debt entailed dependency. Virginia planters had to sell their tobacco on consignment to English shippers, meaning that the planters would receive payment only when the tobacco sold, at prices dictated by European markets. Lean harvests meant little tobacco to sell, while bumper crops could depress prices. No planter
or exporter could anticipate economic fluctuations in Europe. Meanwhile, no matter whether the market for their product was good or bad, Virginia planters had to keep buying supplies, equipment, and slaves to maintain their acreage, in addition to purchasing new lands for expanded production. Sometimes they also indulged in luxury items: crystal, china, wine, and the like, which could deepen their debt, especially in lean times. Planters often found themselves indebted to English merchants with little hope of paying off their balance for years. Virginians, it seemed had a unique penchant for accruing debt: of the four million pounds sterling owed to British creditors by colonists at the beginning of the Revolution, half were the responsibility of Virginia planters.
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