Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry is best remembered today for stirring oratory and memorable phrasing, most notably his 1775 speech in which he roared, “[G]ive me liberty or give me death!” Henry's alleged reason for avoiding the 1787 Constitutional Convention—“I smelt a rat”—ranks a close second. But whatever words come to mind, Patrick Henry, patriot orator, looms large in the public memory. Less well known, however, is Patrick Henry, Christian politico, whose religiously tailored republicanism merits our interest in Thomas S. Kidd's lucidly written tome. Professor Kidd's Patrick Henry underscores the political arc of eighteenth-century Virginia, in which slaveholding planters monopolized provincial offices and tenaciously held power. The modestly educated Henry did have land and slaves, of course, but more tellingly, his voice gained him entrée and political notice, outraging and mesmerizing audiences. When Anglican clergy attempted to collect back pay after Parliament's revocation of the Two Penny Act, an earlier bit of provincial legislative cost trimming, Henry savaged them mercilessly, denounced the king as a tyrant, and won a 1763 court case in Hanover County based largely on pyrotechnic oratory. By 1765, Henry loudly proclaimed to a rump session of the House of Burgess that only Virginia's assembly, not Parliament, could levy taxes, extending his fame across the British North American colonies. By 1774, Henry rode alongside George Washington to attend the First Continental Congress. Dubbed the Demosthenes of the gathering, a reference to the classic Greek defender of liberty, Henry had arrived politically. Henry's aforementioned 1775 speech captured the revolutionary tenor of the times as Virginia prepared for conflict. That Henry subsequently served as Virginia's wartime governor hardly surprises.

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