Speech to the Virginia ratifying Convention, Part XIV: The Rights of the Whole of the People

While there was yet some worth in this among Henry’s favored rhetorical techniques – in that confrontation is sometimes necessary in a debate in order to break an impasse or sort out the most basic terms of agreement and disagreement – there is conversely very little that can be said in favor of this same orator’s apparent propensity to mischaracterize the truth. This habit made itself known in several forms across the length of his address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, often in an attempt to supplement an otherwise reasonable argument that had no need of being bolstered. In some cases, the attempt was made to present an ostensibly sensible-sounding fact – one which Henry’s cohorts would likely have accepted without a second thought – whose veracity was in reality almost impossible to confirm. By thus relying on the ignorance of his audience – or their lack of resources, as the case may be – Henry was able to pass off a host of false assertions as though they were the plain and simple truth. In other cases, relying perhaps instead on the tension of the moment, or the suspicion or the pride of his audience, he attempted to give the same presentation to more obvious falsehoods. “Don’t pay attention to what my opponents are saying,” Henry was effectively declaring with the latter technique, “Because you and I know what’s really going on.” The former Governor of Virginia thus sought to establish himself as a purveyor of hidden truths and the only trustworthy participant in a conversation dominated by liars and artificers.

            It was all hogwash, of course – to borrow a charming colloquialism – but cunning hogwash all the same. Consider, by way of example, an assertion which Henry made during his critical examination of the amending formula described by the proposed constitution. As mentioned previously, Henry was alarming by how few people would have actually been required to deny an amendment for it to fail to achieve the force of law, thus essentially placing the fate of the Constitution in the hands of a small minority of the general population. “If, sir,” he lamented accordingly, “Amendments are left to the twentieth, or tenth part of the people of America, your liberty is gone forever.” As contemporary figures well affirm, this represented a perfectly legitimate concern – if a statistically unlikely one – and Henry was by no means behaving in a suspect fashion by attempting to alert his countrymen to the same. But then, for whatever reason, he felt the need to draw a comparison. “We have heard,” he continued,

That there is a great deal of bribery practised in the House of Commons, in England, and that many of the members raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people. But, sir, the tenth part of that body cannot continue oppressions on the rest of the people. English liberty is, in this case, on a firmer foundation than American liberty.

There was some truth to this assertion, of course. The contemporary House of Commons was notoriously – almost comically – corrupt, shot through with procedural inconsistencies and rife with cronyism and entrenched venality. Whether a given individual could vote or stand for election depended on where in Great Britain they could claim to reside, electoral regulations were a confused and contradictory muddle, and a number of seats in Parliament were the exclusive possession of wealthy patrons who made a practice of either selling the right of election or bestowing the office on a favored friend or relative. Thus, as Henry rightly observed, did many members, “Raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people.”

But the former Governor of Virginia didn’t stop at merely observing the sorry state of late 18th century British democracy. “But, sir,” he instead went on to say, “The tenth part of that body cannot continue oppressions on the rest of the people.” Granting that the figure of “one tenth” was meant by Henry to form a rhetorical parallel with the issues he had previously cited with the aforementioned amending formula, the claim itself had no basis in fact. Neither Henry, nor any of his countrymen, nor likely anyone in Britain with even an expert knowledge of the deficiencies of the contemporary House of Commons could have said for certain how many seats therein were subject to endemic corruption, what effect their presence had on the ability of the voting public to see their will translated into legislation, or what ratio of corrupt to non-corrupt ridings would have tipped the balance in favor of the former. Such information simply wasn’t available in the 1780s, in no small part because no one was particularly interested in collecting it on a large enough scale to form any actionable conclusions.

This isn’t to say, mind, that the topic of reform had never before entered into Britain’s national political discourse. The adoption of universal suffrage – along with a great many other similarly audacious proposals – had been passionately debated during the waning years of the English Civil War (1642-1651), particularly by such factions of the Parliamentary army as believed it essential while they yet controlled the reins of power to “level” as much of British society as substantively possible. While the emergence of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) as de facto sovereign of the English Commonwealth in the early 1650s effectively dashed any such hopes in the immediate, the state of corruption in the House of Commons remained troubling enough to some portion of the British political establishment that the issue reared its head again in the 1760s at the behest of William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778) and in the 1780s at the hands of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806). Sincere though this father and son duo most certainly was to see the so-called “people’s house” reformed to the point where it might actually be said to reflect the will of the general British public, however, both men faced impossibly long odds. Pitt the Elder, perhaps because he had himself been first sent to Parliament as the Member for Old Sarum – arguably the most “rotten” seat in all of Britain, controlled at that time by the Pitt family of Boconnoc, Cornwall – and perhaps in recognition of the fact that there were many more men of influence who had arrived in the House of Commons by the same means, declined to suggest the elimination of the corrupted boroughs in question. Instead, hoping to counterbalance what he regarded as the detrimental influence of the borough ridings – a number of which, because of the way that they allocated votes, were horrendously unrepresentative – by adding an additional seat to each of the county ridings. Unsurprisingly, this proposal met with significant resistance. Those in possession of borough ridings did not take well to the notion that their influence needed to be actively decreased. Others held that giving more power to the landed gentry who dominated the county ridings would do little to counteract the tendency of Parliament to become a tool in the hands of an interested few. The proposal accordingly failed to generate even token legislation, and the issue of reform resumed its accustomed dormancy.

Pitt the Younger, though more successful – and perhaps more tenacious – than his father at getting the prospect of reforming the House of Commons a formal public hearing, likewise failed to achieve even the modest program of reform which he believed it wisest to pursue. Attempting initially, as a backbencher, to resurrect his father’s proposal – an effort which, though it did come to a vote, ultimately went down to defeat to the tune of 140 against – Pitt next proceeded as Prime Minister to introduce a far more ambitious program in 1785 that would have eliminated the representation of thirty-six rotten boroughs while also slightly extending the electoral franchise in all that remained. While this latter effort represented by far the most wide-ranging bid to alter the essential composition of the House of Commons since the 1640s – a testament, to be sure, to the political imagination of its author – it was perhaps for this exact reason that it could not but have met with eventual defeat. Though 174 Members of Parliament voted in its favor, 248 voted against. For the remainder of his term in office – the first stint of which lasted from 1783 to 1801 – Pitt the Younger declined to raise any further discussion of reforming the House of Commons.

The issue of Parliamentary corruption having been essentially settled in Britain in 1786 for at least the next forty years – until the first rumblings of the debate which would lead to the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 – it would seem audacious indeed for Patrick Henry to claim in 1788 to possess anything like a deep and precise knowledge of the effects and significance thereof. The events which finally led to the first successful act of legislative reform in British history took place over a period of several years in the early 1830s, during which time a great deal of information had to be gathered and collated so as to provide the authors of the bill in question with a set of precise figures and proposals to be presented to their fellow MPs. Only by the end of this process, therefore, could anyone on Earth truly claim to know with a certainly how and to what extent the existence of endemic corruption in the House of Commons had thus far affected the business of Parliament. In the end, the terms of the Reform Act mandated the total abolition of fifty-six boroughs, the reduction of a further thirty from two seats in the House to one, and the creation of a further one hundred and thirty seats divided among a number of otherwise unrepresented or underrepresented counties and towns across England and Wales. Recalling that Pitt the Younger’s 1785 plan called for the abolition of only thirty-six boroughs, one is forced to wonder at the nature of the discrepancy. Where his standards less stringent than those of his eventual successors? Did he consciously restrain his attentions to only the worst cases so as not to lose potential allies? Or did he simply lack the information that the later Reform Act proponents ultimately had several years to gather and analyze? Likely the answer embodies some combination of each of these factors. Sincere though he surely was, Pitt the Younger also doubtless possessed canny enough political instincts to know how far he could push a particular measure before it lost even a hope of success. And he almost definitely possessed less and spottier information than would his counterparts some four decades later.

Bearing all of this in mind, it would once again seem eminently bizarre for Patrick Henry, some two years after Pitt the Younger’s last effort at Parliamentary reform failed and on the entire other side of the world, to speak with evident authority as to the nature and implications of political corruption in the contemporary House of Commons. One-tenth of that body, he said, could not “continue oppressions on the rest of the people.” But how could he possibly have known that? On what data did he base this statement? Maybe one tenth of the sitting members were exactly enough to capture and hold the initiative of Parliament, particularly if the members in question belonged to particularly influential families or factions. Or perhaps, in a negative sense, one tenth of the sitting MPs could introduce enough delay and sow enough chaos as to stymie the passage of otherwise salutary legislation. Indeed, one tenth may have been more than enough, not that the figure itself had any significance beyond what Henry gave it. By the reckoning of the authors of the aforementioned Reform Act of 1832 – accepting, of course, that the final terms of said act represented a compromise – one hundred and forty-three total seats were abolished. As a percentage of the total number of seats then allocated in Parliament – that being, as of 1831, six hundred and fifty-eight – this would amount to just under twenty-two percent. Affirming, once again, that this figure likely represents the most accurate contemporary understanding of the depth of corruption within the House of Commons, Henry’s citation of one tenth or ten percent would appear almost wholly nonsensical. That is to say, even if a corrupt ten percent of the sitting members in the lower house of Parliament could not, as Henry said, “continue oppressions on the rest of the people,” the actual figure as of 1788 was likely closer to double that.

Notwithstanding his need to quote a figure that had no particular connection to reality, Henry’s comparison of the corrupt cohort within the contemporary House of Commons to the bare minimum assortment of states necessary to block an amendment under the formula described by the proposed constitution was on its own merits fundamentally flawed. For one thing, the Parliament of Great Britain was a body which met constantly – though not perpetually – over the course of its term of existence between one election and another. Legislation was considered, and read, and debated, and voted upon, all of which provided the members sent from “rotten” constituencies any number of opportunities to exert their influence over the business of government. The tenth percentage of the American population of which Henry expressed his especial dread represented a comparative abstraction. He was not referring to ten percent of the membership of the House of Representatives, or ten percent of the Senate, or ten percent of the state legislatures, or even ten percent of the men elected to and seated therein. What he claimed to fear was rather that ten percent of the total population of the United States of America whose elected representatives in the state legislatures could defeat a proposed amendment to the Constitution by withholding ratification. The figure itself, it bears recalling, was not wrong. The delegates of one tenth of the American population could in fact stymie the passage of an otherwise successful amendment. This was, however, an exceptionally unlikely outcome given the arrangement of states whose legislators would need to find common cause. It was also preconditioned by the need for a proposed amendment to secure a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. As this latter requirement represented, by design, a steep hill for any proposal to surmount it was thus also quite unlikely on any given day that the aforementioned alliance of state lawmakers would even be given the chance to flex their obstructionist muscles.

Not only did Parliament, by comparison, meet multiple times a year, every year, but that same body possessed far greater constitutional authority than even its closest counterpart in the proposed United States Congress. As mentioned above, alterations to the text of the United States Constitution would need to pass through a complex – and theoretically quite lengthy – process of approval before finally being implemented. After first securing the agreement of either two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate or a simple majority of the state delegations in a national convention called in response to the petition of two-thirds of the state legislatures, the amendment in question would then require the further ratification of three-fourths of the total number of state legislatures or of three-fourths of the total number of conventions called by the same for the purpose of ratification. In theory and in practice, the need to follow such procedures introduced a great deal of delay into the process of altering the United States Constitution and ensured that no one body or constituency could claim exclusive control. Notwithstanding the 27^th Amendment – a historical oddity, being one of the first proposed and the last ratified – many of the successful articles in question have experienced lengthy gestation periods between being approved by Congress and validated by the states. The first parcel of ten amendments, for example, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, received the requisite congressional approval on September 25^th, 1789 – seven months into the first session of Congress – and was fully ratified over two years later on December 15^th, 1791. While other amendments have enjoyed much shorter intervals between passage in Congress and ratification by the states – the 26^th claiming the briefest yet at a scant one hundred days – many more clock in at over a year, or over two years, or even in excess of three years. In consequence, amidst all of this time and all of these procedures, it would seem fair to describe amendments to the proposed constitution as both an uncommon occurrence and one whose accomplishment entails a great many opportunities for second thoughts and careful scrutiny.

This is eminently not the case as regards the British Constitution. Being an unwritten document – if such a thing can be said to exist – the constitution of Great Britain essentially comprises every law in force at a given moment within the legal confines of that selfsame nation. The main pillars of the British Constitution are generally held to include the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Union (1707), though in truth any piece of legislation granted approval by Parliament – or indeed any court ruling which determines how legislation is executed – can be said to form a part of the broader constitutional framework. Whereas the United States Constitution represents a singular, integral, codified text, the British Constitution thereby exists as something more like a centuries-old accretion of acts, and rulings, and principles from which the structure and authority of the British government is customarily derived. This undeniably allows for a great deal of flexibility, there being no formal limit upon what Parliament can or cannot do within its particular sphere save whatever laws continue to be in force that it cannot find the consensus to alter. At the same time, however, it also means that any session of Parliament can alter the “Constitution” without special authority and as rapidly as a majority can be assembled. If the Commons and the Lords determined – after much debate, no doubt – to repeal the terms of the Bill of Rights, for example, they could absolutely do so. It would be a terribly foolish thing to attempt, the Bill having served for centuries as a guarantee of Parliament’s independence against the interference of the Crown. All the same, it would be entirely within their power to accomplish.

Bearing this fact in mind, the approximately twenty percent of the membership of the House of Commons whose seats, as of the turn of the 19^th century, were owed directly to the mechanism of political corruption inarguably possessed a far greater influence over the character of the British Constitution than did their American counterparts as described by Patrick Henry. Granting, of course, that this selfsame cohort of MPs sent from the various rotten boroughs were unlikely to share a common objective – and were thus unlikely to bring their full, collective strength to bear upon or against a given initiative – their presence as Members of Parliament placed them far closer to the reins of power than the obstructionists that Henry attempted to identify. The latter being the various state legislators who together represented one-tenth of the total population of the American republic, their ability to exert any effect at all upon the relevant constitutional status quo would be wholly contingent upon the passage of amendments through the aforementioned first step of a codified two-step procedure. And even in the event that a proposed amendment was successfully submitted to the states – an outcome which, between 1789 and 1992, occurred on average about once every thirteen years – the offending ten percent would be so scattered among small and dissimilar states as to render a convergence of opinion and action practically impossible. The rotten MPs, while similarly unlikely to cooperate, would enjoy a great many more chances to do so and could act far more directly upon the primary object in question. Henry’s claim, therefore, that, “English liberty is, in this case, on a firmer foundation than American liberty [,]” would appear to be wholly unfounded. 

 It remains something of an open question whether Henry knew this to be the case or not. As mentioned above, likely no one on Earth in 1788 could have spoken with certainty as to the relative level and influence of corruption within the contemporary British House of Commons. The relevant information simply hadn’t been gathered, and indeed wouldn’t be for some forty years on. What was known, however, as something of a truism on both sides of the Atlantic was that the House of Commons as it then existed was very, very corrupt. People knew what a rotten borough was, and that certain wealthy families essentially owned them, and that the resulting seats in Parliament were little more than aristocratic possessions. In Britain itself, suspicion of this arrangement and desire for reform most certainly did exist as of the waning decades of the 18^th century, though it tended to remain confined to certain isolated factions within the larger proto-party structure. In the United States, however, whose inhabitants had but recently settled a successful war for independence from the authority of Parliament and the Crown, belief in the corruption of the House of Commons was doubtless much closer to being universal. Having just witnessed – and suffered at the hands of – what to their eyes appeared to be a determined impulse within Parliament towards unprincipled self-interest, the late 18^th century inhabitants of the United States of America had no particular reason to believe that the House of Commons wasn’t tremendously, overwhelmingly, irredeemably corrupt. Not only would this perception have afforded with their understanding of why the events of the 1760s and 1770s transpired as they did – Parliament having been taken over by a coterie of petty gentry and greedy financiers – but it would also have served to buttress their emerging national self-image. Whereas everybody knew that Great Britain was plagued by endemic corruption, they could conceivably begin to tell themselves, the United States was possessed of a political culture that prized liberty, integrity, and justice above all else.

Herein Patrick Henry’s rhetorical genius was able to spring into action. If everybody “knew” that the House of Commons was horrendously corrupt despite a complete absence of solid data as to the nature and extent of the problem, it was possible in the course of a given debate to say just about anything that was generally consistent with the theme thereof without fear of being called into question. Parliamentary corruption could thus fairly be said to exist, within the context of late 18^th century American political discourse, as a fixed point of knowledge. It was a cliché, a maxim, a piece of received wisdom; its validity was taken almost entirely for granted in spite of there being little in the way of hard data to back it up. Depending on the nature of the debate and its participants, of course, someone might conceivably call into question the extent to which such claims were really true. But just as its proponents couldn’t rigorously support the claim, neither could its detractors offer much evidence to the contrary. For the purposes of Patrick Henry – whose aim, again, was to convince his fellow delegates to the Virginia Ratifying Convention that the proposed constitution was too dangerous to be adopted – this vague but immutable sense of validity was arguably the key. If every member of his audience believed or had heard tell that the British House of Commons was notoriously corrupt and none of them could prove conclusively that this wasn’t the case, then what might be the effect of asserting that this selfsame House of Commons in fact offered greater security to the liberties of the British people than did the proposed constitution to those of their American counterparts? What counter might Henry’s opponents possibly have offered?

Doubtless their first instinct would have been to affirm that the proposed constitution was not near so poorly designed as to permit the kind of lopsided distribution of authority for which the contemporary House of Commons had in America become notorious. There could be no comparison, they might fairly have claimed, between the unlikeliest outcome of the amending formula and the effects of the everyday corruption implied by the very existence of the rotten boroughs, and it was plainly disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Sound though this argument would have been, however, it had also yet to be proven or disproven. Likely the supporters of the proposed constitution were right and the scenario that Henry forecasted was so improbable as to be practically meaningless. But, then again, perhaps Henry was right and the ability of so small a proportion of the population to stymie the passage of potentially needful amendments would in time spell the downfall of liberty in the American republic. Only time, as it were, would tell for certain. Casting about for alternative arguments, Henry’s opponents would likely have been at a loss to lay hands on anything more solid.

They might have attempted to affirm that the House of Commons was not as corrupt as all that, the purpose of which would have been to thereby insinuate that the proposed constitution was more secure than Henry had described. Having to push against the overwhelming weight of popular opinion would have made this an especially undesirable approach, however, and one which the aforementioned paucity of hard data would have rendered yet more difficult in turn. Supporters of the proposed constitution might also have avowed that the House of Commons was in fact far more corrupt than Henry indicated and that the peculiarities of the amending formula – while indeed problematic in theory – were in practice much less likely to obstruct the realization of the general public good than was the persistent ability of a moneyed few to buy and sell seats in Parliament. While this would surely have embodied a more outwardly favorable approach, it would also have run up against the aforementioned absence of verifiable information. How, in short, could one determine in 1788 precisely the degree to which the House of Commons was corrupt? All that Henry had said was, “We have heard that there is a great deal of bribery practiced in the House of Commons, in England, and that many of the members raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people.” In order to convincingly argue that this represented an understatement of fact, one would have ideally had to bring to bear such definite figures as would render the question wholly unequivocal. It would not do to simply say, “Actually, things are much worse.” Rather, one ought to have explained how much worse and by what means. Since this would have proven next to impossible to accomplish – absent the time and resources necessary to complete an exhaustive survey of the rotten boroughs and the effects of their influence – this counterargument to Henry’s decidedly vague assertion would likewise have availed his opponents of little advantage.

Perhaps the most accurate response to Henry’s claim would have been to agree in principle that the contemporary House of Commons was very corrupt and that the amending formula described by the proposed constitution was not without its flaws while also pointedly affirming that these two truths bore little if any relation to one another. The corruption represented by the existence of the rotten boroughs stemmed from a general resistance within contemporary British political culture to institutional reform and to the expansion of the electoral franchise. The deficiencies of the amending formula – including its theoretical vulnerability to minority control – were conversely the unintended but perhaps inevitable consequences of attempting to describe a practical system of constitutional modification which struck a balance between stability and openness. Both of these embodied potential problems for the respective political frameworks of which they were a part. But they were problems of a fundamentally different nature; comparing them directly could yield but little of philosophical value.

For one of Henry’s opponents in the Virginia Ratifying Convention to have attempted to affirm this point, however, would arguably have been to commit an even worse tactical blunder than embodied by the first two approaches here described. Admitting that either of the points which Henry had attempted to make was in any sense true would have been tantamount, rhetorically, to admitting defeat. By the terms of debate which the former Governor of Virginia had set out, the only options available to his audience were either to agree with his assertions or deny them outright. There could be no quibbling about details, no pointing to specifics, for neither would have helped to avoid the trap that Henry had set. Speaking just enough truth to maneuver his opponents into admitting that he was in some capacity correct, he could then swiftly claim victory and dismiss all else that was said. Harnessing popular opinion – by, for example, trying an argument against the proposed constitution to the common perception of corruption within the British House of Commons – made this kind of tactic yet easier to deploy.

Such was the admitted genius – one might even fairly say the deviousness – of Patrick Henry within the realm of public debate. It didn’t matter, under the rules he had set for himself, that he tended to make gross generalizations, or treat assumption as though they were facts, or practice a “winner take all” style of argument wherein complexity had no place. So long as he could claim to have won – by forcing his opponents to grant any part of his premise or to wrestle their way out of the logical frameworks he had constructed – the actual substance of his arguments mattered very little. What did matter were the things for which Henry claimed to stand. As he made clear quite often over the course of his oration before the assembled delegates of the Virginia Ratifying Convention, he was a firm believer in the absolute sovereignty of the American states. He believed in American liberty first, and the American Union second. He thought it paramount that the American people refuse to acquiesce to any form of government that did not explicitly recognize their fundamental natural rights. And he held it to be an absolute truth that human beings simply weren’t built to voluntarily relinquish whatever power came into their possession. It was wholly inconsequential that almost none of the arguments which Henry offered alongside these principles in any way served as proof of their essential validity. The important thing was that Henry consistently “beat” his opponents. If he was right, and he believed “x,” “y,” and “z,” then it followed by a kind of transitive property that “x,” “y,” and “z” must also be right. Logically, of course, this kind of equation is exceedingly specious. Nevertheless, it makes perfect rhetorical sense, and Patrick Henry was nothing if not an undisputed master of the rhetorical arts.