Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part XI: Insidious Anonymous Writings

At this stage in the present discussion, it’s only natural that no small number of those who have ended up reading this far – bravo, by the way – will be given to ask what any of the preceding meditation has to do with Patrick Henry and his cited belief that the proposed constitution was conceivably the product of a shallow urge on the part of its authors to grasp at material splendor rather than political stability. The thread, it bears admitting, has been drawn rather thin up to this point, and no blame ought to be laid upon those who have lost it altogether. That being said – and begging, as always, the indulgence of those who have persevered thus far – what follows will attempt to tie everything back together as neatly as is practicable. Reflect, to that end, on the nature of the relationship between the life and experiences of Patrick Henry and certain of the topics thus far discussed.

While Henry had not served in the officer corps of the Continental Army – unlike, it bears repeating, the majority of the Framers of the United States Constitution – he had been appointed colonel of the 1^st Virginia Regiment in August, 1775 by the Third Virginia Convention, and made overall commander of colonial forces in September, 1775 by the Virginia Committee of Safety. In consequence, though Henry’s military experience was limited compared to the likes of George Washington or Alexander Hamilton – he was never a part of the Continental Army’s command structure, was isolated from the internal rivalries which typified that selfsame organization, and ended up resigning his militia commission in February, 1776 – he nevertheless possessed some firsthand knowledge of contemporary Anglo-American military culture. His first term as Governor of Virginia (1776-1779) arguably provided him with a similar experience. Formally the Commander-in-Chief of the state militia, Henry took a keen interest in recruiting and logistics – to the extent that he was eager to aid the efforts General Washington – while at the same time remaining relatively aloof from the day-to-day workings of the larger American military apparatus. To Washington, he avowed, he would always defer on series military matters, and for the most part he appeared to be unaware of the internal machinations which at various points threatened to upend the command structure that had first been erected at the Continental Army’s founding in 1775.

The exception to this state of relative detachment – which arguably serves to prove the rule – took place in the winter of 1777.  Having received a letter from the Surgeon General of the Continental Army, Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), detailing certain of the machinations that were then unfolding against Washington – the aforementioned “Conway Cabal” – Henry dutifully passed the information along to the Commander-in-Chief. While Washington affirmed, speaking of Henry as he might have of one of his own officers a number of years later in 1794, that, “I have conceived myself under obligation to him for the friendly manner in which he transmitted to me some insidious anonymous writings in the close of the year 1777 [,]” the fact remains that Henry was able to render the aid in question almost wholly by chance. Unlike Hamilton, Laurens, Gates, Lee, Wilkinson, or Conway, he was not enmeshed in the inner workings of the American officer corps. He was not a member of this faction or that one, trading in rumors, issuing challenges, and flying to the support of his patron. Having received a letter from an associate in his private capacity, he became alarmed at its contents and transmitted them to the person which he felt they most concerned. Henry did not do this because the person in question was his superior officer, or because he understood that their professional prospects would very much reflect on his own. It was rather that Washington was his friend and his countrymen, and one who had come to enjoy his personal loyalty and his professional support.

Given this brief but significant brush with conspiracy, one might fairly be given to wonder just what it was Henry came to believe about the nature of military life and the kinds of people it attracted. While he was struggling as Governor of Virginia to meet recruitment requests and fulfill supply quotas – a position, it bears recalling, he never aspired to but was bestowed for the purpose of keeping him under control – here were the officers of the army he was endeavoring to aid plotting amongst themselves like courtiers in a bad farce. Did he expect that sort of behavior? Did he give it a second thought? In light of the disdain he later expressed during the Virginia Ratifying Convention for those who sought splendor for splendor’s sake, it seems likelier that he came to regard such military pretentions as more than slightly troubling. Granted, the same army which had nearly upended itself over the issue of Washington’s leadership had managed, within five years of the Conway Cabal’s exposure, to win a final victory over the forces of Great Britain that definitively secured the independence of the United States of America. But had every man who risked his life in the process done so with that goal explicitly in mind? Had Horatio Gates and Charles Lee the best interests of their countrymen in mind when they recommended themselves in Washington’s place? Did Alexander Hamilton truly believe that his participation as a commander at the Siege of Yorktown was necessary to an American victory? Did John Laurens think that his life was worth whatever meager triumph he could have scrapped together over the dispirited British on the Combahee River? Again, Henry had reason to think otherwise – drawn from personal experience – and to question the result of certain of these selfsame individuals devising a new, more powerful, and more centralized government for the union of American states.

       

The facts of his having grown up, lived, and worked in Virginia likewise surely conditioned Henry to be both familiar with the customs and attitudes of the dominant planter elite and somewhat ambivalent as to the value of the same. Born in relative comfort on the plantation owned by his wealthy mother, and raised amidst the leisure that was common to the southern gentry, he in fact stood to inherit none of the luxuries to which he had become accustomed due to their passing instead to his elder half-brother. In consequence, unlike most of his later contemporaries, Henry was forced to begin working at the age of fifteen as a clerk before trying his hand – and failing – as a merchant. While his next career move – marriage to one Sarah Shelton – resulted in his being able to at least begin the life of a potentially successful plantation magnate on the land gifted to him by his new wife’s father, this would likewise result in dashed expectations. A persistent drought and a destructive fire ended Henry’s brief tenure at Pine Slash Farm almost as soon as it began, and by the late 1750s he was reduced to serving guests and playing the fiddle in the employ of his father-in-law at the Hanover Tavern. It was only his private study of the law and subsequent admission to the colonial bar in 1760 that finally opened the way for his professional life to well and truly begin. His role as a barrister brought him to the Parson’s Cause, which led to his election to the House of Burgesses, and to the Virginia Conventions, the governorship, and the Virginia Ratifying Convention. And while many of Henry’s contemporaries throughout this period were members of the colony’s landed elite – the Randolphs, the Lees, the Harrisons, and the Taylors – his own prominence was decidedly popular in nature. A radical who frequently found himself sidelined or isolated by his more conservative colleagues, the success which he experienced beginning in the 1760s was almost wholly the result of the support he had managed to amass among the general population of Virginia.

Certainly, it wasn’t due to the wealth which he possessed or the manner in which he spent it, for it should be clear by now that he could boast of comparatively little. This isn’t to say that Henry never again experienced anything close to the kind of luxury which had earlier colored his childhood, or which many of his contemporaries seemed to take for granted as their natural state of being. Having purchased a ten thousand acre tract of land in 1779 upon the completion of his first term as Governor of Virginia, Henry thereafter established a tobacco plantation by the name of Leatherwood – after the adjacent Leatherwood Creek – wherein he lived and worked as a farmer and a lawyer for most of the years between 1780 and 1784. This property – and the slaves that worked it – remained in the Henry family until some point around the early 1830s, though Patrick Henry himself would enjoy its amenities only briefly. Upon his appointment to a second term as Virginia’s chief executive in 1784, he opted to relocate his family to Chesterfield County near the state capital in Richmond. Lodging came in the form of the Salisbury Plantation, purchased by Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. (1768-1828) in 1777 for use as a hunting lodge and rented to Henry for a two-year period ending in 1786. Compared to Randolph’s primary home at Tuckahoe Plantation – built in the 1730s and passed through two generations – Salisbury was somewhat less than magnificent. Whereas the former consisted of a pair of two story wings connected by a central corridor and surrounded by extensive gardens, the latter was a one and a half story frame house with irregular brick chimneys. All the same, it seemed to serve Henry well enough, and indeed rather appeared to suit his sensibilities.

Consider, to that end, Henry’s final home, where he retired in 1794 and died in 1799. Located in Charlotte County on the Roanoke River, Red Hill was decidedly on the small side, with a lopsided, two story/one story main house and a one story outbuilding that Henry used as a law office. And while, like Leatherwood, it was also a working tobacco plantation, compared to the likes of Washington’s Mount Vernon or Jefferson’s Monticello, its dimensions – and, one would argue, the pretensions of its owner – were quite modest. While this no doubt owed in part to the fact that Henry was deeply in debt by the end of his political career in the early 1790s, it also arguably reflects the comparatively reduced circumstances in which he had been living since at least the 1750s. He was a slave owner, of course, for essentially the whole of his adult life. He did, at various times, own productive plantations. And even at its most modest, his living situation after about the middle 1760s never fell much below the level of what we might now consider to be upper middle class. There can be no feeling sorry for Patrick Henry, in short, as a victim of economic circumstance. That being said, following his departure from his mother’s home in Hanover County he never again came particularly close to enjoying that same quality of material extravagance. Whatever personal attainments he could boast of were hard won through private study, and the likes of Mount Airy and Westover would remain forever beyond his reach. And while it would be difficult to say for certain whether or not this state of affairs was a cause of distress for Henry, it would seem reasonable to assume that it to some extent colored his personal and philosophical outlook.

In this sense, as with his military experience, Henry could conceivably lay claim to an unusual perspective among his contemporaries. While exceedingly familiar with the membership and character of the contemporary southern planter class – having worked alongside members of his homeland’s great landed families in the House of Burgesses and the Virginia Conventions since the early 1760s – he never managed to ascend to that elevated social strata wherein said community made its home. Not only was he comparatively lacking in formal education – being neither a graduate of one of the ancient institutions of old England nor even Virginia’s own College of William & Mary – but his knowledge of the law was entirely self-taught and his political prominence almost wholly popular in origin. For that matter, though he did manage, occasionally and briefly, to take on some semblance of the planter lifestyle in the form of the various estates he was able to establish in the 1750s, 1770s, and 1790s, he never came particularly close to being able to emulate the material indulgence of his wealthiest neighbors and countrymen. All in all, this made Patrick Henry something of an outlier. He knew the planters very well, but he wasn’t really one of them. He saw how they lived with his own eyes, but could never really match it. He understood the manner by which they attached value to education, though he was himself but sparsely schooled. And yet, for all that, he had risen to such a position of power and influence in Virginia that the high-born planter elite actually saw him as a threat.

Time and again, the Lees, and Braxtons, and Pendletons had tried to place him in a box, to thrust upon him some high office or other whose prestige was a mask for the practical limitations of its authority. The reason for their distress? Beginning in the 1760s with the Parson’s Cause, Henry had fashioned himself as a defender of the rights and liberties of his countrymen regardless of the class to which they belonged. By the 1770s this had made him the most popular statesmen in the whole of Virginia, and also one of the most radical. And though Henry seemed willing enough at the time to cooperate with the resulting attempts to keep his ambition contained, it would have been uncharacteristic of him not also to take note that the people who seemed most keen to maintain their traditional monopoly on political power in Virginia were also those most given to investing in extravagant material symbols of the same. Combined with his aforementioned military experiences – whereby he became aware of, though remained personally detached from, the egotism and infighting of the contemporary American officer corps – there would seem to have been ample reason for Patrick Henry to have concluded by the time of his service in the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788 that certain of his countrymen were perhaps constitutionally more susceptible to the lure of pomp and circumstance than they might have cared to admit.

Bearing this in mind, the concern which Henry expressed in the spoken address currently under consideration is not so difficult to understand. Having seen for himself the degree to which certain of the Framers of the proposed constitution prioritized reputation over rationality – either as military officers in search of personal glory or quasi-aristocrats eager to assert their social preeminence – he had every reason to express concern at the implications of much of what they’d proposed. Unlike the national government as it existed under the Articles of Confederation – which possessed no formal military authority at all – the regime proposed by the United States Constitution granted Congress the ability to call forth the militias of the various states, “To execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” while further mandating that, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States [.]” Granting that no further mention was made of either an army or a navy, the fact that the President was explicitly authorized to serve as the commander of such forces strongly indicates that the Framers believed the creation of the same was both permissible and likely. Congress and the President might therefore quite easily have erected a permanent military establishment of whatever size the relevant parties deemed appropriate, or else have taken functionally permanent control of the various state militias. When one recalls the manner in which American military authorities behaved during the late war with Great Britain, the opportunities for mischief developing out of this state of affairs would seem exceptionally numerous.

Consider, to that end, the following. A permanent American army, authorized by Congress and commanded by the President, would require a corps of loyal and experienced officers in order to properly perform its essential function. George Washington being most likely to occupy the office of President at the outset, the appointment of said officers would most likely fall to him either formally or by way of deferral on the part of Congress to his knowledge and expertise. The inaugural corps of American army officers would therefore likely consist of individuals who had served under the former Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and in some manner impressed him with their soldierly qualities. While this would likely guarantee that the first batch of men to command the permanent ground forces of the United States of America were possessed of a great deal of collective practical experience, it would also potentially serve to perpetuate many of the deficiencies under which the Continental Army had previously operated. The rivalries, the rumormongering, the partisanship, the duels; 18^th century Anglo-American military life seemed inescapably prone to these kinds of behaviors, and while the War of Independence had succeeded in spite of their interference, there was no particular reason to believe that a permanent American army would not succumb to them in turn.

Charles Lee and John Laurens had died in the early 1780s, it was true, and Horatio Gates was unlikely to garner much support from Washington if his name came forward as a candidate for command. But Henry Knox was still alive, still in the good graces of his former commander, and doubtless perfectly willing to resume his duties. Much the same could be said of James Wilkinson, Gates’ former adjutant who proved his value to Washington by betraying the confidence of his then-superior. And then there was Alexander Hamilton, whose loyalty to Washington was beyond reproach and whom Washington in turn appeared to trust implicitly. If Hamilton requested of his patron to be commissioned as an officer in the new American army, there is every reason to believe that his wish would have been granted. Indeed, it seems likely that Hamilton – ambitious, cunning, glory-seeking Hamilton – would have ended up the most influential American officer below the level of commander-in-chief. That he was also one of the principal architects and supporters of the frame of government which would make such an outcome possible would doubtless have seemed to the likes of Patrick Henry reason enough to doubt the suitability of the same. The purpose of a strengthened national government could not have been the continued self-aggrandizement of a few ambitious individuals. But matters become more concerning yet when one considers the purpose to which a permanent American military establishment might have conceivably been turned.

Men like Hamilton and Knox may well have satiated their immediate need to engage in feats of derring-do during the late Revolutionary War, but there was bound to be an entire cohort of junior officers commissioned in the prospective American army whose ambitions had not yet been satisfied. How were they to win their laurels? How were they to prove themselves, their courage, and their devotion? Answering these questions – and thereby attempting to justify the continued service of successive generations of talented young men – carried potentially distressing implications for the future of the American republic. Led by officers who in their younger days had sought glory to the point of risking their lives, the army of the United States may soon enough have found itself seeking out enemies, agitating for war, and celebrating its arrival. Congress, to be sure, would attempt to protect its own prerogatives by exercising some degree of influence over things like funding and logistics. But with the President declared by the proposed constitution to be the sole commander-in-chief, and with Washington having shown himself in the 1770s and 1780s to be a fairly permissive leader in terms of indulging – and even encouraging – the personal ambitions of his subordinates, it would seem far from impossible for the American military establishment to end up exercising far more power than was strictly desirable in a republic. It might drag the country into unnecessary wars, or prolong those which could not otherwise be avoided. Its officers might threaten to revolt if their wishes were not granted, if promotions did not come swiftly and often, or if funding was reduced or redirected without its assent. It might even demand honors for itself and its members in the form of titles, and land grants, and great processions, and monuments. And why not? What, in the behavior of the American officer up to the late 1780s, would serve to indicate that such things were unlikely to occur? Not every man in American service during the 1770s and 1780s had shown himself to be an inveterate seeker after personal glory, of course. Indeed, a great many had demonstrated an admirable instinct for self-sacrifice, probity, and humility. All the same, Patrick Henry had doubtless seen enough examples of both to wonder which was in the majority among his military-minded countrymen and to be cautious of anything which appeared to tilt in favor of the former.