Probably the most
characteristic quality of Patrick Henry’s address to the Virginia Ratifying
Convention in the summer of 1788 – indeed, the most characteristic qualify of
any of Henry’s many public orations – was the degree to which the former
Governor of Virginia more or less set logic aside and instead gave vent to such
soaring flights of rhetoric as were bound to forcefully strike the ears of his
listeners. Capable though he was of incisive reasoning and prosecutorial rigor,
Henry’s career as a public servant had been largely built upon his ability to
rouse the sentiments of his countrymen rather than engage their critical
faculties, and his performance during the debate over the ratification of the
proposed constitution did not stray much at all from this pattern. The origins
of this tendency, by all accounts, were entirely sincere. Though born to a
devoutly Anglican father, and a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church
himself, young Henry was exposed by his mother to the emotionally-charged
preaching of some of the Presbyterian ministers then working their way across
the colonies amidst the continent-wide Protestant religious revival known to
later generations as the First Great Awakening (1730-1755). One of these evangelists
in particular, Delaware-born Samuel Davies (1723-1761), preached specifically
in Hanover County between 1748 and 1759 and was reported by Henry as a major
influence upon his later rhetorical predilections. In addition to absorbing
from Davies a deep respect for the liberty of the individual as a moral being,
he also seemed to internalize the preacher’s evident conviction that the most
effective way to reach people was by combining appeals to reason with a
stirring emotional dialogue.
While this
particular style of oration was undoubtedly effective – feelings, as a rule,
being much harder to dismiss than ideas – and was wielded by figures like
Davies with honesty and passion, it could very easily become something of a
crutch if misapplied or indulged in carelessly. Patrick Henry, to be sure, made
exceedingly effective use of emotional appeals as a part of his rhetoric during
the years between 1763 (the Parson’s Cause) and 1779 (the end of his first term
as Governor of Virginia). Accusing George III (1738-1820) of tyranny for
vetoing the Two Penny Act in – the
purpose of which was to provide the government of Virginia with a degree of
economic relief during a period of poor tobacco harvests – was perhaps the
slightest bit excessive, but the general thrust of Henry’s argument was
nonetheless entirely sound. Notwithstanding the British monarch’s formal
position as legal sovereign of the Province of Virginia, the legislature
thereof retained a great deal of functional autonomy, up to and including the
passage of laws requiring only the assent of the appointed royal governor. Just
so, while it remains far from certain that Henry would truly rather have died
than submit to the heavy-handed authority of the British Crown in spite of his
assertion to the contrary in a speech delivered in Richmond in March of 1775,
the position for which he was advocating was not the least bit hysterical or
absurd. The Crown and Parliament alike had shown themselves to be increasingly
resolved to confront the discontent yet roiling the Thirteen Colonies – in the
form of riots, protests, boycotts, and intercolonial cooperation – with
military force. Thus confronted with the true face of “British liberty” in the
form of bayonets and economic blockades, Henry was wholly justified in asking
of his countrymen whether it was worth any longer remaining loyal to a
government that treated its constituents with compassion and forbearance only
as long as they never questioned the rightness of its actions.
By deploying
arguments such as these where and when he did, Henry was likely able to spur
more people to action on some of the most important issues of the day than
would have been the case if he had relied on reason alone. No doubt many of
those present at the Hanover County courthouse in October, 1763 who heard Henry
speak knew on some level that vetoing the Two Penny Act did not really make the
reigning British sovereign a tyrant. Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), who effectively
trampled upon the laws and customs of the Roman Republic by placing himself
above the influence of the Senate, the magistrates, and the Roman people, was a
tyrant. George III was simply a constitutional monarch who was attempting to
take advantage of the fact that the government of distant Virginia presented
less of a threat to his authority than that of Parliament. In the moment,
however, this fact seemed doubtless to matter less than the implication that
Henry was attempting to promote, namely that that the rights of the people of
Virginia were being abrogated by an authority which they had not chosen and
which they could not control. If exaggeration helped to get this point across
with greater force, it was arguably an excusable transgression. People are
sometimes slow to act if the problem they are being confronted with remains
confined to the realm of intellectual abstraction. Often as not, they need to
feel scared, or angry, or prideful, or disturbed before they begin to move
toward a viable solution.
There would seem
to be a limit, however, beyond which an instance of stirring rhetoric ceases to
be a permissible exaggeration whose negative effects are outweighed by positive
outcomes and instead becomes a potentially harmful fabrication whose usefulness
cannot but be limited because no part of it is actually true. Patrick Henry
unfortunately seemed to have crossed this limit at some point in the 1780s, for
his address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788 was rife with examples
of the gross misrepresentation of contemporary reality being passed off as
edifying truth. Once content to win people over to his side of a given dispute
by using emotional appeals to essentially force them into a personal
consideration of the issues at hand, Henry was now evidently content to peddle
as many sweet-sounding falsities as were necessary to convince his audience
that he was right and his opponents were wrong. This isn’t to say that Henry’s
address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention was wholly without philosophical,
moral, or political merit. With any luck, this series has provided sufficient
examples as to effectively prove the contrary. Nevertheless, the address in
question remains overburdened with instances in which its author seemed less
concerned with turning the attention of his audience towards the light of truth
than with getting them to agree with him by whatever means he could manage.
There were times,
it bears noting, when this conviction did not necessarily impel Henry towards
indulging in demonstrable falsehoods. Frequently, when attempting to convince
his fellow delegates of either the sincerity of his intent or the paramount
importance of the issue at hand, he simply gave voice to such expressions of
principle as would seem to compare favorably to “Give me Liberty or Give me
Death.” When prefacing the extensive examination that was to come of the
proposed constitution and what he considered to be its many and various faults,
for example, Henry notably declared, “Liberty, the greatest of all earthly
blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else!” What
did Henry really mean when he said that liberty was the greatest of all earthly
blessings? Was he really willing to give up everything in exchange? How did he
define liberty? And what fell under the rubric of “every thing else,” exactly? There
were no answers to these questions on offer – answers which might have given
Henry’s audience a better sense of what, precisely, he meant – because to do so
would have weakened the assertion itself. If Henry had been more specific, more
people would have been able to compare his feelings against their own and
determine whether or not they agreed with his position. By keeping his
exhortations vaguely – though stirringly – worded, he conversely left room for
as many of his audience as possible to find a way to endorse what he had said.
In addition, like
“Give me Liberty or Give me Death,” the exclamation “give us that precious
jewel, and you may take every thing else” arguably functioned as the kind of
encouragement which only the most clear-eyed could have easily ignored. When a
person claims they’d rather die than live in submission to another, the depth
of their conviction would seem ostensibly quite clear. Maybe they don’t
actually mean it, and maybe no one around them actually believes it. But
they’ve put the idea out into the world that they’re willing to hazard their
life in the cause of freedom, and woe to the man who would equivocate in
response. In private discussion, perhaps, a person might express the full gamut
of their concerns and their feelings as to the relationship between liberty and
submission while expecting not to be discriminated against based on their
answer. But having heard it said in public that this man is willing to die for
his freedom, the expectations of late 18th century masculinity would
demand agreement from all in earshot lest they be branded cowards or worse.
Just so, once someone had said in open council that they would surrender all
they had to guarantee their liberty, it would do no good for anyone else in
attendance to attempt to litigate the specifics of the expression. Henry,
without exposing himself to accusations of falsity – for nothing that he had
said was provably false – had thus effectively thrown down the gauntlet and
dared those to whom he was speaking to refuse his implicit challenge.
A little further
on in the same oration, evidently convinced of the need to defend his personal
and political integrity, Henry further explained that,
An
invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined,
enlightened days, be deemed old fashioned; if so, I am contended to be so. I
say, 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. Twenty-three years ago was I supposed to be a
traitor? I was then said to be the 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 the people of this country are weak
enough to think these things are too true.
Again, the thrust
of the speaker’s intention would seem to have been to essentially goad his
listeners into registering their agreement. Consider, to that end, certain of
the expressions that Henry deployed. “In these refined, enlightened days,” he
declared, “An invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may […] be
deemed old fashioned [.]” Refinement and enlightenment might now seem like
virtues – indeed, they surely seem so to many in the 1780s as well – but Henry
appeared to use them here as markers of vacuity or pomposity. How else might a
person have come to think that “an invincible attachment to the dearest rights
of man” was in any way old fashioned? Thus, with minimal effort, Henry served
to create a dichotomy: modern sophisticates who thought the love of liberty was
outmoded were on one side, crusty old men who thought that freedom was worth
dying for were on the other. And from there, relentlessly, he piled it on.
There was a time, he continued, when he and
his countrymen were of like minds in their conviction that nothing was more
important than the liberty of America. And yet now, some quarter century later,
the name of Patrick Henry is called into disrepute. Is he a traitor now, or was
he a traitor then? Then, in the midst of the Revolution, he was heralded as a
great statesman, followed as a great leader, promoted as a magistrate, and
given responsibility over the life and limb of his fellow man. Were Americans
simply more foolish in those days? Was the generation that fought and won the
freedom of a continent too credulous to know that one of the most heralded
among them was in fact their inveterate enemy? Such questions and insinuations
were not easily answered, particularly where they appeared to inveigh against
the honor of either those being addressed or those they held in particular
esteem. According to Henry’s construction, to doubt him was to doubt the entire
cohort of Americans responsible for the existence of the United States. He had
not changed in all the time that had passed since that event. Indeed, he
admitted to being old fashioned in his convictions. The American people, then,
must have been the ones whose beliefs had been altered, who had become so
“refined” and “enlightened” as to no longer value liberty above all else. And
if this were not damning enough, Henry concluded by throwing down yet another
rhetorical gauntlet. “But, sir” he thus avowed, “A number of the people of this
country are weak enough to think these things are too true.” The subtext here
would seem at once unflattering and plain: “Those who believe I am a traitor
are simply too weak to know otherwise.” Or, to phrase it as a question, “Are
you weak, or will you listen?”
It
would be difficult to deny that this was manipulative language. In 1788 as in
1775, Henry’s principle tactic was to maneuver those who did not agree with him
already into having to succumb to or argue their way out of a particularly
unflattering premise. Either they were in favor of the measure which he
advocated, in essence, or they were against something – a person, an
institution, or an ideal – which enjoyed otherwise universal acclaim. Faced
with such a stark dichotomy – contrived though it may have been – it is little
wonder that anyone might have preferred simply to bow to Henry’s wishes rather
than attempt to bring nuance to bear upon a topic of intense emotional
resonance. The person who stood forth during the Second Virginia Convention and
claimed that liberty was perhaps not always worth dying for was the person who
opened themselves up to immediate castigation. Such was the tone of the
occasion, the times, and the crisis at hand. Just so, while it would have been
far from unreasonable for one of Henry’s fellow delegates to the Virginia
ratifying convention to question whether liberty was all a person really needed
– not property, not representative government, not habeas corpus, not trial by
jury – the individual that expressed such doubt was liable to be dismissed as a
someone fonder of traditions, and customs, and institutions than of the
principles from which they sprang. Institutions, the former Governor or
Virginia may well have said, were mere artifice if they failed to serve the
ideals of those upon whom they acted. The proposed constitution appeared to
strike him as just such an arrangement of artificial conventions – serving
something less than the majority of the American people – and should thus have
been called out as standing in opposition to true liberty.
Again, it would be strictly accurate to say
that the base elements of this conviction were not inherently erroneous. For
all that anyone knew or could prove, Henry well and truly did believe that
liberty was more important than any other right that a person could claim. The
trick, such as it was, lay in the manner by which he gave voice to this
ostensible truth. It was not enough to simply say, “I believe in so-and-so” and
leave it to others to agree or disagree as their convictions allowed. Henry, as
ever, was trying to win an argument, and knew that one of the best ways to do
so was to make disagreement look as unattractive as possible. Anyone made to
listen to one of Patrick Henry’s orations with the expectation that they would
act on what he said could have voiced their opposition. They could have said he
was being overly simplistic, or creating a false dichotomy, or appealing to
sentiment over reason, or doing any number of rhetorically manipulative things.
Doubtless some did exactly that. But many, it can be safely assumed, did not,
or else Patrick Henry’s career would not have carried him to the heights which
he ultimately enjoyed. The person who avowed in 1775 that the phrase “Give me
Liberty or Give me Death” represented a gross overreaction to what yet remained
a complex, multifaceted issue was perfectly free to do so, of course. But in
the midst of a culture which expected men to be brave, and noble, and generous,
and direct, such an assertion would surely have appeared undesirable to have
associated with one’s name. Better, under the circumstances, to make peace with
rank populism than be thought a coward or a sycophant.
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