Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part XVI: Those Unfeeling Blood-suckers

The ambivalent attitude towards fact which Henry displayed while attempting to make reference to the history and politics of contemporary Switzerland was also in evidence during his somewhat tangential discussion of Article I, Section 8 of the proposed constitution. The text of that section reads, in part: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States [.]” Henry’s issue with this declaration of federal authority was, among other things, that it would effectively create, “Two sets of tax-gatherers—the state and the federal sheriffs. This, it seems to me, will produce such dreadful oppression as the people cannot possible bear.” Elaborating further upon nature of his distress, Henry went on to claim that,

The federal sheriff may commit what oppression, make what distresses, he pleases, and ruin you with impunity; for how are you to tie his hands? Have you any sufficiently decided means of preventing him from sucking your blood by speculations, commissions, and fees?

The existing state sheriffs, he explained – “Those unfeeling blood-suckers” – were bad enough, and could hardly be restrained by the relevant legislature from committing, “The most horrid and barbarous ravages on our people.” Why, then, knowing this to be the case, should the people of Virginia consent to the employment of a second set of legally-sanctioned brigands whose masters would reside in distant Philadelphia or New York, where the people of Virginia would be forced to travel at personal cost in order to seek redress?

Henry’s venomous language notwithstanding, the point which he was attempting to make was in many ways a fairly reasonable one. If, as he affirmed, the state sheriffs in Virginia to whom the responsibility of tax collection fell tended to behave in a scurrilous and self-interested manner, it was not irrational to assume that federal sheriffs possessed of the same responsibility would follow this example, to the tune of extortion, and fraud, and corruption. Indeed, at increasing distances from their overseers in the national capital – as of 1788, New York City – why shouldn’t these selfsame revenue agents behave even more outrageously than their state counterparts thus far had done? “Regulations may be made by Congress [,]” Henry admitted, “As shall restrain these officers […] But, sir, as these regulations may be made, so they may not; and many reasons there are to induce a belief that they will not.” Patrick Henry thus concluded that it was better to count on the certainty of Virginia remaining outside of the federal taxation scheme by rejecting the proposed constitution than on the possibility of said scheme being applied with care and finesse. Despite the ostensibly firm logic of this assertion, however, there was at least one problem with its construction and one potential complication. As to the latter, the government of Virginia – of which Henry had been the chief executive on two non-consecutive occasions – had in the past shown itself perfectly willing to subject people within its jurisdiction to exactly the kind of inconvenience which Henry was here railing passionately against. And as to the former, the proposed constitution made no mention of there being any such thing as a federal sheriff.  

Virginia, recall, was much larger in 1788 than it is today. At the time that Henry was speaking, Kentucky (which achieved separate statehood in 1792) and West Virginia (which followed suit in 1863) were both integral parts of the Old Dominion, the residents of which elected representatives to the state legislature and sent delegates to the Virginia Ratifying Convention. As the fact of Virginia’s eventual partition would indicate, however, the relationship between the political establishment in Richmond and the inhabitants of these outlying areas was historically somewhat fraught. The counties which would eventually form West Virginia were for the most part physically separated from the state’s Atlantic coast by the Blue Ridge Mountains, passage through which was possible only during certain months of the year. The rocky terrain and abundance of mineral deposits also resulted in the development of significant economic differences – mainly in terms of deemphasizing agriculture and placing greater importance on mining and timber – and the proximity to western Pennsylvania allowed for a steady southward flow of migration that substantially altered the social and political character of what would in time become the 35^th state in the American union.

Separation from Virginia was still some eighty years away as of 1788, of course, but these and other factors nonetheless resulted in some degree of tension even during this early period in that state’s post-independence history. Whereas the state capitol in Richmond was located amidst the wealth and grandeur enjoyed and cultivated by the planter elite, residents of Virginia living to the west of the Blue Ridge Mountains were accustomed to much more humble surroundings. Some sense of alienation was likely inevitable, then, when the western representatives chosen by their neighbors to take their assigned seats in the General Assembly were confronted by the seemingly indomitable influence of the planter elite, the fact that the wealth they generated via plantation agriculture was prioritized within the state’s economy, and the resulting tendency of infrastructure spending to go towards projects which benefited and enhanced the same.

While the region of Virginia which would go on to form the state of Kentucky was more closely aligned economically to that state’s Atlantic coast than that which would secede to form West Virginia– in as much as it was likewise dominated by plantation agriculture – distance and physical geography would result in the emergence of a very similar divergence of interests. Compared to the future West Virginia, in fact, the issues facing pre-statehood Kentucky were so urgent that Richmond was moved to grant the residents of the latter permission to apply to Congress for full statehood as early as 1788. Not only did a stretch of the Appalachians likewise separated the future Kentucky from Virginia – thus creating an at-times impassable physical barrier between residents of the same and the government whose authority could most directly affect their lives – but the indifference of Richmond to the economic priorities of its western constituents created a degree of tension that in time became practically intolerable. Unlike coastal Virginia, whose ports on the Chesapeake were open to the Atlantic Ocean and provided access to a myriad of markets beyond, Virginia’s trans-Appalachian residents were forced to rely on access to the Mississippi River and to the storage and shipping facilities of Spanish New Orleans if they were intent on making anything like a reasonable profit on their produce. While this would not pose much of a problem under normal circumstances, the planter elite demonstrated an alarming indifference towards the economic stability of their state’s western reaches during moments of peak tension between the United States and the Kingdom of Spain.

Doubtless eager to maintain favorable relations with a potential buyer for their own produce – a buyer, no less, whose various Caribbean possessions were seemingly always in need of basic supplies – the planter-dominated government of Virginia accordingly did little to secure the reopening of New Orleans to American commerce following its closure by Spanish authorities in 1784. Granted, two of Virginia’s delegates in Congress, James Madison (1751-1836) and James Monroe (1758-1831), did take the lead in defeating the ratification of the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty (1786), which would have exchanged a twenty-five year continuation of this state of affairs in exchange for access to Spain’s West Indian colonies. But in the interim, between 1784 and Virginia’s granting of permission for Kentucky statehood in 1788, the residents of that region were left to suffer without recourse. Some segment of the planter elite may have shown itself willing to prevent the indefinite continuation of their economic woes, but this gesture did nothing to alleviate their misery in the meantime. Facing immanent economic ruin and yet still unable to make themselves effectively heard in Richmond – being both outnumbered and forced to shoulder the burdens of distance and expense – Kentuckians accordingly held some ten conventions between 1784 and 1788, all of which for the purpose of proposing and establishing statehood. Though the last of these was ultimately successful – in as much as it resulted in the acquiescence of the government of Virginia – events would unfortunately transpire so as to prevent the actual admission of Kentucky into the union of American states until 1792. 

Returning to Patrick Henry’s cited commentary upon the supposedly reprehensible notion of subjecting the people of Virginia to the taxation authority of a government too far from those being affected than was in keeping with the basic principles of liberty and justice, the above discussion would seem to call his sincerity into question. As of 1788, whether he would himself have admitted it or not, the state of which Henry had twice been Governor was arguably guilty of exactly this behavior. The inhabitants of the regions of Virginia which would at length become the states of Kentucky and West Virginia were all of them subject to the authority of a government that was not only separated from them by both distance and physical obstruction but which had repeatedly shown itself to be disinterested in addressing their basic economic needs. Granted, the relative inability of these far-flung Virginians to exercise control – or else register their discontent – over the behavior of state sheriffs assigned to collect what taxes they owned was not particularly at issue within the context of their major grievances with Richmond. That being said, the basic principle at work was fundamentally the same. The trans-Appalachian residents of what would soon become Kentucky, as well as the trans-Blue Ridge residents of what would at length become West Virginia, were at a loss compared to their countrymen on the Atlantic coast by being unable to contact their government at certain times of the year, at others being forced to do so at significant expense and risk of harm, and at all times being the victims of persistent neglect. 

Henry, it again bears noting, would likely not have granted the parallel between what he had described in his speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention and what was then occurring in the Old Dominion. Indeed, having served as Governor of that state during what were arguably the pivotal stages in Kentucky’s journey towards admission to the American union, he would likely have claimed that he and his successor, Edmund Randolph (1753-1813), had between them laid the issue completely to rest by clearing the way for Kentucky to petition Congress directly for statehood. Virginia may have formerly been guilty of what Henry described in 1788 as “mischiefs” and “oppressions” as regarded the inhabitants of Kentucky, but it was accordingly guilty no longer. True though this may have been, it would nevertheless leave out the parallel situation of the future territory of West Virginia. Residents thereof, though not faced with as dire a near-term economic forecast as their countrymen in Kentucky, were still at a distinct disadvantage compared to Virginia’s plantation-owning coastal elite. They could and did elect representatives to the General Assembly, of course, and their representatives were entitled to vote during the joint sessions convened for the purpose of electing a governor. It was entirely accurate to say, therefore, that they had as much formal input over the affairs of the government of the state in which they resided as did any inhabitant of the Piedmont or the Chesapeake. But they were also outnumbered, as representatives of a set of economic interests unique to their region, and forced to contend with significant barriers to their continued participation in civic affairs. And while, in a moral and legal sense, they were indisputably entitled to submit their grievances to Richmond, they were practically restricted from doing so by the changing of the seasons, the time that they could put aside to make the lengthy journey to the coast, and their willingness to risk potential harm or hardship. Authorities in Richmond, unless they were tremendously ignorant of what was going on in the state that they governed, could not but have known that all of this was the case. All the same, they seemed content enough not to consider the issues at hand particularly worth addressing.

The reason that Henry likewise made no note of this fact during a speech in which he vociferously decried the very concept of a people being bound to the authority of a distant, inaccessible government would seem, essentially, to be twofold. On one hand, both tactically and morally, it surely would not have suited him to admit that the government over which he had quite recently exercised executive authority was in any way guilty of neglecting its constituents. Not only would it have weakened the force of the argument he was trying to make – by demonstrating that the proposed national government would be no more guilty of the sins Henry decried than certain state government were already – but it would also have served to tarnish Henry’s hard-won reputation as an ardent defender of the rights of the people. How sincere could the man be in his convictions if he had previously overseen precisely the kind of passive oppression which he was now claiming he wanted to prevent? Did he truly despise arbitrary authority in all guises, as he had long and loudly affirmed, or just when it was wielded by anyone other than himself? Rather than attempt to answer these kinds of question – which would most definitely have been valid ones – Henry likely saw it as far a safer bet to simply omit any mention of the subject and count on the planter preponderance in the Virginia Ratifying Convention to accomplish the same result as it had in the General Assembly. That is to say, so long as those whose grievances were not being addressed remained in the minority there was no practical need to pay them any mind.

On the other hand, of course, there was the somewhat subtler influence of ingrained provincialism. Though perhaps conscious of the difficulties faced by the residents of what would at length become the state of West Virginia – as events had surely forced him to become aware of the similar conditions then at work in what was soon to be Kentucky – Henry may have managed to convince himself that the situation he described in his speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention vis-à-vis the authority and oversight of federal sheriffs was not at all like what had happened and was happening in his home state by keeping one basic fact at the very front of his mind. Kentuckians and West Virginians, while forced to contend with more trying circumstances than their neighbors in coastal Virginia, could nonetheless take comfort in the knowledge that the government with whom they struggled was at the very least familiar with their customs, their character, and their basic situation. It was not, in essence, a foreign government to which they were subject. Familial and economic connections crossed the aforementioned barriers represented by the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains, and the communities in question elected representatives on a regular basis whose sole task it was to make their voices heard in the halls of power in Richmond. While the interests of these people may have been neglected from time to time, therefore, owing to their comparative minority within the general population, they were not strangers in Virginia, and nor was Virginia, to them, a strange land. The same could not have so easily been claimed of the consolidated national government described by the proposed constitution.

Virginia, of course, was going to have as much input into said government as would any of the other American states. Virginians would directly elect representatives to the lower house of Congress, and the General Assembly would collectively appoint the state’s two Senators. The same would be true of Massachusetts, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Virginia’s presidential electors would likewise be chosen by the General Assembly, the votes of which would be cast on the same footing as those of its twelve sister-states. But if it could accordingly be said that the resulting national government would belong as much to Virginia as it did to Massachusetts, it would also have been fair to claim that said government would belong to Virginia less than to the other twelves states combined. In this sense, while Virginia Congressmen and Virginia Senators would have some input into what federal taxes were levied in the Old Dominion and the manner by which they were collected, said taxes might also conceivably be levied and collected over the vehement objection of these same Virginia legislators. Having agreed to submit to the authority vested in the national government by the proposed constitution, Virginians would possess no legal recourse in the event of such a result. Their property would be at the disposal of people who did not live in Virginia, who had perhaps never been to Virginia, and likely had only a limited idea of the kind of treatment the people of that state were willing or able to bear. Having subsisted for over a decade on their own initiative, electing their own governments, making their own laws, and generally forging their own destiny, this was doubtless not an outcome the people of Virginia believed they were due to confront when they declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776. Indeed, it was this exact kind of situation which the severing of formal legal ties between British America and Great Britain proper was supposed to foreclose upon forever. The proposed constitution, as Patrick Henry described it, threatened to undo this outcome, and for that reason represented a legitimate source of anxiety for those who had come to invest the concept of state sovereignty and state autonomy with an almost religious degree of moral significance.

The text of the proposed constitution itself didn’t hold much in the way of answers to the queries posed by the abovementioned situation. Cognizant though the Framers doubtless were of the importance which their countrymen had come to invest in the continued independence of the various state governments, the entire raison d’être of their meeting in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 was to reform the government of the United States of America along more centralized lines. The assembled delegates, while willing to concede certain responsibilities to the states, were accordingly unwilling to seed the administrative framework in question with the means of its own undoing. The various states, for example, were granted the right to draw the districts by which individuals were to be elected to the House of Representatives, were given direct responsibility for the appointment of Senators, were allowed a tremendous amount of flexibility in the selection of presidential electors, and enjoyed final approval over potential amendments to the text of the Constitution. At the same time, however, no state was permitted to disregard an act of Congress, disobey a ruling of the federal courts, claim such responsibilities as had been allocated to the federal government, or refuse to participate in the national military establishment. The 1780s had borne witness to the consequences of failing to thus curtail the simultaneous autonomy of thirteen separate states – the competition, mutual sabotage, diplomatic paralysis, and economic malaise – and the proposed constitution was the Framers’ purpose-made answer. They were not about to see the union of states for which many of them had but recently fought and sacrificed slide further into internal chaos and external irrelevance. The inability of the various states to any longer engage in practically unlimited freedom of action was therefore, to their thinking, not an unfortunate side effect of their efforts but rather the whole and specific purpose.

All that being said, Henry was likely as troubled by the notion that Virginia was bound to lose a significant portion of its by-now accustomed autonomy under the terms of the proposed constitution as by to whom he believed said autonomy was going to be ceded. Recall, to that end, his assessment of the likely locations from which the federal sheriffs he complained of were to receive their orders. “If they perpetrate the most unwarrantable outrage on your person or property,” he avowed to fellow Virginians, “You cannot get redress on this side of Philadelphia or New York [.]” Congress, it was true, had been meeting in New York City since 1785. And Philadelphia, in fits and starts resulting mainly from external threats, had previously served in the same role as capital of the United States of America during the Revolutionary War between 1776 and 1781. But there was almost certainly something more than a statement of probability to what Henry was saying. It wasn’t just that these were the likeliest locations wherein the government described by the proposed constitution would set down roots, or that they were each of them located quite far from Virginia. It’s that they were northern cities, full of traders, and merchants, and speculators, the character and customs of which were doubtless viewed by the plantation-owning Virginia elite – and even by their comparatively modest yeoman farming neighbors – as alien, unnatural, and even vaguely threatening.

Most contemporary Americans were of shared British extraction, of course, and spoke English, and practiced some form of Protestant Christianity. And the government which Henry claimed would be located in far-off New York or Philadelphia was to include its share of Virginians, and Georgians, and Carolinians as well. Indeed, the first person almost certain to hold the office of President of the United States was already widely known to be Virginia’s own George Washington, perhaps the wealthiest planter from a land of wealthy planters and a personal friend of Patrick Henry. Within the context of the rhetorical framework that Henry was seeking to construct, however, none of this mattered as much as the mere fact of the consolidated government’s probable northerly location. Despite having cooperated with increasing closeness over the course of the 1760s and 1770s – between the Stamp Act Congress, the First and Second Continental Congress, and the ongoing Congress of the United States – the various states continued to function – and their inhabitants continued to view them – as inherently distinct, separate, and unalike entities. This distinctiveness extended from the realm of government and administration – each state having adopted a constitution of its own, the variations between which were sometimes quite significant – to matters economic – some states depending almost completely on agriculture, others deriving much greater profits from trade – to questions of culture. A New Yorker, for example, was likely to view a Virginian as too courtly and supercilious, a Virginian to view a New Yorker as being overly avaricious, and both to perceive a native of Massachusetts as too much the moralizer and the busy-body for their own or anyone else’s good. So long as everyone minded their own affairs, of course, these relatively harmless stereotypes might remain just that. Congress, it was true, mandated cooperation in order to function. But since, as of 1788, Congress wasn’t required to function all that well or all that often, it would seem to have made little difference that the residents of the various states did not always see eye to eye.

The proposed constitution naturally threatened to change all that. By giving a reformed and empowered Congress binding decision-making authority, the Framers ensured that the cultural, political, and economic differences that persisted between the states could not continue to be ignored while each pursued their respective interests and priorities. Courtly Virginians, acquisitive New Yorkers, and censorious New Englanders would be forced to cooperate in the formulation of such laws and policies as would have the same effect upon – and demand the same adherence from – every state in the nascent American republic. While on one hand this would almost certainly have required the individuals in question – elected to represent their respective communities – to familiarize themselves with the political, economic, and cultural realities of states other than their own, thus arguably helping to bind the nation closer together in the spirit of partnership and mutual aid, it was also likely to produce more problematic results in the process. Namely, as mentioned above, it was entirely possible that a bill might receive enough votes to become law, garner the signature of the President, and begin to be enforced despite having been uniformly rejected by the delegation of a given state. It was this latter scenario that Patrick Henry seemed intent on invoking with his cited reference to New York and Philadelphia, and the lingering provincialism of his countrymen which he seemed interested tweaking. Having refused its assent to a law which it was nonetheless bound to obey, how else might said law have fairly been described? If it was not a Virginia law, then whose was it? And what, for that matter, did it mean when a people were made to adhere to laws that they had no part in making? Henry doubtless would have answered that the only word to describe such a state was “tyranny.” Granted, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians to whom Henry alluded might also have refused their assent and been thrust into the same unenviable position as the Old Dominion herself. But the likes of Annapolis, Maryland – where Congress had met for a little less than a year between 1783 and 1784 – made a far less effective bogeyman than did New York or Philadelphia. It was the “otherness” of these places that Henry was almost certainly counting on, and the sense of foreign occupation that their authority over Virginia at least emotionally implied.