Patrick Henry delivers his “Liberty or Death” speech on March 23, 1775. (Image courtesy Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History)
On March 23, 1775, in what was then the Henrico Parish Church, a backwoods lawyer known for his gift of oratory stood up amid the crowded room to address a momentous question.
His prorations in support of raising and arming a militia for defense against the British army rankled some of his listeners and encouraged others.
What Hanover County’s Patrick Henry said isn’t known with complete accuracy, and he spoke without notes.
Matters are further complicated because the Second Virginia Convention that Henry addressed met in defiance of John Murray, the fourth earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia. Lord Dunmore did less to ease the tensions in Virginia than almost anyone else, dissolving the governing House of Burgesses in 1774. Thus, those delegates convening — whether they agreed with Henry or not — understood that they gathered illegally, and they didn’t want a paper trail.
Opponents of the measure favored being cautious and awaiting a response from King George III to the most recent petition for reconciliation.
Henry, at 38 years old, was renowned in the community both for his speaking skills in court and his opposition to what he regarded as increasing royal overreach. A failed farmer and a mediocre businessman (and briefly a bartender at Hanover Tavern), he taught himself law and passed the bar in 1760. He shot to fame three years later due to arguments in the complicated “Parson’s Cause” case, in which he disputed the Crown’s invalidation of statutes adopted by local representatives as the behavior of “a tyrant who forfeits the allegiance of his subjects.”
This was the first in what became a series of Henry’s vehement arguments against government without local representation, which included taxation.
Three weeks prior to Henry’s speech, his wife Sarah Shelton, a childhood sweetheart and the mother of their six children, died. She’d suffered for several years, perhaps experiencing extreme symptoms of postpartum depression.
Her mental state deteriorated to the point where family members counseled for her institutionalization in the grim public asylum at Williamsburg. Henry chose instead to maintain her in a cellar apartment at his Hanover plantation of Scotchtown. She was cared for by his mother, sisters and daughters and enslaved attendants. The champion of liberty before his speech kept at least 10 slaves at Scotchtown, several of them inherited through his marriage. He knew well of his hypocrisy.
Prominent Richmond Quaker and abolitionist Robert Pleasants of Curles Neck in Henrico County wrote to Henry in 1773, pressing about his stance on the trafficking of people. Henry in part responded, “Would anyone believe that I am the master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, and cannot justify it.”
He hoped future generations would end the practice. “I could say many things on the subject,” Henry concluded, “a serious view of which gives a gloomy perspective to future times.”
Henrico Parish Church, where Henry spoke, is now known as Historic St. John’s Church. (Image courtesy Stephen Wilson)
Meanwhile at Scotchtown, during Sarah’s violent episodes she was strapped into a “Quaker gown,” a primitive straitjacket, to prevent harm to herself or others. Her cause of death is unknown, as is her assumed Scotchtown resting place.
Two years later, Henry wed Dorothea Dandridge and they raised 10 more children. Also in his future were five one-year terms as the first non-Colonial governor of Virginia and his opposition to the ratification of the Constitution without enumerated rights, alongside his concern regarding the potential abolition of slavery.
Henry’s rhetoric at Henrico Parish Church wasn’t put to paper by the eyewitness and judge St. George Tucker for more than 40 years. This came in response to frustrated biographer William Wirt, a lawyer and a member of Aaron Burr’s defense team in the former vice president’s Richmond treason trial, a United States attorney general, speechwriter and would-be 19th-century attorney turned novelist.
Wirt began collecting material for a biography of Henry in 1808. He despaired of finding an accurate record of Henry’s “greatest hits” from the earlier part of his career. Tucker wrote for Wirt his best recollection, although that correspondence went missing around 1904. Thomas Jefferson, who was in the room where the speech happened, also contributed his memory to the 1817 book. This material would form the most familiar version of Henry’s declamation.
But did Wirt conflate the sentiments with the decades-old recollections of Judge Tucker?
At his Monticello library, Jefferson placed Wirt’s book on the fiction shelves. Perhaps this is also a reflection of his long-simmering dislike of Henry. Yet Jefferson somewhat grudgingly admitted, “It is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry.”
Wirt also credits Henry with a certain amount of prescience during the March 23 speech: “The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms” refers to the first shots of the war at Lexington and Concord, which occurred on April 19. Henry also assured the skeptics in the audience that the Colonies wouldn’t fight alone. Friends from overseas (the French, for their own complicated geopolitical reasons) would bolster the cause. In Richmond on that day, this would have seemed like wishful thinking.
That said, Henry’s rhetoric seems to have been tuned exactly right. Many of the delegates would have attended theater productions and seen Joseph Addison’s “Cato: A Tragedy.” The 1713 five-act play, based on the last days of the Roman Senator Marcus Porcius Cato, who forcibly opposed Caesar, made its way to the Colonies by 1732 and was frequently performed.
Henry’s exhortation about life and peace coming at the cost of “chains and slavery” and the climactic “Give me liberty or give me death!” may have been inspired by a scene in Act II. There, Cato exclaims, “It is not now a time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”
Regardless of the source of Henry’s poetic flourishes, his delivery made the difference. The militia measure passed in an unrecorded voice vote that likely was quite close.
Some years ago, responding to a posting about the speech, the late photographer Eric D. Dobbs made the following erudite revelation:
“I once was asked by a real prince, the son of a Yoruba Oba (king) from Nigeria, to take him to St. John’s and take his photograph there. I asked how he knew about the church.
“He said, ‘Is this not where Patrick Henry gave his famous speech?’ I said it was, but how did he know about that speech? He said, ‘The whole world knows of this speech. It is what we expect of you.’ When he said that, I would have carried him there on my back, if necessary.”
Tickets to see reenactments of the “Liberty or Death” speech at St. John’s Church on March 23 have sold out, but the Virginia Museum of History & Culture will open for a livestream viewing. Learn more at va250.org.
