Lion of Liberty (25 page)

Thomas Jefferson. His disastrous one-year term as Virginia governor saw the British army overrun the state, burn the capital at Richmond, and chase the government to the safety of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Henry's subsequent criticism of Jefferson's stewardship provoked bitter recriminations by Jefferson.
(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Two days later, Cornwallis, Washington, and Rochambeau, among others, signed the articles of capitulation.
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In the euphoria that followed, the Virginia Assembly not only laid aside its Jefferson inquiry, it passed a resolution of “sincere thanks . . . to our former Governor . . . for his impartial, upright and attentive administration whilst in office ... and mean, by thus publicly avowing their opinion, to obviate and remove all unmerited censure.”
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The resolution did little to soothe Jefferson, or to calm his fierce anger towards Henry,
whom he described to all who would listen, “as being all tongue without either head or heart.”
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Unlike Jefferson, George Mason called Patrick Henry one of the greatest heroes of the Revolution for having sounded the first clarion call for independence with his impassioned cry for “liberty or death.” It was Henry, Mason declared, who was first to rouse the people to revolution. “I congratulate you most sincerely,” Mason wrote to Henry after Yorktown, “on the accomplishment of what I know was the warmest wish of your heart, the establishment of American independence and the liberty of our country. We are now to rank among the nations of the world; but whether our independence shall prove a blessing or a curse must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness.”
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Chapter 11

When the Virginia legislature reconvened in Richmond, British depredations had left fewer than 300 homes standing, and the depleted population was unable to offer legislators many services. In sharp contrast to the magnificent House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, the legislature convened in a small frame building, with members paid next to nothing. It was not much fun; most delegates had to lodge in uncomfortably tight quarters and were often in foul moods. Nonetheless, they heaped encomiums, along with their thanks and good wishes, on the heroes of the Revolution—Washington, Lafayette, Greene, French King Louis XVI, and endless other American and French personages both in and out of the military. They also conducted some essential business, electing as governor the Tidewater aristocrat and long-time burgess Benjamin Harrison, a cousin of Martha Washington. The government was bankrupt and paper money was worthless, so the legislators restricted use of outstanding paper money to payment of 1781 taxes or the purchase of new, government-issued “specie certificates” that would yield 6 percent a year in coins or other specie.

To replenish the state treasury, the Assembly imposed a variety of crushing new taxes: a 1 percent property tax on land, a flat two-shilling tax (about $6 today) on every horse and mule, a three-penny tax (about 75 cents today) on each head of cattle, a five-shilling tax (about $15 today) per wheel
on pleasure carriages, and a whopping fifty-pound tax on every billiard table (about $3,000 today!) to discourage (or perhaps exploit) gambling. Taverns had to pay five pounds ($300) for their licenses and every master had to pay a ten-shilling ($30) capitation tax for every slave and every white male over twenty-one in his employ or under his control as an indentured servant. Without specie, however, payment of most taxes became all but moot, and the government agreed to accept the equivalent in tobacco or hemp for half the taxes due. As angry Piedmont farmers had sensed throughout the war, the same men who had taxed them as burgesses under the royal colonial government had returned to tax them as assemblymen under the independent government of Virginia. Only their titles had changed.

A week after the legislature reconvened, Henry's malarial fever overwhelmed him again, and he returned to Leatherwood. When he arrived, he found that Dolly had given birth to her third child, a daughter she had named Martha Catherina—Henry's ninth child. Despite her husband's debilitating illness, the ever-patient Dolly persevered, managing the household of thirty-two slaves and thirty-four indentured workers, tending to her huge collection of children and step children, and nursing her sick husband—all without complaint.

For the next eighteen months, his illness kept him either in his sick-room or close to home,
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and few acts of consequence were passed in the legislature during that time, according to Henry's grandson.

Although the Assembly met as scheduled, it was little more than a social club. The Assembly's wealthy planters still ruled their huge plantations like private fiefdoms and the rest of the state as mere extensions of their lands. They had joined the Revolution because they had had the most to lose from British taxation and other government intrusions in the way they ran their properties and the state. Now they ruled again and had no intention of allowing the state to intrude where they had repulsed the British government.

“During the visit I made I saw this estimable assembly quiet not five minutes together,” said a surprised German visitor to Richmond. “It sits, but this is not a just expression, for those members show themselves in every possible position rather than that of sitting still. . . . In the anteroom, they amuse themselves zealously with talk of horse-races, run-away Negroes, yesterday's play . . . according to each man's caprice.”
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Other state legislatures were no more active or constructive than Virginia's, however. After decades of ever more restrictive British laws, Americans were fed up with government telling them how to live and what to do with their earnings. They had heeded Henry's call and risked death for “liberty”—and when they won their liberties, they expected government to stay out of their lives—as, indeed, did Henry. He envisioned postrevolutionary America developing into a vast agrarian society, with farmers able to live as independent, self-sufficient property owners, free from the tyranny of big government.

What Henry called liberty, however, George Washington called anarchy, as he pleaded in vain during seven years of war for enactment of federal laws to empower Congress to force men to fight and to tax citizens to pay the costs of war. He envisioned an orderly postrevolutionary America under a strong central government empowered to control every citizen's baser instincts. To Washington's dismay, the Confederation Congress proved as ineffectual as its predecessor Continental Congress. After the British and Americans signed a preliminary peace treaty on April 15, 1783, Congress faced war debts of more than $50 million, plus interest. Although its members recommended a 5 percent tariff on imports as a partial solution, the Articles of Confederation required approval from the legislatures of every state to put it into effect.

Henry had just returned to the Virginia Assembly for the first time in more than a year when the Assembly faced a vote on the national tariff. Still the unquestioned leader in the Assembly, he found himself caught by surprise by the impending vote. Not having studied the issues, he urged his followers to vote as his friend Washington had recommended—that is, for the tax. After the vote, however, he developed second thoughts about granting Congress any taxing powers and, a few days later, he asked the Assembly to rescind its vote and add restrictions. He suggested a 5 percent
tariff limited to twenty-five years, with receipts earmarked to pay wartime debts.

Henry's “enmity to everything which may give influence to Congress and infringe on individual liberties put him in opposition to any permanent national government tax,” Thomas Jefferson explained. After rebelling for more than twenty years against taxation by London's Parliament, Henry said he was not about to grant those powers to Congress. On the other hand, he recognized that none of the states would be able to engage in international trade until Congress repaid their collective war debts and that “ruin was inevitable unless something was done to give Congress a compulsory process for the delinquent states.”
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So the question for Henry and other American leaders was how to repay national government debts without giving the national government taxing powers. It was an impossible question that leaders of every state tried to answer, knowing that there was no answer. Henry had never before been so indecisive—at a loss for words for one of the few times in his political career. After Washington sent a circular letter urging the states to strengthen the powers of the Confederation Congress, Henry recognized there was no other solution. Yielding to Washington's argument, he sacrificed his political beliefs in the interests of the national economy and told James Madison to “sketch out some plan for giving greater power to the federal government” and that he would support it in the Assembly. “A bold example set by Virginia,” he declared, “would have influence on the other states.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that Henry had been “strenuous for invigorating the federal government.”
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Although shocked by Henry's political turnabout, the Assembly voted as he asked—in favor of the import duty, which, unlike a property or income tax, had a noncompulsory complexion in that no one is obligated to buy imported goods. To his and the Assembly's dismay, however, the New York legislature refused to accept it in its present form and set the process of saving the Confederation back to the beginning. Without approval by all the states, Congress could not levy the tax, and it remained without funds to pay current expenses, let alone the nation's debts. Henry's political sacrifice had been meaningless.

Henry's turnabout on the national tax, however, was but the first political shock he had prepared for Virginia's legislators. The next shock came when he called for reopening trade with Britain, and a third came with his call to permit Tories who had fled the state to return and reclaim their properties. A barrage of catcalls greeted his trade proposal, but Henry returned fire with accusations of insensitivity. He argued that most Virginians had suffered devastating economic hardships, “struggling through a perilous war, cut off from commerce so long that they were naked and unclothed. Why should we fetter commerce?” he asked, insisting that renewal of trade with Britain would “bless the land of plenty.”
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Henry's proposal to allow the return of Tories provoked even more consternation. His close friend Judge John Tyler asked how he, “above all other men” could think of inviting “into our family an enemy from whose insults you have suffered so severely?”
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Henry was ready, with one of his most eloquent speeches, saying he was willing to sacrifice his personal resentments and “all private wrongs . . . on the altar of my country's good.”

“We have, sir, an extensive country without population,” he explained, adopting the dramatic pose that had won him such renown:

Henry scoffed at fears of Tory uprisings, insisting that relations with “those deluded people” had changed with the king's acknowledgment of American independence. “The quarrel is over,” he affirmed. “Peace hath returned and found us a free people. Let us have the magnanimity to lay aside our antipathies and prejudices and consider the subject in a political
light. They are an enterprising, moneyed people. They will be serviceable in taking off the surplus produce of our lands and supplying us with necessaries during the infant state of our manufactures.” He then looked at Judge Tyler:

“Afraid of them?” Henry sneered. “Shall we who have laid the proud British lion at our feet now be afraid of his whelps?”
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Henry's remarkable oration won passage of both resolves, but some assemblymen stalked out angrily when he presented a fourth proposal—to subsidize marriages between whites and Indians to encourage “the friendship and confidence of the latter, whereby . . . their hostile inroads be prevented.” Henry proposed a £10 bounty to every white man or woman marrying an Indian and settling in Virginia, along with a £5 bonus for each child born of such marriages. He also suggested tax exemptions on the livestock of mixed couples and free education for their minor children. Among the few to support Henry's proposal was John Marshall, America's future U.S. Chief Justice, who called it “advantageous to this country,” but conceded to the all-but-empty chamber that “our prejudices . . . operate too powerfully.”
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