Lion of Liberty (40 page)

For the first two years of the tax, Hamilton's collectors resisted making the arduous trip across the Appalachians, where farmers greeted them with tar and feathers and other forms of brutalization. As armed federal agents appeared to protect tax collectors, farmers responded violently and, on August 1, 1794, they declared “a state of revolution,”
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gathering by the thousands outside Pittsburgh and threatening to burn the city and march to Philadelphia to overthrow the federal government. A week later, President Washington issued a proclamation ordering rebels to return to their homes or face arrest. His words echoed those of British governors to stamp tax protestors thirty-five years earlier and further raised Henry's status as a prophet. Dismissing comparisons to the British, Washington ordered 13,000 state militiamen drafted into a federal force to march against the rebels. It was Patrick Henry's worst nightmare come true. As he had predicted at the Virginia ratification convention, the Constitution had replaced the tyranny of Parliament and the British king with the tyranny of Congress and the American president. Congress had indeed taxed the people without the consent of their state legislatures—as Parliament had done—and the president was sending troops to enforce tax collections—as King George III had done.

As Washington's troops neared Pittsburgh, however, the rebels vanished, realizing that rifles and pitchforks were no match for army field artillery. Although federal troops captured twenty laggard “Whiskey Boys,” as they were called, all the others had either returned to their homes or fled into the wilderness. The troops carted their prisoners back to Philadelphia expecting cheers as they paraded them down Market Street, but the thousands who watched stood in silence—mourning the powers they had ceded to the federal government by ignoring Patrick Henry's warnings against granting unrestricted powers “over the sword and the purse” to a
national government. Although the courts convicted only two of the Whiskey Boys—and Washington pardoned them both—the president became the target of ferocious criticism for suppressing the very type of citizen protest he had led before the Revolutionary War. Although Washington shrugged off the comparisons, his aura of infallibility evanesced in a ceaseless rain of press criticism that left the old warrior bitter about having remained in office as long as he had. “I can religiously aver,” Washington complained, “that no man was ever more tired of public life or more devoutly wished for retirement than I do.”
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Although furious at Washington's response to the Whiskey Rebellion, Henry no longer wielded the regional or national political power of his days in the Virginia capital. In any case, there was little he or anyone else could do. Richard Henry Lee and George Mason had both died in 1792, and most of the other Antifederalist leaders had drifted off the national political scene—as, indeed, he had done. “It is time for me to retire,” he admitted to his daughter Betsey. “I shall never more appear in a public character . . . My wish is to pass the rest of my days as much as may be unobserved by the critics of the world, who show but little sympathy for the deficiencies to which old age is so liable. May God bless you, my dear Betsey, and your children.”
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The sun that had set on Henry's political life, however, did not cease to shine over his home life. Still the “Belgian hare,” prolific Patrick fathered yet another son. In 1795, Dorothea gave birth to John, her ninth surviving child and Patrick's fifteenth. Patrick's son John, by his first marriage, had died four years earlier.

To try to calm the furor associated with the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington asked Virginia Governor Lee to renew his offer of a Senate seat to Henry. Senator Grayson's old seat, which Antifederalist James Monroe had filled, was vacant again after Washington appointed Monroe minister to Paris. Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the former Virginia governor, told Washington he believed that Henry had embraced the Constitution and the concept of a strong national government. “He grows rich every hour,” Randolph explained, “and thus his motives to tranquility must be multiplying every day.”
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Henry quickly disavowed Randolph's assertions. “The reports you have heard of my changing sides in politics,” he told his daughter Betsey, “are not true. I am too old to exchange my former opinions, which have grown up into fixed habits of thinking.” Calling Federalist policies “quite void of wisdom and foresight,” he accused them of twisting his most casual words “to answer party views. Who can have been so meanly employed, I know not—nor do I care; for I no longer consider myself as an actor on the stage of public life.”
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Henry again declined Lee's offer of a Senate seat in a simple note that avoided political controversy: “It gives me great pain to declare that existing circumstances compel me to decline this appointment . . . arising from my time of life—combined with the great distance to Philadelphia.”
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Randolph and other Federalist leaders, however, remained convinced that the wily old Antifederalist simply wanted a higher-profile post than the Senate, where he would have to compete with and continually compromise his beliefs with more than two dozen other senators. Washington countered Henry's refusal to enter the Senate with the offer of a mission as “envoy extraordinary” to Spain to wrest a treaty guaranteeing American navigation rights on the Mississippi—an almost sacred quest for Henry and his constituents in the West. Success might have propelled him to the presidency or, certainly, the vice presidency. But again, Henry confounded the political world by declining. “The importance of the negotiation and its probable length in a country so distant,” he explained, “are difficulties not easy to reconcile to one at my time of life.”
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When in 1795, Edmund Randolph resigned as secretary of state after being accused of soliciting a bribe from the French government, Henry's earlier rejections of federal appointments convinced Washington to turn to other candidates to replace Randolph. But after they refused the post, he again approached Henry, warning that “a crisis is approaching that must . . . soon decide whether order and good government shall be preserved, or anarchy and confusion ensue. . . .

Henry again declined, acknowledging that

Aware of the political suspicions that most Federalists harbored toward him, Henry pledged Washington his full support: “Believe me, Sir, I have bid adieu to the distinctions of federal and antifederal ever since the commencement of the present government, and . . . have often expressed my fears of disunion amongst the states from collision of interests, but especially from the baneful effects of faction. . . . If my country is destined to encounter the horrors of anarchy, every power of mind or body which I possess will be exerted in support of the government.”
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Convinced of Henry's loyalty to the new government, Washington offered to appoint him Chief Justice of the United States in 1795, but by then Henry's health was indeed failing. The long-term effects of his many bouts with malarial fever and intestinal infections had taken their toll; he had lost interest in political affairs and, when he wasn't doting over his
children, he read the Bible incessantly—at dawn and again by candlelight in the evening. “This book is worth all the books that ever were printed,” he concluded, “and it has been my misfortune that I have never found time to read it with the proper attention and feeling till lately. I trust in the mercy of heaven that it is not yet too late.”
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Henry hired a tutor for his children and, when they weren't at their studies, he spent as much time with them as possible to compensate for the time he had lost while traveling the legal circuits. As with his newfound attention to the Bible, he put his trust “in the mercy of heaven that it was not yet too late” to show his family how much he loved them. According to his brother-in-law Samuel Meredith, “His visitors have not un-frequently caught him lying on the floor with a group of these little ones climbing over him in every direction, or dancing around him with obstreperous mirth to the tune of his violin, while the only contest seemed to be who could make the most noise.” In retirement, Henry again grew “fond of entertaining himself and his family with his violin and flute and often improvising the music.”
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The Federalists, though, refused to believe that so political an animal as Patrick Henry would reject an offer of political power. “Most assiduous court is paid to Patrick Henry,” Thomas Jefferson growled to James Monroe. “If they thought they could count on him, they would run him for their vice president.”
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In fact, Henry's successful defense of so many American debtors in the British Debts Case had restored his status as the most popular figure in the nation after George Washington. Like no one else among the Founding Fathers, he consistently defended the interests of the ordinary citizen. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had harbored ambitions to succeed Washington to the presidency, but he knew that the taxes he had imposed as secretary of the treasury had left him too unpopular to do so. Rather than see his party fall from power, he decided to offer the nomination of his party to Patrick Henry, whom he believed to be a convert to federalism. Hamilton knew that Henry would automatically win the support of the Antifederalist South and West, while Hamilton and other Federalist leaders would rally support for Henry in the largely Federalist Northeast.

At Hamilton's behest, Massachusetts Federalist Rufus King wrote to John Marshall, who went to see Henry with Governor Henry Lee, but found him “unwilling to embark in the business. His unwillingness I think proceeds from an apprehension of the difficulties to be encountered by those who shall fill high executive offices.”
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Henry explained to his daughter Elizabeth that he had watched “with concern our old Commander in Chief [Washington] abusively treated. If he whose character as our leader during the whole war was above all praise is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected by men of the common standard of character?”
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Despite his refusal to run, a groundswell of popular support for his candidacy developed across the nation among moderate Antifederalists, Federalists, and independents who shunned radical politics. “A strong reason for the appointment of Mr. Henry is that it may have a tendency to unite all parties,” wrote Virginia's Leven Powell, who was campaigning to be a presidential elector. He predicted that Henry's election would “do away with the spirit of contention which . . . threatens the destruction of the Union.”
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Elated by the prospects of Henry's elevation to the presidency, the Virginia legislature elected him to a sixth term as governor in November—without his knowledge. Henry decided the efforts to draw him back into public office had gone too far. After rejecting the governorship, he wrote to the
Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser
:

In the ensuing election, Henry finished fourth in the electoral balloting, with Adams elected president and Thomas Jefferson vice president. South Carolina Federalist Thomas Pinckney, a Revolutionary War hero and successful diplomat in the Washington administration, finished third.

In 1798, increased threats of war with France and other European powers provoked a “spy scare” and consequent passage by President John Adams's Federalist majority in Congress of the Alien and Sedition Acts, effectively stripping Americans of their First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of the press. The Alien Enemies Act gave the president powers “to arrest, imprison, or banish alien subjects of an enemy power” in time of war, while the Sedition Act made it illegal for citizens or aliens to incite “insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination” or prevent a federal officer from enforcing federal laws. It also made it illegal to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the U.S. government, Congress, or the president. The acts outraged Antifederalists, who called them unconstitutional. Vice president Jefferson went a step farther, setting the stage for a confrontation with the federal government over state sovereignty. Jefferson declared the Constitution only “a compact” among sovereign states in which the states retained the authority to restrain federal government actions that exceeded its constitutional mandate. Jefferson rode to the new state of Kentucky and convinced the Antifederalist majority of former Virginians in the legislature to approve a resolution that any federal government exercise of powers not specifically delegated to it by the Constitution was, by definition, unconstitutional and, therefore, subject to nullification by state government.