Patrick Henry Part 3

"on the courtyard such a concourse as would have appalled any other man in his situation. They were not people of the county merely who were there, but visitors from all the counties to a considerable distance around. The decision upon the demurrer had produced a violent ferment among the people, and equal exultation on the part of the clergy, who attended the court in a large body, either to look down opposition, or to enjoy the final triumph of this hard fought contest, which they now considered as perfectly secure.... Soon after the opening of the court the cause was called.... The array before Mr. Henry's eyes was now most fearful. On the bench sat more than twenty clergymen, the most learned men in the colony.... The courthouse was crowded with an overwhelming mult.i.tude, and surrounded with an immense and anxious throng, who, not finding room to enter, were endeavoring to listen without in the deepest attention. But there was something still more awfully disconcerting than all this; for in the chair of the presiding magistrate sat no other person than his own father. Mr. Lyons opened the cause very briefly.... And now came on the first trial of Patrick Henry's strength. No one had ever heard him speak,[53] and curiosity was on tiptoe.

He rose very awkwardly, and faltered much in his exordium.

The people hung their heads at so unpromising a commencement; the clergy were observed to exchange sly looks with each other; and his father is described as having almost sunk with confusion, from his seat. But these feelings were of short duration, and soon gave place to others of a very different character. For now were those wonderful faculties which he possessed, for the first time developed; and now was first witnessed that mysterious and almost supernatural transformation of appearance, which the fire of his own eloquence never failed to work in him. For as his mind rolled along, and began to glow from its own action, all the exuviae of the clown seemed to shed themselves spontaneously. His att.i.tude, by degrees, became erect and lofty. The spirit of his genius awakened all his features. His countenance shone with a n.o.bleness and grandeur which it had never before exhibited. There was a lightning in his eyes which seemed to rive the spectator.

His action became graceful, bold, and commanding; and in the tones of his voice, but more especially in his emphasis, there was a peculiar charm, a magic, of which any one who ever heard him will speak as soon as he is named, but of which no one can give any adequate description. They can only say that it struck upon the ear and upon the heart, in a manner which language cannot tell. Add to all these, his wonder-working fancy, and the peculiar phraseology in which he clothed its images: for he painted to the heart with a force that almost petrified it. In the language of those who heard him on this occasion, 'he made their blood run cold, and their hair to rise on end.'

"It will not be difficult for any one who ever heard this most extraordinary man, to believe the whole account of this transaction which is given by his surviving hearers; and from their account, the court house of Hanover County must have exhibited, on this occasion, a scene as picturesque as has been ever witnessed in real life. They say that the people, whose countenance had fallen as he arose, had heard but a very few sentences before they began to look up; then to look at each other with surprise, as if doubting the evidence of their own senses; then, attracted by some strong gesture, struck by some majestic att.i.tude, fascinated by the spell of his eye, the charm of his emphasis, and the varied and commanding expression of his countenance, they could look away no more. In less than twenty minutes, they might be seen in every part of the house, on every bench, in every window, stooping forward from their stands, in death-like silence; their features fixed in amazement and awe; all their senses listening and riveted upon the speaker, as if to catch the least strain of some heavenly visitant. The mockery of the clergy was soon turned into alarm; their triumph into confusion and despair; and at one burst of his rapid and overwhelming invective, they fled from the house in precipitation and terror. As for the father, such was his surprise, such his amazement, such his rapture, that, forgetting where he was, and the character which he was filling, tears of ecstasy streamed down his cheeks, without the power or inclination to repress them.

"The jury seem to have been so completely bewildered, that they lost sight not only of the Act of 1748, but that of 1758 also; for, thoughtless even of the admitted right of the plaintiff, they had scarcely left the bar, when they returned with a verdict of one penny damages. A motion was made for a new trial; but the court, too, had now lost the equipoise of their judgment, and overruled the motion by an unanimous vote. The verdict and judgment overruling the motion were followed by redoubled acclamations, from within and without the house. The people, who had with difficulty kept their hands off their champion from the moment of closing his harangue, no sooner saw the fate of the cause finally sealed, than they seized him at the bar; and in spite of his own exertions, and the continued cry of order from the sheriffs and the court, they bore him out of the courthouse, and raising him on their shoulders, carried him about the yard, in a kind of electioneering triumph."[54]

At the time when Wirt wrote this rhapsody, he was unable, as he tells us, to procure from any quarter a rational account of the line of argument taken by Patrick Henry, or even of any other than a single topic alluded to by him in the course of his speech,--they who heard the speech saying "that when it was over, they felt as if they had just awaked from some ecstatic dream, of which they were unable to recall or connect the particulars."[55]

There was present in that a.s.semblage, however, at least one person who listened to the young orator without falling into an ecstatic dream, and whose senses were so well preserved to him through it all that he was able, a few days afterward, while the whole occasion was fresh in his memory, to place upon record a clear and connected version of the wonder-working speech. This version is to be found in a letter written by the plaintiff on the 12th of December, 1763, and has been brought to light only within recent years.

After giving, for the benefit of the learned counsel by whom the cause was to be managed, on appeal, in the general court, a lucid and rather critical account of the whole proceeding, Maury adds:--

"One occurrence more, though not essential to the cause, I can't help mentioning.... Mr. Henry, mentioned above (who had been called in by the defendants, as we suspected, to do what I some time ago told you of), after Mr. Lyons had opened the cause, rose and harangued the jury for near an hour. This harangue turned upon points as much out of his own depth, and that of the jury, as they were foreign from the purpose,--which it would be impertinent to mention here.

However, after he had discussed those points, he labored to prove 'that the Act of 1758 had every characteristic of a good law; that it was a law of general utility, and could not, consistently with what he called the original compact between the king and people ... be annulled.' Hence he inferred, 'that a king, by disallowing acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects'

obedience.' He further urged 'that the only use of an established church and clergy in society, is to enforce obedience to civil sanctions, and the observance of those which are called duties of imperfect obligation; that when a clergy ceases to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry, and may justly strip them of their appointments; that the clergy of Virginia, in this particular instance of their refusing to acquiesce in the law in question, had been so far from answering, that they had most notoriously counteracted, those great ends of their inst.i.tution; that, therefore, instead of useful members of the state, they ought to be considered as enemies of the community; and that, in the case now before them, Mr. Maury, instead of countenance, and protection, and damages, very justly deserved to be punished with signal severity.' And then he perorates to the following purpose, 'that excepting they (the jury) were disposed to rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks, he hoped they would not let slip the opportunity which now offered, of making such an example of him as might, hereafter, be a warning to himself and his brethren, not to have the temerity, for the future, to dispute the validity of such laws, authenticated by the only authority which, in his conception, could give force to laws for the government of this colony,--the authority of a legal representative of a council, and of a kind and benevolent and patriot governor.' You'll observe I do not pretend to remember his words, but take this to have been the sum and substance of this part of his labored oration. When he came to that part of it where he undertook to a.s.sert 'that a king, by annulling or disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects'

obedience,' the more sober part of the audience were struck with horror. Mr. Lyons called out aloud, and with an honest warmth, to the Bench, 'that the gentleman had spoken treason,' and expressed his astonishment, 'that their wors.h.i.+ps could hear it without emotion, or any mark of dissatisfaction.' At the same instant, too, amongst some gentlemen in the crowd behind me, was a confused murmur of 'treason, treason!' Yet Mr. Henry went on in the same treasonable and licentious strain, without interruption from the Bench, nay, even without receiving the least exterior notice of their disapprobation. One of the jury, too, was so highly pleased with these doctrines, that, as I was afterwards told, he every now and then gave the traitorous declaimer a nod of approbation. After the court was adjourned, he apologized to me for what he had said, alleging that his sole view in engaging in the cause, and in saying what he had, was to render himself popular. You see, then, it is so clear a point in this person's opinion that the ready road to popularity here is to trample under foot the interests of religion, the rights of the church, and the prerogatives of the crown."[56]

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 12.

[34] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ 316, 317.

[35] Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vi. 88, 89.

[36] _Ibid._ vi. 568, 569.

[37] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 508, 509.

[38] Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vii. 240, 241.

[39] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 467, 468.

[40] As was alleged in Richard Bland's _Letter to the Clergy_, 17.

[41] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 467.

[42] _Ibid._ i. 466.

[43] _Ibid._ i. 465, 466.

[44] Meade, _Old Families of Virginia_, i. 223.

[45] In the account here given of these Virginia "option laws," I have been obliged, by lack of s.p.a.ce, to give somewhat curtly the bald results of rather careful studies which I have made upon the question in all accessible doc.u.ments of the period; and I have not been at liberty to state many things, on both sides of the question, which would be necessary to a complete discussion of the subject. For instance, among the motives to be mentioned for the popularity of laws whose chief effects were to diminish the pay of the established clergy, should be considered those connected with a growing dissent from the established church in Virginia, and particularly with the very human dislike which even churchmen might have to paying in the form of a compulsory tax what they would have cheerfully paid in the form of a voluntary contribution. Perhaps the best modern defense of these laws is by A. H. Everett, in his _Life of Henry_, 230-233; but his statements seem to be founded on imperfect information. Wirt, publis.h.i.+ng his opinion under the responsibility of his great professional and official position, affirms that on the whole question, "the clergy had much the best of the argument." _Life of Henry,_ 22.

[46] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 510.

[47] _Ibid._ i. 513, 514.

[48] _Ibid._ i. 496, 497.

[49] Perry, _Hist. Coll._ i. 497.

[50] Maury, _Mem. of a Huguenot Family_, 419.

[51] Maury, _Mem. of a Huguenot Family_, 419, 420.

[52] _Ibid._ 420.

[53] This cannot be true except in the sense that he had never before spoken to such an a.s.semblage or in any great cause.

[54] Wirt, 23-27.

[55] _Ibid._ 29.

[56] Maury, _Mem. of a Huguenot Family_, 418-424, where the entire letter is given in print for the first time.

CHAPTER V

FIRST TRIUMPHS AT THE CAPITAL

It is not in the least strange that the n.o.ble-minded clergyman, who was the plaintiff in the famous cause of the Virginia parsons, should have been deeply offended by the fierce and victorious eloquence of the young advocate on the opposite side, and should have let fall, with reference to him, some bitter words. Yet it could only be in a moment of anger that any one who knew him could ever have said of Patrick Henry that he was disposed "to trample under foot the interests of religion," or that he had any ill-will toward the church or its ministers. It is very likely that, in the many irritations growing out of a civil establishment of the church in his native colony, he may have shared in feelings that were not uncommon even among devout churchmen there; but in spite of this, then and always, to the very end of his life, his most sacred convictions and his tenderest affections seem to have been on the side of the inst.i.tutions and ministers of Christianity, and even of Christianity in its historic form. Accordingly, both before and after his great speech, he tried to indicate to the good men whose legal claims it had become his professional duty to resist, that such resistance must not be taken by them as implying on his part any personal unkindness. To his uncle and namesake, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who was even then a plaintiff in a similar suit, and whom he had affectionately persuaded not to remain at the courthouse to hear the coming speech against the pecuniary demands of himself and his order, he said "that the clergy had not thought him worthy of being retained on their side," and that "he knew of no moral principle by which he was bound to refuse a fee from their adversaries."[57] So, too, the conciliatory words, which, after the trial, he tried to speak to the indignant plaintiff, and which the latter has reported in the blunt form corresponding to his own angry interpretation of them, after all may have borne the better meaning given to them by Bishop Meade, who says that Patrick Henry, in his apology to Maury, "pleaded as an excuse for his course, that he was a young lawyer, a candidate for practice and reputation, and therefore must make the best of his cause."[58]

These genial efforts at pacification are of rather more than casual significance: they are indications of character. They mark a distinct quality of the man's nature, of which he continued to give evidence during the rest of his life,--a certain sweetness of spirit, which never deserted him through all the stern conflicts of his career. He was always a good fighter: never a good hater. He had the brain and the temperament of an advocate; his imagination and his heart always kindled hotly to the side that he had espoused, and with his imagination and his heart always went all the rest of the man; in his advocacy of any cause that he had thus made his own, he hesitated at no weapon either of offence or of defence; he struck hard blows--he spoke hard words--and he usually triumphed; and yet, even in the paroxysms of the combat, and still more so when the combat was over, he showed how possible it is to be a redoubtable antagonist without having a particle of malice.

Then, too, from this first great scene in his public life, there comes down to us another incident that has its own story to tell. In all the roar of talk within and about the courthouse, after the trial was over, one "Mr. Cootes, merchant of James River," was heard to say that "he would have given a considerable sum out of his own pocket rather than his friend Patrick should have been guilty of a crime but little, if any thing, inferior to that which brought Simon Lord Lovat to the block,"--adding that Patrick's speech had "exceeded the most seditious and inflammatory harangues of the Tribunes of Old Rome."[59] Here, then, thus early in his career, even in this sorrowful and alarmed criticism on the supposed error of his speech, we find a token of that loving interest in him and in his personal fate, which even in those days began to possess the heartstrings of many a Virginian all about the land, and which thenceforward steadily broadened and deepened into a sort of popular idolization of him. The mysterious hold which Patrick Henry came to have upon the people of Virginia is an historic fact, to be recognized, even if not accounted for. He was to make enemies in abundance, as will appear; he was to stir up against himself the alarm of many thoughtful and conservative minds, the deadly hatred of many an old leader in colonial politics, the deadly envy of many a younger aspirant to public influence; he was to go on ruffling the plumage and upsetting the combinations of all sorts of good citizens, who, from time to time, in making their reckonings without him, kept finding that they had reckoned without their host.

But for all that, the willingness of this worthy Mr. Cootes of James River to part with his money, if need be, rather than his friend Patrick should go far wrong, seems to be one token of the beginning of that deep and swelling pa.s.sion of love for him that never abated among the ma.s.s of the people of Virginia so long as Patrick lived, and perhaps has never abated since.

It is not hard to imagine the impulse which so astonis.h.i.+ng a forensic success must have given to the professional and political career of the young advocate. Not only was he immediately retained by the defendants in all the other suits of the same kind then inst.i.tuted in the courts of the colony, but, as his fee-books show, from that hour his legal practice of every sort received an enormous increase.

Moreover, the people of Virginia, always a warm-hearted people, were then, to a degree almost inconceivable at the North, sensitive to oratory, and admirers of eloquent men. The first test by which they commonly ascertained the fitness of a man for public office, concerned his ability to make a speech; and it cannot be doubted that from the moment of Patrick Henry's amazing harangue in the "Parsons' Cause,"--a piece of oratory altogether surpa.s.sing anything ever before heard in Virginia,--the eyes of men began to fasten upon him as destined to some splendid and great part in political life.

During the earlier years of his career, Williamsburg was the capital of the colony,--the official residence of its governor, the place of a.s.semblage for its legislature and its highest courts, and, at certain seasons of the year, the scene of no little vice-regal and provincial magnificence.

Thither our Patrick had gone in 1760 to get permission to be a lawyer.

Thither he now goes once more, in 1764, to give some proof of his quality in the profession to which he had been reluctantly admitted, and to win for himself the first of a long series of triumphs at the colonial capital,--triumphs which gave food for wondering talk to all his contemporaries, and long lingered in the memories of old men. Soon after the a.s.sembling of the legislature, in the fall of 1764, the committee on privileges and elections had before them the case of James Littlepage, who had taken his seat as member for the county of Hanover, but whose right to the seat was contested, on a charge of bribery and corruption, by Nathaniel West Dandridge. For a day or two before the hearing of the case, the members of the house had "observed an ill-dressed young man sauntering in the lobby," apparently a stranger to everybody, moving "awkwardly about ... with a countenance of abstraction and total unconcern as to what was pa.s.sing around him;"

but who, when the committee convened to consider the case of Dandridge against Littlepage, at once took his place as counsel for the former.

The members of the committee, either not catching his name or not recalling the a.s.sociation attaching to it from the scene at Hanover Court House nearly a twelvemonth before, were so affected by his rustic and ungainly appearance that they treated him with neglect and even with discourtesy; until, when his turn came to argue the cause of his client, he poured forth such a torrent of eloquence, and exhibited with so much force and splendor the sacredness of the suffrage and the importance of protecting it, that the incivility and contempt of the committee were turned into admiration.[60] Nevertheless, it appears from the journals of the House that, whatever may have been the admiration of the committee for the eloquence of Mr. Dandridge's advocate, they did not award the seat to Mr. Dandridge.

Such was Patrick Henry's first contact with the legislature of Virginia,--a body of which he was soon to become a member, and over which, in spite of the social prestige, the talents, and the envious opposition of its old leaders, he was promptly to gain an ascendancy that const.i.tuted him, almost literally, the dictator of its proceedings, so long as he chose to hold a place in it. On the present occasion, having finished the somewhat obscure business that had brought him before the committee, it is probable that he instantly disappeared from the scene, not to return to it until the following spring, when he came back to transact business with the House itself.

For, early in May, 1765, a vacancy having occurred in the representation for the county of Louisa, Patrick Henry, though not then a resident in that county, was elected as its member. The first entry to be met with in the journals, indicating his presence in the House, is that of his appointment, on the 20th of May, as an additional member of the committee for courts of justice. Between that date and the 1st of June, when the House was angrily dissolved by the governor, this young and very rural member contrived to do two or three quite notable things--things, in fact, so notable that they conveyed to the people of Virginia the tidings of the advent among them of a great political leader, gave an historic impulse to the series of measures which ended in the disruption of the British Empire, and set his own name a ringing through the world,--not without lively imputations of treason, and comforting a.s.surances that he was destined to be hanged.

The first of these notable things is one which incidentally throws a rather painful glare on the corruptions of political life in our old and belauded colonial days. The speaker of the House of Burgesses at that time was John Robinson, a man of great estate, foremost among all the landed aristocracy of Virginia. He had then been speaker for about twenty-five years; for a long time, also, he had been treasurer of the colony; and in the latter capacity he had been accustomed for many years to lend the public money, on his own private account, to his personal and political friends, and particularly to those of them who were members of the House. This profligate business had continued so long that Robinson had finally become a defaulter to an enormous amount; and in order to avert the shame and ruin of an exposure, he and his particular friends, just before the arrival of Patrick Henry, had invented a very pretty device, to be called a "public loan office,"--"from which monies might be lent on public account, and on good landed security, to individuals," and by which, as was expected, the debts due to Robinson on the loans which he had been granting might be "transferred to the public, and his deficit thus completely covered."[61] Accordingly, the scheme was brought forward under nearly every possible advantage of influential support. It was presented to the House and to the public as a measure eminently wise and beneficial. It was supported in the House by many powerful and honorable members who had not the remotest suspicion of the corrupt purpose lying at the bottom of it. Apparently it was on the point of adoption when, from among the members belonging to the upper counties, there arose this raw youth, who had only just taken his seat, and who, without any information respecting the secret intent of the measure, and equally without any disposition to let the older and statelier members do his thinking for him, simply attacked it, as a scheme to be condemned on general principles. From the door of the lobby that day there stood peering into the a.s.sembly Thomas Jefferson, then a law student at Williamsburg, who thus had the good luck to witness the debut of his old comrade. "He laid open with so much energy the spirit of favoritism on which the proposition was founded, and the abuses to which it would lead, that it was crushed in its birth."[62] He "attacked the scheme ... in that style of bold, grand, and overwhelming eloquence for which he became so justly celebrated afterwards. He carried with him all the members of the upper counties, and left a minority composed merely of the aristocracy of the country. From this time his popularity swelled apace; and Robinson dying four years after, his deficit was brought to light, and discovered the true object of the proposition."[63]