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NOTE 21. Patrick Henry Intervenes

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CHAPTER XXI. PATRICK HENRY INTERVENES.

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Like other colonists, Virginians had no notion at first of how to meet the new situation,

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and by assuming that they simply must, they began to bear the new burdens with pacific

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resignation. The protest of the previous year had been unsuccessful. What was there now

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The Powerful House of Burgesses, the elected lower house of the legislature, felt it could

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do nothing, and one by one the Burgesses drifted back home as the house occupied itself with

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minor business.

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By the third week in May, only about a third of the Burgesses remained, and a merchant

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A Falmouth, Virginia reported that talk about the Stamp Act had subsided much.

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Into this sleepy situation stepped a new member just admitted to the House, the brilliant

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young lawyer and orator Patrick Henry, Virginia's champion against the Anglican establishment

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in the Parsons Cause battle.

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Admitted to the House on May 20, Henry quickly mobilized the young members against the naturally

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In nine short days, Henry drafted and introduced five resolutions of vigorous protest against

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the Stamp Act. A furious debate ensued over the resolutions. The conservative and timid

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ruling planter oligarchy of the Burgesses, led by Speaker John Robinson, former Speaker

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Mr. Peyton Randolph, Judge John Randolph, Judge Wythe, Colonel Richard Bland, Edmund Pendleton, and Robert Carter Nicholas furiously opposed the resolutions.

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Against them was arrayed a lesser group of landowners, to be sure, whose main distinction was relative youth and daring.

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Leading the Henry Group were young Robert Munford and John Fleming.

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It was not that the older leadership in any sense favored the Stamp Act. It had led the

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protest of the year before and would not be particularly opposed to the revolutionary

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movement in later years. If there was any class struggle involved here, it was largely

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a struggle of the classes of youth versus age, of daring versus a natural conservatism.

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The highlight of the debates was a fiery speech by Patrick Henry, who impressed young Thomas

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Jefferson as appearing, to me to speak, as Homer wrote. Henry cited the principles of

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English liberty and self-taxation as the fortress of freedom. Finally, Henry darkly and courageously

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laid down this famous warning. Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus, Charles the First,

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is Cromwell, and as for George III, he did not doubt that some good American would stand

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up in favor of his country. Speaker Robinson indignantly exploded that this was treason,

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as indeed it was to anyone who doomed the British king a proper sovereign thus betrayed.

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Robinson also denounced the other members of the House for not stopping Henry's treasonable

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Henry, seeing that tactically he had gone too far, apologized, protested his loyalty to the king, and attributed the error to his passionate interest in his country's dying liberty.

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When other Burgesses then moved to accept Henry's apology, Robinson finally dropped his clear threat to proceed against the young representative.

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Although the five resolutions, the Virginia Resolves, were voted upon separately by the Burgesses, they actually formed a coherent and related whole.

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The first two of Henry's resolutions merely asserted the rights of every Virginian to the time-honored liberties and privileges of Britons.

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The third resolution declared the vital principle of self-taxation by the colonist as essential to the British Constitution.

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The fourth resolution pressed the colonies' right to be governed solely by laws passed by their own consent and approved by the royal governor.

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In short, it denied the right of Great Britain to govern the colonies' internal matters.

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All of these results were passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30 by a vote of 20 to 17.

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The fifth resolution was more sharply edged, but was actually implied in the third.

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It resolved that therefore the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power

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Any attempt to place that power elsewhere has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.

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A bitter debate raged around this final action resolution, which passed by the narrowest of margins, 20 to 19,

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with Speaker Robinson anxiously ready to vote nay should the vote be a tie.

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The Henry radicals then offered two culminating resolutions. The sixth flatly declared that

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Virginians were therefore not obliged to obey laws not enacted by their assembly,

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an evident call for civil disobedience to the stamp tax, whereas the seventh went so far as to

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to label anyone maintaining the right of parliament to tax the colonies a traitor and an enemy

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to the colony of Virginia. If the far milder fifth resolve could pass by only one vote,

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it is no surprise that these two were handily defeated. At this point, Patrick Henry, thinking

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that the five resolves were safely passed, made the grave tactical error of leaving for

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for Home. Taking advantage of Henry's departure, the Old Guard, on the next and final day of

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the session, moved to rescind all of the Resolves and did manage to expunge the vital fifth

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resolution. The Conservatives had been able to defeat the sixth and seventh Resolves and

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to expunge the fifth from the record of the House of Burgesses, but they were not able

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How to Keep Any of Them from the Minds and Hearts of the American People

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News of the seven Virginia Resolves spread like wildfire through the colonies, providing

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the needed spark that aroused them from their stolid resignation to active resistance to

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the hated Stamp Act.

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By mid-June, copies of the Resolves were being passed around in Philadelphia.

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From there, they were sent to friends in Newport, and on June 24, the Newport Mercury became

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the first newspaper to publish these rousing and exciting resolutions.

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The other colonial papers quickly picked up the news from the Mercury and reprinted the

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results.

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Virginia's stirring example to the other colonies was not just the mild first four

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for Resolutions, but the entire seven, including the dramatic and fiery last three. The colonists

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taking their cue from the Newport Mercury and all the other newspaper accounts were

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under the firm impression that all seven resolutions had been passed by the House of Burgesses.

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This misunderstanding came about by supreme irony. Joseph Royal, the reactionary editor

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The author of Virginia's only newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, was so offended by even

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the mild first four resolutions that he refused to print any of them. As a result, the papers

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in the other colonies could only receive their information unofficially, and Henry and his

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radicals, in a master stroke of tactics, took care to feed all seven resolutions to the

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Press, as if they all had passed the House. As the Morgans have phrased it, Henry and

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his friends, having failed to secure passage of their most radical items in the House of

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Burgesses, were able to get them passed unanimously in the newspapers. The Virginia Resolves,

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aided by the Henrichian codicils were important less for themselves, that is, as protest by

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a colonial assembly than as a clarion call to the American people. For in the final analysis,

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the colonial assemblies protest all they might, could do nothing to defeat the stamp tax.

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And this would have been true even if the assemblies had taken the unlikely step of

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Moving not to enforce the tax, and moving to withhold the salaries of the judges who

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did so.

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For the enforcement officials were mostly royal officials, beyond the power of assemblies.

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Especially out of reach were admiralty judges and customs officers.

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To be defeated now, the stamp tax would therefore have to be nullified by the direct action

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of the American People by Mass Civil Disobedience.

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The tax, in short, could not be actually resisted in the assemblies.

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It could only be resisted and nullified in the streets.

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Resolves would be important now only as a call to revolutionary mass action.