Lion of Liberty by Harlow Giles Unger

Pendleton of Caroline County, had close family and business ties to England and hoped for quick approval of the new law without debate, followed by a motion to adjourn for the summer. Indeed, some members had already left Williamsburg. Most colonies to the north had already approved the Stamp Act quite routinely, with little debate, and Virginia expected to follow suit. As older burgesses gasped with outrage, Patrick Henry stood and refused to allow the House “to end its session in feeble inaction.”
    â€œI had been for the first time elected a burgess a few days before,” he recalled later. “I was young, inexperienced, unacquainted with the forms of the House and the members that composed it. . . . All the colonies, either through fear, or want of opportunity to form an opposition . . . had remained silent. Finding men of weight averse to opposition, and the commencement of the tax at hand, and that no person was likely to step forth, I determined to venture, and alone, unadvised and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law book wrote . . . the first opposition to the Stamp Act and the scheme of taxing America by the British Parliament.” 13
    On May 29, 1765, his twenty-ninth birthday, Henry startled the House by asking for recognition and, as older burgesses demanded that he sit, he
proposed five resolutions that they shouted down as preposterous. The first three were harmless enough, reiterating the principle that colonists were entitled to “all the privileges, franchises, and immunities . . . possessed by the people of Great Britain.” The fourth resolution declared speciously that “taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom. ...” In fact, few British subjects had any say over taxes, although Virginia, as Henry stated correctly in his fourth resolution, had “uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being . . . governed by their own Assembly in the article of their [direct] taxes. ...” 14
    The last Henry resolution was the most preposterous, and provocative, of all, and he was too well versed in British law by then not to have realized it. Inspired, perhaps, by the overwhelming popular support he had received in the Parsons’ Cause, he evidently saw opposition to taxes as a way to ensure and even broaden that support. In his fifth resolution, he declared that “the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes . . . upon the inhabitants of this colony, and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons . . . other than the General Assembly . . . has a manifest tendency to destroy British and American freedom.” 15
    Their faces reddening with rage as Henry read his resolutions, House elders erupted in fury, calling out to him to be silent and sit down. They were not used to airing their disputes in public. They normally settled “difficulties” quietly, behind closed doors in a private room at Raleigh Tavern. They saw Henry as a threat not only to their own leadership but to their profitable ties to the mother country. As Henry realized, his resolutions not only violated House protocol, they represented the first colonial opposition to British law.
    The most heated of the debates revolved around the fifth resolution, with Henry raging against the tyranny of the Stamp Act and warning, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third. ...”
    â€œTreason, sir!” the aging Speaker interrupted.
    â€œTreason!” shouted the older burgesses one after another, some standing to shake their fists at the insolent renegade. “Treason! Treason!”

    An idealized painting of Patrick Henry delivering his oration denouncing the Stamp Act in 1765, with a warning to King George III that “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell.