Lion of Liberty by Harlow Giles Unger Page A

...” (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPH)

    Henry arched his back and stood as tall as his height permitted until the shouting faded.
    â€œ . . . and George the Third,” he boomed in defiance, “may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it!” 16
    The House erupted in a cacophony of angry shouts and jubilant cheers. “Violent debates ensued,” Henry recalled. “Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me. After a long and warm contest, the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only.” 17 With many older members out of the Assembly making preparations to adjourn for summer, populists and young uplanders commanded a bare majority of the forty-one members present, and they forced through the vote approving Henry’s resolutions—with George Washington and, most surprisingly, Richard Henry Lee among them. Both Washington and Lee were Tidewater planters with huge properties of more than 20,000 acres each. Although Washington had married into the Tidewater aristocracy, Lee was born to a family of great wealth for many generations and, like his peers, went to England for his higher education. He was so integrated in Virginia’s British establishment that he had applied for the post as distributor of stamps and collector of stamp revenues for the British government. After hearing Henry’s condemnation of the Stamp Act, however, he realized, as did Washington, that the act would undermine the rights of all Virginians, the wealthy planters as well as Henry’s uplanders. Lee and Washington immediately abandoned the pro-British bloc of burgesses and became two of Patrick Henry’s staunchest political allies, with Lee resigning his ties to stamp distribution. Thomas Jefferson explained why:
    I attended the debate at the door of the lobby of the House of Burgesses, and heard the splendid display of Mr. Henry’s talents as a popular orator. They were great indeed; such as I have never heard from any other man. . . . By these resolutions and his manner of supporting them, Mr. Henry took the leadership out of the hands of those who had theretofore guided the proceedings of the House. ... 18
    Henry had two additional resolutions that called for outright disobedience of the Stamp Act, but he decided he had gone far enough with his
first five resolutions and stopped short of espousing revolution—for the moment.
    â€œMr. Henry plucked the veil from the shrine of parliamentary omnipotence,” Edmund Randolph wrote. “It was judicious in Mr. Henry to suspend his resolutions . . . until a day or two before the close of the session. At this stage of business those who would be most averse . . . had retired. Those who were left behind . . . clung to Mr. Henry.” 19
    Outraged by what he considered nothing less than a coup d’état, Speaker Robinson acted swiftly to reassert his authority and that of senior members by recalling absent burgesses to the House for the next morning’s session. When the House reconvened, Robinson’s aristocrats, led by Edmund Pendleton, took control and moved to erase the resolutions from the public record. All the burgesses strained their necks looking for Henry to protest, but he was nowhere to be seen. In fact, after stirring the political pot to a boil the previous afternoon, he had disappeared into the crowd outside the House, slipped away to the stable to find his horse and trotted off on the road to Hanover County, indistinguishable in the stream of farmers riding home from market.
    â€œMr. Henry,” an Anglican minister reported to the Bishop of London, “is gone quietly into the upper parts of the country to recommend himself to his constituents by spreading treason and enforcing firm resolutions against the authority of the British Parliament.” 20
    Henry’s absence startled the entire House of Burgesses. Even more startling were the votes of