Lion of Liberty by Harlow Giles Unger Page B

Lee and Washington and younger Tidewater planters, who rebelled against their elders by joining Henry’s uplanders in defeating Pendleton’s omnibus motion to erase all of Henry’s resolves from the record. Although senior burgesses managed to remove the most virulent resolutions, their efforts came too late. Before leaving Williamsburg the previous day, Henry had given the editor of the Virginia Gazette all seven resolutions to copy, and, under a news-sharing agreement among newspaper printers in most of the colonies, he had already sent them on their way to newspapers across America. The entire continent soon heard the lion’s roar.
    â€œThe alarm spread . . . with astonishing quickness,” Henry chuckled, “and the ministerial party were overwhelmed. The great point of resistance
to British taxation was universally established in the colonies.” 21 The royal governor responded to Henry’s resolves by abruptly dissolving the House of Burgesses on June 1, without the usual ceremony or closing speech. He would not reconvene the House for a year.
    A week later, Henry’s resolves appeared in the Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper; by mid-June they were in the Philadelphia, New York, and Boston papers, and by early August, in the Scottish and British press. Newspaper publishers in Britain were at one with American publishers in despising the Stamp Act, which required them to put a stamp on every copy they sold. With each publication of Henry’s resolves, exaggerations, misinterpretations, and copying errors transformed them into nothing less than a call to revolution. His sixth resolution, according to the Maryland Gazette , declared that Virginians were “not bound to yield obedience to any Law or Ordinance whatsoever, designed to impose Taxation upon them, other than the Laws or Ordinances of the General Assembly . . . ” and his seventh resolution called anyone who supported Parliament’s efforts to tax Virginians “AN ENEMY TO THIS HIS MAJESTY’S COLONY.” 22
    The Boston Gazette also printed all seven of what they called Henry’s original resolutions, but claimed, in addition, that Virginia had adopted them all intact—a lie planted by Samuel Adams.
    With or without lies, publication of Henry’s resolutions fired up colonist antipathy toward British government intrusion in their affairs and Parliament’s efforts to tax them, directly or indirectly. Stamp Act opponents rallied in every city, forming secret societies called the Sons of Liberty.
    â€œThe flame is spread through all the continent,” Virginia’s royal governor Francis Fauquier warned his foreign minister in London, “and one colony supports another in their disobedience to superior powers.” 23 Governor Sir Francis Bernard of Massachusetts agreed, warning the ministry that Henry’s resolutions had sounded “an alarm bell to the disaffected.” 24
    After reading Henry’s resolutions in the Boston Gazette , the Massachusetts Assembly called on all colonies to send delegates to an intercolonial congress to be held in New York City in October, one month before the Stamp Act was to take effect.
    Having sparked the fires of rebellion across the colonies, however, Henry remained curiously absent from the turmoil he had created, having
vanished into the Piedmont hills to attend to the mundane tasks of raising and supporting his family. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Henry derived far less pleasure from the pomp, power, and formality of the capital than he did from the sense of freedom he felt in his fields at home and the joys he derived from his children. After planting his grain and tobacco, he set to work expanding his law practice—and his family. He was already father of three—a daughter and two younger sons—and his wife was pregnant again. To accommodate his growing family, he began building a new, larger, and more comfortable home on the