Patrick Henry. Moses Coit Tyler
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 passion of love for him that never abated among the mass 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 astonishing a forensic success must have given to the professional and political career of the young advocate. Not only was he immediately retained [Pg 60] by the defendants in all the other suits of the same kind then instituted 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 surpassing 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 assemblage 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 [Pg 61] memories of old men. Soon after the assembling 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 passing 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 association 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 [Pg 62] 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 constituted 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 [Pg 63] 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 assurances 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 [Pg 64] 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 Assembly Thomas Jefferson, then a law student at Williamsburg, who thus had the good luck to witness the début 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 [Pg 65] 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]
But a subject far greater than John Robinson’s project for a loan office was then beginning to weigh on men’s minds. Already were visible far off on the edge of the sky, the first filmy threads of a storm-cloud that was to grow big and angry as the years went by, and was to accompany a political tempest under which the British Empire would be torn asunder, and the whole structure of American colonial society wrenched from its foundations. Just one year before the time now reached, news had been received in Virginia that the British ministry had announced in parliament their purpose to introduce, at the next session, an act for laying certain stamp duties on the American colonies. Accordingly, in response to these tidings, the House of Burgesses, in the autumn of 1764, had taken the earliest opportunity to send a respectful message to the government