Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots
By Thomas S. Kidd; Basic Books
We all know Patrick Henry gave immortal speeches: “Give me liberty or give me death.” “I am not a Virginian, but an American.” His patriotic appeals transcended not only regional but class boundaries: The resonant chords he struck among common folk helped transform elite resistance to British imperial policy into a people’s movement. His oratory punctuated every crucial moment of the Revolution. So who was he?
Unfortunately, the rich documentation that fills fat, multivolume biographies of Henry’s contemporaries does not exist for this American Demosthenes. So biographer Thomas Kidd has to fill in the blanks. For the lost details of Henry’s inner life, Kidd substitutes a broad and generally well-executed survey of Revolutionary history, then leans on abstract concepts like “patriotism” drawn from Henry’s inspiring oratory. He uses these concepts to reinforce connections he sees between Henry and his fellow Virginians and Americans. This is supposed to explain Henry’s character. But then as now patriotism means many things to many people; this approach obscures much more than it explains. The same can be said of “liberty” and “virtue,” Kidd’s other key terms. Speeches, even by Patrick Henry, aren’t the sum of a man’s life—or of a population divided by the Revolution he championed.
Most controversially, Kidd calls Henry a “Christian republican,” suggesting that Henry’s faith determined the course of his public career. But what does that mean? “Henry’s lifelong championing of virtue was sincere,” Kidd insists, even as he acknowledges that Henry’s “pragmatic” interests as lawyer, land speculator, slave-owning planter and family man often took precedence. Here Kidd’s analysis reflects Henry’s recently conferred status as Christian conservative hero. (Earlier, Henry was an icon of left-wing populists. History moves in mysterious ways.)
For all his wooly earnestness, Kidd is a good historian who doesn’t suppress unseemly facts; he simply reinterprets them. This creates unintentional irony. Henry is a “patriot,” not a “founder.” Obsessed with the dangers of “consolidation,” he “squinted” at secession and disunion. At the 1788 ratifying convention in Richmond, Henry “smelled a rat” in a federal Constitution that “squints toward monarchy.” After all this squinting, Kidd hails Henry and his anti-Federalist colleagues as the “other founders,” the supposed authors of the Bill of Rights. But if they are, it’s only because the union they so vehemently opposed overcame their resistance and survived.
Kidd insists the liberty-loving Henry defended “the American Revolution by opposing the Constitution.” If that’s true, Henry’s Revolution had a distinctly provincial, self-serving flavor. This virtuous patriot was “always a defender of Virginia’s interests,” and foremost among those interests was slavery. Did it matter that this “Christian republican” —a “half-Quaker”—also famously acknowledged the peculiar institution’s injustice?
Henry’s complicated positions on slavery and the Constitution may confuse Christian conservatives, but they will admire Kidd’s partisan revisionism. Others should look to Henry Mayer’s A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (1991), a much fuller political portrait, or Kevin Hayes’ brief but deft The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (2008).
Originally published in the June 2012 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
