21. Patrick Henry Intervenes

Like other colonists, Virginians had no notion at first of how to meet the new situation; and by assuming that they simply must, they began to bear the new burdens with pacific resignation. The protests of the previous year had been unsuccessful; what was there now to do but submit? The powerful House of Burgesses, the elected lower house of the legislature, felt it could do nothing, and one by one the burgesses drifted back home as the House occupied itself with minor business. By the third week in May, only about a third of the burgesses remained, and a merchant of Falmouth, Virginia, reported that talk about the Stamp Act had “subsided much.” Into this sleepy situation stepped a new member just admitted to the House, the brilliant young lawyer and orator Patrick Henry, Virginia’s champion against the Anglican establishment in the Parsons’ Cause battle. Admitted to the House on May 20, Henry quickly mobilized the young members against the naturally conservative and staid elder statesmen of Virginia’s planter oligarchy.

In nine short days, Henry drafted and introduced five resolutions of vigorous protest against the Stamp Act. A furious debate ensued over the resolutions. The conservative and timid ruling planter oligarchy of the burgesses led by Speaker John Robinson, former Speaker Peyton Randolph, Judge John Randolph, Judge Wythe, Colonel Richard Bland, Edmund Pendleton, and Robert Carter Nicholas, furiously opposed the resolutions. Against them was arrayed a lesser group of landowners, to be sure, whose main distinction was relative youth and daring. Leading the Henry group were young Robert Munford and John Fleming. It was not that the older leadership in any sense favored the Stamp Act; it had led the protest of the year before and would not be particularly opposed to the revolutionary movement in later years. If there was any “class struggle” involved here, it was largely a struggle of the “classes” of youth versus age, of daring versus a natural conservatism.

The highlight of the debates was a fiery speech by Patrick Henry, who impressed young Thomas Jefferson as appearing “to me to speak as Homer wrote.” Henry cited the principles of English liberty and self-taxation as the fortress of freedom. Finally, Henry darkly and courageously laid down this famous warning: “Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell,” and, as for George III, “he did not doubt that some good American would stand up, in favor of his country.” Speaker Robinson indignantly exploded that this was “treason,” as indeed it was to anyone who deemed the British king a proper sovereign thus “betrayed.” Robinson also denounced the other members of the House for not stopping Henry’s treasonable remarks earlier. Henry, seeing that tactically he had gone too far, apologized, protested his loyalty to the king, and attributed the error to his passionate interest in “his country’s dying liberty.” When other burgesses then moved to accept Henry’s apology, Robinson finally dropped his clear threat to proceed against the young representative.

Although the five resolutions—the “Virginia Resolves”—were voted upon separately by the burgesses, they actually formed a coherent and related whole. The first two of Henry’s resolutions merely asserted the rights of every Virginian to the time-honored liberties and privileges of Britons. The third resolution declared the vital principle of self-taxation by the colonists as essential to the British constitution. The fourth resolution pressed the colony’s right to be governed solely by laws passed by their own consent and approved by the royal governor; in short, it denied the right of Great Britain to govern the colony’s internal matters. All of these resolves were passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30 by a vote of 20 to 17. The fifth resolution was more sharply edged but was actually implied in the third. It resolved that therefore the “General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony” (emphasis added). Any attempt to place that power elsewhere “has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom. A bitter debate raged around this final, action resolution, which passed by the narrowest of margins, 20 to 19, with Speaker Robinson anxiously ready to vote nay should the vote be a tie.

The Henry radicals then offered two culminating resolutions. The sixth flatly declared that Virginians were therefore not obliged to obey laws not enacted by their Assembly—an evident call for civil disobedience to the stamp tax—whereas the seventh went so far as to label anyone maintaining the right of Parliament to tax the colonies a traitor and an enemy to the colony of Virginia. If the far milder fifth resolve could pass by only one vote, it is no surprise that these two were handily defeated.

At this point, Patrick Henry, thinking that the five resolves were safely passed, made the grave tactical error of leaving for home. Taking advantage of Henry’s departure, the old guard, on the next and final day of the session, moved to rescind all of the resolves and did manage to expunge the vital fifth resolution.

The conservatives had been able to defeat the sixth and seventh resolves and to expunge the fifth from the record of the House of Burgesses, but they were not able to keep any of them from the minds and hearts of the American people. News of the seven Virginia Resolves spread like wildfire through the colonies, providing the needed spark that aroused them from their stolid resignation to active resistance to the hated Stamp Act. By mid-June copies of the Resolves were being passed around in Philadelphia. From there they were sent to friends in Newport, and on June 24 the Newport Mercury became the first newspaper to publish these rousing and exciting resolutions. The other colonial papers quickly picked up the news from the Mercury and reprinted the Resolves.

Virginia’s stirring example to the other colonies was not just the mild first four resolutions, but the entire seven, including the dramatic and fiery last three. The colonists, taking their cue from the Newport Mercury and all the other newspaper accounts, were under the firm impression that all seven resolutions had been passed by the House of Burgesses. This misunderstanding came about by a supreme irony: Joseph Royle, the reactionary editor of Virginia’s only newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, was so offended by even the mild first four resolutions that he refused to print any of them. As a result, the papers in the other colonies could only receive their information unofficially, and Henry and his radicals, in a masterstroke of tactics, took care to feed all seven resolutions to the press as if they all had passed the House. As the Morgans have phrased it: “Henry and his friends, having failed to secure passage of their most radical items in the House of Burgesses, were able to get them passed unanimously in the newspapers....”*

The Virginia Resolves, aided by the Henrician codicils, were important less for themselves—that is, as protests by a colonial assembly—than as a clarion call to the American people. For in the final analysis, the colonial assemblies, protest all they might, could do nothing to defeat the stamp tax. And this would have been true even if the assemblies had taken the unlikely step of moving not to enforce the tax and moving to withhold the salaries of the judges who did so. For the enforcement officials were mostly royal officials, beyond the power of assemblies; especially out of reach were admiralty judges and customs officers. To be defeated now, the stamp tax would therefore have to be nullified by the direct action of the American people—by mass civil disobedience. The tax, in short, could not be actually resisted in the assemblies; it could only be resisted and nullified in the streets. Assembly resolves would be important now only as a call to revolutionary mass action.

*Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, p. 132.