Liberty or Death
He rose, a Baptist clergyman recalled, “with an unearthly fire burning in his eye.” It was Thursday, March 23, 1775, and the fate of American liberty was on the patriot’s mind. To Thomas Jefferson, he was “the greatest orator that ever lived.” To Roger Atkinson, a spectator, he was “a son of thunder.” To his enemies, he was an insolent traitor to king and empire, a man as infamous for his utterances as the Apostle Paul when he stood on Mars Hill and preached to the people of Athens.
Not yet thirty-nine, Patrick Henry dressed like a dour Puritan, “a grave-looking member, in a plain dark suit of ministers gray [with an] unpowered wig,” a delegate of the First Continental Congress recalled. As a boy, he was “mild, benevolent, humane… quiet, thoughtful,” Samuel Meredith, his brother-in-law, wrote. “He had a nice ear for music [and] was an excellent performer on the violin.”
His voice, however, and not his violin, made him a popular and esteemed (and detested) defender of English liberty; it was as melodious as any musical instrument. Henry was the “completest speaker I ever heard,” the Connecticut statesman, Silas Diane, wrote. “But in a letter I can give you no idea of the music of his voice, or the highwrought yet natural elegance of his style and manner.”
Following a religious habit, George Washington, who sat representing Fairfax County, carefully observed the weather and recorded it in his diary: “Cloudy & chilly—with appearances of snow—wind being Easterly but none fell. Afternoon clear.” The oldest church and largest building in Richmond, Virginia, St. John’s, could hold roughly 120 people. But as the Second Virginia Convention met at 10 a.m. for its fourth day, every pew was taken, and an overflow of spectators crowded the churchyard and peered in through the windows opened to alleviate the sultry atmosphere that radiated from inside.
Standing in the third pew on the left side of the church, looking toward the front, Henry spoke in his usual brilliant fashion. “I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery,” Henry declared, defending the resolutions he introduced just moments earlier. The third resolution was the most controversial. It called for Virginia to “be immediately put into a posture of defense” and prepare a militia.
Henry continued: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”
The past taught Henry that true reconciliation with London would require that Americans concede their faith in first principles, in the noble ideal of self-rule. “If we wish to be free,” he shouted, “we must fight!”
Pausing, Henry stared briefly “heavenwards at the roof beams of the church… as if in prayer,” a contemporary described, then continued, his voice growing in force. “Gentlemen cry peace, but there is no peace,” he said. As Henry spoke, the “tendons of his neck stood out white and rigid like whipcords,” Henry Randall recalled. “His voice rose louder and louder, until the walls of the building, and all within them, seemed to shake and rock in its tremendous vibrations.”
In a climax that resembled a Greek tragedy, Henry “let his left hand fall powerless to his side and clenched an ivory letter opener in his right hand firmly, as if holding a dagger,” and aimed it at his heart. “I know not what course others may take,” he declared. “But as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
One observer outside the church, Edward Carrington, was so moved by the oratory that he exclaimed, “Let me be buried on this spot!” a wish that was granted upon his death.
Thomas Jefferson, who had witnessed Henry’s “sublime eloquence” in 1765, was once again dazzled by the words of his fellow Virginian. “His eloquence was peculiar,” Jefferson recalled, “it was impressive and sublime beyond what can be imagined.”
Edmund Randolph remarked that “after every illusion had vanished, a prodigy yet remained… rousing the genius of his country, and binding a band of patriots together to hurl defiance at the tyranny of so formidable a nation as Great Britain.” Henry’s climactic phrase was sewn on the shirts of men of all ages who volunteered in throngs to defend North America from the armies of George III.
More than three hundred miles away in New York, a young Alexander Hamilton marched solemnly in front of the tombstones in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel near King’s College with Henry’s rallying cry stitched across his leather hat. On his military jacket, he proudly bore another phrase: “God and Our Right,” a creative American adaption of the official motto of the English monarch (that reads “my right”).
Exactly one month before Henry’s speech, Hamilton published an essay in the New York Gazetteer. “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” he wrote. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
A year later, on Thursday, July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress chose liberty over death, unity over division, and principle over compromise. “For the support of this Declaration,” the Congress resolved, “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
The sentiments of the Revolution and the Declaration, Lincoln said in February 1861, “gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.” The question Americans must ask themselves every July (and every day) is one Lincoln asked in one of our darkest hours: “Can this country be saved upon that basis?” It is, as it was for Henry, a choice between liberty or death.