Patrick Henry Read Free

to expand or modify Wirt’s admiring portrait of Henry. This patriotic trend began with Henry’s grandson, a man tellingly named William Wirt Henry. A prominent historian, lawyer, and Confederate veteran, Henry published in 1891 a three-volume set titled Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches , which, while imperfect, remains the best published collection of Henry’s papers. Since William Wirt Henry’s compilation, scholars and popular writers have fought back and forth, with the academics seeking to deconstruct myths about Henry that the popularizers promptly restore. The historian Bernard Mayo noted fifty years ago that of all the major Founders,
Henry presented the most perplexing disjunction between popular and scholarly interpretations. 9
    In recent years, both the political Left and Right have appropriated the image of Henry as a radical dissenter. Much of this use of Henry, of course, is based only on current applications of the ringing phrase “Give me liberty or give me death.” Henry is a favorite of the contemporary Tea Party, a movement that reacted against President Barack Obama’s massive increases in domestic spending and became the biggest news story of the 2010 election cycle. One sign at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, read “Give me liberty, not debt.”
    No matter how much they venerate Henry’s defense of American liberty, few Americans today, Tea Partiers or otherwise, take seriously Henry’s fundamental criticisms of the Constitution. Unlike Henry, the conservatives who cite him would defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights—at least as they were originally intended, if not as they have been interpreted—as the best guarantees of our liberties. Certainly, after ratification, Henry came to advocate a strict interpretation of the Constitution as the only hope for restraining the national government. But he always worried that in establishing such a strong national authority, Madison and Hamilton had created a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, destined to grow uncontrollably and eventually to become tyrannical. As welcome as the Bill of Rights was to anti-federalists such as Henry, those amendments did not address the fundamental issue of the national government’s expansive powers.
    Henry has also become a hero to many Christian conservatives, who see him as a defender of both Christian virtue and liberty. In 2000, the conservative activist and homeschooling advocate Michael Farris founded Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. One of the college’s dorms is even named Red Hill, after Henry’s last home. Many homeschoolers see Patrick Henry as one of their own, because he was tutored by his Christian family at home and yet
achieved great heights in the public sphere. Henry is an attractive figure to those Christian conservatives interested in sustaining the image of America as a Christian nation, because among the major Founders, he probably held some of the most committed Christian beliefs. Certainly as compared to Washington, Madison, and especially Jefferson, Henry made his sympathy toward traditional Christianity widely known. A serious Anglican with stirring memories of the Great Awakening, he possessed religious beliefs that were orthodox for his time. Although he was not an evangelical (in the sense that he did not emphasize the need for a conversion experience), he had abundant sympathy for the dissenting Protestants of Virginia, with his oratory profoundly influenced in style and substance by the evangelical preachers of his era.
    At times, advocates of a Christian perspective on America’s founding have gone to extremes in recruiting Henry to their cause. In particular, a widely circulated quotation erroneously attributed to Henry has him declaring, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on