How Patrick Henry Saved America From It’s First Civil War

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Speaker 1: And we continue here with Our American Stories. Our next story comes to us from John Regasta. He’s an historian at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and is a Jack Miller Center Fellow. This is the story of the pivotal role that Patrick Henry played in holding together the American Union in seventeen ninety-nine when it seemed that partisan bickering would put an end to the American experiment. Let’s take a listen.

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Speaker 2: January fifteenth, seventeen ninety-nine. George Washington is living in retirement at Mount Vernon. On this particular date, it is mild and sunny outside, but it is becoming very stormy inside. You can almost sense George Washington pacing the yellow pine boards. Finally, the man that we know as the Sword of the American Revolution sits down, picks up a stack of paper and a quill pen to write a long letter to the man we know as the Trumpet of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry. The former general writes in desperation. There is a crisis when everything dear and valuable is assailed. He rails at people putting party over country to create the crisis. Measures are systematically and pertinaciously pursued, which must eventually dissolve the Union or produce coercion, by which Washington meant the U.S. Army marching on its own people. The nation was at risk. Civil war loomed. Washington asked Patrick Henry to come out of retirement to help to save the nation that they had helped to found. Henry had previously been offered positions as Senator, Supreme Court Justice, Secretary of State, ambassador to France or Spain, but he had sworn that he would only come out of retirement if the nation itself was at risk, if we faced the horrors of anarchy. Receiving Washington’s letter, Patrick Henry writes, “I accord with every sentiment you expressed to me.” Henry agrees to run for office. For it was the people causing the threat to the new nation, putting personal political ambition and partisanship above the country—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in the Radical States’ Rights Agenda of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Patrick Henry won his election. Patrick Henry always won his election, but he dies before he takes office. Had Henry lived, Thomas Jefferson likely would not have been elected president in eighteen hundred. What had Jefferson and Madison done that ignited such concern? We need to look back to the partisan battles of the seventeen-nineties. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, had adopted the Sedition Act, making it illegal to criticize Congress or the President. Scores of newspaper editors were being jailed. Jefferson and Madison believed that the nation couldn’t work without a free press; fair elections would be impossible. Jefferson called it “a reign of witches.” In desperation, Jefferson and Madison adopted an equally disturbing response, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, claiming that states were independent sovereigns that could ignore, nullify, to use Jefferson’s term, federal laws in their states. Under this radical states’ rights theory, each state would have different federal law. Secession was a real possibility, and Jefferson was talking about that. Several Virginia militia officers said that if the United States was dragged into the raging European Wars and a French army landed on our shores, they would take their troops to the French banner rather than to the Stars and Stripes carried by a political opponent. Treason! This was the constitutional crisis that worried George Washington and Patrick Henry: states against the federal government, state against state, civil war. When it was announced that Patrick Henry would speak on March fourth, seventeen ninety-nine, at Charlotte Courthouse, thousands gathered. When Henry rose to speak, it was said that he was bent. He appeared tired. He had a gray cast. But, as he began to speak, a wonderful transformation came over him. He rose up to his full height. His voice boomed out across the gathered thousands. Henry told the throng that political infighting had planted thorns upon his pillow. He told the people that Virginia was to the Union like Charlotte County was to Virginia. Virginia had no more right to block federal laws than Charlotte had to block the laws of Virginia. Such opposition on the part of Virginia to the acts of the General Government must beget their enforcement by military power, civil war, foreign alliances. Henry warned that Virginia would face a federal army led by George Washington. “Who will dare to lift his hand against the father of his country, to point a weapon at the breast of the man who often led them to battle and victory?” Now, this being an eighteenth-century election, people had been drinking, and a drunk in the crowd, raising a hand, “I would!” Henry rose up, turned on him, glaring. “You dare not do it. In such a parricidal attempt, the steel would drop from your nerveless arm.” This was classic Patrick Henry. He tells the crowd, “If the administration has done wrong, let us all go wrong together. Let us trust God and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United, we stand; divided, we fall.” Henry reminds the people that he had opposed the Constitution. He had warned the Federal Government would become too powerful and would interfere with the rights of the people. “I warned you, I warned you,” he seems to say. But we agreed. “I didn’t agree,” Henry explains. “But we the people agreed to the Constitution. It was necessary to submit to the constitutional exercise of that power.” He warned the people, “If we cannot abide by the government that we the people created, tyranny would result. You can never exchange the present government but for a monarchy.” Henry is saying, “If you disapprove of government policy, go to the ballot box. Go to the ballot box.” Henry won his election, but he dies on June sixth before he could take office. John Randolph of Roanoke, a leading politician, says that had Henry lived, Jefferson would not have been elected President. Now, to their credit, Jefferson and Madison, after the outcry, and after losing badly in the seventeen ninety-nine congressional elections because people believed that they were threatening the Union, backpedaled strongly. Chastened, Jefferson and Madison seemed to realize that the hyperpartisanship of the seventeen-nineties, in which they had participated, brought the nation to the brink of collapse. They realized that what unites us is more important than what divides us, and this was the theme of Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address. They wouldn’t publicly admit that they had been wrong, that they had gone too far, but they pulled back. President Jefferson has been accused for two centuries of hypocrisy for not implementing some of the radical ideas that he floated in the seventeen-nineties. But this reassessment is a far better explanation than hypocrisy. Jefferson’s idea of nullification was tabled until it was dredged up by Southern fire-eaters in the eighteen-twenties and exploded over Fort Sumter in eighteen sixty-one. We often point to the Revolution of Eighteen Hundred, a peaceful change of parties after an election, which was an American hallmark until twenty twenty, but it almost wasn’t. Henry helped create the idea of a loyal opposition. If you disagree with government policy, you go to the ballot box. The first rule in a democracy is the majority rules. The second rule is equally important: the minority must accept the first rule at least until the next election.

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Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to John Augusta. He’s an historian at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and he’s a Jack Miller Center Fellow. And what a story he told about Patrick Henry bringing Americans at the brink of partisan crisis and at the edge of perhaps our first civil war, while bringing people down off the cliff; and, by the way, time and again on this show, we get at the fact that America has been bitterly divided as it is now and perhaps even worse. One example right here: the Civil War sixty years after this, perhaps the worst manifestation of them all. The story of how Patrick Henry calmed down a divided nation, here on Our American Stories.