250 years ago Patrick Henry delivered his most famous
speech. A version of its text is here. There is an article by Drew Gilpin Faust
on pages 22 to 26 of the November 2025 The Atlantic magazine titled No one gave
a speech like Patrick Henry. On page 24 he says:
“Henry delivered his
legendary ‘Liberty or Death’ speech on March 23, 1775, at the meeting of the
Second Virginia Convention in Richmond’s Henrico Parish Church. The colonies
were already well on their way to war with England, which would begin just a
month later at Lexington and Concord. The First Continental Congress had the
previous fall created a Continental Association committed to resisting British
incursions on American rights, and Virginians were assembling to prepare for
the conflict that was coming to seem inevitable. The decision to meet in
Richmond, a modest town 50 miles beyond the reach of the royal governor in the
capital of Williamsburg, was itself an indication that the representatives
recognized the boldness of their actions.
Yet many members of the
Virginia gentry remained nervous about what lay ahead and uncertain whether
preparation was simply prudent or would in itself esca- late differences and
make reconciliation with Britain impossible. These men of status, reputation,
and means were not yet ready to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their
sacred honor. It would be Patrick Henry’s job to get them there.
Some 120 Virginians,
including such worthies as Jefferson and Washington, gathered on a hill high
above the James River, crowding into the pewboxes of the wood-framed church,
the largest structure available in a town that had only recently grown to 600 souls.
After lengthy discussion ultimately approving the work of the Continental
Congress, Henry rose on the fourth day of the convention to ask the clerk to
read a set of resolutions proposing that ‘this Colony be immediately put into a
posture of defence.’ The time had come for ‘embodying, arming, and disciplining’
a Virginia militia, he maintained. When cautious delegates objected to such a
public declaration of military mobilization as unduly provocative, Henry
responded with his famous speech.
The text that schoolchildren
have declaimed and aspiring orators have studied since the early 19th century
was derived from recollections that the distinguished jurist St. George Tucker
provided to Wirt, Henry’s biographer, sometime between 1805 and 1815. Tucker
was present at the convention to hear Henry speak, and judged that ‘nothing has
ever excelled it, and nothing has ever equaled it in its power and effect.’ The
version he provided for Wirt and for posterity rests upon the accuracy of his
memory of a day more than three decades earlier. Historians have sparred for
more than two centuries now over the reliability of this rendering. William
Safire, the late journalist, presidential speechwriter, and authority on
language and rhetoric, offered the measured assessment of an informed critic: ‘My
own judgment is that Patrick Henry made a rousing speech that day that did
conclude with the line about liberty or death; that a generation later, to
respond to the wishes of his friend writing a biography of the patriot, Judge
Tucker recalled what he could and made up the rest. If that is so, Judge Tucker
belongs among the ranks of history’s best ghostwriters.’ A unique ghostwriter
whose work followed rather than preceded the text.”
There is another article by Harry Kollatz Jr. at Richmond
Magazine on March 21, 2025 titled ‘It is what we expect of you’ and subtitled Patrick
Henry changed the course of history with a speech – though we’re not sure
exactly what he said. Harry said:
“Henry’s
rhetoric at Henrico Parish Church wasn’t put to paper by the eyewitness and
judge St. George Tucker for more than 40 years. This came in response to
frustrated biographer William Wirt, a lawyer and a member of Aaron Burr’s
defense team in the former vice president’s Richmond treason trial, a United
States attorney general, speechwriter and would-be 19th-century attorney turned
novelist.
Wirt began
collecting material for a biography of Henry in 1808. He despaired of finding
an accurate record of Henry’s ‘greatest hits’ from the earlier part of his
career. Tucker wrote for Wirt his best recollection, although that correspondence
went missing around 1904. Thomas Jefferson, who was in the room where the
speech happened, also contributed his memory to the 1817 book. This material
would form the most familiar version of Henry’s declamation.
But did Wirt
conflate the sentiments with the decades-old recollections of Judge Tucker?
At his
Monticello library, Jefferson placed Wirt’s book on the fiction shelves.
Perhaps this is also a reflection of his long-simmering dislike of Henry. Yet
Jefferson somewhat grudgingly admitted, ‘It is not now easy to say what we
should have done without Patrick Henry.’ ”
And on page 23 of his article Mr. Faust also said that:
“Henry reminds us of how our
inability to hear the past before the advent of audio recording has left us
with an incomplete and even distorted understanding of history. He lived in an
era when the spoken word had not yet been overtaken by the power and reach of
print. This was a time - and Henry was a figure - we can only poorly understand
if we do not recognize the centrality of oratory.
An assiduous scholar has
located nearly 100 responses by individuals who heard Henry’s speeches, so we
at least have secondhand access to the impact of his words. We can’t retrieve
his voice, but we can find accounts of how it made audiences feel. As one
contemporary explained, there was ‘an irresistible force to his words which no
description could make intelligible to one who had never seen him, nor heard
him speak.’ On a trip through Virginia as a young man, the future president
Andrew Jackson sought out the orator he had heard so much about. ‘No
description I had ever heard,’ he reflected, ‘no conception I had ever formed,
had given me any just idea of the man’s powers of eloquence.’ Patrick Henry had
become a tourist attraction.
We can’t even read Henry’s
most important speeches. The potency of his rhetoric derived in no small part
from its extemporaneity. He left no texts or notes of his Revolutionary-era
addresses, and observers described being so swept up in the moment that they
were unable to document his performances. ‘No reporter whatever could take down
what he actually said,’ the Virginia judge Spencer Roane remembered. ‘Much of
the effect of his eloquence arose from his voice, gesture, etc., which in print
is entirely lost.’ Today, Henry’s legacy is left chiefly to schoolchildren
tasked with memorizing and reciting a reconstruction of his ‘Liberty or Death’
speech of 1775, pieced together by his biographer William Wirt from witnesses’
testimony two decades after his death.”
A Currier and Ives lithograph
came from Wikimedia Commons.
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