eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Patrick Henry was a charismatic orator whose devotion to the pursuit of liberty fueled the fire of the American Revolution and laid the groundwork for the United States. As a lawyer and a member of the Virginia House of Burgess, Henry championed the inalienable rights with which all men are born. His philosophy inspired the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and, most significantly, the Bill of Rights.
Famous for the line “Give me liberty or give me death!” Patrick Henry was a man who stirred souls and whose dedication to individual liberty became the voice for thousands. In A Son of Thunder, Henry Mayer offers “a biography as [Patrick] Henry himself would have wanted it written—a readable style, informal, engaging, and entertaining” (Southern Historian).
“This is history and biography at its best.” —Charleston Evening Post
“A fine job of placing Henry’s idea of republican rectitude in context without ignoring the many ironies of his life as a mediator between the yeomanry and the elite.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A narrative that eases the reader with seemingly effortless grace into the rough-and-tumble world of eighteenth-century Virginia. Patrick Henry, patriot, emerges . . . a lion of a man, proud, earnest, melancholy, eloquent. The biographer has done his job; one sets this book down having heard the lion’s roar and having felt the sorrow that he is no more.” —San Francisco Examiner
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802198099 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Grove Great Lives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 544 |
| Sales rank: | 599,619 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Backcountry Gentry
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century eminent Virginians conceived a passion for mansions of brick. They wanted baronial manor houses that would rival the country seats of their distant English cousins, and by poring over published books of English designs and construction drawings, by importing master workmen, by setting gangs of slaves to quarry clay and fire bricks, and by sparing no expense in furnishings, the planters got what they desired. "You perceive a great air of opulence amongst the inhabitants, who have sometimes built themselves houses, equal in magnificence to many of our superb ones at St. James," an English visitor wrote admiringly in 1746. "The planters live in a manner equal to men of the best fortune" at home.
Governor Alexander Spotswood had set the pace in 1710 with his handsome new mansion at Williamsburg, three stories high and gracefully proportioned, with four central chimneys and a charming two-tiered cupola in the center of the roof. Spotswood had cunningly grouped the kitchens, artisans' shops, stables, and other outbuildings behind a symmetrical forecourt, following the best Italianate villa style, as adapted for England by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Acres of shrubbery and gardens, wonderfully arranged, further enhanced the magnificence of the edifice. Detractors thought that Spotswood had "lavished away" too much public money on the building and derisively called it the governor's "palace," but the opulent residence captivated the leading planters.
The Carters and the Randolphs, the Harrisons, Beverleys, and Lees soon undertook their own mansions along the broad reaches of the James, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, seating the new dwellings upon knolls and terraces with commanding views of the river and their wharves. They sought the most advanced English styles, reworked them to their own advantage, and added something unique to set their estates apart from others.
If Spotswood had a cupola, then at Turkey Island the Randolph mansion would be surmounted by a dome visible for a great way downriver and topped by an aerial structure "called the bird cage, because many birds do hover and sing about it." If the governor's "palace" had four chimneys, then at Stratford the Lees would have two central chimneys with four stacks apiece, joined by archways to form pavilionlike bell towers. If others had remained with the steep hipped roofs of the old Virginia cabin, then the Harrisons would build Berkeley with a pedimented gable, a more heroic-looking affair that expressed the first turn of fashion toward the classic revival. If Landon Carter built his Sabine Hall of variously shaded red brick with a mile-long view down to the river, then his brother Robert would situate Nomini Hall on a piece of high ground above the Potomac so that the mansion, its brick stuccoed white, could be seen from six miles off. At Westover, William Byrd II, perhaps the most erudite man in Virginia, fused the elements admired by the planters into the most accomplished and stylish of the new mansions. Built of soft red brick along lines of the utmost purity and restraint, Westover stood three stories high and had four massive chimneys, marble pedimented doorways, and two flanking wings, one of which housed Byrd's four-thousand-volume library, the largest in America. Gracious brick walls enclosed the garden and screened the outbuildings at a convenient distance. From the James River visitors approached Westover through an ellipse of tulip poplars, and Byrd balanced this elegant avenue with an equally imposing land entry through wrought-iron gates, imported from London and unrivaled in craftsmanship. With his initials worked into the design and suspended from ten-foot brick piers capped with falcons perched on gilded globes, the gates could be read as a rebus for the master's name and power.
Westover and its contemporary expressions of order and repose seemed to consolidate generations of headlong development. They supplanted older, more ramshackle dwellings, built for the moment and carelessly, artlessly expanded to meet pressing needs. The stately new halls crowned the achievements of Virginia's first century. The colony had grown up along its rivers, long fingers of tidal water extending one hundred miles or more into the sandy forests of the coastal plain, a region lying so low and flat and so divided by waterways that to the European eye it appeared only recently reclaimed from the sea. The Virginia barons, too, bore the marks of fresh minting, their fortunes only three or four generations old, their progenitors drawn from the middling ranks of English merchants and craftsmen. They had engrossed enormous tracts of land and, especially since 1700, imported cargoes of enslaved Africans to clear the forests and produce tobacco for the European markets. They had braided family connections into a tight knot of social and political control. Half of the consequential men in the assembly belonged to fewer than a dozen families, and their political and matrimonial alliances worked together to extend their hold upon the land. The new county boundaries the assembly drew upon Virginia's map followed and extended the progress of their family lines, as sons established new branches upriver and slipped easily into the new political offices opened up through extension and subdivision of the counties.
The great rivers gave Virginia its highways and its history and tied the flourishing colonists to the British Isles they still called home. The grandees of Virginia faced their new mansions toward the water, but their thoughts increasingly turned west, toward a second Virginia, the beckoning region of rising ground between the tidewater falls and the mountains. Indeed, Governor Spotswood had no sooner finished his palace than he led a great party of gentlemen on the first expedition over the mountains in 1716. Upon their return he presented each of his companions with a golden horseshoe studded with valuable stones and symbolizing membership in what Spotswood called "the tramontane order."
Within a few years the select Knights of the Golden Horseshoe had laid claim to huge tracts of land on both slopes, and the entire region had been organized into Spotsylvania County, its western boundary dreamily reaching over the crest of the Blue Ridge toward the misty regions of the Mississippi and Ohio. When the Spotswood party toasted King George I atop the Blue Ridge in 1716 only 80,000 souls inhabited the colony, all of them dwelling east of the line of rocky rapids and falls that marked the limit of oceangoing navigation. Twenty years later, in the year of Patrick Henry's birth, the population had doubled, and it had increased by half again to 230,000 by the time of his marriage in 1755. The number of counties had doubled, too, and the tide of settlement had pushed over the mountains into the great valley of the Shenandoah and pressed southwest toward the rich bottomlands of Kentucky. Virginians could dream of a continental empire vested, as an enthusiastic mapmaker put it, "with all the Wealth and Power that will naturally arise from the Culture of so great an Extent of good Land, in a happy Climate." Henry was a son of this second Virginia. His family looked west for an increase in fortune, having occupied for generations a respectable but far from opulent position on the margins of Tidewater. Yet Patrick Henry never owned a mansion of brick and came to challenge the political power of those who did.
"Pamunkey" meant "sweat house" to the native people who first inhabited its banks, and the Bristolmen who were Patrick Henry's forebears could understand why. The steamy expanse of lowland that forced the York River to divide forty miles upstream from the bay was a place of agues and fevers, but once seasoned to the land's vapors a man could make his fortune on it. Still, the Winstons (Henry's mother's folk) preferred to push on upstream another thirty miles or so to plant themselves on healthier ground. There the land began a gentle rise; from the slight upswells in the clearings one could see the ridges separating one creek's path from the next, and the trees no longer seemed to grow directly out of the river itself. Indeed, so far inland, the Pamunkey narrowed into a meandering, sluggish stream, its uncertain channels no longer hospitable to the large oceangoing vessels. It took great faith and a mighty hunger to believe that one could become rich by setting a few barrels of tobacco on a shallow- draft sloop and expecting it to coast forty miles on the ebbing tide out to the broad channel of the York, where the Lark, the Lively, or the John and Mary rode at anchor, taking on the cargoes of tobacco, staves, and deer and beaver skins with which backcountry men hoped to turn their forest land to coin.
Hopeful Virginians in the late seventeenth century acquired land under a system of "headrights." In order to populate the colony, the assembly offered fifty acres for every person one transported into Virginia. Poor people gained their passage by signing indentures obliging them to repay the cost of transportation with labor, so that the importer gained hands to work his land or realized some cash by selling the indentures to someone else. The first Winston in Virginia may well have come over from Bristol as an indentured servant, but eventually he accumulated enough land to give his sons an independent start. The second generation of Winston brothers — William, Anthony, and Edmund — used the headright system to patent more than five thousand acres of New Kent County, on the upper stretch of the Pamunkey where Totopotomoy's Creek met the river. At first indentured servants cleared and drained the marshy creek bottoms, but then the Winstons bought a few slaves to make the tobacco crops that brought the family into prosperity.
The Winstons lifted themselves from subsistence to respectability, although their situation never became favorable enough for them to match the operations of Tidewater magnates like the Carters or Byrds. In 1720, however, when their section grew thickly enough settled by Virginia standards to become the separate county of Hanover, the next generation of Winstons moved smoothly into seats on the new county court and the parish vestry. Just emerging from the frontier stage of settlement, Hanover (named to honor the new royal house of Britain) had only about two thousand "tithables" — the white men and the Negroes of both sexes over sixteen counted in the levying of taxes. Only a few families possessed holdings on a grander scale than the Winstons, while the great majority had simply cleared a few tobacco patches on their hundred-acre tracts and begun to do largely subsistence farming with the aid of one or two servants or slaves.
Anthony Winston's son, Isaac, distinguished in a thin-haired family by an exceedingly bald head, had worked up a stake in the export business and made a good marriage early in the new century with Mary Dabney, the daughter of an equally enterprising English family that tried to gloss its humble origins by claiming a French connection — d' Aubignes, s'il vous plait. Isaac and Mary had six children, and while young William (known as "Langloo") displayed an untoward wild streak, running off to the West to hunt and trap among the Indians half the year, the daughters had made good marriages right in the county.
Sarah, born in 1710 as their fifth child, made an especially advantageous match. Colonel John Syme was a gentleman, born in Scotland, who had made his fortune in Virginia. An older man and a widower who had inherited a great deal of Tidewater property from his first wife, Syme held extensive land patents in the hilly, western portion of Hanover reaching across to the upper James River. Moreover, he had some skill as a surveyor, which allowed him to keep a close eye on land developments throughout the region. He had assumed a seat on the parish vestry and the county bench, and he had served one term in the House of Burgesses. Sarah gave birth to their first child, John, Jr., in 1729, and the new family had every prospect of success on the Syme home plantation, "Studley," a choice expanse of higher ground not far from Sarah's parents, a mile or so back from the Pamunkey River and ribboned with fertile meadows in the creek bottoms. Syme's quarrelsome style had got him in political trouble, however, and in 1731 he tried to augment his waning power by organizing a major surveying party to establish the boundary between Hanover and the newly organized county of Goochland lying southwest along the James. He stood to gain a great many more patents himself and the favor of planters whose tracts would be confirmed by the line. Unfortunately, Syme dropped dead in the forest before the job was done. Sarah had to sue the county to recover some of the expedition's expenses, and the promise of land and patronage passed to other entrepreneurs.
The Widow Syme apparently bore up well, for when the great William Byrd II called at Studley some months later she impressed him as an exceedingly cheerful woman who "seemed not to pine too much for the death of her husband." Her lack of reserve captivated the flirtatious grandee, who was wearily nearing the end of a three-week "progress" across "the more retired part of the country" lying north of Westover. Only a few families could match Byrd in rank. He passed a few rainy days with the Randolphs at Tuckahoe, where the company "killed the time and triumphed over the bad weather" by reading aloud The Beggar's Opera. He had a pleasant and informative time with the Chiswells at "Scotch-town" in upper Hanover, and at Germanna he toured former Governor Spotswood's mines and forges. For the remainder of the trip, however, he took lodgings with a succession of local colonels and justices, drank much cider and wine, and engaged in dull conversation until he "gaped wide as a signal for retiring."
Then he met the Widow Syme. He had spent the day along the Pamunkey inspecting some of his "quarters," outlying plantations run by overseers with groups of twenty or so slaves, and although he had found everything in good order and his "people" well, Byrd felt tired and out of sorts by the time his overseer conducted him to Studley, where he could expect decent quarters for the night. The place seemed well kept, the outbuildings in good trim; and while the long, low one-story house did not look as large as the library wing at Westover, it had solid brick foundations and stood at the end of a charming lane of locust trees.
The widow struck Byrd as grave at first ("suspecting I was some lover," Byrd surmised), and the traveler must have feared another dreary rustic evening of forced conversation and feigned sleepiness. Mrs. Syme, however, "brightened up" as soon as she learned her visitor's distinguished identity, and before long they had "tossed off a bottle of honest port" and "relished it with a broiled chicken."
Byrd looked at his hostess closely and was thoroughly charmed. He saw a "portly, handsome dame . ... with much less reserve than most of her countrywomen." Her heartiness was very becoming, he thought; it set off her other agreeable qualities to advantage. Byrd had heard some malicious talk in the neighborhood, but to his eye her child certainly bore the "strong" (that is to say, ugly) features of the late Colonel Syme. The man was rather a "saracen," Byrd knew, coarse and uncouth, not at all like his cheerful, practical widow. If the philandering Byrd sensed an amorous opportunity, the moment passed unseized, for his account of the evening concludes demurely: "At nine I retired to my devotions and then slept so sound that fancy itself was stupefied, else I should have dreamt of my most obliging landlady."
The morning brought another amiable meeting over milk and tea. The "courteous widow" invited Colonel Byrd to rest a day from his travels and accompany her to church, "but I excused myself," Byrd says, "by telling her that she would certainly spoil my devotion." The widow reminded the colonel that her house would always be his home when he visited his plantations in the neighborhood. Byrd bowed low and thanked her very kindly.
The hospitable widow had another admirer for whom Studley had already become home. He was John Henry, a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire like her late husband, and he had made his way to the Syme plantation shortly after his arrival in Virginia in 1727. Colonel Syme had taken his countryman into the household; the young man had some skills in mathematics, and he joined Syme in his surveying projects. When his host died, John Henry stayed on at Studley, undoubtedly making himself useful in managing the plantation affairs. Within a year or so of Colonel Byrd's visit, the Scotsman married the Widow Syme. In another year their first son was born and named William for his mother's frontiersman brother, and on May 29, 1736, their second son arrived. They named him Patrick for his father's older, an Anglican minister who had just come from Scotland to take up the vacant pastorate at St. Paul's, Hanover.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Son of Thunder"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Henry Mayer.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Prologue "The Great Adversary",
PART ONE / 1736–1766,
Chapter One Backcountry Gentry,
Chapter Two The Dilapidated Colonel's Son,
Chapter Three "Bold License",
Chapter Four "Ancient Rights and Privileges",
Chapter Five "Young, Hot, and Giddy",
PART TWO / 1766–1773,
Chapter Six "We Are All in Parties",
Chapter Seven "Hunting Out Good Land",
Chapter Eight "Virtual Obedience",
Chapter Nine "The New Boanerges",
PART THREE / 1774–1776,
Chapter Ten "Hurrying to an Alarming Crisis",
Chapter Eleven "The Present Measures Lead to War",
Chapter Twelve "The Busy Voice of Preparation",
Chapter Thirteen "A Man of Desperate Circumstances",
Chapter Fourteen "From the Senate to the Field",
Chapter Fifteen "I Own Myself a Democrat",
PART FOUR / 1776–1789,
Chapter Sixteen "A Thousand Things to Mend, to Begin",
Chapter Seventeen "To Do Good and Prevent Mischief",
Chapter Eighteen "Great Divisions Are Likes to Happen",
Chapter Nineteen "I Speak the Language of Thousands",
Chapter Twenty "Overpowered in a Good Cause",
Chapter Twenty-One "Playing the After Game",
Epilogue "My Secluded Corner",
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
