I first became acquainted with Patrick Henry in the second grade. My frazzled, rather mediocre, teacher linked his name to mine on my report card, in what was meant to be a not altogether flattering manner. “John,” she wrote, “Is most definitely the class’s Patrick Henry.” By this she meant I was a rabble rouser, deeply suspicious of her authority, always checking the sense of her (often illogical) dictates.
She meant it as a put down, as it was code for my parents to get me back in line. However, my wonderful mother (another, and far better, grade school teacher) and my father (a keen student of history) took her passive-aggressive put down in a far more flattering light. They took me aside and told me it was a badge of honour; that I should always question authority, look at the logic under-riding authoritarian dictates, and bravely stand up for liberty when it was imperilled at any level. It is in the spirit of that promise that I made to my parents when I was eight that I introduce our new, regular Friday Patrick Henry column, where we will fearlessly take on the inept, the authoritarian, the illogical, and the sacred cows (and their supporters) in the world, all in the name of safeguarding the most precious gift we have been given: the sanctity of freedom and individual liberty.
Along the way, I hope to Tarantino-ise Patrick Henry, (that is, to take a great, forgotten leading man of the past and elevate him to deserved, regenerated fame), for us to get to know the greatest orator of his day, the implacable foe of both the political establishment, and the illogic that often keeps it in power at the expense of the rest of us.
On May 29, 1765, Henry was holding forth in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the state’s parliament, as the hated British Stamp Act was being debated. The British Empire had decided, after the ruinously expensive French and Indian War which had left it masters of the North American continent, that the significant war debt should be paid for by the colonists themselves. After all, hadn’t they benefitted the most from the expenditure of British blood and treasure? The key problem with this half-logic, a point which Henry and his patriot allies hammered home again and again, is that taxes were being unilaterally imposed on Englishmen who didn’t have electors in the parliament; there was taxation without representation. Henry, being the libertarian radical that he was, fearlessly called this what it was; tyranny.
So, on that late Spring day in 1765, while in the course of debating what Virginia should do about the imposition of the Stamp Act, Henry made his derision for George III clear, just skirting arrest for outright treason against the crown. Using historical analogy, Henry began his speech by noting Julius Caesar had his Brutus, English King Charles I his Cromwell, and George III…”
This was very close to the bone. For Henry was well aware his classical trained fellow Burgesses knew what he was playing at. Caesar had been a dictator, slain by dedicated believers in the Roman Republic. Charles I had tried to expand the English crown’s then already-formidable powers, only to run into a people’s revolt led by Oliver Cromwell, who in the end defeated the hapless monarch and had him executed as a (short-lived) republic was set up. Henry was offering history as a direct threat to George III, ominously noting that if he persisted on his authoritarian, illogical path, the same dire fate would befall him, as republicans would rise up to smite him.
At this point the aghast members of the Virginia assembly tried to shout Henry down, calling out, ‘Treason, Treason.’ He masterfully silenced them, ironically adding, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”
This column will take Henry’s bold fearlessness as its guiding star, each week discussing the many illogical fallacies the world’s establishment commits, forever suspicious of their abilities, motivations, and the often dangerously wrong-headed policies they advocate. I say this as a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations; I know these people!
Instead, while in Henry’s spirit being the scourge of authoritarian mediocrities everywhere, we will fearlessly advocate for what we see as the way forward, however unpopular or difficult it may be, however many feathers it ruffles, however ‘dangerous’ such ideas are.
For Henry was right about one big thing. His other masterful speech of March 1775 contains the still-famous, ringing plea, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” But—as Henry, Jefferson and the other Founders knew—Liberty has to be fought for constantly, always besieged by elites that simply think they know better.
In our own time an elite that has given us Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 Financial Crisis, has ignored the rise of China, and has bungled to Covid pandemic surely does not have the track record to live up to this haughty, dangerous self-regard in the superiority of its views. But, incredibly but wholeheartedly, it still feels it has a right to dictate to the rest of us.
Just as I managed to nettle my inept second grade teacher, I hope we have great fun with this column, calling the powerful to account, safeguarding our inalienable rights, and making sense of our fascinating, confusing world. Welcome to the Patrick Henry column.