Patrick Henry

Primogeniture decided his life before he could argue with it. Studley and everything on it was going to his older half-brother, John Syme Jr., so Henry had to find his own footing. His father, an Aberdeen-educated Scot, pulled him from the local school around age 10 and taught him at home. At 15 he clerked for a merchant. At 16 he opened a store with his brother William that failed. He married Sarah Shelton in 1754, at 18, and her father's wedding gift was six enslaved people and 300 acres of worn-out ground at Pine Slash. The house burned. Henry moved his family into his father-in-law's tavern, entertained guests on a fiddle, and read law long enough to pass the Williamsburg examiners in April 1760.

Three years after that examination he took a clergyman's back-pay suit and turned it into an attack on the crown, and the jury awarded the parson one penny. What followed is the public record: the anti-Stamp Act resolves of 1765, the speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775, five terms as governor of Virginia, and a refusal to sit at the Constitutional Convention that became the Constitution's most effective opposition. BriefHistory has that career. This page is about the household behind it and the property in it.

After the birth of their sixth child in 1771, Sarah Henry began showing symptoms that his biographer Jon Kukla reads as postpartum psychosis. There was no treatment. At times she was restrained in a garment like a straitjacket. Virginia opened the first public mental hospital in North America in 1773 and Henry did not send her there — he fitted out an apartment at Scotchtown and kept her in it until she died in the spring of 1775. Then he cleared out the objects that reminded him of her and sold the house. He had been a slaveholder since his wedding day. In 1773 he wrote that he was master of people of his own purchase and could not justify it. He owned 67 people at his death, and freed none of them.

The speech first appeared in print in 1817, in William Wirt's biography, 18 years after Henry died. Wirt assembled it from the recollections of Judge St. George Tucker, who had been in the church, and Tucker's letter has been lost. Nobody questioned the text for 160 years. Historians started to in the 1970s, noting that the one surviving first-hand account has Henry using graphic name-calling Wirt left out. Henry himself wrote almost nothing down, which left Jefferson to fill the vacuum, and he was still complaining about Henry at Monticello in 1824. He has settled since on the American right, and because his father taught him at home, on the homeschooling movement, which named a college for him in 2000.

Patrick Henry's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Virginia Resolves against the Stamp Act law
  Introduced within days of his taking a seat in the House of Burgesses 1765
• Speech to the Second Virginia Convention speech
  Known only through a reconstruction published 42 years later 1775
• Hampden-Sydney College company
  Founding trustee — he sent seven sons there 1775
• Virginia's ban on importing enslaved Africans law
  Carried by planters who had a surplus, not by abolitionists 1778
• Opposition speeches at the Virginia Ratifying Convention speech
  The pressure behind the Bill of Rights 1788

• 1754 aged ~18 Marries Sarah Shelton at 18 and becomes a slaveholder Her father's wedding gift was six enslaved people and 300 acres at Pine Slash.
• April 1760 aged 23 Passes the Williamsburg bar examination on scant knowledge of procedure The examiners were impressed by his mind rather than his law.
• December 1, 1763 aged 27 Wins the Parson's Cause when the jury sets damages at one penny His own father presided. He added 164 clients in the following year.
• 1765 aged ~29 Introduces the Virginia Resolves against the Stamp Act
• March 23, 1775 aged 38 Argues for an independent militia at St. John's Church in Richmond His amendments carried, though only narrowly.
• Spring 1775 aged ~39 Sarah Henry dies at Scotchtown He sold the house two years later.
• June 29, 1776 aged 40 Elected Virginia's first governor under the new state constitution By 60 votes to 45 for Thomas Nelson Jr.
• 1788 aged ~52 Leads the Anti-Federalist attack at the Virginia Ratifying Convention
• June 6, 1799 aged 63 Dies at Red Hill of intussusception, a telescoping of the bowel

• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. rival
• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. opposed
• George Washington 1732–1799
  First President of the United States and commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. refused his appointments
• George Mason 1725–1792
  Founding-era statesman whose Virginia Declaration of Rights helped inspire the Bill of Rights. ally against ratification
• John Marshall 1755–1835
  Chief justice who established judicial review and strengthened the Supreme Court and federal government. co-counsel
• Dolley Madison 1768–1849
  First Lady who built the political salon of early Washington and saved the Washington portrait in 1814. bought Scotchtown from her father