On the morning of Tuesday, the 30th of August, Patrick Henry arrived on horseback at Mt. Vernon, the home of his friend and colleague, George Washington; and having remained there that day and night, he set out for Philadelphia on the following morning, in the company of Washington and of Edmund Pendleton. From the jottings in Washington’s diary,[102] we can so far trace the progress of this trio of illustrious horsemen, as to ascertain that on Sunday, the 4th of September, they “breakfasted at Christiana Ferry; dined at Chester;” and reached Philadelphia for supper—thus arriving in town barely in time to be present at the first meeting of the Congress on the morning of the 5th.

John Adams had taken pains to get upon the ground nearly a week earlier; and carefully gathering all possible information concerning his future associates, few of whom he had then ever seen, he wrote in his diary that the Virginians were said to “speak in raptures about Richard Henry Lee [Pg 102] and Patrick Henry, one the Cicero, and the other the Demosthenes, of the age.”[103]

Not far from the same time, also, a keen-witted Virginian, Roger Atkinson, at his home near Petersburg, was writing to a friend about the men who had gone to represent Virginia in the great Congress; and this letter of his, though not meant for posterity, has some neat, off-hand portraits which posterity may, nevertheless, be glad to look at. Peyton Randolph is “a venerable man … an honest man; has knowledge, temper, experience, judgment,—above all, integrity; a true Roman spirit.” Richard Bland is “a wary, old, experienced veteran at the bar and in the senate; has something of the look of old musty parchments, which he handleth and studieth much. He formerly wrote a treatise against the Quakers on water-baptism.” Washington “is a soldier,—a warrior; he is a modest man; sensible; speaks little; in action cool, like a bishop at his prayers.” Pendleton “is an humble and religious man, and must be exalted. He is a smooth-tongued speaker, and, though not so old, may be compared to old Nestor,—

‘Experienced Nestor, in persuasion skilled,
Words sweet as honey from his lips distilled.’”

But Patrick Henry “is a real half-Quaker,—your brother’s man,—moderate and mild, and in religious matters a saint; but the very devil in politics; a son of thunder. He will shake the [Pg 103] Senate. Some years ago he had liked to have talked treason into the House.”[104]

Few of the members of this Congress had ever met before; and if all had arrived upon the scene as late as did these three members from Virginia, there might have been some difficulty, through a lack of previous consultation and acquaintance, in organizing the Congress on the day appointed, and in entering at once upon its business. In fact, however, more than a week before the time for the first meeting, the delegates had begun to make their appearance in Philadelphia; thenceforward with each day the arrivals continued; by Thursday, the 1st of September, twenty-five delegates, nearly one half of the entire body elected, were in town;[105] and probably, during all that week, no day and no night had passed without many an informal conference respecting the business before them, and the best way of doing it.

Concerning these memorable men of the first Continental Congress, it must be confessed that as the mists of a hundred years of glorifying oratory and of semi-poetic history have settled down upon them, they are now enveloped in a light which seems to distend their forms to proportions almost superhuman, and to cast upon their faces a gravity that hardly belongs to this world; and it may, perhaps, help us to bring them and their work somewhat nearer to the plane of natural human [Pg 104] life and motive, and into a light that is as the light of reality, if, turning to the daily memoranda made at the time by one of their number, we can see how merrily, after all, nay, with what flowing feasts, with what convivial communings, passed those days and nights of preparation for the difficult business they were about to take in hand.

For example, on Monday, the 29th of August, when the four members of the Massachusetts delegation had arrived within five miles of the city, they were met by an escort of gentlemen, partly residents of Philadelphia, and partly delegates from other colonies, who had come out in carriages to greet them.

Accordingly, at 10 o’clock on Monday morning, the 5th of September, when the delegates assembled at their rendezvous, the city tavern, and marched together through the streets to Carpenters’ Hall, for most of them the stiffness of a first introduction was already broken, and they could greet one another that morning with something of [Pg 107] the freedom and good fellowship of boon companions. Moreover, they were then ready to proceed to business under the advantage of having arranged beforehand an outline of what was first to be done. It had been discovered, apparently, that the first serious question which would meet them after their formal organization, was one relating to the method of voting in the Congress, namely, whether each deputy should have a vote, or only each colony; and if the latter, whether the vote of each colony should be proportioned to its population and property.

Having arrived at the hall, and inspected it, and agreed that it would serve the purpose, the delegates helped themselves to seats. Then Mr. Lynch of South Carolina arose, and nominated Mr. Peyton Randolph of Virginia for president. This nomination having been unanimously adopted, Mr. Lynch likewise proposed Mr. Charles Thomson for secretary, which was carried without opposition; but as Mr. Thomson was not a delegate, and of course was not then present, the doorkeeper was instructed to go out and find him, and say to him that his immediate attendance was desired by the Congress.

Next came the production and inspection of credentials. The roll indicated that of the fifty-two delegates appointed, forty-four were already upon the ground,—constituting an assemblage of representative Americans, which, for dignity of character and for intellectual eminence, was undoubtedly the [Pg 108] most imposing that the colonies had ever seen. In that room that day were such men as John Sullivan, John and Samuel Adams, Stephen Hopkins, Roger Sherman, James Duane, John Jay, Philip and William Livingston, Joseph Galloway, Thomas Mifflin, CÆsar Rodney, Thomas McKean, George Read, Samuel Chase, John and Edward Rutledge, Christopher Gadsden, Henry Middleton, Edmund Pendleton, George Washington, and Patrick Henry.

Having thus got through with the mere routine of organization, which must have taken a considerable time, James Duane, of New York, moved the appointment of a committee “to prepare regulations for this Congress.” To this several gentlemen objected; whereupon John Adams, thinking that Duane’s purpose might have been misunderstood, “asked leave of the president to request of the gentleman from New York an explanation, and that he would point out some particular regulations which he had in his mind.” In reply to this request, Duane “mentioned particularly the method of voting, whether it should be by colonies, or by the poll, or by interests.”[107] Thus Duane laid his finger on perhaps the most sensitive nerve in that assemblage; but as he sat down, the discussion of the subject which he had mentioned was interrupted by a rather curious incident. This was the return of the doorkeeper, having under his escort Mr. Charles Thomson. The latter walked [Pg 109] up the aisle, and standing opposite to the president, said, with a bow, that he awaited his pleasure. The president replied: “Congress desire the favor of you, sir, to take their minutes.” Without a word, only bowing his acquiescence, the secretary took his seat at his desk, and began those modest but invaluable services from which he did not cease until the Congress of the Confederation was merged into that of the Union.

The discussion, into which this incident had fallen as a momentary episode, was then resumed. “After a short silence,” says the man who was thus inducted into office, “Patrick Henry arose to speak. I did not then know him. He was dressed in a suit of parson’s gray, and from his appearance I took him for a Presbyterian clergyman, used to haranguing the people. He observed that we were here met in a time and on an occasion of great difficulty and distress; that our public circumstances were like those of a man in deep embarrassment and trouble, who had called his friends together to devise what was best to be done for his relief;—one would propose one thing, and another a different one, whilst perhaps a third would think of something better suited to his unhappy circumstances, which he would embrace, and think no more of the rejected schemes with which he would have nothing to do.”[108]

[Pg 110] Such is the rather meagre account, as given by one ear-witness, of Patrick Henry’s first speech in the Congress of 1774. From another ear-witness we have another account, likewise very meagre, but giving, probably, a somewhat more adequate idea of the drift and point of what he said:—

The notable thing about both these accounts is that they agree in showing Patrick Henry’s first speech in Congress to have been not, as has been represented, an impassioned portrayal of “general grievances,” but a plain and quiet handling of a mere “detail of business.” In the discussion he was followed by John Sullivan, who merely observed that “a little colony had its all at stake as well as a great one.” The floor was then taken by John Adams, who seems to have made a searching and vigorous argument,—exhibiting the great difficulties attending any possible conclusion to which they might come respecting the method of [Pg 111] voting. At the end of his speech, apparently, the House adjourned, to resume the consideration of the subject on the following day.[110]

Accordingly, on Tuesday morning the discussion was continued, and at far greater length than on the previous day; the first speaker being Patrick Henry himself, who seems now to have gone into the subject far more broadly, and with much greater intensity of thought, than in his first speech.

Patrick Henry was then followed by John Jay, who seems to have closed the debate, and whose allusion to what his immediate predecessor had said gives us some hint of the variations in Revolutionary opinion then prevailing among the members, as well as of the advanced position always taken by Patrick Henry:—

Of this entire debate, the most significant issue is indicated by the following passage from the journal for Tuesday, the 6th of September:—

So far as it is now possible to ascertain it, such was Patrick Henry’s part in the first discussion held by the first Continental Congress,—a discussion occupying parts of two days, and relating purely to methods of procedure by that body, and not to the matters of grievance between the colonies and Great Britain. We have a right to infer something as to the quality of the first impression made upon his associates by Patrick Henry in consequence of his three speeches in this discussion, from the fact that when, at the close of it, an order was taken for the appointment of two grand committees, one “to state the rights of the colonies,” [Pg 114] the other “to examine and report the several statutes which affect the trade and manufactures of the colonies,” Patrick Henry was chosen to represent Virginia on the latter committee,[113]—a position not likely to have been selected for a man who, however eloquent he may have seemed, had not also shown business-like and lawyer-like qualities.

The Congress kept steadily at work from Monday, the 5th of September, to Wednesday, the 26th of October,—just seven weeks and two days. Though not a legislative body, it resembled all legislative bodies then in existence, in the fact that it sat with closed doors, and that it gave to the public only such results as it chose to give. Upon the difficult and exciting subjects which came before it, there were, very likely, many splendid passages of debate; and we cannot doubt that in all these discussions Patrick Henry took his usually conspicuous and powerful share. Yet no official record was kept of what was said by any member; and it is only from the hurried private memoranda of two of his colleagues that we are able to learn anything more respecting Patrick Henry’s participation in the debates of those seven weeks.

For example, just two weeks after the opening of this Congress, one of its most critical members, Silas Deane of Connecticut, in a letter to his wife, gave some capital sketches of his more prominent [Pg 115] associates there, especially those from the South,—as Randolph, Harrison, Washington, Pendleton, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry. The latter he describes as “a lawyer, and the completest speaker I ever heard. If his future speeches are equal to the small samples he has hitherto given us, they will be worth preserving; but in a letter I can give you no idea of the music of his voice, or the high-wrought yet natural elegance of his style and manner.”[114]

It was on the 28th of September that Joseph Galloway brought forward his celebrated plan for a permanent reconciliation between Great Britain and her colonies. This was simply a scheme for what we should now call home rule, on a basis of colonial confederation, with an American parliament to be elected every three years by the legislatures of the several colonies, and with a governor-general to be appointed by the crown. The plan came very near to adoption.[115] The member who introduced it was a man of great ability and great influence; it was supported by James Duane and John Jay; it was pronounced by Edward Rutledge to be “almost a perfect plan;” and in the final trial it was lost only by a vote of six colonies to five. Could it have been adopted, the disruption of the British empire would certainly have been averted for that epoch, and, as an act of violence [Pg 116] and of unkindness, would perhaps have been averted forever; while the thirteen English colonies would have remained English colonies, without ceasing to be free.

The plan, however, was distrusted and resisted, with stern and implacable hostility, by the more radical members of the Congress, particularly by those from Massachusetts and Virginia; and an outline of what Patrick Henry said in his assault upon it, delivered on the very day on which it was introduced, is thus given by John Adams:—

The only other trace to be discovered of Patrick Henry’s activity in the debates of this Congress belongs to the day just before the one on which [Pg 117] Galloway’s plan was introduced. The subject then under discussion was the measure for non-importation and non-exportation. On considerations of forbearance, Henry tried to have the date for the application of this measure postponed from November to December, saying, characteristically, “We don’t mean to hurt even our rascals, if we have any.”[117]

Probably the most notable work done by this Congress was its preparation of those masterly state papers in which it interpreted and affirmed the constitutional attitude of the colonies, and which, when laid upon the table of the House of Lords, drew forth the splendid encomium of Chatham.[118] In many respects the most important, and certainly the most difficult, of these state papers, was the address to the king. The motion for such an address was made on the 1st of October. On the same day the preparation of it was entrusted to a very able committee, consisting of Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, Thomas Johnson, Patrick Henry, and John Rutledge; and on the 21st of October the committee was strengthened by the accession of John Dickinson, who had entered the Congress but four days before.[119] Precisely what part Patrick Henry took in the preparation of this address is not now known; but there is no evidence whatever for the assertion[120] that the first draft,[Pg 118] which, when submitted to Congress, proved to be unsatisfactory, was the work of Patrick Henry. That draft, as is now abundantly proved, was prepared by the chairman of the committee, Richard Henry Lee, but after full instructions from Congress and from the committee itself.[121] In its final form, the address was largely moulded by the expert and gentle hand of John Dickinson.[122] No one can doubt, however, that even though Patrick Henry may have contributed nothing to the literary execution of this fine address, he was not inactive in its construction,[123] and that he was not likely to have suggested any abatement from its free and manly spirit.

The only other committee on which he is known to have served during this Congress was one to which his name was added on the 19th of September,—“the committee appointed to state the rights of the colonies,”[124] an object, certainly, far better suited to the peculiarities of his talents and of his temper than that of the committee for the conciliation of a king.

Of course, the one gift in which Patrick Henry excelled all other men of his time and neighborhood was the gift of eloquence; and it is not to be [Pg 119] doubted that in many other forms of effort, involving, for example, plain sense, practical experience, and knowledge of details, he was often equaled, and perhaps even surpassed, by men who had not a particle of his genius for oratory. This fact, the analogue of which is common in the history of all men of genius, seems to be the basis of an anecdote which, possibly, is authentic, and which, at any rate, has been handed down by one who was always a devoted friend[125] of the great orator. It is said that, after Henry and Lee had made their first speeches, Samuel Chase of Maryland was so impressed by their superiority that he walked over to the seat of one of his colleagues and said: “We might as well go home; we are not able to legislate with these men.” But some days afterward, perhaps in the midst of the work of the committee on the statutes affecting trade and commerce, the same member was able to relieve himself by the remark: “Well, after all, I find these are but men, and, in mere matters of business, but very common men.”[126]

It seems hardly right to pass from these studies upon the first Continental Congress, and upon Patrick Henry’s part in it, without some reference to Wirt’s treatment of the subject in a book which has now been, for nearly three quarters of a century, the chief source of public information concerning [Pg 120] Patrick Henry. There is perhaps no other portion of this book which is less worthy of respect.[127] It is not only unhistoric in nearly all the very few alleged facts of the narrative, but it does great injustice to Patrick Henry by representing him virtually as a mere declaimer, as an ill-instructed though most impressive rhapsodist in debate, and as without any claim to the character of a serious statesman, or even of a man of affairs; while, by the somewhat grandiose and melodramatic tone of some portion of the narrative, it is singularly out of harmony with the real tone of that famous assemblage,—an assemblage of Anglo-Saxon lawyers, politicians, and men of business, who were probably about as practical and sober-minded a company as had been got together for any manly undertaking since that of Runnymede.

Wirt begins by convening his Congress one day too soon, namely, on the 4th of September, which was Sunday; and he represents the members as “personally strangers” to one another, and as sitting, after their preliminary organization, in a “long and deep silence,” the members meanwhile looking around upon each other with a sort of helpless anxiety, “every individual” being reluctant “to open a business so fearfully momentous.” But

This great speech from Patrick Henry, which certainly was not made on that occasion, and probably was never made at all, Wirt causes to be followed by a great speech from Richard Henry Lee, although the journal could have informed him that [Pg 122] Lee was not even in the House on that day. Moreover, he makes Patrick Henry to be the author of the unfortunate first draft of the address to the king,—a document which was written by another man; and on this fiction he founds two or three pages of lamentation and of homily with reference to Patrick Henry’s inability to express himself in writing, in consequence of “his early neglect of literature.” Finally, he thinks it due “to historic truth to record that the superior powers” of Patrick Henry “were manifested only in debate;” and that, although he and Richard Henry Lee “took the undisputed lead in the Assembly,” “during the first days of the session, while general grievances were the topic,” yet they were both “completely thrown into the shade” “when called down from the heights of declamation to that severer test of intellectual excellence, the details of business,”—the writer here seeming to forget that “general grievances” were not the topic “during the first days of the session,” and that the very speeches by which these two men are said to have made their mark there, were speeches on mere rules of the House relating to methods of procedure.[129]

Since the death of Wirt, and the publication of the biography of him by Kennedy, it has been possible for us to ascertain just how the genial author of “The Life and Character of Patrick [Pg 123] Henry” came to be so gravely misled in this part of his book. “The whole passage relative to the first Congress” appears to have been composed from data furnished by Jefferson, who, however, was not a member of that Congress; and in the original manuscript the very words of Jefferson were surrounded with quotation marks, and were attributed to him by name. When, however, that great man, who loved not to send out calumnies into the world with his own name attached to them, came to inspect this portion of Wirt’s manuscript, he was moved by his usual prudence to write such a letter as drew from Wirt the following consolatory assurance:—

The final adjournment of the first Continental Congress, it will be remembered, did not occur until its members had spent together more than seven weeks of the closest intellectual intimacy. Surely, no mere declaimer however enchanting, no sublime babbler on the rights of man, no political charlatan strutting about for the display of his preternatural gift of articulate wind, could have grappled in keen debate, for all those weeks, on [Pg 124] the greatest of earthly subjects, with fifty of the ablest men in America, without exposing to their view all his own intellectual poverty, and without losing the very last shred of their intellectual respect for him. Whatever may have been the impression formed of Patrick Henry as a mere orator by his associates in that Congress, nothing can be plainer than that those men carried with them to their homes that report of him as a man of extraordinary intelligence, integrity, and power, which was the basis of his subsequent fame for many years among the American people. Long afterward, John Adams, who formed his estimate of Patrick Henry chiefly from what he saw of him in that Congress, and who was never much addicted to bestowing eulogiums on any man but John Adams, wrote to Jefferson that “in the Congress of 1774 there was not one member, except Patrick Henry, who appeared … sensible of the precipice, or rather the pinnacle, on which we stood, and had candor and courage enough to acknowledge it.”[131] To Wirt likewise, a few years later, the same hard critic of men testified that Patrick Henry always impressed him as a person “of deep reflection, keen sagacity, clear foresight, daring enterprise, inflexible intrepidity, and untainted integrity, with an ardent zeal for the liberties, the honor, and felicity of his country and his species.”[132]

Of the parting interview between these two men, at the close of that first period of thorough [Pg 125] personal acquaintance, there remains from the hand of one of them a graphic account that reveals to us something of the conscious kinship which seems ever afterward to have bound together their robust and impetuous natures.

[Pg 126] This anecdote, it may be mentioned, contains the only instance on record, for any period of Patrick Henry’s life, implying his use of what at first may seem a profane oath. John Adams, upon whose very fallible memory in old age the story rests, declares that he did not at the time regard Patrick Henry’s words as an oath, but rather as a solemn asseveration, affirmed religiously, upon a very great occasion. At any rate, that asseveration proved to be a prophecy; for from it there then leaped a flame that lighted up for an instant the next inevitable stage in the evolution of events,—the tragic and bloody outcome of all these wary lucubrations and devices of the assembled political wizards of America.

It is interesting to note that, at the very time when the Congress at Philadelphia was busy with its stern work, the people of Virginia were grappling with the peril of an Indian war assailing them from beyond their western mountains. There has recently been brought to light a letter written at Hanover, on the 15th of October, 1774, by the aged mother of Patrick Henry, to a friend living far out towards the exposed district; and this letter is a touching memorial both of the general anxiety over the two concurrent events, and of the motherly pride and piety of the writer:—

“My son Patrick has been gone to Philadelphia near seven weeks. The affairs of Congress are kept with great secrecy, nobody being allowed to be present. I [Pg 127] assure you we have our lowland troubles and fears with respect to Great Britain. Perhaps our good God may bring good to us out of these many evils which threaten us, not only from the mountains but from the seas.”[135]