Excerpts
"We Must Fight!" The Private War Between Patrick Henry and Lord Dunmore
Virginia's Revolution was less the result
of events than of personalities; less the product of a misunderstanding
than of a mutual conviction that "After all, we must
fight." Those were Henry's words, and when they are compared
to Dunmore's December 24 reply to the King's rebuke,
"these Virginians should be made to suffer the misery of which
they themselves are the author," it is clear that Henry and
Dunmore were of one mind about the inevitability of war. Had
it not taken weeks for the Governor’s letters to reach London,
he might have been stopped. Had Henry not been an oratorical
force of nature, Virginians might have given peace a
chance. But both men were effectively beyond recall, and what
they achieved together, revolution and war, though it would
later be ascribed to political differences, was actually the result
of irreconcilable similarities in character aggravated by contempt
on one side and a bottomless need for revenge on the
other.
• • •
Sallie [Henry] died in February of 1775. On March 23, Henry gave
the greatest speech of his life to the Second Virginia
Convention assembled at a safe distance from Lord Dunmore in St. John's Church in Richmond. William Wirt's mostly fictitious
account of Henry’s "Give me liberty or give me death!"
speech suffers as usual from its author's need to gild the oratorical
lily. Even so, it is the essential point of departure for
anyone who wonders how a mere speech could have started a
revolution:
‘. . . There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be
free – if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable
privileges for which we have been so long contending – if
we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in
which we have been so long engaged, and which we have
pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious
object of our contest all be obtained! We must fight! I
repeat it, Sir, we must fight!!! An appeal to arms and to
the God of hosts, is all that is left to us!'
• • •
'The battle sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant,
the active, the brave. Besides sir, we have no
election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too
late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in
submission and slavery! Our chains are forged. Their
clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war
is inevitable – and let it come!! I repeat it sir, let it
come!!!'
• • •
It was now mid-May. With Henry in Philadelphia, his Lordship
found himself, like Shakespeare's Cleopatra, sitting out that
"great gap in time" while his rival was away. Impatient, and
growing more so by the moment, he still had not reduced
Williamsburg to ashes. He decided to advance the cause of
conflict and controversy by asking the city officials to join him
in investigating the pilferage of muskets from the Magazine. In
a later report to the House of Burgesses James Mercer
described how the Magazine’s keeper had incurred his
Lordship's wrath by observing that the muskets left on the
floor by looters had no firing mechanisms.
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