NO ONE GAVE A SPEECH LIKE PATRICK HENRY

How he roused a nation to war

- BY DREW GILPIN FAUST

Patrick Henry is generally treated as a second-string Founding Father. He didn't write—or even sign—the Declaration of Independence. He didn't write the Constitution. Instead, fearing that it allocated too much power to a centralized government, he did all he could to defeat it. He was not a Revolutionary military hero. He did not explain lightning, invent bifocals, take Paris by diplomatic storm, or write an autobiography that has become a classic in American literature. Henry did attend the First and Second Continental Congresses, but made little mark. After 1775, he remained in his home state of Virginia, where he would serve five terms as governor. He did not again take up national service.

What Patrick Henry did above all was talk—and get talked about. He astonished his listeners as the most compelling public speaker they had ever encountered. He was, John Adams proclaimed, the Demosthenes of his age. Thomas Jefferson hailed him as “the greatest orator that ever lived.” In the opinion of Edmund Randolph, the country's first attorney general, Henry's eloquence “unlocked the secret springs of the human heart, robbed danger of all its terror, and broke the keystone in the arch of royal power.” Many of his contemporaries agreed that he made the Revolution possible with words that rendered it both desirable and inevitable.