Books in Brief: Patrick Henry: Patriot and Statesman

Patrick Henry: Patriot and Statesman, by Norine Dickson Campbell (Devin-Adair, $10). Despite his contributions to the Revolution, which included much more than the renowned liberty-or-death speech, Henry has never been the subject of a satisfactory biography. He has remained an enigma and his life a field for enemies and mythmakers. This somewhat roughhewn labor of love by a lady of Henry’s own county, Hanover, resolves some of the mysteries of his personality and influence and dispels some persistent distortions: the nineteenth-century myth of Henry the ill-educated and lazy backwoods demagogue and the twentieth-century myth of the proletarian revolutionary. As governor, Henry was more energetic, and as politician, less expediential, than Jefferson who made the charges of laziness and demagogy. The backwoodsman, I learned here, was a relative of Lord Brougham and the son of a Scottish university graduate. American liberty owes much to fusion of the frontier and aristocratic spirits, as exemplified by Patrick Henry, and neither spirit had anything to do with the proletariat or the plutocracy of cities. The chapter on Henry’s opposition to the Constitution particularly should be pondered by conservatives. There is always profit in examining the American Revolution and the gentlemen who made it, and an adequate examination, as in this case, can never fail to be a rebuke to succeeding generations.

CW

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Clyde Wilson

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Patrick Henry: Patriot and Statesman, by Norine Dickson Campbell (Devin-Adair, $10). Despite his contributions to the Revolution, which included much more than the renowned liberty-or-death speech, Henry has never been the subject of a satisfactory biography. He has remained an enigma and his life a field for enemies and mythmakers. This somewhat roughhewn labor of love by a lady of Henry’s own county, Hanover, resolves some of the mysteries of his personality and influence and dispels some persistent distortions: the nineteenth-century myth of Henry the ill-educated and lazy backwoods demagogue and the twentieth-century myth of the proletarian revolutionary. As governor, Henry was more energetic, and as politician, less expediential, than Jefferson who made the charges of laziness and demagogy. The backwoodsman, I learned here, was a relative of Lord Brougham and the son of a Scottish university graduate. American liberty owes much to fusion of the frontier and aristocratic spirits, as exemplified by Patrick Henry, and neither spirit had anything to do with the proletariat or the plutocracy of cities. The chapter on Henry’s opposition to the Constitution particularly should be pondered by conservatives. There is always profit in examining the American Revolution and the gentlemen who made it, and an adequate examination, as in this case, can never fail to be a rebuke to succeeding generations.