E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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American Statesmen
PATRICK HENRY
BY
MOSES COIT TYLER
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY MOSES COIT TYLER
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY MOSES COIT TYLER AND HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JEANNETTE G. TYLER
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
PREFACE
In this book I have tried to embody the chiefresults derived from a study of all the materialsknown to me, in print and in manuscript, relatingto Patrick Henry,—many of these materialsbeing now used for the first time in any formalpresentation of his life.
Notwithstanding the great popular interest attachingto the name of Patrick Henry, he hashitherto been the subject of but one memoirfounded on original investigation, and that, ofcourse, is the Life by William Wirt. When it isconsidered, however, that Wirt’s book was finishedas long ago as the year 1817,—before the timehad fairly come for the publication of the correspondence,diaries, personal memoranda, and officialrecords of every sort, illustrating the greatperiod covered by Patrick Henry’s career,—itwill be easy to infer something as to the quantityand the value of those printed materials bearingupon the subject, which are now to be had by us,but which were not within the reach of Wirt.Accordingly, in his lack of much of the detailed[Pg vi]testimony that then lay buried in inaccessible documents,Wirt had to trust largely to the somewhatimaginative traditions concerning Patrick Henrywhich he found floating in the air of Virginia;and especially to the supposed recollections of oldpeople,—recollections which, in this case, werenearly always vague, not always disinterested,often inaccurate, and generally made up of emotionalimpressions rather than of facts. Any onewho will take the trouble to ascertain the enormousdisadvantages under which Wirt wrote, andwhich, as we now know, gave him great discouragement,will be inclined to applaud him for makingso good a book, rather than to blame him fornot making a better one.
It is proper for me to state that, besides thecopious printed materials now within reach, I havebeen able to make use of a large number of manuscriptsrelating to my subject. Of these may bespecified a document, belonging to Cornell University,written by a great-grandson of PatrickHenry, the late Rev. Edward Fontaine, and giving,among other things, several new anecdotesof the great orator, as told to the writer by hisown father, Colonel Patrick Henry Fontaine, whowas much with Patrick Henry during the lateryears of his life. I may add that, through thekindness of the Hon. William Wirt Henry of[Pg vii]Richmond, I have had access to the manuscriptswhich were