A very small caveat to an otherwise excellent post from
Professor Finkelman.

We don't really know why Patrick Henry joined the Federalists
in the last year of his life.  It may be the case, as Paul
suggests, that "he like to be on the winning side," but there
are other, and to my reading more plausible explanations.
Henry himself did not say explicitly, so we have to infer from
what we do know about him to make a plausibility argument.  We
will never be able to know with certainty.

To me, Henry's career makes best sense if we read him as being
motivated by a lifetime commitment to the people Jack Greene,
Rhys Isaac, Charles Sydnor, and others have described as
Virginia's plantation aristocracy.  These are the men who,
through county and vestry institutions, governed the colony,
and struggled in the 1780s and 1790s to retain their
ascendence in the new Commonwealth.  Henry was born into a
family that, for part of his child hood, participated in the
higher echelons of Virginia's governing class, and then lost
the economic basis for that participation.  Much of Henry's
young adulthood was spent in clawing his way back into that
class--a status he achieved by the mid-1760s, from the
patronage of an established Virginia planter and politician,
and from his own forensic brilliance in the courtroom.  By the
1770s, he had surpassed the achievements of his father, and of
his own half-brother, whose inheritance had precipitated the
personal economic crisis from which Henry spent most of his
late teens and 20s recovering.

So I read Henry's career in light of his loyalty to the
planter class of mid-18th century Virginia and to the
institutions which assured its influence and power.  Henry's
opposition to the Constitution, his oppostion to the
dis-establishment of the Church, and his conversion to
Federalism in the 1790s all make sense viewed in this
perspective.  For this reason, I don't see him as the
unprincipled opportunist that Jefferson portrayed him to be.

The Virginia ruling class to which Henry was loyal was, like
any ruling class, guilty of various kinds of oppression.  But
as Jack Greene makes quite clear, it also had its undeniable
achievements, not the least of which was that it produced a
generation of leaders who contributed enormously to the
founding of our country.  The Virginia aristocracy at its best
 embodied an ethos of "stewardship," which Greene explores
very well in several of his essays.  Patrick Henry certainly
participated in the political culture of 18th century Virginia
and was one of the men who most successfully articulated its
values.  Jefferson hated him for his own reasons, but I don't
see why we have to take Jefferson's word as the final word.

Warm regards,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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