I think, Kevin has a pretty good take on Henry, although I would add
the family tragedy of his wife's illness, as a further complication
to Henry's climb back into the heart of the gentry.

It is difficult today to understand just how stratified Virginia
society was, and how closely social status was tied to land, money,
and family (a situation, I think many would agree, which changed
considerably after the Civil War when there was little money and
family became the defining talisman).  My earlier comments about
Mason and his views on slavery stem, at least in part, from these
same issues.  Henry and GW, are two very good examples of upwardly
mobile colonial men. Different paths, different characters, but the
same impulse to rise in their rarified world.

-- Stephan


On 9 Dec 2005, at 12:30, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> 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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