Kevin is right.

Too long a story for the moment - but Henry didn't "become a Federalist."
He WAS accused of that because he disagreed with BOTH the Alien and
Sedition Acts and (to the point) with the Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions - he died June 6 1799 in the heat of these partisan debates -
after having won election to the General Assembly on the urging of George
Washington in which he counseled that the way to deal with the Alien $ Sed
Acts was to repeal them rather than assert the incipient state rights
arguments he perceived in the VA & Ky Res - which he contended Va had
largely (mistakenly) surrendered in 1788.  An interesting thing about
Henry is that we was gracious in defeat - check out the episode right
after the VA convention is which he tells a would rump-session of
Antifederalists in essence we've done our best, we lost the vote, now its
time to go home and play by the new rules in order to salvage what can be
saved. Its in Kmainski's Virginia Ratification volumes.....   Trial
lawyers on the county court circuit - and effective legislators - learned
to disagree vigorously in debate without being jerks - since they might be
arguing the same side of tomorrow's case, or sharing a bed in some crowded
ordinary, and certainly would be traveling together to the next court
days.....
jk
jk

> 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
>
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>
>


Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President
Red Hill - The Patrick Henry National Memorial
1250 Red Hill Road
Brookneal, Virginia 24528
www.redhill.org
Phone 434-376-2044 or 800-514-7463

Fax 434-376-2647

- M. Lynn Davis, Office Manager
- Karen Gorham-Smith, Associate Curator
- Edith Poindexter, Curator

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html