Dedication & Purpose

Dedication:

This World Wide Web page is devoted to Patrick Henry (1736-1799).

The greatest orator of the American Revolutionary period, Patrick Henry spoke for freedom and against tyranny at all possible occasions.

After failing as a farmer and a storekeeper, read for the law and succeeded before frontier juries. His first famous case and oration was the known as the Parson's Cause in 1763. A Preacher, one of a dozen who refused to take out a license to preach from the Anglican church, was flogged for his resistance. During the trial, he declared, that a king, by vetoing acts of the colonial legislature, "degenerates into a tyrant and forfeits all right to his subjects' obedience." In gratitude, the Virginia colonists elected Henry to a seat in the House of Burgesses in 1765.

During his first term, Henry introduced resolutions declaring that the British Parliament could not tax the American Colonies. During one of the debates Patrick Henry declared, ""Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the Third . . .," when he was interrupted by cries of "Treason! Treason!" by the Tory members of the house. Patrick Henry continued, "and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!" Henry's resolutions passed.

In 1774 Henry was sent by Virginia as a delegate to the first Continental Congress. At the second revolutionary "convention" called in Virginia the next year, he urged the colony to arm its militia. It was in this speech that he uttered the famous words:

Gentlemen may cry peace! peace! but there is no peace! The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.

Henry also helped draw up Virginia's state constitution in 1776 and was elected first governor of the state. He was reelected twice. It was with a commission from Governor Henry that George Rogers Clark set out to wrest from the British the territory northwest of the Ohio.

In the Virginia ratification convention of 1788, Henry opposed the adoption of the new Constitution of the United States. He objected to it because it contained no "bill of rights" and because it infringed too much on the rights of the states. He wanted the country to remain a confederation and feared that under the Constitution it would become merely "one great consolidated national government of the people of all the States." Henry's advice to reject the Constitution was not followed, but it was as the result of such opposition that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, popularly known as the Bill of Rights, were adopted.

Henry retired to Red Hill, his plantation near Brookneal, Va. In 1799 he consented to serve again in the Virginia legislative assembly, but on June 6, before he could take his seat, he died at Red Hill.

So for his leadership that led to the American Revolutionary War, and for his adamant insistence and suspicion of the CONstitution, to which he never became reconciled, and his attempt to curtail the CONstitution that which led to the Bill of Rights, this World Wide Web Political Page is dedicated to Patrick Henry, Patriot.

"I look upon that paper [the CONstitution] as the most fatal plan that could be possibly conceived to enslave a free people."
Patrick Henry, Anti-Federalist

Purpose:

The purpose of Patrick Henry On-Line is to propagandize for freedom-oriented social order which allows human beings to attain their full potential free of artificial, man-made constraints. In order to attain this freedom, it is necessary to overthrow the current criminal regime and exterminate regime criminals in order by whatever means necessary in order to finish the Revolutionary work left undone after 1776-1781.

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