Lion of Liberty Read Online Free

William—was on his way in 1757 when fire consumed their farmhouse
and its contents. Patrick, Sarah, and the children moved into an empty cabin and tried to halt their financial free fall. Patrick sold his slaves to furnish the cabin and buy a stock of goods to open another store, then hired a clerk to tend the store while he worked the fields and Sarah tended the children and kitchen garden.
    He could not have picked a worse time to open a store: A drought had devastated the area’s harvest and left farmers without means to buy necessities, let alone extras or luxuries. At the end of his first year, Patrick Henry had collected a mere £10. During the first half of his second year, only twenty-six customers set foot in the store. In debt himself, without capital to buy more inventory, with a wife, a newborn, and two other children to feed, he closed the store and moved his family into the attic of his father-in-law’s inn, across the road from the Hanover County Courthouse. In exchange for room and board, Henry tended bar and entertained customers with his fiddle, hiring an overseer to continue wringing whatever he could out of the farmland.
    In the winter of 1759-1760, Patrick went by himself to several Christmas celebrations to search for job opportunities, leaving Sarah alone at home to mind the children—a lonely, isolated role she would play almost without variation the rest of her life.
    â€œMy acquaintance with Mr. Henry commenced in the winter of 1759- 1760,” Thomas Jefferson recalled. On his way to enroll at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was spending his Christmas holidays on the 6,000-acre Hanover plantation of the wealthy shipbuilder Nathaniel West Dandridge, a son-in-law of the colonial governor and a cousin of George Washington’s fiancée, Martha Dandridge Custis. A neighbor of John Henry, Dandridge was a close friend of the judge, and young Patrick “was at home as one of the family,” according to Jefferson.
    During the festivity of the season I met Mr. Henry in society every day. His manners had something of coarseness in them; his passion was music, dancing, and pleasantry. He excelled in the latter, and it attached everyone to him. Mr. Henry had, a little before, broken up his store—or, rather, it had broken him up; but his misfortunes were not traced, either in his countenance or conduct. 10
    Hanover County was entirely rural, with only about 10,000 people scattered across the land—more than half of them slaves. Hanover town—the county seat and largest community—had fewer than fifty houses. Court days, though, turned the town into a fairground. A procession of vendors peddled horses, quilts, “white lightning,” and patent medicines often more potent than white lightning. In the yard before the courthouse, burly sheriffs and fierce-looking deputies dispensed justice—often dragging sobbing women or somnambulant drunks into the stocks or flogging runaway slaves, as spectators hallooed at the agony.
    Across the road from the courthouse, the Shelton tavern was aswarm with lawyers and their clients, debating virtually every written, unwritten, and should’ve-been-written law. Henry’s cousin William Winston recalled that Patrick dressed like most hill folk—in coarse work clothes, “very often barefooted. . . . He was very active and attentive to his guests and very frequently amused them with his violin on which he performed very well.” 11 Reels were popular, setting the men to dancing—and tripping over themselves. Patrick Henry sang Scottish ballads—some bawdier than others, but all of them enlivened with facial expressions that sent drinkers doubling over with laughter:
    â€œGo get me some of your father’s gold
And some of your mother’s too,
And two of the finest horses he has in his stable
For he has ten and thirty and two.”
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    She got him some of her father’s gold