Postscript Notes on Liberty and Death
The Revolution had no shortage of heroes. Some had proved their valor in politics, others on the battlefield. But some heroes were yet to be created. One Founding Father whose legend only grew over time was Patrick Henry—a man whose dynamic rhetoric and divine invocations borrowed much from the evangelists of the Great Awakening, and a leader who showed just how enduring the hallmarks of the Christian revival could be.
As a child of the Anglican faith, Henry grew up in a climate of New Light fervor. He witnessed the ministry of George Whitefield but was most taken with the passion and zeal of Samuel Davies. Davies, a Presbyterian minister, had brought the revival to Virginia as a missionary, saving thousands of souls for Christ. He later raised money for the College of New Jersey with Gilbert Tennent and served as its president. Henry saw Davies as “the greatest orator he ever heard” and learned from him a style of oratory that could provoke listeners to a state of excitement and uproar, and unite them in a cause blessed by God himself. By the mid-1770s, that cause was no longer evangelical rebirth, but revolution against Britain.
Henry became a well-known planter and lawyer, and an agitator for war with the mother country. His most famous oration was, of course, delivered to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, forever known as the “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech. Yet before Henry finished his speech with that famous line, he invoked the Deity to bless the coming struggle for independence, with all the flair of a country revivalist: “There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. . . . There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come!”
The speech was calculated to be incendiary and went well beyond the style of Samuel Davies into rhetoric that was more familiar in the pulpits of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. As one historian wrote, “With its effective mixing of Revolutionary and biblical themes, the ‘Liberty or Death’ speech resembles the sermons of New England’s ‘Black Regiment.’” However, though Henry was without a doubt a stirring orator and a key figure in pushing Virginia toward war, no one knows what he actually said on that day in 1775.
None of Henry’s revolutionary orations survive in print, and “Liberty or Death” was no different. Although the speech conveyed much of his renegade spirit—if anything he may have used language that was even more slashing against the Crown—it wasn’t published until forty years after the revolution. And its author was William Wirt.
The enterprising lawyer Wirt was about to become attorney general in the James Monroe administration when he penned Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry in 1817. It had been a lengthy undertaking to cobble together the words of the famous Virginian from a variety of accounts, memories and anecdotes. For “Liberty or Death,” Wirt relied heavily on the recollections of a lawyer named St. George Tucker, who claimed to have witnessed Henry in action and provided a report that detailed Henry’s verbal flourishes and wizardry—almost four decades after the fact. Tucker doubtless invented many passages he attributed to Henry, and the speech became an object of contention among scholars in the years after Wirt published it. Nonetheless, the Sketches . . . of Patrick Henry had a singular effect on the Virginian’s reputation, vaulting him from being one of several notable revolutionaries in Virginia to the preeminent orator of the new republic.
Patrick Henry became a totem of the evangelical style adapted to American politics. His jeremiad against the British—thick with Biblical allusion and threats against transgressors of native liberties—served to influence countless public figures in the nineteenth century. Thus, even in a distant echo, the firebrand populism of the Great Awakening electrified listeners once more, this time with God as part of the packaging instead of the core message. Politicians of the era invoked the Deity for purposes both noble and base, whether asking him to bless their public endeavors or issuing divine threats against their enemies or declaiming against conspiracies real and imagined.
This budding populism gave rise to one of the first third parties in U.S. history, and the first of any kind to hold a nominating convention. It was known as the Anti-Masonic Party, and in 1831, its presidential candidate was none other than William Wirt. The party was founded in reaction to the disappearance of a Freemason named William Morgan, who had threatened to expose the society’s many secrets. With countless politicians and gentry linked to Masonry, the Anti-Masonic Party peddled fantastic tales of conspiracies and threats to American liberties at the hands of the organization, with a message that nakedly trafficked in fear and demagoguery. Wirt joined the fray in his letter to the nominating convention, writing that Masonry was “at war with the fundamental principles of the social compact, as treason against society, and a wicked conspiracy against the laws of God and of man which ought to be put down.” However, despite his calumny against Masonry, Wirt was himself a former member, and later tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his name as a presidential candidate. In the election of 1832, he secured around 8% of the vote and won a single state—Vermont.
Though the Anti-Masons soon disappeared, their style of demagoguery endured. Ironically, the man who best showcased it was their enemy “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson. The American general had parlayed military fame at the Battle of New Orleans and the Seminole War to national celebrity by the 1820s, and his defeat in the election of 1824—despite receiving a plurality of the vote—allowed him to chastise the victor John Quincy Adams as the recipient of a “corrupt bargain” that undermined democracy itself. Riding high on fears of political malfeasance, Jackson won the presidency four years later, and presented himself as a tribune of popular will who took on scheming elites and scoundrel politicians even as he showed many of the same flaws he denounced in others.
For two terms he infuriated his political opponents by dissolving the national banking system, creating a spoils system that rewarded friends with plum government jobs, and pushing the limits of presidential power beyond what law and tradition allowed. Jackson was a slaveholder who entrenched slavery in the U.S. economy, and tried to thwart the rise of abolition however he could. He was thin-skinned and bellicose, and his body carried bullets that had been fired into him from duelists he had faced. He used blunt and fearsome rhetoric against his opposers, arrogated authority to the executive branch, and even occasionally dismissed the power of federal courts to stop him. His critics said he behaved like a despotic monarch—“King Andrew I.” Others were even less kind, and called him everything from a “roaring demagogue” to a “pocket-sized Paul Bunyan” to “a frontier bully.” His actions against native peoples especially made him notorious, as he broke treaties protecting Native American land rights and oversaw “the forced relocation of the eastern Indians. . . . on a massive scale,” resulting in atrocities like the Trail of Tears. Yet despite all the criticism, Old Hickory remained undaunted, and with each brash step he took to dominate the national agenda and crush his adversaries, he became only more popular—and he was reelected in 1832 in a landslide.
Future demagogues of the left and right would take Jackson’s brand of populism and recast it for their own purposes: the Know-Nothings deploying it against immigrants and Catholics; the prairie populists against bankers, robber barons, and Wall Street; McCarthyites against liberal New Dealers; and Donald Trump and his supporters against immigrants and racial minorities. This style of politics proved to be remarkably elastic and adaptable for different eras and conditions, and it continues to surface whenever class inequality or status anxiety boils over, and opportunistic politicians feel secure that attacking economic and cultural elites will bring them popular notoriety, and ultimate success at the ballot box.
Beyond politics, the Great Awakening established a model for the growth of future evangelical movements. One such revival—the Second Great Awakening—borrowed from the original an emphasis on religion of the heart, enthusiasm in worship, and emotional transcendence over legalistic doctrine and ritual. It hit its peak from the 1820s to the 1840s and spread widely across the country, from upstate New York to the pioneer country of the West to the camp meetings of the South. Some compared it to a prairie fire; others called it “an expansion of religious feeling unknown in American history.”
Like the first movement a century before, it drew on people’s dissatisfaction with contemporary life, and their dislocation in a rapidly industrializing economy. With canals, steamboats and mercantile trade gradually turning America into a world power, many citizens saw the rural country of their youth disappearing in the shadow of great cities connected by train tracks and telegraph wires. Protestant revivalists answered their fears with a call to piety and devotion, and told them God could ease their worries and solve their problems. This time, however, strict theology and Calvinist dogma would play little role in the revival. Instead, evangelists told people they had the free will to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and be reborn in him—instead of the old, depressing idea that God might damn them no matter what they did.
What arose, then, was a unique form of homegrown American religion, inspired by the Great Awakening but departing from it in important ways. The Church of England was no longer a target—it had been reinvented as the Episcopal Church of America and now ordained its own homegrown bishops, without controversy. And instead of provoking chaos in the pews, this revival bolstered the power of ministers and grew evangelical churches by the tens of thousands, especially the Methodists and Baptists. Professional organizers and formal literature helped drive conversions, and the leaders of the revival understood that modern planning and organization would be as important to saving souls as melting hearts in Christ.
The greatest proponent of the Second Great Awakening was Charles Grandison Finney, who, for all his fervent evangelizing and Christian exhortations, might be called the era’s own George Whitefield—except he was a Presbyterian, he encouraged the education of both black and women worshippers, he was president of what would become one of the most liberal schools in America, Oberlin College, and he fought vigorously against slavery. He even dismissed hoary Calvinism with his book on free will, Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.
The churches of professional ministers like Finney became bulwarks of the new faith, but the flames of revival could not be so easily contained within them. Through the tumult and economic trials of the 1830s, public dissatisfaction grew and spread, and new, more radical sects emerged like Joseph Smith’s Mormons and the Millerites of New York. The Mormons faced ridicule and violence in trying to establish their communities, while the Millerites embraced “chaos as the birthpangs of a new and perfect era” in predicting the end of the world—which their leader, William Miller, announced would occur in October 1844. The failure of his prophecy led to a “Great Disappointment,” but it also inspired new apocalyptic sects that took advantage of the freedom of American religion to welcome God’s inevitable destruction of the earth. (The Millerites also led to the growth of new denominations like the Seventh-Day Adventists.) At the same time, a counter-reaction to apocalyptic Christianity arose in utopian communities in the Northeast and Midwest, from New Harmony and Brook Farm to Hopedale and Oneida, with the promise of creating an ideal community under God with its own rules, beliefs and best practices for living.
Whether worshippers expected worldly doom or moral perfection, eventually the fracturing of faith inspired even smaller splinter sects, and consumed many of the established churches of the Second Great Awakening—just as it had the First. By the mid-1840s, the Presbyterian church once again split over the practices of revivalism, and then fractured again over slavery, as did the Methodists and Baptists. Other evangelical sects followed them in breaking into Northern and Southern branches.
As in so many aspects of American life, slavery became the touchstone for conflict in religion. But while most ministers of the original Awakening either apologized for or embraced human bondage, now the majority of those in the North condemned it as an affront to God and a stain upon the national character. They took their ideas not from slaveholders like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, but from the radicals who had resisted slavery—the likes of Edwards’s son Jonathan Jr. and Samuel Hopkins. In the eighteenth century, those ministers and their followers had taken proud and perilous stands against slavery, and often found themselves chastised for it. Yet over the decades their work, and those of black men and women who had experienced slavery like Obour Tanner, Bristol Yamma, and Phillis Wheatley, eventually triumphed in the Northern Christian revival.
Thus, the impact of the Great Awakening resonated well into the nineteenth century, though in strikingly different ways. On one hand, it created a model for populist upheaval, and a way for politicians to undermine and transform society on their own terms. On the other, it shaped religion as a powerful force of social change, in which radicals called for moral reform even if it led to turmoil.
The reformers had the most lasting impact. For them, “liberty or death” was not an either/or proposition. They knew that both often went hand in hand, and there could be no true human liberty as long as slavery degraded the ideal. They realized that demanding it could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, in a harrowing new conflict fought on American soil. Yet when the Civil War came, they embraced it, as battlefield chaplains and missionaries. One of them, Indiana minister John Hight, even wrote of how “the flames and smoke surged amongst the burning buildings, like ocean waves, and struggled upward like a thousand banners in the sky. . . . How wondrous the judgments of an avenging God against the crime of slavery.” He and other evangelicals brought the fire of belief to the fire of the cannon, and gave holy sanction to the unholy practice of war, just as their predecessors had done nearly a century before at the violent birth of the new republic.