Reflections: Orator of Nature: William Wirt’s Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry

First published in Philadelphia in 1817 and reprinted more than two dozen times before World War I, William Wirt’s Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry remains in print to this day. (Now in the public domain, a 2013 paperback version can be found through Barnes & Noble for $17.00.) A romantic precursor for America’s log-cabin myth, Wirt’s Sketches defined Henry’s reputation as the unschooled child of the American forest—an image that promptly crossed the Atlantic when Lord Byron enshrined Patrick Henry as “the forest-born Demosthenes whose thunder shook the Philip of the seas.”¹

Born in Maryland in 1772 and orphaned at the age of eight, William Wirt bounced around from one guardian family to another until he moved to Culpeper, Virginia, in 1792. There he began to practice law just as Patrick Henry retired from public office.² Wirt probably never met Henry, certainly never heard him speak, and knew little about Henry’s endeavors as a legislator, governor, or statesman. Having focused his research on Henry’s oratory, Wirt worried about the gaps, or “blanks,” that remained as his book neared completion: “He was a blank military commander, a blank governor, and a blank politician,” Wirt grumbled to a friend, and “as hopeless a subject as a man could well desire.”³

After serving as a chancery judge first in Williamsburg and then in Nor-folk, Wirt accompanied his wife Betsy back to Richmond, her hometown, for the birth of their first child. As he awaited the blessed event, Wirt wrote a series of epistolary essays modeled in part upon Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator that appeared in Richmond’s Virginia Argus as “The Letters of the British Spy.” Letter III, published on September 15, 1803, announced two themes that subsequently preoccupied Wirt’s literary imagination: Patrick Henry and nature.

Wirt then devoted fourteen years to researching and writing his pioneering biography of Henry. Long active in state politics, Wirt’s national career coincided with the publication of his Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry. In 1817 Wirt joined James Monroe’s cabinet as attorney general and moved permanently to Washington, D.C., where he became the nation’s longest-serving attorney general, a confidant to four presidents, and America’s first presidential candidate chosen by a party convention.⁴

During Wirt’s first decade in Virginia, courtroom experience and a few years as a clerk for the state legislature convinced him that public oratory, which he regarded “as a very powerful engine . . . in a republic,” was being “negligently cultivated in the United States.”⁵ With an explicit nod to Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), Wirt’s “British Spy” contended that “genuine and sublime eloquence” derived from a state of nature and was therefore rare in all civilized countries. The emphasis of Wirt and Blair on nature and simplicity reflected the Scottish Enlightenment’s cultural-stage theory of civilization that literary historian Kevin J. Hayes has also identified as a context for Thomas Jefferson’s disparaging assessments of Henry.⁶ An orator needed to embody “primitive simplicity” and to “forget the habits in which he has been educated.”⁷

Virginians, the “British Spy” proclaimed in 1803, could boast of just such “an orator of nature. . . . the celebrated Patrick Henry, whom I regret that I came to this country too late to see.”⁸ Orator of Nature was a concept that forever dominated Wirt’s understanding of Patrick Henry. He emphasized it in caps and small-caps on the final page of his Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (p. 427).

Wirt’s very first comment about Patrick Henry in Letter III of the “British Spy” outlined the romantic vision that his book would project into U.S. civic culture. Hugh Blair’s ideas about eloquence and America’s romantic affinity for nature gave shape to the deeply personal connection that drew Wirt (a self-described “poor orphan boy, of obscure parentage”) toward his...