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epilogue Country Gentleman in a New Country John Hook’s Beef 194 John Hook sued many people during his long mercantile career and, judging from his ultimate wealth, successfully collected debts. Yet in one case he got caught in his own snare. His ultimate fame—or infamy—resulted from bringing a case to district court in New London in which he claimed an army commissary in 1781 had illegally taken two of his steers. The defendants hired Patrick Henry as their lawyer. William Wirt’s biography of Henry in 1817 records a scene of both magnificent oratory and hilarity. Hook wanted payment for the property the army had appropriated. Henry mounted a simple defense; he emotionally manipulated the crowd and ridiculed John Hook. In Henry’s argument, the ragtag suffering army was on trial, not the army commissioner, and Hook was no American if he could refuse to feed such heroes. As Wirt tells it, Henry’s humiliation of Hook is vivid. Henry painted a picture of “the American army, exposed almost naked to a winter’s sky and marking the frozen ground over which they marched with the blood of their unshod feet.” In stock courtroom drama, Henry’s voice rose and fell as he appealed to the jury, until he reached the dramatic moment, at which point he thrust out his arm and pointed an accusatory finger: Where was the man who had an American heart in his bosom, who would not have thrown open his fields, his barns, his cellars, the doors of his house, the portals of his breast, to have received with open arms, the meanest soldier in that little band of famished patriots? Where is the man? There he stands—but whether the heart of an American beats in his bosom, you gentlemen are to judge.1 Henry continued to carry the jury by the “powers of their imagination” to the plains around York. He described the victory, the surrender, the “shouts of victory . . . and the cry of Washington and Liberty as it rung and echoed throughout the American ranks, and was reverberated from the hills and shores of the neighboring river.” Henry paused. “But hark! What notes of discord are these that disturb the general joy . . . —they are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely brawling through the American camp, beef, beef, beef!” The audience convulsed with laughter. Rather than despoil the sanctity of his office, court clerk James Steptoe raced outside and rolled “in the grass in the most violent paroxysm of laughter.” Hook, also seeking relief, came out and in the Scottish brogue that Wirt so carefully records, asked: “Jemmy Steptoe, what ails ye, mon?” Steptoe could only say “he could not help it.” Patrick Henry had worked up the audience into such an uproar, first laughter then outrage at such Tory audacity, that Hook’s lawyer could not even respond. Soon, according to Wirt, the echoing cries of “beef, beef ” were replaced with “tar and feather,” and only a fast horse could save John Hook. By the time that William Wirt’s account of the famous beef trial appeared in 1817, John Hook was long dead. His end was rather ignominious. His lawsuit with David Ross had dragged on and required that Hook often travel from Hale’s Ford to Richmond to deal with court business. Returning home at the end of March 1809, he fell ill. He wrote a will that strangers witnessed and then passed away. His sons and sons-in-law later refused to stand as executors. A state marker erected two centuries later identifies New London as an early town and singles out Henry’s involvement in the court case as the most historically interesting thing to have happened there. Perhaps the skill of Patrick Henry—Wirt reported that his contemporaries called him the “shakespeare and garrick combined!”—led to the melodramatic pathos that caused the new nation to heap scorn on John Hook and in some ways brought to an end the Revolutionary saga of this Scottish merchant. John Hook’s personality made him easy to dislike. His letters reveal a man who alternated between pessimism and bravado; his fear of failure necessitated vigilance against disadvantage. He spent countless hours in the saddle traveling to courthouses pressing for debts; his papers include a concise reference list of several county courts along with their meeting days. Between 1772 and 1774, Hook undertook forty-six prosecutions in Bedford County Court alone for collection of...

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