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  • The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas
  • Peter S. Onuf (bio)
Kevin J. Hayes. The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. ix + 184 pp. ISBN 978-0-813-92758-9, $22.95.

Patrick Henry, the “Son of Thunder” whose powerful rhetoric helped spark the American Revolution, is customarily cast as “an unlearned backwoodsman” (24) with an intuitive grasp of natural law. The brash young Virginian (1736–1799) galvanized the patriot movement with his incendiary resolutions opposing the Stamp Act of 1765; a decade later his resounding words, “give me liberty, or give me death” (72), transformed resistance into revolution. William Wirt, Henry’s first biographer, and Thomas Jefferson, one of Wirt’s most important sources, first limned this portrait of the frontier democrat, and it has resonated with Americans ever since. Yet this image of Patrick Henry, as Kevin J. Hayes shows in this gem of a short biography, is profoundly mistaken. Far from being unlettered and unlearned, Henry was the product of his reading. Indeed, Hayes provocatively suggests, books were “more integral to the mind of Patrick Henry than to other contemporary intellectuals” with far larger libraries, for he “sought to internalize what he read” (106).

No one is better qualified to explore Henry’s mind that Hayes, author of the magnificent literary biography of Jefferson, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2008). Estimates of Henry’s supposedly modest intellectual attainments reflect comparisons between the two Virginians, with Jefferson’s enormous library, conspicuous erudition, and rich documentary legacy leaving Henry deep in the shadows. Not surprisingly, The Road to Monticello is a much, much longer book than The Mind of a Patriot. But Hayes recognizes Henry was much less concerned than Jefferson with conventional markers of status, and therefore with his legacy: “neither a fine mansion nor a great library appealed to Henry” (105). Yet if Henry had relatively few books, he used them intensively. Hayes’s painstaking bibliographical detective work reconstructs a library of 188 titles (listed in an appendix) at Red Hill, Henry’s last home. The book list, as interpreted by Hayes, demolishes the Henry stereotype, illuminating a mind that was steeped in the learning of his age.

Jefferson was too easily misled by Henry’s self-presentation. Henry “cultivated the persona of an unlearned backwoodsman” (24), adapting “a down-to-earth style of speaking as a means of ingratiating himself with local Virginians” (57). He might seem “lazy” to Jefferson (15), but he worked hard at his studies, “reading a few books deeply and thoroughly” (32). Henry’s eloquence seemed spontaneous, unstudied, “natural,” and Jefferson found it captivating despite—or perhaps, because of—its “vulgar and vicious” character (57). Yet it is now apparent to historians that rhetorical effects that [End Page 854] seemed natural to contemporaries were the product of hard work. Henry’s books show that “speaking like a backwoodsman was a deliberate rhetorical technique” (58). Henry knew he was an effective speaker, but he always “saw room for improvement” (61).

Hayes displays a formidable mastery of the books in Henry’s library. Henry’s reading and rereading in the classics as well as in modern works in linguistics and elocution reveal the hard student beneath the unstudied orator. So, too, Hayes shows that Henry “learned about natural law by reading some of the same treatises on the subject Jefferson read” (44). And if Henry did not show off his learning, he had thoroughly absorbed the same important texts that inspired the leading legal writers and practitioners of his age. Even Jefferson had to acknowledge, commenting on the knotty litigation over the British debt cases in the 1790s, that Henry “‘not only seemed, but had made himself really learned on the subject’” (99).

Jefferson’s reluctant concession that reality just might match appearance underscores Hayes’s achievement. Reconstructing the Red Hill library enables Hayes to reconstruct the realities of Henry’s reading life, and thus to show how his strenuous efforts produced such apparently effortless effects. Hayes also offers some sensible suggestions about the relationship between books and life that...

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