A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic

Rating:
Summary: Does not supercede earlier works by R. Meade, R. Beeman
Review: Few biographies manage to avoid the perils of the genre, and this one is no exception. Mayer celebrates his subject, misunderstanding Henry as a fore-bearer of Jacksonian democracy and failing adequately to appreciate Henry's conservative commitment to social hierarchy, genteel leadership, and religious establishment. As a consequence, Mayer cannot convincingly explain Henry's espousal of Federalist politics in the 1790s, which makes sense only if we abandon any lingering neo-Whiggish inclination to find in Henry a self-conscious commitment to democracy.

There have been numerous other biographies of Patrick Henry. I would still recommend Moses Coit Tyler's 1887 PATRICK HENRY, which was reprinted by Chelsea House in 1980 with an introduction by Lance Banning. William Wirt Henry's three volume PATRICK HENRY, LIFE, CORRESPONDENCES, AND SPEECHES (originally published in 1891 but recently republished) should be used with care, since W.W. Henry incorrectly attributes a number of letters and other sources to Patrick Henry which more recent scholarship has established were written by others. Richard Beeman wrote a good analytic biography, PATRICK HENRY: A BIOGRAPHY, in 1974, which provides an excellent brief introduction to Henry's politics. The most comprehensive modern scholarly biography remains Robert Meade's two volume master-work, PATRICK HENRY (1959, 1967).

Mayer's prose is far more sprightly than Meade's, but Meade provides the more balanced and judicious treatment, and Meade's documentation of his conclusions is much superior. While Mayer updates Meade and Beeman in a number of places, his work does not supercede theirs, and should be read in conjunction with the earlier scholarship. Mayer's is a good book, especially as an introduction to a general audience. It is not, however, a work of historical biographical scholarship in the same class as, say, Drew Gilpen Faust's biography of James Henry Hammond, nor is it researched with the same meticulous care as Meade's account of Henry.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing Life of the Man Behind the Speech
Review: There's much more to Patrick Henry than 'Give me liberty or give me death,' the most famous line from his most famous speech. But if ever a one-liner summed up a man's philosophy, this was the line for this man.

Sadly, many of the great figures of America's early history have faded from public understanding. Maybe we remember the ones who became President, but truly great and influential men like Patrick Henry and George Mason are all but forgotten. Mayer's excellent book shows what a tragedy this is.

From his early career as a Virginia lawyer, to the way his beliefs and oratory were shaped by circuit-riding nonconformist Christian ministers, Mayer lays the foundations for Henry's later greatness. But most absorbing, to this reader, was Mayer's depiction of the fight in the Virginia Assembly over the ratification of the Constitution. Henry's prescient warnings of the growth of centralised power at the expense of the sovereign states leads one to wonder if maybe the anti-federalists weren't right after all.

Vital insights into a vital figure in a vital period of our history.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent read, a worthy portrait.
Review: While Henry Mayer exaggerates the extent to which Patrick Henry was a democrat, he certainly does a brilliant job in portraying the key figure in Virginia politics from the decade before the Revolution to through ratification of the constitution. This book should be on the shelf of everyone interested in the period in which Henry lived.

This is not the sole extensive biography of Henry, but the other book that fits that description -- a three-volume work, including a volume of Henry's surviving letters, by Henry's grandson -- is over a century old. Since then, we've not had anything that competes with Mayer's book either in narrative style or in the accuracy with which it captures the true Patrick Henry. (Richard Beeman's brief anti-Henry, pro-Jefferson and Madison volume of thirty years ago, for example, completely misapprehends Henry's role between 1787 and 1799.) Read of Henry's stirring Revolutionary oratory, then consider that he used the same gift for stirring men's souls in opposition to the current federal constituiton's ratification in 1788. Mayer shows that it wasn't Henry, but the world around him that had changed between 1765, or even 1776, and 1788. To understand the reasons for Henry's opposition to the current constitution is to have an inkling of what was lost when it was ratified; our generally Whiggish national outlook on history does not allow us often to stop and contemplate what might have been.

One should note, too, that it is incorrect to claim unqualifiedly, as the reviewer above does, that Henry favored religious establishment. It is true that Henry opposed the severe disestablishment legislation written by Thomas Jefferson and successfully sponsored in the Virginia General Assembly by James Madison, but Henry's alternative legislation was only a pale immitation of a real establishment. Anyone who knows Henry's story will find this unsurprising, since Henry's was a very ecumenically minded version of Episcopalianism.

This is a truly outstanding book.