Evangelism in Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” Speech

St. John's Church in Richmond, Va., where Henry delivered his speechSt. John's Church in Richmond, Va., where Henry delivered his speech (Photo: NYPL Digital Collections)

March 23 marks the 241st anniversary of Patrick Henry’s famous “Liberty or Death” speech, delivered before the Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond. With tension between crown and colonists at an all-time high in March 1775, many Americans expected war to begin shortly. Yet some convention delegates continued to push for reconciliation with Britain, a course that to Henry seemed cowardly. Henry’s speech has been famous ever since as the iconic speech of the Revolutionary era, but few people today realize just how deeply embedded it was in evangelical religious culture.

Shaming reluctant Virginians into taking defense measures, Henry declared “We must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us! . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” With this, Henry raised his arms and bellowed, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

Even those very familiar with this episode may not recall how much Henry’s speech relied upon religious ideas and biblical texts. Although these are easily missed now, they would have been familiar to the audience at the Virginia Convention, who grew up in the Bible-soaked culture of colonial America. Several phrases, for example, came directly from the prophet Jeremiah. Henry warned that assurances of good will by the British would “prove a snare to your feet” (Jeremiah 18:22). He worried that Virginians would become like those “who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not” (Jeremiah 5:21). And he declared that “gentlemen may cry, peace, peace—but there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).

Henry acquired his deep biblicism in part from his parents, and in part from his autodidactic education in which the Bible took a central role. But as a child he was also introduced to religious controversy of a kind that was seen in many parts of the colonies. Henry came from a traditional Anglican family, and he remained an Anglican (or Episcopalian, after the Revolution) throughout his life. However, in the 1740s and 1750s Patrick Henry’s family found itself in the middle of the first serious uprising against traditional authorities in colonial America, a series of religious revivals commonly referred to as the Great Awakening.

In the 1740s, evangelical Presbyterians began preaching in the Henry family’s home county of Hanover, much to the disgust of Henry’s uncle Patrick, an Anglican rector. The evangelicals challenged the Anglicans, who represented the established state church, suggesting that they preached a lukewarm gospel. Some of the new preachers even hinted that certain Anglican ministers had never experienced conversion, the emotional moment that secured one’s saving faith in Christ. Patrick Henry the uncle thought that the evangelicals only spawned religious frenzy and believed the Virginia government ought to stop such dangerous men. He envisioned evangelical preachers screaming at their congregations that they all were “Damn’d double damn’d, whose [souls] are in hell, though they are alive on earth, Lumps of hellfire, incarnate Devils, 1000 times worse than Devils.”

But the evangelicals had an entirely different effect on Patrick Henry’s mother Sarah. Despite the fact that her husband was an Anglican vestryman, Sarah found Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies’s preaching irresistible, and she joined his maverick congregation. Henry family tradition holds that Sarah would take twelve-year-old Patrick to the evangelical Presbyterian meetings, and require him to repeat the biblical text and essence of the sermon to her. Although we do not know if Patrick Henry ever experienced evangelical conversion himself, he certainly never forgot the feel of those meetings. Like numerous populist politicians who have followed him, Henry adapted the evangelical style to politics. He later insisted that Samuel Davies not only delivered finer sermons than any preacher he ever encountered, but that Davies was the “greatest orator he ever heard.”

Evangelical preachers such as Davies appealed to and stuck with Henry because they relied on emotional appeals delivered in the common language of the people. Where the established churches of the colonies emphasized the people’s duty to attend the official congregations, the evangelical “dissenters” emphasized the people’s right to pursue their own spiritual happiness, regardless of what the authorities told them. This moral, emotional challenge to established authority transferred subtly to the crisis with Britain that began in the 1760s.

Historians have argued a great deal about the extent to which the Great Awakening fueled the American Revolution. Most would agree that while the Great Awakening had some kind of conditioning effect on American culture prior to 1776, the Revolution itself had more to do with taxes and politics than religion. Still, it is notable how often the Revolution’s popular paeans to liberty came packaged in an evangelical style. The Great Awakening, after all, was the greatest cultural and social upheaval in the British colonies prior to the Revolution, beginning just thirty-five years before the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the evangelicals’ attacks on the established churches also entailed an indirect popular attack on the state.

Prominent signs of this evangelical influence on the Patriots’ appeals to the people could be found even in unexpected places. Compare Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. These were, respectively, the most important speech and the most important pamphlet of the Revolution, and both Paine and Henry delivered them in evangelical cadences, even as Paine would become known later as a skeptical critic of Christianity. Among the most rousing sections of Common Sense, for instance, was when Paine took readers to Israel’s original political sin in I Samuel 8, when the Israelites insisted that they have a king in spite of God’s warnings against it. More people likely heard Common Sense recited aloud in taverns and coffeehouses than read it silently to themselves, and those readings took on the tenor of revivals for liberty.

Fights over taxes and representation may have been the immediate precipitants of the Revolution, but the Patriots couched their appeals for liberty in a revivalist mode. If we fail to notice this, we might also miss the critical role of religion in the Revolution, just like many modern readers might miss those references to Jeremiah peppered throughout “Liberty or Death.”

About the Author

Thomas Kidd

Thomas S. Kidd is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University. His books include Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots (2011), and most recently, American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths (2016).

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8 Comments

  1. Bravo! Finally, a Baptist historian who takes a closer look at the past of this nation. Wait until you get to the part about the agreement between the Baptists and the colonial legislature that, in exchange for their freedom to practice their faith, the Baptist ministers would encourage their young men to enlist in the Patriots’ Cause. One wonders if Elijah Craig had a part in it (he was chairman of the committee)and got carried away. I found in a volume of the DAR in the Arkansas State Library back in the 80s a whole regiment of the colonial militia of Virginia in which ever member bore the last name of Craig. I copied them and they are somewhere in my library. There is more, but of all the preachers in the Revolution, I can count on the fingers of one hand with maybe a few on the other all the Baptist ministers who did not support the Cause.

    1. Funny, you seem to have forgotten to mention the clergyman Patrick Henry witnessed flogged to death for preaching a sermon in public without a “permit/license”? WHich by all accounts was a MAJOR inspiration for the speech and sentiment.

  2. Note that Patrick Henry was a slave owner. I have observed that among the founding fathers, those who owned slaves liked to use the slavery/chains metaphor in describing the relationship between the colonists and England.

  3. Part of the background was missing. The flight from england and the state church were the reason for coming to America. You were not allowed to preach the gospel as you please. Then moving on, Henry on his ride through Appomatox , came across a baptist minister being flogged for preaching the gospel. The very thing that brought the people to America to flee the persecution of anyone that preached any other gospel. Hince, the speech..give me liberty or give me death. The people risked it all to have a place where there was freedom from the state. 1st amendment guaranteed freedom of religion not freedom from religion. There are those that want to destroy our constitutional freedoms. When one persons rights step on someone else’s rights, we no longer have the freedom. Freedom of religion is once again being trampled..

    1. Yes, seems that someone forgot to lend all of that part of the story for one reason or another. YOU SHOULDN’T “TEACH HISTORY” IF YOU DON’T KNOW IT YOURSELF. in my humble opinion.

  4. I would love for college students to read “Pilgrims Progress” used to be the 2nd most read book. Talk about Paul Bunyan, the author. It gives great evidence of the state church. Does anyone else know the story, ?

  5. Interesting you cite that most say the revolution was about taxes and politics, when John Adams, who writing to Hezekiah Niles, said quite the opposite, that the revolution happened before the war, when the people had a change in their hearts and minds of their religious sentiments.
    “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” John Adams.

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