Almost 250 years ago, four weeks before the battles of Lexington and Concord, Patrick Henry rose in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Va., to urge Americans to arm for a war that he saw as inevitable. He famously concluded his call to arms: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Patriots embraced Henry’s dramatic refrain, and rallying militia members sewed it into their hunting shirts. Since then, his words have echoed through the centuries, here and abroad. In 1845, Frederick Douglass referenced Henry when he wrote of the enslaved battling for freedom. Over a century later, when thousands gathered for liberty in Tiananmen Square and when Hong Kong protesters fought for democratic rights, they also invoked Henry’s words.
Yet, Henry’s phrase has been embraced by some as a radical call for opposition to almost any government action. Timothy McVeigh quoted Henry after his 1995 anti-government Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 and injured 700. In 2020, signs attacking health regulations demanded, rather confusedly, “Give me liberty or give me COVID-19!” Protesters seeking to undermine a democratic election on Jan. 6, 2021, quoted Henry. His famous phrase has appeared on everything from AR-15 dust covers to a Tea Party manifesto.
Rather than a call for democratic freedom, Henry’s mantra has become a radical screed. But wrapping anti-government campaigns in Henry’s words demonstrates a fundamental historical misunderstanding, one that speaks to an increasingly dangerous American fixation on personal freedom at the expense of fellow citizens and our shared government.
Read More: Beyond the Founding Fathers: 12 Unsung Figures Who Helped Build America
Henry was never simply a tax protester or opposed to government regulation. The problem was, as we learn in school, taxation without representation. Henry consistently recognized the right of government, empowered by the community, to make binding laws and regulations—even when he disagreed with the result.
In 1788, Henry led antifederalist efforts to oppose ratification of the U.S. Constitution, because he believed that it would create a government too powerful and distant from the people. When the Constitution was ratified over their objections, some antifederalists sought to enrage the public and undermine its implementation. When they called upon Henry to lead their effort, he emphatically rejected such opposition, insisting that change must be sought “in a constitutional way.”
Henry’s commitment to the community’s right to govern was never clearer than in his final political campaign.
In 1798, in desperation over the Sedition Act that criminalized political dissent, Thomas Jefferson, in his Kentucky Resolutions, proposed nullification of the law: the idea that a single state could make a federal law “null, void, of no force or effect” in that state. Turning to the defunct Articles of Confederation, Jefferson resurrected the notion that the nation was a mere compact of independent states.
George Washington saw that anarchy or secession was the likely consequence of Jefferson’s rash theories. He begged Henry to come out of retirement to oppose the dangerous new doctrine.