Give me liberty or give me death!

Two hundred and forty years ago, today on March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry addressed the Virginia House of Burgesses and uttered his now famous speech calling upon Virginians to make preparations for war. Henry was a patriot for liberty, who had his fill of British tyranny and oppression of English rights. He had become incensed with the events that led up to his patriotic words passionately spoken that day in Richmond, Virginia. The colonists had suffered by the Stamp Act in 1765; again in 1767, their glass, paint, lead, paper and tea goods were taxed heavily by the Townshend Acts. They had seen five colonial men killed by British troops in front of the State House in Boston three years later in 1770. In 1773, Sons of Liberty, masquerading as Mohawk Indians, boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, British ships belonging to the East India Company, and dumped their tea into the Boston Harbor in protest. The time had come to organize, since there was no other question other than “freedom or slavery.”[1]   

Patrick Henry could see no other course to take than to either fight for liberty or give into to servitude. He was a witness of the tyrannical events of recent colonial history and knew “of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”[2] History had demonstrated that kings and rulers, determined to maintain control and their power over others, have always resorted to “the implements of war;” which Henry had pointed out to the members attending the Second Virginia Convention that day, by asking them why the King had needed to “call for all this accumulation of navies and armies” in the colonies, if it was not only meant as a means to enslave them.[3] He answered his own question to them, “They are meant for us,”[4]

Henry attempted to show them the folly of their continued attempts at debate and political rhetoric with Parliament and the King of England. In Henry’s opinion, every rational and logical attempt to argue the rights of Englishmen had been made: “Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing.”[5] The colonists had utilized every civil attempt to “avert the storm” that they were unavoidably facing.[6] According to Henry, they had “petitioned;” they had “remonstrated;” they had “supplicated;” they had “prostrated” themselves “before the throne, and [had] implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament.”[7]

The time had come for the colonials to fight for their inalienable rights and freedoms. The time was long gone for British gentlemen to cry, “Peace, Peace…there is no peace.”[8] Henry stood before the delegates that day and guaranteed to them that the war had already begun.[9] It was time to take up arms and meet the enemy or be killed where they stood, helpless, defenseless. But not Patrick Henry; no, not him, he would not stand idly by while the enemy was at the gates. “Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”[10]

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[1] Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, March 23, 1775, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.