What Patrick Henry did above all was talk—and get talked about. He astonished his listeners as the most compelling public speaker they had ever encountered. He was, John Adams proclaimed, the Demosthenes of his age. Thomas Jefferson hailed him as “the greatest orator that ever lived.” In the opinion of Edmund Randolph, the country’s first attorney general, Henry’s eloquence “unlocked the secret springs of the human heart, robbed danger of all its terror, and broke the keystone in the arch of royal power.” Many of his contemporaries agreed that he made the Revolution possible with words that rendered it both desirable and inevitable.
He certainly had no rhetorical rival among the other Founders. George Washington was frightened of public speaking, and trembled visibly during his first inaugural address. When a speech was required of him, Jefferson customarily spoke so softly that he could scarcely be heard. Benjamin Franklin offered copious advice on rhetoric to others, but himself preferred print to oratory. His most famous “speech”—urging unity at the Constitutional Convention in 1787—was a written text that he gave to another delegate to read aloud. James Madison, in spite of his brilliant legal mind, was a nervous speaker, with a shrill and off-putting voice.
Henry reminds us of how our inability to hear the past before the advent of audio recording has left us with an incomplete and even distorted understanding of history. He lived in an era when the spoken word had not yet been overtaken by the power and reach of print. This was a time—and Henry was a figure—we can only poorly understand if we do not recognize the centrality of oratory.
An assiduous scholar has located nearly 100 responses by individuals who heard Henry’s speeches, so we at least have secondhand access to the impact of his words. We can’t retrieve his voice, but we can find accounts of how it made audiences feel. As one contemporary explained, there was “an irresistible force to his words which no description could make intelligible to one who had never seen him, nor heard him speak.” On a trip through Virginia as a young man, the future president Andrew Jackson sought out the orator he had heard so much about. “No description I had ever heard,” he reflected, “no conception I had ever formed, had given me any just idea of the man’s powers of eloquence.” Patrick Henry had become a tourist attraction.