05/29/2026
Happy Birthday Patrick Henry! Today in 1736, Henry was born at Studley Plantation in Hanover County. Twenty-nine years later, he carried out one of the most important acts of his career. in 1765, Patrick Henry introduced his Resolves against the Stamp Act to the Virginia House of Burgesses. This act established Henry as a voice for American liberties in the years leading up to the War for Independence.
The Stamp Act was a tax on paper products that caused considerable consternation among the people of the American colonies, who believed it infringed on their rights. Although most of the Burgesses opposed the Stamp Act, many also opposed Henry’s Resolves, considering them overly inflammatory. According to Thomas Jefferson, who was a student watching the legislative battle from the doorway, Henry unleashed “torrents of sublime eloquence” in support of the resolutions.
Henry’s Resolves declared that the people of Virginia, according to the charter the colony had been founded under, had “all the Liberties, Privileges, Franchises, and Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the People of Great Britain.” Among the rights enjoyed by British citizens was the right to only be taxed by persons they elected to represent them; there was no Virginian representation in Parliament. The final Resolution, which said that only the General Assembly had the authority to levy taxes on the people of Virginia, was the most contentious.
Henry’s speech in support of the Stamp Act Resolves would be one of his most famous, but also one of his most controversial– he was accused of treason for comparing George III to Julius Caesar and Charles I, two rulers who were killed for their tyranny. Although its veracity has been challenged, Henry’s rejoinder to these accusations of treason has passed into legend: “If this be treason, make the most of it!”
When Patrick Henry passed away in 1799, he left along with his will a letter containing the text of the Virginia Resolves and a message to posterity. The Virginia Resolves, he wrote, spread through America with “astonishing quickness.” “The great point of resistance to British taxation was universally established in the colonies. This brought on the war which finally separated the two countries and gave independence to ours.”
The Stamp Act crisis was the beginning, not the end, of the tumult between the Colonies and Great Britain. Henry’s role as a voice for American liberties would mark him as a patriot in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, and while his “Liberty or Death” speech may be better remembered, it is likely that Henry himself considered his Stamp Act Resolves to be his most important legacy.
While another notable founding father–John Marshall–was only ten years old at the time of this event, he would come to learn of Henry’s influence at a young age. Marshall’s father Thomas represented Fauquier in the House of Burgesses during Henry’s years as a delegate, and likely witnessed Henry’s Resolves. Years later, in Marshall’s biography, Life of George Washington, Marshall wrote how the Stamp Act “excited serious concern throughout the colonies” and “was sincerely believed to wound vitally the constitution of the country, and to destroy the sacred principles of liberty”, an opinion that he likely watched his father live through in the 1760s.
Contributed by Scotchtown and John Marshall House Staff
Image: Peter F Rothermel's "Patrick Henry Before the Virginia House of Burgesses" credited to the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation
