Here’s what we know: On March 23, 1775 — probably in the afternoon — a self-taught lawyer named Patrick Henry arose in a little white church in Richmond and unleashed a scorching, wig-blasting, Flying V electric-guitar solo of a speech. It literally inspired the American Revolution.
Here’s what we don’t know: Exactly what he said.
The phrase “Give me liberty or give me death” still reverberates 250 years later, quoted in countless classrooms, the online Encyclopaedia Britannica and on the Virginia 250 website. Although Henry might have said it that day, some historians are skeptical. As for the rest of the speech — “The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms!” — there are at least two other men who deserve credit, both relatively unknown today.
William Wirt, a noted orator and U.S. attorney general during the 19th century, published the first account of the speech more than 40 years after it was delivered. And St. George Tucker, a respected judge and law professor, saw the speech as a young man and supplied Wirt with his best recollection when he was in his 50s.
No written copy of Henry’s remarks was ever known to exist. And no one took notes as he spoke.
“Henry didn’t write speeches down,” Stephen Wilson, executive director of the St. John’s Church Foundation in Richmond, said on a recent weekday as he stood near the pew where Henry is thought to have delivered his thunderclap. “We know what happened here, essentially. We may not know word for word what Henry said, but we do know what the message was.”
The message, basically, was that it was time to go to war. Older political leaders hesitated, but young(ish) bucks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were itching to haul out the muskets against increasing indignities from England. In Wirt’s telling, Henry addressed the Second Virginia Convention with a slowly building mushroom cloud of rhetoric that depicted an “awful moment” for the country, a choice between the bonds of slavery to a distant king and the freedom that could now only come from violence — sadly ironic for a group of enslavers.
Whatever Patrick Henry actually said that day fired up the oldsters enough for the convention to pass his resolutions arming the militia. Within a month, the first blood was shed up in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord, and it didn’t stop until after Yorktown.