Patrick Henry’s legacy
Henry went on to have a distinguished career in Virginia state politics, including serving five one-year terms as governor. His most important legacy, however, is clearly the words he spoke in that Richmond church in 1775. After the speech was published in William Wirt’s 1817 biography of Henry, it entered Americans’ public consciousness. The phrase was particularly popular in antislavery circles and among enslaved people themselves. Henry had, after all, invoked slavery as the alternative to fighting for liberty, despite the fact that he himself was an enslaver.
As Matthew J. Clavin shows in his book Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War, newspapers in the mid-19th century chronicled the stories of enslaved people who died by suicide after repeating Henry’s cry, as well as those fleeing from slavery who credited him as an inspiration. For instance, the Virginian William P. Newman, who escaped to Ohio, wrote, “I am proud to say that Patrick Henry’s motto is mine.”
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison took up Henry’s phrase in a speech at a gathering to commemorate John Brown, who led the violent antislavery raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. “Who instigated John Brown?” Garrison asked. “Let us see. It must have been Patrick Henry, who said—and he was a Virginian—‘Give me liberty or give me death!’” As Frederick Douglass noted in a June 1854 newspaper editorial, however, many Americans praised Henry’s phrase and the violent rebellion against British oppression while simultaneously decrying violent resistance to slavery.
Black activists continued to claim Henry’s mantle in the 20th century. When Marcus Garvey appealed to Congress in 1919 to argue against the constitution of the League of Nations, which gave European powers the right to control African countries, he quoted the famous phrase and asked, “Will you deny the native Africans of the spirit of a Patrick Henry?” More ominously, Black nationalist leader Malcolm X said in 1964 that the struggle for civil rights had reached a dangerous inflection point: “It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets. It’ll be liberty, or it will be death.” Malcolm X was assassinated the following year.
Henry’s speech has also been cited regularly in protests. In 2020, a New York Times photographer captured a snapshot of a woman upset about Covid-19 public health measures; she stood outside of a Baskin-Robbins with a poster emblazoned “Give me liberty or give me death.” In 2022, Chinese protesters objecting to their country’s zero-Covid policy also used the phrase. This wasn’t the first time Henry’s words appeared in China: Pro-democracy demonstrators held posters with the phrase at Tiananmen Square in 1989.