WAS HE ILLITERATE?
Concerning the quality and extent of Patrick Henry's early education,
it is perhaps impossible now to speak with entire confidence. On the
one hand there seems to have been a tendency, in his own time and
since, to overstate his lack of education, and this partly, it may be,
from a certain instinctive fascination which one finds in pointing to
so dramatic a contrast as that between the sway which the great orator
wielded over the minds of other men and the untrained vigor and
illiterate spontaneity of his own mind. Then, too, it must be admitted
that, whatever early education Patrick Henry may have received, he
did, in certain companies and at certain periods of his life, rather
too perfectly conceal it under an uncouth garb and manner, and under a
pronunciation which, to say the least, was archaic and provincial.
Jefferson told Daniel Webster that Patrick Henry's "pronunciation was
vulgar and vicious," although, as Jefferson adds, this "was forgotten
while he was speaking."[5] Governor John Page "used to relate, on the
testimony of his own ears," that Patrick Henry would speak of "the
yearth," and of "men's naiteral parts being improved by larnin';"[6]
while Spencer Roane mentions his pronunciation of China as
"Cheena."[7] All this, however, it should be noted, does not prove
illiteracy. If, indeed, such was his ordinary speech, and not, as some
have suggested, a manner adopted on particular occasions for the
purpose of identifying himself with the mass of his hearers, the fact
is evidence merely that he retained through his mature life, on the
one hand, some relics of an old-fashioned good usage, and, on the
other, some traces of the brogue of the district in which he was born,
just as Edmund Pendleton used to say "scaicely" for scarcely, and as
John Taylor, of Caroline, would say "bare" for bar; just as Thomas
Chalmers always retained the brogue of Fifeshire, and Thomas Carlyle
that of Ecclefechan. Certainly a brogue can never be elegant, but as
it has many times coexisted with very high intellectual cultivation,
its existence in Patrick Henry does not prove him to have been
uncultivated.
Then, too, it must be remembered that he himself had a habit of
depreciating his own acquaintance with books, and his own dependence
on them. He did this, it would seem, partly from a consciousness that
it would only increase his hold on the sympathy and support of the
mass of the people of Virginia if they should regard him as absolutely
one of themselves, and in no sense raised above them by artificial
advantages. Moreover, this habit of self-depreciation would be brought
into play when he was in conversation with such professed devourers of
books as John Adams and Jefferson, compared with whom he might very
properly feel an unfeigned conviction that he was no reader at all,--a
conviction in which they would be quite likely to agree with him, and
which they would be very likely to express. Thus, John Adams mentions
that, in the first intimacy of their friendship begun at the Congress
of 1774, the Virginian orator, at his lodgings, confessed one night
that, for himself, he had "had no public education;" that at fifteen
he had "read Virgil and Livy," but that he had "not looked into a
Latin book since."[8] Upon Jefferson, who of course knew Henry far
longer and far more closely, the impression of his disconnection from
books seems to have been even more decided, especially if we may
accept the testimony of Jefferson's old age, when his memory had taken
to much stumbling, and his imagination even more to extravagance than
in his earlier life. Said Jefferson, in 1824, of his ancient friend:
"He was a man of very little knowledge of any sort. He read nothing,
and had no books."[9]
On the other hand, there are certain facts concerning Henry's early
education and intellectual habits which may be regarded as pretty
well established. Before the age of ten, at a petty neighborhood
school, he had got started upon the three primary steps of knowledge.
Then, from ten to fifteen, whatever may have been his own irregularity
and disinclination, he was member of a home school, under the
immediate training of his father and his uncle, both of them good
Scotch classical scholars, and one of them at least a proficient in
mathematics. No doubt the human mind, especially in its best estate of
juvenile vigor and frivolity, has remarkable aptitude for the
repulsion of unwelcome knowledge; but it can hardly be said that even
Patrick Henry's gift in that direction could have prevented his
becoming, under two such masters, tolerably well grounded in Latin, if
not in Greek, or that the person who at fifteen is able to read Virgil
and Livy, no matter what may be his subsequent neglect of Latin
authors, is not already imbued with the essential and indestructible
rudiments of the best intellectual culture.
It is this early initiation, on the basis of a drill in Latin, into
the art and mystery of expression, which Patrick Henry received from
masters so competent and so deeply interested in him, which helps us
to understand a certain trait of his, which puzzled Jefferson, and
which, without this clue, would certainly be inexplicable. From his
first appearance as a speaker to the end of his days, he showed
himself to be something more than a declaimer,--indeed, an adept in
language. "I have been often astonished," said Jefferson, "at his
command of proper language; how he obtained the knowledge of it I
never could find out, as he read little, and conversed little with
educated men."[10] It is true, probably, that we have no perfect
report of any speech he ever made; but even through the obvious
imperfections of his reporters there always gleams a certain
superiority in diction,--a mastery of the logic and potency of fitting
words; such a mastery as genius alone, without special training,
cannot account for. Furthermore, we have in the letters of his which
survive, and which of course were generally spontaneous and quite
unstudied effusions, absolutely authentic and literal examples of his
ordinary use of words. Some of these letters will be found in the
following pages. Even as manuscripts, I should insist that the letters
of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real
intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an
uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they
are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the
great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of
written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry's letters the
nameless felicity which, even with great natural endowments, is only
communicable by genuine literary culture in some form. Where did
Patrick Henry get such literary culture? The question can be answered
only by pointing to that painful drill in Latin which the book-hating
boy suffered under his uncle and his father, when, to his anguish,
Virgil and Livy detained him anon from the true joys of existence.
Wirt seems to have satisfied himself, on evidence carefully gathered
from persons who were contemporaries of Patrick Henry, that the latter
had received in his youth no mean classical education; but, in the
final revision of his book for publication, Wirt abated his statements
on that subject, in deference to the somewhat vehement assertions of
Jefferson. It may be that, in its present lessened form, Wirt's
account of the matter is the more correct one; but this is the proper
place in which to mention one bit of direct testimony upon the
subject, which, probably, was not known to Wirt. Patrick Henry is said
to have told his eldest grandson, Colonel Patrick Henry Fontaine, that
he was instructed by his uncle "not only in the catechism, but in the
Greek and Latin classics."[11] It may help us to realize something of
the moral stamina entering into the training which the unfledged
orator thus got that, as he related, his uncle taught him these maxims
of conduct: "To be true and just in all my dealings. To bear no malice
nor hatred in my heart. To keep my hands from picking and stealing.
Not to covet other men's goods; but to learn and labor truly to get my
own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it
shall please God to call me."[12]
Under such a teacher Patrick Henry was so thoroughly grounded, at
least in Latin and Greek grammar, that when, long afterward, his
eldest grandson was a student in Hampden-Sidney College, the latter
found "his grandfather's examinations of his progress in Greek and
Latin" so rigorous that he dreaded them "much more than he did his
recitations to his professors."[13] Colonel Fontaine also states that
he was present when a certain French visitor, who did not speak
English, was introduced to Governor Henry, who did not speak French.
During the war of the Revolution and just afterwards a similar
embarrassment was not infrequent here in the case of our public men,
among whom the study of French had been very uncommon; and for many of
them the old colonial habit of fitting boys for college by training
them to the colloquial use of Latin proved to be a great convenience.
Colonel Fontaine's anecdote implies, what is altogether probable, that
Patrick Henry's early drill in Latin had included the ordinary
colloquial use of it; for he says that in the case of the visitor in
question his grandfather was able, by means of his early stock of
Latin words, to carry on the conversation in that language.[14]
This anecdote, implying Patrick Henry's ability to express himself
in Latin, I give for what it may be worth. Some will think it
incredible, and that impression will be further increased by the
fact that Colonel Fontaine names Albert Gallatin as the visitor
with whom, on account of his ignorance of English, the conversation
was thus carried on in Latin. This, of course, must be a mistake;
for, at the time of his first visit to Virginia, Gallatin could
speak English very well, so well, in fact, that he went to Virginia
expressly as English interpreter to a French gentleman who could not
speak our language.[15] However, as, during all that period,
Governor Henry had many foreign visitors, Colonel Fontaine, in his
subsequent account of that particular visitor, might easily have
misplaced the name without thereby discrediting the substance of his
narrative. Indeed, the substance of his narrative, namely, that he,
Colonel Fontaine, did actually witness, in the case of some foreign
visitor, such an exhibition of his grandfather's good early training
in Latin, cannot be rejected without an impeachment of the veracity
of the narrator, or at least of that of his son, who has recorded
the alleged incident. Of course, if that narrative be accepted as
substantially true, it will be necessary to conclude that the
Jeffersonian tradition of Patrick Henry's illiteracy is, at any
rate, far too highly tinted.
Thus far we have been dealing with the question of Patrick Henry's
education down to the time of his leaving school, at the age of
fifteen. It was not until nine years afterward that he began the study
of the law. What is the intellectual record of these nine years? It is
obvious that they were years unfavorable to systematic training of
any sort, or to any regulated acquisition of knowledge. During all
that time in his life, as we now look back upon it, he has for us the
aspect of some lawless, unkempt genius, in untoward circumstances,
groping in the dark, not without wild joy, towards his inconceivable,
true vocation; set to tasks for which he was grotesquely unfit;
blundering on from misfortune to misfortune, with an overflow of
unemployed energy and vivacity that swept him often into rough fun,
into great gusts of innocent riot and horseplay; withal borne along,
for many days together, by the mysterious undercurrents of his nature,
into that realm of reverie where the soul feeds on immortal fruit and
communes with unseen associates, the body meanwhile being left to the
semblance of idleness; of all which the man himself might have given
this valid justification:--
"I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."
Nevertheless, these nine years of groping, blundering, and seeming
idleness were not without their influence on his intellectual
improvement even through direct contact with books. While still a boy
in his teens, and put prematurely to uncongenial attempts at
shopkeeping and farmkeeping, he at any rate made the great discovery
that in books and in the gathering of knowledge from books could be
found solace and entertainment; in short, he then acquired a taste for
reading. No one pretends that Patrick Henry ever became a bookish
person. From the first and always the habit of his mind was that of
direct action upon every subject that he had to deal with, through his
own reflection, and along the broad primary lines of common sense.
There is never in his thought anything subtle or recondite,--no mental
movement through the media of books; but there is good evidence for
saying that this bewildered and undeveloped youth, drifting about in
chaos, did in those days actually get a taste for reading, and that he
never lost it. The books which he first read are vaguely described as
"a few light and elegant authors,"[16] probably in English essays and
fiction. As the years passed and the boy's mind matured, he rose to
more serious books. He became fond of geography and of history, and he
pushed his readings, especially, into the history of Greece and of
Rome. He was particularly fascinated by Livy, which he read in the
English translation; and then it was, as he himself related it to
Judge Hugh Nelson, that he made the rule to read Livy through "once at
least in every year during the early part of his life."[17] He read
also, it is apparent, the history of England and of the English
colonies in America, and especially of his own colony; for the latter
finding, no doubt, in Beverley and in the grave and noble pages of
Stith, and especially in the colonial charters given by Stith, much
material for those incisive opinions which he so early formed as to
the rights of the colonies, and as to the barriers to be thrown up
against the encroaching authority of the mother country.
There is much contemporaneous evidence to show that Patrick Henry was
throughout life a deeply religious person. It certainly speaks well
for his intellectual fibre, as well as for his spiritual tendencies,
that his favorite book, during the larger part of his life, was
"Butler's Analogy," which was first published in the very year in
which he was born. It is possible that even during these years of his
early manhood he had begun his enduring intimacy with that robust
book. Moreover, we can hardly err in saying that he had then also
become a steady reader of the English Bible, the diction of which is
stamped upon his style as unmistakably as it is upon that of the elder
Pitt.
Such, I think it may fairly be said, was Patrick Henry when, at the
age of twenty-four, having failed in every other pursuit, he turned
for bread to the profession of the law. There is no evidence that
either he or any other mortal man was aware of the extraordinary gifts
that lay within him for success in that career. Not a scholar surely,
not even a considerable miscellaneous reader, he yet had the basis of
a good education; he had the habit of reading over and over again a
few of the best books; he had a good memory; he had an intellect
strong to grasp the great commanding features of any subject; he had a
fondness for the study of human nature, and singular proficiency in
that branch of science; he had quick and warm sympathies, particularly
with persons in trouble,--an invincible propensity to take sides with
the under-dog in any fight. Through a long experience in offhand talk
with the men whom he had thus far chiefly known in his little
provincial world,--with an occasional clergyman, pedagogue, or
legislator, small planters and small traders, sportsmen, loafers,
slaves and the drivers of slaves, and, more than all, those bucolic
Solons of old Virginia, the good-humored, illiterate, thriftless
Caucasian consumers of tobacco and whiskey, who, cordially consenting
that all the hard work of the world should be done by the children of
Ham, were thus left free to commune together in endless debate on the
tavern porch or on the shady side of the country store,--young Patrick
had learned somewhat of the lawyer's art of putting things; he could
make men laugh, could make them serious, could set fire to their
enthusiasms. What more he might do with such gifts nobody seems to
have guessed; very likely few gave it any thought at all. In that
rugged but munificent profession at whose outward gates he then
proceeded to knock, it was altogether improbable that he would burden
himself with much more of its erudition than was really necessary for
a successful general practice in Virginia in his time, or that he
would permanently content himself with less.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Curtis, _Life of Webster_, i. 585.
[6] Randall, _Life of Jefferson_, i. 20.
[7] MS.
[8] _Works of John Adams_, ii. 396.
[9] Curtis, _Life of Webster_, i. 585.
[10] Curtis, _Life of Webster_, i. 585.
[11] MS.
[12] MS.
[13] MS.
[14] MS.
[15] Henry Adams, _Life of Gallatin_, 59, 60.
[16] Wirt, 9.
[17] Wirt, 13. This is the passage on which Jefferson, in his extreme
old age, made the characteristically inaccurate comment: "His
biographer says, 'He read Plutarch every year.' I doubt if he ever
read a volume of it in his life." Curtis, _Life of Webster_, i. 585.