Patrick Henry's "Shameful" Secret

This Founding Father cared for his mentally ill wife at home.

"Is life so dear…?"

            Patrick Henry and Sarah Shelton, "a woman of some fortune," had been childhood friends. They married when he was 18. She was 16. Years later it would be her good fortune that her husband loved her so much that when she became mentally ill he cared for her as best he could at home.

            He wanted to be a plantation owner, but he failed at that. His land, given to him by Sarah's parents, was poor, and his manor burned to the ground. Then he tried his hand at being a storekeeper. After two years, he failed at that, too. Some said he was reduced to working as a barkeeper in his father-in-law's inn.

            Patrick and Sarah had six children. The first two, Martha and John, respectively, were born in 1755 and 1757.

            He read for the law and passed his law exams—barely—doing so "after much entreaty and many promises of future study," said Thomas Jefferson.

            In one of his first cases in 1763, known today as "the Parson's Cause," he found his calling. He was a natural-born rabble-rouser.

            King George III had vetoed a popular law passed by Virginia's House of Burgesses (legislature). It had capped how much clergymen would be paid. When the King vetoed it, a parson came forward suing for back wages. This would have cost the colony's taxpayers more in taxes.

            In court, Henry declared that the King had "degenerated into a Tyrant" and thus had "foreit[ed] all right to his subjects' obedience. People in the courtroom cried "Treason!" Henry lost the case but won—The jury awarded the parson only a penny in damages.

            And it was also in 1763 that Sarah and Patrick had their third child, William.

            Two years later Parliament passed the despised Stamp Act. It taxed a variety of paper goods in the colonies to pay for the upkeep of British troops stationed in North America. Not only did the colonists see no need for such an army, they regarded this as taxation without representation.

            Speaking again in the House of Burgesses, Henry warned King George that he risked being overthrown by heroes of the people. "Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus! Charles the first, his Cromwell," Henry cried. "And George the Third…

            Before he could complete his sentence, delegates shouted "Treason!" When the uproar died, Henry finished his thought, calmly saying, "….and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it."

            In Boston, when John Adams heard an account of Henry's speech, he said, "the eminent patriot Patrick Henry, Esq. who composed" those words revealed "the universal opinion of the continent." Founding Father George Mason said, "His eloquence is the smaller part of his merit. He is in my opinion the first man upon this continent, as well in abilities as public virtues."

            The Henry family added two new members in the late 1760s—Annie in 1767 and Elizabeth in 1769, giving them five offspring.

            A sixth child—Edward—arrived in 1771, and it was then that darkness fell in the Henry home. Sarah developed postpartum depression. She stopped speaking. She stopped feeding herself.

            Worse, she believed she was being persecuted. She hallucinated and threatened suicide and even expressed a desire to kill her baby. Patrick Henry's "beloved companion had lost her reason" his doctor later told Henry's son. "[She] could only be restrained from self-destruction by a strait-dress" (an early type of straitjacket).

            In 1773, the first hospital for "lunatics, idiots, and those of disordered minds" opened in Williamsburg. Henry toured it, but when he saw its barred windows and the iron rings where inmates would be chained in their cells, he realized he could never send his wife to such a place.

            Upon returning to his estate, he converted part of its basement into an apartment for Sarah. It had a sunny view and a fireplace. A slave tended to her needs, and Henry visited her several times a day to be with her and help feed her.

            In September 1774, he traveled to Philadelphia as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. British troops now occupied Boston in the aftermath of the Tea Party in 1773. The mood in the colonies had changed. More and more colonists now understood how right Henry had been when he said the King was a tyrant.

            "We are in a State of Nature," Henry told the Congress. "Government is dissolved. The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American." At that time, this was a most radical thought—to be an American.

            Upon returning home, he found that Sarah's condition remained the same. In fact, she deteriorated and died in early 1775. Some think she committed suicide. The location of her grave is unknown.

            In those days to have a mentally ill relative cast shame on an entire family. By keeping her at home and caring for her as best he could, Henry showed extraordinary courage.

            In March 1775, weeks after her death, he traveled to Richmond to take part at a convention of Virginia delegates at St. John's Church. While still grieving for Sarah, Henry told his fellow Virginians "Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The War in inevitable—and let it come!...Why stand we here idle!"

            Then Henry slumped as though he were a slave weighed down by shackles or perhaps in part by the woes and miseries of his life.

            He lifted his hands heavenward and raised his eyes and asked, "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me—Give me liberty, or give me death!"

            In a final touch, Henry thrust an imaginary dagger into his chest, just as the Roman patriot Cato had done by committing suicide rather than honor Caesar.

            Instead of cries of "Treason!" now there was only silence. His listeners were awestruck. One delegate was so overwhelmed that then and there he declared, "Let me be buried at this spot!" Word of Henry's courage spread, heartening the colonists' resolve.

            In later years, Washington asked him to serve on the Supreme Court. Henry, who once could barely pass his law exams, declined. And when he died, a local newspaper eulogized him, writing, "As long as our rivers flow, or mountains stand…Virginia..will say to rising generations, imitate your HENRY!"

MORAL: Stand up for what you believe in. Grief be damned.