Speech to the Second Virginia Convention

Patrick Henry, who delivered this speech to an assembly of delegates in Virginia, is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and a leading radical “patriot” of the American Revolution. Although he was politically and socially active for decades, his most famous and celebrated moment is an exclamation from this speech: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” (Paragraph 5).

Henry was born in Virginia in 1736. He became a self-educated and successful attorney. Fellow Virginian men elected him to serve in the House of Burgesses in the Virginia Colony legislature, where he used his oration skills to spread awareness of the illegality and unjustness of British taxation policy in the colonies in the mid-1760s.

Henry was an active delegate and politician before, during, and after the American Revolution. He attended the First and Second Continental Congresses, meetings where a self-proclaimed colonial government met to strategize a response to British taxation and coercion and eventually sign the Declaration of Independence. He was a relatively early proponent of independence. As a delegate to the Second Virginia Convention, he implored his fellow delegates to support the assembly of a militia for colonial defense against impending British attack, and, once the colonies declared independence, Henry contributed to the drafting of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights and Constitution, foundational documents at the state level. He was the first governor of Virginia in its postcolonial age, elected in 1776, and was elected its sixth governor in 1784.

Most of Henry’s career was focused on state delegations and offices rather than national ones. Henry opposed a strong centralized government and elected to not take part in the Constitutional Convention that drafted the US Constitution. He also opposed its ratification, as did many others before the addition of a Bill of Rights that clearly outlined individual rights in the context of the new nation.