Episode Details

He was a 29-year-old backcountry lawyer in shabby clothes, nine days into his first term, in a chamber full of the most powerful men in Virginia. By the time he sat down, he had compared King George the Third to a murdered tyrant and dared the House to call it treason.

This is the story of Patrick Henry and the Virginia Resolves of 1765, the moment the colonial argument stopped being a polite petition and became open defiance. It is also a story about how history actually travels: how Henry’s most radical words were struck from the record by his own colleagues, how the one eyewitness account has him apologizing rather than defying, and how the colonial newspapers printed resolutions Virginia never passed, until a continent came to believe in a defiance that had half existed only in print.

The great men wanted to ask. Henry refused. And once the word treason had been spoken out loud in a House of His Majesty’s government, it could not be taken back.