[69] For this splendid anecdote we are indebted to Judge John Tyler,
who, then a youth of eighteen, listened to the speech as he stood in
the lobby by the side of Jefferson. Edmund Randolph, in his _History
of Virginia_, still in manuscript, has a somewhat different version of
the language of the orator, as follows: "'Caesar had his Brutus,
Charles the First, his Cromwell, and George the Third'--'Treason,
Sir,' exclaimed the Speaker; to which Mr. Henry instantly replied,
'and George the Third, may he never have either.'" The version
furnished by John Tyler is, of course, the more effective and
characteristic; and as Tyler actually heard the speech, and as,
moreover, his account is confirmed by Jefferson who also heard it, his
account can hardly be set aside by that of Randolph who did not hear
it, and was indeed but a boy of twelve at the time it was made. L. G.
Tyler, _Letters and Times of the Tylers_, i. 56; Wirt, 65.
[70] Mem. by Jefferson, _Hist. Mag._ for 1867, 91.
[71] Campbell, _Hist. Va._ 542.
[72] The subject of the Virginia resolutions presents several
difficulties which I have not thought it best to discuss in the text,
where I have given merely the results of my own rather careful and
repeated study of the question. In brief, my conclusion is this: That
the series as given above, consisting of a preamble and seven
resolutions, is the series as originally prepared by Patrick Henry,
and introduced by him on Wednesday, May 29, in the committee of the
whole, and probably passed by the committee on that day; that at once,
without waiting for the action of the House upon the subject, copies
of the series got abroad, and were soon published in the newspapers of
the several colonies, as though actually adopted by the House; that on
Thursday, May 30, the series was cut down in the House by rejection of
the preamble and the resolutions 6 and 7, and by the adoption of only
the first five as given above; that on the day after that, when
Patrick Henry had gone home, the House still further cut down the
series by expunging the resolution which is above numbered as 5: and
that, many years afterwards, when Patrick Henry came to prepare a copy
for transmission to posterity, he gave the resolutions just as they
stood when adopted by the House on May 30, and not as they stood when
originally introduced by him in committee of the whole on the day
before, nor as they stood when mutilated by the cowardly act of the
House on the day after. It will be noticed, therefore, that the
so-called resolutions of Virginia, which were actually published and
known to the colonies in 1765, and which did so much to fire their
hearts, were not the resolutions as adopted by the House, but were the
resolutions as first introduced, and probably passed, in committee of
the whole; and that even this copy of them was inaccurately given,
since it lacked the resolution numbered above as 3, probably owing to
an error in the first hurried transcription of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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