It was an ordinary day. Almost 250 years ago, four weeks before the battles of Lexington and Concord, Patrick Henry rose in St. John's Church in Richmond, VA., to urge Americans to arm for a war that he saw as inevitable. He famously concluded his call to arms: "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
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Partiots embraced the refrain, and militia members sewed it into their shirts. Since then, his words have echoed through the centuries. In 1845, Frederick Douglas referenced Henry when he wrote of the enslaved battling for freedom. In 1989, when thousands gathered for liberty in Tiananmen Square, his words were invoked. But they have also been embraced by some as a radical call for opposition to almost any government action. In 2020, signs attacking health regulations demanded, rather confusedly, "Give me liberty or give me COVID-19!" Protesters on Jan. 6, 2021, quote Henry. His famous phrase has appeared on everything from AR-15 dust coves to a Tea Party manifesto. Rather than a call for democratic freedom, Henry's mantra has become a radical creed. But wrapping anti-government campaigns in Henry's words demonstrates a fundamental historical misunderstanding. Henry was never simply opposed to taxes or regulation. The problem was, as we learn in school, taxation without representation. Henry consistently recognized the right of government, empowered by the community, to make binding laws--even when he disagreed with the result. In 1788, Henry led efforts to oppose ratification of the U.S. Constitution, because he believed that it would create a government too powerful and distant from the people. When it was ratified, some anti-federalists sought to undermine its implementation. When they called upon Henry to lead their effort, he emphatically rejected such opposition, insisting that change must be sought "in a constitutional way." Henry's commitment to the community's right to govern was never clearer than in his final political campaign. In 1798, in desperation over the Sedition Act that criminalized political dissent, Thomas Jefferson proposed that states could nullify federal laws. George Washington saw that anarchy or secession were the likely consequences of Jefferson's theories. He begged Henry to come out of retirement to oppose the dangerous doctrine. An ailing Henry agreed. In his last pubic speech, the great anti-federalist warned that if we cannot live within the Constitution that "we the people" adopted, we "may bid adieu forever to representative government." Even though his warnings had been ignored, even though he disagreed with the Sedition Act, Henry insisted that the people could not simply refuse to follow the law. The community had the right to voice dissent via elected representatives. That is the very nature of a democracy: joining with our co-citizens to govern, even when we disagree with their choice. A modern fixation on "give me liberty" as a license for unbounded personal freedom is a historic lie, and symptomatic of a broader problem. The freedom that patriots fought for was not a ticket to do whatever one wanted, but the right to participate in a community that governed itself, a government -- to quote the Declaration of Independence -- "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed." With such a government, Henry understood that a "loyal opposition" must seek reform "in a constitutional way": at the ballot box. So be it! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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