page_title: Patrick Henry
section_title: Renewed involvement and First Continental Congress (1773–1775)
hierarchical_section_title: Patrick Henry / Revolutionary lawyer and politician (1760–1775) / Renewed involvement and First Continental Congress (1773–1775)
caption_attribution_description: English: "Washington, Henry &amp; Pendleton going to the First Congress," lithograph by Henry Bryan Hall, showing George Washington, Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton traveling from Virginia to the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collection.
context_page_description: Patrick Henry was an American attorney, planter, politician, and orator best known for his declaration to the Second Virginia Convention: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" A Founding Father, he served as the first and sixth post-colonial Governor of Virginia, from 1776 to 1779 and from 1784 to 1786.
  Henry was born in Hanover County, Virginia, and was for the most part educated at home. After an unsuccessful venture running a store, and assisting his father-in-law at Hanover Tavern, Henry became a lawyer through self-study. Beginning his practice in 1760, he soon became prominent through his victory in the Parson's Cause against the Anglican clergy. Henry was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he quickly became notable for his inflammatory rhetoric against the Stamp Act of 1765.
  In 1774 and 1775, Henry served as a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, but did not prove particularly influential.
context_section_description: In 1773, Henry came into conflict with the royal governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore. The governor, appointed in 1771, had sent British soldiers to Pittsylvania County to aid in apprehending a gang of counterfeiters. Once captured, they were immediately taken to Williamsburg for trial before the General Court, ignoring precedent that judicial proceedings should begin in the county where the offense took place, or where the suspect was captured. This was a sensitive matter especially because of the recent Gaspee affair in Rhode Island, in which the British sought to capture and transport overseas for trial those who had burned a British ship. The Burgesses wanted to rebuke Dunmore for his actions, and Henry was part of a committee of eight members, that drafted a resolution thanking the governor for the capture of the gang, but affirming that using the "usual mode" of criminal procedure protected both the guilty and the innocent. They also penned a plan, adopted by the Burgesses, for a committee of correspondence to communicate with leaders in other colonies, to inform and coordinate with each other. The members included Henry.
  Although Henry had by this time come to believe that conflict with Great Britain, and independence, was inevitable, he had no strategy for advancing this. The Burgesses were sitting when in 1774, word came that Parliament had voted to close the port of Boston in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, and several burgesses, including Henry, convened at the Raleigh Tavern to formulate a response. According to George Mason, a former burgess from Fairfax County, who joined the committee in the work, Henry took the lead. Mason and Henry would form a close political relationship that would last until Mason's death in 1792. The resolution that Henry's committee produced set June 1, 1774, the date upon which the Port of Boston was to be closed, as a day of fasting and prayer. It passed the Burgesses, but Dunmore dissolved the body. Undeterred, the former legislators met at the Raleigh Tavern, and reconstituted themselves as a convention, to meet again in August, after there was time for county meetings to show local sentiment. They also called for a boycott of tea and other products.
  The five Virginia Conventions (1774–1776) would guide the Old Dominion to independence as royal authority came to an end. Their work was advanced by many resolutions of county meetings, denying the authority of Parliament over the colonies, and calling for a boycott of imports. The first convention met in Williamsburg in the chamber of the Burgesses beginning on August 1; Dunmore was absent from the capital fighting the Native Americans and could not interfere. Divided between those who wanted separation from Britain and those who still hoped for some accommodation, it met for a week; one major decision was the election of delegates to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Henry was chosen as one of seven delegates, tying for second place with Washington, burgess for Fairfax County, both receiving three votes less than Randolph.
  As Washington's estate, Mount Vernon, lay on the way from Scotchtown to Philadelphia, he invited Henry to stop there and to ride to Philadelphia with him, and Henry did, also accompanied by Pendleton, another Virginia delegate to the Congress and a political rival of Henry's. Delegates and prominent Philadelphians took an intense interest in the Virginians, who had taken the lead in resistance to Britain, but whom few in the other colonies had met. This was Henry's first stay in the North, excepting a brief business trip to New York in 1770 but he found that his actions were well known. The sessions began on September 5, 1774, at Carpenter's Hall. Silas Deane of Connecticut described Henry as "the compleatest speaker I ever heard ... but in a Letter I can give You no Idea of the Music of his Voice, or the highwrought, yet Natural elegance of his Stile, or Manner". The secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, wrote that when Henry rose, he had expected little from a man dressed as plainly as 
caption: 19th century engraving of Washington (center), Henry (right) and Pendleton riding to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress
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