Harlow Giles Unger

Lion of Liberty Harlow Giles Unger

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,†Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution†and Jefferson, “the Pen,†Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet†of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War. Henry was one of the towering figures of the nations formative years and perhaps the greatest orator in American history. To this day, many Americans misunderstand what Patrick Henrys cry for “liberty-or-death†meant to him and to his tens of thousands of devoted followers in Virginia. A prototype of the 18th and 19th century American frontiersman, Henry claimed individual liberties as a “natural right†to live free of “the tyranny of rulersâ€â€”American, as well as British. Henry believed that individual rights were more secure in small republics than in large republics, which many of the other Founding Fathers hoped to create after the Revolution. Henry was one of the most important and colorful of our Founding Fathers—a driving force behind three of the most important events in American history: the War of Independence, the enactment of the Bill of Rights, and, tragically, as Americas first important proponent of states rights, the Civil War.