Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry is by Moses Coit Tyler, whose preface says the writer has tried to embody the chief results derived from a study of all the materials known to the writer, in print and in manuscript, relating to Patrick Henry. The text deals with the question of Patrick Henry's education down to the time of his leaving school, at the age of fifteen, and says it was not until nine years afterward that he began the study of the law. The text says that if that narrative be accepted as substantially true, it will be necessary to conclude that the Jeffersonian tradition of Patrick Henry’s illiteracy is, at any rate, far too highly tinted.

The text includes a bleak account of the quartermaster's and commissary's departments filled with idleness, ignorance, and peculation, and of our hospitals crowded with six thousand sick, but half provided with necessaries or accommodations. The same account asks whether our case is desperate and answers By no means, saying we have wisdom, virtue and strength enough to save us.