Speech to the Second Virginia Convention

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1775

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British (or “American”) Colonies

Henry’s speech is an essential surviving document from the revolutionary period of American history during which thirteen colonies transformed from British landholdings to American states. The colonies-turned-states were Connecticut New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The British had many colonies—about 30—in different parts of the world by the era of the American Revolution. When Henry mentions his country and uses the “we” pronoun, he is referencing men within his home colony, Virginia, and their counterparts in the other 12 colonies on the East Coast of North America.

Martial Array

This is a term that Henry uses in Paragraph 3 of the speech and a core concept in his argument. Henry is specifically referring to British troops stationed within Virginia (and other colonies) and British naval ships visible in the water just offshore. Henry argues that this display of armed forced indicates that a war has already begun, despite the fact that those forces were not actively and violently attacking colonists. He asks his audience to consider why else Britain would send these military parties if not to forcibly subjugate the colonists. Henry insists that the war has already started because of British intimidation and political attacks; he argues that the colonists respond with common sense and practicality instead of bold and potentially reckless action.

Slavery

Henry invokes the image of slavery at several moments in the speech. Slavery at the time was both a literal system that functioned in the colonies and wider world and a more abstract concept that orators and authors invoked as a threat to liberty.

The enslavement of and forced labor from mostly African captives were at the heart of the 18th-century Atlantic world’s society and economy. A trade in enslaved people joined Great Britain and other European powers, Africa, and the Americas via the “Middle Passage,” a continual cycle of “slave ships” traversing the Atlantic to forcibly relocate enslaved people from their homes to colonies built for extracting natural resources and growing crops. Though altered, the general practices of bondage and forced labor remained legal in parts of the United States until the Civil War, long after Patrick Henry and his contemporaries spoke of freedom and slavery during the revolution.