Discover Patrick Henry’s Legacy, Beyond His Revolutionary ‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’ Speech

Delivered 250 years ago, the famous oration marked the height of Henry’s influence. But the politician also served in key roles in Virginia’s state government after the American Revolution

Cassandra Good - Author, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America

March 21, 2025

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In a simple white church in Richmond, Virginia, tourists regularly fill the pews to hear a re-enactment of a speech first given within the building’s walls 250 years ago, on March 23, 1775. Here, with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the audience, Patrick Henry delivered an address to his fellow Virginia colonists, closing with the words that would make him famous: “Give me liberty or give me death!” That line has echoed down through the centuries, a dramatic plea that Americans have used time and again to capture their commitment to freedom.

But few Americans know much about Henry himself. Though Jefferson credited him as “the man who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution,” Henry isn’t one of the most prominent founding fathers. In part, that’s because his 1775 speech marked the height of his influence in the American Revolution; he played a limited role in the actual fighting of the war and otherwise served largely in state rather than federal offices. He emerged again briefly as a key figure in the debate over the Constitution in the late 1780s, when he advocated for a Bill of Rights. Yet by the time Henry died in 1799, he had so angered his partisan opponents that they resoundingly blocked a resolution paying tribute to him in the Virginia legislature.

One of the challenges in getting to know Henry is that he left behind a limited paper trail. The bulk of Henry’s known writings were published by his grandson in an 1891 volume, but historian Mark Couvillon says that previously unknown correspondence continues to turn up for sale. And even though Henry was famed as an orator, no written accounts of his speeches survive from his lifetime; scholars have to rely on recollections recorded years later by those in the audience.

Who was Patrick Henry?

Henry was born in 1736 in Hanover County, Virginia, and underwent little formal schooling. At age 18, struggling to make ends meet as a merchant, he married 16-year-old Sarah Shelton. He then pivoted to law, studying only briefly before barely passing the bar exam in 1760. However, he quickly found success, particularly for his courtroom advocacy. It was not his knowledge of law but rather his talent for public speaking that swayed judges and juries. His reputation as a lawyer is likely why leaders in his county selected him for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, wrote historian Richard R. Beeman in his 1974 biography of Henry.

Soon after taking his seat, Henry, by his own account “alone, unadvised and unassisted,” introduced resolutions opposing Great Britain’s recent Stamp Act, which taxed paper goods like newspapers, playing cards and legal documents. Henry’s five resolutions rejected the crown’s right to unilaterally tax the American Colonies; his speech defending the resolves was so fiery that some in the audience accused him of treason. But most of the delegates were persuaded and supported his resolutions. The resolves also inspired other Colonies to take similar action.

Henry was not very active in the House of Burgesses over the following decade, but he took on a greater role in the push for revolution beginning in 1773. He helped coordinate boycotts of British goods and was selected to represent Virginia at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774.

The next spring, Henry arrived at the Second Virginia Convention in mourning for his recently deceased wife but just as fiercely determined to fight for the Colonies. To evade the royal governor in the Colonial capital of Williamsburg, the group met at the largest public building in the then-tiny town of Richmond: a 34-year-old Episcopal church now known as St. John’s. The 120-odd delegates filled the pews as they deliberated over whether to raise troops against the British.

Henry proposed resolutions on the need for defense, in part by establishing a militia in Virginia. His final resolution was very nearly a declaration of war, suggesting that a committee be convened to “prepare a plan for embodying, arming and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient for that purpose.” It was in support of these resolutions that Henry rose to speak on March 23, 1775.

He began, according to one observer, “somewhat calmly”; his practice was to start his orations softly and apologetically. He would then work up to a passionate, booming crescendo, his voice so loud it “seemed to shake and rock” the walls of the church, the observer added. Henry described the Colonies’ grievances and colonists’ many attempts at making peace, then concluded, “Gentlemen may cry, ‘Peace, Peace’—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.”

A born orator, Henry used his entire body as part of the performance. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” he asked while bending forward and crossing his wrists as if his hands were bound by manacles. Raising his invisibly chained hands up to the sky, he cried, “Forbid it, Almighty God!”

“I know not what course others may take,” Henry added, his body straining as if against chains and his voice rising, “but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” With these final words, he broke free from his imaginary chains and raised his hands, then motioned as if to stab his breast with a paper cutter clasped in his right hand.

The audience sat in stunned silence as Henry took his seat. One delegate said the speech was “one of the most bold, vehement and animated pieces of eloquence that had ever been delivered.” Another said his words had “blazed so as to warm the coldest heart.” Yet another said the delegates felt the echoes of “that supernatural voice” resonate through their bodies and that “they became impatient of speech—their souls were on fire for action.” Henry’s resolutions were approved, and he was appointed chair of a committee to organize the raising of militia companies across Virginia.

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The inspiration behind “give me liberty or give me death”

What was it in this speech that so moved the audience? It was not the logic of Henry’s argument or even the words he spoke. As fellow founder Jefferson said of the many times when Henry gave speeches opposing one of his ideas, “I myself [had] been highly delighted and moved, [but] I have asked myself, when he ceased, ‘What the devil has he said?’ and could never answer the inquiry.”

One observer of the 1775 speech recalled decades later that “voice, countenance and gestures gave an irresistible force to [Henry’s] words, which no description could make intelligible to one who had never seen him, nor heard him speak.” With no recordings or even contemporary written accounts, historians can never know precisely what Henry looked and sounded like during his orations. They don’t even know for sure what kind of accent Henry had.

Historical interpreter Beau Robbins portrays Henry with an accent you can still find relics of in rural eastern pockets of Virginia, a lilt that sounds Canadian but in fact derives from Scotland, where Henry’s father was born. Robbins believes that Henry’s gradually escalating tone meant that as “his audience would be enraptured, … he had the freedom to build and get louder and more firm in his tone.”

Henry’s performance animated ideas that took on new urgency with his voice. His words clearly echoed language from the Bible, which he read regularly, as well as texts like the speeches of Greek orator Demosthenes and Joseph Addison’s play Cato, which features the line “It is not now time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death.” Revolutionaries often quoted Cato, which was performed regularly in the Colonies, and the juxtaposition of liberty and death seems to have permeated American culture. In 1774, Abigail Adams wrote a friend that “the only alternative which every American thinks of is liberty or death.”

Since no contemporaneous accounts of Henry’s speech survive, historians cannot be entirely certain that he used the exact phrase “give me liberty or give me death,” or whether this was the invention of a later biographer. But Couvillon, who has written extensively on the founding father, finds the evidence that the famous quote was indeed Henry’s convincing.

Patrick Henry’s legacy

Henry went on to have a distinguished career in Virginia state politics, including serving five one-year terms as governor. His most important legacy, however, is clearly the words he spoke in that Richmond church in 1775. After the speech was published in William Wirt’s 1817 biography of Henry, it entered Americans’ public consciousness. The phrase was particularly popular in antislavery circles and among enslaved people themselves. Henry had, after all, invoked slavery as the alternative to fighting for liberty, despite the fact that he himself was an enslaver.

As Matthew J. Clavin shows in his book Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War, newspapers in the mid-19th century chronicled the stories of enslaved people who died by suicide after repeating Henry’s cry, as well as those fleeing from slavery who credited him as an inspiration. For instance, the Virginian William P. Newman, who escaped to Ohio, wrote, “I am proud to say that Patrick Henry’s motto is mine.”

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison took up Henry’s phrase in a speech at a gathering to commemorate John Brown, who led the violent antislavery raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. “Who instigated John Brown?” Garrison asked. “Let us see. It must have been Patrick Henry, who said—and he was a Virginian—‘Give me liberty or give me death!’” As Frederick Douglass noted in a June 1854 newspaper editorial, however, many Americans praised Henry’s phrase and the violent rebellion against British oppression while simultaneously decrying violent resistance to slavery.

Black activists continued to claim Henry’s mantle in the 20th century. When Marcus Garvey appealed to Congress in 1919 to argue against the constitution of the League of Nations, which gave European powers the right to control African countries, he quoted the famous phrase and asked, “Will you deny the native Africans of the spirit of a Patrick Henry?” More ominously, Black nationalist leader Malcolm X said in 1964 that the struggle for civil rights had reached a dangerous inflection point: “It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets. It’ll be liberty, or it will be death.” Malcolm X was assassinated the following year.

Henry’s speech has also been cited regularly in protests. In 2020, a New York Times photographer captured a snapshot of a woman upset about Covid-19 public health measures; she stood outside of a Baskin-Robbins with a poster emblazoned “Give me liberty or give me death.” In 2022, Chinese protesters objecting to their country’s zero-Covid policy also used the phrase. This wasn’t the first time Henry’s words appeared in China: Pro-democracy demonstrators held posters with the phrase at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Part of the power of Henry’s phrase is the multiplicity of meanings people have found in the word “liberty.” For Henry, liberty in the context of his speech meant breaking free from the oppression of British control. (After the American Revolution, he remained suspicious of centralized government power in the nascent United States.) For enslaved people and abolitionists, liberty was the state of owning one’s own body. And for the woman protesting pandemic restrictions, liberty was about removing the government from decisions about exposing oneself and others to a potentially lethal illness.

As gay rights activist Harvey Milk argued in 1978, Henry “was talking about political liberty. But there is a more personal type, a more important type.” Milk added, “If you are not personally free to be yourself in that most important of all human activities—the expression of love—then life itself loses its meaning.” The fact that Henry’s short phrase, spoken 250 years ago this month, could inspire activists across the political spectrum and even the world is a testament to the power of those simple words. The man whom Jefferson called “the greatest orator that ever lived” lives on with words that speak to Americans’ enduring struggles for freedom.

Cassandra Good | | Read More

Cassandra Good is a historian and writer who has taught at Marymount University, George Washington University and the University of Mary Washington. She writes, researches and teaches about early American history.