Home > Resources > Historic Polegreen Church Foundation Lecture Series -- 2003

Historic Polegreen Church Foundation Lecture Series -- 2003

The 2003 Spring Lecture featured Dr. Jan Swearingen, Professor of English at Texas A & M University, speaking on "The Patrick Henry/Samuel Davies Connection". Dr. Swearingen's special field of study and expertise is in the field of rhetoric, the art of influencing the thought and conduct of an audience. Jan has studied the skills of those who make persuasive speeches beginning with the classic orators in ancient Greece and Rome up until present times. Jan is now writing a book on the influence of Samuel Davies' oratory on Patrick Henry, chief orator of the American Revolution.

The lecture series also included a musical presentation by Dr. John Turner, Program Developer/Producer of the Religious Project of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

C. Jan Swearingen
Spring Lecture 2003, Richmond, VA
Professor of English
Texas A&M

Presbyterians in Virginia 1740-1770: Samuel Davies, Patrick Henry, and the Gospel of Liberty

A strong emphasis upon education made Presbyterians distinctive among the denominations outside New England in colonial America. In addition, Presbyterians were among the first to establish a structure for cross-colony government, a structure based in their history as covenanters as much as in their need to preserve doctrinal and social consistency in thinking, teaching, and practice. Procedures and policies for educating clergy and for examining congregants prior to certifying them to receive communion provided an additional reason for closely coordinated policies and doctrinal practices. The New Light/Old Light split that divided the Presbyterian Church between 1742 and 1758 was eventually resolved by the desire to establish The College of New Jersey as a respected multi-denominational college, dispelling the stigma that had been attached to the "Log Colleges." The schism could not have been healed without the partnership between Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent, his mentor and senior colleague. When Davies first arrived in Virginia he brought with him a legacy of rhetorical, legal, and homiletic practices that prepared him well for what he was going to encounter there: heated disputes about the roles played by itinerants going back to Tennent's defense of Roan, a growing number of Scots-Irish immigrants fervent in their loyalty to covenanter and Presbyterian beliefs and practices, and the promise of protection which Governor Gooch had extended in order to encourage their immigration. The Anglican establishment, both Church and State, was up in arms about the growing number of dissenters and itinerants in their midst, but it was also aware of the need for an influx of immigrants to the western backcountry as the likeliness of warfare with the French increased. The Scots were perfect choices, as they had been in Ulster, for fighting the "papists." Unfortunately, they were also primed to fight the English and the Anglicans for their political and religious rights. Davies' initial role as a missionary and itinerant among the Scots dissenters quickly became a political role as well.

To better understand the legacy that Davies brought with him to Virginia, and its reception among the Scots and the English nonconformists who constituted his audience, it is instructive to review the rhetoric of liberty and tyranny that had been brewing in the Scottish rhetorical lexicon for over a hundred and fifty years.

The relationship between Samuel Davies and Patrick Henry's family in Hanover County Virginia concludes with the well known influence of Davies' pulpit oratory upon Henry's development as a speaker. The Scots homiletic tradition in which Davies was educated originates not only with John Knox's fiery invective, but also with the less well known George Buchanan, known as "the Humanist" in his own time. Buchanan was with Knox a leader of the Scots Reformation; he brokered one of the first covenants with Mary Stuart to insure freedom of religious practice for the Scots Kirk. Stained glass windows and plaques in Greyfriars church preserve Buchanan's first goal as a reformer: to improve upon the badly corrupted liturgical Latin used by the poorly educated Catholic priests then serving Scotland. A much improved liturgical Latin and sermons, and then vernacular sermons and liturgy exhibiting the highest level of erudition would become the hallmarks of the Scots and English Reformation. One of the first goals of the Protestant Reformation was rhetorical: through education in rhetoric and philosophy conducted entirely in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew clergy would be prepared to restore to liturgy and preaching the finest style of Biblical and Classical texts, and convert these to vernacular language translations of the Bible. Among the best educated of the Scots reformers, Buchanan was assigned to be the tutor of young Elizabeth Tudor, cementing the anti-Stuart alliance of English and Scots Protestants against Catholicism. Buchanan later became, at Elizabeth's request, tutor to James I. His little known influence upon the genesis of the King James Bible is one of many points to be recovered by Scots Presbyterians in understanding their complicated but in the end highly fruitful differences from English Protestantism.

A second influence of Buchanan upon the Scots' Kirk was more overtly political. Beginning with the first covenant signed with Mary Stuart, the Kirk and its representative went through successive battles to protect and redefine their religious freedom and political independence from England. In the long battle, whose first chapter stretched from the 1540s to 1607, Buchanan's voice was a powerful presence. In these first battles key words and phrases were developed that eventually found their way into the political oratory of the revolutionary era.

When John Knox deemed Mary Queen of Scots incapable of reigning, he had no trouble assembling the Scottish nobility to secure the installment of her son James in her place. The tutor he appointed was George Buchanan, from Stirlingshire, the only layman ever to serve as Moderator of the Kirk's General Assembly, and a co-author of the Kirk's first Book of Discipline. Buchanan had studied in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews, then at the University of Paris; where his classmates included John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola. Of significance for later Presbyterian rhetorical and political history, Buchanan's 1579 The Law of Government Among the Scots asserted that all political authority ultimately belonged to the people, who came together to elect someone, whether a king, or a body of magistrates, or a minister, to manage their affairs. The people were always more powerful than the rulers they created; they were free to remove them at will. " The people have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." When the ruler fails to act in the people's interest, each and every citizen, including "the lowest and meanest of men", had the sacred right and duty to resist the tyrant, even to the point of killing him.

The legacy of this history was both political and rhetorical. From its very beginnings the Scots Kirk, like many of its Calvinist counterparts in Europe, was vigorously congregational. The clergy were selected by individual congregations' elected Elders, and could be removed at the initiative of the congregation. Oversight for the education and examination of clergy lay not only with the universities, but also with the congregation, the Elders of each parish, and the collected regional congregational body, or the Presbytery. Elders sent representatives to the regional Presbytery, then to the larger regional body, the Synod, and, yearly, to the national General Assembly. This form of elected representational democracy would eventually influence the form of government adopted by the American colonies as they moved toward independence. There were other congregational denominations whose political structure was similar to that of the Scottish Kirk and had a similar influence on later revolutionary politics: the Dutch Reformed and Hugenot Churches, for example, were influential in the Middle Colonies.

Particularly strong in Scots tradition was pulpit oratory that defended the autonomy of the Kirk and self-governing rights of the people: repeated themes that struck a template for later political invectives against the English and then the British crown. The defiance of the Scottish Kirk in the mid seventeenth century was directed at King Charles' imposition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It resulted in a massive and long-remembered revolt that initially took the form of the "National Covenant" of 1637. Rank and file marched to fight Charles' mercenary armys. By 1649, the so-called "Bishops' War." based in the refusal to accept the authority of Charles's Anglican bishops over the Scottish Kirk, contributed eventually to the English Civil War that ended with Parliament's defiance of Charles's authority as King. The diatribes against the English crown written during this period were based in doctrinal and Biblical argument that would later serve the American colonists well: arguments against the tyrant and the unjust ruler; sanction to rise above the law when the law itself is "of man, and not of God," invocations of the divine creation of human will, moral sense, and assertions of human reason and the rights of individuals to collectively decide their religious and political leaders. The Anglican invective against dissenters, "no Bishop, no King," only further provoked non-Anglicans, whose resentment at being taxed to pay for the Anglican clergy prepared them well to resist other forms of unjust taxation. The Ulster Scots in particular, enraged by the rescinsion of the Acts of Toleration in 1706 that led to their exodus, brought with them to the colonies the full fury of this long history with several British crowns.

When Gilbert Tennent preached in New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, they were drawing upon a rich tradition of testimony and political resolve that the Scots had developed over two centuries of interactions with the English, both in Scotland and in Ulster. The political experiences of the communities of the Middle Colonies, ministered to by a diverse range of Dutch Reform, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Mennonite clergy — all accustomed to the freedom to defend their religious doctrines — were added to this mix. Davies’ appearance in Virginia coincided with an influx of Scots, but also with growing discontent among some indigenous English colonists with the religious conduct of their Anglican clergy. By the time Davies arrived in Hanover county, dissenting groups had already begun meeting in private homes for bible study, devotional reading, prayer, and worship. Openly critical of the Anglican clergy, they were paying fines rather than attend services that had no meaning for them and which they resented as an unjust law of the British crown and its bishop in London. Patrick Henry's maternal grandfather, Isaac Winston, and his mother, Sarah Winston Symes Henry were among the dissenters in the parish where his paternal uncle and namesake, Patrick Henry Sr., was the Anglican parish priest.

The Henry family's interaction with Davies provides a concise microcosm of the complex socioeconomic and cultural identifications that shaped, and divided, colonial Virginia at the time. Upwardly mobile Scots, like John and Patrick Henry Sr.., were educated at the best Scottish universities and undertook gentry or clergy roles in the colony. Land was available and settlers were needed to inhabit the backcountry of the Shenandoah and provide a buffer between the tidewater plantations and the frontier. Upwardly mobile, aspiring Scots often took leadership roles in these communities: Patrick Henry Sr. and Governor Gooch both represented the crown, one as priest and the other as governor. Their Scottishness made them more indebted to the crown appointment than an English nobleman would have been. But it also gave them an independence from English systems of class and inheritance that shaped the tidewater Cavalier culture. Although they began to create their own hierarchies of land ownership and inheritance, the gentry life of the backcountry Scots and English farmers was never as elite as that of the coastal plantations. The farms were smaller, the life harder, and the communities mingled more intimately than in the more stratified plantation society. Patrick Henry Jr. matured within this rich mixture of newly arrived Scots and Scots clergy, disaffected Anglican English farmers and laborers, parishioners seeking a more inspiring spiritual guidance, defensive Anglican priests, and a colonial government trying with increasing difficulty to serve its constituency within Virginia and the crown. From boyhood he heard debates around the family table concerning religion, for his mother and maternal grandfather were active in the dissenting community that defied the rule requiring attendance at Anglican worship. His uncle was the Anglican priest affected by the dissenters' mutiny, and his father was a vestryman. Yet, unlike many upwardly mobile Scots who attended Scottish universities in the eighteenth century to polish their speech and remove all Scottishisms, John Henry remained proud of his brogue and refused to correct it. The upward mobility of many colonial Scots was never entirely conformed to the terms set by British customs and social requirement.

Patrick Henry credited Samuel Davies with teaching him by example the best of oratory. While his father, John, maintained a Scots' brogue even in the midst of English gentry, his uncle Patrick railed against the "enthusiastic" dissenter preachers who denounced him and others as "unconverted" clergy, observing the dullness and the lack of inspiration in their preaching. Surrounding them all was the eighteenth century culture and literature of England and the colonies, with its emphasis on neoclassicism in education and literary styles. Alongside John Henry and Patrick Henry Sr., Samuel Davies was an exact contemporary of Haydn and could quote from Cato and Montesquieu with ease. His pulpit eloquence was far from the bible thumping backcountry circuit rider we have come to associate with evangelical Protestantism. Rather, his "New Light" theology and preaching was the child of the Scottish Enlightenment. In Patrick Henry we can see a similar amalgam of folk popularity and gentry education, a double identity when it came to self presentation and oratorical styles. As an orator and public figure, he was a deft synthesizer of sources, styles, and models, much as Jefferson was to be in his written work.

Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech has often been attributed to the influence of Joseph Addison's play, Cato, widely performed in the colonies in the pre-Declaration period, and increasingly popular for its depiction of a populist republic rising up against an unjust tyrant.

The hand of fate is over us, and heav'n
Exacts severity from all our thoughts:
It is not now a time to talk of ought
But chains, or conquest; liberty, or death.

It is easy to forget that there was a second language of liberty circulating in the colonies, a language better known to the rank and file than Addison's play. In the sermons of the Great Awakening "liberty" was a key word above all others, emphasizing freedom from sin, freedom to exercise conscience in the face of unjust laws and rulers, and freedom to fight to the death to secure liberty for the future. The religious appeal to liberty was pervasive in the sermons of the New Light Presbyterian itinerant Samuel Davies. Davies' sermons in support of the French and Indian War seamlessly weave together ideals of freedom and liberty, victory and conquest, earthly and heavenly kingdoms, and doctrines of peace:

"Jesus, the Prophet of Galilee will push his conquests from country to country until all nations submit to him. His victorious arm has reached to us in these ends of the earth: here he has subdued some obstinate rebels, and made their reluctant souls willingly bow in affectionate homage to him. And may I not produce some of you as the trophies of his victory? Has he not rooted out the enmity of your carnal minds, and sweetly constrained you to the most affectionate obedience? Make this country a dutiful province of the dominion of thy grace. My brethren, should we all become his willing subjects, he would not longer suffer the perfidious slaves of France, and their savage allies, to chastise and punish us for our rebellion against him; but peace shall again run down like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream."

On the defeat of General Braddock, delivered at Hanover, July 20, 1755, the year after Patrick Henry was married:

"And, O Virginia! O my country! Shall I not lament for thee? I see slaughtered families, the hairy scalps clotted with gore. And alas, in the midst of all these alarms, I see thy inhabitants generally asleep, and careless of thy fate. I see vice braving the skies; religion neglected and insulted.... Let our country, let religion, liberty, property, and all be lost, yet still they will have their diversions...".

May 8, 1758, to a general muster with the purpose of raising a company to be commanded by Captain Samuel Meredith, Henry's brother in law:

"Must peace then be maintained, maintained with our perfidious and cruel invaders? maintained at the expense of property, liberty, life, and every thing dear and valuable?" Davies became was renowned within a year of assuming the Hanover post, and traveled widely in the surrounding areas. His sermons often lasted over three hours, and drew crowds of hundreds. By natural temperament and by choice, Davies employed a wide range of oratorical voices that could speak to different audiences on a variety of subjects. Yet, by his own description Davies was not an enthusiast ..."in feeling or in method." Nonetheless, for many of his contemporaries, most famously Patrick Henry Jr., Davies served as a model, both religious and secular, for "the means of kindling the hidden fires of eloquence in other bosoms." Like Henry, Davies has been credited with "founding a school of oratory that profoundly affected forensic method in America, whether in the forum, in the pulpit, or at the bar"

It is easy to forget that in colonial America the sermon was perhaps the most significant form of communication, not only for religious instruction and inspiration, but also as a way of disseminating recent news to large numbers of people. This continued to be the case up to the emergence of the political orator at the time of the Revolution, and it is more than probable that political orators patterned their speaking after the preaching of the day. At the same time, clergy in all colonies were increasingly active on both political sides of the cause of independence. The southern scene in Viriginia is especially rich in the diversity of denominations and social classes that argued with one another in political and religious debates. Davies was remembered for the warmth of his voice and the use of a variety of "sounds" (pitches) in his sermon delivery, patterns which via Patrick Henry, influenced a distinctly Southern form of political oratory.

It is easy to over-generalize these patterns, however, and the range of styles among the speeches and writings of Davies and Henry deserves more attention if we are to fully understand their popularity and success. Davies' petition in support of extending the Acts of Toleration to the colonies was a finely drawn and successfully argued plank in American laws that eventually resulted in the legal protection of religious freedom in Virginia and then throughout the colonies. Davies' petition for a license to preach, secured upon his arrival in Hanover County, greatly impressed Lieutenant Governor Gooch, who, while alarmed by some of the more "enthusiastic" itinerants, was no stranger to Presbyterianism. Davies' initial petition for religious tolerance extended the range of legal rights for itinerants and for self-selected dissenting congregations of whatever origin or motivation. From Samuel Davies' 1752 letter to the Bishop of London, via William Dawson in Williamsburg:

'If the members of the Church of England come from distant places to the meeting houses licensed for the use of professed dissenters, and upon hearing, join with them, and declare themselves Presbyterians, and place themselves under my ministerial care, I dare say your lordship will not censure me for admitting them. And if these new proselytes live at such a distance that they cannot meet statedly at the places already licensed, have they not a legal right to have houses licensed convenient to them, since they are as properly professed dissenters, in favour of whom the Act of toleration was enacted, as those that have been educated in non-conformity?"

Writing in 1755, James Maury takes up the opposing argument, addressing Rev. William Dawson, the representative of the Bishop of London, on the eve of a hearing at the House of Burgesses:

"'Yis needless to mention to You, Sir, who for some years past have had frequent opportunity of remarking, what Heats and Dissentions, what Breeches of Charity, what Ruin & Decay in the Families of well meaning but deluded People, what Confusion and Disorder, what Disaffection in the People to regular Pastors, of unblemished Morals and unquestionable Abilities, together with many other unhappy Effects, have usually attended the Ministry of Itinerants & Enthusiasts in this Colony, whenever they have either boldly intruded, or been legally licensed. —Tis a Doubt, I am told, with some worthy Members of your honorable Bench, whether the Act of Toleration extends to the Plantations. ...I trust I am far from the inhuman & uncharitable Spirit of Persecution. No man professes himself a warmer Advocate of Liberty of Conscience, that natural Right of Mankind. ....If, to effectuate their Intentions, however pious, the Laws of the Community must be violated, & if the Violation of such Laws be an Evil; they have, if not intentionally, yet eventually, acted upon that unsound Principle, which St Paul disclaims with so much Abhorence, Doing Evil that Good may come."

Influenced at first by his mother's and sisters' conversion by Davies, and then by an admiration of Davies' preaching, and eloquence as a teacher, Henry began a lifetime of sympathy and support for dissenting religious traditions, beliefs, and practices. Family legend has it that Sarah Henry drove Patrick and his sisters to hear Davies preach at the Polegreen church near Hanover almost every Sunday. On the way home she would ask Patrick to recite back the sermon he had heard. In the course of eleven years, Patrick acquired a rhetorical education in the oldest school of all: recitation and repetition of model speeches.

It was not just the form of the speeches that Henry absorbed from listening to Davies. He also acquired a political and religious vocabulary far wider than any he could have acquired from the formal schooling he received in Greek and Latin from his uncle and father. Davies' sermons were spoken in the vernacular and adapted for his listeners. He utilized a wide range of biblical, classical, and contemporary literary and historical quotations, not to display his learning, but to drive home the universality of the theological and moral truths he was teaching. His second wife, Jane Holt, was the daughter of a Williamsburg mayor and printer, and provided Davies with direct access to the Virginia Gazette, which he used as a platform for defending his own and other dissenting clergy's rights to preach. At the time of his death, in 1761, Davies' sermons were well known and influential as models for other clergy; by the time of the Revolution, they were among the most widely circulating collections of sermons in the colonies, particularly in the Middle Colonies, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Looking at Davies' pulpit oratory alongside Henry's speeches, we see a growing convergence of religious and political themes, as well as Henry’s increasing ability to shift back and forth between political, moral, and religious terminologies. Like Davies, but even more so, Henry became known for a fluency of styles. Jefferson was not alone in accusing him of demagoguery, appealing to the baser passions of the common people. But Henry understood these appeals in a different way, as did the people to whom he spoke. With the best of the Scottish Enlightenment thought, transmitted through Davies' sermons, Henry had come to believe in the innate moral sense of all individuals, tutored or untutored. He may never have heard of Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense, but he was an exponent of it, and his listeners had been taught to receive this kind of teaching by ministers like Davies who wanted to appeal to the heart and spirit, and not exclusively to the head. By the time of the Parson's Cause, Henry's first court case, the issue of "enthusiastic" preaching and speaking had become extremely controversial, with Anglicans denouncing the emotional rabble, and pietist dissenters denouncing Anglicans' formal doctrinal preaching as dull and lifeless. Henry's Parson's Cause speech, his Stamp Act speech, and his famous trumpet call for liberty or death exhibit the range of styles and vocabulary that Henry could employ: homely anecdote in the Parson's Cause, impassioned parliamentary invective in the Stamp Act, and eloquent political declamation in the St. John's church speech declaring "liberty or death."

It was in response to Davies' old critic, the Anglican clergyman, Maury that Henry launched his first oratorical triumph, the "Parson's Cause" speech of 1763. The court had already decided that Maury was entitled to an adjustment of his deflated salary during a drought-plagued season. Henry's job was to speak to the issue of how much adjustment should be back-paid to Maury. Along with other clergy, Maury had appealed for an adjustment of his 1758 payment by invoking the Two Penny Act, a just-expired relief bill. The adjustment would back-pay him the amount of his 1758 deflated tobacco income adjusted to 1759 market value. Henry challenged the king's right to annul the the Act. It is a homely and impassioned appeal to the community's sense of its disenfranchisement by the Anglican religious leaders imposed by English law. His appeal was to compact and covenant: government is a conditional compact, composed of mutual and dependent covenanats, the king stipulating protection and the teople stipulating obedience and support. A violation of these conenants by either party discharges the other from obligation. "The king by his act degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeited all rights to his subjects' obedience to his order." Henry also challenged the clergy. Just as the king had abdicated his duty to the people, so the clergy by refusing to accept the relief to the taxed community provided by the Two-Penny Act had corrupted the role of an established church and clergy in society. Defining the role of clergy in a social compact, Henry claimed, "when a clergy cease to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry, and may justly strip them of their appointments." He called the clergy,"enemies of the community,"not only for selfishness of lack of charity, but also for failure to understand the reciprocal relations of church and state."

In addition to a closely reasoned appeal to contract law and covenant polity, The Parson's Cause speech exhibits the vernacular syntax of anecdotes told in the immediate and concrete terms of individual suffering at the hands of unjust and unfeeling superiors, the "unjust law" and "unjust tyrant" themes that link Davies' sermons with Henry's earliest political rhetoric. Just before his day in court began, Henry asked his uncle, Patrick Henry Sr., Maury's colleague, to please step outside since he would not like what he was going to hear.

We have heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy, but how is this manifested? Do they manifest their zeal in the cause of religion and humanities, by practising the mild and benevolent precepts of the Gospel of Jesus? Do they feed the hungry and clother the naked? Oh no, gentlemen! Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these rapacious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishoner his last hoe cake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow, the last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in woman!

It is easy to reduce Henry's style to this style of robust invective and forget that the hour-long Parson's Cause speech in Hanover Courthouse set an important legal precedent. It was the beginning of the end of rigid Anglican rule over religious life in Virginia. Henry's invocation of social contract doctrines in support of religious freedom and the obligation of church and clergy as well as the state is pure Scottish Enlightenment thought, hearkening back ultimtely to George Buchanan's defenses of the autonomy of the Scots Kirk. Henry's Stamp Act Speech, his first to the House of Burgesses, exhibits more explicitly legal and legislative language that betokens a knowledge of the laws to which it is a response, but it retains the rhythm of invective and narrative that he had honed listening to courtroom banter in Hanover County Courthouse and the Inn across the street where he worked. There is no reliable account of the entire speech. Two reports disagree on the climactic moment when Henry likened the American colonists to Caesar's Brutus and Charles' Cromwell. Caesar had his Brutus, Charles his Cromwell, and the King finds before him "...the good american who would stand up in favour of his Country. But, says he [Henry] in a more moderate manner, and was going to Continue, when the speaker of the house rose and Said, he, the last that stood up had spoke traison, and was sorey to see that not one of the members of the house was loyal Enough to stop him, before he had gone so far. He [Henry]was ready to ask pardon of the speaker...what he had said must be attributed to the Interest of his Countrys Dying liberty which he had at heart, and the heat of passion might have lead him to have said something more than he intended, but, again, if he said anything wrong, he beged the speaker and the houses pardon. some other members stood up and backed him, on which that afaire was droped." Alternate accounts present a less conciliatory Henry declaring, "if this be treason, let us make the most of it."

A number of sources now provide valuable records and details that help untangle the varieties of Davies' and Henry's oratory from often distorted reports of them. Responding to the Anglican invectives against enthusiastic preaching is itself one subject of Davies' rhetoric, and his rhetorical practice, more moderate than his enemies claimed, stands as an additional rebuttal. Similarly, Henry's lifelong popularity, reputation for virtue and piety, and political success must be placed alongside the criticism of his colleagues, especially Jefferson, who was an awkward speaker and shy person and already jealous of Henry by the time he was elected to the Burgesses. One of the first long accounts of Henry's life, character, and oratory by William Wirt relied heavily upon Jefferson's accounts provided in interviews long after Henry's death. More recent studies have provided more balanced accounts and, increasingly, document the degree to which invectives against Henry’s and Davies’ speech styles were a part of their rhetorical heritage and tradition. One of Henry's speeches to the House of Burgesses illustrates this invective. "There is many a religious man who knows nothing of argumentative reasoning,...there are many of our most worthy citizens who cannot go through all of the labyrinths of syllogistic argumentative deductions, when they think that the rights of Conscience are invaded. This sacred right [of religious liberty] ought not to depend upon constructions of logical reasoning. Clearly, this view could lead into a programmatic anti-intellectualism of which many backcountry citizens were no doubt capable. This speech, and others, provide ample evidence of how and why Henry could be denounced as a demagogue by his enemies.

Conclusion

The influence of Presbyterians upon colonial religious history, rhetorical education, and oratory is easily overlooked if one approaches colonial higher education and political discourse as based primarily on classical historians and orators, and Enlightenment political theory. Many political and rhetorical histories of the founders emphasize their secular learning, Deist leanings, and dedication to the separation of church and state. Conversely, religious histories of the colonial period often concentrate on New England, ignore religion among the Virginia founders, and create a portrait of a separate church and state long before that idea was ever expressed. The rhetorical education of Scottish Presbyterians carried a legacy of beliefs about human reason, human rights, congregational polity, and the educability of moral sensibility through the written and the spoken word. Sermons in particular, but speeches in general, were conceived of as instruments of moral edification and as exemplars for their listeners. They were "talking books."

A distinctively, uniquely American vocabulary, and rhetoric, concerning rights, freedom, and liberty was developed in the Virginia sermons and political oratory of the founding era. Unlike British common law and Lockean positions defining rights and social contract, and very much unlike the French Deist philosophies of social contract and liberty, colonial discussions of rights and calls for bills of rights were grounded in unique, neologistic combinations of natural law, social contract, and divine providence. Certainly they had taxes and property rights in mind; but it cannot be ignored that such phrases as "nature, and Nature's God," and "endowed by their Creator," —clear statements that most colonials pointedly based their doctrines of liberty, freedom, and justice upon affirmations of religious beliefs and doctrines— recur repeatedly in sermons even while the colonies made their way to strong affirmations of religious tolerance and disestablishment of state supported churches. The unique American idiom appears in pamphlets and sermons throughout the founding era, and should be consulted alongside Burke's widely influential response to the French Revolution. Colonial rhetoric, political and religious, taught in the classroom and church alike, comprised a larger and more diverse family than representations from Puritan New England suggest.

In various denominations and colonies, religious rhetorics shaped political oratory and religious doctrines shaped emerging patterns of government in town, city, and colony. Multi-denominational colonies such as Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey were the cradles for doctrines of religious liberty and toleration that made their way, finally, into the Constitution. Presbyterians were among the first to establish a structure and policy for cross-colony education and government, a structure based in their history as covenanters, as well as in the need to preserve doctrinal and social consistency in thinking, teaching, and practice. The Presbyterian presence in Virginia during the eighteenth century is full of anomalies, surprises, and contact narratives. Why, when the faculty of the College of William and Mary was dispersed in 1768 for profligacy, was it replaced heavily with Scots and Welsh educated at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen? When Virginia planters sent their sons back to Britain for a college education, why did they in most cases select the Scots universities over Cambridge and Oxford? When the College of William and Mary finally got back on its feet again why did it adopt the curriculum of the College of New Jersey, perfected by Samuel Davies and John Witherspoon? It was this curriculum in rhetoric and moral philosophy that Thomas Jefferson studied at William and Mary under the Scots-educated William Small. The political and moral thought of the Scottish Enlightenment which came to Virginia through Samuel Davies and then the College of New Jersey was distinctly different from the secular Deism we have come to equate with the Virginia founders. A Deist platform could never have succeeded in mobilizing rank and file Americans for revolution. A sense of religious liberty and God-given rights could.

Coda:

Religious pamphlets and sermons circulated throughout the founding era, and after. In understanding evolving American understandings of liberty, these should be consulted alongside Burke's widely influential response to the French Revolution. John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey, Noah Webster, our first American lexicographer, and John Adams all weighed in with scathing denunciations of the French Revolution's philosophically atheist Deist, bases, progress, and demise. In all cases the US Revolution was judged far superior. A sermon preached in New York on the occasion of the Anniversary of the Independence of America, to the Tammany Society, or Columbian Order, in 1793 Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller provides a representative sample of the seamless synthesis of religious and political terms in the rhetoric of the period.

Preaching on the text from II Corinthians, iii. 17, "And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty,"" Miller expounds upon the selfish versus Christian meanings of liberty, prosperity, and happiness. He begins,

...the sentiment which I shall deduce from he text, and illustrate and urge:

That the general prevalence of real Christianity, in any government, has a direct and immediate tendency to promote, and to confirm therein, political liberty. The corrupt passions and the vices of men have in all ages of the world been the grand source and support of tyranny, and of every species of political and domestic oppression. A moment's reflection on the nature of tyranny, and of those dispositions in the constituent members of society, which lead to its origin and advancement, is sufficient to convince every unprejudiced mind, that human depravity is the life and the sould of slavery. What was it that raised this monster from the infernal regions, and gave him a dwelling among men, but ignorance, on the one hand, and on the other, ambition and pride?

...The truth is that political liberty does not rest, solely, on the form of government, under which a nation may happen to live. It does not consist, altogether, in the arrangement or in the balance of power; nor even in the rights and privileges whhich the constitution offers to every citizen. These indeed, must be acknowledged to have a cnsiderablel effect in its promotion or decline.

...Human laws are too imperfect, in themselves, to secure completely this inestimable blessing [of liberty]. It must have its seat in the hearts and dispositions of thsoe individuals which compose the body politic; and it is with the hearts and dispositions of men that Christianity is conversant. When, therefore, the perfect law of liberty, which this holy religion includes, prevails and governs in the minds of all, their their freedom rests upon a a basis more solid and immoveable, than human wisdom can devise. For the obvious tendency of this divine system, in all its parts, is, in the language of its great Author, to bring deliverance to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to undo the heavy burthens; to let the opposed go free; and to break every yoke.

The prevalence of real Christianity, tends to promote the principles and the love of political freedom. by the doctrines which it teaches, concerning the human character, and the inalienable rights of mankind; and by the virtues which it inculcates, and leads its votaries to practice. ...Can oppression and slavery prevail among any people who properly understand, and are suitably impressed with, those great gospel truths, that all men are, by nature, equal, children of the same common Father...? (Sandoz 1156). Miller's sermon draws on the language of Davies and Witherspoon, the New Light / Old Light controversy that the Presbyterian Church had survived through judicious compromise. The language of these debates flowed into the larger debates that created the Declaration, and the compromises that shaped the Constitutional Conventions (Bailyn).

The history of the Scots Presbyterians in Virginia during and after the Revolution has sometimes been seen as one of their decline during a time when Methodists and Baptists came to the foreground, especially for non-elite communities and new immigrant populations (Isaac, Ingham). However, on two fronts, rhetorical and educational, the Presbyterian legacy remained strong. Hampden-Sydney College was founded as a Presbyterian school; Patrick Henry was on its first board of governors, and many of his children and grandchildren were students there. Alexander Campbell, among numerous other Presbyterian clergy, continued to minister to western Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky churches, and eventually founded Bethany College and the foundations of what would become the Disciples of Christ, dissenting with mainstream Presbyterians over issues of liturgy, preaching style, clergy education, and church government (Olbricht). Methodists came to distinguish themselves from Presbyterians explicitly in terms of preaching styles and requirements for clergy education (Shenandoah). In these late eighteenth-century controversies about preaching styles, liturgy, clergy and laity can be seen many of the issues of the 1730s and 40s revisited. Should preaching be directed at the heart or the head? Should a minister's personal conversion experience and testaments of piety prevail in deciding his "call" and his qualifications for ordination? What amount and what kind of education should be required of clergy, and, for that matter, of laity? Remote frontier circumstances had contributed to these debates, both in the 1730s and 40s and later in the 1790s. Westward expansion was taking place very quickly in advance of the Revolution and in its wake, as the new country sought to secure lands claimed at the time of independence. The New Light movement, and the Baptist and Methodist denominations that developed from it, can be seen as a triumph of the laity (Westerkamp), a deeply democratic grass-roots movement based in shared faith that often matured, out of necessity, without clergy. Characterizing the liturgy and preaching of these movements has proven difficult, for each denomination developed its own invective directed at the flaws of the other. Many recent studies are beginning to fill in the details of frontier piety, preaching and laity that will illuminate both the differences and the similarities of post-colonial religious rhetorics, as well as their continuing influence upon political oratory (Ingram, "Holy Feasts"). Just as Samuel Davies influenced Patrick Henry in Virginia during the 1740s and 50s, William Hill and Alexander Campbell became acclaimed missionary ministers on the Western frontier, where they fostered the religious growth and provided models for pulpit and political oratory. Campbell in particular is noted for his movement away from Ciceronian modes of elite schooled rhetoric, and toward a more populist, narrative, vernacular style that would reach a wider audience. Like Henry's oratory, but more consciously, Campbell's speaking style as well as his content followed the principles of Reid's Common Sense philosophy (Casey). The educability and the moral edification of the common man through the spoken word were first and foremost Scottish Enlightenment and Presbyterian goals that continued to shape the religious rhetoric and the political discourse of the rural and frontier south.