Patrick Henry: Champion of Libertyby Jon KuklaSimon & Schuster, 2017Historian Jon Kukla begins stressing the outspoken nature of Patrick Henry's defense of freedom right there in the subtitle of his new book, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty, a close echo of Harlow Giles Unger's 2010 biography of Henry, Lion of Liberty, which itself echoed dozens of similar earlier titles always linking “Patrick Henry” with “liberty” because of the one thing most Americans know about him: that in a speech he gave in the Virginia House of Burgesses in March of 1775, he punctuated his long comments with the line “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”There's no good reason to believe Henry ever said the line that is now virtually his sole claim to fame, and Kukla, refreshingly, only glances at it; he's got a much bigger and richer story to tell, about this Virginia plantation master and politician who was one of the earliest and most outspoken advocates for the freedom of the American colonies from distant British rule – and one of the most fiery orators against the much closer rule of potential despots on American soil. Henry initially hated and distrusted the idea of Federal government embodied in the new nation's new constitution, urging the addition of what would become known as the Bill of Rights and warning, among other things, that the office of the presidency as proposed in the new governmental scheme was open to serious abuse:

Madison and his colleagues regarded Henry's portrayal of an imperial presidency as such an apocalyptic fantasy that they did not bother to refute it, but in the decades after these debates were published, Henry's grim vision has resonated with many readers. “If you American chief be a man of ambition and abilities,” Henry warned, “how easy is it for him to render himself absolute!”

In more ample and more readable detail than any previous biography has done since Henry Mayer's A Son of Thunder thirty years ago, Kukla traces all the stages of Henry's life, both professional – the succession of homes, the growth in business, the professional advancement, including Kukla's intensely interesting looks at Henry's terms as governor of Virginia – and personal, with warmly sympathetic attention given to Henry's relationship with his mentally ill first wife Sarah.In fact, Kukla's book has only one major failing, and it's also the major failing of every other biography of Patrick Henry, and it was also the major failing of Patrick Henry himself: a thoroughly repulsive double-vision when it comes to the subject of slavery. Despite all the subtitles of all the biographies in the world, Patrick Henry was not a champion of liberty, nor was he theoretically neutral to liberty – he was, rather, for his entire life an active enemy of liberty. For his entire life, he kept slaves. He joked about slaves. He beat slaves, and overworked them, and bought them, and sold them. He used his considerable financial and later political power to protect the institution of slavery from any moderation suggested by the many voices of his time that saw it for the evil it was. He saw it for the evil it was and often self-servingly lamented that evil, all the while reaping its benefits.This has always prompted his biographers to work extra hard at pumping rhetorical fog into their narratives, and on this subject Kukla is no exception. “Few contradictions in American history are more stark than the existence of slavery in a nation ostensibly committed to liberty,” he writes, “and Patrick Henry was acutely aware of this dissonance.” Kukla goes on to point out, in a telling mishmash of defensiveness and obscure phrasing, that “We frequently forget that by declaring that slavery was morally wrong, the founders themselves set the standard against which subsequent generations gauge their moral failures.”The irreconcilability here sometimes pushes Kukla to weirdly accommodating phrasing on a subject that admits of no accommodation, and it can sometimes happen in subtle ways. When writing about Henry's new plantation at Long Island on the Staunton River, for instance, Kukla tells his readers: “Boasting some of the most fertile soil in the southern Piedmont, the 2,506-acre farm (to which Henry added another thousand acres prior to his death) produced tobacco worth more than £200 a year as well as vegetables, sheep, cattle, and hogs for the family and about seventy slaves.” But Long Island didn't bring in £200 a year for its seventy slaves – it brought in £200 a year because of its seventy slaves, who were worked 16 hours in the fields every day watched by mounted overseers with bullwhips. The land itself didn't spontaneously burst with crops – it was worked by slaves.Worse is Kukla's description of Red Hill, Henry's final home, in 1794:

Red Hill was also the most productive of Henry's plantations, with an annual yield of as many as 20,011 pounds of tobacco. Estate inventories taken in July 1799, and September 1802 listed – along with Henry's books, furniture, and household goods – 128 head of cattle, 186 hogs, 38 sheep, 13 horses, 7 colts, and 5 yoke of oxen. Also listed, by name and with some indication of family connections, were the sixty-nine slaves (fourteen men, seven teenage boys, fifteen women, two teenage girls, and thirty-one children under twelve years old) whose presence made Red Hill a multifamily village and whose labor made everything work.

Slave labor. Whose slave labor made everything work. So much can turn on a single word, and in this case “slave labor” is as accurate as “multifamily village” is disgusting when used to describe a slave plantation.Patrick Henry's status as a wealthy slave owner is always described by his biographers as a contradiction, as a dissonance that needs serious study – and it does need serious study, but not as a contradiction. It's only a contradiction if you beforehand absolve Henry of racism – if you do that, you're left with the dissonance of a man who championed the liberty of some people while actively destroying the liberty of some other people, which does indeed seem like a contradiction. But you shouldn't do that. Despite his high rhetoric (the very last metric by which the integrity of a talented orator should be measured), Henry during his lifetime exhibited no remorse on the subject of slavery that can't easily be dismissed as simple two-faced deceit.His lifetime itself was filled with the drama of a new nation being born, and Jon Kukla has written an account of that drama that will fascinate readers and prove very useful to scholars. But the sooner we stop linking “Patrick Henry” and “liberty,” the better.