Give me liberty or give me death. It is without
a doubt the most fairest sequence of seven words
in the history of the American Revolution. It
really is. It's the ultimate rock star anthem
of 1775. I mean, you hear that line and you instantly
picture Patrick Henry. He's standing in a church
pew, veins popping in his neck, fist in the air.
Rallying the troops against the British Empire.
Exactly. It's the definitive line in the sand
moment for the country. It is. It's the moment
the revolution arguably became inevitable. But
here's where things get a bit complicated. Oh,
I love when things get complicated. Right. Well,
what if I told you that while this sentiment
was very real, The specific recording of that
speech, the text that we all memorized in school,
is actually something of a remix created decades
later. See, this is exactly why I love these
deep dives. You take something everyone assumes
is just set in stone, and you realize it's actually
a lot more fluid. Very fluid. So for all of you
listening today, we are unpacking the myth and
the reality of Patrick Henry's famous cry. We've
got a great stack of sources here. Historical
accounts, 19th century biographies, even some
analysis of 18th century theater. Yes. The theater
aspect is wild. Right. So our mission is to figure
out what actually happened on March 23, 1775.
And perhaps even more importantly, we need to
ask, you know, does it even matter if he actually
said those specific words? Or is the myth more
powerful than the actual transcript? Ooh, that
is a philosophical curveball right out of the
gate. I like it. But before we get to the conspiracy
theories about who wrote what and the whole remix
accusation, we really have to set the scene.
Because this speech didn't just happen in a vacuum.
No, and it didn't happen in a comfortable legislative
hall either. Not at all. So the date is March
23, 1775. The location is St. John's Episcopal
Church in Richmond, Virginia. This was the second
Virginia Convention. And the reason they are
meeting in a church in Richmond rather than the
Capitol building in Williamsburg is because it
just wasn't safe, right? Exactly. Williamsburg
was where the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, was
stationed. The tensions with the British were
already so high that the colonial leaders felt
they needed to move inland. Get away from the
immediate reach of the British authorities. Right.
So they packed themselves into this church. And
the room is full of absolute heavy hitters. Our
sources note that future presidents George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson are sitting right there.
Richard Henry Lee is there. It's a packed house.
But based on the accounts, the mood wasn't exactly
let's go to war. Far from it. That's the key
context we often forget when we look back. We
look back with hindsight and think of the revolution
was a foregone conclusion. Sure. But in March
1775, Most of the men in that room were moderates.
I mean, they were wealthy, established landowners.
They had a massive amount to lose. They were
terrified of treason charges, because if they
declare war and lose, they don't just get fined.
No, they hang. Right. Precisely. Yeah. So the
prevailing mood was caution. There were people
arguing that they should just send another petition
to the king, try to smooth things over one more
time. And that's when Patrick Henry stands up.
Right. He stands up to argue that, hoping for
peace at this stage, was a complete delusion.
He was basically the guy shaking them by the
shoulders saying, wake up. He was introducing
amendments to raise a militia independent of
royal authority. Basically, he was arguing for
the creation of a Virginian army to fight the
British. And his core argument was incredibly
simple. The war isn't coming. It's already here.
I have the text here, or at least the text we
think is right, and his rhetoric is just masterful.
He systematically strips away that comfort blanket
of peace. Yes. He says, the war has actually
begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north
will bring to our ears the clash of resounding
arms. That imagery is incredibly powerful. He's
referring to the situation up in Massachusetts
where the British were already clamping down
hard. Right. He's telling these comfortable Virginia
gentlemen, look, you might feel safe here in
Richmond, but the chains are already clanking
on the plains of Boston. He completely frames
it as a binary choice. It isn't a debate about
war versus peace anymore. It's freedom versus
slavery. And we really should pause on that word
slavery. Henry uses it repeatedly. He says, our
chains are forged. He asks. Is life so dear or
peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price
of chains and slavery? Yeah. It's a very specific
rhetorical device in the 18th century to describe
political subjugation. Which creates a really
complex and frankly uncomfortable irony given
that many men in that room, including Patrick
Henry himself, were enslavers. It is a heavy
contradiction that runs through the entire era.
But in the immediate context of this speech,
he's using the word to trigger their deepest
fear of losing autonomy. Now here is a detail
from our sources that I honestly had no idea
about before this deep dive. It wasn't just a
speech, it was a full -blown physical performance.
That was incredibly theatrical. Henry wasn't
just a lawyer, he was a master of the stage.
The sources mentioned that when he got to the
climax, the whole give me liberty part, he didn't
just shout it from his pew, he acted it out.
Yes. Allegedly he took a bone paper knife. Which
is essentially like a letter opener. Right, a
bone paper knife, and he literally plunged it
toward his own chest. He was imitating the Roman
patriot. Cato the Younger. Okay. In the classical
education of the 18th century, Cato was the ultimate
symbol of Republican virtue. He was the man who
famously committed suicide rather than submit
to the tyranny of Julius Caesar. So by mimicking
that stabbing motion with the letter opener,
Henry is visually signaling to everyone in the
room, I am the American Cato. I will die before
I submit. Exactly. It's a suicide gesture. He's
showing them that death is literally the only
alternative to liberty. I just try to imagine
seeing that in church. A guy pretending to stab
himself with a letter opener while screaming
about death. It must have been electrifying.
It was. And it worked. But the reaction in the
room wasn't immediate applause or cheering? No.
No. It was stunned silence. Profound silence,
the sources say. Edmund Randolph reported that
the convention sat in dead silence for several
minutes. They were just processing the absolute
gravity of what had just happened. George Mason,
who was usually the cool, logical head in the
room, he said later that the audience's passions
were not their own after Henry spoke. Not their
own. That is such a great description. It's like
he cast a spell over the whole congregation.
And there's this amazing anecdote in our materials
about a guy named Edward Carrington. Ah, yes.
Carrington wasn't even inside the church. It
was so packed that he was forced to listen. from
a window outside. He was so moved by what he
heard through that open window that he requested
to be buried at that exact spot. Yeah. And get
this, in 1810, he got his wish. He is literally
buried right where he stood listening to Patrick
Henry. That really highlights that this wasn't
just some logical argument for a militia. It
was a visceral, emotional event. It changed people
on a deeply personal level. Then it had immediate
results, too. The spell worked. The convention
passed the resolution. They voted to put the
colony into a posture of defense. Which, as 18th
century speak, forget the guns ready. Henry was
immediately named chairman of the committee to
build this new militia. But this is where the
story usually fades to black for most of us.
We think, OK, speech over. War starts a little
while later. But our sources detail something
called the gunpowder incident that happens just
a month later. And this isn't just a footnote.
It's like the action movie sequel to the courtroom
drama. It really is. It proves that Henry wasn't
just all talk. This happened in April 1775, right
after the battles of Lexington and Concord up
north. The news of those battles hadn't fully
arrived in Virginia yet. OK. But the governor
of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, realized things were
getting extremely dangerous. He saw these militias
forming just like Henry asked for. So he decided
to make a preemptive strike. He went after the
ammo. He did. He ordered Royal Navy sailors to
sneak into the magazine in Williamsburg in the
dead of night and remove the gunpowder. Which
effectively disarms the colony. You can have
all the muskets in the world, but without powder,
they're just heavy clubs. Exactly. And when Patrick
Henry heard about this, he didn't write a sternly
worded letter to the editor. He rallied his new
militia, the very one he just argued into existence,
and he marched on Williamsburg. He marched on
the king's representative. I mean, that is treason,
plain and simple. It was an absolute act of war.
As Henry's forces got closer to Williamsburg,
they were gathering more men along the way. Lord
Dunmore started to panic. He threatened to burn
the town down. He threatened to free the enslaved
population to fight the colonists. It was a completely
chaotic situation. But it didn't end in a shootout,
right? No, it didn't. It ended with a transaction.
A wealthy intermediary stepped in to cool things
down. A payment of 330 pounds was made to Henry
to pay for the stolen powder. I looked at the
notes on this. That is over fifty three thousand
pounds or about sixty thousand dollars in today's
money. That is a serious settlement. He was a
massive sum. Henry took the money, issued a formal
receipt and sent his militia home. But the symbolic
victory was what really mattered. He had forced
the royal governor to back down. Lord Dunmore
was fearing for his safety and eventually retreated
to a naval vessel off the coast. That effectively
ended royal control of the Virginia colony. So
the speech worked. It fired people up, they mobilized,
they got paid, and they kicked out the governor.
Patrick Henry eventually becomes the first governor
of the independent state. Case closed, history
written. I know that tone. Here comes the twist.
This is where we have to dive into the aha moment
regarding the text of the speech itself. We have
to talk about where those famous words, give
me liberty or give me death actually came from.
Okay, lay it on me. I assume someone was taking
notes in the church. That is the problem. The
speech was not written down when it was delivered
in 1775. Wait, no stenographer. No diary entry
from Jefferson saying Henry just dropped this
exact cool line. Not really, no. We have the
resolution that passed the actual legal text.
But the text of the speech itself, it vanished
into the air the moment he said it. So how do
we know what he said? We know it. Or rather,
we think we know it because of a man named William
Wirt. Wirt was a biographer who decided to write
the definitive life story of Patrick Henry. But
here is the major catch. Wirt published his biography
in 1817. Let me just do the math on that. 1775
to 1817. That is 42 years later. And Patrick
Henry had been dead for 18 years by the time
the book even came out. So Wirt couldn't exactly
call him up to fact check the draft. Precisely.
Wirt had to completely reconstruct the speech
based on the recollections of elderly men who
had heard it in their youth. He was writing letters
to these old revolutionaries asking, hey, do
you remember what he said four decades ago? I
can barely remember what I said in a meeting
last week. I can't imagine trying to reconstruct
a complex political speech from 40 years ago,
verbatim. That is exactly the issue historians
have. One of the people Wirt reached out to was
a man named St. George Tucker. Tucker really
tried to help. He sent Wirt a letter with his
recollection, but he explicitly admitted it was
in vain to try and recall the exact speech. Sure.
He provided about two paragraphs of his rough
memory just trying to capture the general spirit
of the argument. Two paragraphs. But the speech
we all read in the history books is pages long.
It's this sweeping masterpiece of rhetoric. It
is a masterpiece. Yeah. Because William Wirt
took those two paragraphs and he filled in the
blanks. He used his own incredible skill as a
writer and a lawyer. to create the long, flowery,
beautifully structured speech we know today.
So you're saying give me liberty or give me death
might be, what, William Wirt fan fiction? Fan
fiction might be a bit harsh, but historical
reconstruction is very accurate. Historians since
the 1970s have been very skeptical about the
authenticity of the Wirt version. They point
out that the style doesn't actually match Henry's
other known, documented speeches. How so? Was
Henry just not that polished normally? It's not
about polish. It's about the content of his typical
arguments. Whenever Henry argued for forming
militias in other contexts, he almost always
invoked the fear of Indian attacks on the frontier.
That was his go -to argument to scare people
into arming themselves. But Wirt's version leaves
that out entirely. Interesting. So Wirt strips
out the messy, uncomfortable frontier politics
and makes the whole thing purely about high -minded
liberty. Exactly. and a surviving firsthand account,
one of the very few partial notes we actually
have mentioned, that Henry used some pretty graphic
name -calling during the speech. Really? Yeah,
he was a rough, aggressive speaker when he needed
to be. But Wirt's version is very sanitized.
It reads more like a noble Roman senator speaking,
not a Virginia back country lawyer. So the most
famous speech in American history might be largely
the invention of a biographer writing almost
half a century later, just trying to create a
legend. That is the consensus of many modern
historians. Wirt wasn't just recording history.
He was building a national myth. But wait, if
Wirt made up the bulk of it... Where did he get
the specific line, give me liberty or give me
death? Did he just pull it out of thin air? Or
did Henry actually say that one part? This leads
us right to the cultural context of the time.
You see, that phrase or variations of it was
already in the cultural water, so to speak. It
wasn't an original invention by Henry or Wirt.
Who said it first then? Well, remember how we
talked about the bone knife and the suicide gesture
mimicking Cato? Right, the Roman guy. There was
a very direct link to a play called Cato, a tragedy,
which was written in 1713. So it was an old classic
by the time Henry was speaking. It was incredibly
popular in the American colonies. It was essentially
the Hamilton of its day. George Washington absolutely
loved it. He actually had to perform for the
troops at Valley Forge years later to boost their
morale. So everyone in that church would have
known this play. Most likely, yes. Yeah. And
here is the kicker. There is a line in act two
scene four of that play that goes it is not now
a time to talk of ought But chains or conquest
liberty or death liberty or death. It's right
there. It is right there So we have two distinct
possibilities one Patrick Henry who was already
acting out the suicide scene of Cato? Also quoted
the line from the play because he knew it would
perfectly resonate with his audience, which makes
total sense He's basically sampling the pop culture
of the day to make his point hit harder It's
exactly, or possibility, too. William Wirt, writing
40 years later, knew that Henry mimicked Cato.
So he just inserted the line from the play into
the written speech because it fit the theatrical
vibe he was trying to recreate. Either way, it
wasn't a brand new sentence. It was a deliberate
cultural reference. And it goes back even further
than that, too. You can trace similar sentiments
back to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 regarding
Scottish independence. Really? Yes. And handles
oratorio Judas MacMaeus. from 7046 has the explicit
line, resolve my sons on liberty or death. So
Patrick Henry or Wirt was tapping into a very
old, very established tradition. Liberty or death
is basically the Western shorthand for we are
the good guys fighting for freedom. It communicates
a specific set of values instantly. It completely
removes the gray area. There is no compromise,
only total victory or total erasure. But the
story doesn't stop in 1775 or even 1817. What
I found so fascinating in our sources is how
this specific phrase became a global virus of
rebellion. It just spreads everywhere. It truly
does. It totally transcends the American Revolution.
Once Wirt put it in print, it became a universal
slogan for resistance globally. The sources list
so many examples of this. During the French Revolution,
the famous motto liberty, equality, fraternity
was sometimes written as liberty, equality, fraternity,
or death. Which puts a much darker Robespierre
-style spin on it. It implies, join us or you
die. Then you have the Society of United Irishmen
in the 1790s using liberty or death as their
official slogan. Moving into South America, the
national anthem of Uruguay contains the line,
liberty or with glory to die. In Brazil, Emperor
Pedro I issued the famous cry from Ipiranga in
1822, which was independence or death. It seems
like every revolution needs this exact ultimatum.
It's binary. There is no third option. That is
exactly why it is so effective. It forces people
to pick a side right then and there. You see
in the Russian Civil War too, Nestor Makhno's
anarchist army in Ukraine used liberty or death
on their black flags. And it comes all the way
up to modern times. The sources mention Malcolm
X. Yes. His incredibly famous speech in 1964
called The Ballot or the Bullet. In that speech,
he riffs on this concept explicitly. He says,
it'll be liberty or it will be death. But he
adds a powerful twist. He says, the only difference
about this kind of death. it'll be reciprocal.
He's taking the Henry framework, that foundational
American myth, and claiming it directly for the
civil rights struggle. He's telling his audience,
we are just as American as Patrick Henry, and
we are willing to die and fight for the exact
same rights. And even more recently, we see it
in China. This was really surprising to find
in the research. It is stark. In 2012, a young
village official named Ren Jianyu was sentenced
to re -education through labor. And one of the
pieces of evidence the state used against him
was a t -shirt. A t -shirt? A t -shirt that simply
said, give me liberty or give me death, in Chinese.
That is incredible. A t -shirt with a quote from
1775 is used as literal evidence of subversion
in 2012. It shows how dangerous those words still
are. to authoritarian regimes today. And in 2022,
during the COVID -19 lockdown protests in Chungking,
our sources show a man was filmed shouting that
exact phrase repeatedly to a cheering crowd.
It's amazing. A lawyer in Virginia in 1775, or
maybe his biographer in 1817, puts these words
together. And 250 years later, they're being
used on the other side of the world to protest
a lockdown. It speaks to the absolute universality
of the human desire for autonomy. The specifics
change, whether it's British taxes, colonial
rule, segregation, lockdowns, but the core sentiment
remains exactly the same. So let's bring it all
back home for you listening. We have unpacked
the speech, the theatrical stabbing, the gunpowder
sequel, the ghostwriter controversy, and the
global tour of the phrase. It is quite a journey
for seven words. If you had to summarize the
reality of this myth, what is the headline here?
The headline is that the give me liberty or give
me death speech is a perfect storm of history
and memory. Patrick Henry definitely gave a fiery
speech that started a war. He definitely marched
for that gunpowder. But the specific words we
quote, they are highly likely a reconstruction.
A remix by William Wirt filtered heavily through
the pop culture of the 18th century, like the
play Cato. It's like a collaboration across time.
Henry provided the fire and Wirt provided the
poetry. That is a beautiful way to put it. Henry
lived the action, but Wert wrote the script that
we all remember. But it leaves us with that big
question you teased at the very beginning. If
Wert made up the best parts, is it a lie? This
is the provocative thought I want to leave you
with today. Does it actually matter if an audio
recording would have matched Wert's text? The
spirit of that speech burned itself into the
memory of everyone in that church. It changed
the course of history. It convinced a colony
to go to war. So the effect was entirely real,
even if the transcript wasn't. Exactly. Sometimes
a myth becomes more powerful and perhaps more
real in its consequences than the literal dry
facts of what was whispered or shouted on a given
day. The words, give me liberty or give me death,
capture the absolute truth of the moment, even
if they weren't the exact truth of the mouth.
That is definitely something for you to chew
on. History isn't just what happened. It's the
story we tell ourselves about what happened.
Thanks for taking this deep dive with us today.
Always a pleasure. And to you listening, next
time you hear a famous quote, maybe dig a little
deeper. You never know what historical remix
you might find. Catch you on the next deep dive.