Speech to the Second Virginia Convention

Many revolutionary documents of this historical period invoke the image of slavery to describe the colonists’ status in relation to Great Britain. Henry says that the conflict between the colonists and England represents “nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery” (Paragraph 1). Freedom resides in victory and independence, slavery in defeat and subjugation to the Crown.

Henry later exclaims: “There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston!” (Paragraph 4). These are emphatic remarks that use specific images associated with bondage. He mentions chains and the sound they make as chained, enslaved people are made to walk across plains. These images recall both biblical and 18th-century practices. The colonies were tied into the network of chattel slavery that forcibly relocated captives mainly from Africa’s interior to the European colonies of the “New World” via the Atlantic Ocean. Those captives were chained and often marched to the wealthy coastal societies that exported them in bondage. Henry knew of these methods and voiced a vehement disdain for any type of slavery, and yet he was an enslaver, meaning that he, in the language of the time, “owned slaves” (it should be acknowledged that enslaved people were not mere commodities, even if society treated them as such).

If Henry was not directly referencing the trade of enslaved people in which he was complicit, he was drawing on well-known stories of bondage from the Bible, like the plight of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt, whom God apparently liberated. Henry and others would reference the Bible as an abolitionist text, but there is still much debate about the extent to which both New and Old Testament verses both endorse and condemn slavery. Either way, an anti-slavery rhetoric fueled American patriotism even as slavery had an established place in British/American society and culture.

Modern commentators often highlight the patriots’ hypocrisy in invoking slavery to describe British despotism while not outlawing slavery in the foundational documents that shaped American government. It was common among the era’s most famous speeches and texts to speak in generalities about freedom and slavery without addressing the lived experience of different demographics in colonial society. Most of the revolution’s significant leaders were wealthy white men who stood to gain the most from overthrowing British governmental control and assuming it themselves while upholding racial and gendered hierarchies long rooted in British (and American) society and culture.