"Patrick Henry is generally treated as a second-string Founding Father. He didn't write-or even sign-the Declaration of Independence. He didn't write the Constitution. Instead, fearing that it allocated too much power to a centralized government, he did all he could to defeat it. He was not a Revolutionary military hero. He did not explain lightning, invent bifocals, take Paris by diplomatic storm, or write an autobiography that has become a classic in American literature."
"What Patrick Henry did above all was talk-and get talked about. He astonished his listeners as the most compelling public speaker they had ever encountered. He was, John Adams proclaimed, the Demosthenes of his age. Thomas Jefferson hailed him as "the greatest orator that ever lived." In the opinion of Edmund Randolph, the country's first attorney general, Henry's eloquence "unlocked the secret springs of the human heart, robbed danger of all its terror, and broke the keystone in the arch of royal power.""
Patrick Henry emerged as a prominent Virginian leader who never authored or signed the Declaration of Independence and opposed the Constitution as concentrating power in a central government. He stayed in Virginia after 1775, serving five terms as governor and never returning to national office. He was not a military commander, inventor, scientist, or literary autobiographer. He attended the First and Second Continental Congresses but made little mark there. His principal influence came from extraordinary public speaking, which contemporaries like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph praised as decisive in galvanizing support for the Revolution.
Read at The Atlantic
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