“Liberty or death!” That was the stark choice that Patrick Henry proposed to his fellow Virginia delegates 250 years ago today. It was a challenge the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary Army accepted, and thus a new nation was born.
How remarkable that it has been two and a half centuries since a small group of farmers, shopkeepers, politicians, mariners, and slaves banded together into a ragtag army to take on the world’s most powerful empire on behalf of liberty. The Revolution was years in the making, but electrifying speeches from fiery Patriot orators in the months leading up to Lexington and Concord spurred the political conflict to a military crisis, and not one of these speeches is as famous as that delivered by Patrick Henry on March 23, 1775, in St. John’s Church.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Henry asked the delegates. The Second Virginia Convention was meeting in the Richmond church since Virginia’s royal governor Lord Dunmore, faithful to instructions from Britain, was preventing the House of Burgesses from convening for some months. Part of the reason seems to have been that this allowed legal authorization for the colony’s militia to lapse, theoretically leaving the colony unprotected — and therefore more vulnerable to British tyranny. It is always a prime goal of tyrants to try and ensure that the people are unarmed/unprotected. That, fortunately, did not succeed as the British hoped in the American colonies in 1775.
Not everyone at the Convention was convinced that war was the answer, of course, though it is interesting that one of Henry’s auditors at the Convention was George Washington, who would go on to lead the Revolutionaries to victory. Other famed delegates included Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Harrison V. At the convention, Henry’s proposal to put Virginia “into a posture of Defence” was considered too provocative, too militaristic. Did the colonists really want war?
So on March 23, lawyer and statesman Patrick Henry stood up and thundered forth a speech that would become one of the most famous in American history. “The questing before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery,” Henry stated bluntly. He left no gray area, no room for compromise. Great Britain had been ignoring or oppressing the colonies for years. At this point, it was either war or submission. The “illusions of hope” could not hide the “painful truth.”
Borrowing Biblical language, appropriate to the church setting, Henry said, “Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?…I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.” Experience told him that those leaders who trampled liberty in the past would continue to do so. And already were the British sailors and soldiers being concentrated in key colonial towns and ports to keep the populace in line.
23 March 1775 - On this day, Patrick Henry gave his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention during the run up to the American Revolutionary War. His words convinced delegates to vote in favour of Virginian troops joining the fight. pic.twitter.com/TJ4WF9Drso
— History of War (@HistoryofWarMag) March 23, 2025
Henry, at least, had no illusions. “If we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained–we must fight!” he cried. Divine justice was on their side, he argued. “There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.” And in conclusion, Henry declaimed the famous words:
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Virginia subsequently went to war with the other colonies against Britain, and the rest is history. “It is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry,” Thomas Jefferson reflected later on his fellow Virginian’s influence. “He was before us all in maintaining the spirit of the Revolution.”
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a reenactment of Henry’s speech in the Richmond church where he delivered it back in 2022. That was in the middle of Joe Biden’s presidency, when we patriots were all witnessing the lawless violation of rights and confident crisis-making of the Biden administration with gloom and trepidation. Yet We the People, like the Patriots of 1775, took a stand for freedom in the 2024 election — and won. And appropriately, Donald Trump issued a proclamation in honor of this year’s 250th anniversary of Henry’s history-making speech, ordering that March 23 be a day of celebration.
St. John’s in Richmond, where 250 years ago Patrick Henry delivered his “Liberty or Death” speech pic.twitter.com/kzJdwg7e3X
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) March 23, 2025
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But the work of restoring our Constitution and protecting our liberties is only beginning, and each one of us has a part to play, either at the city, state, or local levels, from education to political campaigning to public service. The Deep State is reeling, but not defeated; our neighbors are waking up to the truth, but still the propagandists desperately rave on, trying to drown out that truth.
Like Henry, may each of us step up, take responsibility for our liberties and our communities, and decide that life is not so dear, nor peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery — we take up Henry’s challenge, and we too choose liberty or death!
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