Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry was a Virginia lawyer, planter and politician born in 1736 who became one of the most recognisable orators of the American Revolution. He first gained wide attention through the Parsons’ Cause in 1763 and entered the House of Burgesses soon afterwards. His Virginia Stamp Act resolutions of 1765 pushed resistance to parliamentary taxation further than many contemporaries wished. At the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775, he argued for military preparedness in the speech later remembered for the phrase “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Henry served in the Continental Congress and became the first governor of independent Virginia, holding office from 1776 to 1779 and again from 1784 to 1786. In the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 he opposed the proposed federal Constitution because he believed it created a dangerously powerful central government without sufficient protection for individual and state rights. He later declined several high offices and died at Red Hill in 1799. The famous wording of his 1775 speech survives through later reconstruction rather than a contemporary verbatim transcript.

Ann Rinaldi’s Or Give Me Death places Henry’s public revolutionary career beside a fictionalised domestic narrative centred on his daughters and the severe illness of his first wife, Sarah Shelton Henry. The novel uses the approach to the 1775 speech as its public chronology while imagining conversations, fears and family tensions for which the historical record is much thinner. Henry’s politics are therefore factual scaffolding for a story primarily concerned with the costs of secrecy inside his household.