Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” Speech

At the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, Patrick Henry argued that petitions had failed and that Virginia should organise a militia. The exact wording was reconstructed years later, but the speech became an emblem of revolutionary resolve.

Henry’s public defence of liberty coexisted with slaveholding and with private family responsibilities largely absent from patriotic legend. His wife Sarah suffered severe mental illness and was confined at home rather than placed in the colonial public hospital.

Or Give Me Death imagines the Henry household through the daughters who manage secrecy, illness and political danger while their father’s public rhetoric enters national memory.