Give Me Liberty: Saint John's Church, March 1775

The church sits at the crest of Church Hill on East Broad Street, a white-painted wooden building from seventeen forty-one, surrounded by an old churchyard. It is the oldest church in Richmond. On the twenty-third of March, seventeen seventy-five, it was the site of the Second Virginia Convention, a gathering of delegates who were trying to decide whether the colony of Virginia should prepare for war with Great Britain.

Patrick Henry had come from Hanover County. He was thirty-eight years old. The mood in the church was cautious.

Many delegates still hoped for reconciliation. Henry rose and argued that war was already upon them whether they wished it or not. His speech, reconstructed from notes by witnesses who were present, moved through a careful catalogue of British provocations and closed on a declaration that has outlasted almost every other phrase from the American founding.

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!

Those words, attributed to Henry by William Wirt in his eighteen seventeen biography and corroborated by others present, carried the room. Virginia voted to raise and arm a militia. The Revolution in Virginia had a date.

Saint John's was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-one. The church still holds a Sunday service every week. Every summer, actors re-enact the convention on the original grounds, Henry's speech delivered again in the same room where it was first heard.

The churchyard behind the building holds the graves of George Wythe, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and other figures from early Virginia. The hill itself, with its view of the river valley below, gives a sense of why the location mattered to those who gathered there.