Hanover County: Where Patrick Henry Found His Voice

Hanover County was carved from New Kent County on November twenty-sixth, seventeen twenty, and named for the Elector of Hanover, the man who would soon become King George the First of Britain. For half a century, it was tobacco country: rolling red-clay hills, Anglican parishes, a courthouse crossroads, and very little else to mark it on the map of history.

Then came Patrick Henry.

Henry was born at Studley, a modest plantation about a mile and a half from that courthouse, on May twenty-ninth, seventeen thirty-six. He came of age in a county that was deeply skeptical of ecclesiastical power, and that skepticism shaped him. In seventeen sixty-three, a legal dispute called the Parson's Cause turned that courthouse into a stage. Anglican ministers were suing for back pay after the king overturned a Virginia law that let their salaries be paid at a lower rate. The twenty-seven-year-old Henry, arguing for the county's defense, turned a routine contract case into a sermon on the limits of royal authority. When the jury awarded the parson one penny, the crowd outside the courthouse cheered.

Henry never stopped practicing that voice. He moved to Scotchtown, a large plantation just northwest of here, where in seventeen seventy-five he appeared before the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond and delivered the line no schoolchild ever forgets: "Give me liberty, or give me death."

The old Hanover Courthouse still stands. Built in the early seventeen forties, it is one of the oldest courthouses in continuous use in the entire United States, a National Historic Landmark whose brickwork predates the nation it helped inspire. Inside those walls, a young lawyer learned that a well-timed argument, delivered with enough fire, could change the direction of an empire.