What good men may do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

The early Americans whom formed the American Republic had a intellectual kinship with the early Republican Romans. Like the Romans the nascent American society was largely a rural, agricultural society manned by tough, self sufficient farmers whom lived by strict moral codes. Harlow Unger (1931-present) describes the many American pioneers who lived the frontier life in the mid eighteenth century in the American colonies:

In North America settlers were isolated in the hamlets woods of America where they had lived cleared the land, felled large great forests, built homes and churches, planted their fields,hunted, fished, and fought off Indians marauders on their own, cooperating with each other,collectively governing themselves, electing their militia commanders and church pastors and turning to assemblies of elders to mediate occasional disputes. Self -reliant-often courageously so-they had thought and acted independently for four or more generations, seldom hearing, let alone responding to, utterances from the church, throne or Parliament in far off London¹.

The colonial Americans had little or no economic restrictions on them by the English Crown. The English government did put tariffs, duties on many of the colonist’s products but it was an invisible cost to the colonist producer/exporter/importers:

The charters of most of the colonies were quite similar, and permitted much freedom. That of Virginia may be taken for a type of all. It laid a duty of 21/2 per cent. on all goods imported by British subjects and 5 per cent. on all imported by foreigners. Food, clothing, arms implements and other necessaries might be sent from Britain to Virginia free [meaning without any duties] for seven years. The proceeds from the duties were to be applied to the support of the colony for twenty-one years, and were then to revert to
the King[2^].

By 1758 the English King was receiving all the duties from the colonies. An English King oppressing the American colonists as the Romans had an Etruscan King whom oppressed the Roman people.

The first rumblings of the American Revolution began with a Virginian backwoodsman lawyer named Patrick Henry (1736-1799) with a peculiar lawsuit which included the Church of England (Anglican Church) the Plaintiffs against Virginian tobacco farmers, the Defendants; the lawsuit was launched in 1760 and was known as the ‘Parson’s Cause’:

In the absence of currency, Virginia required each parish to pay the Anglican minister 16,000 pounds of tobacco per year, which the Anglican minister then sold in the open market…. Ministers earned more when tobacco prices rose and absorbed losses when they fell, but over the years they earned an average of about two pence per pound. In 1758, however, a catastrophic drought [climate change too in 1758, who knew? editor] devastated Virginia’s tobacco crop sending the crop to record prices but reducing tobacco stocks to levels that would have left planter’s bankrupt, but without any tobacco to sell to the market if they [the farmers paid pro rata to their respective acreages within the parish] delivered the 16,000 pounds to each priest. Virginia’s legislature-the House of Burgesses-passed the Twopenny Act to permit each parish to pay its minister in cash instead of tobacco at the historical average rate: two pence per pound … ²

However, the Virginia Burgess under was not a solid fiduciary agent for the English Crown . Please read footnote #3 for a for an example what malfeasance took place in its ‘hallowed halls’³.

Anyways, the English Parliament voided the “Twopenny Act” executed by the Virginia Burgess (the Virginia State assembly) in 1760. After the act was voided the top Anglican Reverend James Maury (1717-1769) took the farmers to court and won the right to be compensated for what the 16,000 pounds of tobacco would have brought in coin during the fevered tobacco market of 1758. Reverend Maury won the case. A second trial was planned to establish what exact monetary damages the farmers would have to pay the Anglican ministers.

The desperate farmers turned to young, fiery Patrick Henry to represent them at the ‘damages’ trial. It was a much larger crowd than usual in the Hanover County Courthouse as the farmers were anxious on behalf of their pocketbooks.

At the time the Anglican church was the only recognized religious body as it was England’s national church; only the Anglican church had the power to tax the American colonists. Other American religions, Baptists, Presbyterian, Catholic et al were not allowed to tax.

Patrick Henry was fortunate as he had a friendly six man jury on the ‘damages’ trial – one juror was actually one of the farmers that would have to pay damages to the ministers if awarded! At the trial on December 1, 1763, In his opening speech Henry’s went full Old Testament on the Anglican minister’s metaphorical behinds,

We have a heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy but how is that manifested? Do they manifest their zeal in the cause of religion and humanity by practicing the mild and benevolent precepts of the Gospel of Jesus? Do they feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Oh, no gentlemen! Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these rapacious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoe-cake [cornbread], from the widow and her orphaned children their last milch cow! The last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in [pregnant] woman ⁴

Patrick Henry’s oratory had stirred the crowd. The court attendees were focused on his every word as one seldom had observed these type of attacks against government and Royal authority especially in a courtroom.

Henry, encouraged by the crowd’s cheers , went even further. He claimed King George III had, by sanctioning the English Parliament’s annulment of the Twopenny act,

degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all rights to his subject’s obedience to his order of annulment !! ⁵

The Anglican ministers and their backers yelled inside the court , “Traitor, Traitor” ⁶; however, the majority of the crowd remained steadfast behind young, eloquent Patrick Henry.

The jury deliberated for all of five minutes, returned to the court then awarded damages to Reverend Maury: the award was one penny.

Reverend Maury’s lawyers cried out and demanded a mistrial. No luck, the justices dismissed the motion unanimously⁷.

Patrick Henry had become, America’s Cicero⁸!

[1^]: “Lion of Liberty”, Harlow Giles Unger, 2010, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pages 31-32. [2^]: The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1892, page 79. [3^]: John Robinson (1705-1766) was the Virginia Speaker of the House as well as the colony Treasurer since 1735. Robinson was the foremost politician in Virginia and an extremely wealthy planter. Over the years colleagues, other farmers, family connections asked Robinson for loans, mainly when there were poor tobacco harvests.

> With the colony’s funds at his disposal, Robinson started making loans from the [Virginia] treasury, fully prepared to cover any losses with funds from his own, seemingly 
> infinite fortune-until the Seven Years’ War [1757-1763] reduced it to a dangerous finite amount.  As he took the speaker’s chair he was, ‘sensible that his deficit to the 
> public was become so enormous that a discovery soon will take place’, and he and his colleagues in the House-all of them his debtors-proposed creation of a public loan office 
> with 240,000 pounds that the colony would borrow from Britain, in part to cover the losses the colonial treasury has suffered from Robinson’s malfeasance

Eventually, Patrick Henry ran the old fraud Robinson out of the Burgess.

Source: “Lion of Liberty”, Harlow Giles Unger, 2010, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, page 36.

[4^]: Ibid, pg. 23. [5^]: Ibid, page 24. [6^]: Actually, Patrick Henry was not conspiring with a foreign government which is the definition of treason, like Benedict Arnold (1741-1801) who, later, did just that with Britian. Henry, being under the powers of the English Crown at the time of this statement, his ‘crime’, if it was a crime, would have been sedition, not treason. [7^]: “Lion of Liberty”, Harlow Giles Unger, 2010, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, page 25. [8^]: A portrait of the young Patrick Henry as well a short synopsis of his life from the Library of Virginia: