[Patrick Henry's landed estate was in Henry County, Virginia. I too was
raised in a county named for my family, PoorAssJews County, California.]
He was on of those who wrote the US Constitution and represented, not the people, though they often claimed to (politicians were hypocritical liars then too), but country gentlemen like the Virginia aristocracy, i.e themselves.
The liberal democrats like Henry and Jefferson wanted a weak central government run by Southern aristocrats which would not be able to impose direct taxes and most of all not be able to interfere with slavery. A government composed of people like, say, Jefferson and his class.
The Federalists, led by Hamilton and the New Englanders and New Yorkers, wanted a strong central government that could create a positive business climate for commerce and banking. It was mere coincidence that they and their friends were engaged in commerce and banking. They wanted to impose taxes to pay for infrastructure like the Erie Canal, turnpikes, harbors, and suppression of the Indians. They wanted a strong government to limit and eventually suppress the slave trade.
Now we have come to an era when everybody quotes one Founding Father or another for some principle or another as though the Founders were unified and agreed on anything. They agreed on absolutely nothing. They only reason they were able to stick together at all was the personal prestige and leadership of George Washington. Without Washington they would have been defeated, the British army would have rounded them all up and hung them, just as Franklin predicted.
In modern times the libertarians call on the Constitution to give freedom to business against the interest of the common people. Completely wrongheaded and false. Similarly, the liberals call on the Constitution for a strong government to regulate business. Equally wrong. The fact is that the situation of American business and banking is now so far from when it was just getting started in the near-wilderness of 1787 that the comparison is meaningless. American business and banking are a colossus that bestrides the world. Slavery has been gone for a century and a half and the slave trade even longer. So the reasons for wanting a strong or a weak government in 1787 are meaningless today.
Which means, to me at least, that quoting the Founders for this purpose or that is doubly meaningless. They were all over the map on every issue and fought bitterly over every word and phrase in the constitution. Patrick Henry, who did as much as anyone to get the Revolution underway, "smelt a rat" and refused to even attend the Constitutional Convention. On the other side of the question, it is meaningless to try and figure out what Jefferson or Adams would have thought of tapping cellphones or abortion or racial equality. Those things would be inconceivable to them. So I think we have to look to how we the living want to govern our country and not worry too much about what the Founders would have thought about the issues that divide us. The real fact is that they would not have thought anything at all. They couldn't have.
