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ADS, signed “P. Henry,” one page, 3.75 x 6, November 1, 1777. Handwritten document recording a financial settlement between Henry and his brother-in-law, Colonel William Christian of Virginia, a decorated officer who had served under Washington and was married to Henry’s sister Anne. Christian held a bond comprising two obligations: a debt of £145 owed to a party named Jones, and a valuation of £70 for an enslaved woman named Jenny and her child, together £215. Henry then calculates simple interest accrued from 1 February 1776 to 1 November 1777—a period of one year and nine months—adding £18.11.3 and bringing the total to £233.11.3. Below, in a settlement notation dated 1 November 1777, Henry records receipt of a horse valued at £75 and cash of £158.11.6, the account thereby discharged in full. He signs at the conclusion, adding "Teste," Latin for 'I witness.' Mounted to a same-size card and in very good to fine condition, with trimming to the edges; the upper left corner tip is detached, and held in place with a small piece of old tape on the back.
The named woman, Jenny, may correspond to an enslaved woman of the same name listed among the enslaved people in Henry’s Scotchtown household as early as 1768, though the identification cannot be confirmed. Her child goes unidentified entirely—subsumed into a single line item, appraised as a unit.
The dating gives the document particular historical force, the interest period beginning on February 1, 1776. By that spring, Patrick Henry—who had electrified the Virginia Convention the previous March with the cry 'Give me liberty, or give me death!'—was serving on the committee charged with drafting Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, the document that would proclaim to the world that all men are 'by nature equally free and independent.' By summer, those words had found their echo in Philadelphia: 'all men are created equal.' The interest period closes 1 November 1777, sixteen months after independence was declared. Jenny and her child are present throughout, as collateral.
Henry’s own writings show that he recognized the moral contradiction of slavery, even while continuing to participate in the institution. In a 1773 letter, he described slavery was a practice he could not justify and that it was 'repugnant' to Christianity, while admitting that he remained bound by the 'general inconvenience' of life in Virginia without enslaved labor. None of this anguish altered the arithmetic in Henry's calculations: Jenny—woman, mother, person—entered the ledger at seventy pounds.
Autograph documents of Patrick Henry are uncommon, and one that bears so directly, and so candidly, on the institution of slavery—reducing a named woman and her child to a line in a debt settlement, in the very year Henry was inscribing the language of universal liberty onto Virginia’s founding charter—is a document of singular historical resonance.
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