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The Battle for Virginia's 5th District
Mark Kevin Lloyd
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The Battle for Virginia's 5th District
Mark Kevin Lloyd
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About This Book
New from Broadside Books' Voices of the Tea Party. As a child, Mark Lloyd's grandmother always told him that he was a descendant of Patrick Henry. Though he's still trying to document the connection, he likes to believe that he is guided by Henry's spirit. As a resident of Campbell County, Virginiaâthe county of Henry's final homesteadâLloyd follows Henry's example every day, dedicating his life to ensure the liberty Henry fought for would be passed on to his own children and grandchildren. As an active grassroots Tea Party participant in the political elections in Virginia's 2010 Fifth Congressional District, Lloyd describes the Republican primary battles between the tea party and Establishment Republicans, the somewhat awkward General Election alliance between the two, and the challenge of holding the victor of the General Electionâan Establishment Republican who defeated an incumbent Democrat only with tea party supportâaccountable to the principles that brought him to Washington in January of 2011.
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The Battle for Virginiaâs 5th District
When I was a child growing up in Texas in the early 1960s, my grandmother often told me that I have the blood of Patrick Henry in my veins. She knew this to be so because her mother and grandmother had told her, and the strong oral tradition of our family reinforced that idea again and again. We were a working-class family, descendants of backcountry Virginians who had migrated first to Tennessee and then to Texas. Years later, I would try to confirm her story. My research has brought me tantalizingly close to a connectionâthe same county in eighteenth-century Virginiaâbut I have never been able to completely confirm or disprove the claim. Still, with seventeen children and fifty-six grandchildren, Patrick Henry did his part to populate the frontier.
But whether I share a portion of his DNA or not, I certainly share Henryâs ardent libertarian convictions. As I look back at my own life, and the events that drew me to the Tea Party movement, I am left with one inescapable conclusion. The spirit of Patrick Henry has guided me.
When we think of the Founders, we often envision a band of like-minded men and women who respected each other and worked harmoniously toward a common purpose. This wasnât true of the Founders, and, as my experience has shown, it isnât always true of the Tea Party. Yet both groups were very effective at accomplishing important common goals.
Patrick Henry came from the rough side of town. His father was a Scottish military officer, and his mother, descended from the Virginia aristocracy, was considered to have married well beneath her. They lived on the Virginia frontier, in the midst of the border-country Scots-Irish who filled out the empty spaces on the edges of America in the early eighteenth century.
We think of Patrick Henry as an educated man, because of the famous speech in which he said âgive me liberty or give me death,â and because he was a successful lawyer. But like many of us, Henry was very skilled in one specific arena, and not at all in others. His great skill was the ability to speak extemporaneously. He was spellbinding, able to capture the hearts and minds of his audience by appealing to their deepest concepts of honor and duty. And yet, he really wasnât much of a scholar. He was said to be such a poor writer that he could barely draw up even the simplest legal documents. But he succeeded as an attorney because he knew how to speak before juries of the common folk. They liked him, related to him, and trusted him.
Henry was known as a radical in his day, and his Anti-Federalist positions caused those who wanted a strong central government constant irritation. He believed that the states should be sovereign, and would not relent in his opposition to the Constitution until the first ten amendments were accepted and added to the document. Jefferson and Madison despised him personally and, because of his lack of education, looked down on him as a social inferior. Henry returned the compliment, considering them pampered, overly theoretical dilettantes. This mutual contempt stood between these men for decades, and it is said that when Henry died in 1799, sighs of relief could be heard from Monticello and Montpelier.
Henry was a true revolutionary who always looked for opportunities to take action and to speak in support of his positions. His oratory was powerful and influential, able to reach into the core of the listeners and inspire them to join the cause, or to take his positions. Even though he had failed at business, was known as an idler, and was an irritant to his fellow Founders, they admired his demonstrated ability to get things done.
In 1765 Henry proposed the Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions, which are considered by many historians to be the most anti-British legislation passed by the colonies. It was one of the acts that lit the decade-long fuse that ultimately ignited the Revolution. Henry took advantage of the fact that several of those loyal to the crown were absent when he proposed the resolutions, and he succeeded in getting them passed. During his address to the Virginia House of Burgesses, the loyalists accused this young and inexperienced legislator of treason; they shouted at him and demanded his expulsion. He simply said, âIf this be treason, then make the most of it.â
As a patriot, I naturally admire Jefferson and Madison. But I relate more to Patrick Henryâs hands-on style and his bias toward action. Perhaps he did habitually fail to plan and prepare, but his masterful seizing of the p...