Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry's most famous speech was not his first act of defiance. In 1763, as a young lawyer in the case known as the Parson's Cause, he told a Virginia jury that a king who struck down the colony's good laws forfeited his subjects' obedience. Two years later, newly seated in the House of Burgesses, he pushed through resolutions against the Stamp Act.

In 1776 Virginia made him its first governor under the new state constitution. Then, in 1788, he turned the same voice against the federal Constitution. At the Virginia ratifying convention he argued for weeks that it gave the national government too much power and the people too few protections. He lost the vote, but the demand for a Bill of Rights that he helped drive was answered in 1791.

Americans remember him for one sentence from March 1775. The rest of his career shows he meant it in more than one direction: liberty from Parliament first, and then from any government that grew too strong.

The painting puts Henry on a raised platform in a tall, paneled hall, his right arm thrown up toward an arched window and his left hand pressed flat to his chest. The delegates below have turned in their seats to watch him, and one man at the back has a fist in the air.