Program Information

Word of Patrick Henry’s speech spread though out the colonies. The phrase “liberty or death,” became a rallying cry for many Americans…even those who did not benefit from the revolution.

Liberty or Death is a production of the Community Idea Stations and the St. John's Church Foundation. When England taxed the American colonies to pay for the French and Indian war, the colonists became enraged and ardently resisted. What was at odds was the right of the colonists to govern and tax themselves versus Britain's absolute authority over its empire. In Virginia, Patrick Henry brought this issue to the forefront through many impassioned speeches to the colonial leaders in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Henry is most noted for the speech in which he decrees "give me liberty or give me death." Henry's immortal words spread throughout the colonies and became a rallying cry for revolution.

Transcript

Word of Patrick Henry’s speech spread though out the colonies. The phrase “liberty or death,” became a rallying cry for many Americans…even those who did not benefit from the revolution.

LAURANETT LEE
“The enslaved population heard also and later when Gabriel Prosser rebelled against slavery just outside of Richmond, one of the men that was captured referenced to Patrick Henry and he inverted the phrase and said “death or liberty.”

“One of the consequences was the everyone began to think about freedom for themselves in a different kind of way. Women and enslaved people and Native Americans, too, believe that this was the time to that everyone needed to push ahead and fight for their rights to be equal in this new society.”

SARAH MEACHUM
“Their rhetoric put into motion events they could not have suspected. The African-American civil rights movement, the women rights movement, and many of these movements used the rhetoric “all men are created equal.” The Founding Fathers put into motion something that really, in many ways, spun out of anything they have ever dreamed of.”

Virginia Standards