we are indebted for the names of the principal men who stood
out against Patrick Henry's motion. "This produced," he says, "an
animated debate, in which Colonel Richard Bland, Mr. Nicholas, the
treasurer, and I think Colonel Harrison, of Berkeley, and Mr.
Pendleton, were opposed to the resolution, as conceiving it to be
premature;"[154] all these men being prudent politicians, indeed, but
all fully committed to the cause of the Revolution.

At first, this testimony may seem to leave us as much in the dark as
before; and yet all who are familiar with the politics of Virginia at
that period will see in this cluster of names some clew to the secret
of their opposition. It was an opposition to Patrick Henry himself,
and as far as possible to any measure of which he should be the
leading champion. Yet even this is not enough. Whatever may have been
their private motives in resisting a measure advocated by Patrick
Henry, they must still have had some reason which they would be
willing to assign. St. George Tucker tells us that they conceived his
resolutions to be "premature." But in themselves his resolutions, so
far from being premature, were rather tardy; they lagged weeks and
even months behind many of the best counties in Virginia itself, as
well as behind those other colonies to which in political feeling
Virginia was always most nearly akin.

The only possible explanation of the case seems to be found, not in
the resolutions themselves, but in the special interpretation put upon
them by Patrick Henry in the speech which, according to parliamentary
usage, he seems to have made in moving their adoption. What was that
interpretation? In the true answer to that question, no doubt, lies
the secret of the resistance which his motion encountered. For, down
to that day, no public body in America, and no public man, had openly
spoken of a war with Great Britain in any more decisive way than as a
thing highly probable, indeed, but still not inevitable. At last
Patrick Henry spoke of it, and he wanted to induce the convention of
Virginia to speak of it, as a thing inevitable. Others had said, "The
war must come, and will come,--unless certain things are done."
Patrick Henry, brushing away every prefix or suffix of uncertainty,
every half-despairing "if," every fragile and pathetic "unless,"
exclaimed, in the hearing of all men: "Why talk of things being now
done which can avert the war? Such things will not be done. The war is
c