and love, may unite all our different
persuasions, as brethren who must perish or triumph
together; and I trust that the time is not far distant when
we shall greet each other as the peaceable possessors of
that just and equal system of liberty adopted by the last
convention, and in support of which may God crown our arms
with success.

I am, gentlemen, your most obedient and very humble servant,

P. HENRY, JUN.[258]

August 13, 1776.

On the day on which Governor Henry was sworn into office, the
convention finally adjourned, having made provision for the meeting of
the General Assembly on the first Monday of the following October. In
the mean time, therefore, all the interests of the State were to be in
the immediate keeping of the governor and privy council; and, for a
part of that time, as it turned out, the governor himself was disabled
for service. For we now encounter in the history of Patrick Henry, the
first mention of that infirm health from which he seems to have
suffered, in some degree, during the remaining twenty-three years of
his life. Before taking full possession of the governor's palace,
which had to be made ready for his use, he had likewise to prepare for
this great change in his life by returning to his home in the county
of Hanover. There he lay ill for some time;[259] and upon his recovery
he removed with his family to Williamsburg, which continued to be
their home for the next three years.

The people of Virginia had been accustomed, for more than a century,
to look upon their governors as personages of very great dignity.
Several of those governors had been connected with the English
peerage; all had served in Virginia in a vice-regal capacity; many had
lived there in a sort of vice-regal pomp and magnificence. It is not
to be supposed that Governor Henry would be able or willing to assume
so much state and grandeur as his predecessors had done; and yet he
felt, and the people of Virginia felt, that in the transition from
royal to republican forms the dignity of that office should not be
allowed to decline in any important particular. Moreover, as a
contemporary observer mentions, Patrick Henry had been "accused by the
big-wigs of former times as being a coarse and common man, and utterly
destitute of dignity; and perhaps he wished to show them that they
were mistaken."[260] At any rate, by the testimony