adopted, on Patrick Henry's motion, a resolution authorizing the
governor to convene the next meeting of the legislature at some other
place than Richmond, in case its assembling in that city should "be
rendered inconvenient by the operations of an invading enemy,"[320] a
resolution reflecting their sense of the peril then hanging over the
State.

Before the legislature could again meet, events proved that it was no
imaginary danger against which Patrick Henry's resolution had been
intended to provide. On the 2d of January, 1781, the very day on which
the legislature had adjourned, a hostile fleet conveyed into the James
River a force of about eight hundred men under command of Benedict
Arnold, whose eagerness to ravage Virginia was still further
facilitated by the arrival, on the 26th of March, of two thousand men
under General Phillips. Moreover, Lord Cornwallis, having beaten
General Greene at Guilford, in North Carolina, on the 15th of March,
seemed to be gathering force for a speedy advance into Virginia. That
the roar of his guns would soon be heard in the outskirts of their
capital, was what all Virginians then felt to be inevitable.

Under such circumstances, it is not strange that a session of the
legislature, which is said to have been held on the 1st of March,[321]
should have been a very brief one, or that when the 7th of May
arrived--the day for its reassembling at Richmond--no quorum should
have been present; or that, on the 10th of May, the few members who
had arrived in Richmond should have voted, in deference to "the
approach of an hostile army,"[322] to adjourn to Charlottesville,--a
place of far greater security, ninety-seven miles to the northwest,
among the mountains of Albemarle. By the 20th of May, Cornwallis
reached Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of Richmond; and shortly
afterward, pushing across the James and the Chickahominy, he encamped
on the North Anna, in the county of Hanover. Thus, at last, the single
county of Louisa then separated him from that county in which was the
home of the governor of the State, and where was then convened its
legislature,--Patrick Henry himself being present and in obvious
direction of all its business. The opportunity to bag such game, Lord
Cornwallis was not the man to let slip. Accordingly, on Sunday, the 3d
of June, he dispatched a swift expedition under Tarleton, to surprise
and capture the members of the legislature, "to seize on the person of
the