William Wirt’s Tricky Task

In 1805, while practicing law in Virginia at the age of 32, Wirt embarked on an ambitious project: a biography of the legendary orator Patrick Henry, who died shortly before the turn of the century. Although Wirt had neither met Henry nor heard him speak, he assumed he could find sufficient material by consulting newspaper accounts, combing through Henry’s private papers, and communicating with Henry’s contemporaries.[i] But in 1815, ten years into his quest, he confessed to a friend he had come up empty:

It was all speaking, speaking, speaking. ’Tis true he could talk— ‘Gods how he could talk!’ but there is no acting ‘the while.’ …And then, to make the matter worse, from 1763 to 1789, covering all the bloom and pride of his life, not one of his speeches lives in print, writing or memory. All that is told me is, that on such and such an occasion, he made a distinguished speech…. [T]here are some ugly traits in H’s character, and some pretty nearly as ugly blanks. He was a blank military commander, a blank governor, and a blank politician, in all those useful points which depend on composition and detail. In short, it is, verily, as hopeless a subject as man could well desire.[ii]

Hamlet-like, Wirt questioned his ability to continue. “Then, surely, you mean to give it up?” he asked himself, but he could not abandon the project: “I have stept in so deep that I am determined, like Macbeth, to go on.” And so he did, but it wasn’t easy. “Fettered by a scrupulous regard to real facts,” he confessed, felt “like attempting to run, tied up in a bag. My pen wants perpetually to career and frolic it away.”[iii]

Yet Wirt’s pen needed room to roam. He knew he could not say that Henry “made a distinguished speech” and “keep saying this over, and over, and over again, without being able to give any account of what the speech was.” To celebrate Henry’s oratory, he would have to put it on display—and that meant placing words in his subject’s mouth. This gave him further cause for doubt: wouldn’t that be “making too free with the sanctity of history?” Yet there was no other way. Based only on distant memories of aging men, he imagined what his subject might have said—or perhaps what he wished Henry had said—despite his pledge to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, at least in this book.”[iv]