R Street Echoes Patrick Henry’s Call
“Give me liberty or give me death!”
Sunday, March 23, 2025 marks 250 years since Patrick Henry’s famous declaration. As America approaches its 250th birthday in 2026, R Street is celebrating our founding-era principles and how they intersect with today’s policy challenges. Explore more from our policy teams.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Patrick Henry stained the page of history with his famous declaration: “Give me liberty or give me death!” Addressing the Second Virginia Convention, Henry debated with his fellow delegates if their circumstances justified armed resistance to Great Britain. The stakes were literally life or death, yet Henry saw liberty as worth any price: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
Thanks to our founders’ sacrifices, Americans today enjoy the blessings of liberty without risking their lives to secure it. However, ensuring that future generations inherit that same freedom is a perpetual challenge. Liberty does not preserve itself; it requires constant vigilance, principled leadership, and a government that reflects the will of the people. R Street believes, as Henry did, that defending liberty is a cause worth fighting for.
To preserve liberty, a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. In Henry’s time, that meant casting off the rule of a distant, unresponsive monarch. Today, it means ensuring that every American can participate meaningfully in free and fair elections. R Street champions election reforms that make government more efficient, representative, and democratic. This includes policies that remove unnecessary barriers to participation, ensure secure and efficient election administration, and increase the representativeness of our elected officials.
While we do not face the threat of war, the battle of ideas in America has reached a fever pitch. Polarization threatens to tear the country apart, and hyper-partisans would rather see their ideology enforced than liberty prevail.
In this climate, it would be easy to retreat into partisan camps. Doing so would certainly bring greater popularity and influence, but Henry warned against such cowardice: “Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.”
At R Street, principles matter more than popularity. Real solutions—not blind political allegiance—should guide policy decisions, as Henry’s words remind us: “Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.”
Notably, while Henry believed that the just cause of liberty would ensure divine favor and righteous might, he never guaranteed success to his wavering colleagues. His speech made no allusion to strategic advantage or some military reason why the colonists might expect to prevail. Instead, he justified his call to arms as simply the right thing to do:
If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight!
Recognizing that liberty is not self-sustaining, R Street echoes Henry’s call: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”