had already drawn a proper Memorial against the Sugar Act and
were now, as they leisurely gathered at Williamsburg in the early
weeks of May, 1765, unwilling to protest again at present, for
they had not as yet received any reply to their former dignified
and respectful petition.

To this assembly of the burgesses in 1765, there came from the
back-country beyond the first falls of the Virginia rivers, the
frontier of that day, many deputies who must have presented, in
dress and manners as well as in ideas, a sharp contrast to the
eminent leaders of the aristocracy. Among them was Thomas
Marshall, father of a famous son, and Patrick Henry, a young man
of twenty-nine years, a heaven-born orator and destined to be the
leader and interpreter of the silent "simple folk" of the Old
Dominion. In Hanover County, in which this tribune of the people
was born and reared and which he now represented, there were, as
in all the backcountry counties, few great estates and few
slaves, no notable country-seats with pretension to architectural
excellence, no modishly dressed aristocracy with leisure for
reading and the cultivation of manners becoming a gentleman.
Beyond the tide-water, men for the most part earned their bread
by the sweat of their brows, lived the life and esteemed the
virtues of a primitive society, and braced their minds with the
tonic of Calvin's theology--a tonic somewhat tempered in these
late enlightened days by a more humane philosophy and the
friendly emotionalism of simple folk living close to nature.

Free burgesses from the back-country, set apart in dress and
manners from the great planters, less learned and less practiced
in oratory and the subtle art of condescension and patronage than