Why did Patrick Henry say "Give me liberty or give me death" ?

He actually NEVER said that --- it's a 'historical myth'.

Kind of like the Humphrey Bogart 'Play it again,Sam' thing -- never happened.

Oh, he said some things relatively similar ... but NEVER "Give me liberty or give me death".

It's funny because he is best known for that line he made in the House of Burgesses on March 23, 1775, in Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia.

I've stood at that very podium Henry gave this speech ....

42 years later, Henry's first biographer, William Wirt, working from oral histories, tried to reconstruct what Henry said.

It was William Wirt that used that line, not Henry.

Call it poetic license.

For 160 years Wirt's account was taken at face value.... but like George Washington's "I cannot tell a lie -- I chopped down the cherry tree." It was all just lovely faerie tales to make us see these hard working, hard drinking, philandering, sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes damned odd very REAL men into perfect sinless heroes rivaling Hercules or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

What Henry really DID say was full of stories of fear of Indian and slave revolts --which was a favorite of his -- in promoting military action against the British and that, according to the only written first-hand account of the speech, Henry also used some rather "graphically creative" name-calling that Wirt did not include in his heroic rendition.

Patrick Henry worked as a bartender as a young man and enjoyed a nice "stiff one" for breakfast.

What William Wirt MEANT to get across is that Henry was the type of man would would rather die than live any longer among the lack of liberty, personal freedom, and the British elitist attitudes towards them as secondary citizens.

He knew how to stir a crowd and urge men on. Now, if he'd just known how to lead them, maybe he could have freed the British also.....

Did I get a spit take with that one, Ammianus?

Because he was a long way away from anybody with a gun who might actually kill him for his treason - and remained so throughout the Revolutionary War.The one opportunity he had to do something in the field as soldier (the Gunpowder Incident) saw him take a payoff and retreat instead.

So,typical lawyers' bluster.