The story
If you've driven Route 301 north of Richmond, you've probably passed it: a small brick courthouse in Hanover. Ghost hunters tour it after dark, and people on those tours say they've heard things they can't explain. The strangest story about the building is on paper, though, and it involves a minister, a jury, and one penny.
In 1763, in Hanover County, Virginia, a minister went to court for his pay. He won. Then a jury decided how much he was owed: one penny. The lawyer who argued against him was a young man named Patrick Henry, and the courthouse where it happened is still standing.
The man who lost
Most of what we know comes from the man on the losing end. His name was James Maury. Eleven days after the hearing, on December 12, 1763, he wrote to a fellow minister, John Camm, about what had happened.
Maury had plenty to say about the jury and about Henry, and he reported the penny verdict in full. His letter is still read today. It's worth keeping in mind as the story unfolds that it was written by the man who lost.
Why a minister sued
To see why a minister was in court over money, you have to start with tobacco. In colonial Virginia, ministers' salaries were set in tobacco. That worked until the crops failed. When harvests were bad, the price of tobacco climbed, and what a minister was owed became worth far more.
So in 1758 Virginia passed a law that let those debts be paid at a fixed rate instead. The ministers didn't receive the difference. Then, in 1759, the Crown struck the law down. That opened the door to lawsuits for what ministers had lost, and Maury sued his own parish.
The hearing
The case was heard at the Hanover County courthouse. The stone above its arcade says 1735; state historians date the building to about 1740.
That November the court agreed with Maury. The Crown had struck down the law, so his claim held. All that was left was to decide how much he was owed. Arguing for the defense was Patrick Henry, then twenty-seven.
On December 1 a jury was called. Maury's letter is unhappy about who sat on it. He wrote that the sheriff's first choices were excused, and that the men he picked instead were not the kind the court had asked for. Maury objected to one of them as a surety for the opposing party. The court did not strike his name.
What Henry argued
What Henry argued, by Maury's account, was bigger than the tobacco. He spoke for about an hour. His point, as Maury reported it, was that a king who throws out good laws becomes a tyrant and loses his subjects' obedience. Encyclopedia Virginia notes that Henry drew on the philosopher John Locke and on pamphlets by two Virginians, Richard Bland and Landon Carter.
Then the jury left. By Maury's account they were gone less than five minutes. They came back with a verdict of one penny. Encyclopedia Virginia says Maury had hoped for nearly three hundred pounds.
Maury's side objected that the verdict went against the evidence, and asked for the jury to be sent out again, then for a new trial. The court turned both down. In practice, for that one case, the vetoed law got the last word.
What the record shows, and what it doesn't
The record is solid on the outline. A minister sued after the Crown struck down Virginia's fixed-rate law. The court found for him in November 1763. In December a jury awarded him one penny, and the court refused to send them back out or order a new trial.
What we don't have is Henry's own words. No transcript of the speech survives. We have Maury's summary, and Maury was not a neutral listener: he was the plaintiff, and he had just lost. Later writers gave Henry speeches of their own.
A few details rest on a single source. The December 1 date and the nearly three hundred pounds come from Encyclopedia Virginia; Maury's letter says only "December Court" and names no sum he hoped for. The less-than-five-minutes and the hour-long speech are Maury's own reckoning.
There's also a famous painting of the scene. George Cooke made it around 1834, about seventy years after the hearing, so it is a later imagining and not an eyewitness picture.
The ghost tours are a separate thing again. They are real events, run at night by the Hanover Tavern Foundation, and the stories told on them are what guests report. Nothing in the record connects them to Maury, Henry, or the case.
Seeing it today
The courthouse is still there, in Hanover County, north of Richmond, on U.S. 301. You can see it from the road, and the Hanover Tavern Foundation has run evening paranormal investigations of the courthouse and its neighbouring buildings.
What the record gives us is a penny and a letter from the man who lost. The most famous argument of that day is the one nobody wrote down, and the building that heard it is still standing. Watch the film above.
Sources
- James Maury to John Camm, Dec. 12, 1763 ("The Parson's Opinion of the Parson's Cause"), transcription on Wikisource
- Encyclopedia Virginia, "Patrick Henry (1736–1799)"
- Encyclopedia Virginia, "Patrick Henry Argues the Parsons' Cause" (George Cooke, ca. 1834)
- Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Hanover County Courthouse (042-0016)
- Hanover County Historical Society, "Historic Hanover Courthouse"
- Hanover Tavern Foundation, paranormal investigations of the tavern, jail, courthouse and clerk's office
Credits
Images in the film: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, George Cooke, Patrick Henry Argues the Parsons' Cause (c. 1834), and Erechtheus, Hanover Courthouse and memorial (2006). Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Albert Herring, Hanover County Courthouse (2010, CC BY-SA 3.0); Arniesc1, Hanover County Courthouse (2020, CC BY-SA 4.0). Letter text: Wikisource (public domain). The pay diagram and the "1d" card were made for the film. Poster: a "1d" over George Cooke's painting (public domain). Original score.