"As this government stands," Patrick Henry thundered, "I despise and abhor it. . . . I speak as one poor individual — but when I speak, I speak the language of thousands. If I am asked what is to be done when a people feel themselves intolerably oppressed, my answer is . . . 'overturn the government!'"
Henry's roar of exhortation was not aimed at Britain; it was aimed at the United States, as the thirteen former British colonies considered whether to adopt a new constitution. As he had done a decade earlier in his famed cry for "liberty or death," Henry once again roared for the rights of free men to govern themselves with as few restrictions from government as possible. His roar would reverberate through the ages of American history to this very day.
Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, "Give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry is all but forgotten as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, for revolution against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much freedom as possible from government — American as well as British. If Washington was the "Sword of the Revolution" and Jefferson "the Pen," Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as "the Trumpet" of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.As first governor of Virginia — then the most important colony in America — Henry became the most important civilian leader of the Revolutionary War, ensuring troops and supplies for Washington's Continental Army and engineering the American victory over British and Indian forces in the West that brought present-day Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky into the Union. Without Patrick Henry, there might never have been a revolution, independence, or United States of America.
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/19/131444425/-lion-of-liberty-patrick-henry-s-fiery-life