xpression which here follows,--"additional powers be given to the
governor and council." This amendment was assented to by the House;
and almost immediately thereafter it adjourned until the last Thursday
in March, 1777, "then to meet in the city of Williamsburg, or at such
other place as the governor and council, for good reasons, may
appoint."[276]

Such, undoubtedly, was the occasion on which, if at any time during
that session, the project for a dictatorship in Virginia was under
consideration by the House of Delegates. The only evidence for the
reality of such a project is derived from the testimony of Jefferson;
and Jefferson, though a member of the House, was not then in
attendance, having procured, on the 29th of the previous month,
permission to be absent during the remainder of the session.[277] Is
it not probable that the whole terrible plot, as it afterward lay in
the mind of Jefferson, may have originated in reports which reached
him elsewhere, to the effect that, in the excitement of the House over
the public danger and over the need of energetic measures against that
danger, some members had demanded that the governor should be invested
with what they perhaps called dictatorial power, meaning thereby no
more than extraordinary power; and that all the criminal accretions to
that meaning, which Jefferson attributed to the project, were simply
the work of his own imagination, always sensitive and quick to take
alarm on behalf of human liberty, and, on such a subject as this,
easily set on fire by examples of awful political crime which would
occur to him from Roman history? This suggestion, moreover, is not out
of harmony with one which has been made by a thorough and most candid
student of the subject, who says: "I am very much inclined to think
that some sneering remark of Colonel Cary, on that occasion, has given
rise to the whole story about a proposed dictator at that time."[278]

At any rate, this must not be forgotten: if the project of a
dictatorship, in the execrable sense affirmed by Jefferson, was,
during that session, advocated by any man or by any cabal in the
Assembly, history must absolve Patrick Henry of all knowledge of it,
and of all responsibility for it. Not only has no tittle of evidence
been produced, involving his connivance at such a scheme, but the
Assembly itself, a few months later, unwittingly furnished to
posterity the most conclusive proof that no man in that body could
have b