Patrick Henry delivered the most famous speech in American revolutionary history — "Give me liberty, or give me death!" — but the man behind the words was considerably more complicated than the patriotic icon. He was a failed storekeeper, a self-taught lawyer, a slaveholder who called slavery evil but refused to free his own slaves, and an Anti-Federalist who fought the Constitution because he thought it would create a tyranny.

This episode traces Henry from his early business failures through the speech that electrified the Revolution, his opposition to the Constitution, and the contradictions that make him one of the most human and least mythologized of the Founding Fathers.

• Henry's failed careers as a farmer and shopkeeper before his unlikely rise as a lawyer and orator
• The "Give me liberty" speech and the role his ora ...