Light-Horse Harry: A Biography of Washington’s Great Cavalryman, General Henry Lee (Heroes and Villains from American History)

by Noel B. Gerson

  The student body during Henry’s undergraduate days was a remarkable group. Madison, a prodigious worker, saw little of his fellows, but he and Henry were on friendly terms. Mercurial Aaron Burr and Henry were close, and another friend was Philip Freneau, who later became known as the “Poet of the American Revolution” and one of America’s first distinguished men of letters. Oddly, still another colleague, Hugh H. Brackenridge, was destined to become a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion a quarter of a century later, an insurrection that General Harry Lee would smash on President Washington’s orders.

  Until young Lee went to the College of New Jersey, he was always known as Henry, but his classmates soon dubbed him Harry, and from that time until the end of his days his formal Christian name appeared only on legal documents. The newcomer threw himself into the school’s many activities with unprecedented zeal. It was customary for freshmen to apply for admission to either the debating or literary society, and inasmuch as each took up a great deal of precious time, virtually no one wanted to be a member of both. Harry Lee was one of a tiny handful of students in the entire history of the college who applied to both, and was promptly granted membership in both.

  His social society, which he also joined in his first year, was the Cliosophic, a group interested in legal philosophy. Encouraged by the large Lee clan, he mistakenly believed he would become an attorney. The following year, however, his real interests became evident when he transferred his allegiance to a new organization founded by Madison and Freneau. This group, known initially as the Plain Dealers, wrote political satire for its own amusement and, at a time when the political and economic conflict between Great Britain and her North American colonies was becoming sharper, it was inevitable that the Plain Dealers should devote their thought and energies to that dispute.

  The issues were so clearly drawn within the next twelve months that the society changed its name to the American Whigs, and its members boldly advocated complete independence for the colonies, echoing Sam Adams of Boston and, technically, branding themselves as traitors to the Crown. The rules of the school required them to renew their oath of allegiance to His Majesty every morning, and they paid their lip service glibly, their real attitude encouraged by the silence of Dr. Witherspoon, who was himself becoming increasingly sympathetic to the cause of American freedom.

  Charles Lee found it difficult to adjust to the environment and regimen of the school, but Harry was in his element from the day he first arrived at Princeton. He roared with laughter when a charge of gunpowder was exploded in the room he shared with Charles, and was scornful when his brother was reduced to tears. Calmly rounding up other victims of the practical joke, Harry and his new friends returned the compliment twenty-four hours later, placing still larger charges in the rooms of the perpetrators.

  Freshmen were expected to behave meekly, and several upper classmen threw him and two other freshmen into Stony Brook in order to teach them their proper place. Refusing to be cowed, Harry and his cohorts bound and gagged two of the ringleaders, then dumped them in the undergraduate outhouse, where they were found some hours later. The prank could have caused serious trouble for Harry and his friends, but the older boys grudgingly admired their courage and said nothing of the incident to the authorities.

  Dr. Witherspoon’s charges had few opportunities for such rough games, however. A student worked hard or was dropped, and Harry soon proved himself an able scholar. Latin was still his first love, and he developed a passion for legal and military history. He wrote long essays on Solon and Lycurgus during his second year at the college.

  Significantly, he studied the strategy and tactics of various great generals for his own amusement and edification. Hannibal, he wrote in his notebooks, was the greatest general in all history, and he drew countless sketches of the evasive tactics that had enabled the Carthaginian to fool the leaders of the formidable Roman legions he defeated.

  Harry also developed an admiration for Epaminondas of Thebes, a Greek general who had developed new methods of deploying cavalry on his flanks in battle and, subsequently, proved his theories so effectively that he changed the whole nature of warfare. Aristides of Athens, another ancient Greek, a firm believer in democracy who used cavalry in unorthodox ways to support infantry, was one of Harry’s idols, too, and a treatise he wrote on the subject won him a rare “Well done” from Dr. Witherspoon before the entire student body.

  Anti-British feeling flared higher during Harry Lee’s sophomore year, and he became a leader of a patriotic movement of a somewhat questionable and thoroughly undemocratic nature. Merchants in every colony were being urged to boycott England and refuse to buy British-made goods, but the storekeepers, reluctant to lose their profits, were slow to respond to the demands made on them. There were only a few merchants in the little town of Princeton, but they, like their colleagues elsewhere, couldn’t understand why they alone should take a financial beating.

  Forty students, parading to the rhythms of a fife and drum corps, marched through the streets of the town, halted in front of each store and shouted anti-British slogans in unison. The merchants, afraid that their shops might be burned and sacked by unruly undergraduates, were duly intimidated and stopped buying English wares.

  “I can recall no other incident in my past,” Harry wrote many years later, “that fills me with such shame. I preached the virtues of law and order and sang the praises of democratic government, but I was guilty of the grossest violation of the principles I claimed I loved. Terror and the threat of force are inexcusable, regardless of whether the majority make its will obeyed by a minority, or a minority impose its dictum on the majority. Would that I could hide behind the façade of callowness, but I cannot. Alas, although I was but fifteen, I knew better.”

  Studies continued to claim the better part of Harry Lee’s time, and when his sophomore year ended after a week of back-breaking written examinations, he won third prize in Greek and in Latin, and first in translating English into Latin. His record, for a sophomore, was remarkable, and Aaron Burr, who stood one class ahead of him and won still higher honors, predicted a brilliant future for his friend.

  Harry and Charles went home for their first vacation in two years, and although the growing threat of war between England and her colonies had cast a pall over Virginia, the mansion in Prince William County was the scene of several lively parties during the six weeks that the two brothers were on holiday. Harry proved himself a sophisticate worthy of the Lee name, dazzling girls with his courtly manners and smile, and cutting a dashing figure in his powdered wig and superbly tailored suits of pure silk.

  But, unlike most college undergraduates on vacation, he had more on his mind than girls. He broke in a new stallion that no one else had been able to ride, he spent hours in the saddle every day, and he alarmed his bewildered family by retiring to his own room most evenings to read the works of Alexander Pope. One goal he set for himself was a line-by-line comparison of Pope’s translation of the Iliad with Homer’s original, and he completed the task handily, boring the other Lees by talking of nothing else at the dinner table, where he ate prodigiously.

  “Our Henry,” a troubled Lucy Lee confided in a note to Martha Washington, “behaves in a manner so unpredictable that I know not from one day to the next what he will do. He seldom speaks of the law, but is firm in his intent to practice before the bar. Yet he speaks so much of English poets that I sometimes wonder if good Dr. Witherspoon will make him into a college president, no true vocation for a man of wit.”

  Harry paid a visit to the Washingtons at their Mount Vernon estate, and the colonel, although preoccupied with the angry Anglo-colonial quarrel that grew more intense each day, found time to take the youth on an inspection of his estate. The boy’s father accompanied them, and Henry, Jr. later had good cause to boast, “The colonel tells me that no man sits a saddle more firmly or has a sounder leg and more delicate touch than our eldest. For this we give gratitude to the Almighty Lord, the lad otherwise carin
g little for the pursuits so dear to young bloods.”

  The principal cause of paternal concern, perhaps, was Harry’s indifference to the brothels of Alexandria, which Charles sometimes visited with other gallants of the neighborhood. Harry, at sixteen, had not yet really sparked to the opposite sex.

  In September 1772 the brothers returned to Princeton for their final terms at the college, the last eleven months being equally divided between the junior and senior classes, the entire process of obtaining a bachelor’s degree taking three years, in accordance with the English system of education universally observed in the colonies.

  Literature remained Harry’s great passion during his junior term, and his enthusiasm for the works of Pope was undiminished. He wrote a long paper proving — to his own satisfaction — that Pope was far more talented than John Milton and Ben Jonson. He dismissed Shakespeare in a single, faintly contemptuous paragraph, calling him a “scribbler of verse who tries with little success to imitate the ancients; he lacks the grandeur of Sophocles and the power of Aeschylus.”

  Dr. Witherspoon, who considered Harry his brightest student in the upper classes, found nothing to criticize in the paper and invited the youth to attend his lectures on moral philosophy, the highest honor he could bestow on an undergraduate. As a senior Harry also took courses in natural philosophy, natural science, and mathematics, and at the president’s suggestion plunged into independent reading on the history of Anglo-Saxon law.

  The future had been planned with care, and Harry thought he knew what was ahead. He would spend a month or two at home after his graduation, riding and resting. Then he would sail to England and take up residence with one of his many cousins in London, where he would spend one to two years as a law student and apprentice solicitor. For the sake of experience he might spend a year or two at the bar in London before returning home, but eventually he intended to take up practice in Virginia, where his family connections would assure him a substantial income.

  But the continuing deterioration of relations between England and her colonies were making it increasingly unlikely that the youth of seventeen, who received his diploma from Dr. Witherspoon in August 1773, could carry out his scheme for the tidy future he had envisioned.

  His kinsman, Richard Henry Lee, working with a bold and eccentric attorney named Patrick Henry, had been instrumental in forming Committees of Correspondence in each of the thirteen colonies. These groups exchanged letters in which ways and means of fighting the Mother Country’s high-handed treatment of the colonies were discussed, refined and put into operation. Each new punitive measure designed by stubborn young King George III and his insensitive Prime Minister, Lord North, met with increasingly stiff and sullen resistance in America, where radicals like Sam Adams of Massachusetts exaggerated and fanned the flames of rebellion. Strained relations were being stretched toward a breaking point.

  In Virginia the situation was unique. Elsewhere men of substance and social standing were doing their utmost to avoid an armed conflict, and only the wealthy merchant prince of Boston, John Hancock, was giving unqualified support to the radicals. In New York Town the rich were almost unanimous in their desire for a peaceful solution of the problem. Philadelphia, heeding the advice of America’s most distinguished citizen, Benjamin Franklin, supported by banker Robert Morris, quietly insisted that armed conflict would be catastrophic.

  The aristocrats of Virginia felt otherwise, and most of the great landowners and planters — many of them related to Harry — were calmly but urgently insisting that the colonies should declare themselves free and independent. A tiny minority of wealthy lawyers and merchants remained fiercely loyal to the Crown, and virtually no one listened to moderates like Colonel Washington, who wanted to find some accommodation satisfactory to both sides.

  Harry, already a prominent and active member of James Madison’s American Whigs at Princeton, needed no time for reflection. He admired Cousin Richard Henry, and agreed that if England refused to grant America’s demands for greater self-government, the colonies would be compelled to go their own way, no matter what the cost.

  The seventeen-year-old Bachelor of Arts expressed his views in no uncertain terms at the taverns of the neighborhood. One of his many cousins, George Lee, wrote that “No one proclaims his admiration for the Massachusetts Bay Sons of Liberty more loudly than does Harry. His arguments in their favor are based on literary and legal allusions which I find thin and unconvincing. It is enough that the Sons of Liberty exist and do what they must and should to further our cause. But Harry is already a lawyer by temperament. No step can be taken, no move made, no torch burned without ample precedent. If one listens long enough to Harry, Pope and Milton were writing of American freedom in their poems, which he recites in such solemn tones that I would laugh if I dared.

  “No one laughs when Harry makes his recitations, for his temper is well known to all, and he has so perfected his skill with sword and pistol that I believe he would run through or shoot to death anyone who mocked him or the cause in which all of us believe.

  “A Lee does not brawl with his fists in the gutter, but Harry creates in everyone the feeling that he would not hesitate to lower himself to such pastimes if in the mood. He is learned, but there is in him a wild and savage humor that neither the gracious living at Leesylvania nor his years at the College of New Jersey have tamed. M— has said to me privately that she pities the girl Harry will some day marry, for he is certain to beat her if she disputes his word in any matter.”

  The unknown M— was a poor judge of Harry’s character. He displayed unflagging gallantry to the ladies throughout his life, and always treated them with consideration and gentle kindness. Cousin George was more perspicacious. There was a wild streak in Henry Lee, Jr.’s eldest son and heir that the growing war fever stirred to the boiling point.

  For the first time in his life Harry confided in his father, confessing that he didn’t know what to do. Parties at Leesylvania were pleasant affairs, and a young man could drift from one day to the next, waiting for events which he could not control to decide his future for him. But he already hated inactivity, and was unhappy, restless, and bored. On the other hand, he was less sure of his stand than his public remarks in the taverns of northern Virginia had indicated. The Lee family had always respected law and order, and open rebellion against the Crown was treason, justifiably punishable by hanging.

  Arthur Lee was still in London, living as a prosperous and respected colonial, and so was William Lee. Harry had long looked forward to living with them while pursuing his studies. From a purely selfish standpoint, too, he could not obtain an education as a lawyer in Virginia on a level even remotely comparable with what he could learn in England.

  The ever-cautious Henry, Jr. urged his son to do nothing for the present. With each passing month the inevitability of open revolt became greater, and the colony was thrilled as Patrick Henry, the leader of the Burgesses, edged closer and closer to a declaration of Virginia’s independence.

  Three times Harry engaged passage on a ship bound for London, and three times he canceled his reservation. He attended innumerable parties, played cards with other young men at supper parties and spent his days in the saddle, riding around his father’s estate. Politics fascinated him, and he made several journeys to Williamsburg in order to watch the Burgesses in session from the visitors’ gallery. He spoke vaguely of entering the political arena himself, but made no real attempt to seek office.

  Events moved still more rapidly. Boston defied the Crown, and the port of Boston was closed. The Virginia Burgesses, prodded by Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, defiantly passed a resolution sympathizing with the citizens of a sister colony. The authority of Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s governor, had been challenged, and his lordship felt compelled to dissolve the Assembly. Young men began to drill in the towns and villages, and Lord North, the British Prime Minister, was hanged in effigy in a dozen or more places.

  It was beneath the dignity of a Lee t
o take part in such public spectacles, but Harry went off quietly to a patch of woods that stood on his father’s property and practiced his marksmanship with both pistol and rifle. He wanted to brush up on his swordsmanship, too, but couldn’t persuade Charles or Cousin George to cross blades with him. Left to his own devices, he was reduced to riding his stallion bareback, and spent hours each day slashing at targets suspended from the branches of trees.

  The year 1775 was one of decision, and the nineteen-year-old youth knew now that he had to give up his dream of studying in London. His father was elected to the new House of Burgesses, but first sat as a member of the rump colonial parliament which solemnly threatened to break off all trade relations with England unless Virginia and her sisters were granted greater rights.

  Cousin Richard Henry Lee had been a member of the First Continental Congress, sitting at Philadelphia, and had been prominent in the committee that had drawn up a list of grievances to be presented to the King, Prime Minister, and House of Commons. Patrick Henry made an international reputation for himself by demanding liberty or death in the most impassioned speech ever heard in the Burgesses. Even the levelheaded Colonel Washington, who frequently dined at Leesylvania with his lady, now believed that it might be necessary to fight for freedom.

  Harry put up still more targets and, using a saber weighted with metal odds and ends in order to make the task more difficult, sliced and slashed and thrust while riding bareback at a full gallop. It is impossible to determine whether he sensed his destiny and deliberately, methodically made ready for it, or whether he was guided by blind instinct.