by Myron Magnet
But the fortunes of Richard’s uncle and brothers dwindled under Cromwell’s dictatorship, so, now married and with young children, he returned to England at the Restoration to recharge his vital transatlantic connection, starting a new London trading house and grooming his son Francis to run it. Like so many British imperialists for the next two centuries, he aimed to retire as a country gentleman back “home” and bought a big estate at Stratford-Langton, outside London, suitable for very different guests from the Wicomico and Chicacoan Indian chiefs he’d entertained as the first European settler of the Northern Neck. But on one of his periodic trips to Virginia in 1664, as death stole up on him at only forty-five, he foresaw what was far from obvious: that the future lay in the still untamed New World, not the Old. He wrote his wife to sell Stratford-Langton and bring the children (except for Francis) back to Virginia, where he was among the biggest and richest landowners.7
Dutifully, his Oxford-educated son, Richard, Jr., dubbed “the Scholar,” gave up the future his teachers had predicted of “rising to the highest dignities” in the English church and moved from the pinnacle of European intellectual refinement to its opposite—one of his father’s wilderness properties named, with unintentional mockery, Paradise. When his older brother’s death in 1673 left him head of the family, he took a wife and moved to his father’s Northern Neck headquarters, Machodoc Plantation, far from the more settled York River precincts of Virginia’s Jamestown capital. It was an uncivilized place, meagerly furnished with a Spanish table, seven leather chairs, sixteen quarts of hominy, some books, a saddle, a pistol, sixteen shovels, and two frying pans. There, Richard the Scholar ran the family business conscientiously, but with frequent retreats into the civilized refuge of his own fine library. He followed his father in becoming first a member of the House of Burgesses (the elected lower house of Virginia’s legislative Assembly) and then of the Council of State (the Crown-appointed upper house, made up of the colony’s half dozen or so top military and civil officials), and a pillar of the establishment.8
So much so, that when an upstart immigrant planter named Nathaniel Bacon received a Council seat in 1676 and stirred up his followers to slaughter Indians and change the terms of the fur trade, from which he claimed that Richard the Scholar and his fellow dignitaries had wrongfully excluded “the commons of Virginia,” the starchily conservative Richard went to jail rather than bow to the multitude. He stayed there until dysentery fortuitously carried off Bacon two months later—not, however, before the full-scale rebellion Bacon had sparked among small farmers, laborers, and indentured servants had put Jamestown, the only town in an already class-ridden colony of isolated plantations and pioneer shacks, to the torch.9
Two decades later, the Scholar’s establishment instincts made him swallow hard when the Glorious Revolution deposed the Stuarts; but authority being authority and the only bulwark against Bacon-style leveling and anarchy, he led his reluctant neighbors in recognizing William and Mary’s legitimacy. As a reward, he became revenue collector for the Southern District of the Potomac, pocketing a cut of the tax on every ship that came into that bustling commercial hub and every hogshead of tobacco or bale of furs that went out of it. Tellingly, Virginia’s royal governor praised him a few years before his death in 1715 for his “unexceptionable loyalty.” By then, like his father, he too had put his sons into the family business, the younger ones in Virginia and the eldest in the London branch.10
HE MADE SURE as well that his second son, Thomas, got his lucrative revenue collector’s job, which the young man’s uncle, Thomas Corbin, a partner in the London branch of the firm, helped supplement with an even richer job that led to the building of Stratford. Uncle Corbin kindly hinted to his friend Lady Fairfax that her million Northern Neck acres overseas seemed to be yielding paltry rents and that his go-getter nephew on the spot could boost them. Once young Thomas had coolly informed Lady Fairfax’s former agent—Virginia’s richest and most powerful man, Robert “King” Carter—that he was replacing him, he set about making good on Uncle Corbin’s promise. As he crisscrossed the immense Fairfax domain doing so, he came upon a spot whose majestic white cliffs rising from the Potomac, seven shimmering miles wide at that point, took his breath away. He wanted the 1,443-acre property desperately enough to sail to England to seal the deal with its owner in 1718.11
Two Branches of the Lee Family Tree Alberto Mena
It was twenty years before Thomas began to build Stratford on that beautiful land. Meanwhile, believing that “the first fall and ruin of families and estates was mostly occasioned by imprudent matches to embeggar families and to beget a race of beggars,” he married heiress Hannah Ludwell, as strong-willed and overbearing as he. Entrepreneurial and visionary like his grandfather, Thomas believed that America would burst out westward, that the backwoods would teem with industrious settlers and blossom into prosperous farms, and that the Potomac, navigable even without improvement for about a hundred miles, would be a main transport artery into the profitable future.12
To cash in on that future, he began buying up as much land as he could along the river, especially 16,000 acres around the rocky falls where navigation ended, fifteen miles upstream of where Washington now stands.13 He also was a key negotiator of the land-grabbing 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, acquiring from the Six Nations of the Iroquois all their territory to “the setting sun,” which the Virginians interpreted far more expansively than their Indian counterparties to mean most of the Ohio basin. To settle that vast real estate, Thomas led fellow speculators in setting up the Ohio Company, which in 1749 received a Crown grant of half a million acres. To underscore the immensity of Virginia’s claims, Thomas, the Ohio Company’s first president and the colony’s acting governor, reminded the Privy Council in London a year later that Virginia’s 1609 charter had granted it all the land “to the South Sea to the West including California.”14
AS A JUSTICE of the peace, Thomas was always a hard-liner with lawbreakers, so revenge was the presumed motive for the robbery and torching of his house in 1729, which killed a servant girl, carried off his grandfather’s silver and thousands of pounds in cash, and burned his father’s cherished library. For a decade thereafter, he and Hannah lived in makeshift quarters, until they began building Stratford around 1739.15 The ninety-foot-long house, on an H-plan, with two north-south wings joined by an east-west one, so as to multiply the number of bright corner rooms, was worth waiting for. It is what architecture critics would call a “swagger” house: rich, stylish, handsome, proud almost to insolence, and strong.
Stratford Hall Main Floor Courtesy of Stratford Hall
It is in effect a one-story house—a single piano nobile above a raised basement. But what keeps it from looking merely long and low are the main floor’s tall windows (sixteen panes over sixteen), the broad stone front staircase that climbs steeply to the imposingly elevated front door, and above all the two clusters of four huge chimneys, brilliantly conceived as a pair of triumphal arches springing from the roofs of each wing and leading the eye skyward. For colonial America, says the noted historian of English architecture John Summerson, Stratford is a “remarkable performance” that he would more readily believe the work of such great royal architects as Nicholas Hawksmoor or Sir John Vanbrugh than some local.16 But the house’s inspired designer, who worked closely with Hannah Lee, was most probably Virginia-born William Walker.17
The great houses of early Virginia—Berkeley or Shirley Plantations on the James, say—display beautiful brickwork, but Stratford is a fanfare in brick, flaunting every one of the refinements that London artisans had developed in the late seventeenth century. The craftsmen, mostly slaves, laid the bricks in “Flemish” bond—header, stretcher, header, and so on—but they distinguished the lower story by firing the ends of the headers hot enough to burn and turn them glassy, producing a checkerboard pattern of shiny dark bricks alternating with ordinary lighter-colored ones. The piano nobile, which a beautifully cut molding separates from the ba
sement story, is by contrast all the same color and texture of brick. Rounded arches cap the lower-story windows, while flat arches crown the upper ones, all made of bricks rubbed smooth to produce a slightly different color and texture, as are the bricks defining the corners of the house and flanking the door and the upper windows. The vaunting chimneys, with viewing platforms at their bases, return to the checkerwork pattern of the lower story. Part of the pleasure of Stratford is figuring out what ingeniously different treatments of the same material, made from clay dug at Stratford and mortared with lime from Potomac oyster shells, produced such subtle but rich variations in effect.
THE BUILDING of Stratford, begun exactly a century after the first Richard Lee set foot in the New World, marks an inflection point in the history of British America. With no help from England other than royal charters saying they could claim land and create a social order, pioneers like the Lees had built a new civilization in the wilderness, and it was now pouring forth wealth. The prime minister at that time, Sir Robert Walpole, 280 pounds of wily competence, was continuing by wisdom the policy that seventeenth-century Britain had begun by weakness: “salutary neglect,” as Edmund Burke later called it, meaning that colonies that enriched England by supplying raw materials and markets for its manufactures should be left alone to do what they were doing so well. As Walpole’s long, benign rule drew to a close in 1742, and as Stratford neared completion, the colonial wealth-producing machine went into high gear.18
The rich got richer, and, as the American population exploded—and as English and Scottish investment capital poured into Virginia—everyone else prospered too.19 At Stratford, the twenty-nine-foot-square great hall, still one of America’s most beautiful rooms, acquired a cut-glass British chandelier to hang from its seventeen-foot-high ceiling, glittering even in the daylight flooding in from the doors and windows to the north and south. Someone went so far as to gild one of the refined Corinthian pilasters on the paneled gray walls before having second thoughts and painting it over, either as too gaudy or too flaunting even for those palmy days.
While Thomas Lee filled his lofty rooms with walnut and mahogany, silver and china, paintings and musical instruments, Americans everywhere, in what historians call the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, started taking luxuries for granted, including matched tea sets from Chinese (and later English) potteries.20 Benjamin Franklin reported coming to breakfast one morning to find his pewter spoon and earthenware bowl gone, his wife having decided that “her Husband deserved a Silver Spoon & China Bowl as well as any of his Neighbours.”21 By the 1760s, Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, observed that while he’d seen few fancy rugs in his youth, “Now nothing are so common as Turkey and Wilton Carpetts.”22 By then, too, British-American trade had doubled since the 1740s, with nearly half of all English shipping engaged in it—and with Virginia tobacco accounting for 40 percent of all American exports.23
THOMAS AND Hannah Lee moved seven of their brood of eight, ranging from toddlers to teens, into Stratford’s grand surroundings sometime in the 1740s—all but Philip, the eldest, already at Eton. The children had the customary tutors and dancing masters who oversaw privileged Virginia childhoods, and, along with the social graces and some Greek and Latin, the boys also mastered horses and boats, since Chesapeake Bay and Virginia’s four great rivers formed the colony’s main highways for visiting as well as for trade. As Stratford, like the handful of other great houses of the Virginia tobacco magnates, was the outward emblem of social preeminence and political power, Thomas liked to strut its drop-dead splendor with the days-long house parties fashionable among the Virginia gentry as sociable respites from life on isolated plantations.24 They politicked, courted each other, and gossiped in this spectacular setting, while boating on the Potomac and playing cards, dancing, and feasting in the magnificent rooms, with plenty of wine, a regular topic in the Lee family correspondence. Thomas had become a suaver host in the years since he had anxiously fussed over every detail of his first big party, given as a suitor to impress Hannah’s family; back then he had even taken a cram tutorial in Latin and Greek phrases, so he could seem learned.25
When Thomas and Hannah died within ten months of each other in 1750, Philip, studying law at the Inner Temple, returned from London to become Stratford’s master. Under his regime, the plantation soared to its apogee of wealth and opulence.26 Colonel Phil, as his five brothers and two sisters called him, turned Stratford into a major tobacco-shipping operation. He upgraded its wharf and shipyard to handle oceangoing vessels, built a big warehouse that collected fees from the surrounding planters for the required inspection of tobacco, and bought the ninety-ton Mary to transport the tobacco abroad for a further fee. A tannery, barrel-making shop, mill, and import warehouse sprang up, too, along with housing for workers that turned the whole area into a little village called Stratford Landing.27 Philip even brought prize stallions from England and went into the horse-breeding business. Over time, he increased the 4,800 acres he had inherited at Stratford to 6,595.28
The new wealth made entertainment at Stratford Hall even grander. The colonel loved music and filled the house with it. Musicians played from the observation platforms between the chimneys; music, not the standard gong or bell, announced dinner; trumpeters atop Philip’s carriage heralded his comings and goings. Getting the latest printed scores from London for his musicians and his harpsichord-playing daughters, who had a live-in music teacher, preoccupied him. And his taste was good: he was thrilled to snag the newly published selection of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas.29
As the executor of his father’s will and guardian of his minor siblings, however, the “arrogant, hauty” Philip, in a contemporary’s words, was less openhanded. The will called for distribution of the estate once Thomas’s debts had been settled, so the colonel simply delayed paying the debts and distributed pittances. Since he couldn’t escape the will’s education bequest for the younger boys, he dutifully sent Arthur, the youngest, to Eton—directing, however, that he get “as little pocket money as ever any boy had at your school and rather less.” After all, he explained, Arthur “has not an estate to support him as a gentleman without a profession. So the more he minds his studies, the less time he will have to spend money.”30 Tightfistedness turned meaner when young Richard Henry, fresh out of school in Yorkshire, proposed marriage to a highly suitable English girl. Philip refused consent, writing to the girl’s father that such a match “must be very bad for her, as his Brother’s fortune [would] only maintain him alone.”31
Little wonder that in 1754 Philip’s siblings sued to make him pay up. Though the suit dragged on for years and fizzled out, the four minor children at least did manage to get their guardian changed. The colonel released the real-estate bequests in 1758, but he held tight to the money until he died seventeen years later.32
NEVERTHELESS, when Richard Henry Lee finally got possession of his Prince William County property, he didn’t want to live there. He wanted to stay on at Stratford, even though he was now married, having wed nineteen-year-old Anne Aylett the year before. The reason was political: at twenty-five, he had just won election to represent Westmoreland County in the House of Burgesses and needed to stay in the county to keep his seat. So he rented out his inherited land, leased five hundred acres of the Stratford Hall plantation from Philip, and, still living under his childhood roof, began planning his own house three miles down the river. By 1763 he, Anne, and their two baby boys moved into their gracious new wooden villa, called Chantilly, with a big bay window commanding an Elysian view from a high bluff over the Potomac. It was no Stratford Hall, but in its twenty- by twenty-four-foot dining room, he entertained like a Lee.33
The Lees by then had formed their own faction in the House of Burgesses: R.H., as his siblings nicknamed him, took office the same year as his cousin Squire Richard Lee; his cousin Henry Lee was already a burgess. The next year, his brothers Francis Lightfoot (Frank) and Thomas settled into their inherited estates in
different counties and also became burgesses, while Philip served on the Council of State. During the next fifteen years, R.H. became part of an oligarchy within Virginia’s tiny ruling oligarchy, one of only seven men who chaired the house’s standing committees during that entire time.34
But R.H. didn’t start out in the inner circle. The reason was temperament. Before he had set out for school in England, his father had come upon him—frail, asthmatic, and epileptic—boxing with a “stout negro boy.” Angrily, his father asked, “What pleasure can you find in such rough sport?” R.H. replied that he practiced like this every day, because “I shall shortly have to box with the English boys, and I do not wish to be beaten by them.”35 That pugilistic spirit never left him.
HE CERTAINLY SHOWED it in his maiden speech as a burgess in 1759. Despite the stage fright that plagued him until the eve of the Revolution, he rose to support a motion to tax the slave trade so heavily as to end it, and he delivered one of eighteenth-century America’s most forthright, stinging denunciations of slavery itself. Slavery is wrong as a matter of policy, he began. Just look at how the free colonies, settled later than Virginia and with no richer soil than hers, have outstripped her economically, because “with their whites they import arts and agriculture, whilst we, with our blacks, exclude both.” Worse, the resentment that burns in slaves every minute that they see the luxury and liberty their masters enjoy, “whilst they and their posterity are subjected for ever to the most abject and mortifying slavery,” must make them “natural enemies to society, and their increase consequently dangerous.” Only consider the slave rebellions of Greece and Rome, which laid the Greek colonies of Sicily waste, for example, and brutalized the Romans into passing laws to govern slaves “so severe, that the bare relation of them is shocking to human nature.”