by Myron Magnet
R.H.’s call to go a step further and form a national militia, while demanding British withdrawal from Boston, failed however, since, as Silas Deane of Connecticut objected, it would be a declaration of war. But Congress did impose a colonies-wide trade embargo and form the Continental Association—devised by R.H.’s committee—which urged local groups to police the boycott, as part of a fast-spreading grassroots network that was forming a shadow government throughout the colonies.69 That winter, too, Colonel Philip Lee died, leaving R.H. executor of his estate and, until Philip’s two-year-old heir grew up, master of Stratford.70
A few months later, by the time the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, Paul Revere had already ridden his midnight ride, the shots at Lexington and Concord had crackled out, and colonial troops had besieged the British in Boston. In June, the British drove the besiegers from their fortified Bunker Hill position. Sure that their trained regulars would make short work of the rebellious rabble, the British gasped at the 40 percent casualties the colonists’ guerrilla tactics inflicted. “What an unfair method of carrying on a war!” a British survivor whimpered.71 In Philadelphia, Congress now established an army, with George Washington at its head, and R.H. boasted that Virginia could produce 6,000 frontiersmen with amazing “dexterity . . . in the use of the Rifle Gun. There is not one of these Men who wish a distance of less than 200 yards or a larger object than an Orange—Every shot is fatal.”72
AS A LAST-DITCH reconciliation effort, in early July the congressmen sent the king an Olive Branch Petition, asserting loyalty and asking him to restore the former harmony of Britain’s pre-1764 colonial policy. More realistically, however, the same week they published a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, explaining to potential foreign allies and lenders how royal policy, not colonial rebelliousness, had ignited the fighting. The king almost instantly replied that the colonists were in open revolt, aimed, he told Parliament in October, at “establishing an independent Empire.” In December 1775, Parliament passed the American Prohibitory Act, blockading the colonies and declaring all ships bringing goods to America liable to seizure and confiscation, “as if the same were the ships . . . of open enemies.”73
The king was right, of course. R.H., like many other Patriot leaders, was busily stockpiling gunpowder and, on behalf of Congress, buying ships to form a navy. But the royal statements and the Prohibitory Act swept away all his congressional colleagues’ hesitations about the real state of affairs. The law has “dissolved our government . . . and placed us on the high road to Anarchy,” R.H. wrote Patrick Henry. “This proves the indispensable necessity of our taking up government immediately, for the preservation of Society.” How else could Americans secure the foreign trade and alliances they needed to survive?74
Accordingly, on June 7, 1776, acting on instructions from a Virginia legislature led by his brother and one of his uncles, R.H. moved in Congress “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”75 Congress also empowered each colony to form its own government, and R.H., summoned by George Mason’s plea that “we cannot do without you” (words later carved on his gravestone), rushed home to help write a constitution—a very democratic one, he made sure—leaving Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration that made his motion for independence a reality.76 In August, R.H. and Frank joined fifty-four other congressmen in signing the great document, after R.H. politely commiserated with Jefferson over Congress’s having “mangled” the Declaration by editing out Jefferson’s blaming of Britain for introducing slavery into America. “However,” R.H. assured the crestfallen author, “the Thing is in its nature so good, that no Cookery can spoil the Dish for the palates of Freemen.”77
THE LEES ACTED as a transatlantic family firm in revolution as in business, with family members abroad working to advance the family enterprise at home. The most luminous expatriate Lee was R.H.’s youngest brother, Arthur, who served as a key American agent in Britain and France. His saga is material for a thriller, as a youth from the fringe of the empire becomes first a radical wheeler-dealer at the center of British affairs, intimate with a vivid array of the eighteenth century’s celebrities, and then a spy. After a few post-Eton years back at Stratford, Arthur returned to England in 1760 to study medicine, heading to Edinburgh on Samuel Johnson’s advice that it had Britain’s best medical school. There he became close friends with his classmate James Boswell, later Johnson’s incomparable biographer, and he graduated with the gold medal as top student. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s London lobbyist and a nurturer of talented Americans, Arthur got elected to the prestigious Royal Society, and he formed a lifelong friendship with Lord Shelburne, who later became prime minister (and whose dining room, where Arthur hobnobbed, you can visit in New York’s Metropolitan Museum).78
Laden with honors, Arthur returned to Virginia in 1766 to practice medicine, presuming on his brand-new expertise to hector R.H., fruitlessly, to quit smoking his beloved cigars. But after the glitter of London, Williamsburg palled—as did doctoring, compared to the excitements of politics, once the Townshend Acts radicalized Arthur in 1767. With a series of articles, bylined “Monitor,” in a Virginia paper, he began a long career as a crusading polemicist for justice and liberty for America. “I cannot Conceive of the Necessity of becoming a Slave,” he wrote, in terms that R.H. would approve, “while there remains a Ditch in which one may die free.”79
In the autumn of 1768, just after Arthur finished writing the “Liberty Song”—which became an American Revolutionary anthem, with its lines “By uniting we stand/By dividing we fall”—he headed back to London, aiming to turn British public opinion against George III’s American policy. Changing professions as well as countries, he entered the Middle Temple to study law in 1770, happy with his rooms overlooking the Temple garden and the Thames, and with his visits to the Royal Society, the theaters, the opera, and the concert halls, especially when Johann Christian Bach performed. And of course he politicked. “In the field of politics,” he boasted, “from the politician in the cider-cellar to the peer in his palace, I had access and influence.”80
He was closest to one politician in particular, John Wilkes, a radical, pro-American member of Parliament and later lord mayor of London, who championed Britain’s ancient constitutional liberties, including a restoration of (perhaps legendary) Saxon annual parliaments.81 He was also a libertine, famously quick and sharp of tongue. When fellow rake Lord Sandwich—berating him for a squalid practical joke he had played at the Hellfire Club—told him he would die either on the gallows or of the pox, Wilkes shot back, “That depends on whether I embrace your Lordship’s principles or your mistress.”82 He had become a popular hero—specializing, in Caroline Robbins’s astute phrase, in “highclass rabble-rousing”—when the government foolishly charged him first with seditious libel for accusing George III of having “sunk even to prostitution” for his embrace of Lord Bute’s ministry and then with blasphemous obscenity for a wildly pornographic parody of Alexander Pope.83 The authorities jailed him and threw him out of Parliament. Middlesex voters, chanting “Wilkes and Liberty,” kept reelecting him, until finally the government gave in and seated him.84
Arthur Lee—a leader of Wilkes’s political party, the Bill of Rights Society—made the cause of American liberty integral to British radicalism. Who knows, Wilkes reportedly prophesied in 1773, whether “in a few years the independent Americans may not celebrate the glorious era of the revolution of 1775, as we do that of 1688?”85 The colonists for their part hung on every turn of Wilkes’s fate. His exclusion from Parliament as the people’s legitimately elected representative convinced many Americans that the assault on their own freedom was not accidental but rather the result of what R.H. Lee called deep-laid, malevolent “designs for destroying
our constitutional liberties.”86
Arthur became a propagandist, writing—“with a pen dipped in the gall of asps,” one royal official complained—tracts and seventy-five widely read newspaper articles between 1769 and 1776 on Britain’s injustices in the colonies. In 1774, now Massachusetts’ official London agent, he wrote that Britain couldn’t win an American war. When the fighting started at Concord and Lexington, Arthur got the news by fast schooner from Salem and could spread the pro-American version of the story uncontested for two weeks before official accounts reached the British government. Anybody who didn’t believe him, he wrote, could see the signed affidavits of American eyewitnesses, on display at his friend the lord mayor’s Mansion House.87
Using Wilkes’s political machine, Arthur had gotten his elder brother William, Stratford Hall’s business agent abroad and a prosperous London merchant, elected co-sheriff of London in 1773 and an alderman two years later. With such credentials, William, despite his American origins, emerged as the London merchants’ radical spokesman, and in 1775 he organized a pro-American petition from them, complaining that the colonists’ embargo was ruining them, and Parliament should give in to American demands. Petitions from Britain’s other commercial cities soon followed.88
WHILE R.H. was buying gunpowder and ships, Arthur was making his own equally essential war preparations. At the Mansion House, he had met another celebrity-to-be, Pierre-Augustin Caron, first a brilliant watchmaker whose innovations made timepieces smaller and more accurate, then harp teacher to Louis XV’s daughters, and later—having added “de Beaumarchais” to his name—the immortal playwright of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. At that moment he was a French secret agent and arms dealer, through whom Arthur arranged for a clandestine loan to Congress of a million livres from officially neutral France, as well as an additional loan from Spain. He also made a deal with Beaumarchais to supply Congress with desperately needed arms and provisions in the French agent’s forty-ship fleet.89
Commissioned Congress’s spy in London after independence, Arthur sent a flood of intelligence about transatlantic troop movements and British political developments. In December 1776, Congress made him one of its three secret commissioners to France, to negotiate loans, buy arms and supplies, and above all to get France to join America’s war against Britain. William crossed the Channel soon after him to serve as America’s commercial agent in France.90
And now Arthur’s troubles began. He discovered that his fellow commissioner, ex–Connecticut congressman Silas Deane, was war-profiteering, accepting kickbacks and loading the blockade-running supply ships not just with needed materiel for Congress but also with scarce and valuable commodities for Philadelphia financier Robert Morris to sell privately. Virginians including the Lees, Patrick Henry, and George Mason believed that republican virtue was indispensable to political freedom, so Arthur was scandalized, the more so after smoldering under his brother Philip’s swindles and finagles for so many years. He was equally outraged that the third commissioner, Benjamin Franklin, seemed not to care, perhaps because he believed that when in France, do as the Frenchmen do, perhaps because he knew Robert Morris well, perhaps because his grandnephew was part of Deane’s operation.91
But there was worse. Arthur began charging that Deane’s office was a nest of spies and traitors. Deane angrily countered that Arthur was quarrelsome and paranoid, an image of him that has stuck to this day. Franklin wrote that he had a “sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself with jealousies, suspicions, and fancies that others mean you ill. . . . [I]t will end in insanity.”92
But Arthur was right. Deane’s secretary, an American doctor named Edward Bancroft, was indeed a spy—the “supreme spy of his century,” one historian judges.93 The Foreign Office paid the doctor handsomely to copy the American commissioners’ correspondence in invisible ink and hide it in a hollow tree in the Tuilleries garden for British agents to speed to two British secretaries of state. After the great American victory at Saratoga persuaded the French to join the war against Britain, Bancroft had the Franco-American treaty at the Foreign Office less than two days after its signing on February 6, 1778.94
The brouhaha among the diplomats prompted Congress, led by R.H., to recall Deane to explain his behavior, including his promiscuous handing out of commissions to French officers wishing to serve in Washington’s army. He had no receipts to show for his purchases of materiel and little to say beyond bluster. Instead he wrote a scathing article, reprinted in English and French newspapers, falsely accusing Arthur Lee and his brothers of double-crossing France by seeking a separate peace with Britain, and claiming that Arthur achieved nothing by his diplomacy but “universal disgust.” Congress, after much bitter wrangling, publicly vindicated Arthur; but as Deane and Franklin had discredited him with the French government, his diplomatic career was as dead as Deane’s, and he returned to America for good in 1780.95
Though Arthur was probably wrong to claim that Deane was Bancroft’s knowing accomplice as a British spy, his accusation turned out in time to be sadly prophetic, for Deane, broke and disgraced, ended up a traitor and a British tool, hired to write a series of letters arguing that independence was a mistake and that prodigal America should crawl back to the Mother Country—letters intercepted by prearrangement and published in a New York Loyalist newspaper. As payment for trying to persuade “the provinces to offer to return to their allegiance on the former foot,” George III wrote his prime minister, Lord North, in 1780, “I think it perfectly right that Mr. Deane should so far be trusted as to have £3000 in goods for America.” Deane died suddenly in 1789—poisoned, some historians think, by Dr. Bancroft.96 Arthur Lee went on to be a Virginia assemblyman, a congressman, and one of the three directors of the Board of Treasury until Alexander Hamilton took it over. “Unprejudiced posterity,” summed up Samuel Adams, “will acknowledge that Arthur Lee has borne a great share in defending and establishing the liberties of America.”97
ARTHUR RETURNED to America to find R.H. and Frank out of Congress. Worn down, they had gone home to Virginia in May 1779, Frank for permanent, tranquil retirement. The acrimonious battle over the Deane affair had dispirited them: it was bad enough to fight the enemy, but life in Congress, which served as the executive branch and the bureaucracy as well as the legislature, seemed an endless struggle against their own people, trying to get the individual states to provide troops and supplies, trying to stop war profiteers who seemed to be everywhere, trying to smooth over the squabbling among generals, trying, in R.H.’s case, to convince the delegates of the need for a navy and get it built.98
For three years, as a member or chairman of every military and naval committee, R.H. had poured out torrents of correspondence, ordering 40,000 uniforms from France and reminding the commissioners “that they should be generally for Men of stouter make than those of France”; diplomatically assuring the factious and egotistical General Charles Lee (no relation) that of course he is “conscious of the thousand occasions in which the service must suffer immensely if Commanders at a distance are not to accommodate conduct to circumstances,” but even so, it’s a good idea to follow orders and get congressional permission when possible; joyfully telling Samuel Adams that Virginia will ratify the Articles of Confederation; bursting out to Patrick Henry about the difficulty of recruiting soldiers: “O for 10, or 12 thousand Americans to sweep these vermin from our land!”99
And all this under wartime conditions. “Mr. Lee’s fortune not being very ample & having a large family to support, he was obliged to live on the payts from the State of Va.,” someone wrote long ago in the corner of one of R.H.’s letters. “To be of as little expence as possible, to his Constituents, at a time when every Dollar was needed for their preservation, he Marketed for himself. For two months during Nov & Decr ’77 which were unusually cold, he lived upon wild pigeons,” which “were sold for a few cents pr Dozen & afforded but a scanty fare.”100 Only a few months earlier, R.H. had not been reelected to C
ongress because his enemies had spread a false rumor—one of many—that he was purposely trying to devalue Virginia’s currency. He had to vindicate himself to the House of Delegates before being allowed to go back to Philadelphia and eat pigeons in a cold room.101 “My eyes fail me fast,” he wrote Patrick Henry that year, “and I believe my understanding must soon follow this incessant toil.”102
He was a changed man when he returned to Chantilly in 1779. Loyal Virginian that he was, he had become an American. He dreamed of ending his days in the “wise and free republic in Massachusetts Bay,” he wrote John Adams, since he had come to prefer it to “the hasty, unpersevering, aristocratic genius of the south”—sentiments already latent in his antislavery speech twenty years before.103 And in the same vein he had changed his views about the future he wanted for his sons. He always wanted Ludwell to be a lawyer, but now he’d like him to learn soldiering, too, to be ready for anything “the service of his Country might point out.” For Thom, his eldest, he no longer wanted a career as a clergyman but rather as an international businessman. Virginia may have strayed from its entrepreneurial roots, but he’d like the Lees to return to theirs.104