Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Harlow Giles Unger
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First Da Capo Press edition 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Unger, Harlow G., 1931– author.
Title: First founding father: Richard Henry Lee and the call to independence / Harlow Giles Unger.
Description: First Da Capo Press edition. | New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040744 (print) | LCCN 2017041656 (ebook) | ISBN 9780306825620 (e-book) | ISBN 9780306825613 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Lee, Richard Henry, 1732–1794. | Revolutionaries—United States—Biography. | Politicians—United States—Biography. | United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Biography. | United States. Declaration of Independence—Signers—Biography. | Virginia—Biography.
Classification: LCC E302.6.L4 (ebook) | LCC E302.6.L4 U54 2017 (print) | DDC 973.3092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040744
ISBN: 978-0-306-82561-3 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-306-82562-0 (e-book)
E3-20171013-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Evolution of a Dynasty
CHAPTER 2 Egyptian Bondage
CHAPTER 3 No Liberty, No King!
CHAPTER 4 Poet, Playwright, Watchmaker, Spy
CHAPTER 5 An Indispensable Necessity
CHAPTER 6 The Enemy of Everything Good
CHAPTER 7 A Most Bloody Battle
CHAPTER 8 To Discard General Washington
CHAPTER 9 President Richard Henry Lee
CHAPTER 10 Riots and Mobbish Proceedings
CHAPTER 11 The Farmer and the Federalist
CHAPTER 12 His Majesty the President
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Discover More Harlow Giles Unger
APPENDIX A The Leedstown, or Westmoreland, Resolves
APPENDIX B The Signers and the Declaration
Bibliography
Notes
Index
To Sarah Hopkins
With deep appreciation and affection
from the author and his family
Frontispiece: Portrait of Richard Henry Lee by Charles Willson Peale, in the National Portrait Gallery.
List of Illustrations
Maps
Virginia’s Northern Neck
Northwest Territory
Illustrations
Frontispiece: Richard Henry Lee
1. Lee Family Coat of Arms
2. The First Richard Lee in America
3. Jamestown in 1640
4. Ruins of Jamestown
5. Thomas Lee
6. Stratford Hall
7. Colonel George Washington
8. Château de Chantilly
9. Richard Henry Lee
10. Francis Lightfoot Lee
11. Patrick Henry
12. Arthur Lee
13. William Lee
14. John Wilkes
15. Boston Tea Party
16. Samuel Adams
17. George III
18. Patrick Henry’s Call for Liberty
19. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
20. Richard Henry Lee’s Declaration of Independence
21. John Adams
22. Thomas Jefferson
23. Signing the Declaration of Independence
24. Benjamin Franklin
25. Silas Deane
26. A “Continental”
27. Surrender at Yorktown
28. James Madison
29. Federal Hall in New York City
30. Richard Henry Lee’s Gravestone
31. John Trumbull’s Painting of the Signing
32. Key to the Signers in Trumbull’s Painting
33. Portraits and Signatures of the Signers
34. Copy of the Declaration of Independence with Signatures
Introduction
BEFORE WASHINGTON, BEFORE JEFFERSON, BEFORE FRANKLIN OR John Adams, there was Lee—Richard Henry Lee.
First of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, first to call for union, and first to call for a bill of rights, Richard Henry Lee was as much a Father of Our Country as George Washington. For it was Lee who masterminded the political and diplomatic victories that ensured Washington’s military victory in the Revolutionary War. And after the nation took shape it was Lee—not James Madison—who conceived of the Bill of Rights our nation enjoys today.
Richard Henry Lee was a scion of one of Virginia’s—indeed, one of North America’s—wealthiest and most powerful families, a fabled dynasty akin to Europe’s Medici, Habsburgs, or Rothschilds. He and his blood—and relatives by marriage—ruled over hundreds of thousands of acres across Virginia, western Maryland, Pennsylvania, and present-day Ohio and Indiana; their fleet sailed the world carrying American tobacco to the farthest corners of the earth. At the peak of their wealth and power the Lees controlled Virginia’s government and economy and helped develop Virginia into North America’s largest, richest, and most populated British colony.
Needing nothing to fill his needs as a young adult, Richard Henry Lee absorbed a library of learning before entering public service—an avocation that became a lifelong commitment and turned him against his own class as he encountered government corruption and widespread deprivation of individual rights. His conflicts with corrupt officials and petty tyrants metamorphosed into demands for individual liberties, human rights, and, eventually, American independence from Britain. As a fledgling member of Virginia’s legislature, he shocked the South by declaring blacks “entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature” and planting the first seeds of emancipation in Virginia.
Twelve years before Britain’s colonies declared independence, Lee was the first to threaten King George III with rebellion if he did not annul a new stamp tax. Later Lee worked with Boston’s firebrand activist Samuel Adams to organize committees of correspondence in each colony, uniting the independence movement and bringing colony leaders to Philadelphia for North America’s First Continental Congress.
In 1775 Richard Henry Lee stood with Patrick Henry demanding war with Britain, if necessary, to obtain redress of American grievances against Parliament’s governing ministry. A year later he invited his own execution on the gallows with a treasonous resolve before Congress “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
Three weeks later, on July 2, C
ongress approved Lee’s resolution declaring independence from Britain. Newspapers sent the news streaming across the nation and the world, with banner headlines proclaiming America and her people free of British rule and hailing Richard Henry Lee as Father of American Independence.
A year later, when British troops seized the capital at Philadelphia, Lee rallied a band of twenty congressmen, led them westward to Lancaster, then York, Pennsylvania, and while Washington held the remnants of his army together at Valley Forge, Lee kept the remnants of Congress together and reestablished the fledgling American government. Assuming leadership as de facto chief executive, Richard Henry Lee ensured the new government’s survival, supervising military affairs, foreign affairs, and financial affairs and ensuring the needs of Washington’s army. John Adams called Lee the Cicero of the Revolution, in contrast to George Washington, the unquestioned Cincinnatus.
Three of Lee’s brothers, bound by mutual love of country—and of their older brother—reinforced Richard Henry’s every effort. Francis Lightfoot Lee stood by Richard Henry as a firm ally in Congress, while Arthur Lee and William Lee served as surrogates in Europe, to provide intelligence, find financial aid, and work out secret deals to smuggle French arms, ammunition, and materiel to Washington’s army. The surreptitious shipments would supply Washington with 80 percent of his army’s needs for more than a year until French king Louis XVI recognized American independence and sent his army and navy to America to seal American victory and independence from Britain.
John Adams hailed the Lees as a “band of brothers, intrepid and unchangeable, who, like the Greeks at Thermopylae, stood in the gap, in the defense of their country, from the first glimmering of the Revolution in the horizon, through all its rising light, to its perfect day.”1
In 1779 Richard Henry Lee—forty-seven years old, with four fingers blown away by a flintlock explosion—displayed his heroism in battle, leading his home-county militia in a charge against British troops landing along the Potomac River near Lee’s home.
After the Revolution Lee joined Patrick Henry in opposing ratification of the Constitution, fearing that, without a bill of rights, it would concentrate the nation’s power and wealth in the hands of oligarchs. Although they lost their struggle, Lee continued the fight, winning election to the US Senate in the First Congress, where he led efforts to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
But after two years in the Senate, including service as president pro tempore, the struggle wore him down. Spent and ailing, he retired to his Virginia home and died two years later, surrounded by his wife and nine children. The words on his gravestone expressed their loss and that of the nation: “We cannot do without you.”
CHAPTER 1
Evolution of a Dynasty
FOR ALMOST ALL OF HIS LIFE THOMAS LEE HAD BELIEVED—AND perpetuated—the family myth that the Lees had landed among the Norman knights at Hastings in 1066. Although his boys were fourth-generation Virginians, the Lee family’s evident importance in English history made it imperative that he send them “home” to England for a proper education—much as his own father had sent him there, and as his father’s father had sent his sons to English schools.
“Not one of the pupils has died here,” headmaster Joseph Randall assured Thomas Lee at England’s Wakefield School in 1744, when Lee was touring England in search of appropriate boarding schools for his younger sons. “This village,” Randall added, “is happily retired from those Temptations which Youth are exposed to in Towns… out of the reach… of vice… and corruptions of the age.”1
As important as the safety of its boys, Randall pointed out, the curriculum at Wakefield was identical to but less costly than its exalted competitor, Eton College, which Thomas Lee himself had attended as a boy. Although Henry VI had founded Eton in 1440 to educate poor boys without charge, it expected wealthy eighteenth-century parents to pay enormous sums—indeed, exorbitant sums—to educate, house, and feed its students.
That was to be expected for English noblemen grooming their oldest sons to rule the British Empire, but it seemed inappropriate for their younger boys, bound for only the military or the church—with little or no inheritance to take with them. Like members of England’s ruling class, Virginia’s Thomas Lee had routinely enrolled his oldest son and primary heir, Philip Ludwell Lee, in Eton several years earlier, but his next in line, Richard Henry Lee and his younger brother Thomas, would have to make do with a somewhat less costly education.
Under the universal rule of primo geniture, Thomas Lee would bequeath the vast Lee empire in America to his oldest son, leaving only scattered tracts in the wilderness to Richard Henry Lee and his four other younger sons. With the primary estate that Philip Ludwell Lee would inherit came a seat on Virginia’s ruling council of state, with powers second only to the royal governor. Richard Henry Lee and the younger boys would not share such powers and would need no academic or social credentials from Eton College to work their small plantations in the Virginia wilderness.
But the Lees, in fact, owned no armor and, although Thomas Lee would never admit it even to himself, neither he nor his forebears were high born. Their family name had metamorphosed over generations from de Lega—old French for “of the law” (perhaps a sheriff or notary by trade)—then de Le’, Leigh, and finally Lee. Subsequent generations were largely tradesmen: some peddled clothes, but one was a wine merchant who accumulated small royal land grants in America—all but worthless at the time—as token payments by the crown for his grapes.
Those grants, however, thrust the Lees into the landed gentry, and when Virginia settlers learned to grow tobacco and feed the sudden British craze for the weed, the value of Lee holdings soared—warranting a coat of arms. Described in heraldic terms as “fesse chequy and ten billets,”* it carried the title “Gentleman”—a rank above “Goodman,” or landowner who obtained his holdings from a king’s vassal rather than the king himself.
1. The Lee family coat of arms shows a “fesse chequy,” or wide checkered bar across the center of the shield, with ten “billets,” or vertical rectangles, above and below the central bar.
In 1640 Richard Henry Lee’s great-grandfather Richard took advantage of his rank by sailing across what Britons called “The Virginia Sea”* to claim his land grants and become the first Richard Lee in the New World.
2. The first Richard Lee in America sailed from Britain in 1640 with “headrights” to 1,000 acres in Virginia—a property he expanded to more than 15,000 acres before he died.
Before sailing, he bought enough slaves and indentured servants to acquire “headrights” to a thousand acres in York County, Virginia. Conceived earlier in the seventeenth century to ease labor shortages on Virginia’s tobacco fields, a landowner could obtain rights to an additional fifty acres from the Virginia Company of London for each person—each “head”—he brought to America to work the land. British taste for tobacco seemed limitless at the time, and headrights let Virginia plantation owners expand their properties and tobacco production by buying slaves or paying the passage of indentured white workers to come to America in exchange for a fixed number of years (usually five) of involuntary servitude on the buyer’s plantation. The impending outbreak of an English civil war made it a good time to leave.
With Virginia’s population barely 10,000 in the mid-seventeenth century, the 1,000 acres owned by Richard Henry Lee’s great-grandfather thrust him among Virginia’s largest property owners—and onto the governor’s Council of State, an oligarchy of property owners who ruled the colony. By 1653 Richard Lee had acquired enough headrights to claim 15,000 acres of tobacco land along the Virginia coast—including the site of present-day Mount Vernon.
Far from the Garden of Eden they had envisioned when they left England, the first Richard Lee and his family in America lived in an ugly collection of primitive log cabins north of the York River. Poisonous serpents outnumbered apple trees, and swarms of mosquitoes and other injurious insects harassed settlers day and night. Although
the Lees lived within riding distance of the colonial capital at Jamestown, Powhatan Indians called the land theirs and burned Lee’s settlement to the ground three times in the years after his arrival, slaughtering dozens of slaves and servants. Lee himself survived each assault and kept rebuilding and expanding his empire.
3. Jamestown’s population in 1640 had spilled beyond its original triangle of protective walls, but Indian raids remained common.
Before the first Richard Lee died in 1664 (of natural causes), he sired ten children, including a second Richard Lee, who sailed to England to attend Eton as his father had done, then returned to America to rule over and expand the Lee family holdings. By then they included about seven dozen slaves, herds of cattle and sheep, parts of two shipping companies, and an interest in a tobacco trading company in London. In modern terms the Lee plantation was an “integrated” enterprise that combined growing, harvesting, shipping, and trading tobacco, then the most lucrative crop in the British Empire. Like his father, the second Richard Lee in America assumed political offices, privileges, and powers that came with his lands.
Although the second Richard Lee was born in Virginia, he—like other colonial “aristocrats”—called England “home” and remained English, heart and soul, a bulwark of the royal governor’s ruling oligarchy. When, therefore, a group of shabby, small-property owners from the frontier demanded government protection against Indian raids, the governor—with the support of Lee and other powerful plantation owners—refused. None was willing to disrupt the profitable trade they had established with friendly Indians who gladly exchanged skins and furs for rum.
Led by planter Nathaniel Bacon, the frontiersmen took matters into their own hands and formed a militia that marched to the Roanoke River and slaughtered Susquehannock Indians, whom they deemed responsible for the attacks. Declared a traitor by Governor Sir William Berkeley, Bacon responded by leading his men into Jamestown, setting the town ablaze, burning the governor’s home to the ground, and taking Richard Lee prisoner.
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