First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  4. The ruins of Jamestown after planter Nathaniel Bacon retaliated against the royal governor for failing to protect nearby plantations against Indian raids. Bacon died shortly thereafter, and the governor hanged twenty-three of his followers.

  Bacon died a month later, but Berkeley ordered men from a British naval squadron to crush the rebellion, freeing Richard Lee, hanging twenty-three insurgents, and seizing their properties. After British king Charles II learned of the rebellion, he recalled Berkeley to England, allegedly saying, “As I live, the old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.”2 With that, the king calmed Virginia tempers with tax reductions and stepped up defenses against Indian incursions.

  When the second Richard Lee died, his oldest son—the third Richard Lee—was still living in England, with no inclination to leave for the Virginia wilds. He never got the chance, dying a year later at thirty-nine without male heirs and leaving the Lee empire in America to his brother Thomas Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s father.

  5. Thomas Lee negotiated the first peace treaty with hostile Indian nations at the historic Lancaster Conference, earning a royal land grant of 500,000 acres in the Ohio Territory.

  Thomas married the wealthy American heiress Hannah Ludwell, whose dowry helped expand Lee-family holdings in Virginia to more than 50,000 acres. On January 29, 1729, however, raiders broke into their home as the Lees slept, stole their silver and other valuables, then set fire to the house, barns, and outbuildings. One servant died in the blaze, but Thomas and Hannah swept up their young son, Philip Ludwell, and daughter, Hannah, and leaped out a second-floor window to the ground. Pregnant with her third child, Hannah survived the fall but miscarried. The raiders escaped and were never found or identified.

  The Lees moved north to higher ground on Virginia’s Northern Neck Peninsula and built a fortress-like home on the cliffs overlooking the Potomac River. Named Stratford Hall—the name of the first Richard Lee’s home in Britain—the new Lee manor and its austere exterior housed a palatial interior, where Hannah gave birth to six more Lees: Thomas, Richard Henry, Francis Lightfoot, Alice, William, and Arthur.

  All but adjacent to Stratford Hall, Thomas Lee built a separate two-story brick schoolhouse—in effect, a small boarding school—and hired a well-educated Scottish clergymen to teach his boys reading, writing, literature, science, Latin, proper behavior, morality, religion, Bible, and catechism. Like other plantation owners, Thomas Lee had little time for “fathering” his boys. Supervision of his agricultural enterprise kept him busy most of the year, and obligations in the colonial legislature—the House of Burgesses—and the executive Council of State in Williamsburg occupied the rest of his time.

  Unlike New England, where most villages boasted a church with a minister who taught local children on weekdays, almost nothing but plantations blanketed the South; the road out of one plantation led only to the road into the next. Slaves usually raised the master’s boys until they were five, when a tutor took charge of their upbringing and education until they were twelve and old enough to sail to England and attend boarding schools such as Eton or Wakefield.*

  6. Stratford Hall, the magnificent home that Thomas Lee built on Virginia’s Northern Neck, housed a luxurious interior behind an austere, fortress-like exterior aimed at discouraging attacks by thieves and Indian raiders.

  Richard Henry Lee and his brothers slept in a dormitory on the second floor of the Stratford Hall schoolhouse, adjacent to the tutor’s private quarters. More than just an instructor, their tutor served as a surrogate parent, ministering to the boys on Sundays, escorting them to social and sporting events, and teaching them a variety of social and recreational skills ranging from dancing to horsemanship. The tutor roused the boys at seven each morning for an hour of lessons before breakfast and morning chores. Lessons resumed at nine and, except for an hour for dinner, continued until five. In the hour of free play that followed, Richard Henry Lee—far more than his older brother Philip—embraced a leadership role that earned him the lifelong devotion of three of his younger brothers, Francis Lightfoot, William, and Arthur.

  After the personal and financial disaster Thomas Lee had suffered with the loss of his first home, he decided to strengthen Virginia against Indian raids. All but seizing command of Virginia’s government from a timid royal governor, Lee organized a peace conference with leaders of the Six Nation (Indian) Confederacy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in early summer 1744. Plying them with wampum, whiskey, rum, and rhetoric, Lee convinced Indian leaders to cede much of western Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the lands east of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the British. Language differences, however, left Thomas Lee convinced he had restored British control over territory Britain had claimed in 1609 that “extended to the South Sea” (Pacific Ocean)—or so he wrote to the king.

  The king expressed his gratitude by granting Thomas Lee 500,000 acres in the Ohio Valley, with which Lee and a group of friends, including George Washington and his brothers, formed the Ohio Land Company, with plans to sell land to would-be settlers in the ensuing decades.

  By then Thomas Lee had expanded his property adjacent to Stratford Hall from its original 1,500 acres to about 4,000 acres, with vineyards, orchards, tobacco fields, and fields of grain stretching to the horizon. And at its core stood the magnificent manor, Stratford Hall, atop a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, on Virginia’s Northern Neck, the northernmost of three giant peninsulas that reached eastward into Chesapeake Bay (see map, here). Below, on river’s edge beneath Stratford Hall, stood a mill, a warehouse, a landing for ocean-going transports, a ship’s store, and a fully equipped shipyard to build, repair, and service ships. Scattered about the property was housing for as many as one hundred slaves, servants, and workers, including weavers, carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, shipwrights, millers, herdsmen, weavers, tailors, shoemakers, and other craftsmen. In effect, Thomas Lee—Richard Henry Lee’s father—had transformed a corner of Virginia into a thriving, self-sufficient, English waterfront community, which he intended bequeathing to his oldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee. With Philip already studying law in London, Thomas Lee went to England to see about educating his other sons and sought to enroll Richard Henry Lee in Wakefield School.

  “A young nobleman or gentleman may have a room to himself and eat at a private table with the [Randall] family,” Wakefield headmaster Randall assured Thomas Lee. An additional £35 a year (just under $5,000 in current dollars) would assure him “the best masters” to teach him the basic curriculum, along with “natural philosophy [physics], fortification and gunnery, logic, dancing, fencing, music, and drawing.

  “It must be observed,” Randall added, “that washing is not included in the board. The usual price is fourteen shillings (about $135 today) a year… for which they have three shirts a week. Each pupil finds his own sheets alternately with his bedfellow.”3

  Randall’s presentation evidently convinced Thomas Lee, who enrolled thirteen-year-old Richard Henry. The boy was still there four years later in 1750 when both his parents died—his mother, Hannah, in January, his father, Thomas, in November. As expected, Thomas Lee left the bulk of his wealth to his oldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee, twenty-three by then and still at the Inner Temple in London studying law. As primary heir and executor of his father’s estate, he immediately returned to Virginia.

  Richard Henry Lee was approaching nineteen and in his last year at Wakefield. With no responsibilities in the settlement of his father’s estate and far too late to attend the burial, he chose to finish his studies at Wakefield, then set off to see the Western world. He left for the continent after graduating and spent the next several years touring Europe—including France and especially Paris, which had evolved into a center of arts and letters. “Noblemen, judges, and men of finance perfected the art of conversation with philosophers, artists, and men of letters” in the many salons. The rarity of a visit by so polished and cultured an American as Richard Henry Lee made hi
m a popular figure and left him with little inclination to return to the isolated Virginia hilltop of his childhood.4

  Besides the family fortune, however, his older brother Philip Ludwell Lee had inherited the task of caring for his six minor siblings and managing their inheritances until they each reached the age of majority. Richard Henry had no choice but return to claim his share of the family wealth.

  Thomas Lee had left his minor children with handsome, if not extravagant, assets in either land or money. He bequeathed his sons Thomas, Richard Henry, and Francis Lightfoot several hundred acres each—in Stafford County, Prince William County, and Loudon County, respectively. Each property came with thirty to fifty slaves along with more than adequate sums of money to build substantial homes. He left his two youngest boys, William, eleven, and Arthur, ten, £1,300 pounds ($175,000) each—enough to live on and even build modest homes when they reached their majority. In the meantime their oldest brother, Philip, was to raise the two “religiously and virtuously and, if necessary, bind them to any profession or trade, so that they may earn their living honestly.”5

  As sole executor of the estate, Philip Ludwell Lee controlled the bequests of the four minor boys along with bequests of £1,000 each ($136,500 in current dollars) that Thomas left his two daughters as dowries to ensure marriages to husbands of standing. The older daughter, Hannah Lee, was already twenty-one when her father died and married a prosperous planter. His other daughter, Alice, fourteen, would later marry Philadelphia’s renowned physician Dr. William Shippen, the future surgeon general of George Washington’s Continental Army.

  Twenty-year-old Richard Henry Lee sailed home to Virginia in 1752. More interested in scholarship than commercial trade or agriculture, he returned to his boyhood home at Stratford Hall, where his brother Philip—still unmarried—welcomed his brother’s companionship, giving him his own apartment along with access to the more than 300 books in the Stratford Hall library. While Philip focused on running the family enterprise, Richard Henry immersed himself in history, political philosophy, political science, and law, absorbing the works of John Locke, Sir William Blackstone, and the Baron de Montesquieu.

  “From the works of the immortal Locke,” his grandson Richard Henry Lee II recalled, “he acquired an ardent fondness for the principles of free government; and from those of Cudworth, Hooker, Grotius, and other writers… he drew maxims of civil and political morality.

  He read… the histories of the patriotic and republican ages of Greece and Rome, which animated his love of his country and of liberty.… His taste was refined by… Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Shakespeare.… The best histories of every age were within his reach, and a vast fund of political wisdom derived from them… when, in future life, he called for its use in the service of his country.6

  Lee did not, however, devote himself exclusively to study. A consummate southern dilettante by then, “he mingled cheerfully in society,” according to one of his grandsons. He attended all the festivities at great homes of other planters nearby, including Belvoir,* the stately mansion of Lord Fairfax and his family up the Potomac on the Northern Neck not far from Mount Vernon. Recipient of one of the largest royal grants in American history, Lord Fairfax could claim ownership of more than 1 million acres stretching over the entire Northern Neck in eastern Virginia, westward to the base of the Shenandoah Mountains. Lee was “affable and polite,” his grandson noted, and “became very popular upon entering into the active scenes of life.”7

  It was at Belvoir that Richard Henry Lee met the young George Washington, at twenty-two, a year older than Richard Henry. Washington had just assumed control of what had been his older brother’s plantation at Mount Vernon, upriver from Stratford Hall. In contrast to Richard Henry Lee, young Washington was a professional surveyor, an experienced wilderness explorer who loved gardening and farm work, and an officer in the Virginia militia. Ostensible opposites, Lee and Washington formed an instant friendship, with each—the scholar and the rugged outdoorsman—lacking yet admiring the other’s experiences.

  In the spring of 1755 the first clouds of war darkened American skies when French troops from Canada invaded what Virginia had long claimed as its territory in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley. Virginia’s governor ordered Washington to lead 150 militiamen to demand surrender of Fort Duquesne, which the French had built on the site of present-day Pittsburgh. After a short skirmish in which the French humiliated Washington and his men, the Virginians staggered home to await the arrival of British general Edward Braddock with 1,400 regular British troops.

  Map 1. Virginia’s Northern Neck. The peninsula between the Potomac (spelled Patowmack on this antique map) and Rappahannock Rivers was one of several jutting out from mainland Virginia into Chesapeake Bay. Richard Henry Lee’s boyhood home, Stratford Hall, and Chantilly, the home he built for his family, stood in Westmoreland County on the north shore opposite Blackstone’s Island. George Washington’s Mount Vernon stands overlooking the Potomac upriver at the first bend beneath Alexandria, in Fairfax County.

  When Braddock’s ships sailed up the Potomac River past Stratford Hall, Richard Henry Lee decided to emulate his friend Washington and take up arms. He galloped off with other volunteers to join Braddock in Alexandria—only to have Braddock reject the young Virginians as ill trained and ill equipped. In words Richard Henry Lee described as “coarse and rude,” he ordered them to return to their homes.8

  Braddock was also ready to reject Washington and his 450-man troop until junior officers intervened, citing Washington’s experience in the backcountry and his understanding of Indians and Indian warfare.

  Days later, however, as Braddock and his force reached Great Meadows near their destination, the general ignored—indeed, rejected—Washington’s warning about “the mode of attack which he would likely face against the Canadian French and their Indians.

  “So prepossessed were they in favor of regularity and discipline,” Washington explained in disbelief, “and in such absolute contempt were these people [Indians] held, that the admonition was suggested in vain.”9

  Confident the Indians would not dare attack his sparklingly attired troops, Braddock ordered his men to advance linear style toward Fort Duquesne. Suddenly crackling shots and blood-curdling war whoops engulfed the woods. A mob of half-naked French and Indians materialized among the trees, emitting a ceaseless staccato of shouts and shots. Dozens of British troops fell dead. Before survivors could turn and flee, a second wave of attackers succeeded the first, letting loose another blast of blood-curdling brays and bullets. In and out they sprang, left, right, front, rear, one after another emerging from the trees, firing, then disappearing. Confusion and terror gripped the British ranks. The slaughter lasted three hours: 977 of the 1,459 British troops and 66 of the 86 officers dropped to the ground dead or wounded, including General Braddock, who died from his wounds four days later. The French suffered 17 casualties, the Indians maybe 100.

  As news of Braddock’s humiliation filtered back to Alexandria and, from there, to Stratford Hall, both elder Lee brothers, Richard Henry and Philip Ludwell, determined to reshape Virginia’s policies. As a landowner, Philip was eligible to run for election to the House of Burgesses and won a seat, joining George Washington’s brother Augustine and an imposing number of Lee cousins and their in-laws already sitting in the legislature. Owning no land in Westmoreland County, Richard Henry was ineligible to run, but brother Philip—now addressed as “Colonel Phil”—saw to his younger brother’s appointment as a county justice of the peace. Although Richard Henry would not influence colonial policy for the moment, it was a first step into Virginia’s political machinery until he settled on his own property and became eligible for election to the colonial legislature.

  By the time George Washington and his crippled force emerged from the wilderness, rumors had listed him—and most of his troops—as casualties. Experienced as he was in wilderness warfare, however, he escaped unhurt and even added a touch of humor
to his macabre adventure.

  “As I have heard a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech,” he wrote to his brother Jack, “I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first and assuring you that I have not yet composed the latter. But by the all-powerful dispensation of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation, for I had four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me.”10

  Washington’s prowess as a horseman had allowed him to remount horses of dead officers during the battle and effect his own escape. On his return to Virginia, however, he raged as he reported details of “our shameful defeat” to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. Washington excoriated the British high command for having failed to train troops to adapt to unconventional, Indian-style warfare. He made it clear that a handful of individuals firing behind the cover of trees, shrubs, and rocks had a clear advantage in the wilderness over large columns of troops firing from upright positions in traditional linear-style warfare designed for the wide, open fields of Europe.

  7. Colonel George Washington owned the Mount Vernon plantation upriver from Stratford Hall and commanded a unit of the Virginia militia who suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Indians and French in western Pennsylvania.

  With that, the burgesses, led by a disproportionate number of supporters among the Lees, unanimously named Washington commander of the Virginia militia and voted to raise a 1,200-man force for him to command. “It is probable they will determine for 4,000,” Richard Henry Lee’s cousin Philip Ludwell told Washington. “Every one of my acquaintance profess a fondness for your having the militia [and] whilst I am serving so deserving a man [as you], I think with pleasure that I am serving my country as well.”11