First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Arthur waited in vain.

  Later Mercer claimed he had been delayed and that by the time he arrived, Lee had left. In truth, a discreet word from George Washington, a warm friend of both the Lee and Mercer families, coaxed Mercer to spare Arthur Lee’s life.

  In the spring of 1765 Boston lawyer James Otis sent a letter to each of the colonial assemblies asking them to send representatives to convene in New York City to formulate a colony-wide protest against the Stamp Act. Four provinces failed to respond or send representatives, but state representatives who did appear adopted Richard Henry Lee’s Westmoreland Resolves and sent copies to the king and to both houses of Parliament. Both the king and Parliament ignored the documents.

  When the Stamp Act went into effect on November 1, 1766, Americans refused to purchase a single stamp. And after 200 New York merchants pledged to stop buying imported goods, merchants elsewhere followed suit—400 in Philadelphia, 250 in Boston. Anglo-American trade came to a halt, making Colonel Phil’s warning seem prescient. British exports to America plunged 20 percent. Ordinary Britons, addicted to American tobacco, raged at the shortages the Stamp Act produced. Facing bankruptcy with no American raw materials to sell, British merchants hammered at the doors of Parliament demanding a return to normal trade with the American colonies. Almost a year to the day after it had passed the Stamp Act, Parliament retreated and repealed it, without a single stamp having been sold in America.

  As Richard Henry Lee and other opponents of the Stamp Act rejoiced, Parliament avenged its humiliation, however, by passing a Declaratory Act, asserting that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America… in all cases whatsoever.”18

  A year later it used that power to pass the Townshend Acts, imposing import duties in the colonies on glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea. The first four items were essential to constructing homes and businesses in America, and the last item—tea—was a staple of the American diet in Boston and other major towns. Unnoticed at first, a series of twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania appeared in newspapers across the colonies alerting Americans to the Townshend duties and arousing their collective furor.

  Written by the wealthy Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson, the Letters conceded Parliament’s authority to impose duties to regulate trade but not to raise funds for the government’s treasury. “Every statute relating to these colonies, from their first settlement to this time,” he argued, “is calculated to regulate trade.

  Never did the British Parliament think of imposing duties for the purpose of raising a revenue. Here then, my dear countrymen, ROUSE [his emphasis] yourselves and behold the ruin over your heads. If Great Britain can order us to pay what taxes she pleases, we are… abject slaves.19

  Dickinson’s Letters so gripped Richard Henry Lee that he arranged for a special printing in Williamsburg, writing a preface that condemned Britain’s Navigation Act and the “exclusive trade with these colonies.” He charged Parliament with trying to seize control of America’s most valuable assets by bankrupting those who had uncovered and developed those assets. He then wrote to Dickinson, “As a friend to the just and proper rights of human nature, but particularly as an American, you, Sir… have the honor of giving just alarm and of demonstrating the late measures to be, at once, destructive of public liberty and in violation of those rights which God and nature have given us.

  To prevent the success of this unjust system, a union of counsel and action among all the colonies is undoubtedly necessary. How to effect this union in the wisest and firmest manner, perhaps time and much reflection only can show. But well to understand each other and timely be informed of what passes both here and in Great Britain, it would seem that not only select committees should be appointed by all the colonies, but that a private correspondence should be conducted between the lovers of liberty in every province.20

  In writing to Dickinson, Richard Henry Lee became the first American Patriot to call for establishment of committees of correspondence in all the states and for the British-American colonies to effect a union.

  In Boston Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer provoked merchants to resume boycotting British imports. Rhode Island and New York followed suit. New York City business leaders developed a scheme to promote domestic production of goods they had previously imported, thus increasing local employment as well as local commerce.

  Taking full advantage of the turmoil in Boston, Samuel Adams, a Harvard scholar who had failed in business before becoming a political activist, followed Richard Henry Lee’s suggestion and wrote a “circular letter” approved by the Massachusetts House of Representatives that he sent to the legislatures of the twelve other colonies. As Dickinson had done, Adams assailed the Townshend Acts as violations of the constitutional principle prohibiting taxation without representation.

  Adams, however, conveniently overlooked the fact that few taxpayers in England had any representation in Parliament. Indeed, only 1 million of the 9 million adult males in Britain were entitled to vote, and there were many valid reasons for Americans not to have a vote. First, they would have too small a number of members of Parliament (MPs) to have any impact on legislation. Secondly, agents such as Benjamin Franklin were already representing American interests and had failed to convince a parliamentary majority that the American colonies should not share the costs of defense. One or two votes in Parliament would have added nothing. And thirdly, MPs went unpaid. Colonists would, therefore, incur new costs of transporting their representatives to and from London and lodging and supporting them and their families there.

  “Copyholders, leaseholders, and all men possessed of only personal property choose no representatives,” argued Soame Jenyns, a member of Parliament from Dublin who supported limited representation in Parliament and Parliament’s right to tax Americans. He cited what he called the principle of “imaginary representation,” with Parliament, in effect, representing all Englishmen, voters and nonvoters alike.

  Manchester, Birmingham, and many more of our richest and most flourishing trading towns send no members to Parliament and consequently cannot consent by their representatives because they choose none to represent them. Yet are they not Englishmen?… Why does not their imaginary representation extend to America as over the whole island of Great Britain. If it can travel three hundred miles, why not three thousand? If it can jump rivers and mountains, why cannot it sail over the ocean? If the towns of Manchester and Birmingham sending no representatives to Parliament are notwithstanding there represented, why are not the cities of Albany and Boston equally represented in the assembly?21

  But the arguments of Jenyns and other parliamentarians had little effect in Boston, where street demonstrations grew increasingly violent and provoked the British to send two regiments of troops into Boston Harbor, where they landed and imposed martial law.

  In Virginia both Richard Henry Lee and his brother Arthur scoffed at the Jenyns argument, pointing out that some 15 percent and more of the MPs in the House of Commons represented pocket boroughs and rotten boroughs, in each of which a small group of landowners—in fact, often only one landowner—controlled the vote of an entire geographic area. The Lees charged Parliament with corruption and intending to bleed American landowners of their wealth. The Townshend duties, they charged, aimed at making it too costly for would-be settlers to buy materials to build homes in America, thus undermining land values and allowing British politicians and their cronies to buy American land at a fraction of its value.

  After two years of attempting to establish a medical practice in Williamsburg, Arthur Lee abandoned his efforts. Eight other native Philadelphians with MDs had already established thriving practices in Philadelphia by the time he arrived, and as a Virginian in a state not his own—in effect, a “foreigner”—he faced insuperable competition from them and local “empirics.” The empirics were, in fact, quacks,
but they concocted tasty alcohol-based syrups they patented and sold as medicines to the sick and desperate as well as the healthy poor who could not afford conventional liquor.

  The growing American resistance to Parliament and British rule, however, had piqued Arthur’s interest in constitutional law, and he decided to return to London to study law and, where possible, represent the interests of his brother and other opponents of parliamentary rule. To that end he collected letters of introduction while on a junket through the middle colonies and New England to meet leaders of the resistance to British taxation, including Samuel Adams and his Boston associates.

  Arthur’s younger brother, William, meanwhile, had grown discouraged working for Colonel Phil. Although he had learned all facets of the tobacco trade and kept Colonel Phil’s books carefully and faithfully, William’s rewards were paltry. Aside from free lodging and meals at Stratford Hall, he received only token pay for his work and found himself continually at odds with Colonel Phil over the latter’s reluctance to release funds from William’s inheritance. When he learned of Arthur’s intent to return to Britain, he asked to sail with him, and Arthur embraced the idea of the two sharing the trip and their lives in London.

  In May 1769 George Washington’s Northern Neck neighbor, planter George Mason, introduced a set of resolutions in the House of Burgesses asserting that only the governor and the provincial legislature were authorized to tax Virginians. Mason also assailed a parliamentary proposal to bring American malcontents to Britain for trial. The British royal governor disagreed and responded by dissolving the House of Burgesses before it could vote on Mason’s resolves. Outraged by the governor’s arbitrary dismissal, Richard Henry Lee and the others reconvened the next day at Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern and adopted Mason’s Resolves along with a ban on imports of British goods covered by the Townshend Acts. They also adopted a landmark agreement banning importation of slaves—the ban that had generated outrage when Lee had sought it as a newcomer in the House of Burgesses twenty years earlier. The Burgesses also agreed to ban importation of European luxury goods from which British merchants had been profiting.

  Other provinces followed suit, with Maryland merchants voting for the boycott a month later, followed by merchant groups in all other provinces.

  In August 1769, however, a hurricane sent a forty-foot-wall of water crashing over the Atlantic coast, overflowing Virginia’s low-lying riverbanks and carrying away houses, outbuildings, and tobacco warehouses that bulged with the previous season’s harvest. Ten days of heavy rains followed and washed away the fortunes of Tidewater planters, large and small, leaving many penniless and searching for missing children, family members, and family retainers. Untold hundreds died; thousands of livestock vanished; tens of thousands of acres of fall plantings and topsoil flowed into the maelstrom, leaving direct losses estimated at £2 million—more than $250 million in today’s money. James River planters alone lost 2.3 million pounds of warehoused tobacco.

  Planters, traders, merchants, and bankers across the flood-ravaged regions could no longer think in terms of boycotts. They would need all the help they could get from Britain in money and supplies. Instead of alienating the British, they now needed—and intended—to embrace every Britisher they knew. For them all thoughts of rebellion had ended.

  * Tobacco plant seeds required specially prepared beds, a careful daily watch over each plant, and careful “topping,” or removing flowers by hand to force the flow of nourishment into the leaves. Harvesting leaves required a sixth sense—difficult to teach to anyone without language skills. A day or two too soon or too late reduced leaf quality and the market price. After harvesting came curing—a difficult process that required termination at the exact moment the leaf was pliable without being dry and brittle nor moist and soggy. Misjudgments could cost a planter his profits for the year and mean ruin.

  * Then, as now, Britain’s “constitution” referred to so-called case law—that is, the collective decisions handed down by the courts over generations.

  CHAPTER 3

  No Liberty, No King!

  WHILE FLOODS DEVASTATED THE LOWLANDS, MOST PLANTERS ON the Northern Neck escaped devastation. Their homes and much of their planted acreage stood atop tall bluffs that guided the flood waters harmlessly down streams into the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers and into Chesapeake Bay. With George Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon all but untouched, the value of his tobacco crop soared, increasing his fortune amid surrounding devastation of biblical proportions.

  The storm affected the British as well as Americans, slashing colonial imports from Britain from about £2.2 million the previous year to only £1.3 million in 1769.

  Although Chantilly and Stratford Hall suffered relatively minor damage, the storm destroyed and washed away the thriving riverside port facility at Stratford Landing. Richard Henry Lee, his hand and lower arm still healing, took an indefinite leave of absence from the House of Burgesses to return to his family, help repair his home at Chantilly, and lend whatever help he could at Stratford Hall and Mt. Airy.

  By then Richard Henry Lee’s “dear brothers” Arthur and William had reached London. He missed them both. “The flame of liberty burns bright and clear,” Richard Henry wrote to Arthur, “nor can its luster be impaired by any ministerial art or delusion.

  The Americans from one end of the continent to the other appear too wise, too brave, and much too honest to be either talked, terrified, or bribed from the assertion of just, equitable, and long possessed rights. It is clear beyond question that nothing but just, honest, and friendly measures can secure to Great Britain the obedience and love of America.… I have been so covered with affliction this past winter that I have thought little of anything except my own unhappiness.… Continue, my dear brother, to love me and to believe that I am and ever shall be your most affectionate brother.1

  Once in London, Arthur Lee settled into lodgings at Lincoln’s Inn, where law students lived and studied because of its proximity to the courts. At the time the study of law was an informal process, with candidates immersing themselves in a prescribed range of law books on their own, attending and learning from court proceedings as much as possible, hiring tutors as needed, and eventually taking the bar examination when they deemed themselves prepared. Lincoln’s Inn was—and is—one of four “Inns at Court” where future lawyers (barristers) lived while preparing for the bar, the other three being the Inner Temple, Middle Temple, and Gray’s Inn.

  Richard Henry sold Arthur Lee’s horses to cover his younger brother’s initial London expenses, but he would eventually have to carry the entire burden of Arthur’s legal education. Theirs was a deep filial affection, strengthened by Colonel Phil’s increased coldness toward his siblings. Ever more obsessed with expanding his business and embellishing the palatial interiors at Stratford Hall, he not only distanced himself socially from his younger brothers and sisters, he continually dipped into funds set aside for their inheritances, often making them wait interminably for the money he owed them.

  13. William Lee, another of Richard Henry Lee’s younger brothers, used his commercial ties while in England as head of his own tobacco trading house in London to funnel secret shipments of arms and ammunition to American revolutionaries.

  As Arthur was studying law, William established himself as a tobacco trader. Already skilled from his years under Colonel Phil, he had signed agreements to serve as London agent for a number of Virginia planters. In addition to tobacco from the 500 fertile acres Richard Henry had leased at Chantilly, he had inherited hundreds of acres of his own upriver that he leased to tenant farmers to produce tobacco. After enlisting other Lee relatives as clients, William sailed into London with an impressive list of growers to supply him with tobacco for his trading business. He could not have picked a better time to set up shop.

  Early in 1770 British merchants again forced the British government to cede ground in its conflict with Americans by repealing all but one of the Townshend duties. Wi
thin a year the American provinces ended their boycotts and restored normal trade with Britain, producing enormous profits for William’s new venture. To save face politically, however, the government retained an all-but-negligible duty on tea—a symbol of its authority to tax Americans directly.

  Before Americans learned of the British turnabout on tariffs, however, anti-British riots erupted in New York and Boston, with the Boston disturbance culminating in British troops shooting and killing five protesters. Civil authorities arrested six British soldiers and their commanding officer and charged them with murder, but two renowned Boston lawyers—John Adams and his cousin Josiah Quincy, both of them Whigs—won acquittals for four of the soldiers and their commanding officer by a decidedly anti-British jury made up of local farmers. The jury found two of the soldiers guilty of manslaughter, but recognizing that their victims had provoked them, it exacted only a token punishments (a brand on the thumb) and released them. With the end of the trial peace returned to the streets of Boston and the rest of the American colonies.

  By then William’s tobacco trading business was prospering and adding to the profits of both Philip Ludwell’s Stratford Hall and Richard Henry’s Chantilly. With William acting as their London broker, they eliminated unrelated middlemen, allowing their tobacco to travel on Lee-owned ships to a Lee-owned warehouse in London, where William would sell the tobacco to English merchants—often in exchange for household goods and other items the Lees needed in America. With William’s newfound wealth came access to London society. He was, after all, still British.