First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Like Arthur, William adored his brother Richard Henry, and aware of the financial burdens Richard Henry faced with his growing family, William invited Richard Henry to send his two oldest boys to England, where he would see to their education.

  Attending a British academy remained the hallmark of Virginia gentlemen, and William enrolled them in St. Bees, an adequate (if not Etonian) English boarding school in Lancashire. Founded in 1583 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it experienced good years and bad and would manage to survive until 2015.

  “’Tis the care of my dear boys that I recommend to you with true parental warmth,” Richard Henry wrote to William. “Their welfare, you may be sure, is deeply in my heart.… They are good scholars so far as they have gone. I propose Thomas for the church and Ludwell for the bar. [At] about 15 years old, Ludwell may be entered at one of the Inns of Court and come there to study law… so that he may return with the gown at 21. We shall hereafter consider the cheapest and fittest place for the eldest until the time comes that he can be ordained. He is 14 years old next October and Ludwell 12 the same month.… Pardon me for not now making you a better remittance.”2

  In fact, Richard Henry’s financial reserves were touching bottom. Public service had proved a costly occupation, encompassing nothing but costly outlays and, without a sinecure, no income. He asked William, therefore, to see that “my boys… be very frugally clothed. The plainest, to be decent, will please me much the best.

  With five children and another—it may be two—in the stocks, a small estate must part with nothing unnecessary. I take all possible care, but I assure you, if the varying state of politics on your side would enable my brother to fix the profit of some place with me, it would remove many difficulties. Have an eye on the deputy secretary’s place.3

  In the days and weeks that followed, however, Richard Henry applied himself to the family business, consigning 96 hogsheads of tobacco to William in one shipment, 33 in another, 40 in another, 54 in still another, and promising 220 or 230 more. Business was booming for the Lees on both sides of the Atlantic.*

  Like William, Arthur had also been quick to make friends and connections in London, and given his base at Lincoln’s Inn, they tended to be in law, politics, and the arts. Both Lees used their ties to publicize Virginia’s complaints about British taxation; William established friendships with business men seeking to improve trade relations with America, and Arthur fraternized in the political world with those seeking political compromise.

  William displayed the more winning personality, however, and used his status as an Englishman to win election as one of London’s two sheriffs in 1773. Not long thereafter he won a post as alderman—a lifetime position as a member of the borough council. Once safely on the council, he announced his intention to run for a seat in Parliament and castigated the British government for its treatment of colonials. To the surprise of both William and Richard Henry, William found enormous support from Londoners in the world of commerce with whom he had business relations as head of the Lee trading operation. The commercial community wanted nothing but peace—and the profitable trade and prosperity it generated.

  After Parliament passed an act reasserting its authority over the colonies, William spoke out in defiance, declaring, “The act cannot give a right which does not exist. Parliament had no right to make such an act. Americans had never acknowledged such authority.” Lee accused the Ministry of committing “many oppressions of the unoffending Americans such as… seizing their property violently, sending an armed force to command obedience by the sword.… These proceedings were too much for human nature to bear.”4

  Arthur, meanwhile, defended American interests from a different direction, using a letter of introduction from Samuel Adams to meet Benjamin Franklin—at the time the overworked agent in Britain for both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Franklin gladly arranged to reduce his workload by seeing to Arthur’s appointment as assistant agent for Massachusetts.

  Arthur’s ties to Franklin brought him into contact with a wide range of London political characters, including a group of radical, self-professed “friends of America.” England’s first woman historian, “the Celebrated Catherine Macaulay,” was one, and scientist Joseph Priestly another. Other “friends” included cleric Richard Price and essayist Dr. Samuel Johnson along with such politicians as Edmund Burke, Isaac Barre, and the notorious John Wilkes.

  Wilkes was a relatively well-to-do and extremely learned son of a British distiller, but he was as ugly as he was rich. Often called England’s ugliest politician, he compensated for his facial deficiencies with an insatiable appetite for women, outrageously radical political views, and a charming and disarming personality that won him an army of friends and supporters. After starting a small, opposition newspaper, Wilkes won election to Parliament in 1757 but was expelled for insulting the king. Tried and sentenced to prison, he fled to France but returned in 1768 to serve his sentence. Supporters rioted outside Wilkes’s prison, shouting “No liberty, no King,” only to have troops fire into the crowd, killing seven and wounding fifteen. Infuriated survivors, however, rallied to reelect Wilkes to Parliament even as he languished in his prison cell.

  After his release, Wilkes returned to Parliament to denounce the British government for attempting to tax Americans. “The assumed right of taxation without the consent of the subjects,” Wilkes warned, “will lead to the horrors of civil war.”5

  With encouragement from his brother Richard Henry, Arthur Lee joined a Wilkes-backed political group called the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, which also supported the rights of Americans to tax themselves. “My political progress made me acquainted with many of the leaders of all parts of the opposition,” Arthur explained his transition from law student to spy.

  Then, “by constantly comparing the different ideas of those gentlemen… with the plans and proceedings of the ministers,” he said, “I was able to form a pretty accurate judgment… of the real intentions of the latter and how far America was warranted in relying on the support of the former.”6

  14. John Wilkes, British political leader jailed for insulting the king, won re-election to Parliament while still in prison and led member protests against taxing Americans without their consent. The town of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, honored Wilkes and Irish member of Parliament Isaac Barre for their support by renaming itself Wilkes-Barre.

  Backed by the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, Arthur wrote the first of a series of angry editorials under the pseudonym Junius Americanus—a variation of the anonymous Junius, who had written scathing criticisms of King George III. The original Junius was a Roman patriot who overthrew a despotic Roman government.

  “In the heart of every American,” Junius Americanus (Arthur Lee) explained in one article, “the wish for the prosperity of England is second only to that for the liberties of his own country.

  When that cannot be done without submitting their hands to chains and their necks to the yoke, they must be forgiven for the refusal… they will never be slaves.… It has been my humble, but honest task to warn his majesty’s ministers through the channel of the public papers of the fatal consequences of their arbitrary measures.… When the acts of this country respecting America are just, they will never be questioned; when they are unjust, they will never be obeyed.7

  At Arthur Lee’s suggestion, Richard Henry established his own links to a few opposition figures, including the controversial, albeit delightful Catherine Macaulay. Unusually well educated for a British commoner, Macaulay had been a prolific reader as a girl and embraced the histories of the Roman and Greek Republics. Calling “liberty” her primary object of study, she wrote the epic eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution—a work that transformed her into “the Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay” by questioning divine right of kings and espousing the rights of citizens to depose their monarch. A harsh critic of British government policies in America, she had grown close to John Wilkes and, eventually
, Arthur Lee.

  “As a good Christian properly attached to your native country,” Richard Henry wrote to Macaulay, “I am sure you must be pleased to hear that North America is not fallen. Nor likely to fall down before the images the king hath set up.

  After more than ten years of abuse and injury… the administration is at length determined to try if the sword cannot effect what threatening acts of Parliament had in vain attempted.… The inhumanity with which this war… (unprovoked as it has been on this side) is prosecuted is really shocking. A few days since, in the midst of winter’s northern climate, did [British] General Howe turn out of Boston between two and three hundred women and children without even the necessaries of life. Some of them died on the water side before their hospitable countrymen could relieve them.8

  Although Arthur Lee continued issuing his tempestuous Junius articles, the British government purposely ignored him. Some calm was returning to America, restoring British-American trade to precrisis conditions, and Parliamentary leaders seemed content to leave things that way.

  Convinced that the calm presaged another storm, however, Richard Henry Lee insisted that Congress lay the foundation of an intelligence network in Europe, beginning with the appointment of Richard Henry Lee’s brother Arthur as its eyes and ears in London. “It would be agreeable to Congress to know the disposition of foreign powers towards us [his italics], and we hope this object will engage your attention,” Richard Henry wrote to Arthur on behalf of the Committee of Secret Correspondence of Congress. “We need not hint that great circumspection and impenetrable secrecy are necessary.”9

  In Boston, meanwhile, the vestigial Townshend duties on tea imports had provoked a boycott of British tea and rampant smuggling of Dutch tea. At first British authorities paid little attention. Tea duties were hardly noticeable amidst the flow of revenues from America. When, however, a group of the boldest smugglers burned the British customs schooner Gaspé near Providence, Rhode Island, a Commission of Inquiry proposed sending the assailants to England for trial. Adding to what New Englanders deemed a threat to local self-rule was a decree subjecting the conduct and pay of the governor of Massachusetts and all provincial judges to the crown, rendering the executive and judiciary independent of local control.

  By early 1773 the boycott of British tea had left 17 million pounds of East India Company tea overflowing London warehouses and onto London docks. Parliament reacted by letting the company ship tea to America duty-free and sell directly to consumers through franchised shops. The Act locked the merchants responsible for the American boycott out of the tea business by creating a government-supported monopoly on English tea.

  Boston merchants retaliated, sending thugs to terrorize East India Company agents and calling on other provinces to prevent East India Company tea from landing in America.

  On Sunday, November 28, 1773, the first Boston-bound ship glided toward the wharf in Boston with its cargo of tea. A few days later a second tea ship tied up beside the first, and a third sailed into port after two more days.

  A few days later an angry mob marched down a nearby street shouting, “Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight!” A group of forty to fifty demonstrators, amateurishly disguised as Indians with blankets over their heads and coloring on their faces, boarded the tea ships. Methodically and skillfully they lifted the tea chests from the hold with blocks and tackles, carefully split each open with axes, and dumped the tea and splintered chests into the water—342 chests in all, valued at £9,659, or more than $1 million in today’s currency.

  As lawyer John Adams rode into Boston the next morning he saw the splintered tea chests and huge clots of tea leaves covering the waters of Boston Bay. “This,” he wrote in his diary later, “is the most magnificent movement of all. There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the Patriots I greatly admire.… This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid & inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an Epocha in History.”10

  In Virginia Richard Henry Lee had mixed feelings about what Americans would later call the Boston Tea Party. Even as he hailed Boston’s defiance of the Tea Act, he condemned the destruction of private property. He was, after all, a property owner himself. “Something material may happen in consequence of the well-deserved fate which befell the tea on your quarter,” he warned Boston rabble-rouser Samuel Adams. He predicted the British would respond with “harsh measures.”11

  15. The Boston Tea Party, shown here in Nathaniel Currier’s 1846 lithograph, saw the destruction of £9,659 worth of tea, or $1 million in today’s currency by American rebels disguised as American Indians.

  Richard Henry Lee’s fellow burgess George Washington was more sanguine, disapproving “of their conduct in destroying the tea” but asserting that “the cause of Boston… is and ever will be considered as the cause of America.” He predicted “a general war is inevitable whilst those from whom we have a right to seek protection are endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us.”12

  Samuel Adams ignored Richard Henry’s warning and called for colony-wide disruptions of tea shipments and boycotts of English tea in all the colonies. Bostonians responded with a second “tea party,” New Yorkers staged their own immediately afterward, and Philadelphians followed suit a few days later.

  To halt the spread of insurrection the British government passed the first of the so-called Coercive Acts, or, as others called them, the Intolerable Acts. The first, the Boston Port Bill, passed on March 1, closed Boston’s port to all traffic—in and out—threatening to starve Bostonians until they submitted to unconditional British rule and recompensed the India Tea Co. for its losses.

  “No shock of electricity could more suddenly and universally move [us],” Richard Henry Lee wrote to brother Arthur in London, using the most colorful metaphor he could devise.

  At this time of immense danger to America, when the dirty ministerial stomach is daily ejecting its foul contents upon us, it is quite necessary that the friendly streams of information and advice should be frequently applied to wash away the impurity. Astonishment, indignation, and concern seized on all.

  16. Samuel Adams as a street activist whipped Boston mobs into a frenzy, throwing stones, bottles, and other missiles at British soldiers, provoking them to fire and kill five civilians and wound six others at the Boston Massacre.

  Lee called the British policy “a most wicked system for destroying the liberty of America.”13

  When Bostonians refused to submit to the Boston Port Bill, Parliament passed two more Coercive Acts on May 20. The first stripped the people of Massachusetts of voting rights and empowered the king to appoint and dismiss members of the Massachusetts (governing) Council. It gave the royal governor power to appoint and dismiss all members of the judiciary—the attorney general, all judges, justices of the peace, and so forth.

  The second Coercive Act reached beyond the Massachusetts border and established a centralized British government in the former French colony of Canada. Called the Quebec Act, it also extended the Canadian border southward to the Ohio River, incorporating western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into Canada. In effect, the Quebec Act cost Americans their claims to all the lands in the Ohio Territory, including the hundreds of thousands of acres of Ohio Land Company lands the Lee and Washington families had planned to develop.

  Richard Henry might have tolerated some British trade restrictions and taxes that limited his market for tobacco to Britain; he could even tolerate taxes that forced him to share his income with what he considered a corrupt British government. But he could not—would not—tolerate those same officials confiscating lands that his family had owned for generations. This was their land: Lee land. The Quebec Act simply stole it from him. To make matters worse, Parliament passed yet another, fourth Coercive Act on June 2, legalizing the arbitrary quartering of British troops in private homes as well as taverns and
unoccupied buildings.

  The Quartering Act proved a breaking point.

  The Boston Port Bill had warred against Samuel Adams and Boston, the Massachusetts Government Bill had warred against the rest of Massachusetts, and the Quebec Act had warred against the Lees and Washingtons. But the Quartering Act, with its power to station a Redcoat in every home, warred against all Americans, and Richard Henry Lee strode forward with George Washington to lead Americans to war on the British Empire.

  Sensing the need for stronger leadership in the growing anti-British movement, Richard Henry Lee issued a public condemnation of the Boston Port Bill, calling it “a most violent and dangerous attempt to destroy the constitutional liberty of and rights of all North America.” He called for a colony-wide congress “to consider and determine ways… for securing the constitutional rights of America against the systematic plan for their destruction.”14

  Recognizing Samuel Adams’s influence in the besieged Boston community, Richard Henry wrote to Adams to lay the groundwork for the first truly “continental” congress, asking, “Do you not think, Sir, that the first most essential step… will be an invitation to a general congress as speedily as the nature of things will admit?

  I hope the good people of Boston will not be dispirited under their present heavy oppression, for they will most certainly be supported by the other colonies, their cause being rightly and universally considered the common cause of British North America. So glorious a one it is… that all America will owe their political salvation… to the present virtue of Massachusetts Bay.15