First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Although Richard Henry esteemed Samuel Adams as a valuable, popular leader in Boston and a vital ally in the struggle against Britain, he viewed Adams as both parochial and unstatesmanlike—capable of rallying a mob and igniting riots but too outspoken to attract American statesmen to his side. Despite a Harvard education, Adams lacked the subtlety to negotiate with haughty British leaders who had honed their sophistication at Eton and Oxbridge. Moreover, he did not understand the differing needs of thirteen diversified colonies nor did he wield the political skills to unite them as one. Richard Henry realized that independence by itself would not unite them. Adams, moreover, did not possess what Lee had at his command—a network of allies in every corner of the British political establishment.

  There were many like Adams in America who could lead a violent revolution, but few could match Lee’s ability to lead a nuanced, perhaps even nonviolent revolution to produce political change and restore the constitutional rights of Americans without loss of life.

  Thus Lee stepped into the breach, first by calling for a nonviolent day of fasting in support of the people of Boston. This earned him so much national attention that Virginia’s colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, punished him and his followers by dissolving the House of Burgesses and charging Lee with defying royal authority.

  In doing so, however, Dunmore miscalculated, angering burgesses who had been neutral in the dispute between colonies and crown and even breeding resentment among some otherwise loyal Tories. Lee responded by calling burgesses to reconvene in nearby Raleigh Tavern the next day. With the approval of almost all, he assailed the Intolerable Acts and called for a convention of political leaders from across the colony to meet the following year to respond. To stay informed about the latest schemes afoot in Parliament, he wrote to his brothers in London to establish a flow of information from Parliament’s inner sancta—in effect, establishing America’s first espionage service, sending letters with pieces torn out and sent separately, thus making each letter incomprehensible unless pieced together with one or more others.

  “It is said… that the war is to be carried into Virginia as well as in the northern provinces,” William Lee wrote from London to brother Richard Henry. “The utmost industry of the Ministry is employed to inflame men’s minds here, especially by publishing… accusations of savageness and barbarity… on the part of the provincials.… Thirty thousand men is… the estimate of the whole force intended against America. Next year.”16

  “It is essentially necessary,” Richard Henry wrote cryptically to brother Arthur, “that you visit Virginia for a few months.” Without saying as much, he hoped Arthur would understand his brother’s command as a plea to bring Richard Henry Lee’s boys back to Virginia before someone in the British government decided to use them as hostages.17

  Stepping forward publicly as Virginia’s acknowledged political leader, Richard Henry Lee summoned district leaders from across the state to convention, where they approved proposals that included a total ban on trade with Britain and reiterated their opposition to parliamentary levies, including the Tea Tax. They labeled any consumer of East India Tea “an enemy to the rights and liberties of America.” The ad hoc convention went on to select delegates to attend Lee’s proposed national convention in Philadelphia—or, as historians would call it later, the First Continental Congress. It was an invitation to Americans to unite in a new and independent nation—and an invitation to British authorities to hang Richard Henry Lee for treason.

  On September 5, 1774, Richard Henry joined fifty-five other delegates from twelve of the thirteen British-American colonies in Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall. They were a curious group, differing in modes of dress, depending on their geographic origins. Excepting those whose parents had shipped them to British schools as Lee’s parents had done, they often had difficulty understanding each other. Depending on which colonies they inhabited, they spoke a wide variety of English dialects flavored by accents that often made their words indecipherable. Immigrants from many nations had settled in various parts of North America—often sailors who jumped ship and introduced words and accents that infected entire regions. Slaves had affected almost every southerner’s accent.

  Other factors such as geography worked against cohesion among the delegates to the Continental Congress. Philadelphia lay more than three days’ travel from New York, about ten days from Boston, and was all but inaccessible from far-off cities such as Richmond or Charleston. There were few roads, and foul winter weather and spring rains isolated vast regions of the country for many months and made establishing cultural ties difficult at best and often impossible. The South—and southerners—were as foreign to most New Hampshiremen as China and the Chinese. In fact, only 60 percent of Americans had English origins. The rest were Dutch, French, German, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Irish, and even Swedish. Although English remained a common tongue after independence, German prevailed in much of Pennsylvania, Dutch along New York’s Hudson River Valley, and French in Vermont as well as parts of New Hampshire and what would later become Maine.

  Author-schoolteacher Noah Webster compared the cacophony of languages to ancient Babel, and Benjamin Franklin complained that Germantown was engulfing Philadelphia. “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony,” he growled. “Instead of learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.”18

  So except for a handful of delegates who shared a deep resentment against Britain’s Parliament—John Adams and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, for example, or Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry from Virginia—there was little camaraderie or unity among the delegates as they gathered in Philadelphia. Indeed, Georgia had refused to send delegates. Dependent on British troop protection against Indian attacks, Georgian leaders had no intention of alienating the British government by attending a congress dedicated to criticizing and perhaps overthrowing British rule.

  In addition to Lee and Henry, the other Virginians attending were George Washington, Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Richard Bland, a wealthy planter, longtime burgess, and, like quite a few Virginia patricians, related by marriage to Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson.

  Having won recognition as America’s premier orator, Virginia’s Patrick Henry was first to speak at the convention. According to Boston lawyer John Adams, Henry noted that theirs was the first such congress in American history and that they could look to no former congress for a precedent. Every word uttered would itself be a precedent. According to Adams, Henry went on to proclaim,

  We are in a state of nature, sir.… Government is dissolved. Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of colonies? The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, I am an American.19

  Congress would remain in session seven weeks, during which every delegate had to “show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities,” John Adams grumbled to his wife, Abigail. Calling some of the proceedings “tedious beyond expression,” he told her that if a motion were made that two plus two equaled five, delegates would debate it endlessly “with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics and mathematics.”20 He had a kinder evaluation of Richard Henry Lee, whom he described simply as “an orator.”

  “The Virginians,” Adams noted in his autobiography, “loudly celebrated… the eloquence of Mr. Patrick Henry and Mr. Richard Henry Lee,” but according to one delegate, “the most eloquent speech that had ever been made in Virginia on American affairs had been made by Colonel Washington.” Adams claimed it “was the first time I had ever heard the name of Washington as a patriot in our current controversy.

  I asked who is Colonel Washington and what was his speech? Colonel Washington he said was the officer who had been famous in the late French war and in the battle in which Braddock fell. His speech was that if the Bostonians should be involved with the British Army, he would march to their relief at the head of a Thousand Men at his own expen
se.… We all agreed that it was both sublime, pathetic, and beautiful.21

  Because of Virginia’s importance as the largest and richest American colony, at least two Virginia delegates served on every committee, with Patrick Henry serving on three—including one with John Adams and Richard Henry Lee to prepare a final address to the king. Adams first met Lee at the home of Dr. William Shippen, who had married Richard Henry Lee’s sister Alice. Richard Henry was staying with the Shippens, who had invited the famed Massachusetts lawyer to breakfast along with other dignitaries. Dr. Shippen’s taste for fine wines made his elegant home one of the city’s culinary centers as well as a salon for intellectuals and sophisticates. John Adams was one of four delegates from Massachusetts visiting the Shippens, along with his cousin Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Payne. French visitors to the Shippens’ home described conversaziones reminiscent of the greatest Italian philosophers.

  “In the afternoon, we drank tea,” a visiting French marquis would recall. “While one of the young ladies sang, a second accompanied her on the harpsichord, a male guest played the harp, and another male guest played violin. This was the first time I had seen music introduced into American society.”22

  “They are all sensible and deep thinkers,” Adams said of the Lees and Shippens. Adams called Richard Henry “masterful” and hailed his proposal for repealing all the Intolerable Acts and removing all troops from Boston. He also supported Lee’s proposal for a colony-wide “abstinence from all dutied articles.… He is absolutely certain that the same ship that carries home [to England] the resolution will bring back the redress.”23

  Among Lee’s other resolutions was a ban on imports of all British-made goods, provoking opposition from Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway, a Philadelphia lawyer and staunch Loyalist with close ties to the British government. Striking back at Lee, Galloway warned, “If we will not trade with Great Britain, she will not suffer to trade with us at all. Our ports will be blocked up by British men of war, and troops will be sent to reduce us to reason and obedience.”24

  Galloway called for reconciliation with Britain and adoption of what he called “a plan of union” that would create an American colonial parliament with a president-general appointed by the crown and delegates appointed by colonial assemblies. The colonial parliament would act in concert with Britain’s Parliament on most issues, but each parliament could veto the other’s decision on matters relating to the colonies.

  “I am as much a friend of liberty [as] exists,” Galloway averred, “and no man shall go further, in point of fortune, or in point of blood, than the man who now addresses you.

  It is impossible [that] America can exist under total non-exportation. We… should have tens of thousands of people thrown upon the cold hand of charity. Our ships would lie by the walls, our seamen thrown out of bread, our shipwrights… out of employ and… it would weaken us in another struggle which I fear is too near.… We want the aid and assistance and protection of our Mother Country.25

  Although Galloway’s Plan of Union offered the colonies greater control of internal affairs, Congress rejected it in favor of Richard Henry’s proposal for a Continental Association that would ban all imports from Britain; all exports to Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies; consumption of British products and foreign luxuries; and the slave trade.

  Lee then proposed resolutions that went far beyond his mandate from the Virginia Convention. He called on each of the colonies to organize militias and for Congress to arm them in preparation for war.26 He also demanded that the British remove all troops from Boston. Until then “the free citizens of Boston [should]… quit their town and find safe asylum among their hospitable countrymen.”27

  Reconciliationists rose in opposition, calling Richard Henry Lee’s proposal “a Declaration of War” against the British Empire—as indeed it was. Like Washington, John Adams, and Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee had declared independence.

  * Each hogshead was a barrel four feet high and two and a half feet wide, weighing about 1,000 pounds and containing about ten cubic feet of tobacco.

  CHAPTER 4

  Poet, Playwright, Watchmaker, Spy

  ALTHOUGH CONGRESS HAD APPROVED RICHARD HENRY LEE’S proposal to unite the colonies in a Continental Association, it was unwilling to defend it by warring with the British Empire. In consequence it defeated Lee’s resolution on militias along with his proposal that Bostonians quit their city.

  “If we demand too much,” New York’s John Jay argued, “we weaken our efforts, lose the chance of securing what is reasonable, and may get nothing.”1

  In Massachusetts, however, representatives of towns in Suffolk County, which included Boston, met secretly, declared the Coercive Acts unconstitutional, and called for a boycott of all British trade—imports and exports. The group urged citizens to withhold payment of taxes and debts to British merchants until Parliament restored local control of government in Massachusetts. It told people to arm themselves and form local militias to defend their towns against the British army. It was a declaration of open rebellion, and Boston activist Paul Revere, a local silversmith, galloped off to Philadelphia to inform delegates at the Continental Congress.

  Electrified by the news, the Congress shouted down the reconciliationists and rallied around Richard Henry Lee, who resolved to denounce the Coercive Acts and the presence of Britain’s standing army in and about their homes in cities like Boston. With Lee and the two Adamses—a triumvirate from North and South—urging them on, a majority in Congress adopted Lee’s resolution and ten others drawn from the Suffolk Resolves, enunciating the rights of Americans to “life, liberty, and property” and restoring exclusive powers of provincial assemblies “in all cases of taxation and internal polity”—subject only to veto by the crown.

  After Congress had expressed unanimous consent, Lee led members in declaring thirteen of the parliamentary acts passed since 1763 to have been violations of the rights of British citizens in America. Congress pledged to impose economic sanctions against Britain until Parliament repealed them all, then agreed to reconvene the following May 10, 1775.

  “The proceedings are yet on honor to be kept secret,” Richard Henry wrote to William Lee in London, “but we have great hopes that their vigor and unanimity will prove the ruin of our Ministerial Enemies and the salvation of American liberty. About a fortnight more will produce a publication of our plan after which you shall have it by the first opportunity.”2

  Knowing that his brother would inform key British officials, Richard Henry told William that “50,000 men in arms” in Massachusetts and Connecticut were “on the march” to Boston and that the British would have “no small difficulty… [in] forcing submission from these people and that they are most firmly resolved to die rather than submit.”3

  John Adams was equally excited. “This was one of the happiest days of my life,” he wrote in his diary. “In Congress we had generous, noble sentiments, and manly eloquence. This day convinced me that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her.”4

  After Adams and Lee had prepared a suitably obeisant letter to the king expressing the hopes of Americans to remain his subjects, Richard Henry drafted a letter on behalf of Congress to colonial agents in London, believing the king would respond favorably: “We desire you will deliver the petition into the hands of his Majesty, and… wish it may be made public through the press, together with the list of grievances and… to the trading cities and manufacturing towns throughout the United Kingdom.”5

  When Richard Henry returned to Chantilly he learned that his older brother Philip Ludwell—Colonel Phil—was deathly ill at Stratford Hall. During the weeks of agonizing pain that followed, he worked with Richard Henry to set his estate in order, naming Richard Henry executor and trusting his brother to see to the care of his wife, his two daughters, and a third offspring soon to be born. If a boy, he was to become Philip’s heir.

  Colonel Phil died on February 21, 1775, after which his wi
fe, Elizabeth Steptoe Lee, gave birth to a son and heir, Philip Ludwell Lee Jr., but the boy would live only two years, leaving the great Stratford estate and its associated businesses to Colonel Phil’s two daughters. During that time Richard Henry Lee had to oversee a huge commercial enterprise and assume responsibility for raising a second family—in addition to overseeing his own plantation at Chantilly and caring for his pregnant wife and six children.

  Before the king could respond to the letter from the Continental Congress the British government acted “to declare all meetings and associations in America illegal and treasonable… and to employ military force, chiefly from Canada, if necessary.… Added to this,” Richard Henry Lee wrote to Samuel Adams in early February 1775, “I understand they propose to forfeit and confiscate all the estates of all those who meet, associate, or combine against the commerce of Great Britain.”6

  By then Lee had seen to implementing Continental Association rules at Stratford Landing, boasting to his brother William that “a ship from London… has been forced to return without being suffered to take a single hogshead of [Lee] tobacco [back to England] because she had brought a few chests of tea.” He assured William that “every measure is taken to enforce the Continental Association.”7

  The government ban on meetings, however, infuriated him, coming as it did in the face of the king’s apparent refusal to respond to the carefully—indeed, deferentially—worked out appeal for redress by the Continental Congress. What he called the “wicked violence” of the government left no doubt in his mind, he told his brother Arthur, “of the determination to ruin both countries unless a powerful and timely check is interposed by the body of the people.”8