As the Continental Congress voted to adopt Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for American independence, what seemed like certain victory after the British evacuated Boston suddenly turned into almost certain defeat. Instead of retreating from Boston Bay to Halifax, Canada, British general William Howe had shifted course and sailed toward New York. On July 2, as Richard Henry Lee rode away to his Virginia home, elated over his triumph in Congress, 150 British transports sailed unimpeded into New York Bay, carrying 20,000 troops, including 9,000 Hessian mercenaries, to complement Howe’s 10,000-man army.
Some historians explain Lee’s inexplicable departure from Philadelphia as pique over being left off the committee appointed to draw up the showpiece Declaration of Independence, but pique was not a Lee characteristic. He was no prima donna—and never had been. He was fully aware of his accomplishments in the Continental Congress and in the war for independence. If others wanted to capture fame poeticizing his words with resplendent calligraphy on costly parchment, he was perfectly willing to cede them that glory. Nothing in his voluminous correspondence—some of it exceptionally personal—indicates any resentment at that time toward Jefferson or anyone else associated with the document that became the official Declaration of Independence.
What is indisputable, however, is that as he voted on July 2, he found himself inundated with demands for his presence elsewhere—at home at Chantilly and in the Virginia state capital at Williamsburg. His brother Thomas had written from Virginia that Richard Henry’s wife, Ann, was ailing and needed him—and that the state legislature needed him to help resolve disputes over the form of independent state government to adopt. And still more pressing was news of depredations by British raiders along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and the rivers feeding into it.
Determined to pillage tobacco warehouses, disrupt trade, and bankrupt Virginia’s great plantations, Lord Dunmore had established a military base on the southern tip of the Northern Neck, from which he sent troops to raid plantations on the Maryland coast and replicate the savagery at the four Lee plantations and that of George Washington, among others, on the Virginia side of the river.
News of the British depredations sent Lee riding south as fast as he could to Alexandria, Virginia, where he joined George Mason, among others, in organizing a Virginia navy to ward off Dunmore’s incursions. Donning his Westmoreland County militia colonel’s uniform, Lee ordered the removal of all supply depots to inland locations out of reach of British landing parties. He then contacted Maryland authorities, who agreed to build a joint naval force of fourteen ships—eight Virginia ships armed with thirty-two cannons each and six Maryland ships carrying twenty-four cannons each. Although militia leaders had planned to build forts along the river bluffs, Lee convinced them that stationary forts openly revealed defender strengths and weaknesses. He urged them to organize their men in “movable batteries,” or “flying squads,” which he said would leave the enemy uncertain of the safest, most strategic landing areas. He then positioned the squads along the forty-mile length of the Westmoreland County cliffs overlooking the Potomac and waited for the enemy to approach. He did not have to wait long.
The British had already landed sixty agents “for the purpose of plunder,” Lee wrote to Samuel Adams. They had landed where no militia had been stationed to oppose them, he said, and burned warehouses with between 200 and 300 hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing about a thousand pounds.
“These wretches have it in their power to create us great expense and much trouble, pierced as we are in every part with waters deep and broad, without marine force sufficient to oppose this contemptible collection of pirates.”13
Congress, meanwhile, had become too immersed in debate over the Declaration of Independence to concern itself with Richard Henry Lee’s tobacco warehouses. After Lee had left Philadelphia on July 3 Thomas Jefferson hurried to finish embellishing Lee’s declaration of independence, relying in part on John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. “Men are by nature… all free, equal and independent,” Locke had written. “No one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.
And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands.… Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.14
A poet at heart, Thomas Jefferson transposed Locke’s somewhat clumsy, early-eighteenth-century phrasing into the beautiful preamble of the American Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
He then listed more than a dozen grievances against the British monarch before composing a coda that recapitulated the words of Richard Henry Lee (shown below in italics) and, intentionally or not, usurped Lee’s claim to immortality as author of the Declaration of Independence.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.15
After submitting the document to Congress, Jefferson reported arguments erupting among some delegates “that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with.… For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence.
The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren I believe felt a little tender… under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.16
22. Thomas Jefferson’s extensive embellishment of Richard Henry Lee’s original resolution for American independence created the document Americans celebrate annually at Independence Day.
On July 4 Congress voted twelve to zero in favor of the new document, with New York’s delegates again stating they would abstain until they received express instructions from their state legislature. After New York’s legislature voted in favor on July 12, Congress sent copies to each of the states for ratification at special popularly elected conventions called in each state for that purpose.
As delegates left the Pennsylvania State House, however, they realized they had made an enormous blunder: “The United States of America” were not legally “united.” Indeed, Richard Henry’s “declaration of independence” of July 2—unlike Thomas Jefferson’s version of July 4—had included the essential condition that “a plan for confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration.”17
Accordingly, on July 12 Congress appointed a committee headed by John Dickinson to do just that, and it spent the next month debating issues that remain controversial to this day. A handful of southern representatives refused to cede an iota of state sovereignty to a central—or federal—authority, for example, and in the end
Congress voted to postpone consideration of confederation until all the states had ratified the Declaration of Independence and were indeed free to confederate—or not.
By mid-July Virginia royal governor Lord Dunmore had expanded his forces on Chesapeake Bay and sent troops fanning out to ravage nearby plantations, raid tobacco warehouses, and confiscate tobacco supplies for shipment back to England. On July 20 Richard Henry Lee looked out over the Potomac from his second-floor window at Chantilly and saw British sails looming on the horizon down river. Assuming they were preparing to land troops, he rounded up hands on his own property to defend against a British landing and sent messengers to warn neighboring plantations. Despite his mangled hand, he led “a party of militia expecting visits from four of the enemies’ ships and three tenders that appeared off this house at sunset.”18
“The enemy of everything good has at length turned his wicked steps to this river, on the north side of which [Maryland] we can every day see the smoke occasioned by his conflagrations,” Richard Henry wrote to Landon Carter, whose plantation lay on the southern shore of the Northern Neck along the Rappahannock River.
We learn that the people of Maryland are not quiet spectators of his proceedings, but that they have attacked and killed some of his people and obliged his whole fleet to move its station. They are continually blasting away at each other. We understand that they [the British] are in great want both of water and provisions.19
As the British ships approached the shore beneath Chantilly Lee ordered his makeshift band of fighters to fire a volley of musket shots and so surprised the approaching Redcoats that they jumped back in their boats and rowed back to their mother ship, which turned about and headed upstream. “They are gone up the river,” he reported, “upon what errand I know not, unless to get water where the river is fresh or to burn Alexandria.”20
As Lee defended the shoreline at Chantilly, frightening news arrived from New York. Even as General George Washington was reading the Declaration of Independence to his troops, a British armada of 400 ships had filled New York Bay near Manhattan Island and disgorged 20,000 battle-hardened troops onto Staten Island. Adding to the bad news from New York came word that the British had invaded upper New York and routed American forces, forcing their retreat southward past Lake Champlain toward Albany, New York.
And there was still more bad news—frightening, really. To his horror, Richard Henry received word that “a very extensive conspiracy… has been detected at New York” to bring about an abrupt end to the war by assassinating America’s commander-in-chief. “Washington was to have been assassinated,” Lee explained, “the magazines blown up, the cannons spiked. Many are now in jail for this nefarious business.”21 Newspapers cited New York mayor David Matthews as the suspected leader of the plot. A pro-Patriot newspaper ran a front-page headline offering a $50 reward for his capture—the equivalent of about $3,000 today. Charging Matthews with “high crimes,” the newspaper described him as “well made, about 6 feet high, short brown hair, about 39 years old, and had a very plausible way of deceiving people.… Many are now in jail in this nefarious plot.”*22
By the end of July the legislatures of all thirteen former British colonies had ratified the Declaration of Independence, and on August 2, 1776, forty-two solemn-faced delegates to Congress returned to Philadelphia, shuffling in groups of twos and threes into the Assembly Hall of the Pennsylvania State House. Only silence filled the hall as they took their seats and the president of the Continental Congress called out each name. One by one each delegate stood, then stepped to the front of the room to sign the document pledging his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to declare his province independent of Britain. Well aware by then of the British army presence on Staten Island, each signer knew he was committing treason as he penned his name, inviting summary death if captured by the British.
Only Benjamin Harrison, the fat and jolly Virginia delegate who had married Martha Washington’s niece, provided a note of levity, lowing to the rail-thin Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, “When the hanging scene comes, I shall have all the advantage over you. It will be over with me in a minute, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I’m gone.”23
Although Francis Lightfoot Lee signed with the others, Richard Henry Lee did not arrive until a few days later, as did thirteen other delegates who signed the document.
23. The signing of the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, as imagined here by artist John Trumbull in 1818. All fifty-six signers never convened as a group, however, and the painting, now in the rotunda of the Capitol, shows only forty-two of the fifty-six, as well as six who never signed. Richard Henry Lee sits, his legs (in white stockings) crossed, on the far left of the front row in the rear grouping. Samuel Adams sits beside him to his left. Francis Lightfoot Lee is missing. (See Appendix B, here, for a key to identify figures in the painting.)
Ironically, only the president of Congress, John Hancock of Massachusetts, had signed the Declaration on July 4, the date now celebrated as Independence Day. Although memoirs written years later by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a few others claim that they too signed the document on that date, witnesses insist they did not sign until July 19. Still other signers such as Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, MD, had not even been elected to Congress by July 4 and did not sign until August 2.
By early August 1776, however, more than forty delegates from all thirteen states had indeed signed “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America… that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.” The secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, who alone had witnessed John Hancock’s signature, would add his signature later.
At Chantilly Richard Henry Lee received this letter from Thomas Jefferson:
I enclose you a copy of the declaration of independence as agreed to by the House, and also, as originally framed. You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the Critics. I shall return to Virginia after the 11th of August. I wish my successor [in the Continental Congress] may be certain to come before that time, in that case, I shall hope to see you… in Convention, that the business of Government, which is of everlasting Concern, may receive your aid. Adieu, and believe me to be your friend & Servant, Thomas Jefferson24
Ironically, Thomas Jefferson would not spend a moment in battle or fire a single shot at the enemy, let alone risk his life, fortune, or sacred honor as pledged at the end of the document he signed and submitted to Congress as the Declaration of Independence.
After Richard Henry Lee had tended to his wife’s illness and embraced his children innumerable times, he traveled to Williamsburg “to assist my countrymen in finishing our form of government.” By countrymen, of course, Lee still meant Virginians. Despite calling their country the “United States of America” in the Declaration of Independence, the signers (and all other Americans) still meant their states of residence when they used the term “my country.”
When Richard Henry Lee entered the Virginia Convention the most difficult task he and other members faced was disposing of lands in the Ohio Territory. Independence from Britain, of course, had negated the Quebec Act and left much of the Ohio Territory in dispute between the original Washington-Lee Ohio Company and the old Loyal Land Company, now called the Grand Ohio Land Company. With the Lee bloc in control, however, the Virginia convention voided all titles not obtained under the original 1612 royal land grant, in effect restoring the Washington-Lee claims and voiding almost all rival claims.
After deciding who owned which lands and where, the Virginia Convention turned to fashioning a new government. All eyes turned to Richard Henry Lee, who signaled his choice of Patrick Henry as governor. The other delegates agreed.
“The mighty work is now done,” he enthused after the convention had voted.
After helping Virginia’s Convention design the world’s first democratic government, Lee returned to Chantilly to check on his wife, then rode back to Ph
iladelphia to finish the work of the Continental Congress. Almost all delegates recognized that their states would have to go to war to win concessions from Britain’s Parliament, and most realized they would lose the war if they did not unite with other states. Any union, however, would force them to devise a central authority to coordinate the war—the very type of authority they were seeking to dislodge.
Although Congress had rejected John Dickinson’s proposed articles of confederation, Richard Henry Lee tried developing a more acceptable set of articles after the states had approved the Declaration of Independence. He turned to his four-volume set of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which John Adams had recommended to him. One major argument against the Dickinson articles centered on voting. Small states demanded one vote for each state, while large states wanted voting based on population, arguing that giving each state only one vote would allow states with a tiny combined population to group together and dictate to the vast majority of the American people. The small states countered that voting by population would allow two or three states with large populations to combine to dictate to ten or eleven other states.
After days of tiresome, inconclusive arguments, news of the British landings on Staten Island in New York forced delegates to deal with more immediate issues. In mid-August 1776 they tabled the Articles of Confederation indefinitely and ended efforts to form a union—perfect or imperfect. The thirteen states remained independent nations, so divided in their loyalties that George Washington and Richard Henry Lee would now have the impossible task of dealing with thirteen different state legislatures if they were to pursue the war against Britain. And even if, in the end, Washington’s Continental Army emerged victorious, each state would have to negotiate its own peace with Great Britain or resume war on its own. The vision of a united America that Washington and Lee had shared now seemed far out of reach.
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