First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  At dawn the next morning, however, Washington ordered his troops to attack, triggering a day of exhausting heroics by both sides, but the fighting proved indecisive. As darkness set in, Washington’s troops bedded down for the night, and as they slept, the British quietly slipped away to Sandy Hook, a spit of land on the northern New Jersey shore at the entrance to New York Bay. Transport ships waited to carry them away to New York, ceding New Jersey to the Americans. Washington claimed victory in a letter to his brother John, calling the battle at Monmouth Courthouse “a glorious and happy day.” It had cost the British “at least 2000 of their best troops,” he declared. “We had 60 men killed.”34

  After Lee congratulated him, Washington effused, “I thank you very much for your congratulations. The prospect we have before us is certainly pleasing, and such as promises a glorious and happy issue to all our struggles.”35

  A few days later Lee and Washington received more good news to celebrate: “All our intelligence announces the utmost confusion in Great Britain,” Arthur Lee had written to Richard Henry from Paris. “Their councils are so fluctuating in consequence of… their [military] distress that advices cannot be given with great certainty.” He said the ministry had agreed to an exchange of 200 prisoners.36

  Although the British withdrawal from New Jersey ended the threat to the American capital in Philadelphia, Richard Henry Lee still faced an exhausting political battle when Silas Deane returned to America and promptly accused the Lees—Richard Henry in America and Arthur and William in France—of having surreptitiously aided the British. All the Lees, he charged, had consorted with an admitted British spy. In fact, they had, but far from delivering any state secrets, they had simply given the British spy details of the price the American government would demand from the British to end the war. Deane also charged that Arthur and William Lee had only received their overseas appointments because of the influence of Richard Henry, Francis Lightfoot, and several Lee cousins in Congress. Although the charges contained some truth, no Americans in Britain at the time had been in a position to be more effective spies than Arthur and William Lee.

  As Arthur and William continued investigating Deane’s activities in France, they found he had stolen “large sums of the public’s money.”37 Richard Henry Lee confronted Deane, saying Congress had ordered him to purchase “two quick sailing cutters… with stores,…

  “And how did you do it?

  Were they ever sent? Were they not made a mixed business of public and private concern? Were not 100,000 livres at least of the public money employed in fitting and refitting them? Were not they sent first on the coast of England, against the desires of France and the orders of Congress, instead of bringing stores here [America] for the army?… Were not those prizes consigned to private hands… instead of being delivered to the agents of the U.S.? Have they not finally been sold, without public authority, to private use, and has the money been brought to the public credit?38

  Bit by bit Lee’s brothers in Europe fed him more information on Deane’s activities, including evidence that Deane had pocketed commissions from funds Congress had sent for purchasing military supplies. In what may be one of America’s earliest money-laundering schemes, some of the funds Deane pocketed found their way into the coffers of Robert Morris’s firm of Willing and Morris, whose land speculations had attracted Deane as a silent partner. While probing into Deane’s conduct as an American diplomat, the Lees also exposed Deane’s close friend and private secretary, Edward Bancroft, as having been a British spy.

  Even Franklin was implicated, albeit indirectly. His landlord in Paris, the French merchant Jacques-Donetien Leray de Chaumont, had given Franklin and Deane elegant apartments rent-free in his lavish chateau in Passy, just outside Paris on the road to Versailles. Instead of rent, Chaumont had accepted “a gift” of more than 100,000 acres in northern New York. In the end Deane and Robert Morris reaped huge profits from Deane’s activities in Paris. Called to account by Congress, Deane immediately attacked the Lees, insisting he could account for every penny of public funds, but had left his account books in Paris and would need to return there to recover them and bring them back to Philadelphia to show Congress. He sailed for France in 1780 and never returned. Deane died in London in 1789.

  CHAPTER 9

  President Richard Henry Lee

  EXHAUSTED BY THE DEANE CONFLICT BUT SATISFIED WITH THE outlook for the nation’s new government and its constitutional foundation, Richard Henry Lee and his brother Francis Lightfoot Lee announced they would resign from the Continental Congress at the end of its spring session in May 1779.

  Richard Henry’s last act as a Washington representative in Congress was to try to feed more troops into the southern sector, but as he had found so many times before, it proved impossible to provide “the force you had a right to expect from Virginia for reinforcing the main army. We have no reason to suppose that [more] than 1,400 militia—perhaps not more than 1,000 will go… and of the 1,000 ordered… not more than 350 have been obtained.”1 As before, few men—regardless of their political leanings—were willing or able to enlist. More than 90 percent of American men were farmers, whose properties—and families—depended on year-round ministrations. At most they could enlist for three months in midsummer after the spring plantings to earn some extra money, but the sums were not enough to forego soldiering as fall harvest approached.

  “The situation of affairs… has an aspect truly alarming,” Washington warned Lee. With North Carolina’s troop quota in the field far below what state officials had pledged, British troops were threatening to overrun the South. Washington all but ordered Lee to draft North Carolina troops if necessary, forgetting that the Articles of Confederation left the state sovereign and gave Congress—and Lee—no power to draft anyone.

  “I am at a loss what additional measures to advise,” Washington lashed out, his temper frayed, his military strategy constantly frustrated—not by the enemy but by the lack of authority in Congress to force states to provide him with the means of victory. Although he knew Lee was helpless to respond, he demanded tougher laws to help him win the war.

  “Troops from this [Continental] army cannot possibly be sent [to the South],” he explained to Lee. “It seems however necessary that troops of a better consistence than militia, whose time of service expires almost as soon as they arrive at their destination, should be provided. This can only be done by laws in the neighboring states for drawing out a body for a longer term.”2

  Washington’s last words to Lee did not lighten Lee’s homeward journey: “The want of arms is a melancholy circumstance,” he told Lee, “and it is the more distressing after so long a war—and after the most conclusive proofs that nothing would be left untried on the part of the enemy to carry their points against us.”3

  Lee, however, now admitted there was little he could do to force states to do Washington’s bidding, and he decided not to reply to Washington’s letter. Washington by then knew what the answer would be without Lee having to write it.

  As Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee left Philadelphia, their younger brothers Arthur and William Lee both resigned their diplomatic posts in Europe and set sail for America, leaving Washington without the benefit of either foreign or domestic intelligence reports from the Lees. Arthur, by then, had reported from Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid as well as Paris. Although he had been unable to maintain direct contacts with his sources in London, Paris was a crossroads for European diplomats, and Arthur by then was a trained hand in the lighthearted banter at receptions and salons that often elicited important intelligence.

  And in Congress it was not the outspoken Richard Henry but the quiet, unassuming Francis Lightfoot Lee who extracted intelligence from various state representatives. More than any of his brothers, Francis Lightfoot was quiet, thoughtful—“calmness and philosophy itself,” said brother Arthur. Frank’s calm demeanor and evident interest in the words of others provided comfort to those bursting with troubling politi
cal secrets. But Frank had, nonetheless, disliked the savage political infighting that marked life in the Continental Congress, and he often complained to Richard Henry, “When all our attention [and] every effort should be to oppose the enemy, we are disputing government and independence.”4

  After leaving Philadelphia, Francis Lightfoot Lee returned to the peace of his Richmond County plantation and the arms of his wife, Rebecca (“Becky”), meddling only occasionally in regional politics from the seat he accepted in the Virginia Senate. Deeply devoted to each other, he and Becky had no children of their own but would virtually adopt and raise the two young daughters of his brother William after William’s wife died in 1785. William had returned to America with brother Arthur in 1781, crippled by excruciatingly painful arthritis and virtually blind. He and his son—almost a man by then—settled on William’s farm, where the boy cared for his father and learned to run their property.

  In contrast to the quiet life of brother Frank on the south coast of the Northern Neck, Richard Henry Lee spent the summer of 1779 covered with dust, loping along the bluffs of the Northern Neck coast but nonetheless resplendent in his colonel’s uniform, inspecting defenses and leading militiamen into skirmishes with British troops attempting to land. Without fingers on one hand, he guided his horse with his legs, shifting his weight slightly to direct the animal in one or another direction. Despite the dangers he faced, life out of doors exhilarated him, relieved him of the tensions and insoluble problems of congressional life. During the summer of that year his wife, Anne, gave birth to a boy they named Cassius—their eighth child and Richard Henry’s third son. In addition to caring for his own tribe, Richard Henry rode back and forth between plantations to tend to the needs of the widows and children of his deceased brothers Philip and Thomas.

  By 1780 the conflict in Chesapeake Bay gained enough breadth and momentum that Richard Henry Lee felt bound to rejoin Virginia’s Assembly, which immediately elected him speaker and then sent him back to Congress. He immediately wrote to the new governor, Thomas Jefferson, to bolster the state’s defenses along the more than 1,000 miles of inland waterways. Jefferson had replaced Patrick Henry at the end of Henry’s third consecutive term—Virginia’s constitutional maximum. Richard Henry’s letter to Jefferson coincided with one from George Washington urging Jefferson to expand Virginia’s navy and implant chevaux de fries—spiked logs—into the river beds at the entrance to the state’s waterways to prevent enemy ships from carrying British troops upstream toward Richmond.

  Unlike the American North, winter weather in the milder climate of the South did not force British forces to retire to winter quarters as early or as long, and British troops from Florida had pushed northward and captured most of Georgia by mid-March. By April they had overrun the entire state and reached the outskirts of Charleston. To the horror of farmers and plantation owners, the British freed indentured servants and slaves who were willing to swear allegiance to Britain and, if able, fight the Patriots.

  On May 10 a British fleet sailed into Hampton Roads and set fire to Portsmouth and what was left of Norfolk and captured a supply depot at nearby Suffolk, burning more than 100 American ships and capturing 30,000 hogsheads of tobacco. The threat of further British incursions sent Virginia’s government fleeing inland to Richmond.

  On May 12, 1780, Americans suffered their worst defeat in the war when the southern army surrendered unconditionally to the British in Charleston, South Carolina. Fourteen thousand British troops had attacked, surrounding and capturing the entire 5,400-man American force and its commanding general, Benjamin Lincoln. Among the captured troops were 1,400 Virginians.

  In January 1781 Governor Thomas Jefferson paid the price of ignoring the military advice of George Washington and Richard Henry Lee. With no underwater barriers to block it, a fleet of six British frigates, eight brigs, and ten other vessels with 2,200 troops aboard sailed into Chesapeake Bay toward the mouth of the James River. The expedition commander, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, was brother-in-law of Richard Henry Lee’s sister Alice. He had defected from the American army the previous September in exchange for £6,315 (about $750,000 today) and a commission as a brigade commander in the British army.

  Now chairman of the Assembly’s Maritime Committee, Richard Henry had no sooner learned of Arnold’s incursion when word arrived that a second fleet had sailed into the bay under the command of the renowned Captain Thomas Graves, an admiral’s nephew and soon to become an admiral himself. Graves headed north toward the mouth of the Potomac, putting Chantilly in danger of assault and Richard Henry’s family under threat of capture.

  After calling on the Assembly to fund immediate construction of six more cruisers to patrol the bay, Richard Henry left Richmond and rode home, arriving just as Graves’s fleet entered the mouth of the Potomac. Two days later it attacked Stratford Landing, but by then Richard Henry and his militia were positioned to repel the British, and he proved himself a skilled field commander.

  “In a late engagement,” Richard Henry wrote gleefully to his friend Samuel Adams in Boston, “the enemy landed under cover of a heavy cannonade from three vessels of war… a small body of our militia [were] well posted. After a small engagement, we had the pleasure to see the enemy, though superior in number, run to their boats and precipitously re-embark, having sustained a small loss of killed and wounded.”5

  Fearing Graves’s return and possible capture, Richard Henry bundled his family into a set of carriages and fled inland to Epping Forest, a 500-acre plantation that had been the home of George Washington’s mother. From there he ventured in and out, organizing a militia of more than 400 with which he hoped to defend the Northern Neck against British incursions by land and water.

  On March 1, 1781, after the last of the thirteen state legislatures had agreed to the Articles of Confederation, Congress ratified the document, creating a new nation and the first republic in the Americas. Congress assumed a new title, “The United States in Congress assembled,” or, more simply, the Confederation Congress. In the South, meanwhile, American forces under the supreme command of General Nathanael Greene had halted the northward advance of British troops and, indeed, had pushed the British back to the seacoast. American privateers, meanwhile, had disrupted British supply lines with the capture of 600 British ships, while the fledging American navy had captured or destroyed nearly 200 British warships.

  Britain was now willing to talk peace.

  The Confederation Congress responded by naming a commission of four to begin negotiations in Paris—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Laurens of South Carolina. Jefferson, however, decided against serving, and Laurens was captured by the British on his way to Europe. New York’s John Jay sailed to France and took the third seat at the negotiations.*

  The British army commander in North Carolina, Earl Charles Cornwallis, was in no mood to seek peace, however. Seething with anger from the humiliations his army had suffered at the hands of semiliterate woodsmen, he believed he could crush the American Revolution by increasing the size of his army and overrunning the plantations of the principal leaders of the Revolution in Virginia—Washington, Mason, the Lees, and others. Accordingly, he led his 1,500-man force out of Wilmington, North Carolina, into Virginia, joined Arnold’s 4,000 troops at Petersburg, Virginia, then added a third force of 2,000 horsemen—dragoons trained in terrorizing defenseless rural families and commanded by the fearsome Banastre Tarleton—“Bloody Ban, the Butcher,” as some called him.

  Richard Henry Lee blanched when he learned that Washington had countered by sending a force of only 1,200 men to defend Richmond under the leadership of the untried young French commander Marquis de Lafayette—a mere “boy,” in the estimation of Cornwallis. On May 23, 1781, the British seized the Virginia capital, setting it ablaze as Lafayette and his little band fled northward while Governor Thomas Jefferson and members of the Assembly fled westward toward the mountains. Although Tarleton and his dragoons chased after them,
Jefferson managed to reach Charlottesville and the mountaintop home he called Monticello outside of town. He arrived with just enough time to alert his wife and send her and their two daughters to safety in another town, then barely escaped capture himself by riding off through the woods.

  As Tarleton terrorized local farmers and their families, Richard Henry Lee wrote in desperation from Epping Forest to his “dear brother” Arthur Lee, then still hunkered down at Chantilly. “The enemy are within 30 miles of Fredericksburg,” he warned, “and our army a little above them but too weak to approach.

  We shall receive all the injury possible before aid is sent to us. What will become of these lower parts, heaven knows. We and our property here are now within the power of the enemy.… The enemy affect to leave harmless the poor and they take everything from those they call the rich. Tis said that 2000 or 3000 negroes march in their train, that every kind of stock which they cannot remove they destroy.… They have burned a great number of warehouses full of tobacco, and they are now pressing on to the larger ones… and the valuable iron works in our northern parts.6

  To his brother William, who had fled to safety with his son, he lamented that “your neighbors lost every slave they had in the world, [but] your loss is much less than that of the others.… The enemy have not injured your crops… which are at present very good. In their first visit, they took 60 head of cattle away. The enemy’s generals here appear to carry on the war much more upon views of private plunder and enriching individuals than upon any plan of national advantage.”7

  Though frightened for his family, Richard Henry Lee was flush with anger at Jefferson for his inept handling of the state’s defenses and at other states for their failure to send aid. As Cornwallis pushed Lafayette’s little force northward to within sight of the Rappahannock River and the southern shore of Lee’s Northern Neck, he wrote an angry letter he never thought he would ever have to write to Congress, urging delegates “not to slumber a moment”: