Richard Henry Lee

Biography

Richard Henry Lee was the fourth of eight surviving children of Thomas and Hannah Harrison Ludwell Lee. Like his brothers Francis Lightfoot Lee and Arthur Lee, Richard grew up at Stratford Hall, the home built by their successful planter and land speculator father. When Richard was 16, Thomas sent him to Wakefield Academy in Yorkshire England. While he was there, tragedy struck: at 18, Richard was an orphan. His older brother, Philip, who was also in England, made plans to return to Virginia, but Richard refused to join him. He was engaged to an English woman and did not want to abandon her. Philip managed to bring an end to this relationship, but a defiant Richard spent a year touring Europe rather than sailing home. When he did return to Stratford Hall, Richard began a dispute with Philip over the distribution of their father’s property. A stubborn nature and a tendency to defy authority would carry over into Richard Henry Lee’s political life.

In 1758, Lee entered the Virginia legislature, known as the House of Burgesses, where he would serve until 1775. He made powerful enemies here, many of whom he inherited from his father’s land speculation enterprises. Among these enemies was John Robinson, the head of a rival land company, whose mishandling of tax monies led Richard Henry Lee to severely criticize him. Lee’s attacks on Robinson angered several leading Virginians. It would not be the last time Lee spoke his mind despite the danger of creating enemies.

Britain’s Proclamation of 1763, which put a temporary stop on land acquisition and settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, led to tensions between Virginia colonists and the Mother Country. Lee took a leading role in the protest against this policy. The imposition in 1765 of the Stamp Act further inflamed Virginia’s political leadership, and it was Richard Henry Lee who drafted a letter to King George III warning him not to impose such direct taxes.

Over the next several years, Lee’s personal life was as fraught with troubles as his political life. He had married in 1757, and begun a family, but in 1768 his wife, Anne Aylett, died of “a severe pleurisy.” That same year, as Lee was hunting on his property, his rifle exploded. He lost four fingers on his left hand, and for the rest of his life, he wore a black silk glove on his damaged hand.

By 1774, Lee was in Philadelphia as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. Here he met John and Samuel Adams, two of the most vocal advocates for independence, and the three men formed an alliance that dominated Congress for several years. By this time, Lee was a declared radical; he supported the economic boycott of British goods and spoke passionately against the Quebec Act which, among other things, stripped away Virginia’s claim to the land of the Ohio River Valley and gave that territory to Quebec.

Lee was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress that met in 1775. Lee and the Adamses bided their time while the more moderate delegates sought a way to reconcile with Britain. When their efforts failed, these three independence advocates entered the debate. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented his now famous motion: “Resolved, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” The debate that immediately followed was so heated that the presiding officer of the Congress, John Hancock, tabled Lee’s motion. He scheduled the debate to resume on July 1, 1776. On July 2, Lee’s motion passed, and on July 4, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was approved.

Lee’s role in moving the country toward independence and war earned him new enemies. John Hancock and Robert Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania, spread the story that the three radicals planned to oust George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Lee was also accused of trying to devalue Virginia’s currency. Neither accusation was ever proven.

By 1778, Lee’s brother Arthur was also under attack for suggesting that Silas Deane of Connecticut was using his assignment to win French support for the war to further his own business interests. Richard leapt to his brother’s defense and led a successful movement to have Deane recalled. The Deane affair divided the Congress, and Deane’s allies pursued a scheme to ensure that Virginia’s western boundary was severely reduced. Lee led, and won, an exhausting battle to preserve the existing boundary, but by 1779, he had resigned from Congress and returned home.

Four years later, he was again a delegate to Congress. He served as its president for a year, from 1784 to 1785, but once again resigned, citing poor health. He was back in Congress in 1787 and submitted a short list of amendments to the Constitution written by a special convention in Philadelphia. That October he wrote “Observations on the Plan of Government Proposed by the Convention”; it revealed his opposition to replacing the Articles of Confederation by a government with greater powers. He admitted that the Articles were flawed, but insisted that “To say a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying we should kill ourselves for fear of dying.”

Having declared himself opposed to ratification, in 1788 he withdrew from all public debate. Yet once the Constitution was ratified, Lee accepted appointment as a Senator in the first federal Congress. He refused a second term in the Senate, citing his deteriorating health. He had, he told Virginia’s legislature, “grown gray in the service of his country,” and now suffered from “infirmities’ that could only be relieved by a quiet retirement. Richard Henry Lee died at home in June of 1794.