Thomas Nelson, Jr.

Biography

Thomas Nelson was born at Yorktown, Virginia, to William and Elizabeth Burwell Nelson. He was thus not named for his father, but “Junior” was added to distinguish him from his uncle, Thomas Nelson, who also lived in Yorktown. Thomas, like most sons of prosperous Southern families, was tutored at home in his early years but sent to England to complete his education. He attended the famous Eton School when he was fifteen. He went on to Christ College at Cambridge. His education thus completed, at the age of twenty-three he returned to Virginia and to his family’s mercantile business. His social status destined him to participate in politics, so it was not especially odd that he was elected to the House of Burgesses, the colony’s legislature, while he was still aboard the ship carrying him home.

A year after his return, Nelson married Lucy Grimes, a cousin of several influential Virginians including Peyton Randolph, the Lee family, Carter Braxton, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas Jefferson. For Nelson, Braxton, Harrison, and the Lees would be familiar faces when he joined them in the Continental Congress.

Nelson entered politics while American colonists were still loyal citizens of the British empire, but soon enough Parliament’s new taxation policies and the extreme punishment meted out for Boston’s tea party led him to join the growing opposition to British rule. In 1774, the royal governor of Virginia, frustrated by the legislature’s resolutions censuring and condemning the closing of the port of Boston, dissolved the House of Burgesses. In response, members of the Burgesses reconvened as the first Virginia convention, and proceeded to ban commerce with Britain and suspend all debts to British merchants. With this decision, they demonstrated their opposition to British policy while also giving Virginia’s planter class a much desired break from their consumer debts. Nelson, however, took a radical step in support of American resistance: he spent his own money to send needed supplies to Boston. He then arranged a Yorktown tea party and took satisfaction in personally throwing two chests of tea into the York River.

Nelson formed a deep commitment to independence. As the debate over separation from Britain began in the Constitutional Congress, he proposed to the Virginia legislature that “our delegates in Congress be enjoined in the strongest and most positive manner to exert their ability in procuring an immediate clear and full statement of independency.” Firebrand Patrick Henry seconded this motion and it was quickly adopted. Nelson himself became a delegate to this second Continental Congress where he supported Richard Henry Lee’s resolution. Soon afterward, he signed the Declaration of Independence.

Nelson was forced to resign from congress in May of 1777 because of a severe asthma attack. He returned to Virginia, recovered, and led his state’s militia into battle. During the siege of Yorktown, Nelson, now Governor of Virginia, again commanded the state militia, this time against Cornwallis’s army. He personally organized and supplied his men. This use of his personal fortune ruined him financially, since he was never reimbursed by any government. Legend has it that Nelson ordered his artillery to fire on his own house which Cornwallis had commandeered. Though this story is probably untrue, the house, which is still standing, does have two cannonballs in its brick walls.

Nelson’s health had suffered badly from his time on the battlefield. By November of 1781, illness forced him to resign from the Governorship. Years after the war ended, he had not fully recovered. In early January of 1789, he died while visiting his son ‘s home in Hanover County. He was 51 years old. A doctor attending Nelson suggested that depression or despair rather than disease was the cause of his friend’s death. He wrote: “From his unexampled patriotick exertions during the late war he had exhausted a fortune….sinking from affluence, almost to poverty. He could not bear it. I attended him in his last illness and saw that the exquisite tortures of the mind were the disease that destroyed his body.”