The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  AFTER THE FIGHTING ended at Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris restored peace in 1783, R.H. returned to Congress in 1784, and his colleagues elected him to a one-year term as their president, the chief executive of the United States. Now R.H. made up for the cold and the pigeons with presidential opulence. “If for the good of my country I must be a Beau, why I shall be a Beau,” he sighed archly—and put on “the very best black silk [as befits] my station.” When Congress moved to New York in January 1785 and began paying the presidential expenses, a nephew reported that R.H. was living “in a palace [and] does the honors of it with as much ease and dignity as if he had been always crowned with a royal diadem.” The Lee style of entertaining was back in force, as “crowds of obedient domestics run to his call, [and] Champagne, Claret, Madeira, and Muscat [wash down] a profusion of the delicacies and luxuries of good living” at thrice-weekly dinners for twenty-five.105

  Pomp aside, R.H. led Congress in passing two crucial democratic measures, the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which laid out America’s western territory in parcels that ordinary citizens could buy and provided for the West’s organization into new states with the same political rights as the old ones—and without slavery (as Lincoln stressed in denouncing the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act much later).106 It was built into British America’s democratic DNA from the start that, as new settlements sprang up, they sent representatives to the colonial legislatures as a matter of course. Before the Ordinances could pass, Virginia had to give up its vast western claims, which R.H. energetically urged, rendering worthless his family’s shares in the Ohio Company, which had triggered so many years of upheaval.107 He saw Congress’s sale of the lands as a quick way of paying off the Revolutionary War debt, though Alexander Hamilton, like an alchemist, later transmuted that debt into something magical.108

  R.H.’S PASSION for democracy, wildly opposed to his ancestor Richard the Scholar’s worldview, sparked his last public drama over the new Constitution. He had declined appointment to the Constitutional Convention, because, as a congressman charged with revising the new document, he thought it a conflict of interest to help write it. He was aghast, therefore, when the Convention decided to send its work directly to the states for ratification rather than let Congress tinker with it first, as the Articles of Confederation demanded.109 And, though he thought the Constitution sound, it needed fine-tuning, as did any system of government that, from “Moses to Montesquieu, the greatest geniuses” have produced, he wrote Governor Edmund Randolph in October 1787.110

  He complained that the new Constitution provided for insufficient separation of powers. Concentrating too much power in the president and the Senate, with the House of Representatives being “a mere shred or rag of representation,” it was “most highly and dangerously oligarchic” and could produce an “elective despotism.” Worse, it lacked a bill of rights. “The corrupting nature of power and its insatiable appetite for increase, has proved the necessity . . . of the strongest and most express declarations of that residuum of natural rights, which is not intended to be given up to society,” he wrote Samuel Adams. It’s no good hoping that the new legislature will cure this defect: it may or may not.111 These reasonable objections helped impel the Constitution’s supporters to vow to add a bill of rights by amendment, and R.H. accepted election as the first senator from Virginia in 1788 in order to support that change.112

  Crippled by gout and having injured his one good hand so he could no longer write, he retired to Chantilly permanently in 1792. There he was often “of a gay and cheerful disposition,” his nephew recalled, “and very fond of promoting mirth.” He died two years later, aged sixty-one.113 A British warship shelled Chantilly to ruins in the War of 1812; in the Depression, scavengers carried off the last bricks of its hearth.114

  IN THE LAST famous master of Stratford Hall, his cousin General Henry Lee III, R.H.’s dream of renewed Lee family entrepreneurship turned into a nightmare and ended in a peculiarly American self-made tragedy. As a daring Revolutionary War hero, the perfect incarnation of a Virginia cavalier, a shining favorite of his superiors, George Washington and Nathanael Greene, Henry was a virtuoso of the lightning raid that captured British prisoners, horses, and supplies with no losses of his own. In 1778, he won command of an independent partisan corps of light dragoons operating outside the normal chain of command (hence his nickname, “Light-Horse Harry”). After the twenty-three-year-old major’s breathtakingly audacious 1779 capture of a British fort at Paulus Hook (now Jersey City), New Jersey, Congress promoted him to colonel, gave him its highest medal, and expanded his corps into Lee’s Legion, with infantry as well as cavalry.115

  With its courage, esprit de corps, fine uniforms, and splendid horses that could always outrun the enemy, the Legion quickly gained a mystique. These were self-consciously elite troops, and, though Harry maintained rigid discipline (to the scandalous extreme, once, of setting up the head of an executed deserter on a pike to deter others), he took solicitous care of his men, keeping them well fed and healthy, and never endangering them needlessly. He led them in gloriously daring exploits, but only after meticulous calculation, preparation, and sometimes rehearsal. “A soldier is always in danger,” he emphasized, “when his conviction of security leads him to dispense with the most vigilant precautions.” He molded the Legion into “a band of brothers,” one observer wrote, “having entire confidence in each other, and all having equal confidence in, and personal esteem for, their commander, Lee.” Unlike other Continental Army soldiers, who signed up for a limited hitch, Harry’s men volunteered for the duration of the war. As for Harry himself, this was, he said, “a command I most sincerely love.”116

  But the raids that were the Legion’s specialty don’t win wars. “To win a victory [is] but the first step in the actions of a great captain,” Harry wrote, in censure of the British commander, General Howe. “To improve it is as essential; and unless the first is followed by the second, the conqueror ill requites those brave companions of his toils and perils, . . . and basely neglects his duty to his country.”117 Did Harry never wonder if this shoe fit him? Certainly he heard other carping, since the favoritism of his superiors, and the arrogance that stares out at you from Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of him as a young officer, sowed resentment and enmity all around him. The result was two trumped-up courts-martial, which acquitted Harry with honor but left him embittered, a resentment that grew with later, and more justified, criticism that his absence from his assigned positions at the Battles of Guilford Court House and Eutaw Springs cost his comrades clear-cut victories.118

  What he took to be slights, “ill natured insinuations,” and neglect of his merit gnawed at him, prompting his mentor, General Greene, to remind him sharply that “I have run every risk in favor of your operations,” and “jealousies and discontents have not been wanting in the Army at the opportunities afforded you to the prejudice of others.”119 Nevertheless, Harry decided to quit the service in February 1782, six months after the last great battle at Yorktown, citing ill health, grief, misery, “the persecution of my foes”—some force majeure from outside rather than his own free decision.120

  One reason he gave for leaving was undeniably true: he was getting married in April. His bride was his second cousin, the “Divine Matilda” Lee, the nineteen-year-old harpsichord-playing daughter of Colonel Phil, a shrewd and funny “fine lady with a fine fortune [and a] fine figure.”121 The pair lived at Stratford, which, because Philip’s toddler heir had tumbled headlong down its steep stone grand stairway to his death, now belonged to Matilda’s mother. When she remarried and moved away, she left Harry and Matilda in charge. When she died in 1789, Stratford became Matilda’s in fact.122 Harry put his stamp on it, enlarging and updating its drawing room with a stylish federal mantelpiece, wainscoting, and door and window frames, and turning the basement story, hitherto storage and servants’ quarters, into more bedrooms.

  Harry had grown up with great
expectations. His father was a Potomac grandee; his mother, even richer, a famous beauty whom George Washington had courted unsuccessfully. And because his uncle, Squire Richard Lee, was rich and unmarried, everyone expected him to make Harry, his favorite nephew, the heir of his 10,000 acres. The squire was not wifeless for lack of trying: his brother had tirelessly pitched a succession of eligible widows at him, and he himself had proposed to a parade of unsuitable young women who humiliatingly turned him down. In amorous matters, the Falstaffian squire was a “barbarian,” “lewdly indulgent” with his slaves, Bab and Henny. “If he ever marries,” a friend predicted, “you may depend upon it, . . . it will be with some mop-squeezer who can satiate his filthy amours in his own way.” But around the time of Harry’s marriage, the squire, now past sixty, wed a beautiful sixteen-year-old cousin, with whom he fathered four heirs by the time he died at sixty-nine.123

  Harry, then, would have to make his immense expectations a reality by his own efforts. He would be even more heroic an entrepreneur than he was a soldier and would win the full-throated hosannas he craved. He saw like a shining vision the same American Dream his great-uncle Thomas Lee had dreamed half a century earlier, of settlers thronging into the continent’s rich undeveloped lands, planting farms lush with ripening fields and fat cattle, and turning the Potomac into a river of gold. Now that America had won independence and the Northwest Ordinance had set the terms for new settlements, all this was bound to come to pass, supercharged by a flood of immigrants and foreign investment.124

  AND SO, while Harry had a seemingly normal official life as a statesman—at the Continental Congress from 1785 to 1789, Virginia governor from 1791 to 1794, commanding general who put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, U.S. congressman from 1799 to 1801—he had another life that seemed more real and much more exciting to him.125 He bought land, compulsively—well over a million acres of it, from the Great Falls of the Potomac into the Northwest Territory; in Kentucky, in North Carolina, in Georgia. He bought mines and mineral rights. He bought shares in the Potowmack Company, which George Washington had first conceived before the war to build canals to float barges around the Potomac falls and ultimately create a trade artery linking to—who knows?—maybe Lake Erie. As Washington himself told Madison, “It opens up a field almost too extensive for imagination.” Harry began to talk in a promoter’s get-rich-quick language: “the value of the spot is above present calculation,” “the most convenient & productive iron estate in our country,” and so on.126

  Harry’s vision was right, of course. It all came true. Even the canal materialized, though more modestly than Harry figured. It’s just that he was way too early, he way overpaid, and he was way overleveraged. European investors, making a killing (in more ways than one) by financing Napoleon’s wars, kept their capital in Europe, and in 1795 the American real-estate bubble began to deflate, even as speculators were frenziedly buying warrants for land neither they, the sellers, nor any surveyor had ever seen. It exploded in 1797, when Robert Morris’s six-million-acre North American Land Company went bust, vaporizing $40,000 that Morris owed Harry. But Harry kept on buying.127

  At first Harry had spent—“invested”—his own money and his wife’s. A few days before Matilda died in childbirth at only twenty-seven in 1790, she cannily put Stratford in trust for their three children, but Harry chipped away at their inheritances as much as he could get away with.128 In 1793, he married Ann Hill Carter, twenty, of Shirley Plantation and spent her grand fortune too. When the cash ran low, he began borrowing, mortgaging existing properties to buy new ones, and constructing, with gravity-defying leverage, a pyramid of debt. Ann’s father took Harry’s measure accurately, and, “apprehensive [that] they may be destined to come to want,” he left his property solely to Ann and her children. After her father died in 1806, Ann begged Harry to come to his senses, since “your afflicted, fatherless wife can now only look to you to smooth her rugged path through life, and soften her bed of death!”129

  But nothing stopped him, not even as creditors dunned him in the governor’s mansion; not even as the acreage around Stratford shrank, the best furnishings went out the door, the house itself grew shabby; not even as he gave Washington a bad check, by no means the only one he passed. “No event of my life has given me more anguish,” he wrote his lifelong friend and hero. As creditors closed in and threatened lawsuits, he sold off land to two different buyers, land that was still mortgaged, land he didn’t own, and reportedly even a friend’s horse and slave.130 He made promises, asked for more time, grew vague. He begged his Princeton classmate and friend Secretary of State Madison to send him abroad as a consul—to escape the duns. But they cornered him. Because the laws then gave creditors the right to take all a bankrupt’s property, Harry, trying to save something for his family, refused to take the oath of insolvency. He took the other choice instead: starting in April 1809, he served eleven months in jail for debt.131

  WHEN HE CAME OUT from behind bars for the brief and violent finale of his tragedy, he turned Stratford over to his and Matilda’s twenty-three-year-old son, Henry Lee IV, to settle a debt, and he, Ann, and their children decamped to a small row house in Alexandria.132 As the family was boarding the boat for the trip up the Potomac, legend has it, no one could find Harry’s three-year-old son, Robert E. Lee, who turned up in the nursery next to the room in Stratford where he was born, saying a tearful good-bye to the winged cherubs cast into the iron fireback of the little fireplace there. Arriving at the new house, the first thing Harry did was spread out his papers, soaked in the voyage, to dry—especially the first chapters of his memoirs of the Revolution, which he had begun in jail. Though the vivid book never made money, as he’d hoped, it became a standard reference work on the war.133

  Harry claimed it was to find a publisher for the memoirs that he went to Baltimore in July 1812. He also claimed he’d gone there to play whist. He claimed, implausibly, that he did not go there looking for trouble—but trouble is certainly what he found.134

  Baltimore was a Republican town filled with England-hating Irish and French immigrants who full-throatedly supported the War of 1812 against Britain, declared the month before. Harry was a staunch Federalist—like most ex–Continental Army officers, whom the wartime failures of the Continental Congress had made supporters of strong central government—and he opposed this new war as a useless waste of soldiers’ lives. Two days after the war started, a mob had chased Federalist newspaper editor Alexander Hanson out of Baltimore and had wrecked his office for his antiwar stance. Hanson quietly returned to town on July 26, distributing the next day a new issue of his paper, which charged the mayor and governor with letting the June riot rage unrestrained and never punishing its leaders for political reasons. He then locked himself in his house with a gang of tough young Federalists who’d come from southern Maryland intent on “wresting Baltimore from the tyranny of the mob” and vindicating “the liberty of the Press.” Harry happened to drop in that Monday evening and suggested that the group be “fully prepared to resist an attack.” Famous for holding off and then driving away seventy to two hundred British soldiers—accounts varied—who’d tried to surprise and capture him and seven companions in a house during the Revolution, Harry became leader by popular acclaim.135

  FOR ALL HIS TALK of driving off the mob with “the vigorous use of the bayonet,” when night fell and the mob swelled, Harry counseled keeping the house dark and quiet. Rejecting his advice, the Federalists fired over the heads of the crowd, and when the mob, throwing rocks and shooting guns, swarmed in—and a gun held to Harry’s head misfired—Harry, who “wished above all things, to avoid the effusion of blood,” recommended surrendering to the militia and going to jail. Over Hanson’s sharp warnings not to count on the protection of the authorities, the Federalist defenders took Harry’s advice.136

  A mistake. When darkness fell the next night, the mob overran the undefended jail, beating, kicking, and knifing the Federalists, with special animus toward those
“damned old tories,” Lee and his fellow ex–Continental Army officer James Lingan. When Lingan pulled open his shirt to display the wounds he’d suffered freeing the country when his attackers were still—he sneered—“in the bogs of Ireland,” the rioters killed him. As Harry told the “base villains” that “they disgraced the country in which they had found an asylum,” they beat him senseless, slitting his nose and trying to gouge out his eyes. Only when they thought all their victims were dead did the rioters depart. Lingan, however, proved the sole fatality.137

  “Black as a negro” from his bruises, “covered with blood from tip to toe,” Harry, sewed up and bandaged all over, never really recovered. In May 1813, permanently scarred, “absorbed in misery & tortured with pain,” he sailed for the Caribbean, wandering from island to island for five years, trying different doctors, and treatment after treatment, looking for relief he never found. He wrote letters of advice, encouragement, and love to the abandoned Ann and her five children, who, as the bank twice reduced the interest on the annuity her father left her, grew poorer and poorer. Finally, as what sounds like bladder cancer ate away at him and he knew he was dying, he booked passage for home, so ill that he never made it. He had to be put ashore at Cumberland Island, Georgia, where Nathanael Greene’s daughter lived, “to die in the house and in the arms of the daughter of my old friend and compatriot.” With officers from the nearby bases sitting with him in shifts, he died in agony two weeks later, on March 25, 1818, aged sixty-two. He was buried on the island, the flagship of the nearby naval base firing its minute gun until the earth closed over him.138

  THE STRATFORD STORY has a coda, brief, scandalous, and tragic. Not that sexual irregularity necessarily made the Lees squirm. When the young husband of R.H.’s strong-minded sister Hannah Corbin died, for instance, leaving a will that would force her out of their beautiful house if she remarried, she had her new lover move in without marriage, and gave the son she had with him her first husband’s surname. Family and friends took it in stride and didn’t shun her.139