First Founding Father
Page 3
With the French and Indians threatening to overrun the American West, Britain declared war on France on May 17, 1756, and ordered an expeditionary force far larger than Braddock’s to sail to North America to halt French incursions into territory Britain claimed as her own. Until it arrived, Washington, his militia, and the rest of the Virginia population could do nothing but wait and hope the French and Indians would not march eastward.
In the meantime plantation life proceeded as normally as possible, with three Lee brothers—Philip, Richard Henry, and Thomas, who had returned from England by then—engaged in the usual family quarrels but nonetheless wooing eligible young ladies at the neighboring plantation. Brother Philip had been first to make contact with the owner, Colonel James Steptoe. While courting Steptoe’s daughter Elizabeth Steptoe, he introduced his two younger brothers to his future wife’s half-sisters, Mary and Anne Aylette. Tom married Mary and immediately whisked his bride upriver to the property he had inherited in Stafford County, midway between Stratford Hall and Alexandria. Richard Henry married Anne Aylette but had no inclination to farm the acreage he had inherited in Prince William County, upcountry on the Northern Neck near Mount Vernon. Intent on staying put among the books and luxuries of his boyhood surroundings, he gladly accepted Colonel Phil’s invitation to remain in Stratford Hall with his bride, who became de facto mistress of the household and bore two of her children with Richard Henry there.* In addition to caring for infants Thomas and Ludwell, she and Richard Henry also took a hand in guiding the two youngest Lee boys, William and Arthur, both in their teens by then and still devoted to their older brother Richard Henry.
Colonel Phil had already discerned William’s talents in mathematics and planned to bring him into the family business to learn international trade and banking. The youngest boy, Arthur, seemed an impractical intellect, however, and Richard Henry convinced Colonel Phil to send him to Eton and, from there, to medical school.
As Colonel Phil himself drew closer to marrying, he and Richard Henry recognized the potential for conflict between two matrons living in and governing the same household. Phil agreed to lease Richard Henry 500 acres high on a nearby bluff overlooking the Potomac, where Richard Henry designed a home he called Chantilly, after the Château de Chantilly north of Paris that had entranced him when he visited in 1751.
Richard Henry Lee’s Chantilly was far less elaborate—but more practical—than the original, which had been built in 1560 for the French king’s constable. Although Lee’s home commanded a breathtaking view of the Potomac River, it was standard Virginia—a three-and-a-half-story, rectangular frame house, with front and rear doors placed in the center of the ground floor to let breezes flow through and cool the interior in summer. One Lee relative called the house commodious but not elegant. Its ground floor, clad in a veneer of brick, housed an entrance hall, parlor, library, and a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot dining room. The second floor, with its wooden clapboard exterior, held four bedrooms and a lookout room where Lee kept two telescopes to follow ships as they sailed on the river below, bound, as often as not, to the landing beneath Stratford Hall. The third floor, squeezed beneath a sloping roof, housed a large classroom, where a tutor would educate Richard Henry Lee’s children, just as one had educated him at Stratford Hall.
Formal gardens reminiscent of those he had seen at Chantilly in France enhanced the lawns around the house, and a “great walk” led to the spectacular panorama at the edge of the bluff. A cellar held three dozen bottles of port wine, five dozen bottles of Virginia wine, a dozen bottles of gin, and ample supplies of madeira, muscat, claret, and champagne. Outbuildings included a kitchen, dairy, blacksmith’s forge, stables, barn, laundry, slave quarters, and, of course, a “necessary”—or outhouse. A landscaped path wound its way down to the river’s edge, where a barge waited to take the Lees and their guests on river cruises.
8. The magnificent Château de Chantilly, built in the sixteenth century north of Paris for the constable of France, entranced Richard Henry Lee when he visited it after graduating from Eton College. He would give the name to his own home in Virginia. (LPLT/Wikipedia Commons)
With no interest in farming or commerce, Richard Henry opted for a career in public service, in which Colonel Phil agreed he could best serve the Lee enterprise and its interests in international commerce and land development in the west. Envisioning a life of reading, travel, contact with interesting public figures, and the joys of raising a family, Richard Henry wrote to friends far and wide seeking an interesting, if not taxing, government sinecure, of which there were many.
“I know not any person to whom I can, with more propriety, apply for an application on my behalf, that I may be appointed to fill the next vacancy in his majesty’s council,” he wrote to General James Abercrombie, commander of British forces in America. “The desire I have to do my country service is my only motive for this solicitation.”12 On the same day he wrote to a former schoolmate from Wakefield School to “entreat the favor of you… to apply to your noble friend Lord Halifax.… If an ardent desire to serve my country… [is] considered in this application, you may safely declare yourself my friend.”13
He ended his efforts to obtain government appointments in 1757, however, when George Washington’s older brother Augustine retired from politics and urged Richard Henry to run for his seat in the House of Burgesses.
As Richard Henry sought election in Westmoreland County, his younger brother Francis Lightfoot Lee, who had settled on a farm in Loudon County, fifty miles northwest of Alexandria, also sought election to the House of Burgesses. Both brothers won, and, when the three Lee brothers—Colonel Phil, Richard Henry, and Francis Lightfoot Lee—strode into Virginia’s House of Burgesses, they joined eight in-laws and cousins to form the largest, most powerful voting bloc in the legislature, with more than 10 percent of the votes at most sessions. Their commercial dynasty had evolved into a political dynasty, and Richard Henry Lee, the dilettante scholar, suddenly found himself a powerful figure in Britain’s most important colony.
Nor would Richard Henry Lee’s younger brother Francis Lightfoot Lee—or Frank, as his brothers called him—long remain in the seclusion of his farm. Once in the sociopolitical swirl of Williamsburg, he met the magnificent Rebecca Plater Tayloe—at seventeen, she was half his age but nonetheless as attracted to him as he was to her. Her doting father was John Tayloe, a burgess and master of the 20,000-acre Mt. Airy plantation that stretched along the Rappahannock River on the south side of the Northern Neck, across the peninsula from Stratford Hall and Chantilly. The owner of 320 slaves, he also owned an enormous iron works that would supply Virginia’s militia and navy with cannonballs and pig iron during the Revolutionary War. Tayloe—the origin of the spelling is unclear—fully approved of his daughter’s choice in marriage but refused to consider allowing her to leave for the Loudon County wilderness. He offered her fiancé, Francis Lightfoot Lee, 1,000 acres of Mt. Airy land as his daughter’s dowry if he agreed to build a home and remain there with his wife. He did and they did—happily so. They were near not only her family but also his brothers at Stratford Hall and Chantilly.
9. Richard Henry Lee won election to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, Virginia, bringing to eleven the number of Lees in the colony legislature—enough to dominate proceedings and direct the colony’s destiny.
10. Francis Lightfoot Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s younger brother by a year, supported his brother’s political quests in Virginia’s House of Burgesses, its Assembly, and the Continental Congress. Always working on his brother’s behalf behind the scenes, he almost never displayed the oral histrionics that lifted his brother Richard Henry to national fame.
As these three Lee brothers and their eight cousins and in-laws took their seats in the House of Burgesses for the 1757 session, they joined a group whose names would become some of the most illustrious in American history: George Washington, George Mason, Benjamin Harrison, Peyton Randolph, and George Wythe, among others.
Together the burgesses not only ruled Virginia—they were Virginia.
The only political division between burgesses reflected the split between Tidewater aristocrats like the Lees, who owned the large tobacco plantations in eastern Virginia, and the isolated upland farmers and backwoodsmen from the Piedmont hills to the west. Thirty-five of Virginia’s fifty-six counties were in the Tidewater region, and only twenty-one were upland, giving the closely connected Tidewater aristocrats all-but-absolute control of the House.
All, however, paid obeisance to the politically conservative John Robinson, who had filled dual roles as both Speaker and colony treasurer since 1738 and held almost all the older burgesses in his thrall.
Robinson welcomed Richard Henry Lee and his brothers, expecting them to fall in line with the other burgesses who had marched in political lockstep behind him for a generation. Nothing in Richard Henry’s boyish smile and warm demeanor signaled his intention to shatter the older man’s career and bring Virginia’s century-old political house crashing to the ground.
* A wide, checkered bar (fesse chequy) across the center of the shield, with eight “billets,” or vertical rectangles above and below the central bar.
* To flatter their Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, mapmakers depicted Virginia sprawling across North America from Florida to Canada and westward to the “South Sea,” or Pacific Ocean. As the oldest and largest of Elizabeth’s colonies, Virginia has claimed status as “The Old Dominion” ever since.
* While their brothers acquired formal education, the Lee girls stayed at the sides of female slaves and, later, their mothers, growing up unlettered and learning only “women’s work” and “lady-like” behavior. A few of the wealthiest learned “decorative arts,” such as embroidering or playing a musical instrument to entertain their future husbands.
* The ruins of Belvoir are on the grounds of the military installation at Fort Belvoir, near Mount Vernon, Virginia.
* Thomas and Ludwell were her second and third children, respectively, the first being Elizabeth, who died in infancy.
CHAPTER 2
Egyptian Bondage
AS RICHARD HENRY LEE ENTERED THE HOUSE OF BURGESSES THE French and Indian War was raging in Canada, western Virginia, and other American provinces. Involving only Britain, France, and American Indians at first, it spread across the Atlantic to Europe, where it evolved into the Seven Years’ War, with six more nations joining the conflict, expanding it into the planet’s first “world” war.
In September 1758 the French and Indians staged raids that reached into eastern Virginia, threatening the Lee holdings at Stratford Hall and the Northern Neck. Newspapers blamed Washington and his misadventure in the West as having caused the conflagration: “When raw novices… who have never been used to command… are honored with commissions in the Army,” the Virginia Gazette asked rhetorically, “how wretchedly helpless must a nation be?”1
As British reinforcements landed in America, they met with nothing but disaster. French forces swept southward from Quebec into New York, capturing three key English forts north of Albany while a hurricane destroyed a British fleet attempting to seize the French fortification at Louisbourg at the entrance to the St. Lawrence River.
British forces went on the offensive in some areas, however. In the waters off Nova Scotia they eventually forced the French to surrender Louisbourg. In western Pennsylvania a large force of British troops expelled the French from Fort Duquesne near the site where the French had humiliated General Braddock. In Europe British troops raided the French coast, and Britain’s Prussian ally defeated and occupied Saxony, a French ally.
Although the war would continue in Europe until 1763, the capture of Fort Duquesne ended the immediate threat to Virginia. British forces all but ended the war in North America in September 1759 with a surprise assault on Quebec City that forced the French to surrender all of Canada to Britain the following year.
Although Virginians celebrated the British victory, they paid a heavy price in added taxes to pay for their participation, all but pushing some of Virginia’s wealthiest plantation owners to the brink of financial ruin. Colonial treasurer John Robinson, the wily Speaker of the House of Burgesses, found a way to pay for the war, however, without bleeding his friends, the colony’s property owners. He simply issued and sold government notes, which spread the burden for repaying costs of the war across America and Britain. Virginians hailed Robinson as a financial and political genius.
“His reputation was great for sound political knowledge and… a benevolence which created friends and a sincerity which never lost one,” the future Virginia governor Edmund Randolph testified. “In the limited sphere of colonial politics, he was a column. The thousand little flattering attentions which can be scattered from the chair operated as delicious incense.”2 Robinson was everyone’s hero.
Everyone’s hero but Richard Henry Lee and his family.
Richard Henry Lee and his brothers did not dislike Robinson—no one could dislike him—but Robinson was a partner in the Loyal Land Company with, among others, Benjamin Harrison V, a wealthy Virginia planter-merchant. Their company had staked out lands south of the Ohio River and waged a long, bitter war for control of Ohio River rights with the Ohio Land Company on the opposite bank of the river. Washington, Lee, and their families were among the founder-partners of the Ohio Land Company, whose 200,000 acres were part of a 1612 royal grant. Both companies intended reaping huge profits from the sale of furs and other easily harvested wealth and the reselling of sections of land to would-be settlers. To open the region, however, they needed control of lands along the Ohio River waterway to carry men and materials to their holdings. Years of bitter family feuding had left both companies unwilling to compromise.
When Richard Henry Lee entered the House of Burgesses, he feigned obeisance to Speaker Robinson—politics and good manners demanded nothing less. Lee nonetheless grew suspicious of Speaker Robinson’s grandiosity in providing colleagues with financial assistance in the form of Treasury notes. Backed by his family, Richard Henry moved that the House sever ties between the offices of the Speaker and the treasurer. To his surprise—indeed, to the surprise of most other burgesses—a curious looking, ill-clad burgess stood to second Richard Henry Lee’s resolution.
In stark contrast to burgesses in formal morning clothes and powdered wigs, he had entered the hall in drab work clothes—a working farmer from the Piedmont hills upcountry. Sentries had stopped him at the outer gate, but when he displayed his official papers and election certificate, the sergeant at arms had to let him pass, albeit reluctantly. His name was Patrick Henry, the owner of a simple 1,700-acre farm with no slaves. Although a few other upcountry farmers in homespun clothes sat scattered along the back benches of the House, Patrick Henry stood out in what seemed like a black shroud. He did not fit in, but Speaker Robinson had no choice but to recognize him.
By seconding Richard Lee’s resolution, Patrick Henry drew the support from the other farmers and ensured passage of Lee’s resolution to reform the House of Burgesses. He also established a “lasting friendship” with Richard Henry Lee, according t
o William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry’s grandson and biographer. “Mutual admiration and coincidence of views on public questions soon made them bosom friends.”3
Energized by his first major political victory, Richard Henry again took aim at Robinson, this time noting the large number of slaves who worked the Speaker’s 30,000-acre plantation. Suggesting that Robinson was profiting from the slave trade, Richard Henry set some burgesses aghast by moving “to lay so heavy a duty on the importation of slaves as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic within the colony of Virginia.”4
In what may have been the first—and certainly one of the earliest—public speeches on the subject in American history, he warned of slave rebellions to come, saying, “slaves must be natural enemies to society and their increase consequentially dangerous… because they see us enjoying every privilege and luxury… and because they observe their masters possessed of liberty which is denied to them, whilst they and their posterity are subjected forever to the most abject and mortifying slavery.”
As Burgesses roared in collective outrage, calling on Lee to sit down, he grimaced, indicating he was far from finished.
“Not the cruelties practiced in the conquest of Spanish America,” he thundered above the din, “not the savage barbarity of the Saracens can be more big with atrocity than our cruel trade with Africa.
There we encourage those poor, ignorant people to wage eternal war against each other: not nation against nation but father against son, son against parents, and brothers against brothers, whereby parental, filial, and fraternal duty is violated, that… we Christians [he emphasized the word] may be furnished with our fellow creatures, who are no longer considered as created in the image of God as well as ourselves and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature, but they are to be deprived, forever deprived, of all the comforts of life and to be made the most wretched of the human kind.