Lee claimed that Christianity had introduced humane principles, universal benevolence, and brotherly love in Europe and “happily abolished slavery. Let us who profess the same religion,” he pleaded, “practice its precepts, and… pay a proper regard to the dictates of justice and humanity.”5
Lee himself owned forty slaves, his brother Philip more than one hundred at Stratford Hall, and neither had any inclination to emancipate them. Nor did Virginia law allow them to do so. Slaves were property, to be bought and sold with the land, not to be freed to run loose any more than livestock. Although Quakers hailed Lee’s proposal as a step toward emancipation, Robinson supporters, whose plantations depended on slave labor, shouted Lee down, accusing him of planning to profit by breeding and selling his own slaves to fill slave shortages that his proposed duties would create.
Northern Neck plantation owners like the Lees, however, had seen the number of slaves balloon to 50 percent of the population and create an economic burden for their owners. Unlike cotton, which any child able to crawl could harvest to earn his keep, tobacco required skilled hands to plant, harvest, and cure. Newly arrived slaves, however, were not only unskilled, they were illiterate and, because they could not speak English, often proved difficult to train.*
In addition to difficulties training adult workers, almost one-third of the slave population on many plantations were infants too young to be productive, while an equal number were often too old or crippled to be productive but nonetheless cost their owners for food, clothes, and shelter. What Northern Neck planters feared most, however, was an increase in the slave population to numbers strong enough to stage a rebellion. Lee’s proposed tariff increase was a way of stemming the growth of that population by making it too costly to import more slaves. By adding principles of Christianity to his address Lee hoped Quakers would join the Northern Neckers in support of his proposal.
In the end his political strategy and eloquence won the day, planting some of the first seeds of emancipation in Virginia and giving Lee the potential to become a powerful political force in Virginia.
As the Speaker’s hold on leadership weakened, Richard Henry sought to wrest control of the House from Robinson and his supporters. It was not long before he learned that, instead of destroying Virginia government notes after repaying them from the Treasury, Robinson had kept them on the books as outstanding before parceling them out to cronies to cash in at the colonial treasury a second time.
Without disclosing his evidence of the Speaker’s malfeasance, Lee moved “that a committee be appointed to inquire into the state of the Treasury,” according to his grandson. “The Speaker fixed his eyes with a dark and terrible frown upon Mr. Lee.… The most able and influential members of the House opposed his motion, yet he refuted with great force all objections to the inquiry and seemed to gain strength and ardor from the very means taken to defeat it. The resolution was finally adopted.”6
As Robinson and his cronies held their breath, Lee then “brought the matter to a close,” saying he would not demand that a date be set for the inquiry and, in effect, “saved the colony from great fiscal embarrassment and the people from additional burdens.” Although he had not sought leadership, Lee nonetheless acquired enormous political standing—in effect, a leader in spite of himself. Adding to the admiration for his political discretion was the quality of his speaking skills.
“Richard Henry Lee was by far the most elegant scholar in the House of Burgesses,” recalled William Wirt, later to be attorney general. “His face itself was on the Roman model; his nose Caesarean; the port and carriage of his head, leaning persuasively and gracefully forward; and the whole contour noble and fine.”7 (See frontispiece, here.)
Lee was also among the most well-educated members of the House, having studied every area of literature and science. “He possessed a rich store of historical and political knowledge,” Wirt recalled. “He reasoned well, and declaimed freely and splendidly. The note of his voice was deep and melodious.”8
Robinson retained his hold on the speaker’s seat until his death in 1766, but his passing set off an immediate inquiry, which found at least £100,000 (about $13.5 million today) in outstanding loans to Robinson cronies—including some of Virginia’s most prominent figures. As Lee suspected, Robinson himself had removed £10,000 (about $1.3 million today) from the Treasury to invest in his father-in-law’s lead mines.
In 1765 Lee again displayed his eloquence, joining fellow burgess Patrick Henry in denouncing the British Parliament’s stamp tax, the first direct tax ever imposed on American colonists. In effect for decades in England, the stamp tax required the purchase and affixment of one or more revenue stamps—often worth less than a penny—on all legal documents (wills, deeds, marriage certificates, bills of lading, purchase orders, etc.) as well as on newspapers and periodicals, liquor containers, decks of playing cards, and many other industrial and consumer goods.
All but negligible when added to the cost of any individual item, the stamp tax nevertheless amounted to a considerable—and reliable—revenue source for the government after collections from tens of thousands of documents and products poured into the Treasury. British chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Grenville estimated that stamp tax collections in America would reap about £60,000 a year, or about 20 percent of troop costs there.
At the time years of war had left England’s treasury nearly bankrupt, with a national debt of £130 million (nearly $8 billion today) and £300,000 in annual costs of military garrisons to protect American colonists against Indian attacks. To pay for the garrisons, Parliament first raised taxes at home but sent 40,000 Englishmen plunging into debtor’s prisons and provoked widespread antitax riots. Threatened with a national uprising, Parliament rescinded some tax increases at home and compensated for revenue declines by raising duties on America’s imports and exports. Still facing huge deficits, it extended the reach of the British stamp tax to the colonies. Parliament—and, indeed, most Englishmen—believed Americans deserved to pay for their own military protection, and the stamp tax seemed the most innocuous way to do so.
Lee argued that Virginians had already paid a heavy tax of sorts in the sufferings and lives lost repelling Indian attacks, in the hardships endured settling and developing the wilderness and extracting its natural resources to benefit British shippers and industry.
The eloquent British parliamentarian Edmund Burke agreed. “Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience,” he warned Grenville. “And such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you began; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found.”9
Burke pointed out that for generations Parliament had only collected indirect “hidden” taxes such as import duties from the colonies. It had always allowed each colony’s elected legislature to impose direct taxes such as sales taxes and property taxes to pay costs of colonial administration. The Stamp Act was the first direct tax Parliament had ever imposed on American colonists, and Richard Henry Lee joined other colonial critics in calling it “unconstitutional.”*
Joining them in criticizing the Stamp Act was first-time burgess Patrick Henry. “The General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes… upon the inhabitants of this colony,” Henry all but shouted as Robinson blanched and reached for his gavel. “Every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons… other than the General Assembly… has a manifest tendency to destroy British and American freedom.”10 Reflecting views shared by Richard Henry Lee, Henry argued that Americans did not need the British military to protect them, that American militiamen could defend themselves by themselves.
Coming as it did after Parliament had doubled duties on non-British imports, the stamp tax sparked protests along the entire Atlantic coast, beginning in Boston and spreading to New York, Philadelphia, and southward. As it was, increased duties were already strangling the American economy in the sp
ring of 1765. Importers were collapsing under the weight of debts to English suppliers; shopkeepers and craftsmen closed their doors; even the largest merchants struggled to stay in business, leaving farmers without their usual outlets for crops and at the mercy of speculators. Although personally unaffected by the Stamp Act, Richard Henry Lee stood in the House of Burgesses to support Patrick Henry. Ever the scholar, Lee cited John Locke’s assertion that nature had created all men “equal and… no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… [or] take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”11
As the debate in the House of Burgesses intensified, Henry raged at both the tyranny of the Stamp Act and the elders who had long ruled the House of Burgesses under Speaker Robinson. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third may profit by their example!”12
Robinson interrupted, shouting, “Treason, sir!”
“Treason!” echoed the older burgesses, some standing to shake their fists at the insolent renegade farmer. “Treason! Treason!”
11. Patrick Henry, a newcomer to Virginia’s House of Burgesses, raged against the British Parliament’s attempt to tax Americans as a threat to freedom.
Henry arched his back and stood tall as he let the shouting subside.
“If this be treason,” he sneered in defiance, “make the most of it!”
The House erupted in a cacophony of angry shouts and jubilant cheers. “Violent debates ensued,” Henry recalled. Until then “many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me. After a long and warm contest, the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only.”13
Richard Henry Lee and George Washington had stood as the intrepid “one or two” who formed that “very small majority” and tightened the bonds of friendship with Patrick Henry.
By the time the House of Burgesses recessed, Henry’s eloquent arguments against the Stamp Act had ignited Richard Henry Lee’s hitherto dormant interest in protecting Virginia and Virginians against parliamentary excesses. For him taxes simply meant an all-but-unnoticeable reduction in the income he and the Lees derived from growing and shipping tobacco. Until he encountered Patrick Henry, taxes had no grander meaning. Now they did.
“As bad as Egyptian bondage is now become the fate of every inhabitant in America,” he wrote to his brother Arthur. “Every man in America hath much reason to lament… the loss of American liberty… the mother country being converted into an arbitrary, cruel, and oppressive step-dame.”14
Richard Henry Lee returned home to Chantilly intent on building support for Patrick Henry and the tax protests by writing and publishing the provocative—indeed, subversive, if not treasonous—Westmoreland Resolves of 1766 (see Appendix A). The resolves reiterated his “allegiance and obedience to our lawful Sovereign, George the Third, King of Great Britain” but asserted that a British subject “cannot be taxed, but by consent of a Parliament, in which he is represented by persons chosen by the people, and who themselves pay a part of the tax they impose on others.
If, therefore, any person or persons shall attempt, by any action, or proceeding, to deprive this Colony of these fundamental rights, we will immediately regard him or them, as the most dangerous enemy of the community; and we will go to any extremity, not only to prevent the success of such attempts, but to stigmatize and punish the offender.
Richard Henry intended presenting the resolves to Northern Neck planters at Leedstown on February 27 and threaten “danger and disgrace” to anyone collecting or paying the stamp tax. The resolution warned Parliament that Virginians would fight the Stamp Act “at every hazard and pay no attention to danger or to death.”
But just as Richard Henry Lee was to present the resolutions and reach the pinnacle of political influence in Virginia, his political star suddenly crashed to earth when an ally of Speaker Robinson won the competition to become collector of stamps. Calling himself “An Enemy of Hypocrisy,” he sent two articles to the Virginia Gazette exposing Richard Henry Lee as one of the losing applicants for the post as stamp collector.15
It was a devastating revelation. Lee had told no one that he had applied. Indeed, he regretted doing so immediately after filing it, but had no way of withdrawing it once it left on the boat to London. Red faced, embarrassed, ashamed of an action motivated solely by his greed for extra money, Lee hemmed and hawed and claimed unconvincingly that he had not realized the significance of the Stamp Act when it passed.
Finally he took the only action he could in the circumstances. He publicly apologized: “It was but a few days after my letters [applying for the collector’s job] were sent away,” he wrote to the Virginia Gazette, “that reflecting on the nature of the application I had made, the impropriety of an American being concerned in such an affair struck me in the strongest manner and produced a fixed determination… to prevent the success of a measure I now discovered to be in the highest degree pernicious to my country. I considered that to err is certainly the portion of humanity, but that it was the business of an honest man to recede from error as soon as he discovered it.”16
By then the meaning of “my country” for some Americans had changed from Britain to the colony in which they lived. In Lee’s case “my country” now meant Virginia.
With that, Richard Henry Lee pledged all his energies to fighting the stamp tax and presented the Westmoreland Resolves to a gathering in Leedstown. He then led three of his brothers, two cousins, four members of the Washington family, and more than one hundred others in signing the Resolves and exposing themselves to arrest by British authorities for subversion and imprisonment if not death. Colonel Phil’s name was noticeably absent. Intent on maintaining warm relationships with British merchants, he resisted allying himself with American malcontents—even his own brothers. Although he resented the Stamp Act as much as any of them, he preferred to work for its repeal by sending gentle warnings to English merchants with whom he traded, illustrating in pounds and pence how the Stamp Act would raise costs of American commodities and leave American merchants with fewer profits with which to buy British goods.
With Richard Henry’s name at the top of the Westmoreland signatories, he leaped back to leadership among those his brother called malcontents—only to have tragedy mar his political success. In a ghastly hunting accident Richard Henry fired his gun, and it exploded, blowing the fingers off his left hand. After a long, slow healing process, he covered all but the thumb of his deformed hand with black silk, an accessory he would wear the rest of his life. To add to his misery, his wife, Anne, fell ill and died just before Christmas, leaving him to care for four young children—two girls, two and four, and two boys, eight and ten. Within a year, however, he found another wife, “a pretty little widow” who, Richard Henry enthused, proved “a most tender, attentive, and fond mother to my dear little girls.”
Also named Ann, his second wife lacked only the second “e” of her Christian name to match his first spouse in the love she lavished on the family. She not only embraced him and his children but would also increase his brood to nine, five girls and four boys, none named Richard Henry Lee.
Arthur, twenty-eight by then, had earned his MD from Edinburgh Medical School—then, the English-speaking world’s finest—and toured France and Holland, where he stayed to earn a second MD at the prestigious University of Leyden before returning to London. There, with Benjamin Franklin’s endorsement, he won membership in the renowned Royal Society of London, added the exclusive FRS to the two MDs after his name, and joined Britain’s most distinguished intellectuals and physicians. The prestige of his appointment reached across the Atlantic, where he won election to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the Board of Visitors (trustees) at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
12. Arthur Lee, seven years younger than his brother Richard Henry Lee, studied at Eton College, then earned an MD and a law d
egree in England before evolving into a champion of American independence and the most important spy for the American independence movement.
During Arthur’s years in medical school Colonel Phil had continually dipped into the cash inheritances of his younger brothers to finance trade opportunities, thus forcing him to ignore requests from Arthur (and William) for money that was legitimately theirs—and angering both brothers. Often in desperate need to pay for his education, Arthur, of necessity, turned to Richard Henry, who proved himself a generous brother, dispensing money as well as wise counsel, cementing his role as a trusted mentor.
“Every man in America hath much reason to lament… the loss of American liberty,” Richard Henry Lee wrote to Arthur in July 1766 after Arthur had returned to London and Parliament had passed the Stamp Act. Richard Henry said the Act had transformed “the mother country” into “an arbitrary, cruel, and oppressive stepdame.” He urged his brother to return to America to join the family’s struggle for repeal. America, he wrote, “has a parent’s claim to her descendants and a right to insist that they shall not fix in any place where, in so doing, they may add strength to cruel and tyrannical oppression.” He signed it, “I am, my dear brother, ever your affectionate friend.”17
Although he had not intended doing so, Arthur responded immediately to his brother’s call and returned to Virginia, ready to plunge into battle. He did not have to wait long, although it was not the battle he had anticipated. He arrived just as Richard Henry drew harsh criticism for his public apology over the stamp collector’s post from George Mercer, who had won the job as stamp collector. A former officer cited for bravery serving with George Washington in the French and Indian War, Mercer was a crack shot. His articles exposing Richard Henry’s hypocrisy so infuriated Arthur Lee that he challenged Mercer to a duel. With no experience firing pistols, he nonetheless appeared at the appointed dueling ground at 5 a.m. on the appointed day ready to die—indeed, certain to die—for his brother’s honor.
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