First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

  “I made a pretty good slam among such kind of officers as the Massachusetts government abound in since I came to this camp,” Washington boasted to Richard Henry Lee, “having broken one colonel and two captains for cowardly behavior in the action on Bunker’s Hill. Besides these, I have at this time one colonel, one major, one captain, and two subalterns under arrest for trial.”17

  To the dismay of reconciliationists in Congress, King George refused to receive the Olive Branch Petition, just as he had rejected a previous appeal for reconciliation from the First Continental Congress. In addition, he issued a royal proclamation closing the colonies to all commerce and ordered a build-up of British arms. At Richard Henry Lee’s behest, Congress responded by authorizing development of a full-fledged navy, converting sturdy fishing vessels into armed ships, seizing two British naval vessels, and fitting out four ships with ten guns each.

  Richard Henry Lee wrote to General Washington that he had also ordered fourteen tons of powder sent to the army and asked the committee of secret correspondence to establish ties with “friends of the colonies in Great Britain, Ireland, and in other parts of the world.”

  He said the committee would try to “ascertain the feelings and views of the courts of France and Spain… and how far they would assist… in arms, ammunition, and money.”18 It would also appoint secret agents abroad, with Richard Henry Lee winning official appointment of his brother Arthur as America’s principal agent in London.

  In London British authorities apparently learned that Wilkes and his aides were feeding the Lees confidential information on government military plans and began disseminating false information.

  “We are here as much in the dark about news from England as you are,” Richard Henry Lee reported to Washington. “The indistinct accounts we have tell us of great confusion all over England and a prodigious fall of the stocks. I heartily wish it may be true, but if it is not, I have no doubt of its shortly being the case.”19

  One letter Arthur sent his brother stated that “General [Lord Jeffery] Amherst had recommended (& ’twas said it will be executed) to remove the army this winter from Boston to Long Island in order to get amply supplied by ravaging N. Jersey, N. York, and Rhode Island.”20 To which Richard Henry added his hope that Washington would give the departing British “a genteel parting salute.”21

  With carte blanche from London to combat Virginia’s rebellion, Royal Governor Lord Dunmore ordered marines to seize Norfolk, Virginia’s largest town. With sentries posted at every corner, he proclaimed martial law and offered residents a choice of swearing allegiance to the king or losing their homes and properties. He ordered all able-bodied men to report for duty in the British military or risk forfeiting their properties and possibly their lives as deserters. He offered all slaves, indentured servants, and criminals their freedom if they turned on their masters and joined the British army. “I hope it will oblige the rebels to disperse to take care of their properties,” Dunmore gloated.

  Virginia’s militia commander turned to Richard Henry Lee, who, in turn, appealed to Washington, asking, “what number and what strength of armed vessels could possibly be procured from the ports where you are to be in Delaware Bay… by the middle or last of December. Two or three vessels of tolerable force… may effect a stroke or two of great consequence. We have 4,000 weight of powder, and a very considerable quantity of Oznaburgs [army coats made of a heavy linen fabric] arrived in Virginia from Statia* for the use of our little army… of about 2,000 men now at Williamsburg and Hampton.”22

  After lengthy strategy discussions, 1,200 Virginia militiamen marched out of Williamsburg to repel the British landing at Norfolk. Before attacking, however, the Virginia commander sent one of his servants into the British camp pretending to be a runaway with information that the Virginia troop strength was far smaller than it actually was. On that intelligence the British charged into battle with only 200 regulars and 300 blacks and Tories. The result was a slaughter that left even the most battle-hardened frontiersmen retching at the blood bath. Lord Dunmore and the survivors fled to the safety of British frigates, with Dunmore plotting swift revenge.

  In mid-November Arthur Lee, now spying for America, sent a coded message to Richard Henry, who informed George Washington but took care not to reveal Arthur’s identity in case the message was intercepted. “’Tis from a well-informed, sensible friend and may be relied on,” Lee wrote to Washington, confirming “the fixed determination of the King and Court to leave undone nothing they can do to compel obedience in America.”23

  Washington replied. Citing his lack of “armed vessels… of any tolerable force” to defend American shores. “For God’s sake, hurry the signers of money that our wants may be supplied.”24

  Richard Henry wrote to Arthur, urging him to step up efforts to find financial and military aid from friendly European nations. Vergennes and French king Louis had examined Beaumarchais’s La paix ou la guerre by then but feared that French intervention might provoke Britain to send an army across the English Channel and attack France. France had yet to recover from the Seven Years’ War and could not withstand a direct assault on her homeland. Vergennes nonetheless sought to ascertain the strength and determination of the American rebels to see whether the surreptitious aid to the Americans Beaumarchais proposed might weaken Britain enough for France to win a future confrontation. He sent the French army’s most accomplished intelligence officer to America to find out.

  Disguised as a French businessman, Achard de Bonvouloir reached Philadelphia just before Christmas 1775 to meet with members of Congress. Clinging carefully to his disguise as a merchant, Bonvouloir told Richard Henry and other members of the Congressional Committee of Secret Correspondence that he personally could promise no French military aid but that he understood the French court to be “well-disposed” toward the Americans. Indeed, he said he saw “no obstacles” to American merchants buying arms and other supplies from French merchants in exchange for produce—tobacco, rice, and the like.

  By then so many secret messages were floating back and forth across the ocean that Richard Henry urged Congress to limit the number of members on the committee of secret correspondence. “The Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets,” Benjamin Franklin agreed. Congress agreed to reduce committee membership to five. Besides Lee, they included the powerful Pennsylvania delegate Robert Morris, a brilliant merchant-banker who speculated in commodities and land with his partner, Thomas Willing.

  From the first, however, Lee suspected Morris of using his seat in Congress to enhance the value of his investments, including western lands he and his partner had bought through the Grand Ohio Company—a rival of Lee’s (and Washington’s) Ohio Land Company. At the time there was nothing illegal or unethical about using a political seat to enhance one’s private fortune—if it did not undermine government interests. It was a common practice.

  On January 1, 1776, as Bonvouloir set sail for France to report to Vergennes, Lord Dunmore ordered his ships to fire on the Norfolk waterfront while marines landed and set the town ablaze. The conflagration left 6,000 people homeless in the dead of winter—some of them loyal Tories. With Dunmore’s ships patrolling the coast, every other town along Virginia’s shoreline feared the same fate. “Lord Dunmore… committed every outrage at Norfolk,” Richard Henry fumed as he sent a report of the action to Washington.

  Washington, however, faced problems of his own. “The money… came seasonably but not in quantum sufficit,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee regarding funds for the troops. “Our demands at this time being peculiarly great for pay and advance for the troops—pay for their arms, blanketing, etc.; independent of the demands of the commissary and quartermaster general.”25

  Adding to Washington’s money problems was the nuisance of having to pay postage for letters to and from Congress carried by the continental post. Several states displayed their independence by charging out-of-state mail carriers to cross their borders and requiring that all
mail be transferred to and handled by local mail carriers within their borders. It was America’s first bureaucratic nightmare.

  “When will the express be established between Philadelphia and this post?” Washington cried out in despair.26

  Washington went on to tell Richard Henry that Lord Dunmore’s letters to General Howe “… which fell into my hands… will let you pretty fully into his diabolical schemes. If, my dear sir, that man is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has… nothing less than depriving him of life or liberty will secure peace to Virginia.”27

  Compounding American anti-British anger over Dunmore’s “outrage at Norfolk” was the mid-January appearance of a pamphlet called “Common Sense.” Written by one Thomas Paine, a hitherto unknown Scottish editor/polemicist, it claimed that “the ideas I present here are so new that many people will reject them.” He asked readers to “clear their minds of long-held notions, apply common sense, and adopt the cause of America as the ‘cause of all mankind.’ How we respond to tyranny today will matter for all time,” Paine claimed, adding that the monarchy was not, as it claimed to be, a protector of Americans and that it had brought nothing but misery to its subjects. He called the idea of monarchy “absurd.”

  Why should someone rule over us simply because he is someone else’s child? So evil is monarchy by its very nature that God condemns it in the Bible.… It’s folly to think we should maintain loyalty to a distant tyrant. For us, right here, right now, reconciliation means ruin. America must separate from Britain. Can we win this war? Absolutely.… Let us declare independence. If we delay, it will be that much harder to win.28

  Shortly thereafter Patriot forces scored monumental victories repelling British attempts to land in North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina. As news of the Patriot victories reached Philadelphia, word arrived from Boston that Washington’s chief of artillery Henry Knox had engineered a triumph of equal proportion with an impossible feat: the transport of nearly four dozen cannons through more than 200 miles of deep snows from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to the heights overlooking Boston, where they now menaced British occupying forces with annihilation. Faced with sniper fire on their troops and destruction of their fleet by cannon fire, the British command chose flight. Evacuating the city in March 1776, the British occupiers sailed across Boston Bay into the Atlantic, effectively ceding Massachusetts and most of New England to the Americans.

  “I congratulate you sincerely on the several advantages your troops have lately gained over the enemy,” Richard Henry rejoiced in a letter to Washington. “’Tis amazing with what force and infamous perseverance the devils of despotism… pursue the purpose of enslaving this great continent. They mean to keep their own people in Great Britain quiet and the other powers of Europe still for this campaign by an infinite number of falsehoods… and encourage with hope their deluded people.”29

  In London Arthur Lee—now an accomplished spy with eyes and ears in every sector of the British government—learned details of an imminent British plan to send more troops to America. He described them in a letter, which he slipped into an envelope that he then put into a second envelope and handed to an intermediary. He left the outer envelope blank but told the carrier to deliver it “only to R.H.L. of Virginia, and he will guess from whence it comes.” To hide his own identity and that of Richard Henry Lee if the British intercepted the double package, he addressed the inner envelope and the letter itself to Cadwallader Colden, the Tory lieutenant governor of New York, and signed it with the fictional name John Horsfall. It was a clever ploy that proved successful for a good while. If intercepted, it did not disclose any information to Colden that British officials did not already know. If, however, it got through safely to his brother’s hands, the Patriots would receive valuable intelligence.

  The letter read in part:

  You will be curious to know what are the ministerial intentions and their force for the next campaign: Hessians, 12,000; Brunswickers, Wolkenbutlers, and Waldeckers, 5,000; six regiments under Lord Cornwallis, 3,000; eight more to sail in the spring, 4,000; Highlanders, 2,000; now in America, 8,000.30

  Lee went on to expose their destinations, specifying Virginia as the destination of Lord Cornwallis, who was about to sail from Cork, Ireland. “Upon the whole, the ministry, if everything favors them, may have thirty thousand men in America by the latter end of June.”31

  The letter told “Colden” the English would have “no horse but two light dragoons that are now there.” He appeared to warn Colden that if the Americans had a cavalry well trained for dodging in and out in the woods unpredictably, they would succeed in harassing the British and putting them on the defensive. “It will harass such an army infinitely… cut off their convoys, and if ever they hazard an engagement, it is imagined here that no general on earth can make the campaign decisive.”32

  “Horsfall” wrote that the British ministry had found it impossible to recruit soldiers in England, Ireland, or Scotland to fight the Americans, many of whom were their own relatives—often distant but nonetheless kinsmen. In a separate note to Richard Henry, Arthur told his brother “the intelligence… should be communicated to every part of America,” and Richard Henry Lee did just that, shocking Patriots and Loyalists alike.

  The Lees’ motives were three-fold: first, to expose and reveal to all Americans the British ministry’s military plans and frighten Americans into realizing they faced annihilation if they did not embrace independence and, where possible, enlist to fight the British. Secondly, the Lees hoped to force ordinary Americans—farmers and the like—to prepare themselves for war and its inevitable hardships. And lastly, they wanted to embarrass New York’s Tory governor, his government, and the state’s large numbers of Tories by revealing that they—the Lees and the Patriots—knew every move the British government planned before the Tories knew it: that Patriot friends and spies were everywhere in Britain as well as America.

  By then the French spy Achard de Bonvouloir had returned to Paris and reported to Vergennes. The foreign minister, in turn, sent the king a thoughtful report he called Reflexions—a historic paper assuring the king that the goal of colonial rebels was “no longer a redress of grievances, but a determined effort to cut ties to England.” He warned the king that without foreign aid, the rebels would lose, allowing England to prevent her colonies from trading with other nations “while accumulating all the benefits of exclusive trade with those colonies.” Vergennes called it “imperative” for France to intervene. “England is France’s natural enemy… her cherished, long-standing goal is, if not the destruction of France, at least our emasculation, humiliation, and ruin.”33

  Although George Washington and Richard Henry Lee had no way of knowing it, a nobleman and king in the Palais de Versailles near Paris and a scheming French playwright lurking in a palace antechamber were plotting the fate of the American Revolution and whether the American people were to become a free and independent people.

  Flush with his improbable victory in Boston, George Washington moved his forces to New York to seize control of New York and its huge deep-water harbor. Richard Henry Lee believed the time had come for Americans to declare independence from Britain and wrote to Patrick Henry, Virginia’s unquestioned leader who was all but certain to win election at the imminent state convention to become Virginia’s first governor.

  “Virginia has hitherto taken the lead in great affairs,” Lee wrote, “and many now look to her with anxious expectation, hoping that the spirit, wisdom, and energy of her councils will rouse America… and above all set an example which North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York will most assuredly, in my opinion follow.… Parliament has to every legal intent and purpose dissolved our government and placed us on the high road to anarchy.… This proves the indispensable necessity of our taking up government immediately.”34

  Lee warned Henry that the revolution against Britain could not continue without developing and expanding the nat
ion’s trade, “but no state in Europe will either treat or trade with us so long as we consider ourselves subject to Great Britain. Honor, dignity, and the customs of states forbid them until we take rank as an independent people.… I hope your powers will be fully exerted into securing the peace and happiness of our country by adoption of a wise and free government.”35

  Richard Henry Lee had now come to the firm conclusion:

  It is not choice… but necessity that calls for independence as the only means by which foreign alliance can be obtained and a proper confederation by which internal peace and union may be secured.36

  Although British forces had repelled the American invasion of Canada, North Carolina’s Patriot militia had prevented a British landing near Wilmington and crushed a Loyalist militia at Moore’s Creek Bridge. On April 12 the North Carolina Assembly authorized its delegates in Congress to vote for independence from Britain.

  Unfazed by the setbacks, two British fleets set sail from Britain with 40,000 troops—British, Scot, Hessian, and Hanoverian. As Arthur Lee had indicated, one fleet had indeed left for New York, the other fleet for the South—probably Charleston. Richard Henry immediately ordered twenty tons of powder and as many brass field pieces as he could locate sent to Washington in New York.

  On May 15 Patrick Henry responded to Richard Henry Lee’s call for Virginia to declare independence and, backed by the formidable Lee family bloc, won the Virginia Assembly’s unanimous support. A week later Richard Henry reported that thirteen of the new American navy’s “gundolas” had intercepted two British battle ships “coming up the Delaware. After two engagements of three hours each on the two following days, the [British] ships returned down river well bored with large cannon shot.”37

  In Versailles, meanwhile, King Louis XV approved the ingenious scheme devised by playwright Beaumarchais to keep France out of war while helping the Americans and earning the king—and Beaumarchais himself—substantial profits. Using a loan from the king of 1 million livres (about $4 million today) Beaumarchais was to establish a private company with an invented Spanish name to disguise all connections with France. His company was to use the king’s funds to buy surplus French-army arms and ammunition to resell to the Americans in exchange for tobacco, cotton, lumber, and whale oil for resale in French markets. “This exchange,” Vergennes explained to the king, “could be made without the [French] government appearing involved in any way.”38