First Founding Father

CHAPTER 1

Evolution of a Dynasty

FOR ALMOST ALL OF HIS LIFE THOMAS LEE HAD BELIEVED—AND perpetuated—the family myth that the Lees had landed among the Norman knights at Hastings in 1066. Although his boys were fourth-generation Virginians, the Lee family’s evident importance in English history made it imperative that he send them “home” to England for a proper education—much as his own father had sent him there, and as his father’s father had sent his sons to English schools.

“Not one of the pupils has died here,” headmaster Joseph Randall assured Thomas Lee at England’s Wakefield School in 1744, when Lee was touring England in search of appropriate boarding schools for his younger sons. “This village,” Randall added, “is happily retired from those Temptations which Youth are exposed to in Towns… out of the reach… of vice… and corruptions of the age.”¹

As important as the safety of its boys, Randall pointed out, the curriculum at Wakefield was identical to but less costly than its exalted competitor, Eton College, which Thomas Lee himself had attended as a boy. Although Henry VI had founded Eton in 1440 to educate poor boys without charge, it expected wealthy eighteenth-century parents to pay enormous sums—indeed, exorbitant sums—to educate, house, and feed its students.

That was to be expected for English noblemen grooming their oldest sons to rule the British Empire, but it seemed inappropriate for their younger boys, bound for only the military or the church—with little or no inheritance to take with them. Like members of England’s ruling class, Virginia’s Thomas Lee had routinely enrolled his oldest son and primary heir, Philip Ludwell Lee, in Eton several years earlier, but his next in line, Richard Henry Lee and his younger brother Thomas, would have to make do with a somewhat less costly education.

Under the universal rule of primo geniture, Thomas Lee would bequeath the vast Lee empire in America to his oldest son, leaving only scattered tracts in the wilderness to Richard Henry Lee and his four other younger sons. With the primary estate that Philip Ludwell Lee would inherit came a seat on Virginia’s ruling council of state, with powers second only to the royal governor. Richard Henry Lee and the younger boys would not share such powers and would need no academic or social credentials from Eton College to work their small plantations in the Virginia wilderness.

But the Lees, in fact, owned no armor and, although Thomas Lee would never admit it even to himself, neither he nor his forebears were high born. Their family name had metamorphosed over generations from de Lega—old French for “of the law” (perhaps a sheriff or notary by trade)—then de Le’, Leigh, and finally Lee. Subsequent generations were largely tradesmen: some peddled clothes, but one was a wine merchant who accumulated small royal land grants in America—all but worthless at the time—as token payments by the crown for his grapes.

Those grants, however, thrust the Lees into the landed gentry, and when Virginia settlers learned to grow tobacco and feed the sudden British craze for the weed, the value of Lee holdings soared—warranting a coat of arms. Described in heraldic terms as “fesse chequy and ten billets,”^* it carried the title “Gentleman”—a rank above “Goodman,” or landowner who obtained his holdings from a king’s vassal rather than the king himself.

In 1640 Richard Henry Lee’s great-grandfather Richard took advantage of his rank by sailing across what Britons called “The Virginia Sea”^* to claim his land grants and become the first Richard Lee in the New World.

Before sailing, he bought enough slaves and indentured servants to acquire “headrights” to a thousand acres in York County, Virginia. Conceived earlier in the seventeenth century to ease labor shortages on Virginia’s tobacco fields, a landowner could obtain rights to an additional fifty acres from the Virginia Company of London for each person—each “head”—he brought to America to work the land. British taste for tobacco seemed limitless at the time, and headrights let Virginia plantation owners expand their properties and tobacco production by buying slaves or paying the passage of indentured white workers to come to America in exchange for a fixed number of years (usually five) of involuntary servitude on the buyer’s plantation. The impending outbreak of an English civil war made it a good time to leave.

With Virginia’s population barely 10,000 in the mid-seventeenth century, the 1,000 acres owned by Richard Henry Lee’s great-grandfather thrust him among Virginia’s largest property owners—and onto the governor’s Council of State, an oligarchy of property owners who ruled the colony. By 1653 Richard Lee had acquired enough headrights to claim 15,000 acres of tobacco land along the Virginia coast—including the site of present-day Mount Vernon.

Far from the Garden of Eden they had envisioned when they left England, the first Richard Lee and his family in America lived in an ugly collection of primitive log cabins north of the York River. Poisonous serpents outnumbered apple trees, and swarms of mosquitoes and other injurious insects harassed settlers day and night. Although the Lees lived within riding distance of the colonial capital at Jamestown, Powhatan Indians called the land theirs and burned Lee’s settlement to the ground three times in the years after his arrival, slaughtering dozens of slaves and servants. Lee himself survived each assault and kept rebuilding and expanding his empire.

Before the first Richard Lee died in 1664 (of natural causes), he sired ten children, including a second Richard Lee, who sailed to England to attend Eton as his father had done, then returned to America to rule over and expand the Lee family holdings. By then they included about seven dozen slaves, herds of cattle and sheep, parts of two shipping companies, and an interest in a tobacco trading company in London. In modern terms the Lee plantation was an “integrated” enterprise that combined growing, harvesting, shipping, and trading tobacco, then the most lucrative crop in the British Empire. Like his father, the second Richard Lee in America assumed political offices, privileges, and powers that came with his lands.

Although the second Richard Lee was born in Virginia, he—like other colonial “aristocrats”—called England “home” and remained English, heart and soul, a bulwark of the royal governor’s ruling oligarchy. When, therefore, a group of shabby, small-property owners from the frontier demanded government protection against Indian raids, the governor—with the support of Lee and other powerful plantation owners—refused. None was willing to disrupt the profitable trade they had established with friendly Indians who gladly exchanged skins and furs for rum.

Led by planter Nathaniel Bacon, the frontiersmen took matters into their own hands and formed a militia that marched to the Roanoke River and slaughtered Susquehannock Indians, whom they deemed responsible for the attacks. Declared a traitor by Governor Sir William Berkeley, Bacon responded by leading his men into Jamestown, setting the town ablaze, burning the governor’s home to the ground, and taking Richard Lee prisoner.

Bacon died a month later, but Berkeley ordered men from a British naval squadron to crush the rebellion, freeing Richard Lee, hanging twenty-three insurgents, and seizing their properties. After British king Charles II learned of the rebellion, he recalled Berkeley to England, allegedly saying, “As I live, the old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.”² With that, the king calmed Virginia tempers with tax reductions and stepped up defenses against Indian incursions.

When the second Richard Lee died, his oldest son—the third Richard Lee—was still living in England, with no inclination to leave for the Virginia wilds. He never got the chance, dying a year later at thirty-nine without male heirs and leaving the Lee empire in America to his brother Thomas Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s father.

Thomas married the wealthy American heiress Hannah Ludwell, whose dowry helped expand Lee-family holdings in Virginia to more than 50,000 acres. On January 29, 1729, however, raiders broke into their home as the Lees slept, stole their silver and other valuables, then set fire to the house, barns, and outbuildings. One servant died in the blaze, but Thomas and Hannah swept up their young son, Philip Ludwell, and daughter, Hannah, and leaped out a second-floor window to the ground. Pregnant with her third child, Hannah survived the fall but miscarried. The raiders escaped and were never found or identified.

The Lees moved north to higher ground on Virginia’s Northern Neck Peninsula and built a fortress-like home on the cliffs overlooking the Potomac River. Named Stratford Hall—the name of the first Richard Lee’s home in Britain—the new Lee manor and its austere exterior housed a palatial interior, where Hannah gave birth to six more Lees: Thomas, Richard Henry, Francis Lightfoot, Alice, William, and Arthur.

All but adjacent to Stratford Hall, Thomas Lee built a separate two-story brick schoolhouse—in effect, a small boarding school—and hired a well-educated Scottish clergymen to teach his boys reading, writing, literature, science, Latin, proper behavior, morality, religion, Bible, and catechism. Like other plantation owners, Thomas Lee had little time for “fathering” his boys. Supervision of his agricultural enterprise kept him busy most of the year, and obligations in the colonial legislature—the House of Burgesses—and the executive Council of State in Williamsburg occupied the rest of his time.

Unlike New England, where most villages boasted a church with a minister who taught local children on weekdays, almost nothing but plantations blanketed the South; the road out of one plantation led only to the road into the next. Slaves usually raised the master’s boys until they were five, when a tutor took charge of their upbringing and education until they were twelve and old enough to sail to England and attend boarding schools such as Eton or Wakefield.^*

Richard Henry Lee and his brothers slept in a dormitory on the second floor of the Stratford Hall schoolhouse, adjacent to the tutor’s private quarters. More than just an instructor, their tutor served as a surrogate parent, ministering to the boys on Sundays, escorting them to social and sporting events, and teaching them a variety of social and recreational skills ranging from dancing to horsemanship. The tutor roused the boys at seven each morning for an hour of lessons before breakfast and morning chores. Lessons resumed at nine and, except for an hour for dinner, continued until five. In the hour of free play that followed, Richard Henry Lee—far more than his older brother Philip—embraced a leadership role that earned him the lifelong devotion of three of his younger brothers, Francis Lightfoot, William, and Arthur.

After the personal and financial disaster Thomas Lee had suffered with the loss of his first home, he decided to strengthen Virginia against Indian raids. All but seizing command of Virginia’s government from a timid royal governor, Lee organized a peace conference with leaders of the Six Nation (Indian) Confederacy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in early summer 1744. Plying them with wampum, whiskey, rum, and rhetoric, Lee convinced Indian leaders to cede much of western Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the lands east of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the British. Language differences, however, left Thomas Lee convinced he had restored British control over territory Britain had claimed in 1609 that “extended to the South Sea” (Pacific Ocean)—or so he wrote to the king.

The king expressed his gratitude by granting Thomas Lee 500,000 acres in the Ohio Valley, with which Lee and a group of friends, including George Washington and his brothers, formed the Ohio Land Company, with plans to sell land to would-be settlers in the ensuing decades.

By then Thomas Lee had expanded his property adjacent to Stratford Hall from its original 1,500 acres to about 4,000 acres, with vineyards, orchards, tobacco fields, and fields of grain stretching to the horizon. And at its core stood the magnificent manor, Stratford Hall, atop a bluff overlooking the Potomac River, on Virginia’s Northern Neck, the northernmost of three giant peninsulas that reached eastward into Chesapeake Bay (see map, here). Below, on river’s edge beneath Stratford Hall, stood a mill, a warehouse, a landing for ocean-going transports, a ship’s store, and a fully equipped shipyard to build, repair, and service ships. Scattered about the property was housing for as many as one hundred slaves, servants, and workers, including weavers, carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, shipwrights, millers, herdsmen, weavers, tailors, shoemakers, and other craftsmen. In effect, Thomas Lee—Richard Henry Lee’s father—had transformed a corner of Virginia into a thriving, self-sufficient, English waterfront community, which he intended bequeathing to his oldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee. With Philip already studying law in London, Thomas Lee went to England to see about educating his other sons and sought to enroll Richard Henry Lee in Wakefield School.

“A young nobleman or gentleman may have a room to himself and eat at a private table with the [Randall] family,” Wakefield headmaster Randall assured Thomas Lee. An additional £35 a year (just under $5,000 in current dollars) would assure him “the best masters” to teach him the basic curriculum, along with “natural philosophy [physics], fortification and gunnery, logic, dancing, fencing, music, and drawing.

“It must be observed,” Randall added, “that washing is not included in the board. The usual price is fourteen shillings (about $135 today) a year… for which they have three shirts a week. Each pupil finds his own sheets alternately with his bedfellow.”³

Randall’s presentation evidently convinced Thomas Lee, who enrolled thirteen-year-old Richard Henry. The boy was still there four years later in 1750 when both his parents died—his mother, Hannah, in January, his father, Thomas, in November. As expected, Thomas Lee left the bulk of his wealth to his oldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee, twenty-three by then and still at the Inner Temple in London studying law. As primary heir and executor of his father’s estate, he immediately returned to Virginia.

Richard Henry Lee was approaching nineteen and in his last year at Wakefield. With no responsibilities in the settlement of his father’s estate and far too late to attend the burial, he chose to finish his studies at Wakefield, then set off to see the Western world. He left for the continent after graduating and spent the next several years touring Europe—including France and especially Paris, which had evolved into a center of arts and letters. “Noblemen, judges, and men of finance perfected the art of conversation with philosophers, artists, and men of letters” in the many salons. The rarity of a visit by so polished and cultured an American as Richard Henry Lee made him a popular figure and left him with little inclination to return to the isolated Virginia hilltop of his childhood.⁴

Besides the family fortune, however, his older brother Philip Ludwell Lee had inherited the task of caring for his six minor siblings and managing their inheritances until they each reached the age of majority. Richard Henry had no choice but return to claim his share of the family wealth.

Thomas Lee had left his minor children with handsome, if not extravagant, assets in either land or money. He bequeathed his sons Thomas, Richard Henry, and Francis Lightfoot several hundred acres each—in Stafford County, Prince William County, and Loudon County, respectively. Each property came with thirty to fifty slaves along with more than adequate sums of money to build substantial homes. He left his two youngest boys, William, eleven, and Arthur, ten, £1,300 pounds ($175,000) each—enough to live on and even build modest homes when they reached their majority. In the meantime their oldest brother, Philip, was to raise the two “religiously and virtuously and, if necessary, bind them to any profession or trade, so that they may earn their living honestly.”⁵

As sole executor of the estate, Philip Ludwell Lee controlled the bequests of the four minor boys along with bequests of £1,000 each ($136,500 in current dollars) that Thomas left his two daughters as dowries to ensure marriages to husbands of standing. The older daughter, Hannah Lee, was already twenty-one when her father died and married a prosperous planter. His other daughter, Alice, fourteen, would later marry Philadelphia’s renowned physician Dr. William Shippen, the future surgeon general of George Washington’s Continental Army.

Twenty-year-old Richard Henry Lee sailed home to Virginia in 1752. More interested in scholarship than commercial trade or agriculture, he returned to his boyhood home at Stratford Hall, where his brother Philip—still unmarried—welcomed his brother’s companionship, giving him his own apartment along with access to the more than 300 books in the Stratford Hall library. While Philip focused on running the family enterprise, Richard Henry immersed himself in history, political philosophy, political science, and law, absorbing the works of John Locke, Sir William Blackstone, and the Baron de Montesquieu.