He was a member of the Lee family, a historically influential family in Virginia politics.
Early life and education
Lee was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to Colonel Thomas Lee and Hannah Harrison Ludwell Lee on January 20, 1732. He came from a line of military officers, diplomats, and legislators. His father served on the Governor's council and briefly as an interim governor of Virginia before his death in 1750. Lee spent most of his early life in Stratford, Virginia, at Stratford Hall. Here he was tutored and taught a variety of skills. To develop his political career, his father sent him around to neighboring planters with the intention for Lee to become associated with neighboring men of like prominence. In 1748, at 16, Lee left Virginia for Yorkshire, England, to complete his formal education at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield. Both of his parents died in 1750. In 1753, after touring Europe, he returned to Virginia to help his brothers settle the estate his parents had left behind.[2]
Career
In 1757, Lee was appointed justice of the peace of Westmoreland County. In 1758, he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he met Patrick Henry. Lee remained a "valuable ally of...Henry and Samuel Adams" throughout the American Revolutionary War.[3] An early advocate of independence, Lee became one of the first to create Committees of Correspondence among the many independence-minded Americans in the various colonies. In 1766, almost ten years before the American Revolutionary War, Lee is credited with having authored the Westmoreland Resolution[4] against enforcement of the British Stamp Act 1765, which was publicly signed by prominent landowners who met at Leedstown, Virginia, on February 27, 1766. Among the signers were three brothers and one close cousin of George Washington.
American Revolution
In August 1774, Lee was chosen as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In Lee's Resolution on June 7, 1776, during the Second Continental Congress, Lee put forth the motion to the Continental Congress to declare Independence from Great Britain, which read (in part):
Resolved: That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Lee had returned to Virginia by the time Congress voted on and adopted the Declaration of Independence, but he signed the document when he returned to Congress.
Lee was elected the sixth president of Congress under the Articles of Confederation on November 30, 1784, in the French Arms Tavern, Trenton, New Jersey. Congress convened on January 11, 1785, in the old New York City Hall, with Lee presiding until November 23, 1785. Although he was not paid a salary, his household expenses were covered in the amount of $12,203.13.[5]
Lee abhorred the notion of imposing federal taxes and believed that continuing to borrow foreign money was imprudent. Throughout his term, he maintained that the states should relinquish their claims in the Northwest Territory, enabling the federal government to fund its obligations through land sales. He wrote to friend and colleague Samuel Adams:
I hope we shall shortly finish our plan for disposing of the western Lands to discharge the oppressive public debt created by the war & I think that if this source of revenue be rightly managed, that these republics may soon be discharged from that state of oppression and distress that an indebted people must invariably feel.[6]
Debate began on the expansion of the Land Ordinance of 1784 and Thomas Jefferson's survey method; namely, "hundreds of ten geographical miles square, each mile containing 6086 and 4-10ths of a foot" and "sub-divided into lots of one mile square each, or 850 and 4-10ths of an acre" on April 14.[7] On May 3, 1785, William Grayson of Virginia made a motion, seconded by James Monroe, to change "seven miles square" to "six miles square."
The Land Ordinance of 1785 passed on May 20, 1785,[8] yet the federal government lacked the resources to manage the newly surveyed lands. Not only did Native Americans refuse to relinquish their hold on the platted territory, but much of the remaining land was occupied by squatters. With Congress unable to muster magistrates or troops to enforce the dollar-per-acre title fee, Lee's plan ultimately failed, although the survey system developed under the Land Ordinance of 1785 has endured.[9]
US Senate
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Lee served in the United States Senate in the First and Second Congresses from 1789 to 1792. In 1792 he became the second president pro tempore, but later that year he was obliged to resign due to his failing health, and he retired from public life.[10]
Political offices
Justice of the Peace for Westmoreland County, Virginia (1757)
Lee's mother Hannah Harrison Ludwell died in 1750. On December 5, 1757, he married Anne Aylett, daughter of William Aylett. Anne died on December 12, 1768. The couple had six children, four of whom survived infancy. Lee remarried in June or July 1769 to Anne (Gaskins) Pinckard. The couple had seven children, five of whom survived infancy.
Lee honored his brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee (another signer of the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence), by naming one of his sons after him.
^McGaughy, J. K. Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794). (March 18, 2014). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/ Lee Richard Henry 1732–1794
^Davis, Kenneth C. (2003). Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (1st ed.). New York: HarperCollins. p. 82. ISBN978-0-06-008381-6.
McGaughy, Kent J. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).
Selby, John E. "Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, and the Virginia Constitution of 1776." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84.4 (1976): 387–400. online
Unger, Harlow Giles. First Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee and the Call for Independence (2017) online review
Primary sources
Lee, Richard Henry. The Letters of Richard Henry Lee: 1762–1778 (2 vol 1911–1914) online. also vol 2 online
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