Richard Henry Lee was an American statesman. He served a one-year term as the President of the Congress of the Confederation, and was a United States Senator from Virginia from 1789 to 1792.
Career
After his studies, Lee spent a few months in travel, then returned to Virginia, probably in 1752. He did not, it seems, plan a professional career, but he is said to have made a thorough study of the law and his letters reveal an acquaintance with outstanding works in history, government, and politics. Inasmuch as most of his ancestors had sat in the House of Burgesses or the council, or both, it is a natural inference that his aim from the first was a public career.
His public service began in 1757, when he became a justice of the peace in his county, and in 1758 he entered the House of Burgesses. At about this time he established his residence at "Chantilly, " a neighboring estate to "Stratford. " It is related of Lee that in his earlier years in the House of Burgesses he took an inconspicuous, even a hesitant, part, but that once he had broken through the crust of deference to the older leaders he won the admiration of his friends and the respect of his opponents. His part in the activities of the House was one of increasing importance until he had attained a position of influence in its counsels. An aristocrat of the aristocrats, he steered from the beginning a democratic, or, perhaps more accurately, a progressive, course.
One of his first speeches was in support of a measure designed to check the growth of slavery; he had a part, along with Patrick Henry, not yet a member of the House, in the matter of the so-called "Two-penny Act"; he was Henry's chief ally in the noted case of the speakership and the treasury; and he himself pushed the investigation of the treasury, winning thereby political enmities that vexed his course for a good many years. It was, however, his opposition to the Parliamentary plan of March 1764, to tax the colonies, that placed him at once in the forefront of the defenders of colonial rights. Immediately upon learning of the purpose of Parliament he declared, in a letter written to a friend in England (May 31, 1764), that "the free possession of property, the right to be governed by laws made by our representatives, and the illegality of taxation without consent" were "essential principles of the British constitution, " and that colonial Britons had forfeited none of their rights and privileges, none of "the blessings of that free government of which they were members" (The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, I, 5-6).
When the House of Burgesses registered a protest against the proposed stamp duties, Lee was of the committee appointed on November 14 to draw up an address to the King, a memorial to the Lords, and a remonstrance to the Commons, and he has been credited with the authorship of the first two of these papers. Although he was not present in the House of Burgesses when, in May 1765, Patrick Henry startled that assembly with his famous resolutions, he and Henry were in essential unison, and he shortly afterward reiterated his views in a published address to the people of Virginia. He is said to have led a "mob of gentlemen" to confront the appointed collector of stamps and compel him to promise not to serve in his official capacity. Then, in February 1766, he drew the citizens of his own county into an "association" binding themselves to import no British goods until the Stamp Act should be repealed. (Virginia Historical Register, January 1849. )
This Westmoreland Association is chiefly of importance for the reason that it was the first of the numerous boycotting measures designed to bring the British government to repentance, as the Continental Association, itself promoted by Lee, was the most ambitious. It presently developed that, in November 1764, just when the House of Burgesses was uttering its protest, Lee had himself applied for appointment as collector. He was accordingly charged with inconsistency and rebuked unmercifully in the Virginia Gazette; but he explained that, after "reflecting seriously, " he had withdrawn his application, and he pointed to his zealous works as proof of his thorough conversion. Against the Townshend Acts he set his face even more firmly than he had done against the Stamp Act. They were "arbitrary, unjust, and destructive of that mutual beneficial connection which every good subject would wish to see preserved" (Letters, I, 27). The suspension of the legislature of New York, he wrote in March 1768, "hangs like a flaming sword over our heads and requires by all means to be removed". A few months later he was urging, as a necessary means of uniting their counsels, that the several colonies set up committees for intercolonial correspondence (letter to Dickinson, July 25, 1768), an idea that was not however brought to fruition until 1773.
During the relatively quiet period between 1768 and 1773 he engaged in shipping tobacco to his brother William in London. Yet he by no means forsook the political field, although he did, in the summer of 1770, meditate withdrawing from the popular assembly and seeking appointment as president of the council, which offered, he thought, the greater "means of doing good. " Just what gave rise to this impulse it is not easy to determine. In May 1765 Patrick Henry had swept like a blazing comet across the political skies and made himself a popular idol, yet Lee was by no means eclipsed. As Henry had become the Demosthenes of Virginia, so Lee became the Cicero. He and Henry became congenial coworkers. Likewise, when Jefferson, a new luminary of liberalism, came to the House of Burgesses in 1769, Lee, Henry, and Jefferson, with a few other forward-looking men, pooled their ideas and their efforts. It was they who, in March 1773, originated the plan for intercolonial committees of correspondence, a measure which Lee declared ought to have been fixed upon from the beginning of the dispute "as leading to that union, and perfect understanding of each other, on which the political salvation of America so eminently depends" (Letters, I, 84); and it was the same group who, in May 1774, "cooked up, " as Jefferson expressed it, a resolution to make the day when the port of Boston was to be closed a day of "Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer. "
Lee himself had prepared a set of resolutions which included a declaration that the closing of the port of Boston was a "most violent and dangerous attempt to destroy the constitutional liberty and rights of all British America" (Letters, I, p. 116), and, what is of especial significance, a call for a general congress of the colonies to adopt means for securing these rights. A dissolution of the Assembly, in consequence of the fast-day resolution, prevented Lee from offering these propositions, but it did not prevent the Burgesses from gathering afterward and taking measures to the same end, including the summoning of a convention. Lee was of opinion that the action of the Burgesses was "much too feeble an opposition" to the "dangerous and alarming" despotism that was threatening. Nevertheless the past nine years had worked a great change in the minds of those elder statesmen who had long dominated the course of Virginia politics. They were at last being drawn from their long-time moorings in the quiet channels of conservatism and conciliation out into the current of revolution where Lee, Henry, and Jefferson were plying their radical oars. Meanwhile, before the Virginia convention had assembled and voiced its demand for a general congress, Massachusetts had already sent forth the call, naming Philadelphia, September first, as the place and time. Of Virginia's seven delegates to the Congress, Peyton Randolph, speaker of the House of Burgesses and a conservative, was named first and Richard Henry Lee second. At Philadelphia Lee met with kindred spirits. John Adams pronounced him "a masterly man, " and between Lee and Samuel Adams there began a lifelong friendship. As for remedies, Lee still believed that a non-importation, an enlarged form of his Westmoreland Association, would speedily and effectually accomplish the purpose, and in due time he moved it. The Continental Association, the first real step toward a federal union, was the result. The address to the King, as adopted by Congress, Lee thought was lacking in spirit.
In the Congress of 1775 Lee was active on many of the most important committees and was among the foremost proponents of strong measures. Lord North's conciliation offers, he warned, were insidious. How early he espoused the idea of independence cannot definitely be said, but in November 1775, he agreed with John Adams that it was time the colonies were adopting their own governments, and it was upon his suggestion that Adams drew up his Thoughts on Government (1776). Lee probably experienced no sudden change of heart, but it may have been Thomas Paine's influence that led him to join with George Wythe, in March 1776, in proposing a resolution that the King, instead of the ministry, was the "Author of our Miseries, " a doctrine for which Congress was not quite ready. When presently he is discovered openly advocating independence, it is not independence as an end to be attained for its own sake that he emphasized, but rather as a necessary prerequisite to a foreign alliance. Although in this view Lee by no means stood alone, it was in no small measure in consequence of Lee's urgence that the Virginia convention, on May 15, adopted its resolutions in behalf of independence, foreign alliances, and a confederation, and it was altogether appropriate that he should be chosen to move those resolutions in Congress. By his pen they were redrawn in that compact form in which they appear in the journals of Congress (June 7, 1776).
With the presentation of the resolutions Lee's part in the Declaration of Independence, except for his subsequent signature to the finished document, was essentially ended. He had already planned to return to Virginia to take part in the formation of the new state government, and for that purpose he left Philadelphia June 13 (not on June 11, as has frequently been stated; Letters, I, 199, 201, 203). Accordingly he was not placed upon any one of the three committees to which the resolutions gave rise. Nevertheless it is to the confederation and foreign relations that the most significant phases of his career in Congress during the next two or three years appertain.
In the formation of the Articles of Confederation he appears to have had but a minor part, yet no man in Congress was more concerned for the consummation of "this great bond of union" than he. When it became evident that no confederation was possible until Virginia had surrendered her claims to western lands he advocated the sacrifice and labored to that end. His connection with the problem of foreign relations became very soon anything but a happy one. Naturally, he became deeply involved in the controversy between his brother Arthur, and Silas Deane, and his vehement championship of his brother was largely instrumental in dividing Congress into two hostile factions and giving an unpleasant cast to the foreign relations of the United States for two years or more. During these years he added little to his reputation as a statesman, while his earlier buoyant hopes for the speedy triumph of the right, whether it were national or personal, were sadly dimmed. Nevertheless he continued for some time to labor zealously at his congressional tasks and in his country's cause. In May 1779, worn down in body and in spirit, he resigned his seat in Congress.
In 1780 he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where, strangely enough, he allied himself with the conservative forces. In 1784 he was again elected as a delegate to Congress, and by that body was chosen as its president for a year. Although handicapped by ill health and taxed by the business and the ceremonies of his office, the honor and distinction appear to have afforded him no small gratification. Congress was at this time in a rather unstable situation. A movement essentially aimed at its dissolution had narrowly failed, and the wiser patriots, concerned for the salvation of the union, were seeking to strengthen the hands of Congress as an imperative necessity. Lee was alive to the fact that the Articles of Confederation were seriously defective, but he feared to give Congress the power of "both purse and sword. "
He was chosen as one of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention but declined on the ground that it was inconsistent that members of Congress should pass judgment in New York on their opinions in Philadelphia (Letters, II, 434). He did, however, while the Convention was sitting, have an important share in the creation of another great instrument of government, the Northwest Ordinance. When the Constitution was laid before Congress Lee led the opposition to it, and he was one of its most vigorous critics throughout the campaign for its adoption. His opposition was on several grounds, chief among them, that the Convention, called only to amend the Articles of Confederation, had exceeded its powers; that the Constitution lacked a bill of rights; that it was a "consolidated, " rather than a federal, government, and therefore opened the way to despotism; and that the lower house was not sufficiently democratic. His arguments were set forth in a series of "Letters of the Federal Farmer" which became a sort of textbook for the opposition. His insistence was upon amendments before rather than after adoption. Through the instrumentality of his friend Patrick Henry, also an opponent of the Constitution, Lee was chosen one of Virginia's senators in the new government, and his chief concern in the Senate was to bring to fruition the amendments which he had advocated. Some of his propositions would probably now be regarded as chimerical, but the chief of them were embodied in the first ten amendments, and the verdict of time appears to have sustained their wisdom. In October 1792, broken in health, he resigned his senatorial seat and retired to "Chantilly, " where he lingered a little more than two years.