Richard Henry Lee

Lee was born at Stratford Hall, a Potomac River plantation his great-grandfather had built, the son of a family that had supplied Virginia with councilors and burgesses for three generations. His father died when he was eighteen. At sixteen he had already been sent to Yorkshire, England, to finish his schooling at a grammar school in Wakefield, and after touring the Continent he came home to Virginia in 1753 rather than stay and read law in London. He was a justice of the peace by twenty-five and a burgess by twenty-six. In 1757 he married Anne Aylett; four of their six children survived infancy. By the time Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Lee had already spent a decade learning Virginia's courthouses and county politics.

Lee sat in the First Continental Congress in 1774, helped design the intercolonial committees of correspondence, and in 1784 was elected president of Congress under the Articles of Confederation. In the Senate after 1789 he opposed ratification of the Constitution he thought too centralized, and spent his last public years pressing, as an Antifederalist, for the Bill of Rights the document had left out. The resolution that made him famous, and what it set in motion that June, belongs to BriefHistory. What follows here is the planter behind it.

Lee lived on income his enslaved workers produced, and he rented some of them out to neighboring planters when Chantilly's own fields did not need the labor. He could describe slavery as a wrong against "fellow creatures created as ourselves, and equally entitled to liberty," and in Congress he backed taxes meant to choke off the Atlantic slave trade, a position that also happened to raise the resale value of people he already owned. When the contradiction was put to him directly late in life, he did not deny it. "I do not see how I could in justice to my family," he said, "refuse any advantages that might arise from the selling of them." He also suffered from recurring seizures severe enough that they twice drove him home from Congress to recover.

Jefferson's prose outlasted Lee's motion in the way prose usually outlasts procedure, and Lee settled into the historical record as the man who opened a door someone else is remembered for walking through. Virginia and national memory kept him mainly as an Antifederalist footnote to Madison's Constitution, the losing side of an argument the country later borrowed pieces of anyway when the Bill of Rights passed in 1791. He has schools named for him in three states, a Liberty ship that carried his name through the Second World War, and a speaking part in the 1969 musical "1776." None of it competes with the sentence he stood up to read into the record.

Richard Henry Lee's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Westmoreland Resolves speech
  Signed protest against the Stamp Act at Leedstown, Virginia 1766
• Virginia Committees of Correspondence other
  Helped organize the intercolonial network that coordinated resistance to Britain 1773
• Lee Resolution speech
  The June 7 independence motion — its aftermath is BriefHistory's subject 1776
• Articles of Confederation law
  Signed as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress 1777
• Bill of Rights law
  Pressed for its ratification as an Antifederalist senator 1791

• 1748 aged ~16 Sent to Yorkshire, England, to finish his schooling
• 1753 aged ~21 Returns to Virginia after touring Europe
• December 5, 1757 aged 25 Marries Anne Aylett
• 1758 aged ~26 Elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses
• February 1766 aged 34 Organizes the Westmoreland Resolves against the Stamp Act Signed publicly at Leedstown, Virginia.
• August 1774 aged 42 Elected a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress
• June 7, 1776 aged 44 Introduces the resolution calling the colonies free and independent states BriefHistory covers what followed.
• November 30, 1784 aged 52 Elected president of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation
• October 8, 1792 aged 60 Resigns from the U.S. Senate due to failing health

• George Mason 1725–1792
  Founding-era statesman whose Virginia Declaration of Rights helped inspire the Bill of Rights. allied with
• Patrick Henry 1736–1799
  Revolutionary orator and Virginia leader remembered for mobilizing resistance and opposing centralized federal power. allied with
• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. opposed the constitution of
• Samuel Adams 1722–1803
  Revolutionary organizer who helped mobilize resistance to British rule and build support for independence. organized committees of correspondence with
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. resolution preceded his declaration