First Founding Father by Harlow Giles Unger comes out on November 7, 2017
John Adams was more excited than he’d ever been in his life, scribbling a quick note to wife Abigail that July 2, 1776, would become “the most memorable epoch in the history of America…solemnized with pomp and parade…forever more.”
No, he didn’t get the date wrong. He had it right, for it was on July 2--not July 4--that he seconded a resolution--and Congress approved--“that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent States….”
And no, the author of that resolution was not Thomas Jefferson. The tall Virginian who stood in Congress to demand, “Why…do we delay? Why still deliberate?” was Richard Henry Lee. “Let this happy day give birth to an American republic,” he thundered. “Let her arise, not to devastate and to conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace and of law.”
The effects of his rhetoric were magical-- “so rich,” one listener reported, “with such bewitching cadence…you thought him perfect.” And when Congress approved the resolution, banner newspapers headlines hailed the vote, calling Richard Henry Lee Father of American Independence and our First Founding Father.
A scion of one of Virginia’s wealthiest families, Richard Henry Lee, like the sons of many wealthy Virginians, sailed to Britain at nineteen to complete his higher education and returned filled with notions of free government. Joining George Washington and Patrick Henry in Virginia’s state legislature, he risked charges of treason by writing—and putting his name atop--the notorious Westmoreland Resolves, the first formal American protest against British taxation-without-representation.
With the British crackdown that followed, Lee joined Boston’s patriot leader Samuel Adams to establish committees of correspondence in each state to coordinate the pro-independence movement and organize North America’s First Continental Congress. A year later, he again invited execution by the British hangman with his treasonous resolve in Congress for American independence.
In September 1777, when the British seized the American capital of Philadelphia, most members of Congress fled for their homes. Richard Henry Lee, however, rallied twenty members and led them westward to Lancaster, then York, Pennsylvania, and while Washington held the remnants of the army together at Valley Forge, Lee held the remnants of Congress together and established a fledgling American government. Assuming leadership of military, financial, and foreign affairs, Lee ensured Washington’s military victory, while three of his brothers, bound by love of country, reinforced his efforts. Francis Lightfoot Lee served as a firm political ally in Congress, while Arthur and William Lee worked as surrogates in Europe, providing intelligence, obtaining financial aid, and working out secret deals to smuggle arms, ammunition, and materiel to Washington’s army.
John Adams hailed the Lees as a “band of brothers, intrepid and unchangeable…in the defense of their country.”
In 1779, Richard Henry Lee, forty-seven by then, with four fingers blown away in a gun explosion, displayed his heroism by leading his home-county militia in a charge that repelled British regulars attempting to land along Potomac River shores.
After the Revolution, Lee won election to the U.S. Senate in the First Congress, where he led the struggle for enactment of the first ten amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights.
How could Americans forget such a towering figure? The loss of our collective memory began on July 4, 1776, when Congress approved a second Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson expanded Richard Henry Lee’s July 2 resolution and added a beautiful preamble. In addition, Jefferson outlived Lee by 32 years and with no one to challenge him, he wrote an inscription for his gravestone describing himself as sole author of the Declaration of Independence.
Further ensuring America’s loss of memory, Lee’s home stood on an isolated cliff along the Potomac—so far from any town that his widow and two boys abandoned it, and it eventually burned to the ground without a trace. Jefferson’s magnificent home near Charlottesville, Virginia, remains one of the most visited sites in America, while millions glimpse the great statue of Jefferson as they cross the Potomac into our nation’s capital.
Ironically, the Lee family member most Americans remember today is not Richard Henry Lee, who helped found and form our union, but his great nephew Robert E. Lee who fought to shatter it.
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Harlow Giles Unger is the author of First Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee and the Call to Independence (Da Capo Press). His twenty-four books include eleven biographies of America’s Founding Fathers and three histories of the early American republic.