Stratford Hall and Education Abroad
Arthur Lee was the first Lee born at the newly built Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County on December 20, 1740, and the last born of his parents Thomas Lee and Hannah Harrison Ludwell Lee’s eight surviving children. Hannah Lee was an heiress who hailed from one of the most prominent families in Virginia, bringing wealth and social prestige to the Lee family. Arthur Lee’s siblings included Philip Ludwell Lee, a member of the governor’s Council; two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee; Thomas Ludwell Lee, a member of the Convention of 1776; and Hannah Lee Corbin, an early advocate of women’s rights.
Thomas Lee and Hannah Lee died in 1750, leaving nine-year-old Arthur in the care of his domineering brother and Stratford heir, Philip Ludwell Lee. Philip Lee’s graceless handling of their father’s estate soon embittered his brothers and sisters against him. In 1754 Arthur joined his underage siblings in a successful petition to have their cousin, Henry Lee II, replace Philip as their legal guardian. The siblings also filed an ill-fated chancery suit against Philip Lee, seeking immediate distribution of their father’s legacies. As the youngest of six sons, Arthur inherited no land, and his cash legacy of £1,000 was still unpaid when Philip Lee died in 1775. Thomas Lee’s will provided for Arthur to be educated out of his estate and here at least Philip Lee fulfilled his obligation.
In 1753, Arthur Lee entered Eton College to complete the educational regimen for gentlemen that had begun under a tutor at Stratford. Philip Lee pressed Arthur Lee into the study of medicine, and literary giant Dr. Samuel Johnson steered the Virginian to the prestigious University of Edinburgh, where medical degrees were more efficiently obtained than in England—sometimes too efficiently. When medical faculty conferred degrees on absentee candidates for a cash premium, an outraged Lee organized a successful student walkout.
At Edinburgh, he developed a lifelong interest in scientific agriculture and was awarded the first annual gold medal for promoting the study of botany by His Majesty’s Botanist, Dr. John Hope. Arthur’s university thesis, which detailed his pharmacological trials of the anti-malarial Cinchona bark (quinine), attracted the attention of Benjamin Franklin in London. Alert to rising American talent abroad, Franklin sponsored Lee for membership in the Royal Society. In advance of his return to Virginia, which had neither a medical school nor a licensing body, Lee, hoping to elevate the standard of medical practice in the colony, unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Burgesses to appoint county courts to manage physician licensing.
An Ambivalent Homecoming
In March 1765 Lee expressed “dread” at the prospect of returning to Virginia, confiding to his brother and mentor Richard Henry Lee that his “extreme aversion to slavery” made the homecoming unpalatable. In reply, and with the unpopular Stamp Act roiling the colonies, Richard Henry Lee encouraged Arthur Lee to recognize his duty to his country and to return in defense of its liberty. Of course, his own family and that same country deprived enslaved Africans and African Americans of their liberty. As the stalemate over the Stamp Act dragged into January 1766, Lee listened from the public gallery of Parliament to future Prime Minister William Pitt praising American resistance. In Virginia, his brothers Thomas Ludwell Lee, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, and William Lee organized militant resistance to its enforcement at Leedstown on February 27, 1766. Arthur Lee set sail for Virginia in April, arriving on the heels of the Stamp Act repeal in March. A July notice in the Virginia Gazette announced the intent of Dr. Arthur Lee to settle in Williamsburg. Lee’s academic success and formative experiences in London’s high society left him ill-suited to the comparatively drowsy atmosphere of the colonial capital. In short order, Lee was heartsick for metropolitan London and found neither joy nor consolation in the practice of medicine.
Lee published an antislavery essay on March 19, 1767, in Rind’s Virginia Gazette under the pseudonym Philanthropos or “lover of humankind.” Addressed to the House of Burgesses and composed in Williamsburg, where nearly half of the population was enslaved, the essay pronounced slavery “a violation of Justice and Religion” and observed that “there is not in all history, an instance in which every right of men is more flagrantly violated.”
When newspapers declined to publish the controversial second installment of his essay, and as new forms of British taxation stirred unrest, Lee ceded the topic to “more able Heads.” His views, however, continued to circulate thanks to multiple reprints by antislavery activist Anthony Benezet, through whom the essay reached Robert Pleasants, Granville Sharp, and other antislavery activists.
Lee’s mood was lifted by an opportunity to vindicate his brother Richard Henry Lee in the press against charges of hypocrisy during the Stamp Act crisis. Lee had an aptitude for editorial, though in this early phase his writing was as pretentious as it was pointed. His literary defense of his brother culminated in early 1767 in a famously abortive duel with James Mercer and a subsequent coffeehouse brawl with Mercer that left Lee physically battered and convalescing in his Williamsburg rental.
As Lee recovered, Parliament enacted a series of laws designed to generate revenue from British imports and to fund a loyal administrative apparatus in the colonies. The Townshend Acts (1767) prompted immediate dissent and provoked Lee to quit medical practice for Patriot politics. Colonial grievances were soberly voiced in John Dickinson’s pseudonymous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (December 1767 to April 1768), which Lee read avidly. He resolved “to aid their operation in alarming and informing my countrymen.” He turned again to editorial, publishing from February to April 1768 a series of ten spirited letters under the pseudonym “Monitor” in Rind’s Virginia Gazette. In addition to their forceful plea for unity, appeal to grassroots activism, and insistence on an American bill of rights, the Monitor letters proposed commercial resistance to the Townshend Acts through the formation of associations pledged to “buying American.” Undoubtedly influenced by Monitor VIII, members of the dissolved House of Burgesses met at Raleigh Tavern on May 17, 1769, to approve a nonimportation association drafted by George Mason and George Washington. Signatories to the association quaffed a series of patriotic toasts, the last of which was raised to the Farmer and the Monitor.
By June 1768 Lee had traded Williamsburg for Philadelphia, where he collaborated with Dickinson in rallying city residents to contest British overreach by petition and commercial boycotts. In late summer 1768, having weathered just over two years of provincial life, Lee sailed for London, traveling in the company of his brother William Lee, a merchant who would tend to Lee family interests abroad while making a name for himself in metropolitan politics and the tobacco trade. In the meantime, Arthur Lee proposed to collect and share political intelligence concerning the intrigues of the British ministry with American Patriots back home so that they might “harmonize in one system of opposition.” The erstwhile doctor resolved to become the Monitor in truth.
The London Years
Lee leapt into the trenches of opposition politics soon after setting foot in the British capital. He renewed his rapport with Whig opposition leader Lord Shelburne and offered his energies and abilities to Massachusetts colonial agent Dennys DeBerdt. Far more consequential was Lee’s decision to befriend opposition journalist, civil rights activist, and Whig radical John Wilkes, who was then serving twenty-two months for seditious libel in the King’s Bench Prison. Wilkes’ political dissidence and staggering popular support persuaded Lee to make common cause with him and to yoke the grievances of Wilkes’ broad base, from coal-heavers and weavers to radicals keen on parliamentary reforms, to the mounting grievances of American Patriots. An early measure of Lee’s success is the Middlesex Petition of May 24, 1769, which included an article comparing Parliament’s refusal to seat the duly elected Wilkes as MP for Middlesex to the unconstitutional use of discretionary power in American colonial policy. In February 1769, boosters of the incarcerated Wilkes founded the Society for Supporters of the Bill of Rights, the purpose of which was to advance Wilkes’ political prospects by relieving him of debt, but which soon became a caucus of popular opposition to government authoritarianism and overreach.
Lee’s appointment as secretary of the Society for Supporters of the Bill of Rights in April 1771 only confirmed his role as its chief ideologue and spokesman. Under Lee’s influence, the society’s candidates pledged to oppose colonial policies from 1763 on that violated the constitutional principle of no taxation without representation. In 1773, Lee mobilized the society to help secure the appointment of American Patriots Stephen Sayre and William Lee, his brother, as co-sheriffs of London. At the same time, Lee facilitated intercolonial communication and concord back home, bringing together his influential brothers and his political allies. In December 1770, he encouraged one such ally, Samuel Adams, “to establish a correspondence between the leading men of the provinces, that you might harmonize in moving any measure in the different Assemblies, for the general good.”
With his short-lived medical career behind him, Lee enrolled to study law at Lincoln’s Inn in March 1770, completed his studies at the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar on May 5, 1775, a few weeks after the “shot heard round the world.” When news of Lexington and Concord arrived via the schooner Quero, Lee, who had been deputy colony agent for Massachusetts since October 1770 and senior colony agent since March 1775, broke the news of civil war in the British press on May 29, 1775. In the absence of an official British report on the incident, which did not arrive until June 10, Lee had almost two weeks to hammer the provocations of the government in the papers. When Lord Dartmouth challenged Patriot claims from Massachusetts, Lee made eyewitness affidavits available for public inspection at the home of the Lord Mayor of London John Wilkes.
Since arriving in London, Arthur had been the leading American voice for the Patriot cause among English radicals and the Whig opposition. Under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms—“Monitor,” “Memento,” “A Bostonian,” “Raleigh,” “Junius Americanus,” and others—he kept American grievances in the frame for the literate British public. As a penman, or activist writer, Lee was prolific. The historian A. R. Riggs reckoned that between 1768 and 1776, Lee published a minimum of 170 essays, 9 pamphlets (one of which went through four editions), 17 petitions, and about 50 letters placed anonymously in colonial papers. This doesn’t include the torrent of political intelligence pouring into his correspondence networks. His impact was such that by late summer 1775, Tory MP Charles Gray received this exasperated complaint: “They might act as they pleased in America if we were united at home, but the American Party with Arthur Lee as a writer, have got possession of the newspapers … He is probably the chief Incendiary of Virginia, and he is on this side the Atlantick.”
The Continental Congress soon recognized a need for foreign intelligence and alliance, and for that purpose created the Committee of Secret Correspondence on November 29, 1775. Its first recruit was Lee, whom John Adams later remembered, “communicated, the most constant, and certain Intelligence, which was received from any Individual within my knowledge.” At one of many galas hosted by Lord Mayor Wilkes at Mansion House, Lee established a relationship with playwright and political entrepreneur Pierre-Augustin Caron, known as Beaumarchais, through whom Arthur made contact with French Foreign Minister Vergennes, his intermediary for influence with King Louis XVI. Lee’s persistence soon succeeded in persuading France and Spain to provide secretly the first significant financial and military aid to the Patriot cause. By mid-summer 1776, London had turned dangerous for American Patriots, especially spies, and in December Lee accepted a role in the congressional commission seeking a formal commercial and military alliance with the government of Louis XVI.
The Paris Years
On March 20, 1778, commissioners Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee were received openly by Louis XVI as representatives of the United States. By April a French fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Comte d’Estaing sailed from Toulon in support of Continental forces. The American commission had succeeded in concluding a formal alliance despite significant internal discord. Lee confided to his brothers and allies in Congress that he suspected Deane of exploiting public office in service of his private interests, while commissioner Franklin expressed more interest in the softer pleasures of Paris. Franklin dismissed the evidence Lee offered to expose Deane’s war profiteering and the espionage of commission secretary Dr. Edward Bancroft. Recalled by Congress to answer the charges laid against him, Deane was unprepared, and possibly unable, to do so and in retaliation published a baseless attack on Lee in the Pennsylvania Packet of December 5, 1778, claiming that he was a British agent. The rift in the overseas commission magnified the antagonism and policy rift between the radical Lee-Adams alliance in Congress and a minority faction spearheaded by financier Robert Morris. The public discord in its diplomatic mission embarrassed Congress, and though Deane’s defamations of Lee could not withstand examination, the tarnish to his reputation dimmed his political prospects and soured the Lee family on politics.
Home Again
Lee returned as a private citizen to the colonies on August 17, 1780, enjoying the warmth of friends in Boston and the comforts of family with his sister Alice Lee Shippen in Philadelphia. He soon resumed his public service as a justice of the peace and delegate to the Virginia House of Delegates for Prince William County in 1781, delegate to the Confederation Congress for Virginia in 1782, and as a U.S. commissioner negotiating peace treaties and land cessions with the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) and other western nations in the Northwest Territory in 1784. In July 1785, Congress appointed Lee to the Board of Treasury in New York, where he concluded his distinguished public service in 1789.
In 1790 Lee accompanied his nephew Thomas Lee Shippen of Philadelphia on a carriage tour of Virginia from Mount Vernon to Green Spring and sites in between. He finally settled down on an old estate of more than 300 acres in Urbanna, which he named Lansdowne for his old friend, Lord Shelburne, now the Marquess of Lansdowne. He took to farming with the same indefatigable industry and ability he exhibited as a student, doctor, propagandist, lawyer, spy, diplomat, and public servant. Soon Lansdowne was dotted with black locusts, willow, and rose bushes in pursuit of a “wilderness of sweets.” After a brief illness, Lee died at his home on December 12, 1792, and was buried in the garden.
Remembering him almost twenty-seven years later, John Adams wrote: “Arthur Lee, a man on whom I cannot think without emotion; a man too early in the Service of his Country, to avoid making a multiplicity of Enemies; two honest upright faithful and intrepid to be popular, two often obliged by his principles and feelings to oppose Machiavellian intriguers, to avoid the destiny he suffered—This man never had justice done him by his Country—in his Life time—and I fear he never will have by Posterity—his reward cannot be in this World.”
