Richard Henry Lee

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams served as its most relentless floor advocate in Congress. Benjamin Franklin provided international credibility. But before Congress could explain why America should be independent, someone had to formally propose that it should be. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stood before the Continental Congress and introduced a resolution declaring that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States," calling simultaneously for foreign alliances and a plan of confederation. Jefferson supplied the prose. Lee supplied the motion. Eleven years later, however, Lee became one of the most prominent critics of the Constitution drafted in Philadelphia, warning that Americans were constructing the very type of distant, centralized authority they had just fought a war to escape. Lee's career traced the full arc from revolutionary agitator to constitutional skeptic, and his most lasting contribution to American liberty came not from introducing independence but from insisting that independence was meaningless if citizens stopped questioning power simply because the people exercising it were now Americans.

Born at Stratford Hall

Richard Henry Lee was born on January 20, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into one of the colony's most powerful families. The Lees possessed land, wealth, political connections, and generations of experience inside Virginia's governing elite. Stratford Hall, the great Lee family plantation overlooking the Potomac, estimates that approximately two hundred enslaved Africans and African Americans lived at Stratford and affiliated properties during Thomas Lee's era — cultivating fields, cooking, cleaning, building structures, practicing skilled trades, and sustaining the wealth and lifestyle upon which Lee family political participation depended. Richard Henry grew up surrounded by both privilege and bondage. That contradiction would follow his generation into the Revolution, where Virginia's elite developed some of the eighteenth century's most powerful arguments against arbitrary political authority while simultaneously exercising enormous coercive authority over people they enslaved.

Lee was educated at Wakefield Academy in Yorkshire, England — the kind of education appropriate for a member of Virginia's planter aristocracy — returning with firsthand familiarity with the country whose authority he would eventually challenge. He entered colonial politics through Virginia's House of Burgesses, participated in resistance to the Stamp Act, and co-authored the Leedstown Resolutions in 1766, which challenged the Stamp Act and asserted colonial rights. This was a decade before independence. Lee did not begin as a revolutionary. He began as a British subject participating in colonial government. The empire had to lose his allegiance through a series of escalating provocations.

The Three-Part Resolution

Lee's June 7, 1776 motion was not a simple call for separation. It was a comprehensive three-part proposal for a new international and domestic order. The first element formally severed political connections to the British Crown — the idea that produced the Declaration of Independence, referred to a committee that included Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. The second called for foreign alliances — the diplomatic track that eventually produced the Model Treaty and the crucial French Alliance of 1778. The third called for a plan of confederation — the structural project that produced the Articles of Confederation and America's first national government. Jefferson wrote the Declaration; Lee's resolution made the Declaration necessary.

Lee himself did not draft the Declaration. He had returned to Virginia on family business when the Committee of Five was appointed and the drafting work began. His name appears on the engrossed Declaration he signed later, but his specific contribution to its language was limited. The motion was his; the prose was not. His brother Francis Lightfoot Lee also signed, making them the only pair of brothers to sign the Declaration of Independence — a distinction Stratford Hall continues to commemorate.

President of Congress and the Anti-Federalist Campaign

Under the Articles of Confederation, Lee served as President of the Confederation Congress from 1784 to 1785. The experience gave him direct exposure to the Confederation's strengths and weaknesses. He understood that the national government needed more coherence than the Articles provided. What he disputed was what form that coherence should take.

When delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, Lee declined to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Virginia had not selected him as a delegate. From outside the Convention, he became one of the most prominent Anti-Federalist voices against the resulting Constitution. He focused on two fundamental objections: the absence of a bill of rights, and the danger of a powerful central government operating at a distance from ordinary citizens. The Constitution's supporters argued that explicit rights protections were unnecessary since the federal government possessed only delegated powers. Lee countered that governments reliably find ways to exceed their delegated powers, and that citizens needed explicit legal protections rather than theoretical arguments about structural limits. He raised concerns about the Senate's treaty-making power, the executive's appointment and removal authority, and the federal judiciary's potential to override state courts.

The Federal Farmer Misattribution

For generations, Lee was credited as the author of the Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican, one of the most influential Anti-Federalist works of the ratification era. The attribution became so standard that it appeared in textbooks, encyclopedias, and popular histories for over a century. The Library of Congress catalog for the work now explicitly notes that it "has been wrongly attributed to R.H. Lee." The actual author remains uncertain — various scholars have proposed other candidates, but no attribution has achieved consensus. Lee does not need the Federal Farmer essays to establish his Anti-Federalist credentials. His own correspondence, speeches, and published writings make his constitutional objections clear. Assigning anonymous works to famous founders because the arguments resemble their known views creates tidier historical stories. It does not create more accurate ones.

Senator for the Bill of Rights

When Virginia ratified the Constitution in 1788, Lee accepted the outcome but did not abandon his concerns. He ran for the new Senate and won, serving as one of Virginia's inaugural U.S. Senators from 1789 to 1792. His purpose was specific: to fight from inside the new government for the amendments that would protect individual liberties against federal overreach. Madison, who had originally opposed a bill of rights as unnecessary, took up the project in the House; Lee pushed for it in the Senate. Ten amendments were ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights. The Tenth Amendment, reserving to the states or the people powers not delegated to the federal government, reflected precisely the structural concern Lee had consistently articulated. He had lost the ratification debate and used the resulting legislative seat to win the amendment argument. That is a significant record for someone history tends to remember primarily as a footnote to Jefferson's authorship.

The Contradiction at Stratford Hall

Lee's stature rested upon an economy sustained by enslaved labor. He criticized aspects of the international slave trade and expressed discomfort with the institution in correspondence, but he remained a lifelong slaveholder. The wealth and leisure that allowed him to participate extensively in colonial and national politics depended upon the unpaid labor of people whose natural rights he denied in practice while championing them in principle. He could recognize that slavery was morally and politically troubling while continuing to participate in it personally. He could demand liberty from Britain in language that helped create a nation while exercising coercive authority over the people who built and maintained his plantation. Lee embodied the contradiction rather than hiding from it — he was a member of one of Virginia's most powerful families warning that national institutions might become too distant from ordinary citizens, from a position that was anything but ordinary.

The Problem of Power

Richard Henry Lee died on June 19, 1794, at Chantilly, his Virginia estate, at sixty-two years old. His political life had spanned an extraordinary transformation: he had entered Virginia politics when George II was king and Virginia was a British colony; he died when George Washington was president under a written Constitution, the Supreme Court existed, the Bill of Rights was in force, and the United States maintained diplomatic relations with the great powers of Europe.

His career demonstrates something worth preserving in any account of the founding: revolution does not end when the enemy is defeated. The deeper question — whether the government created to replace the previous one will itself become a threat to liberty — persists beyond any single military or political victory. Lee asked that question in 1776, when Congress needed to hear it to motivate independence. He asked it again in 1787, when Federalists needed to hear it to build a more durable constitutional structure. And he continued asking it as a senator, using his seat to embed explicit protections for individual liberty into the constitutional text. Lee did not oppose power. He opposed unchecked power. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the foundation of every functioning constitutional republic.

Sources

• Richard Henry Lee — Britannica — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Richard Henry Lee — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
• Richard Henry Lee — Stratford Hall — Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation
• Lee Resolution — National Archives — National Archives
• Richard Henry Lee — American Battlefield Trust — American Battlefield Trust