Note 53 — Chapter III

Richard Henry Lee, the mover of this resolution, was born on the 20th of June, 1732, at Stratford, Westmoreland County, Virginia. His earlier education was completed in England, whence he returned in his nineteenth year. Possessed of a good fortune, he devoted himself to public affairs. At the age of twenty-five, he entered the House of Burgesses, where he became a distinguished advocate of republican doctrines, and a strenuous opponent of the right claimed by Parliament to tax the colonies, of the Stamp Act, and of the other arbitrary measures of the home government, coöperating with Patrick Henry in all his great patriotic efforts. He was the author of the plan adopted by the House of Burgesses in 1773, for the formation of committees of correspondence, to be organized by the colonial legislatures, and out of which grew the plan of the Continental Congress. In 1774, he was elected one of the delegates from Virginia to the Congress, in which body, from his known ability as a political writer and his services in the popular cause, he was placed on the committees to prepare the addresses to the King, to the People of Great Britain, and to the People of the Colonies, the last of which he wrote. In the second Congress, he was selected to move the resolution of Independence; and besides serving on other very important committees, he furnished, as chairman of the committee instructed to prepare them, the commission and instructions to General Washington. As mover of the resolution of Independence, he would, according to the usual practice, have been made chairman of the committee to prepare the Declaration; but on the 10th of June, the day when the subject was postponed, he was obliged to leave Congress, and return home for a short time, on account of the illness of some member of his family. He came back to Congress and remained a member until June, 1777, when he went home on account of ill health. In August, 1778, he was again elected a member, and continued to serve until 1780; but from feeble health was compelled to take a less active part than he had taken in former years. He was out of Congress from 1780 until 1784, when he was elected its President, but retired at the end of the year. He was opposed to the Constitution of the United States, but voted in Congress to submit it to the people. After its adoption, he was elected one of the first Senators under it from Virginia, and in that capacity moved and carried several amendments. In 1792, his continued ill health obliged him to retire from public life. He died June 19, 1794.