THE DAY OF THE WEDDING was sultry and hot as only Tidewater Virginia can be sultry and hot in the middle of June. Twenty-four years later and 850 miles removed, the groom still recalled the tropical heat of the day and place.1
The groom was Henry Lee, III, called “Light Horse Harry” to honor his exploits as a cavalry commander during the American Revolutionary War. A graduate of Princeton, once a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, then Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, Lee was Governor of Virginia on his wedding day, June 18, 1793.2
The bride was Ann Hill Carter, called Nancy by her father Charles Carter, who loved her dearly, though she had twenty living siblings. She was twenty years old and thoroughly smitten with Harry Lee.
The wedding took place at Shirley, a plantation since the seventeenth century and the home of Carters since the 1720s. The Great House was (and still is) on the north bank of the James River, about 25 miles southeast of Richmond. Several thousand of the 25,000 acres Charles Carter owned surrounded the Great House at Shirley, and hundreds of African American slaves toiled there to produce the wealth which kept the Carters comfortable and prominent. Atop the roof of the Great House was (and still is) a finial carved in the shape of a pineapple, traditional symbol of welcome. For the Carters and their guests, Shirley was a happy and privileged place. Ann Carter was a young woman accustomed to fine things and many friends in her extensive and extended family.
In the Great Hall of the Great House, relatives and friends gathered with the principals and an Episcopalian cleric for the marriage ceremony in the evening. The heat of the day persisted, however, and the fashionable clothing appropriate to the occasion doubtless rendered the event an ordeal for many in attendance.3
But sweat was sweet that night at Shirley. A dashing governor married an accomplished Carter—a union of fame and fortune. On the surface and at the time, the prospects of Ann Carter and Harry Lee appeared propitious indeed. The Virginia Gazette (published in Richmond) proclaimed: “On Tuesday evening … was married at Shirley, Governor Lee, to the amiable and accomplished Miss Ann Carter, daughter of Charles Carter. Esq.—An event which promises the most auspicious fortune to the wedded pair, and which must give the highest satisfaction to their numerous and respectable relatives.”4
Ill omens there were, however, and most of them concerned Harry Lee. The governor was thirty-seven, seventeen years older than his bride. Portraits of Lee during his adult life portray him steadily stouter, and by 1793 he was beginning to appear somehow delicate and dissolute at once. This was Lee’s second wedding; his first wife, “the divine Matilda,” had died in 1790. At the Governor’s Mansion at Richmond were Lee’s three children from his first marriage.
As a widower Lee had been anxious to remarry and wrote about the delights of “every sweet nymph.” Lee also wanted further fame. He had resigned from the Continental Army in 1782, before the Revolutionary War ended, for reasons still obscure, but likely related to envy of some of his brother officers and slights real or imagined from his superiors. Lee hoped in 1792 his old commander and idol George Washington would give him charge of the new United States Army. When Washington passed over him, Lee seriously sought a command in the army of Revolutionary France. Friends dissuaded him, however, and Washington pointed out the obvious: how could Lee enlist in the cause of France while he was Governor of Virginia? In May of 1793 Lee wrote Alexander Hamilton, “I mean now to become a farmer and get a wife as soon as possible.”
The woman Lee most wanted to “get” for his wife was not Ann Carter but her cousin and one of her best friends, Maria Farley. But Maria Farley rejected Lee’s attentions and his proposal of marriage. Ann Carter reportedly told her friend, “O stop, stop Maria—you do not know what you are throwing away.”
On the rebound Lee then focused his attention upon Ann Carter. She responded, and very soon Governor Lee was asking Charles Carter for his daughter’s hand in marriage.5
Carter was less than pleased; most probably he was appalled. He no doubt knew something of Lee’s avid courtship of Maria Farley and likely believed his daughter’s professed love for Lee was in the nature of passing fancy. Charles Carter knew with greater confidence Harry Lee’s reputation for imprudence and impropriety in his personal affairs.
Like many of his contemporaries, Lee speculated in land; unlike most of his contemporaries, Lee consistently lost money in his speculations. Too often he responded to failed financial expectations with still greater speculation. Moreover, Lee developed a very casual attitude about his debts; he kept forgetting them, or he paid them with paper or promises that proved worthless. Both Lee’s father and his hero and father figure George Washington were poorer but wiser for trusting Light Horse Harry. When Washington as President considered Lee for command of the United States Army, he noted that he had military ability but “lacks economy.”
Lee’s father Henry Lee, II, died in 1787, but Harry inherited none of his personal property and only some of his lesser lands. Although Harry was Henry’s oldest son, the father made his second son, Charles, executor of his estate. Harry Lee did get control of his first wife, Matilda’s, magnificent plantation, Stratford; he sold off parcels of the place at an alarming rate to finance his speculative ventures and cover his debts. Accordingly Matilda, while on her deathbed, arranged to leave Stratford in trust to her children and bequeath to her husband only the right to live on the estate. However, Lee used his influence with the Stratford trustees (his brother and brother-in-law) to enable him to sell still more acres of Matilda’s plantation.
The best story circulating about Lee’s scruples involved his visit to a neighbor with a request to borrow a horse. The neighbor not only lent Lee a horse; he also sent a servant with him on a second horse, so that Lee would not have to go to the trouble of returning the borrowed horse himself. After several weeks the slave returned on foot and in disheveled condition. He told the neighbor that Lee had sold both horses. “Why didn’t you come home?” the neighbor asked. “’Cause General Lee sold me, too.” The story may or may not be true. That people told it reveals what Lee’s neighbors thought of his integrity.6
Charles Carter cared a great deal about his daughter and about the reputation of his family. Carters were righteous folk, staunch Protestant Episcopalians, a clan known for honesty and respectability. Carters were also wealthy; Charles Carter was a grandson of Robert “King” Carter, who once owned 300,000 acres and 1,000 slaves. And Carters had never married Lees, a circumstance dating to a feud between “King” Carter and Harry Lee’s great-uncle Thomas Lee.
Gossip, stories probably apocryphal, vague feelings about family traits, and ancient feuds offered Charles Carter no firm grounds for objection to the marriage his daughter so ardently desired. So Carter seized upon Harry Lee’s flirtation with France; he would not permit his daughter to marry a man about to launch a second military career in Europe. Lee, however, protested that he no longer had any intention of fighting for France. Then Carter had little choice but to embrace Lee as his son-in-law and bless the marriage.7
Wedding festivities at Shirley probably lasted several days after the ceremony itself. Eventually, though, Ann Lee and the Governor traveled to Richmond to begin their life together.
Waiting for the newlyweds were Harry Lee’s three children: Philip, who was nine; Lucy Grymes, eight; and Henry, six. Philip soon died—no one now knows when or how. Lucy likely resented her stepmother; she never mentioned her in correspondence and would later act out rebellion against her family and childhood. Henry (IV) was not a problem … yet. Virginia’s Governor’s Mansion in 1793 was much a misnomer. It was an unpainted frame house with two stories and four rooms furnished with fairly plain furniture. In such circumstances and surroundings, “Nancy” Carter became Ann Lee.8
A friend and admirer later estimated that the bride was happy for all of two weeks. She “became his [Lee’s] delighted wife, but to find in the short space of a fortnight that her affections were trampled on by a heartless and depraved profligate. I am right as to time. One fortnight was her dream of happiness from which she awoke to a life of misery.”9
This statement is hyperbole, but only in degree. Ann Lee did not have an easy time as the wife of Light Horse Harry. Lee’s fortunes seemed to begin a rapid decline about the time of his second marriage. The timing was mere coincidence. Ann Lee did not abet her husband’s downfall; she tried as best she could to abort the process.
When he learned that Lee had given up his notion of fighting for France and intended marriage a second time instead, President Washington wrote to Lee, “We are told that you have exchanged the rugged and dangerous field of Mars for the soft and pleasurable bed of Venus….” and thereby added his blessing to the wedding. But in September 1794, Governor Lee took advantage of his constitutional prerogative as commander in chief of the Virginia Militia and rode off in search of a “rugged and dangerous field of Mars.” The occasion was the “Whiskey Rebellion” in western Pennsylvania. Lee led an expedition of 15,000 militia troops to root out the rebels and in so doing assert the will and strength of the national government to enforce its laws. As it happened, Lee made a long march and found no rebels; he encountered some rugged fields, but none especially dangerous. He did garner the rank and title of general, and he acted out the policy of Washington’s administration regarding challenges to the power of the Federal government.
When Lee returned from his extended mission in Pennsylvania, he discovered that many Virginians resented his eagerness to do the bidding of the administration and abandon his duties as governor. In his absence Lee’s constituents had declared the office of governor vacant and elected another in his stead.10
Ann and the young Henry were ill when Harry left home, and so they retreated to Shirley. Ann was pregnant and remained at Shirley until the baby came—a son, born April 2, 1795, named Algernon Sidney Lee after the English Protestant rebel/martyr from the seventeenth century. Eventually (1795—96), Ann, Harry, Henry, Lucy Grymes, and Algernon Sidney Lee moved to Stratford. There Algernon Sidney died on August 9, 1796.11
Although completed in the same year—1738—Shirley and Stratford were (and are) very different houses. Shirley is more open to the out of doors: two-story porches front and rear, many windows (including those set in the mansard roof on the third floor), front and rear doors carefully aligned to catch breezes and frame the rising and setting sun at the spring and fall equinoxes, all echo the welcome-symbol pineapple finial at the center of the roof. Shirley is more graceful, too, exemplified by the three-story carved walnut stairway which rises through the center of the house with no visible supports. Shirley had been home for Ann Lee. And to the degree that buildings possess a transcendent capacity to reflect human traits and values, Shirley communicated hospitality, romance, and fun.12
Stratford “says” some of the same things that Shirley does. Windows containing thirty-two panes each surround the formal rooms and the huge Great Hall on the second floor. The exterior stairs front and rear are wider at the bottom than the top and thus tend to draw the visitor into the house. Inside, rooms are bright and airy, and set into the twin clusters of four chimneys each are platforms which offer spectacular views of the surrounding landscape and the Potomac River. But the house is a massive, brick block “H” whose exterior appears sturdy in the extreme, practical for certain, yet forbidding and more like a fortress than a home. In an aesthetic sense, Harry Lee’s home was indeed his castle as well. The exterior doors beyond those beckoning stairs appear small in the great scale of the house and consequently seem designed to exclude more people than they admit. Ironically, both a granddaughter and a cousin/brother-in-law of Harry Lee met their deaths in falls from the steps leading to the Great Hall. Harry Lee’s first wife Matilda first saw him returning from the Revolutionary War to seek his fortune and her hand from one of those observation platforms among the chimneys. She was impressed by her suntanned swain and curious about Lee’s white orderly, George Weldon, who insisted upon kissing the colonel’s hand.13
Ann Lee, however, did not spend much time in the formal rooms or Great Hall upstairs. Nor did she often sit on the observation platforms on the roof. Her husband’s debts forced him to sell or dismiss the servants necessary to maintain Stratford in style or comfort. The Lees could not afford to entertain, and eventually Ann and the children had to restrict themselves to a few rooms on the ground floor because they lacked the resources to heat or furnish the rest.
Harry Lee’s orderly remained at Stratford, and his son Henry Weldon was supposed to manage the plantation, despite the fact that Henry could neither read nor write. Tenants actually did most of the farming at Stratford during Harry Lee’s tenure there, paying their rent in produce and crops. However, the number of acres and tenants shrank constantly. In 1775, the plantation included 6,595 acres; by the time of Matilda’s death, it included about 4,000 acres. Ten years later, Stratford contained 2,000 acres.
As his material fortunes declined, Lee continued to display to the world a bold facade. He continued to plunge into reckless speculations and continued to lose his gambles. He was away from home a lot. Stratford was in Westmoreland County on the Virginia “Northern Neck,” the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. The region had been the home of important people and great families; however, it was isolated, very rural, and except by water, not really “on the way” to anywhere. Ann and the children were often alone. She once phrased her plight that at Stratford she was “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.”14
In 1799 Lee ran for election to Congress, and owing largely to the active support of former President Washington, who rode to Montross (the seat of Westmoreland County) to cast his vote, Lee won. So Ann, Lucy Grymes, Henry, and Ann’s second son Charles Carter, born November 8, 1798, accompanied Lee to Philadelphia, which was then the seat of the national government. There Lee made his eloquent pronouncement in eulogy for his commander and benefactor George Washington—“first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Otherwise, what became Harry Lee’s last public service was essentially undistinguished.15
In spite of some lapses when desire for fame or personal gain overcame his principles, Harry Lee was, heart and soul, a Federalist. He believed in government by the rich, the well-born, and the able, because he considered himself one of that number. He supported an energetic national government, capable of directing the new nation’s fledgling economy. He favored a broad interpretation of the Constitution, which made the Federal government strong at the expense of the member states. And he favored England over France, should the Old World draw the New World into its ancient quarrels.16
When he was much a “lame duck” member of Congress in 1801, Lee voted for Aaron Burr for President. The rival Republicans had nominated Thomas Jefferson for President and Burr for Vice President in 1800. However, the way the Constitution prescribed for the electoral college to function at that time (lacking the Twelth Amendment, which requires electors to vote for President and Vice President separately) produced a tie between Jefferson and Burr. Since neither candidate had a majority, the House of Representatives had to choose the President. By the time House members voted, founding Federalist Alexander Hamilton was instructing fellow Federalists to vote for Jefferson. Lee was alone among Virginia representatives to defy the party scion and reject a fellow Virginian in favor of Burr. Some speculated that Lee hoped to secure patronage favors from Burr; others suggested that Lee was merely venting his otherwise-minded nature and his hatred of Jefferson.17
Meanwhile, at Stratford Ann Lee gave birth to a daughter, Ann Kinloch, on June 19, 1800. And Harry Lee continued to wheel, deal, and sell his family’s land. In 1801, Lee paid taxes on about 2,000 acres; one year later, he paid taxes on only 236 acres. By 1802 Ann was again pregnant; but she and the children accompanied Harry on an extended trip to Philadelphia and New York. She planned to return to Stratford by the time the baby came. However, Harry tarried, and Ann went into labor in Camden, New Jersey. She had to depend upon the hopsitality of strangers, in this case a family named Smith in Camden. When Ann’s baby boy arrived on September 2, 1802, she named him Sidney Smith, calling him Smith in gratitude to her hosts.18
Finally back at Stratford with her family, Ann’s health failed. She referred in a letter written in 1803 to “dropsy,” which was the common term for edema, swelling caused by a disorder of the kidneys or heart. However imprecise this diagnosis, it was the best Ann Lee could do. She did write about her infirmity: “I am much of an invalid” (May 3, 1804); “being much indisposed” (January 1805); and “being so often an invalid” (October 1, 1805).19
Lucy Grymes Lee fled the family in the summer of 1803; she married her stepmother’s younger brother, Bernard Moore Carter, thus becoming her own aunt. She referred to her new husband as “such a fool!” and threatened to burn his plantation house if forced to live there. Eventually Lucy Carter moved to Philadelphia and lived alone.20
Also in 1803 Ann’s father Charles Carter revised his will in order to leave his daughter a trust fund which her husband could not invade. Carter was the third relative (after Harry’s father and first wife) to make specific provisions in a will to protect an estate from Light Horse Harry Lee.
Still Harry hoped for more prosperous times, while he installed a chain across the doorway at Stratford to forestall his creditors. In the spring of 1806 Ann realized she was once more pregnant. During the summer she visited Shirley, but her homecoming was devastating; she arrived shortly after her father died. The family mourned Charles Carter’s death. Then it became time for Ann to return to Stratford. She had no carriage, however, and still had none after she all but begged Harry to send some conveyance for her. At last someone secured an open carriage, and Ann returned home in late November or December to Stratford with her children. By this time Carter was eight, Ann six, and Smith four. The rigorous trip in frigid weather made their mother ill, and she feared for herself and her unborn child.
On January 11, 1807, Ann wrote her friend Elizabeth, who was married to one of Harry’s brothers and who was also pregnant. “You have my best wishes for your success my dear,” Ann said, “and truest assurances, that I do not envy your prospects, nor wish to share in them.”21
Eight days after she confided such candor, Ann Lee again underwent childbirth. Still sick with a terrible cold in her chest, Ann surely huddled near a fireplace while the raw wind blew outside; the Northern Neck was brutally cold as only the Northern Neck can be in mid-January. Harry may or may not have been with her. The baby born on January 19, 1807, was a boy, and Ann named him after two of her favorite brothers—Robert Edward Lee.