Atop Shockoe Hill in the heart of Richmond, the khaki clouds of dust were visible from all directions. Horse hooves plodded along the drought-dried roads leading into town. From all points they came, traveling over Virginia’s primitive byways in gigs, carts, or phaeton carriages—their destination the state capitol, a hastily constructed three-story wooden building sitting at the intersection of Carey and 14th Streets.1
Some were the grand old men of Virginia, whose oratory a decade before had been the kindling for the Revolution. Others were the youthful warriors who had fought it. Together they had won Virginia and her sister colonies independence. Now the question at hand, the one that brought them all to this city on the James River, was would these former colonies remain united? Would they coalesce at last around a government capable of guiding the young nation into a splendid future?
In June of 1788, Henry Lee came to Richmond determined that indeed they would.
When the Constitutional Convention had convened eight months before, its goal was to amend the Articles of Confederation into an operable system of government. A plan sketched by James Madison, the first delegate to arrive in Philadelphia, morphed into a wholly new form of government. It would feature three branches—a bicameral legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. Once these were agreed upon, the delegates debated the details before agreeing on a grand compromise. Washington, naturally, was the first to sign the document. The responsibility then fell to the states to approve the new system.
Four members of Virginia’s delegation—the old lion of liberty George Mason, the scholarly George Wyeth, the famed physician James McClurg, and Edmund Randolph, a member of one of the state’s distinguished families—had declined to endorse the new government. Some had contributed little or left early. But others had objected to the lack of a bill of rights and were deeply suspicious of the executive, or president, created by the Constitution. Another of Virginia’s leading politicians, Patrick Henry—skeptical of the entire enterprise and fearing a federal government empowered at the expense of the states—had simply refused to attend the gathering.2
Lee sat in Congress while the Constitution was created and debated and did not leave New York until October 29. On his route back to Stratford Hall he made a familiar stop: for two days at the end of November, he rested at Mount Vernon and conferred with George Washington.
In regard to the Constitution, the general, Lee later told Madison, was “firm as a rock.”3 Lee and Washington had been commiserating on the loathsome state of the American government for several years; this sentiment was hardly newly arrived at. During the war Lee had chafed at the inability of the loose confederation of states to properly sustain their army; in peace he, like Washington, lamented the states’ dysfunction, worried it would jeopardize his future financial success, and looked on in horror at the uprisings against the federal government in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
While states organized their conventions to approve or reject the new government, papers and pamphlets were filled with arguments for and against. Politicians and the public alike weighed its virtues and flaws. Lee’s old friends Madison and Alexander Hamilton (and fleetingly John Jay), using the pen name Publius, composed the most persuasive arguments on behalf of the Constitution in a series of essays sent to New York newspapers. Those who opposed the strengthening of the federal government, men such as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, responded with their own propaganda. Those in favor of adoption and a stronger central government were often called cosmopolitans, though history has labeled them federalists. Those against, more likely to support an agrarian economy and to harbor suspicions of a stronger central power, were localists and later anti-federalists.
States scheduled their own conventions and called elections to nominate delegates; the debates began in some states as early as the fall of 1787. On October 25, Virginia’s legislature met and scheduled elections to be held the following March; two delegates would represent each of the state’s eighty-four counties. The convention itself would meet the first week of June. By December, Lee had declared his candidacy and pleaded with Madison to do the same. But given the number of other contenders in Westmoreland County, Lee was skeptical about his prospects. His fears were unfounded: the following spring, both men were nominated to the convention. Lee would be the only member of his family to attend, and an outlier on account of his support for the Constititution. With the exception of Francis Lightfoot Lee, the Stratford wing of the family, Matilda’s uncles, were opposed to the Constitution.4
There was considerable antagonism towards the Constitution in the counties below Richmond; the state’s legislature, influenced by Patrick Henry, now a delegate, was also hostile. But the people of Northern Neck, where Stratford Hall sat, were in favor.
“Three sets of men are to be found on the question of government,” Lee observed, “one opposed to any system, was it even sent from heaven which tends to confirm the union of the states—Henry is leader of this band—another who would accept the new constitution from conviction of its own excellence, or any federal system, sooner than risk the dissolution of the confederacy, & a third who dislike the proposed government, wish it amended, but if this is not practicable, would adopt it sooner than jeopardize the union—Mason may be considered as the head of this set.”5
In early 1788, in the months before the gathering in Richmond, Lee was suffering rheumatism while Matilda, complaining of “burning and tingling,” traveled to western Virginia seeking relief in the region’s mineral springs.6 Lee made yet another major investment in land: the purchase, for four thousand pounds, of over five hundred acres in northern Virginia adjacent to the Great Falls where the Potomac River splashed over a jagged crop of rocks and into an unnavigable gorge below. The Potomac Company would soon build a set of locks to open the spot for passage. There Lee dreamt of building a thriving town catering to the traffic sailing by on the river. When he arrived in Richmond in June, it was to help guarantee the nation not only a secure government, but also one that would allow projects such as this to flourish.
At 10:00 a.m. on the second day of June, Lee took his seat in the wooden capitol building in Richmond along with 167 other delegates. It was a blisteringly hot summer, the air indoors stifling. Sentiment for and against the Constitution was evenly divided across the delegates. The stakes were dramatically high: out of the nine states required for ratification, eight had already voted yes. The creditability of the document, even if passed by the necessary number of states, would be tainted without the support of Virginia, the largest of them.
The attendees sweltered as Edmund Pendleton, the esteemed jurist-politician who had played an outsized part in the state’s fight for independence, was nominated president. Once other officers and a chaplain were chosen, the gathering agreed to reconvene the following day in a more suitable location, the New Academy on Shockoe Hill, a spacious wooden building ambitiously built two years before as the town’s cultural center.7 On the morning of June 3, the convention formally commenced. The proceedings were open to the public, attracting spectators and reporters alike. Doorways and hallways were crammed with curious citizens drawn to the deliberations from all over Virginia. Among the delegates they watched and listened to, distinct divisions, roughly contouring to Lee’s categories, became evident.
One faction featured George Mason; William Grayson, a one-time aide-de-camp to Washington who had led his own regiment during the war; and Benjamin Harrison V, a former member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and most recently the state’s governor, who all viewed the Constitution as a dangerous usurpation of Virginia’s rights. The Articles of Confederation, at most, had needed adjustments, not replacement by a Constitution authorizing a new, larger, and more powerful form of government.
As Lee had observed, their unquestioned leader was Patrick Henry. Silver-tonged and acerbic, he stood a thin six feet, his hair curling to frame a face with Grecian figures and deep set hazel-blue eyes. He was a master of emotional political rhetoric whose voice had been heard at almost every junction since the colonies began their quest for independence. “Much will depend on Mr. Henry,” Madison had forewarned Washington, realizing what a formidable foe the man from Louisa County would be.8 Henry had made the journey from his plantation home Pleasant Grove to Richmond to fight the adoption of this new form of government, and he came prepared to do the bulk of the labor necessary to defeat it.
Challenging Henry and his fellow anti-federalists were a band of younger Virginians. Among this group were Lee, Madison, and John Marshall, a budding politician and fellow veteran of the Revolution. Aiding the federalist cause, much to the chagrin of Mason and Henry, was also Edmund Randolph, who had refused to vote for the Constitution in Philadelphia before having a change of heart late in 1787. Madison was the unquestioned leader of this group. Diminutive and soft-spoken—listeners strained to hear his voice in the hall—he did not have Henry’s presence. Nor was he capable of his fiery oratory. Instead, he relied on reason and logic, relayed respectfully, to parry Henry’s thrusts. The work of sparring with the old spellbinder in rhetoric would fall to the likes of Lee in the long and hot days ahead.
On the opening day of the convention, Lee immediately displayed his usual aggression, introducing a petition alleging that one of the delegates, William White, had been nominated illegally. Once the substantive debate was underway, Mason offered an opening gambit: why not scrutinize every single clause of the Constitution rather than rushing to a quick vote? Madison raised no objection. To little avail, an impatient Lee argued that the convention should not waste time in clause-by-clause discussion. Mason and Harrison countered that the members of the convention ought to have time to properly consider the document. Lee protested. Virginia’s General Assembly was set to meet on the twenty-third, and the matter would have to be settled before then. He called the anti-federalists’ bluff: for months every man present had been considering this Constitution; they knew its contours in detail. No one needed weeks to come to a decision.9
The actual debate did not begin until the following day, the fourth of June. The attempt at a clause-by-clause discussion of the Constitution was interrupted repeatedly. While the delegates contemplated the Constitution’s preamble, Patrick Henry rose from his seat time and time again to thunder against the entire document. “A year ago the mind of our citizens were in perfect repose,” he intoned, commanding the attention of all the delegates. “Before the meeting of the late federal convention at Philadelphia, a general peace and a universal tranquility prevailed in this country—but since that period they are exceedingly uneasy and disquieted. . . it arises from a proposal to change our government—a proposal that goes to the utter annihilation of the most solemn engagements of the states. . . .”10
But what most offended Patrick Henry was the language of the document itself. “What right had they to say, we the people?” he queried. “My political curiosity. . . leads me to ask, who authorized them to speak the language of we the people, instead of we the states? States are the characteristics and the soul of a confederation.”11
On the following day, June 5, Lee rose to respond to Henry. He professed nothing but respect for the elder statesman, speaking of the “respect and attention” he had paid to his speech the day before. But then he rejected Henry’s histrionic attack on the opening of the preamble. “This system is submitted to the people for their consideration, because on them it is to operate if adopted,” Lee contended.12
Next he accused Henry of rank demagoguery. “The worthy character informed us of the horrors which he felt, of apprehension in his mind, which made him tremblingly fearful for the commonwealth,” Lee recalled before asking “was it proper to appeal to the fear of this house?”
And Lee was not yet done. Now he began his own brand of fearmongering. Henry had painted a picture of domestic tranquility and prosperity disrupted by the introduction of a new government. But “let him go to our seaports,” Lee cried, “let him see our commerce languishing. . . let him ask the price of land, and of produce in different parts of the country: to what cause shall we attribute the low price of these?” Lee wove an image of the nation under the Articles of Confederation as exaggeratedly bleak as Henry’s was rosy. “And the impossibility of employing our tradesmen and mechanics? To what cause will the gentleman impute these and a thousand other misfortunes our people labor under?” Lee inquired. “These, sir, are owning to the imbecility of the confederation; to that defective system which never can make us happy at home nor respectable abroad.”13
Lee’s attack ignited a marathon rebuttal from Henry, who, veering away from the subject at hand, predicted that the chief executive, or president, created in the Constitution would eventually enslave America. An exasperated Randolph commented, “If we go on in this irregular manner, contrary to our resolution, instead of three or six weeks, it will take six months to decide this question.”14
In the days that followed, the Convention addressed the Constitution’s contents, at last digging into its articles. Randolph and Madison coolly spoke at length regarding the new system. Henry meanwhile wailed that the central government would eventually “absorb” those of the states, in a “great consolidation of the government.” He lamented the lunacy of trusting to amend the document after its ratification, as had been proposed, and warned of the danger that the president would transform into a monarch: “Look for an example of voluntary relinquishment of power from one end of the globe to another: you will find none.”
One of Henry’s harangues also took aim at the Constitution’s empowering Congress to raise and regulate armies. A standing army, he maintained, would ultimately be a tyrant’s weapon to terrorize the people. The responsibility of protecting the states should fall to their militias, he argued.
As Henry returned to his seat, Lee took leave of his. At thirty-two, he was two decades Henry’s junior. His political career—two terms in Congress—paled in comparison to his antagonist’s storied past. But on this issue Lee spoke with authority and experience that Henry, for all his rhetorical pyrotechnics, could not match. While Henry had attended the Virginia Conventions, had twice been governor, and had even ridden to the first Continental Congress with George Washington, Lee had been with Washington at Brandywine and Germantown, and during the agonizing winter at Valley Forge. He had fought at Guilford Courthouse and Eutaw Springs. Henry had not.
Now he enlightened Henry on the impracticality of using the militias as a primary form of national defense. “Without vanity, I must say I have had a different experience from that of the honorable gentleman,” Lee began. “It was my fortune to be a soldier for my country. In the discharge of my duty, I knew the worth of militia. . . I saw what the honorable gentleman did not see. I have seen incontrovertible evidence that militia cannot always be relied upon.” Now he shared his memories of Guilford Courthouse, where the North Carolina militia, standing on the front lines and faced with the advancing Redcoats, fled. Memories danced by of Lee chasing after the scared soldiers, threatening them, pleading for them to return to the field as the American front caved. “Had the line been supported that day Cornwallis, instead of surrendering at Yorktown, would have laid down his arms at Guilford,” he lamented.15 No, the only practical means to defend the nation was for the new government to employ both regulars and militia.
Now Lee invoked an experience that only the other veterans present shared. He had been born and raised in Virginia, though he was educated in New Jersey. But he had left home at the end of 1776 and spent the following six years fighting in the Northern and Southern states and alongside Northerners and Southerners alike. He had established enduring friendships with men from New York and Pennsylvania. His Legion of Virginians had even been augmented by soldiers from Northern states, such as New Jersey. These were his countrymen, his brothers.
Lee grieved that “from the terms in which some of the Northern states were spoken of, one would have thought that the love of an American was in some degree criminal, as being incompatible with a proper degree of affection for a Virginian.” And then, the delegates’ attention at his command, slicing through the sultry air in the Richmond Theatre, Lee made a definitive appeal to a lasting union of the states. “The people of America, sir, are one people,” he declared. “I love the people of the north, not because they have adopted the constitution but because I fought with them as my countrymen, and because I consider them as such. Does it follow from hence that I have forgotten my attachment to my native state? In all local matters I shall be Virginian: in those of a general nature, I shall not forget that I am an American.”16
There were still many days of arguing and speechifying to come. The debates dragged on. Henry continued to harangue wildly; Madison, with an eye towards persuading the wavering delegates to the Federalist cause, continued to push the convention to order, to keep it on the task of weighing the merits of each section of the Constitution.
Lee played his part, decrying a nation whose government could not recompense its veterans or provide for their widows and orphans. When his conduct during the debate over a treaty with Spain was raised, he dug in. “The public welfare was my criterion,” Lee confessed. “In my opinion, I united private interest, not of the whole people of Virginia, but of the United States. I thought I was promoting the real interests of the people.”
On the sixteenth, Madison received a letter from Alexander Hamilton, who was preparing to defend the Constitution in New York’s ratifying convention. The news was discouraging: anti-federalists held a majority at the meeting. Hamilton hoped that if Virginia approved of the new government, it could sway New Yorkers; he asked to be notified at once if Madison could carry the day in Richmond. Madison replied immediately, informing Hamilton that the vote would be close—if the federalists triumphed it would be by only a handful of votes. He then folded the sheet and wrote “turn over” on its bottom. On the other side, Lee wrote a note to his old friend, “We possess as yet in defiance of great exertions a majority, but very small indeed,” a moment of uneasy optimism shared between three members of the founding fraternity.
But as the convention reached its crescendo the anti-federalist cause crumbled. Madison’s calm reasoning, teamed with the rhetorical firepower of Lee and Marshall, persuaded the wavering. Mason resorted to demagoguery, warning of a popular uprising against the new government. Lee dismissed this as beneath the venerable old statesman. “If the dreadful picture which he has drawn be so abhorrent to his mind as he had declared, let me ask the honorable gentleman if he has not pursued the very means to bring into action the horrors which he depreciates.”17
With ratification approaching, on June 24 Henry attempted to introduce forty amendments to the constitution, which would then be reviewed by the other states—a desperate stalling tactic. Madison swatted this proposal away, arguing that such a process would lead to permanent disunion, and it was rejected by the majority the following day. Then on the twenty-sixth, after making a host of concessions, the friends of the Constitution carried the day, as the delegates voted in favor of ratification: eighty-nine yays to seventy-nine nays.18
On June 21, while the Virginians debated, New Hampshire had ratified the Constitution at its own convention, formally bringing the new American government into being. But Virginia’s endorsement of the new system was crucial nevertheless. Like New York, which would ratify the following month, Virginia was one of the nation’s most populous and prosperous states. Without its inclusion, the union would be incomplete, fractured, and illegitimate. Madison, in his quiet manner, had led the way. But Lee’s soaring, confrontational rhetoric, motivated by a love of union and sense of nationalism fired by war, and his fearless confrontations with legendary statesmen many years his senior played a part as well. He had helped win American independence on the battlefield. Now he had helped to guarantee a form of government that would unite the land he loved.
The month after Virginia ratified the Constitution, Lee returned to New York to attend the final session of the Continental Congress, which was gradually less active in the months leading up to the time when the new Constitution would come into effect and the new legislative bodies would meet, beginning in March of 1789. Meanwhile, debate in the old legislature turned to the permanent location for the national capital. In its final years the Continental Congress had called New York home, only because other proposed locations—near Trenton in New Jersey, for example—had failed to win the approval of different sections of the country. There was clamor to bring the government back to Philadelphia, but a stalemate had set in.
During Lee’s final moments in Congress, the body resolved to establish a capital city at Germantown, on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. Until it was built, though, the government would remain in New York. This plan was postponed and eventually scuttled, leaving the location of a permanent capital in the hands of the incoming Congress. Lee realized that the placement of the federal city on the banks of the Susquehanna would help commerce in the Chesapeake region, but he, like other Virginians, preferred a capital on the Potomac19—particularly now because Lee was placing an incredible amount of dependence on the land he had acquired on the Great Falls.
There was also the matter of who would fill the new executive position created by the Constitution. As conceived, this position was naturally designed for Washington. The general, though, facing various financial pressures, was not sanguine about leaving Mount Vernon once more. But his wishes were irrelevant. In late 1787 the newspapers were already publishing articles about his assumption of this new office. Before the first national elections, scheduled for the fall of the following year, Washington was beseeched by old friends and comrades to accept the presidency to which he would certainly be elected.
Predictably Lee lent his voice, which commanded Washington’s respect, to this chorus. Anxiety about the launch of the new government was great. Much depended on a successful beginning. Washington’s leadership was necessary to ensure it. “To effect this and to perpetuate a nation formed under your auspices,” Lee wrote to his old friend in September, “it is certain that again you will be called forth.” He urged his old commander in chief, “Without you the govt. can have but little chance of success, and the people of that happiness, which its prosperity must yield.”20
Washington’s response, written in late September, was frank, confidential, and prolonged, giving a clue of his own difficult deliberations and the trust he placed in Lee. He was attached to farming, he explained, and treasured the life of a private citizen. “You are among the small number of those who know my invincible attachment to domestic life,” he wrote, “and that my sincerest wish is to continue in the enjoyment of it, solely, until my final hour.”
But there were also other reasons he was disinclined to be the first president. Why could not some other man, with “less pretense,” do the job every bit as capably? “You will perceive, my dear Sir, by what is here observed. . . that my inclinations will dispose and decide me to remain as I am,” Washington concluded. There was a caveat, though: “unless a clear and insurmountable conviction should be impressed on my mind that some very disagreeable consequences must in all human probability result from the indulgence of my wishes.”21
Lee and Washington continued the conversation in person at Mount Vernon, where the former visited at the end of October on his way home from New York. Lee was lending his voice to a chorus to which Washington would eventually relent. The anti-federalists were continuing to work to undermine the new government, even after ratification. Despite his defeat in Richmond, Patrick Henry still held sway over Virginia’s legislature, which sent members to the upper house of the new national legislature and drew congressional districts. He would do everything he could to deny Madison and the federalists access to power.
No matter Washington’s wishes, the national electors responsible for picking the president voted for Washington unanimously. By the time this outcome became clear, in the spring of 1789, he was resolved to accept the task. Debts were paid, transportation to New York was prepared, a final visit to his ailing mother, Mary, was made. There was also the conclusion of a transaction: Washington agreed to sell Magnolio, a magnificent chestnut-colored Arabian stallion, to Henry Lee in exchange for five thousand acres in Kentucky.22
Once the outcome of the election was verified, a messenger was sent to Mount Vernon. Notified that he had been elected, Washington declared his intention to serve. Lee, who had been called back to Stratford Hall, was unable to bid him good-bye. But when asked by Colonel Dennis Ramsey, the mayor of Alexandria, to compose a farewell from the city to the departing hero, Lee dashed off a stirring adieu. “Again your country commands your care,” it read. “Obedient to its wishes, unmindful of your ease, we see you again relinquishing the bliss of retirement, and this too at a period of life when nature itself seems to authorize a preference of repose!” The people, he said, would “be doubly grateful when they contemplate this recent sacrifice for their interest.”23
Washington departed Mount Vernon on April 16, 1789. On the thirtieth he became the first man sworn into the American presidency.24 “I anticipate with delight our approaching felicity and your new glory—they are entwined together and I hope will never be cut asunder,” Lee wrote to the president-elect before his departure.25
In the spring of 1789, Henry Lee had every reason to be a contented man. Though he did not seek a seat in the new Congress, and was for the time a private citizen, his great hero and good friend now governed the nation they had both freed. His allies, led by Madison, were a majority in the first Congress. Another old comrade, Alexander Hamilton, was addressing the nation’s dire finances as Secretary of the Treasury. And soon the land Lee owned on the newly navigable Great Falls on the Potomac River might be upstream from the nation’s new capital city, and the new nation’s commerce, moving to and fro from the Atlantic to the Alleghenies, would surely help create a thriving community, enriching him in the process. Then in October 1789 he was elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates and arrived in Richmond to participate in that body’s debate over amendments to the Constitution that had recently been proposed by Congress.
Lee’s ascent in prominence and prosperity had so often moved in tandem with that of his county. But now, at this moment of glory for the United States of America, Lee’s fortunes took an abrupt and terrible turn.
The five hundred acres he had acquired at the Great Falls of the Potomac was, at least for the moment, unusable. There were quitrents, or past due rent, on the land that Lee had bought from Bryan Fairfax. This meant that on top of the four thousand pounds he had already paid to Fairfax, Lee was obligated to pay an additional 150 pounds a year. Until this money—which Lee did not have—was tendered, he could not take deed to the land. At once he contrived schemes to raise the funds, wrangling Madison into the project and pestering Thomas Jefferson to solicit European investment to help underwrite it.
Matilda, after a brief recovery, was deteriorating. In the summer of 1788, there was a return of “burning and tingling.” Her beloved mother, Elizabeth, stricken with breast cancer, died in May. The loss devastated Matilda and taxed her already failing health. “Poor Mrs. Lee is particularly injured by it, as the affliction of mind adds to the infirmity of her body,” Lee wrote to Madison in June.26 Despite every effort, there would be no recovery. “Mrs. Lees health is worse and worse, I begin to fear the worst,” her husband concluded, ominously. “My long afflicted Mrs Lee is now very ill & I fear cannot be preserved,” he sighed to Washington some months later
While Matilda faded and Lee agonized, Alexander Hamilton moved. In a grand bargain struck with Jefferson and Madison during a dinner in New York in the summer of 1790, the Virginians achieved the relocation of the capital city to the Potomac River, and Hamilton won their agreement to his controversial proposition that the federal government assume the debts incurred by the states during the war. This would mean purchasing bonds, many of which—once thought worthless—had been sold at discount to speculators at full value, and establishing an excise tax on whiskey and a tariff on imported goods.
Lee was eager to hear of Hamilton’s plans, even hoping for an early confidential preview. “From your situation you must be able to form with some certainty an opinion concerning the domestic debt—will it speedily rise, will the interest accruing command specie, or anything nearly as valuable, what will become of the indents already issued?” he asked the secretary in the fall of 1789, confessing that the “queries, asked for my private information, perhaps they may be improper.” Hamilton sagely demurred, explaining that giving any such information to a friend might indeed be “misinterpreted” as improper.27
While Lee was originally enthusiastic about Hamilton guiding the nation’s finances, he was horrified when he learned of these plans for the federal government to assume the states’ debts. Speculators who had swindled impoverished soldiers out of bonds after the war were now to be rewarded by the government. States such as Virginia, which had paid off their debts, would now be forced to pay for the outstanding debts of Massachusetts and others. And by Hamilton’s design, it was a plan for boosting American manufacturing, much of which was located in the North, at the expense of the agrarian South.
Lee railed against the plan. He wrote a screed to Madison outlining his objections, which were shared by many in the South. “I am confident it is abhorrent to political wisdom & not strictly consonant to justice,” he proclaimed. The idea of the government’s paying full value for bonds bought from starving soldiers he found “inadmissible.”28
The government’s shouldering the burden for all this debt would just encourage additional debt and discourage frugality: “political tricks of this kind are abominable & dangerous in their effects,” Lee warned Madison. There was also the matter of industry versus agriculture. Lee wondered “how can America expect to flourish under a system calculated only for commercial society.” Americans’ goods came from the earth, and the process of cultivating them nurtured its citizens. God forbid the government ever subverted this in favor of manufacturing and mercantilism. “If this should not be the case,” Lee prophesied, “a change may be worked in our national character which will debase us as men, and destroy us as a people.”29
The Constitution and new government that Lee had placed so much faith in was now creating policies he conceived to be harmful to his country. And, doubly painful, a dear friend was ushering them in. Public sentiment in Virginia turned against Washington’s administration, and Lee, from the floor of the general assembly in Richmond, emerged—in an incredible about-face—as a fierce and eloquent critic of federal policy. He grew increasingly bitter, his language progressively subversive. He spoke of a “monopoly” being imposed from “northern hives,” and an effort to “depress the south and exalt the north,” with talk amongst those in the government that the natural role of the South was “to be slave to the north.”
In a dizzying turn, Lee now viewed Patrick Henry’s opposition to the Constitution as prophetic: “his predictions are daily verifying,” he told Madison. Dramatically and dishonestly, he declared an end to all his political ambitions. “I wish to be done with govt.,” Lee proclaimed. “On the score of tranquility and peace I am also desirous to be quiet, for every day adds new testimony of the growing ill will of the people here to the govt.”30
The policies that Lee believed were the cure—and an end to this “gambling system of finance”—were unlikely to be implemented. So Lee even broached the subject of rending the Union, with all the carnage it would bring: “I had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war & risk the loss of every thing dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent northern majority.”31
The man who was once so attached to union, who had argued so eloquently on its behalf, now strode up to the line of civil war. “But we are committed & we cannot be relieved I fear only by disunion,” he wrote. “To disunite is dreadful to my mind, but dreadful as it is, I consider it a lesser evil than union on the present conditions.”
Lee asked Madison, “How do you feel, what do you think, is your love for the constitution so ardent, as to induce you to adhere to it tho it should produce ruin to your native country. I hope not, I believe not.”32
Meanwhile, Lee’s project on the Potomac was still stalled. Jefferson communicated from France that interest in investment was nil. And the Potomac Company, in order to clear way for canal construction, seized part of the Fairfax property. Lee desperately attempted to scrounge up the necessary funds to pay off the quitrents on the Great Falls property by selling and leasing land in far flung parts of Virginia.
In the summer of 1790 Lee traveled to Ballston Springs in southern New York with Matilda. There it was hoped that mineral springs would once again provide a tonic for Matilda’s ailments. The couple went from there to Albany, where Lee reported that his wife had indeed made some minor progress in the restoration of her health.
There was a new danger though: Matilda was once again pregnant. If her health allowed it, they would return to Stratford in September. At that point, it should be clear whether Lee’s “afflicted wife” would “acquire the strength to go well thru her delivery.” Lee had spent the previous eight months largely focused on her restoration. The dips and small rises in her health vexed him greatly; his political disenchantment and financial troubles compounded the melancholy.33 In July Matilda gave birth to a boy, Nathanael Greene Lee, named for his father’s old general; the child died in early infancy at Stratford, on the twenty-eighth of that month.34
On August 10, alarmed at her husband’s efforts to finance his schemes by leasing and selling land she had inherited, Matilda arranged and, along with Lee, signed a trust deeding Stratford Hall to their children, effectively safeguarding it from future depredations by her husband. Surely she realized the end was drawing near. On August 16, the Divine Matilda died; she was twenty-five years old, a wife for merely eight years, and mother to three living children.35
Weeks later, an old friend offered Henry Lee his sympathy.
“I. . . very sincerely condole with you on your late, and great losses,” Washington wrote from the house of Samuel Osgood, which was the temporary executive residence in New York, “but as the ways of Providence are as inscrutable as just, it becomes the children of it to submit with resignation & fortitude to its decrees as far as the feelings of humanity will allow and your good sense will, I am persuaded, enable you to do this.”36
Lee, mindful of posterity, scribbled “the deaths of my wife & son” at the bottom of the letter.