THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606280150
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 479 lines
WHEN IN THE COURSE of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. . . .''
The Declaration of Independence. Most of us have read it at least once. Some of us may even have memorized it as part of some academic torture. That is good. It is our American birthright.
The concept was first presented to the Second Continental Congress by a Virginian, its text largely written by another Virginian.
Today we regard it, of all our nobly phrased historic documents, as our most cherished expression of the American dream.
It is a persuasive and eloquent statement of the ``causes'' that forced the Colonials to dissolve their political ties with Great Britain. It enumerated the significant personal rights that public government must preserve, rights that embodied life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But try to think of it for a moment in the context of the times, try to think what must have gone through the minds of those 56 delegates - seven of them representing Virginia, the most populous colony - who unanimously signed their names to this revolutionary document.
The words on that piece of parchment were seditious. Together these men had committed an act of treason.
And already the war had begun, one which the American Colonies were ill-prepared to wage - a small guerrilla army against the world's most powerful nation. On the surface the situation appeared ludicrous. A late 20th century equivalent might be, say, the Viet Cong of Vietnam taking on the United States.
The war had started at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, and by the summer of 1776 it had spread southward to Great Bridge and Norfolk in Virginia (see story, page Ex) and on beyond to Charleston in South Carolina.
The consequences of a British victory were, well. . . .
Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin said, ``We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.'' There is no contemporary record of his having said that, but it is something the old almanac-writer probably would have said. The quote first appeared as an anecdote related to Franklin in 1840.
Certainly the noose wasn't far from the signers' thoughts.
They risked death by hanging for themselves, poverty and dishonor for their families.
There was, in fact, much gallows humor at the signing. Said the corpulent Benjamin Harrison of Virginia to the frail Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, ``It will be over for me in a minute, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone.''
Many must have paused to read again the last words of the Declaration as they signed: ``. . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.''
Who were the seven Virginians who made that personal commitment on behalf of their fellow citizens, who put so much on the line for future generations of Americans?
Their names: Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Thomas Nelson Jr., Benjamin Harrison and Carter Braxton. If your history teacher was a Virginian, born and bred, you probably got extra credit for knowing that.
Their average age at the time was 42; Jefferson, author of the Declaration, was the youngest at 33, Wythe and Harrison the oldest at 50.
How did they subsequently fare, with regard to their lives, fortunes and honor?
Because America won the war, there were no hangings. Six of the seven lived more or less full lives - two became octogenarians - and died of natural causes; the seventh, Wythe, was poisoned.
All are buried in the Virginia soil to which they were devoted.
The fortunes of each suffered to some extent, though not necessarily because of the war.
The sacred honor of all remained unblemished by this and subsequent actions, and that of most was greatly enhanced - perhaps none more so that that of Nelson.
Six of the seven were principally country gentlemen (Wythe was a lawyer, as was, occasionally, his former pupil, Jefferson). Six of the seven (again Wythe is the exception) inherited considerable wealth and property. All were regarded as aristocrats in Virginia's Colonial culture.
As was the custom and practice of the landed gentry, all had married well, which is to say to women whose families were as least as wealthy, politically connected and socially prominent as theirs were.
Five of the seven had what passed for formal higher education - Jefferson, Harrison and Braxton had attended William and Mary, Nelson and R.H. Lee had been schooled in England. Frank Lee had been educated by private tutors. Perhaps the most scholarly of the lot, Wythe, was largely self-educated and later taught law at W&M and at his private school in Richmond.
Three - Harrison, Braxton and Nelson - were related through a ``King'' ancestor, Robert ``King'' Carter, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the early colony.
Two were brothers, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee - the only brothers to sign the Declaration of Independence. Later they would become the only brothers to sign the Articles of Confederation.
Only one, Nelson, would risk his life on the field of battle.
One, Jefferson, would become the third president of the fledgling nation, and one, Harrison, would have a son and a great-grandson gain the presidency.
They were, in sum, a composite of Virginia's ruling elite.
But these seven Virginians were decidedly NOT of one mind. Not that they differed significantly from political operatives in any other period of time - no more so than, say, within the Virginia Republican Party today.
A decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams of Massachusetts still was puzzled by the ``jealousies and divisions'' in the Virginia delegation. Wythe put the blame on Richard Henry Lee. He had been the central figure in a long-simmering and particularly acrimonious political feud, which, said Wythe (who was Lee's close friend), ``made him so many enemies that he never had recovered his reputation, but was still heartily hated by great numbers.''
R.H. Lee's most ardent opponent was Harrison.
Generally, the Virginia delegation lined up this way:
The Lee brothers were linked with Massachusetts radicals John and Samuel Adams and their independence-now outlook. Wythe and Jefferson were beginning to share that viewpoint. Nelson, despite his affection for things English, had sided with his friend Jefferson against every British effort to tax the Colonies.
Only kinsmen Harrison and Braxton, spokesmen for the Tidewater political leadership of the James-York region, could be called conservative on the independence question most ardently pushed by the Northeastern delegations.
The political intrigue among the Virginia delegates was to cost the sharp-tempered Richard Henry Lee a place on the committee that drafted the Declaration - a place that by all rights should have been his for first proposing such a resolution on June 7.
The Virginia delegation demanded that Harrison, not R.H. Lee, be on the committee. The conservative Harrison, however, was too much for the New Englanders. The compromise was the quiet Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson's quill pen was to speak with thundering eloquence. If the words he wrote were treason, they would come to be regarded, in America and throughout the free world today, as honorable treason. Jefferson would become Liberty's philosopher and one of the nation's great political icons.
An Albemarle County agrarian aristocrat by inheritance, he became a competent modern humanist with far-ranging interests - law, agriculture, botany, astronomy, invention, architecture, education.
He would become a much-troubled and often-maligned governor of an impoverished Virginia during the closing years of the Revolutionary War. His most prominent detractor was Henry ``Light-Horse Harry'' Lee, a cousin of signers R.H. and Frank Lee.
As wartime governor he was pursued by British Col. Banastre ``Bloody'' Tarleton and nearly captured at Monticello (escaping by 10 minutes). The redcoats did little damage to the vacated house, but they severely depleted the stock in his wine cellar. About the same time, other British troops under Gen. Lord Cornwallis virtually destroyed Jefferson's estate at Elk Hill on the upper James River.
Later Jefferson would serve as minister to France, first U.S. secretary of state, second vice president and third president.
In his eyes, his most significant achievements - the ONLY ones he wished inscribed on the simple obelisk that marks his grave at his beloved Monticello - were: author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom and father of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson was one of only three of the 56 signers to live through the first 50 years of American independence. Both he and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. Jefferson was 83, Adams 90. Maryland's Charles Carroll of Carrollton was to live until 1832, dying at 95.
On June 24, 1826, 10 days before his death, Jefferson wrote a letter - the last words from his pen - declining an invitation to participate in a July 4 Jubilee celebration in Washington. In it he spoke of the choice he and his fellow signers had made:
``May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.''
George Wythe (pronounced ``with'' to rhyme with Smith) of Williamsburg was perhaps the foremost classical scholar in Virginia and was generally regarded as the most eminent professor of law in the Colonies. Jefferson referred to him as ``my faithful and beloved Mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life.''
Although R.H. Lee was the senior delegate at the Second Continental Congress, he and the rest of the Virginians deferred to the hawk-nosed and balding Wythe. It is Wythe's name that appears at the top of the Virginia signers, followed by R.H. Lee, although both were absent from the formal signing and added their names later in the space left for them by their colleagues.
In 1779 Wythe was appointed to the newly established chair of law at William and Mary (at Gov. Jefferson's urging), becoming the first person to hold such a chair at an American university. Among his early students was John Marshall.
Wythe would later be a member of the Constitutional Convention (1787) and the Virginia Convention (1788) that ratified the federal Constitution. He became a chancery judge in 1778. After leaving W&M for judicial duties in the new capital at Richmond, he opened a private school of law. Among his students there was Henry Clay.
His home on the Palace Green in Williamsburg, a wedding gift from his wife's amateur architect father, Richard Taliaferro, is a showplace in the restored Colonial capital.
Wythe died tragically in 1806 at the age of 90, a little before his time had come. It is said he was poisoned with arsenic in his coffee by his grand-nephew, George Wythe Sweeney, later charitably described as ``an impatient heir.'' Sweeney was acquitted of the murder in a trail in which the only witness was, as a Negro, disqualified from testifying.
Wythe owned a large number of slaves, one of whom he taught Latin and Greek, and he freed them all in his will, establishing a trust for their care. He left his ``books and small philosophical apparatus'' and his ``silver cups and goldheaded cane'' to Jefferson.
He was buried in the shadows of St. John's Church in Richmond, where, in 1775, he had heard Patrick Henry proclaim, ``Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? . . . I know not what course others may take, but as for me, Give me liberty or give me death.''
Richard Henry Lee of Westmoreland County was the most complex of Virginia's signers. He was self-centered, self-righteous and aggressive, frequently influenced by anger and envy. Despite his imposing appearance, he was frail and accident-prone; he suffered from epilepsy and sometimes drank to excess.
The fingers on his left hand were blown off in a hunting accident when he was 34 and he kept the hand, except for the thumb, covered with black silk. Despite his maimed hand, he was colonel of the Westmoreland County militia. Delegates at the Continental Congress always addressed him as ``colonel.''
R.H. Lee might be looked upon with some degree of sympathy as a tragic figure in this American political drama if he were not so detested - a situation largely of his own making.
Early in his career he made two political choices - one was to impugn the honor of virtually every Virginia family of prominence, the other to attack the very basis of Virginia plantation society, slavery - the consequences of which, quite naturally, were to affect him for more than 30 years.
First he made suggestions of financial malfeasance against John Robinson II, head of the colony's old guard and closely connected with the King Carter dynasty, a man who also headed a land acquisition company that was a rival of one founded by Lees.
Robinson was speaker of the House of Burgesses for so long (27 years) that he was known as Speaker Robinson. He was also the colony's treasurer, as was the custom of the time.
Turns out, an audit after Robinson's death in 1766 showed that Lee's charges were substantially true. During a depression that gripped Virginia in the middle of the 18th century, Robinson had lent public money to many friends in unsecured and unrecorded loans to keep them from bankruptcy.
Curiously, R.H. Lee himself had been recipient of a 12-pound loan.
It was a scandal that, in Virginia, would have made Watergate look like a third-rate burglary.
Second, he denounced Negro bondage and the trade that fostered it, earning for himself unforgiven emnity across Virginia. In today's society this action would be deemed politically correct. It would be said that he took the moral high ground and suffered a martyr's fate. But not in an 18th century Virginia society built of a labor-intensive tobacco economy when slaves were regarded not as human beings but as farm implements.
Curiously again, Lee later would be active as a slave dealer - something gentlemen just didn't do, at least not overtly.
What R.H. Lee could do better than most was speak. A contemporary called him the ``American Cicero.''
In June 1776, Thomas Nelson Jr. arrived in Philadelphia with a letter from the Virginia convention instructing its delegation to introduce a resolution calling for independence. On June 7, Col. Lee, 44 and the senior member of the Virginia delegation, rose and spoke:
``Be it resolved that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
``That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances.
``That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.''
A committee was formed. R.H. Lee was not included. His enemies prevailed. He was humiliated, a humiliation from which he would never recover.
R.H. continued to serve in the Continental Congress until ill health forced him to resign in 1779; he was back in 1784-87, acting as president in '84. He became senior senator from Virginia in the first federal Congress in 1789, serving until 1792, when he retired from public life.
He died in 1794 at age 61 at his Chantilly home in Westmoreland County, a three-mile walk from his ancestral home, Stratford Hall. His body was carried down the Potomac to the Burnt House Field burying ground - surrounded by a brick wall at the end of a dirt road in the middle of a wheat field, it seems adrift at sea - on the site of an early Lee plantation called Machadoc near Hague.
He was buried beside his first wife, Anne Aylett; two years later his widow, Anne Gaskins Pinckard, joined them.
His tomb is inscribed with the words of brother Thomas Ludwell Lee in 1776 when he implored R.H., humiliated by being denied a place on the Declaration draft committee, to come home from Philadelphia to guide the drafting of a constitution for Virginia:
``We can not do without you.''
Francis Lightfoot Lee of Richmond County seemed in many ways to be the antithesis of his older brother: a calm, quiet, genial, bookish man, who entered political struggles reluctantly, but with a sense of duty.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Pennsylvania delegate, contended that the then 41-year-old Frank, as he was called, had ``a more acute and correct mind'' than Richard Henry's.
When Frank came of age, he inherited an estate in distant Loudoun County on the Potomac above what is now Washington. The county seat of Leesburg was named in honor of Frank and older brother Thomas Ludwell. Frank was duly elected to the House of Burgesses.
When Frank married Rebecca Tayloe, a distant cousin and at 17 half his age, Becky's dad, the wealthy Col. John Tayloe, made the couple a gift of 1,000 acres of his Mount Airy estate in Richmond County. There they built a grand house and called it Menokin.
After the Declaration, Frank remained in the Continental Congress through 1779, after which he retired to Menokin to commiserate with R.H.
He died at Menokin in 1797, just 10 days after Becky's death, at the age of 62, and was buried in the local parish graveyard. Frank's and Becky's remains were moved 30 years later to Mount Airy, a private estate still in the Tayloe family, a mile west of Warsaw, the Richmond County seat.
Benjamin Harrison of Charles City County was the fifth in succession to bear that Christian name. His mother was the oldest of King Carter's five daughters to marry.
He was called by one contemporary ``an indolent, luxurious, heavy gentleman'' and a ``lusty, blustery joke teller'' by another, but behind the layers of fat and the convivial personality lay one of the ablest political minds in the Colonies.
New Englanders hated Harrison, and he detested them as much as he did Richard Henry Lee. But enough of the delegates saw his merits to select him a permanent chairman whenever Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole - an arrangement that allowed delegates to discuss issues and vote on them off the record. He presided in that capacity when the Declaration of Independence was reported.
Afterward, he served in the House of Delegates in 1777 and as that body's speaker in 1778-81. He then served three successive one-year terms as governor before returning to the House of Delegates. He opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights.
During the war, Harrison's Berkeley plantation on the James was looted by troops under turncoat redcoat Benedict Arnold but was spared the torch.
Harrison died in 1791 at the age of 65 and was buried at Berkeley, which is open for public tours. His headstone was stolen when federal troops occupied the grounds during the Civil War.
His principal legacy to the nation was two of his offspring: son William Henry Harrison, who chose a military career, became the ninth U.S. president and the first to die in office after only 30 days; great-grandson Benjamin Harrison VI became the 23rd U.S. president.
Carter Braxton of King William County probably experienced more personal grief and misfortune than any of the other Virginia signers, although none could be attributable to his political activity.
His mother, youngest of King Carter's daughters to marry, died at his birth. His first wife also died at the birth of their second child, and six of the 16 children from that marriage died in infancy. His home, the first Chericoke, burned the week before Christmas, 1776, and cousin Benjamin Harrison mourned all the ``fine Liquors'' in Braxton's famous wine cellar that no doubt fueled the flames.
Braxton had inherited a great fortune, but early on it began to get away from him and his financial situation declined steadily and severely simply because he was not a good businessman. He was the beneficiary of Speaker Robinson's largess to the extent of 3,848 pounds, a very large sum in those days.
Braxton was a reluctant signer, but not because of his fondness for things English. He hated everything about New Englanders, who were pushing independence most strongly. But mostly he was reluctant for practical reasons.
He felt ``America is too defenseless a state,'' the lack of allies troubled him, and he feared civil war along the Colonies, among which land disputes already simmered.
Braxton, 39, favored first establishing a ``grand continental league'' and a ``superintending power'' before declaring independence.
``When these necessary steps are taken,'' he said, ``and I see a coalition formed sufficient to withstand the power of Britain, or any other, then I am for an independent state and all its consequences, as then I think they will produce happiness to America. It is a true saying of a wit - `we must hang together of separately.' ''
That hanging thing again. Maybe the legend springs from Braxton, not Franklin.
Braxton served in the Virginia legislature from 1776 until his death in Richmond in 1797 at the age of 61.
It is not known for certain whether he was buried in Richmond or, as family tradition says, at Chericoke. There is no grave marker for Braxton in the family burial plot under a large magnolia tree on the private Chericoke estate, owned by a descendant.
Thomas Nelson Jr. of Yorktown was not really a ``junior'' but a ``II.'' He was the grandson of Thomas ``Scotch Tom'' Nelson and the son of William Nelson, both of whom presided over the King's Council in Virginia, sort of the upper house of the legislature but really more like the present-day president's cabinet for its members were appointed, in the king's name, by the royal governor as his principal advisors.
His mother was a granddaughter of King Carter, making him a second cousin once removed of both Harrison and Braxton.
Nelson was educated at Eton and Cambridge in England and was elected, sight unseen, by York County to the House of Burgesses while the young squire was still at sea on his way home. He was then 21. At 25 he was elevated to the council.
After he had signed the Declaration at age 37 he told a colleague ``that he was the only person out of nine or 10 Virginians that were sent with him to England for education that had taken part in the American Revolution. The rest were all Tories.''
Take part he did. Resigning from Congress because of ill health after signing the Declaration, Nelson was named, in 1777, commander in chief of the state militia. In '79 he again was a member of Congress, and again he resigned for health reasons.
In '80, on his own security, he raised public money for Virginia and paid many military debts out of his own substantial private funds. By 1781 he was both governor of Virginia, succeeding Jefferson, and commander of Virginia's troops at the siege of Yorktown.
There he gave orders to his soldiers to blow up his own splendid house as the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, approached to occupy it, offering five guineas to the first gunner to hit it. The house was damaged, and a cannonball, carefully preserved, still lodges in the wall.
After the war the ex-governor and ex-general was reduced to near poverty. He sold his property to pay the debts he had acquired as his financial contribution to the war efforts and moved to Henrico County near Richmond.
When the Virginia General Assembly debated the cancellation of all war debts to English firms, Nelson rose and stated: ``Others may do as they please; but, as for me, I am an honest man and, so help me God, I will pay my debts.''
Nelson was the first of Virginia's signers to die. He went to his grave a pauper in 1789 at the age of 51 and was buried without a tombstone at the foot of his father's plot at Grace Church in Yorktown. Only in this century was a marker provided.
It is inscribed: ``He gave all for Liberty.'' MEMO: This report draws heavily on information contained in ``Honorable
Treason; The Declaration of Independence and the Men Who Signed It'' by
David Freeman Hawke, and ``The Lees of Virginia; Seven Generations of an
American Family'' by Paul G. Nagel, as well as scores of primary and
secondary sources in the Virginia archives of the Sargeant Memorial Room
at Norfolk's Kirn Library. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Called by one contemporary a ``lusty, blustery joke teller,''
Benjamin Harrison was nevertheless one of the ablest political minds
in the Colonies. He died in 1791 at age 65 and is buried at Berkeley
Plantation.
TOP: Buried at his Chantilly home in Westmoreland County, Richard
Henry Lee was the most complex of the Virginia signers. He was
reknowned for his speaking abilities, yet was frequently influenced
by anger and envy. He died at age 61 in 1794.
ABOVE: Buried at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson was the author of the
Declaration. He would become Liberty's philosopher and one of the
nation's icons. He died at age 83, 50 years, to the day, after the
signing.
Carter Braxton served in the Virginia legislature until his death in
1797 at age 61. There is no grave marker for him in the family
burial plot on the Chericoke estate in King William County.
Francis Lightfoot Lee, calmer and quieter than his brother, remained
in the Continental Congress through 1779, after which he retired. He
died in 1797 at age 62 and is buried at Mount Airy in Richmond
County.
Commander of Virginia's troops at the siege of Yorktown, Thomas
Nelson Jr. paid military debts out of his own funds. He went to his
grave a pauper in 1789 at age 51 and was buried at Grace Church in
Yorktown.
A classical scholar, George Wythe taught law and was a member of the
Constitutional Convention in 1787. He died of poisoning in 1806 at
age 90 and is buried at St. John's Church in Richmond.
The seven Virginia signers all put their lives on the line for
freedom, but they were decidedly not of one mind.
Map
Graphic
KEN WRIGHT/The Virginian-Pilot
GRAVE SITES
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB