Light-Horse Harry: A Biography of Washington’s Great Cavalryman, General Henry Lee (Heroes and Villains from American History) Read online

  LIGHT-HORSE HARRY

  A Biography of Washington’s Great Cavalryman,

  General Henry Lee

  Noel B. Gerson

  For

  George Shively

  Table of Contents

  I: THE PRINCELING

  II: CAPTAIN OF CAVALRY

  III: THE GALLANT BAND

  IV: THE CAPTAIN WINS HIS SPURS

  V: THE PARTIZANS

  VI: THE GRAND ENTERPRISE

  VII: THE TRIAL

  VIII: “LEE’S LEGION”

  IX: DUEL OF THE LEGIONS

  X: THE GRAND DESIGN

  XI: THE LAST VICTORIES

  XII: THE COUNTRY SQUIRE

  XIII: TURMOIL, TROUBLE AND TRAGEDY: THE ACHILLES HEEL

  XIV: THE FIRST CITIZEN OF VIRGINIA

  XV: THE WHISKEY REBELLION

  XVI: THE PART-TIME STATESMAN

  XVII: THE HON. GENTLEMAN FROM VIRGINIA

  XVIII: THE WILDERNESS

  XIX: DON QUIXOTE, WHO TILTS AT WINDMILLS

  XX: “BRAVE DEATH, WHEN PRINCES DIE WITH US”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  If you ride a horse, sit close and tight,

  If you ride a man, sit easy and light.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  I: THE PRINCELING

  The rumor was baseless, totally without foundation and slightly absurd. Nevertheless, many of Henry Lee’s contemporaries believed it, and he himself frequently behaved as though he, too, accepted it as Gospel truth.

  It was said that he came into the world booted and spurred, his spurs made of the purest hand-hammered silver, twirling his saber over his head and shouting, “Charge the bastards! Ride them down, boys!”

  Fact is less romantic than fiction. On January 29, 1756, during a hailstorm, Lucy Grymes Lee, the most celebrated beauty in the colony of Virginia and once the unrequited object of George Washington’s love, presented her husband with their second child and first son. The place was an imposing brick house, Leesylvania, the principal building on an estate of thirty-five hundred acres in Prince William County a few miles from the little town of Dumfries.

  The exhausted Mrs. Lee, who had undergone a brief but painful labor, wept when her clergyman, the Reverend William Preston, informed her that the baby would live and was a remarkably healthy specimen. Her ten-month-old daughter, a sickly infant, had died only a few weeks earlier.

  The child’s enigmatic father, Henry Lee, Jr., who had spent his entire life in the shadow of his two energetic brothers and his dashing father, “Dragoon Harry,” reacted in characteristic fashion. He announced the news to the household staff of twenty to thirty servants, directed that each be given two pounds of boiled bacon, and then retired to his library, where he recorded the event in the family Bible while drinking a stiff tankard of mulled rum.

  Not until the afternoon of the following day did he pay a brief visit to his wife, but he compensated for his tardiness, or so he thought, by presenting her with a half-bolt of linen imported from England that she had admired. In the meantime he had written three letters of inquiry regarding a suitable tutor for his son, painstakingly drawn a sketch of a saddle he wanted made for the boy and paid a visit to his extensive stables, where he selected a foal which, he informed his chief groom, he intended to train himself as a mount for the child.

  Before the day ended he sent short notes to his brothers, telling them of the birth of “Mrs. Lee’s son, Henry.” Aside from these few distractions he refused to alter his daily routines, and although he offered the hospitality of his manor to relatives and friends in a manner befitting a colonial squire, he left their entertainment to his wife, preferring to ride alone across his acres or barricade himself behind a copy of Aristotle’s Politics in his library.

  Charming ladies and handsomely attired gentlemen came to Leesylvania in a steady, daily stream, of course, as both husband and wife were related to the most distinguished families of northern Virginia. The Fairfaxes and Blands and Tyloes came to pay their respects to the proud mother and retiring father, and so did the Wormeleys, Corbins, Turbervilles, and Ludwells, not to mention all the Lees. Almost all were great landowners, and together they comprised the nearest thing to an aristocracy in the Virginia that swore allegiance to His Britannic Majesty, George II.

  The excitement soon subsided, childbirth being commonplace in the Lee family. Lucy bought two competent slaves at the market in Alexandria to take care of the hour-by-hour rearing of her son, and busied herself with the supervision of her household. Her task was formidable, as her staff included a cobbler, tailor, and dressmaker, a part-time herb mixer who also painted rooms when otherwise unoccupied and a carpenter whose chests of oak, chestnut, and cherry were the envy of the county. She made frequent trips to Alexandria and Dumfries to buy foods that weren’t grown on the estate, and habitually spent several hours in the kitchen outbuildings every day supervising the smoking of meats and fish and the preserving of boiled vegetables and fruits.

  Henry Lee, Jr. led an even busier life. His tobacco and corn fields were among the most productive in the colony, thanks to the personal care he lavished on his crops. He was required to make frequent journeys to the capital, Williamsburg, too, as he was one of Prince William County’s two representatives in the colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, where he served faithfully, doggedly, and without distinction for many terms. He considered it his duty to sit there, and apparently it did not occur to his constituents to elect someone more vigorous and incisive in his place. Electors and elected knew what was expected of them, and acted accordingly.

  It was natural that Henry, Jr. should also serve as a justice of the peace and Royal Lieutenant for the county. A Lee accepted such obligations as part of his heritage. Within the family, however, it was freely if discreetly admitted that he was not the most brilliant of men. Although he enjoyed reading, he confined himself to the classics, and seldom joined in literary discussions. Like so many others, he resented the Crown’s refusal to grant greater rights of self-government to England’s North American colonies, but rarely contributed more than a hearty, “I agree!” when the subject of politics was raised at social gatherings.

  Lucy Lee had no intellectual pretensions whatever, and even if she had wanted to exercise her mind, it was doubtful that she could have found the time. Annually, for six years after the birth of her first son, she brought another little Lee into the world. But she remained pretty, sweet, and so cheerful that she unfailingly amazed her closest friend, the childless Martha Washington, with whose husband Henry, Jr. frequently went riding after a late and leisurely breakfast.

  No one expected much of young Henry, who was overshadowed by brilliant, older cousins who were already making colony-wide reputations for themselves when he was a small boy. There was Richard Henry Lee, already a renowned orator and statesman at the time of young Henry’s birth. Richard Henry’s brother, William, who also loved Virginia, had temporarily settled in London, where he was becoming wealthy as a merchant. Another of Richard Henry’s brothers, Arthur, had been unable to decide whether he wanted to be a lawyer or a physician, and had shown so much promise in both fields that, after studying in England, he came home to practice both medicine and law.

  Henry, the quiet son of a quiet father, attracted little notice in his childhood. Relatives agreed that the boy had a natural talent for handling a horse, t
o be sure. He had learned to ride at the age of three or four, perhaps earlier, and when he was only eight he alarmed his father’s good friend, Colonel Washington, by leaping onto the back of a stallion one morning and cantering off gaily.

  He showed an unexpected aptitude for letters, too. The first to realize it was the Reverend Preston, the Anglican clergyman who had married his parents. Paying a visit to Leesylvania in 1762, Preston was startled when the six-year-old boy greeted him in faultless Latin. The following year the child expressed a desire to learn French, but his request was considered unpatriotic, as Virginia was unable to forget the humiliating and costly raids made on the colony’s western outposts during the earlier days of the devastating French and Indian War.

  Certainly Henry Lee became accustomed to luxury from earliest childhood. On cold mornings a slave lighted a fire in his chamber before he climbed out of his feather bed, another brought him a mug of hot tea and a third helped him dress. He ate off fine plate with knives and forks of heavy silver, wore shirts of superbly woven lawn, and accepted the homage of tradesmen as his due. A tutor, two cousins, and an uncle taught him to fence, his father made him familiar with both pistols and the long frontier rifles that were so much more popular in the colonies than cumbersome English muskets, and when he was ten he owned three horses, two geldings and a mare. At twelve he had acquired a library of his own, consisting of more than sixty books, at least ten of them in Latin.

  By the time he was fourteen years old, the daughters of neighbors thought Henry strikingly handsome. He was tall, and still growing, eventually reaching a height of five feet nine, which was considerable in the eighteenth century. He had inherited his mother’s fair hair, which he wore long, fastening it at the nape of his neck with an eelskin. His eyes were blue, rather piercing and alert, and he seemed to be the only member of his immediate family endowed with an ironic sense of humor. Already husky, he was growing still more muscular, and a quick, sometimes uncontrollable temper, his worst character trait, caused other boys to weigh their words in his presence.

  At fourteen Henry embarked on the first independent venture of his life. Accompanied by the son of family friends, James Madison of Orange, and his own brother, Charles, who was only thirteen, he set out for the College of New Jersey, an institution of higher learning located in the town of Princeton that members of the Virginia aristocracy considered the equal of Harvard and Yale. The three boys, traveling on horseback by slow stages, made the journey in ten days, and found themselves in a strange, Spartan, and awe-inspiring world.

  The college had one building, Nassau Hall, where one hundred students from the thirteen colonies slept and ate, studied and worshiped. Only the sons of the wealthy could afford the education offered at Princeton, for the total annual fee, which included the washing of clothes and bedlinen, wood for fires and assistance rendered young gentlemen by servants, as well as tuition, room, and board, was a stunning twenty-five pounds and six shillings.

  Henry and his colleagues were fortunate youths. The Reverend Dr. John Witherspoon was the president of the College of New Jersey, and no eighteenth-century educator in the colonies — or in England, for that matter — was more ambitious or enlightened. A strict disciplinarian, a Scotsman who loved Edinburgh only a shade less passionately than he did the New World, Witherspoon was a farsighted, dedicated man. Believing college curriculums too limited in scope, he had added courses in debating, literature, and science to the school’s program in 1768. Courses in Hebrew and Greek were obligatory, and in 1770 a course in French was also added.

  Aware of the tendency of young men to band together, he encouraged the formation of undergraduate societies, to which he granted special privileges. When a student broke one of his many rules, however, he was swift in inflicting punishment. A rebellious undergraduate received only one warning; when he erred a second time, he was expelled, and sent home in permanent disgrace.

  Daily life at the school was rigorous. Dr. Witherspoon himself walked through the corridors at five o’clock every morning, clanging a large bell, and was followed by a corps of servants who literally threw out of bed those undergraduates too sleepy to respond to the president’s summons.

  At 5:30 A.M. faculty and students gathered in the chapel for a half-hour of prayer and a crisp sermon. At six o’clock, spiritually refreshed, the students marched in order of seniority into the library for two hours of reading in philosophy, history, metaphysical science, the principles of public law and the “canons of criticism and taste.” More often than not, there were also original literary compositions to write.

  The doors of the dining hall were opened at eight, and the ravenous young men broke their fast with a light breakfast of either grilled meat or fish, washed down with coffee or tea. Food and drink were secondary, however, as tutors spent an hour cross-examining the undergraduates on their previous day’s labors.

  Formal classes began at nine, and for the next four hours the students took notes at formal lectures. Attendance was compulsory, and sleeping in class was strictly forbidden. The undergraduates were required to maintain a respectful silence at all times, and only seniors were granted the privileges of wearing hats and taking snuff in class.

  At one o’clock Dr. Witherspoon again rang a bell that signaled the most welcome respite of the day. The students trooped back into the dining hall for a hearty meal of soup, fish, meat, vegetables, and the sour fruit tarts which Witherspoon enjoyed more than all other food. “To this day,” Madison wrote during his second term as President of the United States, “the mere sight of a fruit cutlet sends a shudder up my spine.”

  No one dared to question Dr. Witherspoon’s personally dictated menus, and teenaged boys were usually so hungry they ate anything placed before them. “I found dinner tolerably good,” Henry Lee wrote in later years. “Breads, gravies, and potatoes were always in plentiful supply, and only rarely were we unable to obtain a third helping of meat.”

  Small beer and hard cider were available in pewter pitchers on every table at dinner, and the lordly seniors, who sat at a table of their own, were allowed to drink ale and mead, too, if they paid for it out of their own pockets.

  All classes were allowed the luxury of free time until three in the afternoon. The diligent studied or discussed their current work, and the lazy who retired to their own rooms for naps were soon chagrined to discover that if they did not mend their ways they would fail. Witherspoon was a perfectionist who allowed the slimmest margins of error.

  Lectures were resumed for two hours at three o’clock, when there was another pause for prayers and a light snack of buttered bread and hot chocolate. Princeton students were expected to be young gentlemen, and at six everyone retired to his room to dress for the evening in tailcoat and silk stock, satin breeches, white stockings, and silver-buckled shoes. The wearing of powdered wigs was not mandatory, but no self-respecting undergraduate thought of appearing without one. Those old enough to need a razor also shaved, and at six-thirty the entire undergraduate body convened in the assembly hall to hear another sermon.

  At seven the students went to their rooms, and thereafter the tutors constantly roamed the corridors to make certain that every undergraduate was studying at his work desk. At eleven o’clock the indefatigable Witherspoon rang his bell for the last time, and all candles were extinguished, the young men undressing in the dark.

  The routines were relaxed on Saturday afternoons, when students went for rides or walks in the countryside. On Sundays chapel services were held at eleven in the morning, and at six on Sunday evenings the undergraduate societies held their own meetings, which featured the singing of psalms, the recitation of prayers and the delivery of sermons by students themselves. Only illness, certified by a physician and approved by Witherspoon himself, excused a student from any day’s routine.

  The moral tone of the undergraduate body was remarkably high, and the standards were those of a theological seminary. Under no circumstances were females admitted to Nassau Hall, and i
t was considered bad form for anyone who had an affair with a girl in the town of Princeton or elsewhere to boast of his amatory exploits. Gaming, cock fighting, and the drinking of distilled liquor were forbidden on penalty of instant expulsion. Anyone who cursed or used “foul, vulgar, and impure language” was subjected to a private lecture in Dr. Witherspoon’s office. Students who engaged in fist fights with each other or outsiders were caned by the president in a public ceremony before being placed on suspension, and those who committed “moral wrongs” were expected to stand up before the entire student body at special meetings held at three o’clock every Sunday afternoon and confess their sins.

  Healthy young men needed outlets for their energies, however, and Saturday evenings were devoted to convivial gatherings at which popular songs were sung and the musically talented played flutes and guitars. Practical joking was common, too. On cold winter nights Dr. Witherspoon’s hated bell frequently disappeared, and when he found it at dawn, its clapper was frozen in a solid block of ice. New students were awakened by explosions of gunpowder in their rooms, and the undergraduate outhouse was burned to the ground with monotonous regularity. Raids on the brothels of Princeton were common, and any student who stole a bawd’s corset, stockings, or shift was considered the hero of the hour by his peers.

  The good citizens of Princeton complained that their chickens, ducks, and geese frequently disappeared, but their charges were never proved, even though the scent of roasted fowl was often strong in the hearths of the students’ rooms. Underpaid tutors, some of them recent graduates, were happy to close their eyes and accept a succulent bribe. Feathers from the same mysterious sources were also put to use. Dripping with grease, they were hurled by the bucketload into the rooms of unpopular students.

  Late in Henry’s freshman year a major scandal erupted when Dr. Witherspoon discovered several ingeniously contrived telescopes in sleeping quarters located on the top floor of Nassau Hall. Looking through them, he was shocked to discover they were trained on the bedchamber of an attractive young woman in the neighborhood. The penalty was a particularly long and depressing sermon, but no one was expelled because, as Henry wrote to a friend in Prince William County, “nearly the whole of my class, which is housed on that floor, is involved.”