Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1892, volume 3).djvu/700

684 of the governor's council. He married Miss Corbin. of Staffordshire, and left five sons, Richard, Phil- ip, Thomas. Francis, Henry, and one daughter, who married the second William Fitzhugh. — Thomas, third son of the preceding, d. in Virginia in 1750, was for many years president of the council. He organized a company for the exploration

and settlement of lands in the Ohio valley, but the scheme was premature and unsuccessful. It is said that he once remarked to one of his friends that he " had no doubt this country would in time declare itself independent of Great Britain, and that the seat of its government would be near the little falls of the Potomac river." At the time of his death he had just been appointed royal gov- ernor of Virginia. During his life the original manor-house, built by Richard, was burned, and Queen Caroline sent him a sum of money with which to replace it. He then built Stratford House, which is represented in the illustration, and which is still standing. He married Hannah, daughter of Col. Philip Ludwell, of Green Spring, near Williamsburg, whose father had been gov- ernor of North Carolina. By this marriage he had six sons, Philip Ludwell, Thomas Ludwell, Rich- ard Henry, Francis Lightfoot, William, and Ar- thur, and two daughters. — His second son, Thomas Ludwell, statesman, b. in Stafford, Va., about 1730; d. in 1777, studied law and was admitted to the bar. He took an active part in public affairs, was a member of the Virginia house of burgesses, a delegate to the conventions of July and December, 1775, and was also a member of the committee of safety. In the convention of May, 1776, he was appointed one of a commit- tee to draft a declaration of rights and a plan of government. On the organization of the Vir- ginia state government he was one of the five " revisors," and was afterward elected a judge of the general court. — Richard Henry, statesman, b. in Stratford, Westmoreland co., Va., 20 Jan., 1732; d. in Chantilly, Va., 19 June, 1794, was third son of Thomas. At an early age he was sent over to England and educated at the academy of Wakefield in Yorkshire. In 1752 he returned to Virginia. The wealth of his family was such that it was not necessary for him to earn a liv- ing, but, without any view to professional prac- tice, he applied himself with great diligence to the study of law. Not only English but Roman law occupied his attention, and he was an earnest student of history. In 1757 he was appointed justice of the peace for Westmoreland county. In 1761 he was elected to the house of burgesses, of which he remained a member until 1788. Extreme diffidence for some time prevented his taking any part in the debates. His first speech was on a motion " to lay so heavy a duty on the importation of slaves as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic within the colony of Virginia." On this occasion his hatred of slavery overcame his diffidence, and he made a powerful speech containing the germs of the prin- cipal arguments used in later days by the northern Abolitionists. He was an energetic opponent of the stamp-act, and in 1765 formed an association of citizens of Westmoreland county for the pur- pose of deterring all persons from undertaking to sell stamped paper. A Tory gentleman in the neighborhood accepted the office of stamp-collector, and boasted that he would force the stamped pa- per upon the people in spite of all opposition. Mr. Lee, being then captain _of a volunteer com- pany of light horse, at once went with his men to this gentleman's house and made him deliver up his commission as collector and all the stamped paper in his possession, and bind himself by oath never again to meddle with such matters ; the commission and the obnoxious paper were there- upon burned with due ceremony in a bonfire on the lawn. At the news of the Townshend acts of 1767, Mr. Lee moved, in the house of burgesses, a petition to the king, setting forth in pointed terms the grievances of the colonies. In July, 1768, he wrote a letter to John Dickinson, suggest- ing that all the colonies should appoint select committees " for mutual information and corre- spondence between the lovers of liberty in every province." The suggestion was in harmony with the views of the famous "circular letter'* of the Massachusetts assembly, written by Samuel Adams and lately sent forth to all the colonies. There has been some discussion as to whether Adams or Lee is to be credited with the first suggestion of those remarkable " committees of correspondence " which organized the American Revolution. The earliest sugges- tion of such a step, however, is to be found in a letter from the great Boston preacher, Jona- than Mayhew, to James Otis, in June, 1766. The letter just men- tioned from Lee to Dickinson seems to have come next in point of date, and at the same time Christopher Gadsden appears  to have received   from Lee a letter  of similar purport. Mr. Lee may or may not have heard of Mayhcw's suggestion. The idea was one that might naturally have occurred to several of these eminent men independently. The machinery of committees of correspondence was first actually set in motion by Samuel Adams, as between the towns of Massachusetts, in 1772. The project of in- tercolonial committees was first put into practical shape by the Virginia house of burgesses in the spring of 1773, on motion of the youthful Dabney Carr, brother-in-law of Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Lee was a member of the Virginia committee then ap- pointed, and about this time he wrote to Samuel Adams a letter, which was the beginning of the life- long friendship between the two great leaders. In August, 1774, Mr. Lee was chosen delegate to the 1st Continental congress just about to assemble at