Richard Henry Lee

Richard Henry Lee was born in 1732 at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into the extended Lee family that dominated the Northern Neck's planter society. He was educated in England before returning to take up his inheritance and enter public life, joining the House of Burgesses in 1758. Lee possessed both a talent for political organizing and a gift for political rhetoric that made him one of the most effective advocates for colonial rights within the Burgesses. He was an early opponent of the Stamp Act, helped organize the colonial boycott of British goods, and worked with Patrick Henry and other firebrands to push the Virginia assembly toward increasingly assertive positions on the question of parliamentary authority.

Lee's most consequential single act came in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, when he rose to introduce a resolution declaring that the colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent states. The Lee Resolution, as it became known, set in motion the formal process that led to Jefferson's drafting of the Declaration of Independence and Congress's vote on independence in July. Lee had been building toward this moment through years of increasingly radical political activity, and the resolution was the logical culmination of a political philosophy he had been developing since his earliest years in the Burgesses. He signed the Declaration when it was formally adopted and continued in Congress through the middle years of the war, serving as one of Virginia's most active delegates during a period when congressional business was both enormously consequential and chronically difficult.

Lee later served as president of the Continental Congress from 1784 to 1785, presiding over the body that ratified the Treaty of Paris and oversaw the initial organization of the Northwest Territory. He opposed the Constitution without a bill of rights as a Virginia Anti-Federalist senator and is credited, alongside George Mason, with forcing the commitment that produced the first ten amendments. He died in 1794, having seen the republic whose independence he had formally proposed take shape around him. His legacy rests above all on that June day in 1776 when he gave Congress the precise language it needed to take the most consequential vote in American history.