Today, "Light-Horse Harry" Lee is better known for his son—Robert E. Lee—than for his own accomplishments. At one time, generations of American schoolchildren and quiz-show contestants could recite the most famous line from his eulogy for his great commander, George Washington: "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen."
The line to Harper that I've just quoted, however, though less eloquent, has an unexpected relevance for readers today—for this member of a proud Virginia dynasty had decided he must leave the nation he'd helped establish, in order to avoid the creditors who were increasingly haunting him.
As a kid, you're simultaneously most able to absorb new ideas and, because of your hyperactivity, least inclined to assimilate them. It can be especially difficult to absorb history—a matter not helped by the fact that all human interest is leeched out of most texts. When you're talking about early Virginia, with all those horses and wigs and vast country estates maintained by slaves, the distance from now to then can seem hopelessly vast.
I think adult Americans, however, would find it compelling to learn about Lee and his class—especially so in these last few weeks. For some words and phrases in the story of how Light-Horse Harry Lee—Revolutionary War cavalryman, three-term Virginia governor, author, planter, businessman—came to ruin come up repeatedly in the last month: Real estate. Speculation. Debt. Creditors. Loss. Bankruptcy.
At some point, I’d love to get my hands on a title I learned about recently: Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence, by Bruce H. Mann. It describes how traditional notions of manhood, honor and dependency began to give way to debtors’ invocation of the rights of man as an argument against imprisoning debtors—though too late for Lee.
The Democratic-Republicans that drove Lee's Federalists into the political wilderness for good—Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—would have their own troubles with debt two decades after Lee's troubles. But much of that had to do with the precipitous decline of the Virginia economy in the 1820s.
Lee's troubles derived from a different source: the real estate bubble that occurred in the early-to-mid 1790s. People with great visions for the new nation, especially George Washington, saw endless opportunity in land. In particular, Virginia held immense promise, with the capital of the United States being moved south and with the Potomac River opening commerce to the trans-Appalachian region—a way to diversify the state's economy away from tobacco and slaves.
Washington was an active but seldom imprudent speculator, and his micromanagement of Mount Vernon, even while commander of the Continental Army and America's first President, cushioned him when the financial winds shifted. Two associates were not so fortunate:
* Robert Morris, the "Financier of the Revolution," who managed to put desperately needed funds at hand for Washington and his troops, got in over his head over investments in the West and along the Potomac—along with construction of an unfinished mansion that became known as "Morris' Folly"—went awry. In 1798 he was thrown into a Philadelphia debtor's prison. The experience broke him. When he came out three years later, his health was broken. He lived out his last five years through an annuity arranged by his old assistant, Gouverneur Morris.
* James Wilson, one of only six men to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was so hailed for his judicial sagacity that he became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. That didn't prevent creditors from hounding him so much that he could not attend sessions of the high court because he feared arrest. Eventually they did catch up to him, in Burlington, N.J. Still pursued for uncollected debt, he high-tailed down to the North Carolina home of fellow Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, where he contracted malaria and died in 1798. (For the relationships between the two justices and their wives—including a possible affair between Iredell and Wilson's much younger, pretty second wife, Hannah—see Natalie Wexler's fascinating account in The American Scholar.)
When it came to indebtedness, early American law was modeled on English common law. In the 1790s, when Morris, Wilson and Lee came a cropper, there was still no federal bankruptcy law. The welter of state laws created for debtors a hydra-headed situation in which even imprisonment did not always satisfy financial obligations.
Brave and warm-hearted, Light-Horse Harry lacked his great chief’s hard-won realism about national and personal governance. If a list could be compiled of 20 financial no-nos, Lee could probably be faulted for violating 19 of these, including:
* Lack of documentation of claims;
* Loaning $40,000 to someone (Morris) unable to repay him;
*Lack of priorities in spending his time—e.g., writing a 30-page manuscript on the evils of Thomas Jefferson at a time when he could have been putting his financial house in order;
* Selling lands whose titles were often in doubt;
* Selling land whose dimensions and boundaries were imprecise—for instance, buying what he believed to be a 300,000-acre tract, selling it to New England investors, only to have them stop payment when they learned it was only 133,874 acres;
* Writing a bad check for a friend helping him pay his debts;
* Buying land he couldn’t see even while being forced to sell land he knew, as when he insanely bought a tract in Georgia even as he coughed up Virginia property.
Even Lee’s first wife recognized his instability, leaving her property to her children in trust so her husband’s creditors couldn’t get at it.
All these efforts to avoid catastrophe proved unavailing. In April 1809, Light-Horse Harry Lee was arrested for a debt of approximately 5400 Spanish dollars, and jailed for a year. When he came out, he had to move the family he had established with his second wife so that his son by his first marriage—Robert’s half-brother Henry—could take over the ancestral estate, Stratford. Two years later, in the middle of a Baltimore riot over a newspaper editor’s opposition to the War of 1812, Lee was not just wounded but badly mutilated.
Now even more desperate to get away, this time for his health, Lee sailed for Barbados. After five years, he wrote that he was coming home. He never made it, dying off the coast of Savannah, Ga., on property owned by the daughter of his old Revolutionary War commander, General Nathaniel Greene.
Ann Carter Lee, Harry’s widow, loved her dashing but flawed husband, making her all the more determined that “his grim cycle of promise, overconfidence, recklessness, disaster, and ruin should not be rounded in the lives of her children,” according to the great biographer of Robert E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman.
Light-Horse Harry Lee’s fate was all too common in a republic founded on “the pursuit of happiness.” Something remains of this in the national DNA, as seen in a widening economic misery that hardly anybody expected to see three-quarters of a century after the Great Depression.
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