Arthur Lee (103)

Arthur Lee (21 December 1740–12 December 1792) was a diplomat, politician, lawyer, physician, and prolific polemicist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born into a prominent planter family in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he received an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh and a law degree from London’s Inns of Court. Following a brief medical practice and election to the Royal Society, he turned to politics. Over the course of his life, he published numerous pamphlets and periodical essays attacking British imperial policy and slavery under nearly a dozen identifiable pseudonyms, including “Monitor,” “Raleigh,” and “Junius Americanus.” He is most famous for his oft-reprinted Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain (1774). Lee spent much of the 1770s in London, where he served as an agent of Massachusetts, assisted Benjamin Franklin in undermining Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, sought to unite the opposition faction in British politics to the American resistance movement, and aided the Continental Congress as a confidential correspondent. During the Revolution, he also served on the American diplomatic corps in Paris, negotiating for aid from France, Spain, and Prussia. Exacerbated by Lee’s personal eccentricities, these often frustrating missions led to public controversies with fellow diplomats Silas Deane and Franklin involving accusations of financial impropriety. After being recalled from his post in 1779, Lee was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1781 and served in the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1784. He was a negotiator of Indian treaties at Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh in the winter of 1784-1785 and, between 1785 and 1789, sat on the new nation’s Board of Treasury. His brother Francis Lightfoot Lee I, his nephew Thomas Lee Shippen, and his brother-in-law William Shippen, Jr. were APS members. (PI, ANB, DAB)