Francis Lightfoot Lee (273)

Francis Lightfoot Lee (14 October 1734–17 January 1797) was a planter, slaveholder, and legislator, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Born to the famed Stratford branch of the Lee family of Virginia, his place in colonial British North America was assured. After early education and the death of his father Thomas, Francis inherited a plantation in Loudoun County after 1750 where he used enslaved labor to cultivate tobacco and corn for trade, while experimenting with a variety of the planter classes’ hobbies, including exotic plants and silkworms; with friend and APS Member Landon Carter Francis exchanged ideas about improving each other’s farms. Loudoun elected him to the House of Burgesses first in 1758–68, before his move to Richmond County, which he served thereafter until the Revolution.  Lee rapidly established his patriotic credentials in the Stamp Act crisis, was elected to Virginia’s Revolutionary conventions in 1774–75, and then the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in summer 1775. He was a leading advocate of independence by 1776 and wholeheartedly backed his brother, Richard Henry Lee, in his July 2 resolution to declare it. For a number of reasons Lee effectively left public life in 1779. Beyond his support of the new federal plan—not least because Washington was—Lee otherwise became a homebody, content with his plantation experimentations and his books and the small pleasures of hosting guests. (PI)