Lee, Francis Lightfoot

Francis Lightfoot Lee (October 14, 1734 – January 11, 1797) was a Founding Father of the United States and a member of the House of Burgesses in the Colony of Virginia.^[1] As an active protester regarding issues such as the Stamp Act of 1765, Lee helped move the colony in the direction of independence from Britain.

Lee was a delegate to the Virginia Conventions and the Continental Congress. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as a representative of Virginia. In addition to his career in politics, Lee owned a tobacco plantation as well as many slaves.^[2] He was a member of the Lee family, a prominent Virginian dynasty.

Family, education and early life

Coat of Arms of Francis Lightfoot Lee

Lee was born on October 14, 1734, at Stratford Hall Plantation, in Westmoreland County, Virginia.^[3] Lee was the fourth son of Thomas Lee and Hannah Harrison Ludwell. His middle name "Lightfoot" came from Francis Lightfoot, the best man at his father's wedding.^[4] He was of English descent and was born into one of the First Families of Virginia. He grew up at Stratford Hall, a large tobacco plantation,^[5] which his father completed in 1738. He was educated at home, where Lee pursued classical studies under Dr. Craig.

In 1772, Lee married his cousin, Rebecca Plater Tayloe. They were 2nd cousins, once removed. they had no children. Lee lived his entire life in the region of Virginia between the Rappahannock River and the Chesapeake Bay (known as the Northern Neck).

Lee was the grandson of Col. Richard Lee II and a great-grandson of Col. Richard Lee I. Senator Richard Henry Lee and diplomats William Lee and Dr. Arthur Lee were his brothers. Another brother, Thomas Ludwell Lee, was appointed to a committee, along with Thomas Jefferson, to re-write the laws of Virginia. His namesake Francis Lightfoot Lee II was the son of his brother Richard Henry Lee, and men of the same name descend from him.

Political career

In 1774, Lee was among those who called for a general congress and the first of the Virginia Conventions, which he attended. He served in the Virginia State Senate from 1778 to 1782 and was a delegate to the First Continental Congress held in Philadelphia, serving until 1779. As a congressional representative of Virginia, he signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1768.^[6]

Death and legacy

Lee died of pleurisy at his residence (named "Menokin") in Richmond County, Virginia, on January 11, 1797, following his wife's death four days prior. He is buried in the Tayloe family burial ground at Mount Airy Plantation, near Warsaw, Virginia.^[7]

The World War II Liberty Ship SS *Francis L. Lee* was named in his honor.

Beaumarchais lost a fortune. By convincing the committee not to pay its debt to avoid creating a trail that could reveal the Americans' dealing with the French to the British, Lee forced Deane, who eventually died trying to prove that he was owed his rightful compensation, into disgrace and poverty for years.

Meanwhile, by 1783 the Paris water supply system was up and running and

being tested by Charles Augustin Coulomb, physicist, military engineer,

and superintendent of water supply and fountains (at this time,

high-tech stuff). Over the years Coulomb put together more than three

hundred reports for the French Academy of Sciences on everything from

British hospitals to French canals, harbors, machinery, and engineering

projects in general. Later in life Coulomb would be a major influence in

setting up the French secondary education system. His fame, however,

rests on his work in electricity and magnetism and especially his

development of a gizmo for measuring electric charge. Which may be why

an electric charge is now measured in "coulombs."

Early in his career Coulomb also got to spend time on the Atlantic coast

(at Rochefort) working with the Marquis de Montalembert, inventor of a

new kind of fortress (old-buffer military fortress designers forced him

to delay design publication for fifteen years).

Montalembert changed the

shape of a fort from the previous complicated arrangement of bastions

and angled walls to a simple polygonal or even circular structure. Key

innovation: The fort was built to be aggressive, not defensive. Guns

were placed in enclosed positions (roofed against the downward killing

power of the new shrapnel) all round the fort, so as to be able to shoot

in any direction. Great for clobbering a passing fleet, when time to

shoot was short.

In 1807 New York Harbor this kind of ship-sinking trick was just right

for Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams, looking for a way to

discourage any Brits who might be heading that way. His

Montalembert-inspired "Castle Williams" was circular, with two tiers of

protected cannon. And in terms of Brit discouragement Williams was

right.

In 1812 the threat of Castle Williams's firepower persuaded the

Brits to bypass New York and set fire to some other city farther south.

Alas for Williams, he never got the credit he deserved. And worse, when

he was superintendent of West Point (where he modernized the curriculum)

and then at Castle Williams, regular army officers objected to having an

engineer in command. Williams retired and devoted himself to literary and scientific efforts: his Memoir on the Use of the Thermometer in Navigation was presented to the American Philosophical Society.

Williams's case wasn't helped by Secretary of War William Eustis,

one of the least-qualified holders of the office in American history (though arguably better than Whiskey Pete). Eustis was a doctor (he treated Benedict Arnold's wife Peggy, who was seemingly hysterical over the sudden departure of her husband and the discovery of his plot) with limited military and political experience (as an army surgeon and in Massachusetts local government), appointed by Madison to reform the army. The new secretary proposed a publicly funded volunteer force of fifty thousand plus nine thousand extra infantry and several new military departments. He pushed ahead with equivocation and incompetence.

When war came in 1812 Congress was still arguing about Eustis's plans.

And thanks to his bumbling nothing was ready for the attack on Canada.

General Hull surrendered Detroit without a shot because Eustis hadn't

told him war was imminent.

Buffalo and Washington, D.C., were attacked

and burned. The country went into uproar and Eustis suddenly became

minister to Holland. The irony was that on June 18, 1812, when Madison

declared war, the immediate reason for the conflict (the British Orders

in Council preventing America from trading with France) had just been

provisionally repealed. But the news would take six weeks to get to the

United States, by which time it was too late.

The repeal of the Orders had been the result of lobbying in Parliament

by Henry Brougham, a brilliant young lawyer representing U.K.

manufacturers who were losing a bundle because the trade embargo was

being counter-enforced by the Americans.

Brougham was a politico to his fingertips (opportunistic, depressive, boozer, eccentric, scheming, charismatic, hypochondriac) and argued for reform of Parliament,

antislavery laws, the legal profession, education, bankruptcy,

charities, and much else. He was also a founder of London University and

authored hundreds of articles in the Law Review. He also helped found the Edinburgh Review where, as a follower of Newton, he launched anonymous attacks against Thomas Young's research on light, settling science back by decades; he also went after astronomer William Herschel.

He also helped establish the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as well as holding some academic posts, including Rector, University of Edinburgh. In later years he spent much of his time in the French town of Cannes, making it a popular resort for the British upper-classes. And ended up lord chancellor (top lawyer), loved or hated.

Re love, Brougham had numerous affairs, the most widely publicized of

which involved a foreign holiday with Caroline Lamb (confusingly, a cousin of "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Caroline Lamb). Lawyer George Lamb,

the cuckold in question and known by his mother as "unsatisfactory

George," was a red-faced, red-haired uncouth drunk (hence Caroline's

trip) who fancied himself as a dramatist and wrote unsuccessful Gothic

stuff full of brigands with daggers. In 1815 he was on the new

management committee of Drury Lane Theater when Byron showed him a play

he'd been sent by Sir Walter Scott (who was a financial supporter of the

author). Lamb loved it, and in 1816 Bertram hit the stage for

a sensational forty performances.

Bertram ( with Edmund Kean starring in the lead role) was to be the only great moment for Irish cleric and playwright Charles Maturin. Hugo and Dumas were fans, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge publicly denounced the play as dull and loathsome, and "melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind",^[14]^ going nearly so far as to decry it as atheistic. This meant no more spellbinding sermons, so he turned to novels (one with werewolves).

His other works (with Irish plots full of

coded references to English usurpers and invaders) pretty much flopped.

Maturin was an extravagant dresser and crazy for the quadrille.

Lewis Carroll lampooned the dance in "The Lobster Quadrille," part of his 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Maturin would dance in the daytime with the curtains closed.

This unusual behavior was shared by his nephew's wife, Lady Jane Wilde,

who always closed the curtains when she entertained, dressed like a

tragedy queen in flowing silk, and wore so many portrait brooches she

looked like "a walking family mausoleum."

During the Potato Famine in 1846, Jane began to write the nationalist poems and prose that would make her famous. Six feet tall and strikingly handsome, she was an

active feminist, translator (said to have mastered ten languages by the age of 18), writer of travel books, pal of George Bernard Shaw and Yeats and above all, mother of Oscar. For

twenty years after her husband died bankrupt she eked out an existence

in London still holding weekly salons in the dark.

One of Jane's many admirers was William Hamilton, child prodigy math

nerd. By age thirteen he spoke French and Italian and could read

Persian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hindi, Sanskrit, Malay, and Hebrew (for

relaxation, he said). To the non-mathematician his work is total

gobbledygook. He invented quaternions (a major stage in the development

of algebra, it says here; it was thought that Carroll's The Mad Hatter was satire of them) and helped establish the wave theory of light (with Fresnel, no thanks to Brougham above).

He also developed some arcane mathematical thing known as a

"Hamiltonian." He was also the Irish royal astronomer at age twenty-one

and never did much.

But in 1839 he got the first look through the Earl of Ross's new giant

telescope. Ross was rich enough to have fun making giant telescope

mirrors. In 1844 he produced an even more giant scope known as the

"Leviathan."

Carrying a six-foot mirror that took three years to

perfect, the telescope stood fifty-six feet high and was for sixty years

the biggest telescope in the world. First used in 1845; regular use waited another two years, due to the aforementioned Potato Famine.

Almost immediately it discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy Messier 51, gave the distinct impression that nebulae were actually dense star clusters, and seriously improved the study of the night sky. So Ross won prizes and the presidency of the Royal

Society.

Sixty years later his youngest son, Charles Parsons (aristocrats' titles

and their family names are often different; it's a Brit thing), was made

society vice president.

Parsons started out as an engineering apprentice, and by 1884 was so fed up with the clunky old steam engine that he developed a turbine alternative. High-pressure steam hit turbine blades mounted at an angle on an axle and made them spin eighteen

thousand times a minute (more than ten times the speed a steam engine

could achieve). By 1894 Parsons's spinning-axle turbine-powered

propellor-driven yacht Turbinia could reach thirty-four

knots. Faster than the fastest ship in the navy.

By 1899 Parsons had a turbine in a destroyer.

HMS Dreadnought, considered the first modern battleship. In 1906 it was the fastest in the world due to Parsons's steam turbine. He used gearing to slow turbine speed so it

could be used by cargo vessels.

Early on, Parsons also used his turbine to spin copper wire loops

through a magnetic field and generate electricity. In 1884 the license

for this clever trick was snatched up by American George Westinghouse,

at the time busy fighting the "War of the Currents." Westinghouse made

alternating-current electricity: The electron movement (electricity)

went back and forward in the copper wire as the spinning wire loops

"alternatingly" cut the magnetic field first one way then the other.

Westinghouse rival Thomas Edison's direct current used a commutator to

turn this two-way electron flow into "direct" one-way electricity.

Alternating current could be stepped up to high voltage, sent a long

way, and then stepped down again to usable levels. Direct current

couldn't. So Westinghouse was able to build large generating stations a

long way from cities and Edison wasn't. So Edison lost the

electricity-supply battle. Still, he was already a multimillionaire, so

what did he care.

In 1942 Edison's daughter-in-law (married to Charles Edison, then acting

secretary of the navy) sponsored the launch of the giant, Iowa-class

battleship USS New Jersey, which then went on to a distinguished fighting record in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In 1982 the ship had her final retrofit when she was provided with Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles.

Much of the success of the $467 million refurbishment was due to the

marine engineer and naval architect involved, FRANK LEE.

Lee, Francis Lightfoot

Family, education and early life

Political career

Death and legacy

See also