Henry Lee III, called "Light Horse Harry", was a cavalry officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He was the Governor of Virginia and a U.S. Congressman as well as the father of American Civil War general Robert E. Lee. Lee was born in 1756 near Dumfries, Virginia, the son of Maj. Gen. Henry Lee II and Lucy Grymes. His father was first cousin once removed to Richard Henry Lee, sixth President of the Continental Congress. His mother was an aunt of the wife of Virginia Governor Thomas Nelson Jr. His great-grandmother Mary Bland was a great-aunt of President Thomas Jefferson and he descended once from King John of England, twice from King Edward I of England, once from King Jean de Brienne of Jerusalem, twice from King Edward III of England and once from King Pedro I of Castile. With a view to a legal career, he graduated in 1773 from The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) but soon afterward at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he became a captain in the revolutionary forces. In 1776, he was promoted to captain of a Virginia dragoon detachment, which was attached to the 1st Continental Light Dragoons and in 1778 he was promoted to major and given the command of a small irregular corps with which he won a great reputation as a leader of light troops. His services on the outpost line of the army earned for him the nickname "Light Horse Harry". His greatest exploit was the brilliant surprise at the Battle of Paulus Hook in New Jersey on August 19, 1779; for this feat he received a gold medal, a reward given to no other officer below a general's rank in the entire war. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel with a picked corps of dragoons (Lee's Legion) to the southern theater of war. Here he rendered invaluable services in victory and defeat, notably at Guilford Court House, Camden and Eutaw Springs. He was present at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown and soon left the army due to ill health. During the Whiskey Rebellion, Lee commanded 13,000 militiamen sent to quash the rebels. In 1782 he married his second-cousin, Matilda Ludwell Lee, the daughter of Hon. Philip Ludwell Lee Sr.and Elizabeth Steptoe. Martha Lee died in 1790 and on June 13, 1793, Henry Lee married the wealthy Anne Hill Carter (17 years his junior) at Shirley Plantation. They had six children, one of whom died in infancy in 1796. Their fifth child, Robert Edward Lee, would later gain fame as a Confederate general during the Civil War. Unfortunately for Lee and his family, he invested large sums in numerous, highly speculative schemes, including partnerships with Aaron Burr and merchant Robert Morris. Although financial speculation was not rare among the Founding Fathers, Lee's handling of his personal finances was notably incompetent and subjected his family to financial hardship. In 1810, to meet the demands of his creditors and be released from debtor’s prison, Lee was forced to sell all of his possessions. He instead took what he could from the house and left his family behind to pay the debts he owed. On July 27, 1812, Lee received grave injuries while helping to resist an attack on his friend, Alexander Contee Hanson, editor of the Baltimore newspaper, The Federal Republican. Hanson was attacked by a Democratic-Republican mob because his paper opposed the War of 1812. Lee and Hanson and two dozen other Federalists had taken refuge in the offices of the paper. The group surrendered to Baltimore city officials the next day and were jailed. Laborer George Woolslager led a mob that forced its way into the jail and removed and beat the Federalists over the next three hours. Lee suffered extensive internal injuries as well as head and face wounds and even his speech was affected. Lee later sailed to the West Indies in an effort to recuperate from his injuries. He died on March 25, 1818, at Dungeness on Cumberland Island, Georgia.
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