Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee III (29 January 1756 – 25 March 1818) was Governor of Virginia from 1 December 1791 to 1 December 1794 (succeeding Beverley Randolph and preceding Robert Brooke) and a member of the US House of Representatives (F-VA 19) from 4 March 1799 to 3 March 1801 (succeeding Walter Jones and preceding John Taliaferro). He distinguished himself as a light cavalry commander during the American Revolutionary War, and he fathered Robert E. Lee, one of America's greatest generals.
Biography[]
Henry Lee III was born on 29 January 1756 in Dumfries, Virginia to the famed Lee family; his father was the second cousin of President of the Continental Congress Richard Henry Lee. Lee graduated from Princeton College in New Jersey in 1773, seeking a law career, and he became a captain in a regiment of Virginia dragoons in the 1st Continental Light Dragoons of the Continental Army at the start of the American Revolutionary War in 1775.
American Revolutionary War[]
In 1778, Lee was promoted to Major and given command of the mixed corps of cavalry and infantry known as "Lee's Legion", and on 30 September 1778 he led a raid on Edgar's Lane (now Hastings-on-Hudson, New York), killing 23 Hessians with no losses. Lee would make himself even more famous at the battle of Paulus Hook on 19 August 1779, in which he captured 158 British Army and troops and inflicted 50 losses in a raid on present-day Jersey City that cost him just 12 men. Lee was rewarded with a gold medal before being promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel; in January 1781, he was sent to the South to assist Francis Marion and Andrew Pickens in liberating the state of Georgia and South Carolina from Charles Cornwallis' army. On 25 February 1781, he disguised his men as Tarleton's Legion and pretended to be Banastre Tarleton, luring in John Pyle and 300-400 Tories into present-day Alamance County in North Carolina. However, his men then opened fire on the Tories, killing 93 and wounding 250, massacring the British without the loss of a single man (one horse was killed). Lee proceeded to fight at Guilford Court House, Fort Ninety-Six, and then the final Siege of Yorktown in 1781. Shortly after the siege, Lee decided to leave the army, citing his poor treatment by other officers and fatigue was causes.
Postwar career[]
After the war's end, Lee was elected as Governor of Virginia in 1791, leading his state for four years. In 1794, George Washington called on Henry Lee to lead the 12,950 militiamen sent to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In 1798, Lee was promoted to Major-General during the Quasi-War as fears of war with the First French Republic grew, and in 1808 Thomas Jefferson again commissioned him as a Major-General due to the looming war with Great Britain. When the War of 1812 did break out with Britain in 1812, President James Madison did not commission him, and he died in 1818.