Although Henry Lee III (1756-1818) was connected to a host of great landowners and political leaders of the Virginia Tidewater, read a great deal as a young man, and attended Princeton, he seems to have been about half horse: Lee loved to ride and was a superb horseman.[1] Naturally, he joined the cavalry of the Continental Army in 1776. In April 1778, Lee gained command of “Lee’s Legion,” a mixed force of infantry and cavalry employed in harassing British lines of communication and supply in New Jersey and New York. He won several small-scale victories. In September 1778, Lee ambushed and annihilated a smaller force of Hessians at the Battle of Edgar’s Lane; in August 1779 he commanded a successful raid on a British fort at Paulus Hook, New Jersey.
When the British shifted their main effort to the Carolinas in 1780, Lee’s Legion rode south. Here Lee had much greater scope for the cut-and-thrust type of war to which he was so well suited. The British offensive began well, with the capture of Charleston, South Carolina (and a large force of American forces ordered to hold an indefensible position) in May 1780, and then a crushing defeat of the American army at Camden in August 1780. The British now hoped to raise a large force of American volunteers from among the Loyalists who had been terrorized into submission for the past two years. A march by British troops through the Carolinas would show their command of the region. Large numbers of Loyalists began to be recruited in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Along the way, small forts would guard lines of supply and provide rallying-points for Loyalists. In February 1781, Lee’s Legion greatly discouraged the Loyalists with a surprise attack on Loyalist militia in North Carolina.[2] In March 1781, the British won a costly victory over a larger American army at Guilford Court House. The British commander, Lord Cornwallis, then divided his army. He led most of them toward Wilmington, North Carolina in search of supplies. The rest, mostly Loyalist troops, he left in South Carolina under the command of Lord Rawdon.
Rather than follow Cornwallis north, the Americans began to re-conquer South Carolina. Lee’s Legion played an important part in this campaign. Although Rawdon won a victory at Hobkirk’s Hill in April 1781, he soon found his lines of supply under heavy attack by Lee and by partisans under Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. In May 1781 a series of smaller British posts fell to Lee and the others. Only Ninety-Six, stubbornly defended by Loyalist troops during May and June, defied the Patriot forces. Rawdon had little choice to fall back to Camden, and then toward the coast. In September 1781, Lee’s Legion fought with the rest of the American army at Eutaw Springs, where it suffered another defeat at the hands of a smaller British force. But then news came of the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.
Lee had a fitful postwar political career as a devoted Federalist. (He’s the one who described Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”) In contrast, the management of his business affairs failed to command from him the same attention as had his military operations. He went bankrupt, spent a year in debtors prison, and wandered the Caribbean for a time before returning to die in Virginia.
His son, Robert Edward Lee, commanded the Army of Northern Virginia.
[1] There is a new biography by Ryan Cole, Light-Horse Harry Lee (2019).
[2] Commonly known as the “Pyle Massacre.”
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