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On June 7, 1776 Richard Henry Lee introduced the resolution that helped lead to the Declaration of Independence almost a month later.
Richard Henry Lee (January 20, 1732 – June 19, 1794)
The son of Colonel Thomas and Hannah Harrison Ludwell Lee, Richard was native to Westmoreland County, Virginia. The Lee family had served as military officers and diplomats which provided the growing boy with a template for his later political life. During his early years he received his education from a tutor at the family home at Stratford, Virginia in Stratford Hall. Lee voyaged to England in 1748 to attend the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, in Yorkshire, England. After finishing school, he toured Europe and then returned to Virginia in 1753 to help his brothers settle his parents', who had died in 1750, estate.
Political Career
He received appointment as a justice of the peace in 1757 and gained election to the Virginia House of Burgesses the next year. At his legislature he met Patrick Henry. During the turbulent years after the Stamp Act in 1765, he became an early supporter of independence for the colonies. He was one of the originators of the Committees of Correspondence in Virginia and receives credit for writing the Westmoreland Resolution in 1766. He attended the First Continental Congress and later the Second Continental Congress. On June 7, 1776 he introduced the Resolution that helped lead to the Declaration of Independence less than a month later.
Text of the Resolution:
That these United Colonies are, and of right out to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; that measures should be immediately taken for procuring the assistance of foreign powers, and a Confederation be formed to bind the colonies more closely together
