Dear Cousin

A letter full of life and light from 12-year-old Alice Lee (1749-1789) of Blenheim plantation in Charles County, Maryland, to her second cousin William Lee of Stratford, a commercial agent for Virginia tobacco living in Tower Hill, London. Alice speaks her mind on 'tying the knot,' her eccentric Virginia relation known as 'the Squire,' and the pursuits of a 12-year-old recluse. Alice was well-known among the Virginia Lees and stood sponsor for Richard Henry Lee's son Cassius. Her mother Grace Ashton (who died the same year as her daughter) was the daughter of Colonel Henry Ashton, buried in the Nomini Plantation Graveyard in Westmoreland County.

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Transcript

Stratford Mail

III.

Welcome back to Stratford Mail, a Production of Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, where we give voice to Stratford Hall’s people, places and past to engage, educate, and inspire. Find us on the web at stratfordhall.org. I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.

This month we read a brassy Letter from 12-year old Alice Lee of Blenheim in Charles County, Maryland, to her second cousin William Lee of Stratford, a commercial agent for Virginia tobacco living in Tower Hill, London.

"Maryland, 27 September, 1772. [Dear Cousin,]

So you threaten me if I prove deficient in the deference I owe you as a married man, with the power you have of forwarding or retarding my success in the Matrimonial Way. This would be a tremendous threat indeed were I as fond of Matrimony as my young mistress, as you call her, but happily I am little more than twelve years old and not so eager to tye a Knot which Death alone can Dissolve. And yet I pretend not to ridicule the holy sacred institution, but have all due reverence for that and the worthy people who have entered into the Society, from good and generous motives. It is only those who chuse to be married at all events that I think deserve raillery.”

Alice Lee was the great niece of Thomas Lee of Stratford. She was reared at Blenheim plantation on the north bank of the Potomac, below the Port Tobacco rivermouth. Her father Richard Lee the third married Grace Ashton, whose roots were in Westmoreland Co. Virginia and who brought 2200 acres of Northern Neck property to the marriage. When Richard died in 1787, he named his daughter Alice (now 38) co-executor of his estate and settled on her half of her mother’s old properties in Virginia. 

Among elites, strategic marriages were critical to growth and prosperity; marriage built new dynasties, reaffirmed old ones, and was in every case an exercise in swelling the wealth and status of the families involved. It was a family affair; and families were actively involved in courtship and proposals, weighing and assessing carefully how a potential match would affect the family in terms of affluence and influence. The possibility of a proposal being rejected wasn't zero; so intermediaries got involved to test the waters and to save face if necessary. Dr. Arthur Lee engaged his niece Nancy Shippen of Philadelphia to intercede with a young lady who caught his fancy, but on that occasion no match was made. 

Alice’s cousin WIlliam matched well with Hannah Philippa Ludwell, tying the knot at St. Brides London on March 7, 1769 in the presence of his bachelor brother Arthur Lee, Edmund Jenings, and Lucy Ludwell. Though the 12-year-old Alice wasn’t keen on marriage she concedes the crucial role her relations (including relative newlywed William) would eventually play in making an advantageous match for her. But Alice wasn’t a syrupy little girl pining for her prince to come; she had other interests–and, after all, marriage wasn’t inherently good, only a marriage grounded in “good and generous motives” rated with her. Those who said otherwise deserved raillery, satire.

Maria Carter (~1744-1795), granddaughter of Robert ‘King’ Carter, copied into her commonplace book this dictum from Addison and Steele’s popular daily The Spectator: “A happy marriage has in it all the Pleasures of Friendship, all the Enjoyments of Sense and Reason, and indeed all the Sweets of Life. A marriage of Love is pleasant; a marriage of Interest easie; and a marriage where both meet, happy.” Spectator acknowledges that to err too much in favor of romance or pragmatism is to risk unhappiness, though it seems to prefer the smoother road of pragmatism to the pleasant but uneven byways of love, perhaps on grounds that continuity of status and society would compensate for the deficit of romance, but maybe not vice versa. As Henry Lee II put it to his older brother Richard Lee the Squire: “happiness can’t well subsist on poverty”. 

Next, Alice shares news from a recent visit to William's old turf:
“I  was  in  Virginia  when  your  letter  came.  Your friends  there  are  well  but  I  never  saw  Westmoreland  so  dull.  I  was  at Squire  Lee's.  He  is  the  veriest  Tramontane  in  nature.  If  he  ever  gets married  and  his  wife  civilizes  him,  she  deserves  to  be  canonized.”

Westmoreland has only just picked up a bit since Alice wrote.  A year prior in 1771 William had this to say about his first cousin Richard, bachelor-king of Lee Hall, and commonly referred to as the Squire: “Richard is still Living & unmarried, tho 45 years Old, which is a great Age in Virginia to be single, & his Seat is called Lee Hall, on the Potomack River, Virginia.” But by “a great Age to be single,” William didn’t mean the Squire hit the dating sweet spot at age 45, but rather that he was old.  In the words of William’s younger brother Arthur: ‘In Virginia a man is old at thirty and a woman a twenty.” 

And the Squire wasn’t merely old, but also, says Alice, the veriest Tramontane. Tramontane means ‘over the mountains,’ and originated as a way for Italians to refer to non-Italian folks on the other side of the Alps. They were outside civilization from an Italian perspective. Alice means that the Squire is a barbarian, and she reckons his wife will deserve sainthood if she manages to civilize him.   

Alice continues: "So you can't forbear a fling at femalities; believe me Curiosity is as imputable to the Sons as the Daughters of Eve. Think you there was ever a Lady more curious than our Cousin the Squire? He himself is the greatest of all curiosities, but hang him, how came he to pop twice in my head while I was writing to you!"

Alice wasn’t the only one to take this view of the Squire. To William’s brother Francis Lightfoot Lee, the Squire was simply “the oddest man in the world." On July 8 1773 Reverend Isaac Wm. Giberne penned this bald analysis of the Squire for William Lee: ‘He looks fresh and hearty; and is I am afraid as lewdly indulgent as ever from the appearance of his waiting maids, Bab and Henny. If ever he marries, you may depend on it (as I told him the other day) it will be with some mopsqueezer who can satiate his filthy amours in his own way.”

Even as we deplore the behaviors suffered by enslaved maids Bab and Henny (if Giberne's suspicions are true), we wonder about the term mopsqueezer. Like six-pounder (referring to a maid by her wage) or cinder garbler (one responsible for sifting cinders from ashes), mopsqueezer was demeaning slang for a young woman who performed the work the gentry reckoned to be beneath them, work they sometimes took to imply a degraded character in the worker, as Giberne outrageously implies here.  

The Squire’s brother John periodically urged him to take a widow to wife, writing: “You know very well you have spent a great deal of precious time, money, and wore your constitution in amours, and at last hustled your character thereby.” Hustle meant to shake together, and John means just that the Squire’s exploits have scuffed his reputation. Eventually the sixty-something Squire married his sixteen-year-old first cousin, Sarah Bland Poythress, called Sally, at her home, Branchester plantation in Prince George County. They had four children before the Squire’s death a decade later in 1795. Men marrying younger women was common, but a forty plus year difference wasn't.  

Alice concludes her letter to William with a strong testimony to her character and interests: “The Annapolis  races  commence  the  sixth  of  October,  and  the  company  is expected  to  be  numerous  and  splendid.  The  American  Company  of  Players are  there  and  said  to  be  amazingly  improved.  I  should  like  to  see  them  as  I think  Theatrical  Entertainments  a  rational  amusement ;  But  I  shall  not  be there.  Indeed  I  lead  rather  a  recluse  life,  my  greatest  pleasure  results  from my  correspondents  of  my  friends  in  different  parts  of  the  world  and  I  am very  assiduous  to  cultivate  this  kind  of  amusement.  I  know  your  ability will  always  provide  you  with  materials  to  give  me  that  pleasure  and  I  hope your  inclinations  will  coincide  to[o].  Mrs.  Anna  Lee  has  not  yet  exhibited any  railling  accusations  against  you.  I  thank  your  Mrs.  Lee  for  her amicable  wishes  and  desire  you  to  greet  her  and  Dr.  Lee  with  my  friendly salutations. [Your affectionate cousin, Alice Lee]”

The four days of racing launched on October 6th 1772 by the Maryland Jockey Club, commonly called ‘the Annapolis Races,’ were splendid indeed. In his diary for October 1772, Virginia planter and politico George Washington records his attendance at the races and a loss of 1 pound and 6 [pennies]. Washington also attended the comedies The West Indian and The Padlock put on by David Douglass’ Old American Company, which Alice would like to have seen, but did not. Perhaps she was at her writing desk on those autumn days, indulging her preferred amusement for the edification of her lucky correspondents. Her letter to William is the only public remainder of that preferred amusement, much to our loss.

But perhaps you wonder if Alice ever tied the knot only death could dissolve? Indeed she did, but not until late in life, becoming the third wife of a Revolutionary war veteran and planter. The Maryland Journal for April 1 1788 issues this notice: “Married a few days agi at Blenheim in Charles county, John Weems, late resident of the State of Delaware, to Miss Alice Lee, daughter of the Honorable Richard Lee, deceased.” Alice might have adored the irony of an April Fool’s wedding announcement. She lived at Weem’s Forest in Calvert County, Maryland, with her husband John for 15 months, before her death at the age of 40 in 1789. 

This notice appeared in the September 3rd edition of the Maryland Gazette, and seems to have been produced by her grieving, grateful friends: 

“Died, on the 25th of July, at Weem’s Forest in Calvert, Alice Weems, wife of John Weems and daughter of the late president Lee. This elegant and accomplished woman lived highly respected, and died much regretted by her acquaintances—possessed of a strong and well cultivated understanding, a masculine judgment, a brilliant imagination—a heart warm, benevolent, sincere, charitable, and fraught with the purest sentiments of Christian piety, and of virtue; she was a bright ornament of society. Filial piety and respect, conjugal love and tenderness, sisterly affection, social regard, and unceasing neighbourly kindness, were splendid traits in the amiable character of the deceased—Her friends are impressed with the amplest conviction of these truths; and although she is “lost to their view” she will long live in their memory, securely embalmed as an emblem of many inestimable virtues.” 

Alice is buried in the Lee family cemetery, which is the last trace of Blenheim on the property of the Morgantown Generating Station, south of US 301 and the Harry W. Nice Memorial bridge connecting Maryland to Virginia. Her marble tomb marker was placed by the sister with whom she lived her life (minus 15 months), Elinor Ann, a poet who inscribed the marker with this mystery, “Oft would the suffering angel faintly smile, when from her bossom pain and” - The rest is illegible, but perhaps Alice contracted the influenza that vexed Maryland in the autumn and winter of 1789, but that’s a topic for a different day. Thank you for listening and subscribing to Stratford Mail, from Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia, I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey

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Note: “Mrs Anna Lee” is probably the wife of Alice’s older brother Philip Thomas Lee, Ann Russel.  

Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht and Murf.ai (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2023