The Last Adieu

250 years ago today a fuse was lit in Virginia, where a rogue assembly approved a set of earth-shaking instructions for its delegates in the Continental Congress. The detonation took time, time to traverse the miles from Williamsburg to Philadelphia, time to persuade and prepare the people and their representatives to risk a new political adventure, and time to drag the holdouts across the line. Join us this month on Stratford Mail as we recall the last adieu to the British Crown and count down to the 250th anniversary of Virginia and Richard Henry Lee’s resolution on independence.   

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Transcript

SM 3:7

THE LAST ADIEU

In 1790, before the dust had settled on the Revolutionary War, John Adams was annoyed.

Annoyed, specifically, with how the Revolution was being remembered — in taverns, in schoolrooms, and around hearth fires. "The History of our Revolution," he complained, "will be one continued Lye from one End to the other." He used the word lie, but listen to how quickly he falls into the language of mythology to make his case: "The Essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod — and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislation, and War."

In less than a decade, a man who had lived the Revolution firsthand was watching its complex, brutal, bureaucratic reality surrender to a creation myth — featuring a pantheon of two: a sky god named Franklin wielding the power of lightning, and a warrior son Washington wielding the powers of earth and sky.

Adams was not wrong to worry.

Even today, with more eyes on historical sources than ever before, the story that most people carry around with them hasn't changed much. No one liked tea anyway. Some bloke started shooting in Massachusetts. Jefferson writes the Declaration. Washington crosses the Delaware, and Cornwallis inevitably surrenders at Yorktown. Myth leaves us with a handful of marble men who unite seamlessly against paperthin enemies to achieve a foregone conclusion.

If we want to encounter the truths behind the myth — the men and women behind the marble — we have to consent to what President Kennedy termed “the discomfort of thought.” That discomfort will teach us about the unglamorous, tedious, and often unplanned machinery of rebellion. It will introduce us to the brilliant, beautiful, and tragically flawed people who rolled up their sleeves to negotiate, smuggle, spy, and compromise a country into existence.

So we leave myth behind. We drift south, to Williamsburg, Virginia. It's late spring — the oppressive heat of the Tidewater only just beginning to hint at its return. And we arrive at the exact moment the British Empire is deliberately, quietly fractured by its largest, wealthiest colony.

On the morning of May 6, 1776, assistant clerk Jacob Bruce penned this entry in the Journal of the House of Burgesses:

"Several Members met, but did neither proceed to Business, nor adjourn, as a House of Burgesses. FINIS."

That word — FINIS — ended an elected body that had met more or less continuously since 1643. One hundred and thirty-three years, finished. The following day, Edmund Pendleton wrote to Richard Henry Lee in Philadelphia: "We met in assembly yesterday, and determined not to adjourn, but let that body die."

To adjourn would have been to concede that they met as a colonial assembly under the Crown's authority — and it implied a promise to return under that same authority. So they did not adjourn. They stepped boldly off the map of English law.

That same morning, those same men, sitting in the same chairs, in the same room, convened not as burgesses, but as delegates to a Convention — a rogue political body meeting entirely outside the normal mechanisms of colonial law. Their first order of business was to elect a President. The radicals — spoiling to push through a resolution on independence — put up London-trained lawyer Thomas Ludwell Lee of Stratford, and lately of Belleview in Stafford County. But Tom was narrowly defeated in favor of the more cautious Edmund Pendleton, a signal that Virginia's conservatives hadn't yet been persuaded to abandon caution.

But a fever was rising.

In Philadelphia, Virginia's delegate to the Continental Congress, Richard Henry Lee, was feasting on a steady diet of political news from his Virginia family and allies. From Essex County, his first cousin wrote: "Independence is now the topic here, and I think I am not mistaken when I say, it will very soon be a Favourite Child." From King William County: "The people of this County almost unanimously cry aloud for Independence." And from General Charles Lee (no relation) in Williamsburg: "For Gods sake why do you dawdle in the Congress so strangely, why do you not at once declare yourselves a separate independent State?"

Richard Henry Lee understood the moment with a clarity that few others possessed. A war was already underway — one the Continental Army had no hope of winning without foreign assistance. But what nation would intervene so long as Americans remained nominal subjects of the British Crown? He pressed his old ally Patrick Henry hard, quoting Brutus from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "There is a Tide in the Affairs of Men — which taken at the Floods leads on to Fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

Now was the moment.

But Richard Henry couldn't act without a mandate from Virginia. Virginia was the key. If Virginia moved first, moderates and conservatives in sister colonies couldn't readily dismiss the cause as a Massachusetts problem. He needed that mandate, and he'd charged his allies in that Williamsburg chamber to get it.

And they got it.

From FINIS on May 6 to a resolution on independence took just nine days.

Because the delegates met in closed sessions and kept no detailed minutes, we don't have a microscopic view of how it happened. But we know this: the radicals' best allies were ordinary Virginians. Across April and May, freeholders from different counties sent formal instructions to their delegates at the Convention. These were read aloud from the floor and later published in the papers.

Freeholders from Charlotte County did not mince words with their delegates: "Use your best endeavours that the Delegates which are sent to the General Congress be instructed immediately to cast off the British yoke."

Freeholders from Cumberland County were just as insistent, if somewhat more poetic: "We, your constituents, instruct you positively to declare for Independency; That you might solemnly abjure any allegiance to his Britannic Majesty, and bid him a good night forever."

Freeholders from Buckingham County instructed its delegates to cause a total and final separation from Great Britain — and to bid King George what they charmingly called "the last adieu."

By May 13, when delegates formally took up the question of the last adieu, they'd been arguing, persuading, arm-twisting, and hand-wringing in taverns and backrooms for a week. The room wasn't split between patriots and loyalists. It was split between patriots who couldn't agree on how and when to do it.

Conservatives argued that the Convention lacked the authority to dissolve a 170-year-old relationship with the Crown. They worried that enthusiasm was running ahead of political and military readiness. And here Edmund Pendleton — cautious, steady, underrated Edmund Pendleton — proved his quality. He stepped in to craft that most uninspiring of all political achievements: a compromise. He synthesized the multiple, competing drafts of a resolution for independence into a single text.

On May 15, the resolution went to a vote. It passed unanimously — all 112 delegates present.

The radicals got their result. The conservatives got language they could live with. No one was perfectly happy. In politics, that's usually a sign that something has gone right.

Thomas Ludwell Lee — who had wanted this more urgently than almost anyone — was both overjoyed and annoyed. He quickly sent a copy of the full resolution to his brothers in Philadelphia: "Enclosed you have some printed resolves which passed our Convention to the infinite joy of the people here. The preamble is not to be admired in point of composition, nor has the resolve of Independency that peremptory and decided air which I could wish… However, such as they are, the exultation was extreme. The British Flag was immediately struck on the Capitol, and a Continental hoisted in its room."

Tom was annoyed chiefly because Pendleton's preamble read like a defensive legal brief — almost apologizing for independence as Virginia's tragic last resort, rather than offering a soaring assertion of American rights. Still: the union jack came down at the capitol. And a new flag, the Continental flag, went up.

Meanwhile, George Mason — who had missed the debate and the vote due to a flare-up of gout — wrote to Richard Henry Lee with an assessment of Pendleton's compromise: "The preamble is tedious, rather timid, and in many instances exceptionable, but I hope it may answer the purpose." Then he urged Lee back to Virginia to help with the next great task. "I speak with the sincerity of a friend," Mason wrote, "when I assure you that, in my opinion, your presence cannot, must not be dispensed with. We cannot do without you."

Those words, We cannot do without you, are now engraved on Richard Henry's grave.

Mason and Tom Lee would soon bring a Virginia Declaration of Rights to a vote — a document that opens with the contested line that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and entitled to the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of pursuing and obtaining happiness. It was the first formal statement of citizens' inherent rights adopted by any American government — and it left a deep impression on the Declaration of Independence and the United States Bill of Rights.

But now we leave Williamsburg behind.

We travel north on the public post road, muddy after the April and May rains. We travel in the company of an unnamed express rider — paid to ride hell-for-leather with a single, treasonous dispatch. A resolution on independence, from Virginians.

The rider didn't mount up in the minutes after the vote. He waited only after the draft was formally engrossed, sealed by a clerk, with accompanying instructions from Pendleton. Perhaps by May 22, he took to the saddle — roughly 250 miles of hard riding ahead of him to Virginia's congressional delegates in Philadelphia.

He was poled across the Rappahannock on a flat-bottomed scow near Stratford. He climbed through the plantations and courthouse villages of the Northern Neck, crossed the Potomac at Hite's Ferry surrounded by rolling tobacco fields and dense forest, changing horses at inns and ordinaries, sleeping in short bursts by the hearth, grabbing a hunk of meat from the spit before retaking the road. Turning east, he passed through Annapolis and crossed into the Quaker farmlands of Chester County.

The traffic thickened on the widening road as he approached Philadelphia — the overcrowded political center of the colonies. Cobbled and muddy streets alive with refugees, merchants, militia, and congressional delegates. Fife and drum the daily soundtrack. Neighbors bitterly divided between moderates urging reconciliation and radicals urging independence.

Our rider arrived in a city on the edge.

On May 27, 1776, the Journal of the Continental Congress contains this unassuming entry: "Also the delegates from Virginia laid before Congress certain instructions they have received from their convention."

Short on detail. Pregnant with possibility.

In Virginia, the May 15 resolution was already old news — the printer Alexander Purdie had replaced the colonial seal in his masthead with THIRTEEN UNITED COLONIES — United we stand, Divided we fall — and printed the full text of the resolution ten days prior to that unassuming entry in the congressional record. But outside Virginia, the news broke publicly only after appearing casually and vaguely in the congressional record. The following day, Benjamin Towne's Pennsylvania Evening Post reprinted the full text of the Virginia resolution.

Richard Henry Lee wrote his brother Tom: "The sensible and spirited resolved of my Countrymen on the 15th has gladdened the heart of every friend to human nature in this place."

The local climate was already white hot. Virginia's resolve dumped fuel on the flames. With Virginia and North Carolina committed, independence no longer seemed like a mere Yankee fantasy. Ordinary Philadelphians realized their leaders were lagging irresolutely behind the rest of the continent.

But the radicals in Congress knew that to act immediately would mean independence died on the spot. They didn't have the votes. So through the dying days of May, Richard Henry Lee and John Adams executed an aggressive, stealthy campaign in the taverns and boarding houses of the city. Virginia would introduce the resolution — and they simply had to persuade the nay-sayers not to kill it outright upon arrival.

It was here that Francis Lightfoot Lee — Richard Henry's quieter, more affable younger brother — excelled. Frank deployed a brand of soft-spoken diplomacy that his fiery, visionary brother simply could not. Introduce it. Let it sit. Flip the holdouts.

No whisper of the Virginia initiative appeared in the congressional record for more than a week.

But by Friday, June 7, the Lees and their allies had secured enough informal assurances to strike. When Congress convened at ten o'clock that morning, Richard Henry Lee made no sudden moves. The record shows the Congress plodded through trivia — compensation to the owner of a merchant sloop pressed into naval service; the appointment of a committee to investigate complaints about defective gunpowder at Mr. Oswald Eve's mill.

Then, almost casually, Richard Henry Lee stood up.

"Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought 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."

Everything went according to plan. The resolution met with the expected opposition, but wasn't defeated. After lively debate on June 8, South Carolina's Edward Rutledge — a conservative who wanted to pump the brakes — got his three-week postponement. Which suited the radicals perfectly. They needed that extra time to bring the holdouts around.

Meanwhile, a five-man drafting committee was appointed to offer a rationale for independence. Conspicuously missing from the committee was Richard Henry Lee — partly because Virginia's seat fell to Thomas Jefferson after it became clear Richard Henry was Virginia-bound. His wife was ill. The man who had pushed as hard as anyone for the resolution that set the drafting committee in motion would not sit on it.

When Jefferson mailed Richard Henry copies of his original draft alongside the version agreed to by Congress, with the caveat that Lee should judge which version was better –you see, Jefferson hated to be edited–Lee replied: "It is wonderful, and passing pitiful, that the rage of change should be so unhappily applied. However the Thing is in its nature so good, that no Cookery can spoil the Dish for the palates of Freemen."

Richard Henry departed Philadelphia for home on June 13. He would not return until September — when he would add his signature to Jefferson's document.

I leave Richard Henry on the roads home, the heat shimmering at the horizon.

Frank, sitting in committee at the statehouse, neck deep in the art of building a new nation.

And Thomas Ludwell Lee ensconced still in the stifling heat of Williamsburg, neck deep in edits to the Declaration of Rights and the new Virginia Constitution.

I don't need to tell you what happened on July 2 — the day the Continental Congress voted formally to  separate from Great Britain — or July 4, the day they commemorated that separation with a timeless Declaration of reasons for separation and of aspirational American values. Only Frank was present for the signing ceremony on August 2nd. Richard Henry would sign a month later, when he finally returned to Philadelphia.

The founders were neither sky gods nor pristine marble figures. They were anxious, ambitious, sometimes petty, sometimes brilliant human beings — and they committed high treason, one bureaucratic step at a time, until the thing was done, irreparably done, and the hard work of living up to their aspirations began.

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of easy-peasy.ai (except Dr. Steffey)
© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2026