Ludwell Lee was an American lawyer and planter who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly representing Prince William and Fairfax Counties and rose to become the Speaker of the Virginia Senate.
15 Facts About Ludwell Lee
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Ludwell Lee was the second son born to the former Anne Aylett, the first wife of prominent patriot, politician and planter Richard Henry Lee.
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Meanwhile, these two elder brothers were sent to London, England, where their merchant uncle William Ludwell Lee lived with his wife and decade younger children.
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Tensions between the American colonies and the mother country were rising, which prompted Thomas Lee to return home early, but Ludwell Lee wanted to finish his five-year course of study, so defended his father's signing the Declaration of Independence, although his teacher and some schoolmates thought it treasonous.
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Ludwell Lee's father died in 1794, burdened by debts such that two auctions were made of his property, and his namesake grandson would publish two volumes of his grandfather's memoirs to rescue his name and honor.
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Ludwell Lee practiced as an attorney in northern Virginia, as well as farmed using enslaved labor.
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Ludwell Lee was a trustee for some of his cousins, since his uncle Henry Lee had married Flora's sister Matilda, then engaged in a number of questionable transactions with lands his wife had inherited from their father before fleeing the country, so she made a trust to protect that inheritance for her and their children.
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Voters in Prince William County elected him as a delegate, and later Ludwell Lee won election as a delegate from Fairfax County.
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Ludwell Lee concentrated on operating his plantations and providing for his children and grandchildren.
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Ludwell Lee freed Henrietta and her two children in 1801.
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Ludwell Lee was a member of the Loudoun Auxiliary of the American Colonization Society, as were nearby large slaveholders Burr Powell, George Carter, William Noland, Charles Ball, William Ellzey and Asa Moore, as well as Quakers Israel Janney, Yardley Taylor and Mahlon Taylor.
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In one of his last transactions, in 1825, Lee sold an island in the Potomac River near its conjunction with Broad Run to his cousin Wilson Cary V Seldon, who built a house and for whom the island would later be named.
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Ludwell Lee died in 1836, survived by his second wife, who with the assent of his children, sold Belmont Manor to Margaret Mercer, a dedicated member of the American Colonization Society who had worked as a teacher in order to pay her father's debts, free the slaves she had inherited, and send them to Africa a decade earlier.
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Ludwell Lee operated a school for girls at Belmont, and tried to use the plantation to demonstrate that farming could be successful without enslaved labor, although after her death her executors sold the property to Alexandria's largest slave trader.
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Ludwell Lee was buried at Belmont, as was his widow in 1850.