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As conflict with England escalated, delegates to the 2nd Continental Congress foresaw the need for diplomatic and intelligence services. On 29 November 1775 the Committee for Correspondence was born, soon becoming the Committee for Secret Correspondence, and ultimately the Committee for Foreign Affairs on 17 April 1777. In the beginning, with war on the horizon, the likeliest prospective agents were Americans living abroad with established networks of information and alliance. The first agent recruited was born and reared at Stratford, and had been collecting intelligence for years. He was deeply placed in circles of London radicals and friends with establishment Whigs like Lord Shelburne. Join us this month as Stratford Mail peers beneath the covers of early American spy games. 

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On October 19, 1774 a tyrant minority in Annapolis compelled traders James Dick & Anthony Stewart to burn the merchant brigantine Peggy Stewart. The so-called Annapolis Tea Party differed from its Boston precedent in that there were no disguises, no concealing cover of night. The disposition of the Peggy Stewart and its cargo were topics of open deliberation and debate in public meetings organized to decide the matter. The meetings underscored and magnified local political tensions between patriots and their several methods of dissent and resistance. 24-year old Alice Lee of Blenheim (eyewitness to the bonfire) returns to Stratford Mail to offer her take on the immolation of the Peggy Stewart. 

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In 1787 Thomas Lee Shippen, an American student at Inner Temple, London, shipped a hat to his sister Anne Home Livingston in Philadelphia. Nancy, as she was called by kith and kin, was living at Shippen House with her parents after her marriage to a scoundrel with a taste for scandal and no taste for divorce fell through.  Tommy Shippen was a bon vivant and a bit of a clothes horse, writing home from London: "I am so transformed already by dress that you would hardly know me, curls to my hair, round hat, raven's gray coat, black satin vest," etc. Tommy was keen on the latest fashion, and keen to lift the spirits of his melancholy sister with a magnificent bit of millinery fresh from the frontlines where Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, set the standard. If not for the droll prose penned in exposition of the hat by their uncle Arthur Lee, the transit of this hat from London to New York to Philadelphia might have escaped notice. Tune in this month to track the itinerary of the grandest, most anticipated hat in human history! 

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If you’ve visited Stratford Hall since 2016, you likely noticed the looming full-length portrait of British statesman WIlliam Pitt the elder in our parlor. Standing at 8 feet by 5 feet, it’s difficult to miss! That painting reproduces the original now hanging in the Westmoreland County Museum. From the hand of Maryland painter Charles Willson Peale, the  original shipped from London and arrived at Chantilly, the home of Richard Henry Lee, on April 7, 1769. When Americans still had confidence in the normal political process of the British empire, they commemorated the efforts of British politicos who steered that process in ways sympathetic to the colonies. A painting, a statue, a town named or renamed–-these are among the ways colonists expressed gratitude and aligned themselves politically with power and influence being exercised overseas in Parliament. The Pitt portrait is a by-product of commemorative efforts in the late 1760s before Americans began to despair of substantive change. Ironically, Charles Willson Peale and William Pitt were neither the preferred artist nor the preferred subject for commemorative efforts by Westmoreland County movers and shakers. Tune in to Stratford Mail Episode 6: Painting Mr. Pitt to learn about what might have been, what was, and to learn about an exciting event coming to Stratford Hall on September 9, 2023!

Register here TODAY! 

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Virginia wine has made a comeback from its bleak beginnings. Cultivation failed to make native grapes competitive with European vintages, and European vines struggled to adapt to the challenges of foreign climates, soils, and pests. Interest in producing good quality wine from native grapes persisted across centuries, and was a preoccupation of Virginia planters, including the Masons, Carters, Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Lees. Stratford founder Thomas Lee experimented with 20 vines of Rhine grape acquired from Pennsylvanian Conrad Weiser, though it is unlikely he succeeded where so many others failed. This month Richard Henry Lee of Chantilly and Stratford ships a cask of Virginia wine to a curious party in London, and indulges his youngest brother’s interest in exotic fauna from back home.

For more on the history of wine in Virginia: read here.

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1773. A letter and gift from prominent British abolitionist Granville Sharp prompt a thank you from Arthur Lee, whose antislavery writings circulated among abolitionists at home and abroad. Sharp may have encountered Lee in London, or possibly become acquainted through his abolitionist correspondent in Philadelphia, Anthony Benezet, who reprinted both of Lee's antislavery essays. Those essays model many of the strengths and weaknesses of antebellum antislavery literature. While recognizing fully the contradiction between colonial agitation for liberty and the continued use of enslaved laborers, and despite his rational and spiritual aversion to slavery, Arthur surrenders to the "inhuman traffic" in the last year of his life. 

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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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This month Elizabeth Jackson gives a piece of her mind to Martha Corbin (Turberville) of Portobago on the Rappahannock River and reports on a special event at Stratford. Working with letters from yesteryear we realize emphatically that the 'Devil is in the details,' and often those details lie just beyond our grasp. In consequence we float the known and the suspected to the surface and work assiduously on swelling their numbers by cracking the not-yet-known. This month's letter hums with all the above. If you have additional information about Elizabeth Jackson or Nancy Lawson, email us at [email protected]

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Controlling the narrative is at the center of this month's microcast. As tensions escalate between Britain and the colonies, Americans residing and working in London experienced a unique set of difficulties, especially Americans involved in the production and dissemination of political intelligence. In a letter dated 6 March 1785, Arthur Lee underlined for John Adams, "how powerful a political instrument the press is," and how "the readers of News-papers swallow intelligence much more greedily, than any of the rest of their contents." In the wake of events at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Arthur and the Americans manage to steal a march on their British counterparts, scoring a significant public relations victory at the head of the impending war. One consequence of that victory is the subject of this month's letter dated 22 December 1775, which finds Dr. Arthur Lee put out by some mail gone missing. 

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