Francis Lightfoot Lee

Francis Lightfoot Lee was born in 1734 at the Lee family seat of Mount Pleasant, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, a younger brother of Richard Henry Lee. He served in the House of Burgesses and in the Continental Congress, where he worked steadily on committees and signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He was less of an orator than his brother and left Congress before the war ended, returning to his plantation, Menokin, in Richmond County. He and his wife, Rebecca Tayloe, had no children. Like the other Virginia Lees of his generation, he was a planter who held people in slavery. He died in 1797, a few years after Richard Henry. Students sometimes overlook him because he did not leave a famous speech; his name on the parchment is the record of a man who did the daily work of Congress when it was dangerous to do so.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · Richard Henry Lee · Thomas Jefferson · George Wythe