A courier arrived in Philadelphia on Monday, May 27, 1776, bearing a dispatch from Williamsburg, Virginia, with critical instructions for the colony’s congressional delegation. It would change the course of history.
Although the contents were read aloud to the assembly, an official motion was withheld by the Virginians while they coordinated their strategy with New England’s radicals.
A portrait of Richard Henry Lee, between 1795 and 1805, by Charles Willson Peale. National Portrait Gallery, Washington. (Public Domain)
On the morning of Friday, June 7, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, chosen by his colleagues to be the spokesman for the effort, rose before Congress to present the measure that history would remember simply as the Lee Resolution:…