How did Henry Light Horse Harry Lee die?

Answer 1

Light Horse Harry ended his days n a very sad way. This true hero of the Revolutionary Army, and also the man who had introduced the Resolution into the Continental Congress which led to the Declaration of Independence ("these colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states") had by the time of the War of 1812 become thought of by the ignorant mob as "pro-British". He had a friend who was a newspaper publisher in Baltimore, who published articles and editorials critical of the US government during that war. The publisher was threatened with mob violence. Lee armed himself and went to help his friend defend the newspaper office. Accounts differ, but either the mob broke into the office, or Lee and the publisher were jailed and the mob broke into the jail, but either way Lee received a very severe beating, from the effects of which he never recovered and which eventually led to his death. Lee was a terrible businessman, always very much in debt, all his schemes failures, which meant he was either frequently in debtors prison (jailed for debt until his creditors were paid), or threatened with it. To escape this, after he recovered somewhat from the beating Lee went by boat to the islands of the Caribbean. He soon realized he was dying, and he wanted to see his family again before he went. He boarded a boat and headed north, but his condition grew worse. The captain of the boat put in at the dock of a plantation on one of the sea islands off the coast of Georgia, the home of his old friend from the Continental Army, Nathaniel Greene, the "Fighting Quaker". Greene had already been dead for a number of years but his widow, Kitty, was still there. Lee was carried into her house, and into an upstairs bedroom, and never came out alive again. It took him two weeks to die, in horrible screaming agony. He was buried on the plantation. As a young engineer officer his son Robert worked on Fort Pulaski near Savannah in the early 1830s for several years, but never had the chance to ever visit his father's grave, until the first year of the Civil War, when Robert was in charge of coastal fortifications and defenses in the Carolinas and Georgia.