Today, we tend to think our disagreements are uncivil. But two centuries ago, citizens could be pummeled just for expressing their opinions and exercising their First Amendment rights. This is exactly what happened to a member of the founding generation.
Henry Lee III, who fought with valor in the Revolution and delivered George Washington’s eulogy, came to Baltimore in the summer of 1812 to aid Alexander Hanson, a federalist newspaper publisher critical of President James Madison and the freshly ignited war with Great Britain. After a night-time standoff with a furious crowd of Democrat-Republicans (supporters of the president), the local militia escorted Lee and Hanson’s party to one of the city’s jails, and supposedly to security. But the city’s officials, with little interest in protecting the prisoners, dismissed the guard.
The mob, construing this as tacit official approval of a massacre, regrouped and stormed the building. They entered the corridor in search of Lee and Hanson’s cell.
Watching the scene unfold through the spaces between the iron bars of their door, the prisoners hurriedly debated a course of action.
John Thompson, one of the youngest and strongest of the prisoners, welcomed the fight. Thompson and another sprang forward, extinguishing the torches of their unwanted visitors, sprinting towards the jail’s front door.
In the ensuing darkness and confusion, the prisoners proceeded out the door of their room, rushing for safety. Thompson was the first to pass the door, but as he exited he was bashed on the head and tumbled 12 feet down the stairs leading out of the jail. Surrounded, he begged for his life, only to be tarred and feathered and then put in a cart and wheeled away, his face slashed with rusty swords. John Hall and George Winchester were also beaten on their way to freedom. In minutes, the jail’s floor had turned red with blood.
As Lee made his way from the cell, he was apprehended, his head pummeled with clubs, his body hurled outside, bounding down the steps before finally coming to a rest atop the shoulders of John Hall. The bodies of others were quickly piled on top of those two, forming a macabre monument to the throng’s bloodlust.
Lying on the ground, unable to move, Lee quietly groaned. This only excited the crowd.
An assailant approached Lee’s wounded body, drew back his blade, and began to slice off his nose. Unable to sever the entire thing, he left Lee with a gaping gash in the middle of his face. Now another knife was thrust at his eye; as it approached, Lee sat up, blocking the blow, which instead ripped through his cheek, covering his face in blood. He collapsed, his head falling on the prostrate Hanson’s breast. He was promptly kicked off, leaving a crimson splotch on the younger man’s chest. “See Hanson’s brains on his breast!” enthused one of the monsters, mistaking Lee’s blood for Hanson’s. To measure if any life remained, Lee’s eyelids were peeled open and scalding candle wax dripped over his pupils.
As he lay still, a member of the throng booted him square in the genitals. There were women present too; they chortled at the violence, crying, “Kill the Tories!” The scene only grew more ghoulish. Children clapped and skipped, and all present joined hands, dancing around the heap of writhing bodies, singing, “We’ll feather and tar every damn British Tory. And this is the way for American glory!” Tributes to Madison and Jefferson followed.
Then came the matter of disposing the bodies. One voice suggested dumping them in the jail sink. Another suggested tar and feathers. Another advocated for dissection. A mass hanging was proposed. While the debate went on, Richard Page, the prison’s primary physician, alerted to the chaos, arrived. Though a Democratic-Republican, he was appalled by the carnage. He appealed to the mob, worn out from their evening of gory mischief, to go home and leave the bodies under his care. After all, he reasoned, most were dead and the rest would soon be. Satisfied, they merrily moved on. As Page spirited the prisoners back to their jail cell, one spectator asked where they were being taken. To which another responded, “To Hell.”
A week after the attack, Lee began to speak again, though with difficulty. His family received word that Lee had survived. “My father was much hurt,” Lucy Lee Carter wept to her aunt, Alice Lee Shippen, informing her of the tragedy in August. “Yes I have heard of the sad catastrophe of Baltimore,” Alice responded a month later from Philadelphia. “How melancholy to think or to write of. It is pleasant to report that the worst is over and he is out of danger.”
Following weeks of recuperation, Lee was well enough to return to Alexandria in early October. But though he had survived the Baltimore mob, he would never recover from their beating.
The injuries sustained in the beating eventually forced Lee to flee to the West Indies, where he hoped, in vain, that the warm climate might restore his health. He spent the remaining years of his life there, separated from his family, including his son Robert E. Lee.
Lee’s sad fate and the beating that led to it are worth remembering today. Our political squabbles are civil by comparison.
This is an edited excerpt pulled exclusively for the Washington Examiner from Ryan Cole, author of Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary War Hero (Regnery History; 15 January 2019). This op-ed is an adapted excerpt from this work.
