The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family (review)

BOOK REVIEWS269 not most, of them go entirely unmentioned. (The closest thing to an inclusive listing appears only in a footnote, on page 310.) He focuses instead almost exclusively on the six figures he sees as "unique in their time for the degree and consistency of their social activism and for the new Afro-American institutions they took the lead in forming." More implicitly, the book is also defined geographically. New York City— along with its upstate and Connecticut hinterlands—is the terrain on which Swift's story unfolds. The city's oldest black Presbyterian church— known at various times as First Colored, Prince Street, and Shiloh Presbyterian—provides a kind of axis mundi, for it was founded by Cornish and then successively pastured by Wright, Pennington, and Garnet. Swift is little inclined, however, to pursue geographical links across denominational lines. Such important black clergy activists as New York Episcopal priest Peter Williams, Jr., and upstate AME Zion pastor Jermain W. Loguen receive little attention. Swift is so tenacious in recording the multiple roles these six men played as presidents, secretaries, spokespersons, and publicists for a quite remarkable array of protest and self-help organizations and so resourceful in documenting the intricate web of connections that bound their public lives together that he gradually wears down one's resistance to his claims about their coherence and importance as a group. In the end, however, one still suspects he is too dismissive of black church activist traditions rooted in Philadelphia and too ready (despite disclaimers) to underplay the parallel achievements of the leaders of the independent black denominations . One also wishes he had further explored the ties between his subjects and the wider interdenominational black activist network of which they were a part. This book stands, however, even when some of its grander claims fall, and it is much more satisfying for what it does than disappointing for what it fails to do. As Swift observes: "Far more intensive study of the careers of scores of antebellum black ministers is sorely needed." One hopes his fine contribution will inspire others. David W. Wills Amherst College The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family. By Paul C. Nagel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. 352. $24.95.) In 1639 or 1640, Richard Lee, the son of an English cloth merchant, emigrated to the Virginia wilderness. His family evidently had transAtlantic connections, because shortly after his arrival the colony's secretary of state appointed him clerk of the quarter court. He set an example for his descendants by marrying well. Anne Constable was a member of Governor Francis Wyatt's official household and the ward 270CIVIL WAR HISTORY of an intimate of King Charles I. With his wife's help, Lee's career flourished. He became a favorite of Governor William Berkeley and held an array of important posts, including secretary of state, a seat in the House of Burgesses, and membership on the governor's council of state. He avidly pursued wealth. At his death in 1664, he owned plantations , shares in trading ships, an estate in England, servants, slaves, and fifteen thousand tidewater acres. He had pioneered the use of slave labor. The year of the Stuart Restoration, he brought eighty slaves into the colony and received four thousand acres under the headright system. All this and his ten children with Anne provided the foundations for one of the nation's great dynastic families. The empire-building Lees are the subject of Paul Nagel's book. Nagel's cavalcade of colorful Lees includes Richard the "Scholar," Richard the "Squire," the Widow Hannah, the "Divine Matilda," "Col. Phil," "Light-Horse Harry," "Black-Horse Harry," and, of course, the "Marble Man," whose life is the focus of the last chapters. No less than seven Lees were prominent figures in the American Revolution. They served in the army, the Continental Congress, the House of Burgesses, and abroad. Unfortunately, the most famous of the revolutionary-era Lees, cavalry officer Light-Horse Harry, father of the legendary commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War, was a badly flawed, mercurial personality. His success, Nagel writes, "appeared to depend on whether...