as an eminent member of the Lee
family, and as the father of General Robert E. Lee.

He was born in 1756, in the county of Westmoreland--which boasts of
being the birthplace of Washington, Monroe, Richard Henry Lee, General
Henry Lee, and General Robert E. Lee, Presidents, statesmen, and
soldiers--and, after graduating at Princeton College, entered the
army, in 1776, as captain of cavalry, an arm of the service afterward
adopted by his more celebrated descendant, in the United States army.
He soon displayed military ability of high order, and, for the capture
of Paulus's Hook, received a gold medal from Congress. In 1781 he
marched with his "Legion" to join Greene in the Carolinas, carrying
with him the high esteem of Washington, who had witnessed his skilful
and daring operations in the Jerseys. His career in the arduous
campaigns of the South against Cornwallis, and the efficient commander
of his cavalry arm. Colonel Tarleton, may be best understood from
General Greene's dispatches, and from his own memoirs of the
operations of the army, which are written with as much modesty as
ability. From these it is apparent that the small body of the "Legion"
cavalry, under its active and daring commander, was the "eye and ear"
of Greene's army, whose movements it accompanied everywhere, preceding
its advances and covering its retreats. Few pages of military history
are more stirring than those in Lee's "Memoirs" describing Greene's
retrograde movement to the Dan; and this alone, if the hard work at
the Eutaws and elsewhere were left out, would place Lee's fame as a
cavalry officer upon a lasting basis. The distinguished soldier under
whose eye the Virginian operated did full justice to his courage and
capacity. "I believe," wrote Greene, "that few officers, either in
Europe or America, are held in so high a position of admiration as you
are. Everybody knows I have the highest opinion of you as an officer,
and you know I love you as a friend. No man, in the progress of the
campaign, had equal merit with yourself." The officer who wrote those
lines was not a courtier nor a diplomatist, but a blunt and honest
soldier who had seen Lee's bearing in the most arduous straits,
and was capable of appreciating military ability. Add Washington's
expression of his "love and thanks," in a letter written in 1789,
and the light in which he was regarded by his contemporaries will be
understood.

His "Memoirs of the War in the Southern Depar