SUMMARY
Henry Lee, also known as Henry Lee IV, was a writer, politician, diplomat, army officer, and the last member of the Lee family to own Stratford Hall. The son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a governor and hero of the American Revolution (1775–1783), Lee was educated at Washington Academy in Lexington and then the College of William and Mary. He represented Westmoreland County in the House of Delegates from 1810 to 1813 and served as a major in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. In 1817 he married Anne McCarty, a distant cousin, and became ward of her younger sister, Elizabeth “Betsy” McCarty. The Lees had a daughter who died in a fall, and in the wake of their mourning, Henry Lee began an adulterous and legally incestuous affair with Betsy McCarty, embezzling profits from her estate, which was under his management. The resulting scandal earned him the nicknames “Black Harry” and “Black-Horse Harry” and thwarted his political career. He was for