The Man Who Spent His Fortune on a War

Fielding Lewis was not a soldier. He was a planter, a merchant, and George Washington's brother-in-law, and when the Revolution came he contributed in the way that wealthy men who were not soldiers could contribute: he opened his purse and did not close it again until there was nothing left.

The gunnery manufactory he established on the western edge of Fredericksburg in 1775 produced muskets, bayonets, and military hardware for Continental and Virginia forces throughout the war. He hired workers, bought materials, maintained equipment, and managed the operation at his own expense while fighting repeated bureaucratic battles with the Virginia government for reimbursement that never came in full.

By 1781 he was dying, and his accounts were worse than his health. He had spent somewhere near £60,000 of his own money — a fortune that would have made him one of the wealthiest men in Virginia at the war's beginning — on a public enterprise that the public had never adequately compensated. His petitions to the legislature are preserved: they are the documents of a man who believed he was owed something and could prove it, presenting accounts, receipts, and calculations to committees that acknowledged his contributions in general terms and provided inadequate relief in specific ones.

He died on December 21, 1781, ten weeks after Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. The war was essentially over. The victory that his manufactures had helped make possible was announced throughout the state he had spent himself to defend.

Betty Washington Lewis, his widow, spent years afterward attempting to recover the family's financial position. The Virginia government eventually made partial restitution, but Kenmore Plantation remained encumbered. The Revolution had cost the Lewis family nearly everything.

What Fielding Lewis's story illuminates is the distance between the Revolution's rhetoric and its economics. The same cause that asked ordinary men to die in battle asked wealthy men to spend their fortunes — and then, in too many cases, failed to honor either sacrifice with the acknowledgment it deserved.