He served by using nifty distinction under Washington, and around 1778 was promoted major and given the command of the little irregular corps, with which he won a great reputation as a leader of lightly troops. His services on a outpost line of the army earned for him the cognomen of "Light Horse Harry." His greatest feat was a brilliant surprise at a Battle of Paulus Hook in New Jersey, on August 19, 1779; for this feat he received the gold medallion, the reward given to there is no more officer following general's rank in the entire war.

He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1780, and sent sustaining the picked corps of dragoons to the southern theatre of war. On this button he rendered priceless services within triumph & kill, notably at Guilford Court House, Camden and Eutaw Springs. He was present at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, and later left a army owing to health problem.

Around February 1782, he married his second cousin's girl Matilda, world health organization wore terzetto tikes prior to she died around 1790.

From either 1786 to 1788 Lee was a delegate to the Continental Congress, and in the survive-known as season in the Virginia convention he favoured the adoption of the Federal constitution. From either 1789 to 1791 he served in the General Assembly, and from either 1791 to 1794 was Governor of Virginia.

Around 1794 Washington sent Lee to help in the suppression of the "Whiskey Rebellion" in western Pennsylvania. The recently county of Virginia was named when him in the period of his governorship. Henry Lee was the major-general in 1798-1800. From either 1799 to 1801 he served in Congress. He delivered a location on a dying of Wash. which contained the noted sentence, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

In June 13, 1793, Lee married the flush & attractive Anne Hill Carter (17 years his junior) at Shirley Plantation. It got Sextuplet tykes, one of whom died withinside infancy in 1796. Their fifth tike, Robert Edward Lee would gain fame as a Confederate general during the American Civil War.

Presently when a War of 1812 broke out, Lee, while helping to resist the attack of a mob in his friend, A. C. Hanson, editor of the Baltimore Federal Republican, which had opposed the war, received grave injuries, from which he never recovered. He died at a home of General Nathanael Greene on Cumberland Island, Georgia, on March 25, 1818.

Lee wrote worthful Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department (1812; 3rd ed., by having memoir by his boy Robert E. Lee, 1869).