Lee, George Herbert

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: D. G. Bell, “LEE, GEORGE HERBERT,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/lee_george_herbert_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer and historian; b. 8 April 1854 in Portland (Saint John), N.B., son of the Reverend Charles Lee and Sarah Elizabeth Smith; m. there 8 Sept. 1885 Frances Elizabeth DeVeber, and they had two children; d. 25 Aug. 1905 in Boston.
    • G. Herbert Lee passed most of his early life in Fredericton, where his father became rector about 1860. He studied at the collegiate school and the University of New Brunswick, receiving a ba in 1872. The year following his father drowned and Lee was articled to Saint John lawyer George Sidney Smith, an uncle. After admission as attorney (1876) and call to the bar (1877) he was given much minor employment by Smith until 1880, though the two were never in partnership. As a young lawyer, a son of the rectory, and a relation of Odells, Chipmans, and Hazens, Lee presented a fair character to the world. 
    • He was not in easy circumstances, however, and after his marriage in 1885 the expense of “a very good house and . . . three servants” complicated his financial needs greatly. Yet Lee’s law practice was not lucrative. In his desperation Lee began, in 1889, to speculate in grain and pork futures on the Chicago commodity exchange. Each day he watched nervously for the arrival of the Boston Herald to scan its financial pages and telegraph instructions to his broker in Boston. Disadvantaged by his remove from the market, Lee compounded his vulnerability by selling short. It took him only two years to add nearly $10,000 to his already substantial debt.
    • His losses pushed Lee into misappropriation of security documents that he held as administrator of a number of estates. The richest of these included the legacy that former chief justice Ward Chipman had bequeathed to Ward Chipman Drury (both were cousins of Lee’s maternal grandmother). In effect, Lee was robbing his own family.
    • The Lee affair was pronounced the “worst case of defalcation that we have ever had in this province,” though whether the total involved was the $30,000 claimed by Lee or the $100,000 mentioned in the press cannot be determined. Lee’s great advantage in perpetrating frauds was his “respectability” in a society that still accorded deference to good connections. When contemporaries asked themselves how such a man could go wrong, as they did obsessively, they mentioned the desperation caused by the overcrowding of “a profession containing nearly four hundred men when there is not standing room in it for one hundred.”
  • Great Grandson of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4635
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