Virginia congressman Richard Bland Lee, brother of Light-Horse Harry Lee, helped secure the compromise that placed the national capital on the Potomac River and built Sully Plantation. After the British burned Washington in 1814, President Madison appointed Lee a commissioner to settle claims for property destroyed in the war. In 1819 he became a judge of the Orphans' Court of the District of Columbia. Lee was elected to the First Congress and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1795. In 1790 he and Alexander White changed their votes to support Alexander Hamilton's plan for federal assumption of state debts, part of a compromise that located the national capital on the Potomac. In 1794 he married Elizabeth Collins of Philadelphia and built Sully, a plantation house in Fairfax County, Virginia. He later served again in the Virginia House of Delegates. Richard died in Washington, D.C., and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery there in 1827. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.