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Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee
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Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was the great-granddaughter of Martha and George Washington and the wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was born on 1 October 1808 at Arlington House, the mansion that her father had begun building in 1802 on lands that he inherited from his father in present-day Arlington County, Virginia. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee’s father was George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha and George Washington, and Mary Lee “Molly” Fitzhugh (1788–1853). An infant when his father, John Parke Custis, died of campfever during the Yorktown Campaign, Custis was raised by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was the third of her parents’ four children but the only one that survived infancy. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee received a classical education from private tutors. She learned Latin, Greek, and French, enjoyed English literature, and kept abreast of changes in the country’s political climate through newspapers. After her father died she edited for publication a series of essays that he had written for the National Intelligencer that appeared in 1860 under the title Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis, with a Memoir of the Author by His Daughter. Mary also taught slave women to read and write and gave Bible lessons to black children. As a child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was called Molly, after her mother. As an adult she was usually known as Mary. Yes, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was, like her father, a painter. Self-taught, she especially liked to paint landscapes, and in later years, when handicapped by debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, she often color tinted portraits of the family. Mary also was adept at sewing and knitting handiwork.
Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was quite religious, as her mother was before her. She was a life-long Episcopalian, attending when at home Christ Church, Alexandria, and when away whatever local Episcopal church that was nearby. At Mary’s home family prayers were repeated every morning and evening, and she chronicled her spiritual life in a prayer journal that she wrote in regularly. Mary became even more reliant on her faith when she became deathly ill in the fall of 1830. After her marriage to Robert E. Lee in 1831 she sometimes instructed others in the gospel, including black children to whom she gave Bible lessons. In the years following the Civil War, when her husband served as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, Mary Lee became actively involved in the local church. Yes, Sam Houston (1793–1863), future president of Texas and later U.S. Senator, courted Mary Anna Randolph Custis while he was living in the Federal City as a member of Congress from Tennessee. At the time Mary was about 16 years old and Houston about 31. Mary Anna Randolph Custis and Robert E. Lee wed on 30 June 1831 at Arlington House. The ceremony took place in the so-called Family Parlor, said to be the favorite room in the house and the site of several other weddings, which was adjacent to the dining room. The couple, who had known each other as children and began courting as early as 1824, became engaged in 1829 after Robert’s graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Robert E. and Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee had seven children, six of whom were born at Arlington House. They included three boys and four girls. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee and her family were forced to leave her life-long home, Arlington House, early in the Civil War. Fearing that the high buff on which the house was situated was a perfect place from which to stage a Confederate assault on the Federal City, Federal troopsoccupied the area after the Confederate victory of First Manassas. By then, Mary had overseen the packing and moving of the family heirlooms and other valuables to sites considered to be out of the reach of the Federal Army. (Later, in January 1864, the U.S. authorities illegally confiscated Arlington House for back taxes, and not until 1882 was it returned to the family.) Mary visited relatives and friends, but spent much of the war at a small house in Richmond, on East Leigh Street. Yes, in June 1873, a few months before her death, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee made a brief visit to Arlington House, a final pilgrimage during which she was unable to leave her carriage. Some of her old servants came out to greet her while she gazed upon her “dear old home, so changed,” she wrote, “it seemed but as a dream of the past.“ As she grew older, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee developed rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling and painful disease that worsened with age. Despite constant medical attention and numerous visits to the Virginia springs in search of relief, she found little relief. Mary increasingly found it difficult to walk, and by the end of the first year of the Civil War she was confined to a wheelchair. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee died on 5 November 1873 at her home at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She was 66 years old. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee is buried along side her husband in the Lee Family crypt at the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia. |
