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Robert E. Lee
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The name given to Robert E. Lee at birth was Robert Edward Lee. When Lee and his wife Mary gave the same name to their sixth child (and youngest son) at his birth in 1843, Lee became a Senior, although he continued to sign his name “R. E. Lee”—as he had done since his youth. Robert E. Lee, Jr., was called “Rob” by his family and friends. 
Robert E. Lee was born on 19 January 1807 at Stratford Hall, the Lee Family estate on the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia. Robert was the last Lee born at Stratford Hall to survive infancy, as his family moved to Alexandria in 1810. Stratford Hall passed out of the Lee family in 1822 when Robert’s half brother Henry Lee sold the estate to William C. Somerville of Maryland.
On his mother’s side, Robert descended from John Carter (d. 1669), an English immigrant who sailed to Jamestown in 1625 on board the Prosperous. Within a year of his arrival at James Fort, John Carter was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. In 1642 he settled Corotoman on a 13,500-acre tract of land that he patented in the Northern Neck. His son Robert “King” Carter (1663–1732), born to John and Sarah Ludlow (d. 1668), the fourth of his five wives, was during his lifetime the most weathly and powerful man in the American colonies. King Carter, who ultimately owned some 300,000 acres of land, was Robert E. Lee’s great-great-grandfather.
Below is a detail depicting the Lee crest as engraved on a piece of family silver dinnerware.
According to Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, Robert E. Lee at age 54 was five feet, eleven inches tall and weighed 170 pounds. Two years later, in March 1863, a physician recorded that Lee was at that time five feet, ten and one-half inches tall and weighed 165 pounds. Robert E. Lee’s mother was Ann Hill Carter (1773–1829), a daughter of one of Virginia’s most wealthy planters, Charles Carter of Shirley in Charles City County. Shirley had its orgin in Shirley Hundred, settled in 1613 as the earliest plantation outside Jamestown. Ann’s grandmother Elizabeth Hill of Shirley had married John Carter III, the son and heir to most of the lands of Ann’s great-grandfather, Robert “King” Carter (1663–1732) of Corotoman.
After their marriage at Shirley on 18 June 1793, Light-Horse Harry and Ann Hill Carter lived at Stratford Hall, which had come to Lee upon the death of his first wife, Matilda Lee (d. 1790). Robert was his parents’ fifth child. Robert E. Lee was 11 years old when his father Light-Horse Harry Lee died in 1818 and as a result he soon became his mother’s confidante, and as a young adult Lee became a main source of support for his mother and his siblings. Robert was aware of his father’s failures in business, his imprisonment for debt, and the resulting loss of the family estate Stratford Hall, and some have speculated that Robert’s life-long attention to duty and avoidance of anything remotely scandalous were reactions to his perceptions of his father’s weaknesses, or that he entered the military in an effort to emulate his father in the one role that Light-Horse Harry could be considered to have been a model. Robert chose not to discuss is father’s weaknesses and failures in writing, and this much is certain, that he respected and honored his father’s memory. After the Civil War Robert prepared a new edition of his father’s Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department (1869), introducing it with a biography of Light-Horse Harry that he wrote specially for the republication. Robert twice visited his father’s grave at the home of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene on Cumberland Island, Georgia, the first time in January 1862 when Robert was strengthening the Confederate defenses of Savannah, and the final time in the spring of 1870 when he toured the south to visit the grave of his daughter. Robert E. Lee lived at three different homes as a child. He was born at Stratford Hall, a Lee Family estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and lived there until 1810, when the family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. In Alexandria the family lived first at 611 Cameron Street, in Old Town. About 1811 or 1812 the Lees moved to 607 Oronoco Street, a house now known as the Boyhood Home of Robert E. Lee. The Boyhood Home had been purchased in 1799 by William Fitzhugh of Chatham, who was the grandfather of Robert’s future wife, and in fact the wedding of Robert’s future parents-in-law married took place in the home’s parlor in 1804. (Fitzhugh was a prominent revolutionary and political ally of George Washington and in fact was the last person that Washington visited before his unexpected death in December 1799.) The Boyhood Home was across the street from a house built by Philip Richard Fendall, a cousin of Lee’s father, known now as the Lee-Fendall House Museum and Garden (614 Oronoco Street). About 1819 or 1820 Robert E. Lee entered Alexandria Academy, a small school that had been established in 1785 with George Washington among its first trustees. (In fact, Washington when making out his will in 1799 made a bequest to the school.) Situated in a one-story brick building on Washington Street, between Duck and Wolf, Alexandria Academy was a public school for white boys led by an Irshman, William B. Leary. The curriculum was classical and young Robert learned Greek, Latin, algebra, and geometry. He excelled in all, especially mathematics, and completed his study in 1823. Leary testified to his student’s abilities when recommending Lee for an appointment to West Point: Robert Lee was formerly a pupil of mine. While under my care I can vouch for his correct and gentlemanly deportment. In the various branches, to which his attention has been applied, I flatter myself that his information will be found adequate to the most sanguine expectations of his friends. With me he has read all the minor classics in addition to Homer & Longinus, Tacitus & Cicero. He is well versed in arithmetic, Algebra & Euclid. In regard to what he has read with me I am certain that when examined he will neither disappoint me or his friends. W. B. Leary Although Lee may have thought about attending medical school or entering the clergy, he apparently did not consider those options seriously, setting his sights instead on a military career. For that he needed an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which was best won through the assistance of prominent persons. Accordingly, Lee sought and obtained letters of recommendation from not only his former teacher but from Congressman R. S. Garnett and one written by U.S. Representative Charles Fenton Mercer and signed by Mercer and other Congressmen: Virgina Representative George Tucker, Virginia Senator James Barbour (said to be John C. Calhoun’s likely successor as Secretary of War), Kentucky Senator Richard H. Johnson (later Vice-President under Martin Van Buren), and Tenneesee Senators William Kelly and Henry Johnson (soon after governor of Louisiana). Additionally, Robert’s brothers Charles Carter Lee and Henry Lee wrote letters testifying to Robert’s personal character. Finally, Lee presented these letters of support in person to Secretary Calhoun, armed with a letter of introduction from William H. Fitzhugh of Ravensworth. As a result, Robert was appointed to West Point on 11 March 1824, with admission scheduled for 1 July 1825. Lee’s acceptance of the appointment is the earliest surviving letter of his to survive. Lee graduated from West Point in 1829. No, Robert E. Lee graduated second in his class at West Point. Graduating ahead of Lee was Charles Mason (1804–1882), a New York native who resigned his commission in the engineers corp after two years and became a patent lawyer in Wisconsin. Watson served on the bench of the Iowa Territory Supreme Court until Iowa became a state in 1846. While an opponent of slavery, Mason was also a Copperhead (peace Democrat) who did not serve in the military during the Civil War. Lee’s son, George Washington Custis Lee, graduated first in his class in 1854, exactly twenty-five years after the graduation of his more famous father. Robert E. Lee was a model cadet at West Point and attended the school for four years without earning any demerits or other infractions. He was not the only student in the school’s history to do so, and in fact four others of Lee’s class also went throught their four years without earning demerits, but it was nevertheless a notable accomplishment.
The earliest known portrait of Robert E. Lee was painted by William E. West of Baltimore, who painted portraits of Lee and his wife Mary Anna Randolph Custis in 1838. At that time Lee was a 31-year-old captain serving in the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers at Washington, D.C., and he posed in military attaire. They portraits were considered wedding portraits although by that time the Lees had been married for several years. A portrait of Lee at the time he served as commander of Camp Cooper on the Clear Fork of the Brazos in Texas resemble the West pose.
When Lee became famous he was often photographed. Celebrated photographers Mathew Brady and Julian Vannerson (b. 1826), a Confederate Army officer, both made historic photographs of Lee, and Michael Miley (1841–1918) of Rockbridge County, Virginia, became the “official” family photographer after Lee moved to Lexington. Miley photographed not only Lee and his family but family artifacts as well as Lee’s funeral in Lexington in 1870. Numerous carte de visites (CDV) of General Lee, many of which were signed by him, have survived. Measuring approximately two and one-eight by three and one-half inches, such relics often fetch thousands of dollars.
Robert E. Lee’s wife was Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1808–1873), the great grandaughter of Martha Washington. Mary’s father, George Washington Parke “Wash” Custis (1781–1857), was a few months old when he went to live with his grandparents at Mount Vernon following the death of his father John Parke Custis during the seige of Yorktown. Mary’s mother was Mary Lee Fitzhugh “Molly” Custis (1788–1853), a daughter of William Fitzhugh (1741–1809) of Chatham, the grandson of Robert “King” Carter of Corotoman. Mary Custis was born at a Clarke County estate owned by relatives of her mother but she was raised at Arlington House, the Custis mansion high on the bluff across the Potomac River from the Federal City. As the only surviving of the four children born to her parents, Mary was heir to the Arlington estate. As was the custom for young girls of standing in the early nineteenth century, Mary Custis was tutored at home. She was given a classical education and became proficient in several languages, including French, Greek, and Latin, and throughout her life she was a great reader and an inveterate letter writer. She also was, like her father, a self-taught painter, and late in life she often hand-tinted cartes-de-visite of famous husband before giving them to friends.
Mary Custis Lee was a devout Episcopalian, and her strong faith no doubt helped sustain her in her decades-long struggle with degenerative rheumatoid arthritis. She relied on crutches for as long as she could, but by the time war forced her to leave Arlington House in the spring of 1861 she was confined to a wheelchair. Arlington was confiscated by the federal government during the war and she returned only once, in the months before her death, for a brief visit. Unable to leave her carriage and go inside, she described the event in a letter to a friend, I rode out to my dear old home, so changed it seemed but as a dream of the past. I could not have realized that it was Arlington but for the few old oaks they had spared, & the trees planted on the lawn by the Gen’l & myself which are raising their tall branches to the Heaven which seems to smile on the desecration around them. She died five months later, having survived her husband by almost three years. Mary Lee assembled her father’s memoirs published them in 1859 as Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, by his Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis, with a Memoir of the Author by his Daughter. The book has been a mainstay for anyone interested in the family and personal life of George Washington. Yes, Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Randolph Custis shared the same great-great-grandfather—Robert “King” Carter of Corotoman. Both Robert and Anna each descended from Carter through their mothers. Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Anna Randolph Custis always thought of Arlington, the home of Mary’s parents, as their own home. However, because of Lee’s military career as an engineer, they lived in many places over the course of their marriage, some for extended lengths of time. Beginning shortly after their wedding in June 1831 the young couple occupied a small house at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, where Lee had been ordered to assist in overseeing the construction of Fort Monroe. They lived at Old Point Comfort until 1834 when Lee was ordered to the Federal City, and they lived at Arlington. After Robert E. Lee’s stint in Washington, his pre-Civil War military destinations included Ohio, Michigan, St. Louis, Mexico, Texas, Baltimore, and New York, and his wife and children accompanied him when they could. During the Civil War, he was separated from his family as he saw service in South Carolina, Georgia, and in the field with the Army of Northern Virginia, and Mary lived mostly in Richmond. After the war, with Arlington confiscated by the federal government, Robert and Mary made their final home at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.
Lee traveled to Georgia by sea accompanied only by Nat, the elderly family coachman and house slave that Lee’s recently deceased mother had willed to her grandaughter Mildred and who the family was sending south with hopes that the milder climate would restore his declining health. (Nat’s health continued to decline and he died without returning to Virginia.)
Lee returned to Cockspur Island in 1861 as brigadier general of the Confederate Army in command of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. He arrived right at the moment that Federal forces were planting a foothold within sight of Fort Pulaski, having seized from the Confederates the nearby forts at Hilton Head and Bay Point. Lee inspected Fort Pulaski and redeployed its guns for better defense. It took several months, but the Federals eventually set up an effective blockade of Fort Pulaski, paving the way for a bombardment that led to Confederate surrender and Federal occupation in April 1862. When news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox reached Fort Pulaski in April 1865 the Federal commander ordered two hundred guns to be fired from the garrison’s bulwarks, signaling the end not only of the war but of the military career that had its beginnings in Cockspur Island’s muddy marsh some three and half decades earlier.
Like many men of his day, Robert E. Lee catered his reading to works related to his business or career, in Lee’s case the military. He also read newspapers regularly, and his frequent correspondence meant that he spent some time almost daily reading and answering correspondence. His biographer Douglas Southall Freeman made some interesting observations about Lee’s reading habits while serving as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point: During the two years and seven months of his superintendency he drew from the shelves six magazines and forty-eight books, some of the latter in several volumes, and some of them taken out more than once. He got three volumes of fiction, two of travel, and five of poetry, all of them probably for Mrs. Lee or his daughters, inasmuch as he had no taste for novels and scanty time for verse, though he knew more poetry than most soldiers. Source: R. E. Lee: A Biography, volume 1, by Douglas Southall Freeman (New York and London, 1934).
13 May 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico. In August Robert E. Lee received orders to proceed to San Antonio de Bexar, Texas, for service in Mexico. Once there, Lee put his engineering skills to work, building roads and bridges, mapping the territory, selecting sites for redoubts. Eventually he found himself among a six-thousand-man division some three hundred and sixty-five miles deep into Mexico, leading reconnaissance missions and laying out camps, and volunteering for scouting missions. Lee’s zeal and successes did not go unnoticed and within a few months he was called to the headquarters staff of General, Winfield Scott, who was preparing an expedition to Vera Cruz, as an aide-de-camp. At Vera Cruz Lee went on more scouting missions and erected defensive works, and, importantly, he tasted combat for the first time, directing artillery counterfire against Mexican guns firing on American sailors. (Ironically, Lee’s older brother Smith Lee was among the artillerists that he commanded.) His service in the seige of Vera Cruz won for Lee a commendation in orders, his first. Next, General Scott joined U.S. forces pressing Mexican General Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo. At great personal peril, Lee reconnoitered Santa Anna’s west flank to determine exactly whether American troops might be able to maneuver around the Mexican troops. Lee’s answer was yes, and off marched an entire division, with Lee as its guide and trail cutter, to within seven hundred yards of the enemy. Once the division reached its destination Lee fixed a battery for the impending battle then left to guide a different brigade around Santa Anna’s north flank, to cut off retreat. The American rout of Santa Anna’s army was ensured, and when it had ended no individual emerged with more accolades from his superiors than Lee. In General Scott’s words, This officer, greatly distinguished at the siege of Vera Cruz, was again indefatigable, during these operations, in reconnaissance as daring as laborious, and of the utmost value. Nor was he less conspicuous in planting batteries, and in conducting columns to their stations under the heavy fire of the enemy. Months later, Lee was brevetted major, effective the day of the battle, for “gallant and meritorious conduct” at the battle of Cerro Gordo. Lee, as it turned out, was only beginning to earn a reputation. His exploits were to be repeated, or surpassed, in the performance of his duties as Scott, setting his sights on Mexico City, made assaults at Padierna and Churubusco. Lee produced accurate maps where none had before existed, and he found or made roads for the infantry and artillery when no one else could. And most important, he hand delivered critical messages between commanding generals when the officers themselves were unaware of to make contact with one another. Staying in the saddle for thirty-six hours straight, Lee emerged a hero worthy of comparison to his legendary father, Light-Horse Harry Lee. Again, no one earned more praise for their performance in the offensive. General Scott wrote of Lee that his service exhibited “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, in my knowledge, pending the campaign.” A navy auditor, Lieutenant Raphael Semmes, observed Lee at a council of war before the battle: The services of Captain Lee were invaluable to his chief. Endowed with a mind which has no superior in his corps, and possessing great energy of character, he examined, counselled, and advised with a judgment, tact, and discretion worthy of all praise. His talent for topography was peculiar, and he seemed to receive impressions intuitively, which it cost other men much labor to acquire. Chapultepec, the fortified height at Mexico City, followed. Lee again led reconnaissance, erected batteries aimed at the reduction of Chapultepec, and offered advice on strategy and tactics to General Scott. Before it was over, Lee was forty-eight hours without sleep, wounded in the saddle, and finally fainted from sheer exhaustion. After Santa Anna fled and the Americans waltzed into Mexico City, Lee spent his time surveying and making maps. He was ordered back to Vera Cruz and then to home, twenty months since he had left Virginia. Back home and across the country the public little knew of Lee’s contributions to the American success in Mexico, but his fellow officers knew, and General Scott later referred to Lee as “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.” According to Robert E. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee learned some valuable lessons while in Mexico, lessons that would serve him well as commander of an army in the field during the Civil War: Twenty months of service in Mexico had been ended when Lee saw the castle and the towers of Vera Cruz fade from view, never again to be seen by him. They were probably the twenty most useful months of his training as a soldier. Their effect on him can be seen during nearly the whole of the War between the States. The lessons he learned on the road to Mexico City he applied in much of his strategy. Warnings he read in that campaign he never forgot. Source: R. E. Lee: A Biography, volume 1, by Douglas Southall Freeman (New York and London, 1934).
After gathering information about the layout of the fire-engine house and the number of hostages being held by Brown, Lee drafted a firm course of action. He decided to surrounded the building with militia as a show of force and to offer safety to Brown and his men in exchange for their unconditional surrender, and if Brown declined the terms to immediately storm the engine-house. Out of courtesy, Lee offered the Maryland and Virginia militia the priviledge of storming the building in the event Brown did not surrender voluntarily. After both declined, he turned to the marines, who put forth two dozen men for the task, half to enter the building and half to be held in reserve. In the event of an assault, Lee ordered, the marines were not to fire their guns but to use bayonets only, and they were to consider the slaves in the building as hostages, unless they resisted. J.E.B. Stuart volunteered to approach the engine house under a flag of truce to read Lee’s offer to the insurgents and to give a signal if it was declined. After a conference between Stuart and Brown, with hostages yelling in the background, Stuart gave the signal and the marines stormed the building. The assault lasted under three minutes; the marines suffered two casualites(one mortal) but no hostages were injured. After interrogation Lee sent Brown and the other prisoners under escort to the county jail at Charlestown. Lee then dismissed the marines and returned to Washington to make his report. The insurrection was over and Brown was tried and convicted of treason and murder and a date (2 December) was set for execution.
The Engine-House at Harpers Ferry and the Prison at Charlestown
For Lee, however, the drama had one more, albeit anticlimatic, scene. Two weeks later, admist rumors that radical abolitionists in the north were threatening to rescue Brown or revenge his execution, Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise asked President Buchanan to send Federal troops to Harpers Ferry. The president ordered four companies of marines to Harpers Ferry, under Lee’s command. While at Harpers Ferry Lee met with Brown’s wife, Mary Ann Day Brown (1817–1884), who against her husband’s advice had come to see her husband one last time before his execution; Lee referred her to the commander of the Virginia forces overseeing the jail. Brown’s execution came and went without incident, and Lee and the troops were dismissed ten days later. The Engine-House in 1862 and “Fort Brown“ in the 1880s
Robert E. Lee’s rise in the officer ranks was very slow, as the U.S. Army was small and career officers seldom relinquished their commissions except for reasons of retirement, severe illness, or death. When a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lee was honored with the appointment of staff sergeant at the end of his first year because of his high standing in the class. After his third year he was named corps adjutant, according to his biographer Douglas Southall Freeman “the most coveted of West Point honors.” When Lee was sent to Georgia to work as an engineer at Cockspur Island in August 1829 he went with the rank of brevet second lieutentant. It was July 1832 before he was named regular second lieutenant, backdated to the date of his first commission, 1 July 1829. It was November 1836 before Lee would be promoted to first lieutenant, and August 1838 before he received his captain’s commission. Not until 1856 would he receive another regular rank promotion, to major, although his distinguished service in the Mexican War won him brevets of major after the Battle of Cerro Gordo (August 1847, backdated to the previous April), lieutenant-colonel following the taking of Padierna and Churubusco (August 1847) and colonel for his role at Chapultepec (August 1848). Thus as the superintendent of West Point, 1852 to 1855, Lee’s regular rank was captain although he was drawing pay based on his colonelcy by brevet. Lee’s next regular promotion came in March 1855, when he was named lieutenant colonel of one of the two new cavalry regiments created by Congress to guard the American frontier against hostile Indians. When he was finally promoted to colonel, in March 1861, it was because secession in the deep south had made vacancies in the U.S. Cavalry. Although he had already made up his mind to stay with Virginia, however she might choose regarding secession, Lee accepted the colonel’s commission, which incidentally was signed by Abraham Lincoln. Shortly afterward, U.S. officials made overtures to Lee that he might succeed General Winfield Scott himself as commander of the U.S. Army, while Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker offered Lee a brigadier general’s commission in the new southern army, the highest rank then concieved. As expected, Lee resigned his commission on 20 April, upon learning that Virgina had seceded from the Union. The same day the Alexandria Gazette printed an editorial asking Virginia to rally around Lee if he should resign from the U.S. Army. The next day Governor John Letcher sent a messenger to Lee offering him supreme command of the Virginia military and naval forces, with the rank of major-general. Lee accepted, and his appointment was confirmed unanimously by the Virginia Convention. When Virginia formally allied with the Confederate government in May Lee was given command of Confederate troops within the state, on 14 May, and days later he was authorized to act as a Confederate brigadier-general. By June the Confederate government had moved to Richmond and begun to take over the Virginia forces, leaving Lee without rank or authority. On 31 August 1861 the Confederate Congress commissioned Lee major-general, to date from 16 May. Lee’s Letter of Resignation
After thirty-one years in the army, at age 53, Robert E. Lee’s pay was $1,205 per year; when food, lodging, and traveling expenses were included, it amounted to $4,060. On this salary Lee was supporting himself, an invalid wife, four unmarried daughters, and the education of his sons. No, Robert E. Lee opposed secession. “Secession is nothing but revolution,” Lee wrote to a son, echoing the words of President James Buchanan. As an American citizen, I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a recourse to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. As the threat of disunion began to heat up after the election of Lincoln, Lee wrote from Texas his observation that the “Southern states seem to be in a convulsion.” Nevertheless, although he also believed strongly that the Union should be preserved, Lee thought individual states held the right to self-determination. His loyalty was to Virginia—and to the Union so long as Virginia remained in the Union. How strongly Lee opposed disunion is apparent in a letter that he wrote home in late January 1861: I received from Major Nicholls Everett’s life of Washington, you sent me and enjoyed its perusal very much. How his spirit would be grieved could he see the wreck of his mighty labors! I will not, however, permit myself to believe till all ground of hope is gone that the work of his noble deeds will be destroyed, and that his precious advice and virtuous example will so soon be forgotten by his countrymen. As far as I can judge by the papers, we are between a state of anarchy and civil war. May God avert from us both. It has been evident for years that the country was doomed to run the full length of democracy. To what a fearful pass it has brought us. I fear that mankind will not for years be sufficiently Christianized to bear the absence of restraint and force. I see that four states have declared themselves out of the Union; four more will apparently follow through their example. Then, if the Border States are brought into the gulf of revolution, one-half of the country will be arrayed against the other. I must try and be patient and await the end, for I can do nothing to hasten or retard it. To another relative he wrote, God alone can save us from our folly, selfishness and short sightedness. The last accounts seem to show that we have barely escaped anarchy to be plunged into civil war. What will be the result I cannot conjecture. I only see that a fearful calamity is upon us, and fear that the country will have to pass through for its sins a fiery ordeal. I am unable to realize that our people will destroy a government inaugerated by the blood and wisdom of our patriot fathers, that has given us peace and prosperity at home, power and security abroad, and under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequalled in the history of mankind. I wish to live under no other government, and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honour. If a disruption takes place, I shall go back in sorrow to my people and share the misery of my native state, and save in her defence there will be one soldier less in the world than now. I wish for no other flag than the “Star spangled banner” and no other air than “Hail Columbia.” I still hope that the wisdom and patriotism of the nation will yet save it. Lee was on assignment in Texas when that state seceded, and he half expected to be held prisoner after he refused a Texas Convention delegation’s strong urging that he resign his U.S. Army commission and join the Confederacy. Although Lee feared that Virginia too might pull out of the Union if some means could not be found to avert war, he insisted that his first allegiance was due to his mother state and that as long as she stood with the Union, so would he. The delegation did not attempt to detain Lee or prevent his traveling to the coast to sail for Washington, where he had been ordered, but it did prohibit him from transportating his personal effects out of Texas. Lee stored his belongings with a staunch Federalist friend, Charles Anderson, who later recalled that Lee was quite angry at the Texans. Lee described his thinking on the subject to Anderson: I think it but due to myself to say that I cannot be moved by the conduct of those people from my sense of duty. I still think, as I then told you and Doctor [Willis G.] Edwards, that my loyalty to Virginia ought to take precedence over that which is due the Federal Government. And I shall so report myself at Washington. If any stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will still follow my native state with my sword, and if need be with my life. I know you think and feel very differently, but I can’t help it. These are my principles, and I must follow them. Lee had declared many times that he could never lift his sword against his native state, but if forced would lift it in her defense. In the end Virginia seceded, and with her went Lee. It was his duty and he was bound by honor to do his duty. As his biographer Douglas Southall Freeman observed, when the time came, for Lee, There was no questioning, no holding back, no delay. The road from Arlington, though lit with glory, led straight to Appomattox. But Lee never regretted his action, never even admitted that he had made a choice. With the war behind him, with the South desolate and disfranchised, and with her sons dead on a hundred battlefields, he was to look back with soul unshaken and was to say: “I did only what my duty demanded. I could have taken no other course without dishonor. And if it all were to be done over again, I should act in precisely the same manner.” As with many of his countrymen, Lee’s heart lay with Virginia. According to John Nicolay and John Hay, two of Lincoln’s presidential secretaries, Lincoln only asked Francis Preston Blair, Sr., co-publisher of the Washington Globe, to sound out Robert E. Lee on the subject. But Blair recalled, ten years after the fact, that Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron had “expressed themselves as anxious to give the command of our army to Robert E. Lee. I considered myself as authorized to inform Lee of that fact.” Blair, who had served in Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, not only thought himself empowered by both Lincoln and Cameron to actually offer the command to Lee, if he found Lee receptive to the idea, but he told Lee as much. Lee, at the time still a Federal officer, heard Blair out at length but made it clear that the proposal was unacceptable if meant that he would take command of an army that would be placed in the field against Virginians. “Lee said he was devoted to the Union,” recalled Blair. “He said, among other things, that he would do everything in his power to save it, and that if he owned all the negroes in the South, he would be willing to give them up and make the sacrifices of the value of every one of them to save the Union. We talked several hours on the political question in that vein. Lee said he did not know how he could draw his sword upon his native state.” Lee, according to his own recollections in 1868, declined the offer, “stating, as candidly and courteously as I could, that, though opposed to secession, and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern states.” Although the testimonies of the two men largely agreed, Blair seems to have gone away from their meeting thinking that Lee had not outright rejected the proposal and wanted to discuss it with General Winfield Scott. Whatever the misunderstandings, the offer of command of the U.S. Army had been, in the name of the commander in chief, and rejected. Seven Days Battles, 25 June–1 July 1862,
Second Manassas (Bull Run), 29–30 August 1862
Antietam (Sharpsburg), 17 September 1862 The single most bloody day of the Civil War. Although at the end of the day Lee was forced to retreat from the field back into Virginia, General McClellan’s refusal to pursue the Confederate forces led to his dismissal by Lincoln. Captain John Hope, Artillery Hell
The Advance of the 9th New York Infantry, by Edwin Forbes
Fredericksburg, 13 December 1862
Chancellorsville, 2–3 May 1863
Gettysburg 1–3 July 1863
Wilderness, 5–7 May 1864 This was the opening battle of Federal Army General U. S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. Lee’s army, greatly outnumbered, fought to a draw, but afterwards Grant did what no other Union general had done before: instead of retreating he pressed Lee by moving closer to Richmond, forcing Lee into a defensive posture. Spotsylvania Court House, 8–21 May 1864
Cold Harbor 31 May–12 June 1864 After leaving Spotsylvania, General Grant entered upon what turned out to be the second phase of his Overland Campaign. The Federals occupied Old Cold Harbor on 31 May, driving out the Confederates. Lee attempted to retake Old Cold Harbor on the following day, but was repulsed. Federal counterattacks culminated on 3 June without disloding Lee’s firmly entrenched army. An ensuing week-long standoff ended with Grant shifting his army south of the James River toward Petersburg. Petersburg, 9–17 June 1864 The initial Federal attempts to capture Petersburg resulted in the loss of 10,000 men and forced General Grant to lay siege to the city, which lasted until the spring of 1865. The Crater, 30 July 1864 After weeks of tunneling more than 500 feet underneath the Confederate earthworks the Federals exploded 8,000 pounds of black powder, blasting a hole in the Confederate battery some 170 feet long, 60 to 80 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. The blast caused 278 immediate Confederate casualties. Federal troops rushed into the hole but became trapped when the Confederates mounted a quick counterattack. The result was a massive slaughter of Federal troops and a complete Confederate victory. Grant characterized the Crater as “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.“ Union General Ambrose E. Burnside was relieved of his command as a result. The Crater in 1865
Beefsteak Raid, 14–17 September 1864 With Lee’s army near starvation, a Confederate cavalry force of 4,500 led by Major General Wade Hampton captured a heard of 2,500 beef cattle from the Federals at Coggins Point, about five miles down the James River from City Point and not far from Petersburg. The majority of Confederate cavalry were from the cavalry division of Lee’s son, William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee. Five Forks, 1 April 1865 The Federal victory at Five Forks (in Dinwiddie County) cut off Lee’s final line of supply, the South Side Railroad, and led to the Confederate evacuation of both Petersburg and Richmond. Led by Major General George Pickett, Confederate casualties amounted to 5,200. Union Major General Philip H. Sheridan
Petersburg, 2 April 1865 After several Federal attacks weakened Lee’s army considerably in March 1865, General Grant’s final assault on Petersburg was made as Lee was evacuating the city. Even then victory did not come easy; the Federals suffered 3,500 casualties. Confederate casualties amounted to 4,250, with some 3,000 captured. Sailor’s Creek, 6 April 1865 This Federal victory destroyed nearly one-fourth of Lee’s retreating amry. Lee lost 7,700 men, including eight generals (one of whom was Lee’s son, Rooney Lee, captured), and signaled the death knell of the Army of Northern Virginia. Appomattox, 9 April 1865 With the Army of Northern Virginia severely weakened, surrounded, and cut off from supplies, Lee decided that it was useless to fight another battle and formally surrendered to U. S. Grant. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April 1865. Originally a stop on the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road and the county seat by the 1850s, the small town of Appomattox Court House was three miles east of the South Side Railroad, the 132-mile line running from City Point to Lynchburg and the main supply route for Lee’s army. When Grant’s forces broke the supply route at the Battle of Five Forks (in Dinwiddie County) on 1 April, the fate of Lee’s army was sealed and the Confederates were forced to evacuate both Petersburg and Richmond. By the time Lee’s army reach Appomattox, continued fighting was pointless and Lee began formal negotiations to surrender. The surrender signing took place at Appomattox Court House, at the house of Wilmer McLean, the man who owned the house at the battlefield of First Manassas, where the war in Virginia started. The McLean House at Appomattox, 1865
Yes, Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis had seven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Click images for larger view (opens in new window)
All of the Lee daugters died unmarried and Custis Lee married but had no children. Robert and Mary Lee had four grandchildren that survived to adulthood, however, all children of Rooney and Rob by each’s second marriage, and as a result more than twenty direct descendants of Robert E. Lee are living today. All of the Lee children are buried with their parents in the crypt of the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Lee’s three sons served as officers in the Confederate Army, Rob as a captain in the Rockbridge Artillery, Rooney as a major general in the cavalry, and Custis as a brigadier general and aide-de-camp to President Jefferson Davis. Yes, Robert E. Lee was pardoned, but posthumously. When Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on 9 April 1865 he was with the soldiers in his army placed on parole by General U. S. Grant. On 29 May, after Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty and pardon to any former Confederate who would take an oath to support the Constitution and uphold the laws of the United States, excepting some fourteen classes of persons, of which Lee fell into several. The proclamation provided that any person belonging to any of the excepted classes could apply to the president directly, however, and that "such clemency will be liberally extended as may be consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States." Although he was protected by the terms of his parole as a prisoner of war, Lee was heartened by how the president’s proclamation could positively affect the south and made the decision to apply for pardon as an example to former Confederate officers.
Before Lee could discern how to make application, however, he learned that a Federal grand jury might indict him and some other Confederate leaders for treason. Not wanting it to appear that by applying for pardon he was attempting to escape a possible trial, Lee decided to submit the application contingent on the non-prosecution of the charges against him; if he was indicted and brought to trial he would face the charges. He also determined to submit his application through General Grant, to whom he was paroled, and whom, Lee learned, endorsed Lee’s application and held that paroled prisoners could not be prosecuted as long as they did not violate their parole. The government failed to act on Lee’s application, even with Grant’s support, however. Lee took the oath of allegiance on 2 October 1865 and sent it to Washington but it apparently was set aside, only to resurface in the National Archives in 1970. A resolution introduced in Congress to restore Lee’s full rights of citizenship was signed into law by President Gerald Ford at a ceremony at Arlington House on 5 August 1975. Yes, Robert E. Lee owned slaves, mostly house servants that he inherited from his mother. In the 1830s and 1840s, he owned a slave named Gardner that he rented to his mother’s relatives at Shirley Plantation. In 1846, when making his last will and testament before heading west on military orders, Lee still owned a slave woman named Nancy and her children, who were at the White House plantation in New Kent County. The schedule of property attached to the will directed that upon his death they be “liberated as soon as it can be done to their advantage and that of others.” No evidence has surfaced that Lee ever purchased or sold any slaves although while in Texas he did contemplate buying a body servant when he had trouble hiring one. By the time of the Civil War Lee had liberated his slaves, some of whom he reputedly sent to Liberia, or, depending on the sources, all of whom remained at Arlington until after the war. Lee did not inherit slaves from his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis, Martha and George Washington’s grandson and adopted son. Lee, in fact, was left nothing other than one lot in Washington and the burden of managing Custis’s sprawling legacy (tracts of land in a dozen Virginia counties)—a burden made even heavier after Lee became the only one of the four executors to qualify to serve. Custis left to his only child Mary, Robert’s wife, the lifetime use and benefit of the Arlington House estate and the mill on Four-Mile Run, which after her death would pass to a grandson. The rest of his plantations and lands Custis divided between his seven grandchildren, along with cash payments of $10,000 each to four grandaughters. After payment of the cash legacies, “and my estates that are required to pay the said legacies, being clear of debts, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.” Here was the rub, for Custis died so deep in debt that there was no money with which to either pay the cash legacies or free the slaves. Under Lee’s management the Custis estate became financially viable and the slaves were freed during the winter of 1862–1863. The deed of manumission was made in late December 1862 and recorded in Richmond on 2 January 1863. Sixty-three names were on the list, some of whom were rumored to have been fathered by Custis and thus, if so, were half-siblings of Lee’s wife Mary. When northern newspapers ran stories of Lee’s supposedly having runaways soundly flogged at the Arlington House plantation on the eve of the war it made him unhappy but there was nothing he could do, save complain to his son, Custis. “The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” Lee’s stated views on slavery are well-known, having been set out in correspondence and post-war interviews. Reflecting the prevailing aristocratic and Christian values of his class, the following passage, written to his wife in December 1856, reveals his attitude: There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although many in the country held views similiar to Lee, others did not, and the states plunged into civil war. Late in the war Lee attempted to pursuade his compatriots to allow slaves to enlist in the Confederate Army. If admitting slaves into the Confederate Army subverted the institution of slavery, said Lee, then it would be done by southerners themselves and any ill effects of the measure would be less than the contrary, as the Federal Army already was employing both northern and southern slaves in its ranks. I think therefore we must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us, or to use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay. I believe that with proper regulations, they can be made efficient soldiers. They possess the physical qualifications in an eminent degree,—long habits of obedience and subordination coupled with that moral influence, which in our country the white man possesses over the black, furnish the best foundation for that discipline which is the surest guarranty of military efficiency. There have been formidable armies composed of men having no interest in the cause for which they fought, beyond their pay or the hope of plunder. But it is certain that the best foundation upon which the fidelity of any army can rest, especially in a service which imposes peculiar hardships and privations, is the personal interest of the soldier in the issue of the contest. Such an interest we can give our negroes, by granting immediate freedom to all who enlist, and freedom at the end of the war to the families of those who discharge their duties faithfully (whether they survive or not) together with the privilege of residing at the South. To this might be added a bounty for faithful service. We should not expect the slaves to fight for prospective freedom, when they can secure it at once by going to the enemy in whose service they would incur no greater risk than in ours. For Lee and the Confederacy, and for the slaves, his proposal came too late. When interviewed after the war by a visiting Englishman, Herbert C. Saunders, Lee freely discussed his feelings about slavery and emancipation: On the subject of slavery, he assured me that he had always been in favour of the emancipation of the negroes, and that in Virginia the feeling had been strongly inclining in the same direction, till the ill-judged enthusiasm (amounting to rancour) of the abolitionists in the North had turned the Southern tide of feeling in the other direction. In Virginia, about thirty years ago, an ordinance for the emancipation of the slaves had been rejected by only a small majority, and every one fully expected at the next convention it would have been carried, but for the above cause. He went on to say that there was scarcely a Virginian now who was not glad that the subject had been definitely settled, though nearly all regretted that they had not been wise enough to do it themselves the first year of the war. The same sentiment was indicated to another interviewer, John Leyburn, who visited Lee in Lexington in 1869. Lee was adamament that the war was not fought on the southern side with a view to perpetuate slavery. On this point he seemed not only indignant, but hurt. He said it was not true. He declared that, for himself, he had never been an advocate of slavery; that he had emancipated most of his slaves years before the war, and had sent to Liberia those who were willing to go; that the latter were writing back most affectionate letters to him, some of which he received through the lines during the war. He said, also, as an evidence that the colored people did not consider him hostile to their race, that during, this visit to Baltimore some of them who had known him when he was stationed here had come up in the most affectionate manner and put their hands into the carriage-window to shake hands with him. They would hardly have received him in this way, he thought, had they looked upon him as fresh from a war intended for their oppression and injury. One expression I must give in his own words.
Probably, but recent scholarship on the subject questions traditional interpretations of the event. As related by Thomas L. Broun, an ex-Confederate who had played a role in Lee’s purchase of Traveller from Broun’s brother, the incident supposedly took place at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, in June 1865. When an unnamed black man approached the commmunion table before or among the white communicants, it caused a stir in the congregation. Lee ignored the man’s actions and went to the alter, thereby paving the way for others. For a discussion of Broun's account and what it may have meant, see General Lee and Visibility, by Professor Philip J. Schwarz. Yes, Robert E. Lee had many nicknames. The more popularly known ones are: Marble Model, earned at West Point from fellow cadets who noticed his exemplary attention to his studies and obeying the rules. Reputedly, Robert E. Lee’s favorite song was a Christian hymn of assurance, “How Firm A Foundation,” written about 1787 and variously attributed to John Keene, Kirkham, and John Keith. The hymn was song following the concluding prayer at Lee’s funeral. Lee also is said to have been partial to a piano waltz, “Come Dearest, The Daylight Is Gone,” written in 1852 by Welsh composer Brinley Richards (1819–1885), most famous for “God Bless the Prince of Wales” (1862), honoring the future King Edward VII of Great Britain. “Come Dearest” Sheet Music
Yes, Robert E. Lee was a devoted Christian, and increasingly so as he aged. His mother, Ann Hill Carter Lee, was responsible for the religious training of young Robert and his siblings. Her less pious husband, Light-Horse Harry Lee, deferred to his wife on the subject. To Light-Horse, his wife’s piety arose from “love to Almighty God and love of virtue, which are synonymous; not from fear of hell—a base, low influence.” Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote of Ann’s labors over her children, that “physically it overtaxed her, but spiritually she was equal to it.” Not only did Ann attend to prayers and religious instruction at home, once the family moved to Alexandria she carried her children to the Episcopal Church (Christ Church, Alexandria) not far from her home, where George Washington himself had worshipped. The minister of the church during Lee’s youth was William Meade (1789–1862), son of one of Washington’s Revolutionary War aides-de-camp and later bishop of Virginia and president of Virginia Thheological Seminary. Meade’s presence impacted everyone who came into his sphere, and Robert Lee was no exception. Many years later, when Meade was dead and Lee himself had lost the great war, Lee wrote his appraisal of Meade: “Of all the men I have ever known, I consider him the purest.” At West Point Lee with the other cadets attended morning chapel five days a week. During Lee’s first year at the academy a young new chaplain came to the school, Charles P. McIlvaine, also professor of ethics, history, and geography. Whether his age, his charisma, his zeal, or his eloquence, or a combination of them all, McIlvaine proved an likable and effective minister and role model to the impressionable young men, many of whom, like Robert, would become the country’s leading military figures. When his military service took Lee to New York in the 1840s, he was sufficiently serious about church life to serve as a vestryman at the garrison church at Fort Hamilton, but not terribly interested in a religious squabble that developed among the parisoners over the high-church theology of Oxford’s Edward Bouverie Pusey. Lee leaned toward the low-church view but confided his beliefs to only a few trusted friends. Likewise, Lee was no bigot regarding the freedom of worship, and attended Catholic Church services in Mexico as part of the U.S. delegation of officers. Lee’s religious life took on more serious overtones on 17 July 1853, the day he was confirmed, along with daughters Annie and Mary, at Christ Church, Alexandria. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee up to that time had led a moral and pious life and had felt and verbalized his dependence on God, and he had not gone through any period of questioning or testing or experienced any “sudden spiritual upheaval” although he believed in Christian conversion experiences. “Rather,” said Freeman, “his decision reflected a progression of religious experiences.” Perhaps those experiences included his escape from almost certain capture while on a reconnoitering mission during the Mexican War, after which Lee took time, he wrote his wife, to “give thanks to our Heavely Father for all his mercies to me, for his preservation of me through all the dangers I have passed, and all the blessings which he has bestowed upon me, for I know I fall far short of my obligations.” Perhaps he recognized the example that he was setting for the cadets at West Point, now that he was their superintendent and responsible for their well-being. Or maybe the upcoming confirmation of his daughters signaled to him weaknesses in his personal example. His wife’s unhalted physical decline, which eventually made her an invalid, and the death of his mother-in-law, with whom he had been particularly close, could not but have given him pause. In any event, Lee had decided, at age 46, to make a formal public profession of belief and allegiance to Christ. The vows he made, he kept. While on the Indian frontier, as a cavalry captain, after the expiration of his term at West Point, Lee’s religious life was apparent to all, so much so that one of his men asked him to perform the funeral rites over his dead child. He was as handsome a little boy as I ever saw—the son of one of the sergeants, about a year old; I was admiring his appearance the day before he was taken ill. Last Thursday his little waxen form was committed to the earth. His father came to me, the tears flowing down his cheeks, and asked me to read the funeral service over his body, which I did at the grave for the second time in my life. I hope I shall not be called on again, for, though I believe that it is far better for the child to be called by its heavenly Creator into his presence in its purity and innocence, unpolluted by sin, and uncontaminated by the vices of this world, still it wrings a parent’s heart with anguish that is painful to see. Yet I know it was done in mercy to both—mercy to the child, mercy to the parents. The former has been saved from sin and misery here, and the latter have been given a touching appeal and powerful inducement to prepare for hereafter. May it prove effectual, and may they require no further severe admonition. Many such examples of Lee’s religiosity could be cited from his letters. While on the frontier, in San Antonio, Texas, Lee found time to assist in bringing to fruition the construction of an Episcopal church building. He also learned, and was overjoyed, that his youngest son, Rob, had begun to prepare for confirmation. Like his countrymen, he also began to express concerns for the sectional crisis that was heating up, although he believed God would not let the United States be rent asunder after so blessing the country with its formation. “May God rescue us from the folly of our own acts,” was his plea, “save us from selfishness and teach us to love our neighbors as ourselves.” Alas, it was not be so, but Lee trusted all to the heavenly mercy. “I am not concerned with results. God’s will ought to be our aim, and I am quite contented that his designs should be accomplished and not mine.” Lee’s wartime prayer that “the Great Ruler of the Universe will continue to aid and prosper us, and crown at last our feeble efforts with success,” was not answered in the affirmative. Despite the Confederate loss, however, it left no ill effects on Lee’s religious faith. As president of Washington College, Lee preferred to has his office in the chapel that the school constructed, and remained active in church affairs until his death. In fact, his last deed before suffering the stroke that led to his death was to attend a meeting of the vestry. As usual, Douglas Southall Freeman made some keen observations about Lee’s religiosity: His manners reflected his spiritual life. It has been in vain that some of his biographers have asked if his calm dignity did not cover some deep spiritual conflict. It was not so. His was a simple soul, humble, transparent, and believing. Increasingly through the years prior to that historic railway journey to Richmond, religion had become a part of his very being. So far as may be judged from his letters, he had not passed through a single period of doubt as to the existence of a personal God. The religious controversies of his mature years never touched him. Creeds meant little to him. Reading daily his Bible and his prayer book, spending much time on his knees, he believed in a God who, in His wisdom, sent blessings beyond man’s deserts, and visited him, on occasion, with hardships and disaster for the chastening of the rebellious heart of the ungrateful and the forgetful. As Robert E. Lee viewed it, on the eve of his plunge into the bloody tragedy of a war among brothers, life was only a preparation for eternity. Whatever befell the faithful was the will of God, and whatever God willed was best. In every disaster, he was to stand firm in the faith that it was sent by God for reasons that man could not see. Prayerbook of Robert E. Lee
Yes, Robert E. Lee occasionally drank wine. Lee considered it his duty to live a life of moderation and restraint, and that included personal habits of eating, drinking, language, dress, etc. As a cadet at West Point Leee studiously avoided the revelries indulged in by some of the other students, although he managed to do so without coming across as a prude. As an officer and as a father he thought it incumbent to set an example for those looking to him. Nevertheless, the wine cellar at Arlington House was fully stocked, as evidenced by his wife’s relaying to him of its contents being removed with other family valuables to Ravensworth in the spring of 1861, in anticipation of the Federal occupation of their home. During the Civil War Lee sometimes shared wine at his table when it was sent to him as a gift—to have not done so would have given the appearance, at least in his eyes, of scorning a sacrifice made by impoverished supporters of the Confederate war effort. After the war, in 1869, when Lee was conscious of his example to his students at Washington College, Lee wrote of his thoughts about the use of hard liquor: “My experience through life has convinced me that, while moderation and temperance in all things are commendable and beneficial, abstinence from spirituous liquors is the best safeguard of morals and health.” To a son he wrote, “I think it better to avoid it altogether, as you do, as its temperate use is so difficult.” Another statement attributed to him is completely in character: “Whiskey—I like it, I always did, and that is the reason I never use it.” Those statements seem to sum up Lee’s attitude toward intemperance. Ironically, the National Anti-Saloon League in 1912 renamed its pledge movement the Lincoln-Lee Legion in honor of two men considered to have best set an example of temperance. The LLL’s pledge read: Whereas, the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage is productive of pauperism, degradation and crime; and believing it our duty to discourage that which produces more evil than good, we therefore pledge ourselves to abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage. Lincoln-Lee Legion
Robert E. Lee’s wife Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, George and Martha Washington’s grandson and adopted son. Robert’s grandfather, Henry Lee II, had married a cousin, Lucy Grymes, with whom the youthful Washington had been enfatuated. Their son and Robert’s father, Henry Lee III, as a child knew Martha and George Washington as "Aunt Martha" and "Uncle George." Henry came of age on the eve of the Revolutionary War, secured a commission as a cavalry officer, and won fame and a new name—Light-Horse Harry—as one of the great heroes of the war. Washington even invited Harry, twenty-four years his junior, to serve in his military family, but Lee declined. After the war, however, Light-Horse Harry became one of Washington’s closest political allies and a vocal proponent of the Constitution, which Washington also strongly supported. In that matter Light-Horse Harry broke with another famous cousin, Richard Henry Lee, with whom Washington was also closely allied, along with Richard Henry’s brothers Francis Lightfoot, William, and Arthur. Later, when President John Adams asked Washington to help arrange the Provisional Army in preparation for a possible war with France in 1798, Washington made an annotated list of officers, their strengths and weaknesses, and named Light-Horse Harry as the best among the all. When Washington died, it was Light-Horse Harry who penned the famous words about his former commander-in-chief, “First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.” It was a tribute reflecting his own feelings, and one that Lee reiterated in stories and letters to Robert’s older brother Charles, who was instructed to pass them on his younger siblings. In addition to all this, Washington was namesake and godfather to a son of Light-Horse Harry, who died in infancy, Robert’s half brother. What was more, Washington’s heir, nephew Bushrod Washington, to whom the Mount Vernon estate passed, raised the grandchildren of Richard Henry Lee, who intermarried with the Washington family. In the end, the final Washington owners of Mount Vernon were also Lee descendents. Ironically, George Washington himself had first leased the estate from his half brother’s widow Ann Fairfax Washington (d. 1761) and her second husband, George Lee, (1714–1761), first cousins to Robert’s father and Lee uncles. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman very aptly summed up Lee’s reverence for the Father of His Country: “In the home where Robert was trained, God came first and then Washington.“ If a wealth of family lore and connections and and a childhood in Alexandria where ghosts of Washington appeared on every street corner were not enough to endear Robert E. Lee to George Washington, Lee’s own temperament was. He had an innate sense of duty and honor and a rigid self-control. Even his religion was the same–Episcopalian–although Lee, reflecting the times in which he lived, tended less toward the high church than Washington. And Lee loved horses, as did the great man whom Jefferson described as the “best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.” (Lee’s famous horse, Traveller, bore the name of one of Washington’s stud horses.) Most obvious, of course, was the similar bent for the military, especially their deep respect for civil authority and the audacious manner in which they attempted to wage war, albeit to different ends.
Robert E. Lee rode many horses. The most famous of all, of course, was Traveller, the iron gray made famous by photographers during and after the Civil War. Lee purchased Traveller for $200 from Captain Joseph M. Broun (b. 1835), quartermaster of the 60th Virginia Infantry, which in December 1861 accompanied Lee to South Carolina to shore up the Confederate defensive works. Traveller was sired by Grey Eagle, a famous Kentucky race horse that also produced many fine thoroughbred saddle horses. Traveller’s mother was Flora, a grade mare apparently sent to Maysville, Kentucky, for the purpose. Born in the spring of 1857 near Blue Sulphur Springs in Greenrier County, Virginia (present-day West Virginia), Traveller had one owner before Broun, Captain James W. “Dick” Johnson who had raised him, calling him Jeff Davis. As a colt, Jeff Davis took first prize in the horse shows at the Lewisburg fairs in 1859 and 1860. According to Broun, who paid $175 for the horse in September 1861, Traveller was greatly admired in the Confederate camp for “his rapid, springy walk, his high spirit, bold carriage, and muscular strength.” He needed neither whip nor spur, and would walk his five or six miles an hour over the rough mountain road of Western Virginia with his rider firmly in the saddle and holding him in check by a tight rein, such vim and eagerness did he manifest to go right ahead so soon as he was mounted. Lee took a fancy to Traveller the first time he saw him and inquired about him from time to time and when he saw Broun’s brother riding the horse in South Carolina he offered to buy him. After trying him out for a week, in February 1862, a deal was struck, and Traveller had its third owner. Lee renamed Jeff Davis Traveller, after a stud horse belonging to Lee’s role model and great-grandfather-in-law, George Washington. Traveller weighed 1,100 pounds and stood sixteen hands high. Lee gave a lengthy description of Traveller to his wife’s cousin Markie Williams, who had requested it in preparation of making a painting of the horse, set forth in his Recollections and Letters of General Lee, by Lee’s son Rob: If I were an artist like you I would draw a true picture of Traveller—representing his fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest and short back, strong haunches, flat legs, small head, broad forehead, delicate ears, quick eye, small feet, and black mane and tail. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he passed. He could dilate upon his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts, through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist; I can only say he is a Confederate gray. I purchased him in the mountains of Virginia in the autumn of 1861, and he has been my patient follower ever since—to Georgia, the Carolinas, and back to Virginia. He carried me through the Seven Days battle around Richmond, the second Manassas, at Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, the last day at Chancellorsville, to Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, and back to the Rappahannock. From the commencement of the campaign in 1864 at Orange, till its close around Petersburg, the saddle was scarcely off his back, as he passed through the fire of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbour, and across the James River. He was almost in daily requisition in the winter of 1864–65 on the long line of defenses from Chickahominy, north of Richmond, to Hatcher’s Run, south of the Appomattox. In the campaign of 1865, he bore me from Petersburg to the final days at Appomattox Court House. You must know the comfort he is to me in my present retirement. He is well supplied with equipments. Two sets have been sent to him from England, one from the ladies of Baltimore, and one was made for him in Richmond; but I think his favourite is the American saddle from St. Louis. Of all his companions in toil, “Richmond,” “Brown Roan,” “Ajax,” and quiet “Lucy Long,” he is the only one that retained his vigour. The first two expired under their onerous burden, and the last two failed. You can, I am sure, from what I have said, paint his portrait.
According to Rob Lee, Traveller was “never known to tire, and, though quiet and sensible in general and afraid of nothing, yet if not regularly exercised, he fretted a good deal, especially in a crowd of horses.” During the Maryland Campaign Traveller was the cause of a somewhat serious injury to his owner. After dismounting, Lee was “sitting on a fallen log, with the bridle reins hung over his arm. Traveller, becoming frightened at something, suddenly dashed away, threw him violently to the ground, spraining both hands and breaking a small bone in one of them.” The result was that Lee could not get in the saddle for part of the campaign. Rob Lee also related his own experience riding Traveller, which took place when he first joined the Confedrate cavalry: The general had the strongest affection for Traveller, which he showed on all occasions, and his allowing me to ride him on this long march [from Orange Court House to Fredericksburg] was a great compliment. Possibly he wanted to give me a good hammering before he turned me over to the cavalry. During my soldier life, so far, I had been on foot, having backed nothing more lively than a tired artillery horse; so I mounted with some misgivings, though I was very proud of my steed. My misgivings were fully realised, for Traveller would not walk a step. He took a short, high trot—a buck-trot, as compared with a buck-jump—and kept it up to Fredericksburg, some thirty miles. Though young, strong, and tough, I was glad when the journey ended. This was my first introduction to the cavalry service. I think I am safe in saying that I could have walked the distance with much less discomfort and fatigue. Traveller died of lockjaw in June 1871 and was buried by Lee’s son Custis along Wood’s Creek behindWashington and Lee University. In 1907 his skeleton was disinterred and put on public display, and in 1971 Traveller was re-buried outside the Lee Chapel
Although Lee’s affection and respect was greater for Traveller than for his other horses, because of his nervousnes Lee did not think Traveller his best horse under fire during battle. After Lee was injured by Traveller during the Maryland Campaign, cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart discoverd a “low, easy moving, and quiet sorrel mare” owned by Stephen Dandridge of the Bower, a country estate in Jefferson County where Stuart and his staff sometimes quartered. Thinking the mare might be better suited than Traveller to bear the general in battle, Stuart purchased the 5-year-old horse and presented her as a gift to Lee. When Lee returned to the saddle it was not upon Traveller but upon the back of the new mare, christened Lucy Long. Lee rode Lucy Long until she got in foal two years later, during the siege of Petersburg. Lee sent Lucy Long to the rear of the lines and took to riding Traveller again. Before the war ended Lucy Long disappeared, stolen, but was returned to its owner as a Christmas present in 1867 when Rob Lee discovered her in the eastern part of Virginia. Lucy Long lived in Lexington until leg injuries in the late 1870s forced Custis Lee to send her to the country. Lucy Long was still living in 1891, in her thirty-fourth year, described as being “thin in flesh, though her eye has not lost its wonted brightness and her health apparently is good. She eats dry food with difficulty, hence her present condition. During the grazing season she fattens on the soft grasses of the pasture.”
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On his father’s side, Robert E. Lee’s earliest ancestors were Richard Lee (c.1613–1664), a London merchant called the Immigrant, and his wife, Anne Constable, also of London. The young couple came to Virginia about 1639, and in 1640 Lee patented land at Tindal’s Point in present-day Gloucester County, on the north side of the York River directly across from where Yorktown was later established. Two years later, in 1642, Lee patented a thousand-acre tract on Poropotank Creek, a tributary of the York about twenty miles above the river’s mouth. Richard served as Secretary to Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley.
Robert E. Lee’s first assignment after graduating from West Point in 1829 was to report for duty at Cockspur Island, in the Savannah River, Georgia, to serve in the corps of engineers. Twelve miles down river from Savannah, the narrow mile-long island was little more than a flooded marsh but Congress had chosen to construct upon it a defensive coastal fortification, christened Fort Pulaski in 1833. Replacing Major Samuel Babcock (d. 1831) who was seriously ill, Lee’s engineering duties centered on raising an embankment and digging a canal so that a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre site could be drained, and in the capacity he made surveys and drawings and determined the best location to build the fort. Additionally. Lee acted as assistant commissary of subsistence. Lee’s assignment at Cockspur Island lasted until the spring of 1831, when he was ordered to report to Old Point Comfort, Virginia, much closer to home.
When John Brown (1800–1859) and his followers took the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (present-day West Virginia), in October 1859, U.S. Secretary of War John B. Floyd ordered Robert E. Lee to travel there and take command of the assembling force of armed citizens, Maryland militia, and U.S. marines. Lee and Floyd went to the White House, accompanied by Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart who was at the War Department on business, to discuss the situation with President James Buchanan and his military adviser. Armed with a proclamation from Buchanan, Lee and Stuart at once set out for Harpers Ferry, where upon arrival they found the band of insurgents confined to the armory’s fire-engine house. After learning that the numbers of insurrectionists had been greatly exaggerated, Lee decided that the situation did not warrant issuing the president’s proclamation, and he sent a telegraph to Baltimore calling off reinforcements who were already on the way.
General George C. Meade
General U. S. Grant
In 1918 the Reverend Mack Lee (b. 1835), a former slave once owned by Lee who served as his body servant and cook, published a pamphlet, History of the Life of Rev. Wm. Mack Lee Body Servant of General Robert E. Lee Through the Civil War, Cook from 1861 to 1865, to raise money to build black churches. Characterizing his former master as “one of the greatest men in the world,” Mack Lee claimed that all of Lee’s slaves were freed ten years before the war but remained at the Arlington House plantation until after the surrender—Mack himself returned to Arlington after the war and lived there for eighteen years—and that Lee at his death had left him $360 for the purpose of earning an education, which he did, entering the ministry.
