Robert E. Lee Biography
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Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 –
October 12, 1870) was a career army officer and the most successful
general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. He
eventually commanded all Confederate armies as general-in-chief. Like
Hannibal earlier and Erwin Rommel later, his victories against
numerically superior forces won him enduring fame as an astute military
commander. After the war, he urged reconciliation, and spent his final
years as president of the college that would come to bear his name. Lee
remains an iconic figure of the Confederacy to this day.
****
Early life and career
Robert Edward Lee was born at Stratford
Hall Plantation, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the fourth child of
Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee ("Lighthorse Harry") and Anne Hill (née
Carter) Lee. He entered the United States Military Academy in 1825. When
he graduated (second in his class of 46) in 1829, not only had he
attained the top academic record, but he had no demerits, either. He was
commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers.
Engineering, family
Lee served for seventeen months at Fort
Pulaski on Cockspur Island, Georgia. In 1831, he was transferred to Fort
Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula and played a major role in
the final construction of both Fort Monroe and its opposite, Fort
Calhoun. Fort Monroe was completely surrounded by a moat. Fort Calhoun,
later renamed Fort Wool, was built on a man-made island across the
navigational channel from Old Point Comfort in the middle of the mouth
of Hampton Roads. When construction was completed in 1834, Fort Monroe
was referred to as the "Gibraltar of Chesapeake Bay."
While he was stationed at Fort Monroe, he
married Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1808–1873), the great-granddaughter
of Martha Washington, at Arlington House, her parents' home just across
from Washington, D.C. They eventually had seven children, three boys and
four girls: George Washington Custis, William H. Fitzhugh, Robert
Edward, Mary, Annie, Agnes, and Mildred.
Lee served as an assistant in the chief
engineer's office in Washington from 1834 to 1837, but spent the summer
of 1835 helping to lay out the state line between Ohio and Michigan. In
1837, he got his first important command. As a first lieutenant of
engineers, he supervised the engineering work for St. Louis harbor and
for the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. His work there earned him
a promotion to captain. In 1841, he was transferred to Fort Hamilton in
New York Harbor, where he took charge of building fortifications. There
he served as a vestryman at St. John's Episcopal Church, Fort Hamilton.
Mexican War, West Point, and Texas
Lee distinguished himself in the Mexican
War (1846–1848). He was one of Winfield Scott's chief aides in the march
from Veracruz to Mexico City. He was instrumental in several American
victories through his personal reconnaissance as a staff officer; he
found routes of attack that the Mexicans had not defended because they
thought the terrain was impassable.
He was promoted to major after the Battle
of Cerro Gordo in April, 1847. He also fought at Contreras, Churubusco,
and Chapultepec, and was wounded at the latter. By the end of the war,
he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel.
After the Mexican War, he spent three years
at Fort Carroll in Baltimore harbor, after which he became the
superintendent of West Point in 1852. During his three years at West
Point, he improved the buildings, the courses, and spent a lot of time
with the cadets. Lee's oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee,
attended West Point during his tenure. Custis Lee graduated in 1854,
first in his class.
In 1855, Lee became Lieutenant Colonel of
the 2nd U.S. Cavalry (under the command of Colonel Albert Sidney
Johnston) and was sent to the Texas frontier. There he helped protect
settlers from attacks by the Apache and the Comanche.
These were not happy years for Lee, as he
did not like to be away from his family for long periods of time,
especially as his wife was becoming increasingly ill. Lee came home to
see her as often as he could.
Lee as slave holder
****
As a member of the Virginia aristocracy,
Lee had lived in close contact with slavery all of his life, but he
never held more than about a half-dozen slaves under his own name—in
fact, it was not positively known that he had held any slaves at all
under his own name until the rediscovery of his 1846 will in the records
of Rockbridge County, Virginia, which referred to an enslaved woman
named Nancy and her children, and provided for their manumission in case
of his death.
However, when Lee's father-in-law, George
Washington Parke Custis, died in October 1857, Lee came into a
considerable amount of property through his wife, and also gained
temporary control of a large population of slaves—sixty-three men,
women, and children, in all—as the executor of Custis's will. Under the
terms of the will, the slaves were to be freed "in such a manner as to
my executors may seem most expedient and proper", with a maximum of five
years from the date of Custis's death provided to arrange for the
necessary legal details of manumission.
Custis's will was probated on December 7,
1857. Although Robert Lee Randolph, Right Reverend William Meade, and
George Washington Peter were named as executors along with Robert E.
Lee, the other three men failed to qualify, leaving Lee with the sole
responsibility of settling the estate, and with exclusive control over
all of Custis's former slaves. Although the will provided for the slaves
to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most
expedient and proper", Lee found himself in need of funds to pay his
father-in-law's debts and repair the properties he had inherited; he
decided to make money during the five years that the will had allowed
him control of the slaves by working them on his plantation and hiring
them out to neighboring plantations and to eastern Virginia (where there
were more jobs to be found). The decision caused dissatisfaction among
Custis's slaves, who had been given to understand that they were to be
made free as soon as Custis died. Lee, with no experience as a
large-scale slave-driver, tried to hire an overseer, writing to his
cousin "I am no farmer myself & do not expect to be always here. I wish
to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate &
kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty". But Lee
failed to find a man for the job, and had to take a two-year leave of
absence from the army in order to drive the slaves himself.
Lee found the experience frustrating and
difficult; the slaves were unhappy and demanded their freedom. In May
1858, Lee wrote to his son Rooney that "I have had some trouble with
some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the
previous week, rebelled against my authority--refused to obey my orders,
& said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.--I succeeded in capturing
them & lodging them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called
upon the other people to rescue them". Less than two months after they
were sent to the Alexandria jail, Lee decided to remove these three men
and three female house slaves from Arlington, and sent them down to the
slave-trader William Overton Winston in Richmond, to be kept in jail
until they could be hired out to "good & responsible" men in Virginia
until they were emancipated under the terms of the will at the end of
1862.
In 1859, three of the slaves—Wesley Norris,
his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs—fled for the North, but were
captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and forced to return
to Arlington. On June 24, 1859, the New York Daily Tribune published two
anonymous letters (dated June 19, 1859 and June 21, 1859), each of which
claimed to have heard that Lee had had the Norrises whipped. Wesley
Norris himself later stated — in an 1866 interview printed in the
National Anti-Slavery Standard — that Lee had the three of them whipped
and their lacerated backs rubbed with brine.
Lee sent the Norrises to work on the
railroad in Richmond, Virginia and Alabama. Wesley Norris gained his
freedom in January 1863 by slipping through the Confederate lines near
Richmond, Virginia to Union-controlled territory.
Lee released Custis's other slaves after
the end of the five year period in the winter of 1862, filing the deed
of manumission on December 29, 1862.
Lee's views on slavery
****
Since the end of the Civil War, it has
often been suggested that Lee was in some sense opposed to slavery. In
the period following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Lee became a
central figure in the Lost Cause interpretation of the war, and as
succeeding generations came to look on slavery as a terrible wrong, the
idea that Lee had always somehow opposed it helped maintain his stature
as a symbol of Southern honor and national reconciliation.
The most common lines of evidence cited
[citation needed] in favor of the claim that Lee opposed slavery are:
(1) the manumission of Custis's slaves, as discussed above; (2) Lee's
1856 letter[ to his wife in which he states that "There are few, I
believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery
as an institution is a moral and political evil," and (3) his support,
towards the end of the Civil War, for enrolling slaves in the
Confederate army, with manumission offered as an eventual reward for
good service. Lee gave his public support to this idea two weeks before
the war ended, and too late to do any good for the Confederacy.
Critics [citation needed] object that these
interpretations mischaracterize Lee's actual statements and actions to
imply that he opposed slavery. The manumission of Custis's slaves, for
example, is often mischaracterized as Lee's own decision [citation
needed], rather than a requirement of Custis's will. Similarly, Lee's
letter to his wife is being misrepresented by selective quotation; while
Lee does describe slavery as an evil, he immediately goes on to write:
"It is useless to expatiate on its
disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than
to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf
of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks
are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially &
physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for
their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better
things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered
by a wise Merciful Providence."
— Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December
27, 1856
In fact, the main topic of the letter—a
comment in approval of a speech by President Franklin Pierce—is not the
evils of slavery at all, but rather a condemnation of abolitionism,
which Lee condemns as "unlawful & entirely foreign to them & their duty;
for which they are irresponsible & unaccountable." Lee suggested that
abolitionist criticism of slavery was an "intolerant" attempt to hasten
the end of "the painful discipline ... necessary for their instruction
as a race," an end which only God could properly determine:
"While we see the Course of the final
abolition of human Slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our
prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress
as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work
by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a Single
day. Although the Abolitionist must know this, & must See that he has
neither the right or power of operating except by moral means & suasion,
& if he means well to the slave, he must not Create angry feelings in
the Master; that although he may not approve the mode which it pleases
Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be
the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no
Concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbors
when we disapprove their Conduct; Still I fear he will persevere in his
evil Course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim
fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of
opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual
liberty of others?"
— Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December
27, 1856
Suppression of the Harper's Ferry uprising
and capture of John Brown
Lee happened to be in Washington at the
time of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry,
Virginia (now West Virginia) in October 1859. He was summoned by the
Secretary of War on October 17, informed of that a slave uprising was
taking place in Virginia, and given command of detachments of Maryland
and Virginia militia, soldiers from Fort Monroe, and United States
Marines, to suppress the uprising and arrest its leaders. Lieutenant
J.E.B. Stuart, who happened to be in Washington at the time on business,
was allowed to accompany Lee on his mission. By the time Lee arrived
later that night, the militia on the site had penned Brown and his
supporters up in the fire-engine house at the armory with several white
hostages they had taken from slave-holding families in the area. Lee
surrounded the house with troops and sent Stuart to deliver a demand for
immediate surrender early in the morning on October 18. When Brown
refused and demanded safe passage out of the town as a condition for
releasing the hostages, Stuart signalled Lee and Lee sent the marines to
storm the fire-engine house. About three minutes later, the raid was
over, with two marines shot and four of Brown's party dead. Brown
himself was badly wounded and captured.
Lee participated in the interrogation of
Brown later that day, and turned Brown and his party over to the state
of Virginia on October 19. Lee returned home briefly, then was ordered
back to Harper's Ferry in late November, to command a detachment of
federal troops to protect the arsenal from any further attempts. On
December 9, a week after Brown was hanged, Lee received orders to return
home. He testified before the Senate hearings on the raid, and then
returned to his regiment on February 10, 1860. When Texas seceded from
the Union in 1861, Lee was called back to Washington, D.C., to wait for
further orders.
Civil War
On April 18, 1861, on the eve of the
American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, through Secretary of War
Simon Cameron, offered Lee command of the United States Army (Union
Army) through an intermediary, Maryland Republican politician Francis P.
Blair, at the home of Blair's son Montgomery, Lincoln's
Postmaster-General, in Washington. Lee's sentiments were against
secession, which he denounced in an 1861 letter as "nothing but
revolution" and a betrayal of the efforts of the Founders. However his
loyalty to his native Virginia led him to join the Confederacy.
At the outbreak of war, he was first
appointed to command all of Virginia's forces and then as one of the
first five full generals of Confederate forces. Lee, however, refused to
wear the insignia of a Confederate General stating that, in honor to his
rank of Colonel in the United States Army, he would only display the
three stars of a Confederate Colonel until the Civil War had been won
and Lee could be promoted, in peacetime, to a General in the Confederate
Army.
After commanding Confederate forces in
western Virginia, and then the coastal defenses along the Carolina
seaboards, he became military adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of
the Confederacy, whom he knew from West Point.
Commander, Army of Northern Virginia
In the spring of 1862, during the Peninsula
Campaign, the Union Army of the Potomac under General George B.
McClellan advanced upon Richmond from Fort Monroe, eventually reaching
the eastern edges of the Confederate capital along the Chickahominy
River. Following the wounding of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle
of Seven Pines, on June 1, 1862, Lee assumed command of the Army of
Northern Virginia, his first opportunity to lead an army in the field.
Newspaper editorials of the day objected to his appointment due to
concerns that Lee would not be aggressive and would wait for the Union
army to come to him. He oversaw substantial strengthening of Richmond's
defenses during the first three weeks of June and then launched a series
of attacks, the Seven Days Battles, against McClellan's forces. Lee's
attacks resulted in heavy Confederate casualties and they were marred by
clumsy tactical performances by his subordinates, but his aggressive
actions unnerved McClellan, who retreated to a point on the James River
where Union naval forces were in control. These successes led to a rapid
turn-around of public opinion and the newspaper editorials quickly
changed their tune on Lee's aggressiveness.
After McClellan's retreat, Lee defeated
another Union army at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He then invaded
Maryland, hoping to replenish his supplies and possibly influence the
Northern elections that fall in favor of ending the war. McClellan
obtained a lost order that revealed Lee's plans and brought superior
forces to bear at Antietam before Lee's army could be assembled. In the
bloodiest day of the war, Lee withstood the Union assaults, but withdrew
his battered army back to Virginia.
Disappointed by McClellan's failure to
destroy Lee's army, Lincoln named Ambrose Burnside as commander of the
Army of the Potomac. Burnside ordered an attack across the Rappahannock
River at Fredericksburg. Delays in getting bridges built across the
river allowed Lee's army ample time to organize strong defenses, and the
attack on December 12, 1862, was a disaster for the Union. Lincoln then
named Joseph Hooker commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker's
advance to attack Lee in May, 1863, near Chancellorsville, Virginia, was
defeated by Lee and Stonewall Jackson's daring plan to divide the army
and attack Hooker's flank. It was an enormous victory over a larger
force, but came at a great cost as Jackson, Lee's best subordinate, was
gravely wounded and died soon after from contracted pneumonia.
In the summer of 1863, Lee proceeded to
invade the North again, hoping for a Southern victory that would compel
the North to grant Confederate independence. But his attempts to defeat
the Union forces under George G. Meade at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
failed. His subordinates did not attack with the aggressive drive Lee
expected, J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry was out of the area, and Lee's
decision to launch a massive frontal assault on the center of the Union
line—the disastrous Pickett's Charge—resulted in heavy Confederate
losses. Lee was compelled to retreat again but, as after Antietam, was
not vigorously pursued by Union forces. Following his defeat at
Gettysburg, Lee sent a letter of resignation to Confederate President
Jefferson Davis on August 8, 1863, but Davis refused Lee's request.
In 1864, the new Union general-in-chief
Ulysses S. Grant sought to destroy Lee's army and capture Richmond. Lee
and his men stopped each advance, but Grant had superior reinforcements
and kept pushing each time a bit farther to the southeast. These battles
in the Overland Campaign included the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court
House, and Cold Harbor. Grant eventually fooled Lee by stealthily moving
his army across the James River. After stopping a Union attempt to
capture Petersburg, Virginia, a vital railroad link supplying Richmond,
Lee's men built elaborate trenches and were besieged in Petersburg. He
attempted to break the stalemate by sending Jubal A. Early on a raid
through the Shenandoah Valley to Washington, D.C., but Early was
defeated by the superior forces of Philip Sheridan. The Siege of
Petersburg would last from June 1864 until April, 1865.
General-in-chief
On January 31, 1865, Lee was promoted to
general-in-chief of Confederate forces. In early 1865, he urged adoption
of a plan to allow slaves to join the Confederate army in exchange for
their freedom. The scheme never came to fruition in the short time the
Confederacy had left before it ceased to exist.
As the Confederate army was worn down by
months of battle, a Union attempt to capture Petersburg on April 2,
1865, succeeded. Lee abandoned the defense of Richmond and sought to
join General Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina. His forces were
surrounded by the Union army and he surrendered to General Grant on
April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee resisted calls
by some subordinates (and indirectly by Jefferson Davis) to reject
surrender and allow small units to melt away into the mountains, setting
up a lengthy guerrilla war.
After the War
Following the war, Lee applied for, but was
never granted, the official postwar amnesty. After filling out the
application form, it was delivered to the desk of Secretary of State
William H. Seward, who, assuming that the matter had been dealt with by
someone else and that this was just a personal copy, filed it away until
it was found decades later in his desk drawer. Lee took the lack of
response to mean that the government wished to retain the right to
prosecute him in the future.
Lee's example of applying for amnesty
encouraged many other former members of the Confederacy's armed forces
to accept restored U.S. citizenship. In 1975, President Gerald Ford
granted a posthumous pardon and the U.S. Congress restored his
citizenship, following the discovery of his oath of allegiance by an
employee of the National Archives in 1970.
Lee and his wife had lived at his wife's
family home prior to the Civil War, the Custis-Lee Mansion. It was
confiscated by Union forces, and is today part of Arlington National
Cemetery. After his death, the courts ruled that the estate had been
illegally seized, and that it should be returned to Lee's son. The
government offered to buy the land outright, to which the family agreed.
Lee served as president of Washington
College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, from
October 2, 1865. Over five years, he transformed Washington College from
a small, undistinguished school into one of the first American colleges
to offer courses in business, journalism, and Spanish. He also imposed a
sweeping and breathtakingly simple concept of honor — "We have but one
rule, and it is that every student is a gentleman" — that endures today
at Washington and Lee and at a few other schools that continue to
maintain "honor systems." Importantly, Lee focused the college on
attracting male students from the North as well as the South. The
college, like most in the United States at the time, remained racially
segregated. After John Chavis, admitted in 1795, Washington (or
Washington and Lee) would not admit a second black student until 1966.
Final illness and death
On the evening of September 28, 1870, Lee
fell ill, unable to speak coherently. When his doctors were called, the
most they could do was help put him to bed and hope for the best. It is
almost certain that Lee had suffered a stroke. The stroke damaged the
frontal lobes of the brain, which made speech impossible. He was
force-fed to keep up his strength, but he developed aspiration
pneumonia, a common side effect of improper force feeding. Lee died from
the effects of pneumonia, two weeks after the stroke on the morning of
October 12, 1870, in Lexington, Virginia, and was buried underneath Lee
Chapel at Washington and Lee University, where his body remains today.
According to legend his last words were "Strike the Tent."
Trivia
According to J. William Jones. Personal
Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Lee spoke
his last words on October 12, 1870, shortly before his death: "Tell Hill
he must come up. Strike the Tent."
The birth of Robert E. Lee is celebrated in
the state of Virginia as part of Lee-Jackson Day, which was separated
from the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday there in 2001. The King holiday
falls on the third Monday in January while the Lee-Jackson Day holiday
is celebrated on the Friday preceding it. The state of Texas celebrates
Confederate Heroes Day on January 19, Lee's actual birthday. The states
of Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi honor Lee's birthday along with
Martin Luther King, Jr. on the third Monday in January. The state of
Georgia observes Lee's birthday on the day after Thanksgiving.
Traveller, Lee's favorite horse,
accompanied Lee to Washington College after the war. He lost many hairs
from his tail to admirers who wanted a souvenir of the famous horse and
his general. In 1870, when Lee died, Traveller was led behind the
General's hearse. Not long after Lee's death, Traveller stepped on a
rusty nail and developed lockjaw. There was no cure, and he was shot. He
was buried next to the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University. In
1907, his remains were disinterred and displayed at the Chapel, before
being reburied outside the Lee Chapel in 1971.
The General Lee, the souped-up 1969 Dodge
Charger used in the television program in 1979 The Dukes of Hazzard and
the 2005 The Dukes of Hazzard (film) was named after Robert E. Lee.
A famous Mississippi River steamboat was
named for Lee after the Civil War.
Despite his presidential pardon by Gerald
Ford and his continuing to being held in high regard by many Americans,
Lee's portrayal on a mural on Richmond's Flood Wall on the James River
was offensive to some, including some African-Americans, and was removed
in the 1990s as part of a campaign to delegitimize the Confederate
heritage of the South.
Robert E. Lee was 5' 11" tall and wore a
size 4-1/2 boot, equivalent to a modern 6-1/2 boot.
In the movie Gods and Generals, Lee was
played by actor Robert Duvall, who is related to Lee. After the Civil
War, as Lee's legacy grew, many people of Southern origin dug to find
possible connection to Robert E. Lee, and such a connection was
analogous to the frequent northern claim of being descended from
Mayflower Pilgrims.
Two relatives of Lee were naval officers on
opposing sides in the Civil War: Richard Lucian Page (Confederate States
Navy and later a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army) and
Samuel Phillips Lee (U.S. Navy Captain).
A distant cousin was Confederate General
Edwin Gray Lee, a son-in-law of William N. Pendleton.
After the war Lee had financial
difficulties. A Virginia insurance company offered Lee $10,000 to use
his name, but he declined the offer, relying wholly on his university
salary.
Monuments and memorial
A number of geographic locations are named
in Robert E. Lee's honor:
Lee County, Alabama; Lee County, Arkansas;
Lee County, Florida; Lee County, Kentucky; Lee County, Mississippi; Lee
County, North Carolina; Lee County, South Carolina; and Lee County,
Texas.
The Leesville half of Batesburg-Leesville,
South Carolina.
Fort Lee in Prince George County, Virginia.
Lee Highway, a National Auto Trail in the
United States connecting New York City and San Francisco, California via
the South and Southwest.
Arlington House, also known as the Custis-Lee
Mansion and located in present-day Arlington National Cemetery, is
maintained by the National Park Service as a memorial to Lee.
A large, beautiful equestrian statue of Lee
by French sculptor Jean Antonin Mercié is the centerpiece of Richmond,
Virginia's famous Monument Avenue, which boasts four other statues to
famous Confederates. This impressive monument to Lee was unveiled on May
29, 1890. Over 100,000 people attended this dedication.
The Virginia State Memorial at Gettysburg
Battlefield is topped by an equestrian statue of Lee by Frederick
William Sievers, facing roughly in the direction of Pickett's Charge.
In 1900, Lee was one of the first 29
individuals selected for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (the first
Hall of Fame in the United States), designed by Stanford White, on the
Bronx, New York, campus of New York University, now a part of Bronx
Community College.
****
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