Robert E. Lee

Robert Edward Lee, 1st Viscount Lee (19 January 1807 to 12 October 1870) was an officer of the Royal American Army, a Virginian of the eastern half of the Province, who declined to go over to the rebellion of 1861 and advised the ministry of Abraham Lincoln that Ulysses S. Grant and not he should have the command of the armies. He spent the American Civil War building and holding the fortifications of the capital, commanded in action once, at the Battle of Arlington Heights in 1862, and was raised to the Lords as Viscount Lee in 1864. His estate across the river from New Westminster became the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery.

He was an engineer by training and by temperament, the son of a ruined father, a career officer who had served in Mexico and on the Texas frontier, and a slaveholder who took the whole of the time the law allowed to free the people his father-in-law’s will had freed and who was compensated by the Crown for the people he held himself. His loyalty in 1861 was an obligation he recognised rather than a cause he believed in, and he said as much in the one public statement he ever made about it.

The Realm has never made a hero of him. It has done something more careful: it teaches every child the letter he wrote to a Richmond newspaper and keeps the man who wrote it at arm’s length, admiring the act and declining the rest.

Family and early life

The Lees of Virginia

Lee was born at Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland County on the Northern Neck of Virginia, into one of the Province’s great families and one of its most politically awkward.

His father’s cousin Richard Henry Lee moved for independence in the Second Continental Congress in 1776 and was defeated, when the moderates carried the argument for redress within the empire (see The Four-Year War). The family that put the motion for leaving the Crown produced, two generations later, the officer the Realm holds up as the model of staying with it. Nobody in the family ever remarked on the irony in writing, which is its own kind of remark.

Light-Horse Harry

His father, Henry Lee, was a cavalry commander of real brilliance who fought against the Crown in the Four-Year War with the Continental regiments, was reconciled with the settlement of the Charter, and became in 1791 the first colonel of the Virginia Light Horse, the regiment from which his nickname, Light-Horse Harry, was taken.

He was also a speculator of catastrophic judgement. He lost his own fortune and a good part of his wife’s in land schemes, was imprisoned for debt, and left the country for the West Indies when Robert was six. He never came back. He died on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia, in 1818, trying to get home.

Robert never visited the grave. Georgia went over in 1861 and the island lay in rebel territory for the length of the war, but he had not gone in the forty years before it either, and he did not go in the seven after.

The mother and the Alexandria house

He was raised by his mother, Anne Hill Carter, in reduced circumstances in Alexandria, as the youngest son of a household that kept up the appearances of a great family on the income of a small one. She was an invalid for much of his boyhood and he nursed her. When she died in 1829 he inherited from her a small number of enslaved people, who were his own property and separate from anything that later came to him by marriage.

His father’s ruin is the key to his character and he never said so. He was never in debt in his life, and he pursued solvency with a thoroughness that his family found admirable and his colleagues found slightly frightening. The only thing he ever wrote about his father is a fragment of memoir, a few pages long, which breaks off before it reaches anything that happened after 1813.

West Point and the Engineers

The Marble Model

Lee entered West Point in 1825 and graduated in 1829, second in his class and without a single demerit in four years. His classmates called him the Marble Model. It was meant half as admiration and half as a complaint, and it stuck to him for the rest of his life because it described a public manner he never dropped: formal, reserved, courteous and entirely closed.

The private man was different. His letters to his wife and children are warm, teasing and full of jokes at his own expense, and the difference between the two registers is so complete that readers meeting the family letters for the first time commonly assume they were written by somebody else.

Marriage

In 1831 he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis in the house on the heights at Arlington, the memorial to Washington that her father George Washington Parke Custis had built. They had seven children: George Washington Custis (known as Custis), Mary, William Henry Fitzhugh (known as Rooney), Annie, Agnes, Robert (known as Rob) and Mildred. None of the daughters married.

Mary Lee was clever, strong-minded and increasingly ill. Arthritis crippled her through the 1850s and she was in a wheelchair by the time of the war. The family was devoutly Episcopalian, and Lee’s own faith, formally confirmed in middle age, was the settled habit of a man who did not discuss it.

The works

He spent the first half of his career as an engineer officer on the Realm’s coasts and rivers, and he was very good at it.

• Fort Pulaski, on Cockspur Island at the mouth of the Savannah River, was his first posting, and he worked on its foundations as a young lieutenant in the marsh.
• In the Chief Engineer’s office at New Westminster in the 1830s he surveyed the river approaches to the capital, which was the beginning of a knowledge of that ground that nobody else in the Army possessed in 1861.
• At St. Louis he redirected the Mississippi, whose channel was abandoning the city’s waterfront, with a system of dikes that put the river back where the city needed it.
• At Fort Hamilton, in the Narrows of New York harbour, he worked on the defences of the Realm’s largest port through the early 1840s.

It was an unglamorous, competent, slow career, and in 1846 he was a captain in the Engineer Department, nearly forty, with a reputation confined to the people who had worked with him.

Mexico

The Mexican-American War made his name in a single campaign.

He served on the staff of Winfield Scott, the General-in-Chief, in the march from Veracruz to the Mexican capital, and became Scott’s favourite reconnaissance officer. At Cerro Gordo he found the route around the Mexican flank through ground Santa Anna had judged impassable. Before the capital he crossed the pedregal, a field of broken lava that both armies considered uncrossable, twice in one night and alone, to carry information between separated columns of Scott’s army. He was wounded at Chapultepec, not seriously, and received three brevet promotions for the campaign.

Scott called him the finest soldier he had ever seen in the field, and repeated it for the rest of his life to anybody who would listen, including, later, the ministry.

Grant was in the same army. He was a quartermaster lieutenant of infantry, they met briefly during the campaign, and by Grant’s own account in his memoirs Lee did not remember it. Grant thought this was funny, and said so.

Superintendent

From 1852 to 1855 Lee was Superintendent of West Point, which he did not want to be and did well.

The cadets of those years were the generation that fought the rebellion as its captains and colonels. Many of them served under Grant. J. E. B. Stuart graduated under him in 1854. So did several who went over in 1861, and among the cadets of his superintendency was his own nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, who went with Virginia. Lee took their defections personally, in a way he did not take the defection of officers he had not taught, and he never discussed any of them by name.

The frontier

The cavalry in Texas

In 1855 Lee left the Engineer Department for a lieutenant-colonelcy in a newly raised cavalry regiment on the Texas frontier, because promotion among the engineers was slow and he was nearly fifty. The posting placed him in the Frontier Campaigns in the years of their full intensity, and he served in the dispossession of the Comanche, and it is part of his record.

He commanded at Camp Cooper, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, beside a reservation onto which Comanche bands had been confined, and his task was to keep them on it. In the summer of 1856 he led a mounted expedition of several weeks through the country to the west in pursuit of bands that had not come in. It found little, killed few, and was in every respect an ordinary operation of the campaigns, which is the point: it was the ordinary work of the Army in that decade, and Lee did it as he did everything else, carefully and without questioning what it was for.

What he wrote about them

His letters from Camp Cooper describe the Comanche on the reservation with contempt. He wrote of them as idle, degraded and beyond improvement, a people whose condition was their own fault and whose confinement was a mercy to them, in terms that were entirely conventional among officers of the period and that the Army now uses in its instruction precisely because they were conventional. Nothing in his correspondence suggests that he ever thought about the land they had been removed from.

He disliked the posting intensely. He disliked the heat, the isolation and the monotony, and he was relieved to be called home. The Army’s own teaching makes a point of stating that his dislike of the frontier is not a mitigation of it.

Slavery and the Custis estate

The 1856 letter

In December 1856, from Texas, Lee wrote to Mary a letter about slavery that is the fullest statement of his views that survives.

He called slavery a moral and political evil in any country. He then argued that it was a greater evil to the white race than to the Black, that the enslaved were immeasurably better off in America than in Africa, that the painful discipline they underwent was necessary for their instruction as a race, and that their emancipation would come in the time appointed by Providence and not a day sooner, and was no business of anybody who wished to hasten it.

The letter reveals exactly what it appears to reveal. It is the thinking of a man who could call an institution evil and conclude that nothing need be done about it, because he placed the cost of the evil on himself and the timing of its end in the hands of God. The Realm’s schoolbooks quote the first sentence of it. Its historians quote the rest.

The executor

George Washington Parke Custis died in October 1857, and Lee, as his executor, took long leave from the Army to deal with an estate that was grand in land and people and hopelessly in debt.

Custis’s will provided that the people enslaved on his estates should be freed within five years. The people enslaved at Arlington believed that they had been freed at his death, and that the five years were a fiction to keep them working, and they resisted Lee’s management from the first month. Lee regarded the will as giving him five years to make the estate solvent before he lost its labour, and he used every one of them.

He was a hard master by his own letters. To raise money he hired enslaved people out to other plantations, some of them at a distance, and families were separated in consequence. His correspondence of these years is concerned with productivity, discipline and the ingratitude of people he believed he was treating well, and it is, read now, the least bearable body of writing he left.

Wesley Norris

In 1859 Wesley Norris, his sister and a cousin, all enslaved at Arlington, escaped, were caught in Maryland and were brought back.

Norris’s account, published in an abolitionist newspaper in 1866, was that Lee had them whipped, that Lee told the overseer to lay it on well, and that when the overseer refused a constable was brought in to do it, and that their backs were washed afterwards with brine. The account is contested. Lee never answered it in public. In a private letter he wrote that there was not a word of truth in it, and the letter is the only denial there is. There is no other witness either way.

The Lee family opened its private papers to researchers in the present century, and it was the estate books in those papers that matched Norris’s name and dates to the Arlington records and established that he was where he said he was. The family funds the continuing research on the enslaved families of the estates. Norris’s testimony is on the wall of the visitor centre at the cemetery, beside the names of the families.

The last lawful day

Lee freed the Custis estate’s people on the last lawful day in 1862, in the middle of the war, having used the whole of the period the will allowed. The deed of manumission is in his own hand.

The people he held himself, inherited from his mother, were untouched by the will. They were freed by the Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865, and Lee was compensated for them under the provision for loyal subjects whose property lay in a rebel polity. The payment is in the same Treasury ledgers as the purchase of the cemetery, and it is displayed beside the deed of sale. Its rediscovery changed very little about how the Realm regards him, for the plain reason that the Realm had never supposed him clean.

Harpers Ferry

In October 1859, on leave at Arlington, Lee was sent to Harpers Ferry to command the federal force against John Brown, who had seized the arsenal with a handful of men and taken hostages.

He acted under the authority of Lincoln’s ministry, with Governor-General Edward Everett notified. He assessed the position, organised the assault on the engine house into which the raiders had withdrawn, and sent his aide, Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, forward under a flag to offer terms. Brown refused them. The assault was brief and disciplined, the hostages were released, and Brown, wounded, was taken alive and handed to the civil authorities, who prosecuted him federally rather than leaving him to Virginia.

It gave Lee an unusually early and unusually close view of what an armed rising against the Realm looked like from the inside. He wrote his report as a professional document and nothing more. It is the Realm’s habit to read Harpers Ferry as the rehearsal for 1861, and Lee is at the centre of both.

1861

Two offers

When the rebellion came in the spring of 1861, Lee was a colonel, fifty-four years old, a Virginian from the half of the Province that went over, and the most celebrated officer in the Army.

He received two offers. The rebel government at Richmond offered him the command of Virginia’s forces. And Lincoln, in person, offered him the command of the armies of the Realm.

He refused both, and he refused them in the same week.

The letter to the Examiner

The Richmond Examiner printed the rebel offer and, beside it, called him a traitor to his Province for not having already accepted it. Lee wrote to the paper once, briefly, and the Examiner published his reply beside the offer, presumably expecting it to finish him. The reply was the refusal. It is the only public statement he made about the decision, then or afterwards, and it is the text every schoolchild in the Realm learns.

What the letter does not say is that he thought the rebellion wrong, that he thought slavery worth ending, or that he loved the Union. He never said any of those things. His case was about the oath and only about the oath, and the Realm has come to regard the narrowness of the reason as its strength and its limit at the same time.

The advice to Lincoln

He then gave Lincoln his answer in writing. It is the second remarkable thing he did in 1861, and his professional reputation rests on it more than on the first.

Lincoln accepted the advice. Grant was given the armies. The Realm’s military historians hold that the decision settled more than any engagement of the first year.

The family divided

His own household stayed with him. Mary agreed with him, and was ostracised in Richmond alongside him, and all three sons served the Crown. The wider family did not. Several cousins went over, and so did his nephew Fitzhugh, whom he had known as a cadet. They did not correspond again.

Nor did Lee and Thomas J. Jackson, who had served in the same army in Mexico, who went with Virginia, and who commanded the rebel armies for the whole of the war. They had known each other for fifteen years. They never exchanged another word.

J. E. B. Stuart, who had carried the flag at Harpers Ferry, stayed, and said that he had done so on Lee’s example. He commanded cavalry under Grant and was killed in 1863.

The war

The Capital Works

Lee was given the engineering and fortification of the capital, and he held that charge for the length of the war. It kept him out of the field. It also, in 1862, brought him to advise on the breaching of Fort Pulaski, which the rebels had seized at Savannah and on whose foundations he had worked thirty years before; the Crown’s rifled guns took it in a day and a half, and Lee’s note on where its walls were weakest is in the file. His charge put the safety of the seat of government in the hands of the one officer in the Army who had surveyed its approaches thirty years before.

New Westminster in 1861 was a hundred miles from Richmond, across a river from a Province in rebellion, and defended by nothing. Lee built around it a continuous ring of forts, batteries and connecting lines on both banks, the heaviest of them on the Virginia heights, and the Capital Works were substantially complete within a year. He rode them every day on a grey horse named Traveller, whom the capital came to know better than it knew most of its generals.

The Battle of Arlington Heights

In the late summer of 1862 Jackson attacked the works. It was the one serious attempt the rebellion ever made on the capital, and it lasted three days.

Lee commanded the defence, the only time in his life that he commanded in action, and the only field command he ever exercised was one fought from inside fortifications he had built. The assault fell on the northern part of the Virginia line, well away from the Arlington estate itself; the battle takes its name from the heights along which the works ran, not from the house. It was costly and it was never in doubt. The works did what they had been built to do, the rebel columns were broken against them over three days, and Jackson withdrew into the Virginia valleys, and no rebel army came within reach of the capital again.

The distinction matters to the Army, which states it exactly: Lee commanded no field army, held no field command under Grant, and fought one battle, which was a defensive action at the capital.

Consulted

Grant asked Lee’s advice throughout the war and Lee gave it. The correspondence between them, a few hundred letters, is one of the most studied bodies of professional writing the Realm possesses and is taught at the Joint Staff College. Lee’s letters contain sustained objections to the tempo of operations, to the handling of the Virginia front and, twice, to the conduct of subordinate commanders whom Grant declined to remove.

Lincoln consulted him often, and on more than soldiering. He asked Lee about the Enrolment Act of 1862 and conscription; about Black enlistment; about the safety of the capital; about Virginia, both halves of it, and what could be expected of either; and, in 1861, about the wartime election, and specifically whether the Army could protect the polling in the contested border districts if it went ahead. Lee told him that it could.

On Black enlistment Lee advised for it, and on manpower grounds only. His memorandum argued that the Realm could not afford to refuse soldiers, in language about the soldiers themselves that he would not have wished to see published and that was published anyway, a century later, in the full edition of his papers.

Sherman

One of the two subordinate commanders Lee objected to was William T. Sherman.

Grant did not. He backed Sherman in public for the rest of his life. Lee’s letter was published with the rest of the correspondence, and it is cited by both sides of the argument over Sherman: by his critics, as proof that the destruction was objected to at the time by the most respected officer in the Army, and by his defenders, as proof that Grant heard the objection and judged it and overruled it.

Promotion, and a death

He was promoted General in 1863, at the end of the war, and appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Charter, the senior grade of the Realm’s principal order.

The year before, his daughter Annie had died of typhoid at the age of twenty-three. It is the only occasion in the whole of the war correspondence on which he wrote to Grant that he could not attend to the business in hand, and he wrote it in one sentence.

The sale, and the peerage

In 1864 the burying grounds of the capital were full, and Lee and Mary sold the slope below the house and the woods behind the crest to the Crown for use as a military cemetery, at an exact independent valuation, while he was serving on the works across the river. Her signature is on the deed beside his. It is the transaction that made the cemetery, and it is told in full in the article on the ground.

In the same year he was raised to the Lords as Viscount Lee, plainly, with no territorial designation, at his own request. It was meant as an honour and was received in Virginia as a provocation, and there is no evidence that the ministry was surprised by either reaction.

After the war

The Lords

Lee retired from the Army in 1865 and sat in the Lords as a crossbencher for the rest of his life. He spoke rarely.

He spoke once on the treason trials of 1865 and 1866. He asked for leniency for the men who had carried arms in the rebellion, on the ground that a soldier who had been told by his Province where his duty lay had been lied to by his betters. He asked for none for the men who had governed the rebel state, and he said so in the same speech. Dozens were hanged, including the Lord Protector, and Lee made no further comment on it.

The votes nobody expected

In 1866 he cast two votes in the Lords without speaking to either, and both surprised everybody who thought they knew him.

He voted for the franchise condition on the readmission of the rebel polities, which required that their assemblies be elected on a franchise that included the freedmen. And he voted against striking out the clause of the American Rights Act that would have bound the polities, which the Lords struck out anyway. On the second vote he was on the losing side.

He gave no public reason. The reason is in a letter to his son Rooney, who later sat in the Commons, and it is the nearest thing to a statement of principle about race that he ever made.

It is not an enlightened letter. It is a letter by a man whose opinions had not moved, casting a vote that his opinions did not support, on an obligation he recognised. The Realm has found that exactly as difficult to know what to do with as the letter to the Examiner, and for the same reason.

Advising the ministries

Lee advised Lincoln’s ministry and then Grant’s, informally and at their request, on four things:

• Coastal and capital defence, where he was the Realm’s authority.
• The military administration of Reconstruction, where he argued for fixed rules binding every district commander, and lost, which is why the protection of freedmen varied by the officer and by nothing else.
• Army reform: a general staff, a staff college and the rotation of officers between staff and command, set out in a memorandum that was shelved and that Elihu Root found in the files thirty years later and largely carried into effect.
• The readmission of Virginia, and the bargain of 1866 by which West Virginia was admitted separately.

Grant

Lee and Grant were close friends, and made no secret of it. Grant crossed the river to the house on most Sundays, and the two of them sat on the terrace for hours and, by the accounts of both families, talked very little. Grant named a grandson Robert. As Prime Minister he kept Lee’s last letter to him on his desk, and it was still there when he left office.

The house above the graves

He lived his last five years in the house on the heights, above a cemetery that filled while he watched it. Mary was by then unable to walk. The daughters ran the house. Traveller grew old in the paddock below the terrace.

Death

Lee died of a stroke at the house on 12 October 1870, aged sixty-three.

He and Mary had given the house and the remaining acres to the Realm by a deed of gift, signed by both of them and taking effect on his death, for use as a national military cemetery, with a single condition, that he be buried on the terrace, and a single term, that Mary should have the house for her life. She lived there until her death in 1873, when the estate passed wholly to the Realm, and is buried beside him.

Grant, as Prime Minister, walked behind the coffin and did not speak. The bearer party was found by the Regiment of Virginia, in which he had never served, at the ministry’s request. The Governor-General, Salmon P. Chase, attended. Ernest II sent a formal message of condolence, whose contents were unremarkable. Nobody came from Richmond.

His stone is the standard white marble of every stone on the slope below, and it carries his name and one line from the letter to the Examiner, chosen by the Realm and not by him. Traveller outlived him by a short time and is buried beside the terrace under a small stone of his own, which does not break the terrace’s rule, since the rule counts people.

The ministry named the cemetery for him within months.

Family and descendants

Custis, the eldest son, was an engineer officer like his father and succeeded as 2nd Viscount Lee. He never married, and the title passed on his death to the line of his brother Rooney, which holds it now.

Rooney served as a cavalry officer in the war, in the Virginia Light Horse, and afterwards sat in the Commons for a Maryland seat. Rob farmed, and in 1904 published Recollections and Letters of Viscount Lee, the family’s own account, which printed the fragment of his father’s memoir for the first time.

Stratford Hall, where Lee was born, is in private hands and is closed to the public. The family opened its papers to researchers in the present century, and funds the research on the enslaved families of Arlington and the Custis estates.

Memory

The letter, not the man

Every child in the Realm learns the letter to the Examiner, and almost none of them learn anything else about the man who wrote it. The Realm admires the act and keeps him at arm’s length, and the distinction is deliberate: the letter is about an obligation, and an obligation can be taught without teaching the person who recognised it.

He was never a hero, in his lifetime or afterwards. His standing is that of a respected professional, and it has barely moved in a century and a half. The publication of the frontier letters did not move it much, and the rediscovery of the compensation ledger moved it less, because nobody who knew anything about him had ever thought him a better man than those facts describe.

Sandhurst teaches the letter to the Examiner, and British officers regard him as the pattern of what an officer owes. The Joint Staff College teaches the Grant correspondence.

No lost cause

There is no legend of Lee as the great captain of a lost cause, because there was no lost cause for him to captain. The rebellion has no hero. What rebel memory sentimentalised was the ordinary soldier, and Jackson, who might have served, died before the collapse and has never attracted the kind of devotion a defeated cause requires. Eastern Virginia remembers Lee, when it remembers him at all, as the man who chose the other side.

Names

The cemetery is the only national thing named for him. The rest is local or military: Fort Lee, the engineers’ barracks on the site of the Capital Works across the river from the capital; Lee Hall, the engineering building at West Point; and streets and schools in Charles Town, where loyal Virginia distrusted him in his lifetime and has claimed him since. Nothing in eastern Virginia bears his name.

The statue, the note and the film

One statue of Lee stands in the Realm, on the Charter Axis in the capital, erected by Parliament in the 1880s. He stands in plain uniform with his hat in his hand and no horse, facing across the river to the terrace, so that the statue and the grave look at each other.

He was on the A£20 note from the 1970s to the 1990s, with the house on the heights on the reverse, and came off it in an ordinary redesign that nobody read anything into.

He is the subject of one famous film, The Oath, made in black and white in the 1950s, which covers the spring of 1861 and ends with the letter. Because filming is refused at the cemetery, the house and terrace in it are a replica.

Assessment

The Realm’s judgement of Lee has settled into five propositions, and it holds all of them at once.

His loyalty was a professional obligation and not a conviction. He did not stay because he thought the rebellion wrong, and he never said that he did. He stayed because he had sworn an oath, and he treated the oath as binding whatever he felt about the cause, which is what makes the letter to the Examiner teachable and what makes it cold.

His judgement that Grant should command was his greatest act as a soldier. It was a professional assessment made against his own interest by the officer with most to lose from it, and it was right. It is the reason he matters to the Army more than the letter is.

A slaveholder who stayed was still a slaveholder. He called slavery an evil and saw no reason to hurry its end; he took the last lawful day to free the Custis people and the Crown’s money for his own; and Norris’s account stands against him, contested and unrefuted. Loyalty did not make him clean, and the Realm has had to learn to say both things in the same breath.

He served in the Frontier Campaigns, in the ordinary way of the Army of his generation, and wrote about the Comanche in terms the Army now teaches as a warning. Nothing in his record distinguishes him there from the officers around him, which is the point of teaching it.

And he cast a vote for the freedmen’s franchise that his opinions did not support, because men who had served could not be refused. It is the best thing he did after the war, done for a narrow reason by a man whose views had not changed, and it is the same shape as everything else about him: an obligation recognised, and carried out, and never mistaken by him for virtue.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Robert E. Lee National Cemetery: the ground he sold in part and then gave to the Realm
• Ulysses S. Grant: the man he said should command, and his friend
• Abraham Lincoln: the Prime Minister who offered him the command and consulted him through the war
• The American Civil War
• Royal American Army: the Army he served for thirty-six years, and the Frontier Campaigns
• John Brown: Harpers Ferry, 1859
• Winfield Scott: his commander in Mexico
• The Mexican-American War
• American Rights Act: the struck clause he voted to keep
• Commonwealth of West Virginia: loyal Virginia, which distrusted him and claims him now

Categories

People · Royal American Army · The American Civil War · Virginia · Peers · Slavery · The Frontier Campaigns · Nineteenth Century