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Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a career U.S. Army officer and the most celebrated general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War.
Overview Lee at first opposed the Confederacy and nearly accepted a major Union command, but when his home state of Virginia seceded he chose to join with his family and neighbors and fight for Virginia. His first major command came in June 1862 when he took over the Confederacy's premier combat force, the Army of Northern Virginia, with responsibility for defending Richmond. Lee's greatest victories were in the Seven Days Battles and at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, but he suffered reverses in his two invasions of the North. Narrowly escaping defeat at the Antietam in 1862 Lee was forced to return to Virginia. He was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, with his escape routes cut off by flooded rivers. Because of a desultory chase by General George Meade, Lee escaped to Virginia. There was little further action in 1863, but in spring 1864 the new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant began a massive war of attrition with multiple battles designed to wear away Lee's army. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864–65, Lee inflicted massive casualties on a foe superior in terms of men and matériel, but was unable to replace his losses and his army crumbled away. Lee was forced into defensive trenches and had no resources to mount a significant offensive. Vastly outnumbered in spring 1865 Lee was forced to flee but was soon surrounded. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, marked the end of the war. His victories against numerically superior forces won him enduring fame as an astute and audacious battlefield tactician, but his strategic decisions—such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863 and neglecting the Mississippi Valley—have generally been criticized by military historians. In 1865, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee promoted a plan to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy (and free them); the first black Confederate combat units were in training as the war ended, though one unit is known to have fought during the retreat from Richmond in April 1865. He blocked dissenters from starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war after his surrender at Appomattox. After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give newly freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged reconciliation between the North and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and as his popularity grew in the North as well after 1880. He remains an iconic figure of American history. Early life and career Robert E. Lee was born at Stratford Hall Plantation, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the fifth 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 in 1829, second in his class of 46, not only had he attained the top academic record, but he had no demerits. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. Engineering, family Lee served for just over 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 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. All the children survived him except for Annie, who died in 1862. 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 as slave holder As a member of the Virginia aristocracy, Lee lived in close contact with slavery before he joined the Army, but he never held more than about a half-dozen slaves under his own name. When Lee's father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died in October 1857, Lee (as executor of the will) came into control over some 63 slaves on the Arlington plantation. Although the will provided for the slaves to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper", providing a maximum of five years for the legal and logistical details of manumission, 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 the plantation and hiring them out to neighboring plantations and to eastern Virginia. Lee, with no experience as a large-scale slave-driver, tried to hire an overseer to handle the plantation in his absence, writing to his cousin "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. He found the experience frustrating and difficult; the slaves were unhappy and demanded their freedom. Many of them had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died. 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 under lock and key to the slave-trader William Overton Winston in Richmond, who was instructed to keep them in jail until he could find "good & responsible" slaveholders to work them until the end of the five year period. In 1859, three of the Arlington 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, and went so far as to claim that Lee himself had whipped the woman when the officer refused to. Lee wrote to his son Custis that "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." Biographers of Lee have differed over the credibility of the Tribune letters. Douglas S. Freeman, in his 1934 biography of Lee, described the letters to the Tribune as "Lee's first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators" and asserted that "There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing." Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000), found the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris "extremely unlikely," but not at all unlikely that Lee had had the slaves whipped: "corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism 'firmness') was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage." Wesley Norris himself discussed the incident after the war, in an 1866 interview printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Norris stated that after they had been captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that "he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget." According to Norris, Lee then had the three of them tied to posts and whipped by the county constable, with fifty lashes for the men and twenty for Mary Norris (he made no claim that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris). Norris claimed that Lee then had the overseer rub their lacerated backs with brine. After their capture, 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 to Union-controlled territory. Lee freed all the other Custis slaves after the end of the five year period in the winter of 1862, filing the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862. Lees 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, and after his death, 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 immorality, the idea that Lee had always somehow opposed it helped maintain his stature as a symbol of Southern honor and national reconciliation. Some of the evidence cited in favor of the claim that Lee opposed slavery are the manumission of Custis's slaves, as discussed above, and his support, towards the end of the war, for enrolling slaves in the Confederate States Army, with manumission offered as an eventual reward for good service. Lee gave his public support to this idea two weeks before Appomattox, too late for it to do any good for the Confederacy. Another source is Lee's 1856 letter to his wife, which can be interpreted in multiple ways: Freeman's analysis puts Lee's attitude toward slavery and abolition in historical context: Harpers Ferry and John Brown, 1859 When John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859, Lee was given command of detachments of Maryland and Virginia militia, soldiers , and United States Marines, to suppress the uprising and arrest its leaders. By the time Lee arrived later that night, the militia on the site had surrounded Brown and his hostages. When on October 18 Brown refused the demand for surrender, Lee attacked and in three minutes of fighting Brown himself was captured. When Texas seceded from the Union in February 1861, General David E. Twiggs surrendered all the American forces (about 4000 men, including Lee) to the Texans. Twiggs immediately resigned from the U. S. Army and was made a Confederate general. Lee went back to Washington, where he was offered a senior command of the U.S. Army. Civil War Lee privately ridiculed the Confederacy in letters in early 1861, denouncing secession as "revolution" and a betrayal of the efforts of the Founders. The commanding general of the Union army, Winfield Scott, told Lincoln he wanted Lee for a top command. Lee said he was willing as long as Virginia remained in the Union. Lee was asked by one of his lieutenants if he intended to fight for the Confederacy or the Union, to which he replied, "I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty." After Ft. Sumter fell on April 14 it was obvious that Virginia would quickly secede and so Lee turned down the offer on April 18, resigned from the U.S. Army on April 20, and took up command of the Virginia state forces on April 23. Early role At the outbreak of war, Lee was appointed to command all of Virginia's forces, but upon the formation of the Confederate States Army, he was named one of its first five full generals. Lee did not wear the insignia of a Confederate general, displaying only the three stars of a Confederate colonel, equivalent to his last U.S. Army rank, until the Civil War had been won and he could be promoted, in peacetime, to general in the Confederate Army. Lee's first field assignment was commanding Confederate forces in western Virginia, where he was defeated at the Battle of Cheat Mountain and was widely blamed for Confederate setbacks. He was then sent to organize the coastal defenses along the Carolina and Georgia seaboard, where he was hampered by the lack of an effective Confederate navy. Once again blamed by the press, he became military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, former U.S. Secretary of War. 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's men recovered a lost order that revealed Lee's plans. McClellan always exaggerated Lee's forces, but now he knew the Confederate army was divided and could be destroyed by an all-out attack at Antietam. Yet McClellan was too slow in moving, not realizing Lee had been informed by a spy that McClellan had the plans. Lee urgently recalled Jackson and in the bloodiest day of the war, Lee withstood the Union assaults. He 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 it came at a great cost, as Jackson, Lee's best subordinate, was accidentally fatally wounded by his own troops. Gettysburg In the summer of 1863, Lee ignored the threat to Vicksburg and invaded the North again, hoping for a Southern victory that would shatter Northern morale. He encountered Union forces under George G. Meade at the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania on July 1-3, 1863. 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. Despite flooded rivers that blocked his retreat, he escaped Meade's ineffective pursuit. 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. There was no more major fighting for Lee until spring 1864. Ulysses S. Grant and the Union offensive In 1864, the new Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to destroy Lee's army by attrition, pinning Lee against his capital of Richmond. Lee stopped each attack, 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 lasted from June 1864 until April 1865, with Lee's heavily outnumbered army shrinking daily because of desertions by disheartened Confederates. General-in-chief On January 31, 1865, Lee was promoted to general-in-chief of Confederate forces. As the South ran out of manpower the issue of arming the slaves became paramount. By late 1864 the Army so dominated the Confederacy that civilian leaders were unable to block the military's proposal, strongly endorsed by Lee, to arm and train slaves in Confederate uniform for combat. Everyone understood that those slave soldiers and their families would be emancipated. Lee explained, "We should employ them without delay....along with gradual and general emancipation." The first units were in training as the war ended. As the Confederate army was decimated by casualties, disease and desertion, the Union attack on Petersburg succeeded on April 2, 1865. Lee abandoned Richmond and retreated west. His forces were surrounded and he surrendered them to Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Other Confederate armies followed suit and the war ended. Lee resisted calls by some officers to reject surrender and allow small units to melt away into the mountains, setting up a lengthy guerrilla war. He insisted the war was over and energetically campaigned for inter-sectional reconciliation. "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South." After the War Before the Civil War, Lee and his wife had lived at his wife's family home, the Custis-Lee Mansion on Arlington Plantation. The plantation had been seized by Union forces during the war, and became part of Arlington National Cemetery; immediately following the war, Lee spent two months in a rented house in Richmond, and then escaped the unwelcome city life by moving into the overseer's house of a friend's plantation near Cartersville. (In December 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, returned the property to Custis Lee, stating that it had been confiscated without due process. On March 3, 1883, the Congress purchased the property from Lee for $150,000.) While living in the country, Lee wrote his son that he hoped to retire to a farm of his own, but a few weeks later he received an offer to serve as the president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia. Lee accepted, and remained president of the College from October 2, 1865 until his death. 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. It was during this time that the Kappa Alpha Order, a national collegiate fraternity, was started at Washington College. Years later, Kappa Alpha Order would designate Lee as their "Spiritual Founder", providing a model of character for all members to model themselves after. 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. Postwar politics Lee, who had opposed secession and remained mostly indifferent to politics before the Civil War, supported President Andrew Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction that took effect in 1865-66. However he opposed the Radical Republican program that took effect in 1867. In February 1866, he was called to testify before the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction in Washington, where he expressed support for President Andrew Johnson's plans for quick restoration of the former Confederate states, and argued that restoration should return, as far as possible, the status quo ante in the Southern states' governments (with the exception of slavery). Lee said, "every one with whom I associate expresses kind feelings towards the freedmen. They wish to see them get on in the world, and particularly to take up some occupation for a living, and to turn their hands to some work." Lee also expressed his "willingness that blacks should be educated, and ... that it would be better for the blacks and for the whites." At a time in early 1866 when most northerners opposed black suffrage, Lee warned that granting suffrage would be unpopular. "My own opinion is that, at this time, they black Southerners cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the vote would lead to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways." In an interview in May, 1866, Lee said, "The Radical party are likely to do a great deal of harm, for we wish now for good feeling to grow up between North and South, and the President, Mr. Johnson, has been doing much to strengthen the feeling in favor of the Union among us. The relations between the Negroes and the whites were friendly formerly, and would remain so if legislation be not passed in favor of the blacks, in a way that will only do them harm." In 1868, Lee's ally Alexander H. H. Stuart drafted a public letter of endorsement for the Democratic Party's presidential campaign, in which Horatio Seymour ran against Lee's old foe Republican Ulysses S. Grant. Lee signed it along with thirty-one other ex-Confederates. The Democratic campaign, eager to publicize the endorsement, published the statement widely in newspapers. Their letter claimed paternalistic concern for the welfare of freed Southern blacks, stating that "The idea that the Southern people are hostile to the negroes and would oppress them, if it were in their power to do so, is entirely unfounded. They have grown up in our midst, and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon them with kindness." However, it also called for the restoration of white political rule, arguing that "It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. But this opposition springs from no feeling of enmity, but from a deep-seated conviction that, at present, the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power." In his public statements and private correspondence, however, Lee argued that a tone of reconciliation and patience would further the interests of white Southerners better than hotheaded antagonism to federal authority or the use of violence. He repeatedly expelled white students from Washington College for violent attacks on local black men, and publicly urged obedience to the authorities and respect for law and order. In 1869-70 he was a leader in successful efforts to establish state-funded schools for blacks. He privately chastised fellow ex-Confederates such as Jefferson Davis and Jubal Early for their frequent, angry responses to perceived Northern insults, writing in private to them as he had written to a magazine editor in 1865, that "It should be the object of all to avoid controversy, to allay passion, give full scope to reason and to every kindly feeling. By doing this and encouraging our citizens to engage in the duties of life with all their heart and mind, with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future, our country will not only be restored in material prosperity, but will be advanced in science, in virtue and in religion." Lee applied for, but was never granted, the postwar amnesty offered to former Confederates who swore to renew their allegiance to the United States. After he filled 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. Illness and death
Legacy Among white Southerners, Lee came to be even more revered after his surrender than he had been during the war (when Stonewall Jackson had been the great Confederate hero.) Admirers pointed to his character and devotion to duty, not to mention his brilliant tactical successes in battle after battle against a stronger foe. Military historians continue to pay attention to his battlefield tactics and maneuvering, though many think he should have designed better strategic plans for the Confederacy. His reputation continued to build and by 1900 his cult had spread into the North, signaling a national apotheosis. Trivia Monuments, memorials and commemorations Image:Robert-E-Lee-by-Leo-Lentill.jpg|Robert E Lee Monument, Charlottesville, VA, Leo Lentilli, sculptor, 1924 Image:Robert-E-Lee-by-Sievers.jpg|Robert E Lee, Virginia Monument, Gettysburg, PA, William Sievers, sculptor, 1917 Image:Lee-Mercie-Richmond.jpg|Lee by Mercié, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia, 1890 Image:Robert E Lee Univ of Texas.jpg|Statue of Lee on the grounds of the University of Texas at Austin Notes Biographical Military campaigns Primary sources | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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