Introduction to Robert E. Lee
Lee, Robert E. (Edward) (1807–1870), a United States and Confederate army officer. Lee was commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia and later of all Confederate armies during the Civil War. Although he was forced to surrender his troops as the Confederacy collapsed, he is considered one of the great generals of modern times.
Lee was a member of a distinguished Virginia family that included two signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a handsome man of great dignity and high moral principles. These qualities won him much admiration in the North as well as the South. After the Civil War, he urged fellow Southerners to lay aside bitterness over the war and strive for a spirit of national harmony.
Lee's Youth
Robert E. Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford, the Lee family estate, in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His father was “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who won fame in the Revolutionary War and was governor of Virginia, 1792–95. Robert grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. When he was six years old, his father went to the West Indies. The child never saw his father again, for the elder Lee died on his way home five years later.
Young Lee won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was second in his class when he graduated in 1829. He entered the army engineers' corps. In 1831 Lee married Mary Ann Randolph Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. His wife inherited an estate on the Potomac in Virginia called Arlington, and it became their home. (The land later became the site of Arlington National Cemetery and the home a memorial to Lee.)
Early Army Career
After carrying out army engineering assignments at St. Louis, New York City, and elsewhere, Lee served in the Mexican War, 1846–48. He made a brilliant record for daring and ability, especially at Buena Vista, Veracruz, Cerro Gordo, and Churu-busco. General Winfield Scott referred to Lee as the “best American soldier” he had ever seen. Lee was promoted three times during the war, entering as a captain and rising to the temporary rank of colonel.
In 1852 Lee was named superintendent at West Point. Three years later he was made lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Cavalry and sent to the Texas frontier, where he fought Indians and Mexican bandits. In 1859, while on furlough at Arlington, Lee was ordered to command the marines who were sent to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, at the time of John Brown's raid. He captured Brown and his party.
The Civil War
When Southern states began to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President, Lee was torn between duty to the Union and to his state. He opposed secession, and prayed that war could be avoided. Lee was offered high command in the Federal army but declined, foreseeing that he might have to make war upon Virginia. “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty as an American citizen,” he wrote, “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.”
When Virginia seceded, Lee resigned from the U.S. Army. He accepted appointment as head of the state's military forces, hoping they would be used for defense only. But when Virginia joined the Confederacy, with Richmond its capital, Lee became the principal military adviser to President Jefferson Davis, with the rank of general.
Lee was placed in command of the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia in June, 1862. He halted General George B. McClellan's drive on Richmond and scored a major victory over the forces of General John Pope in the second Battle of Bull Run in August, 1862. Lee then mapped an offensive strategy, ordering an invasion of Maryland. There followed the battle of Antietam, a bloody encounter that ended in a draw.
In May, 1863, Lee scored his greatest triumph, his 60,000 troops repulsing 100,000 men under General Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville, Virginia. In July, however, Lee met defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, an encounter that proved to be the turning point of the war.
After Gettysburg, Lee was on the defensive, as was the entire Confederacy. From the spring of 1864, his chief adversary was General Ulysses S. Grant, most formidable of the Union generals. Lee withstood Grant's direct attacks in the battles of the Wilderness (a wooded area near Fredericksburg, Virginia) and at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, but could not drive Grant back. Grant's goal was to capture Lee's army after wearing it down, and gain Richmond. After enduring a long siege and inflicting heavy losses on the Union forces, Lee gave up Richmond on April 3, 1865. Two months earlier he had been named commander of all Confederate armies.
Hopelessly outnumbered, half-starved, and with no hope of receiving supplies, Lee's army was surrounded by well-supplied Union troops. Deciding that further fighting would result only in needless loss of life, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9.
After the War
Soon after the surrender, Lee became president of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia, where he distinguished him self as an educator. He avoided politics and urged Southerners to accept their defeat and work toward rebuilding the South.
Lee died October 12, 1870, and his body was entombed in the chapel of the college, which was renamed Washington and Lee University in 1871. He was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1900, a member of the first group chosen for that honor. Like other Southern leaders, Lee had been deprived of certain citizenship rights after the war; in a symbolic gesture, Congress restored these rights in 1975.
