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.