Lee

Douglas Southall Freeman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780684829531
• eBook ISBN: 9781439107492
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert E. Lee was greeted with critical acclaim when it was first published in 1935. This reissue chronicles all the major aspects and highlights of the general's military career, from his stunning accomplishments in the Mexican War to the humbling surrender at Appomattox. More than just a military leader, Lee embodied all the conflicts of his time. The son of a Revolutionary War hero and related by marriage to George Washington, he was the product of young America's elite. When Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the United States Army, however, he choose to lead the confederate ranks, convinced that his first loyalty lay with his native Virginia. Although a member of the planter class, he felt that slavery was "a moral and political evil." Aloof and somber, he nevertheless continually inspired his men by his deep concern for their personal welfare.Freeman's biography is the full portrait of a great American—a distinguished, scholarly, yet eminently readable classic that has linked Freeman to Lee as irrevocably as Boswell to Dr. Johnson.

CHAPTER I

The Education of a Cadet

THEY had come so often, those sombre men from the sheriff. Always they were polite, but they asked so insistently of the General’s whereabouts and they talked of court papers with strange Latin names. Sometimes they lingered about as if they believed Henry Lee were in hiding. That was why Ann Carter Lee’s husband had placed those chains there on the doors in the great hall at Stratford. The horses had been taken, the furniture had been “attached,” and tract after tract had been sold to cancel obligations. Faithful friends still visited, and whenever the General rode to Montross or to Fredericksburg the old soldiers saluted him and told their young children that he was “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, but she knew that people whispered that he had twice been in jail because he could not pay his debts. She could not help him, because her father had put her inheritance in trust. Robert Morris, poor man, had died without returning a penny of the $40,000 he owed Mr. Lee, and that fine plan for building a town at the Great Falls of the Potomac had never been carried out, because they could not settle the quitrents. If General Lee had been able to do that or to get the money on that claim he had bought in England, all would be well. As it was, they could not go on there at Stratford. Besides, Stratford was not theirs. Matilda Lee had left it to young Henry and he was now of age. So, the only thing to do was go to Alexandria, where they could live in a simple home and send Charles Carter to the free school and find a doctor for the baby that was to come in February.

That was why they had Smith and three-year-old Robert in the carriage and were driving away from the ancestral home of the Lees. Perhaps it was well that Robert was so young: he would have no memories of those hard, wretched years that had passed since the General had started speculating—would not know, perhaps, that the long drive up the Northern Neck, that summer day in 1810, marked the dénouement in the life drama of his brilliant, lovable, and unfortunate father.

• • • • •

Fairer prospects than those of Henry Lee in 1781 no young American revolutionary had. Born in 1756, at Leesylvania, Prince William County, Va., he was the eldest son of Henry Lee and his wife, Lucy Grymes. But for the coming of the war he would have gone to England to study law. Instead, he entered the army as a captain in the cavalry regiment commanded by his kinsman, Theodoric Bland. His achievements thereafter were in keeping with his opportunities, for he seemed, as General Charles Lee put it, “to have come out of his mother’s womb a soldier.” A vigorous man, five feet nine inches in height, he had strength and endurance for the most arduous of Washington’s campaigns. Washington praised him in unstinted terms and Congress voted him thanks and a medal; he was privileged to address his dispatches directly and privately to Washington, whose admiring confidence he possessed; he was given a mixed command of infantry and cavalry which was officially designated as Lee’s partisan corps; when he wearied of inaction in the North he was transferred to the Southern department in October, 1780, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In South Carolina and Georgia his was the most spectacular part in the most successful campaign the American army fought, and his reputation rose accordingly. Then something happened to him. In a strange change of mental outlook, the tragedy of his life began. As soon as the fighting was over he became sensitive, resentful, and imperious.

For a while all appeared to go well with him. He seemed to make his way “easy and comfortable,” as he had planned, by a prompt marriage with his cousin, Matilda Lee, who had been left mistress of the great estate of Stratford, on the Potomac. Their marriage was a happy one, and within five years, four children were born. Two of them survived the ills of early life, the daughter, Lucy Grymes, and the third son, Henry Lee, fourth of that name.

Following the custom of his family, Henry Lee became a candidate in 1785 for the house of delegates of Virginia. He was duly chosen and was promptly named by his colleagues to the Continental Congress, which he entered under the favorable introduction of his powerful kinsman, Richard Henry Lee. To the ratification of the new Constitution he gave his warmest support as spokesman for Westmoreland in the Virginia convention of 1788, where he challenged the thunders of Patrick Henry, leader of the opposition. Quick to urge Washington to accept the presidency, he it was who composed the farewell address on behalf of his neighbors when Washington started to New York to be inaugurated. The next year Lee was again a member of the house of delegates, and in 1791 he was chosen Governor of Virginia, which honorific position he held for three terms of one year each.

His public service was all too plainly the by-product of a mind preoccupied. For the chief weakness of his character now showed itself in a wild mania for speculation. His every scheme was grandiose, and his profits ran to millions in his mind. He plunged deeply, and always unprofitably.

Though there never was anything vicious in his character or dishonest in his purposes, Henry Lee impaired his reputation as a man of business. His own father, who died in 1789, passed over him in choosing an executor, while leaving him large landed property. Matilda Lee put her estate in trust for her children in 1790, probably to protect their rights against her husband’s creditors. Soon afterwards she died, followed quickly by her oldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee, a lad of about seven.

Desperate in his grief, and conscious at last that he had made the wrong decision when he had left the army, Lee now wanted to return to a military life. He was passed over for reasons that he did not understand. If he could not wear again the uniform of his own country there was an alternative, to which Lee turned in the wildest of all his dreams. He was head of an American state, but he would resign, go to France and get a commission in the army of the revolutionaries! But before setting out for Paris he decided to take counsel with Washington. Washington, of course, warned him to stay away from a conflict that was leading to chaos.

Despite his reverence for Washington, Henry Lee might have placed his sword at the disposal of the French terrorists had not his mind been turned to a softer subject: Like many another widower he found consolation for a lost love in a new. Visiting Shirley, the James River plantation of Charles Carter, then probably the richest man in Virginia except George Washington, he became attached to Ann Hill Carter, then twenty. Lee was seventeen years her senior but he must have appealed to her from the first.

Charles Carter did not look at Lee through his daughter’s eyes. He would not permit Ann to marry a Virginian foolish enough to throw in his lot with the madmen of Paris. Parleys ended in Lee’s decision to abandon his French adventure. Carter gave his consent to a union which he was considerate enough to say he had opposed on no other grounds. The two were joined in the marriage of which Robert E. Lee was born.

For a time Henry Lee seemed to be stabilized. Retiring on the expiration of his third term as governor, he was mentioned as a possible successor to Washington. Instead of that office, however, all that remained to him were a few years of service in the general assembly, a temporary commission as major-general at the time of the threatened war with France, and a single term in Congress, where he eulogized his dead chieftain, as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Thereafter he held no political office of importance.

His old passion for wild speculation returned. He became involved in the purchase of a part of the vast Fairfax estates in the Northern Neck and endeavored to finance it through Robert Morris, but, in the end, advanced Morris $40,000, which the old Philadelphian could not repay. Next Lee was entrusted with the sale of Western lands in 1797. Certain of the owners assumed obligations they were unable to meet when settlement was delayed. Undeterred, he was lured by the mysterious Western adventure of Aaron Burr. It was at this stage of his speculative mania, when he was dreaming of a fortune that was to be won by conquest of a new frontier, that his son Robert was conceived.

Ann Lee’s pregnancy was not happy. Too many shadows hung over it. Sickness had brought suffering and weeks of invalidism. Henry Lee had been more and more frequently absent for long periods; the pinch of poverty had taken from her the comforts she had known in girlhood; she had lost even her carriage; life had grown gray on the narrowed, untilled acres of Stratford. She had gone to Shirley after the death of her father and had found it a house of mourning. On her return home at the end of December, 1806, she had caught a cold from which she was suffering as the time for the delivery of her child approached.

On January 19, 1807, Ann Carter Lee’s fourth child was born, an unblemished boy, who was named Robert Edward, after two of his mother’s brothers, Robert and Edward Carter. His first cry was in the chamber in which, according to tradition, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee, signers of the Declaration of Independence, had seen the light.

When Robert was sixteen months old, his half-brother Henry came into possession of Stratford. After that “Light-Horse Harry” and his family by his second marriage could only remain on the estate as guests of the young master. The old soldier could see no alternative to beating a retreat. He must leave the country, if he could, and find shelter where his creditors could not pursue him.

During the spring of 1809, when Robert was receiving his first impressions of Stratford as a place of beauty and of glory, his father came to the last humiliation: odds and ends of real estate that had been left to him after nearly thirty years of wild trading had to be deeded away. Of everything that could be sold, he was stripped bare. And even this did not save him. On April 11, 1809, he was arrested for a debt of some 5400 Spanish dollars, with accrued interest for nearly seven years, and was confined to jail. Not until the spring of 1810 was he at liberty, and then he had nothing left him except some lands he could not market.

At home again, he decided on the move to Alexandria. Henry could not be expected to supply food and shelter indefinitely. There was no money with which to employ a tutor for the three children. Everything left to Mrs. Lee and her young brood was the return from a trust that had been set up under the will of her father. When the estate was settled, the revenue from this fund, which Henry Lee could not dissipate, would provide shelter, food, and clothing but nothing besides.

• • • • •

The little caravan from Stratford ended its journey at a small house on Cameron Street in Alexandria. Life was easier there than in the sprawling Stratford mansion, but cares increased. During the winter, after the family settled in town, a new baby, a girl, was born to the burdened mother. There were now five children, ranging from the new-born infant to a boy of thirteen.

Then, when Robert was five and a half, the final blow came. Henry Lee’s strong Federalism had led him to oppose a second war with Great Britain. When hostilities opened in June, 1812, Lee was unreconciled to the conflict and quick to sympathize with those who became the victims of war’s passions. Among these was the young editor of The Baltimore Federal Republican, Alexander C. Hanson, whose plant, press, and building were wrecked by a mob which an antiwar editorial had inflamed. Hanson was no coward, and though he left Baltimore temporarily and came to Georgetown, he determined to return to the city and to resume the circulation of his journal. On July 27, 1812, he issued in Baltimore a paper which had been printed in Georgetown. Henry Lee had paid two visits to him after he had reached Baltimore, and when he observed the sensation created by the paper, Lee hastened to him again. He found the editor and a few friends assembled in a house that Hanson was using as a combined office and residence. Soon after Lee arrived, idlers in the street were swollen into a wrathful mob that threatened an assault. As an experienced soldier, Lee was asked to assist in protecting the premises. Firing soon broke out. One man was killed in the street and another was wounded. The mob would doubtless have attacked the building and would have slain the volunteer garrison then and there, had not the militia arrived and taken position in the street.

After a night of excitement, negotiations were opened between the troops and the friends of Hanson. Finally the occupants of the house submitted themselves to the officers of the law, who escorted them to jail as the safest place until passions cooled. After nightfall, a crowd of armed men gathered before the jail, intent on murder. An entrance was soon forced. Death seemed so certain that Lee proposed to his companions that they should take the few weapons they had and shoot one another rather than let themselves be torn to pieces by the mob. But better judgment prevailed, and when the door of the cell was beaten down, the defenders made a sally. Instantly there was a confused mêlée. When it was over, half of Hanson’s friends had escaped, but one had been killed and eleven frightfully beaten. Eight were thought to be dead and were piled together in front of the building, where they were subjected to continued mutilation. Henry Lee was among this number. Drunken brutes thrust penknives into his flesh, and waited to see whether there was a flicker when hot candle grease was poured into his eyes. One fiend tried to cut off his nose. After a while, some of the town physicians succeeded in carrying him to a hospital. His death was reported in Washington, but his great physical strength sufficed to keep him alive and made it possible for him to return home later in the summer. But he was weak, crippled, and disfigured, doomed to invalidism for the remaining six years of his life, wholly dependent on the income of his wife, and of course incapable of accepting the military command that would almost certainly have been given him when the first tide of the war in Canada turned against the United States.

Hope was dead now in the heart of Henry Lee. His one ambition was to leave the country, both for his health and for his peace of mind. President James Monroe arranged for Lee to go to the Barbadoes. So, one day in the early summer of 1813, Robert must have shed tears with the rest, as he shared the final embraces of his father. Behind him, in his own household, “Light-Horse Harry” left only sorrow. For he had never lost the respect, much less the affection, of his family. Fully conscious of his failings, they still were awed by his dignity and fascinated by his conversation. But Henry Lee could not have been greatly comforted, as he went down the Potomac, by the knowledge that he was still king of his fireside. He was sailing away from the state he had governed, from the creditors he could never pay, from a family he might not see again, and he knew he was passing over the gray horizon of failure.

The city that Henry Lee left behind him, the Alexandria of Robert Lee’s widening consciousness, was a pleasant place of 7500 people. Ties of blood or of common service joined the Lees to its society. Cousins uncounted lived in Alexandria. One of Henry Lee’s brothers, Edmund Jennings Lee, was a luminary of the town. Their sister Mary had married Philip R. Fendall, a local lawyer of much social charm. Out at Ravensworth, in Fairfax County, lived William H. Fitzhugh, distant kinsman but close friend, the broad door of whose ample home was always open to Mrs. Lee and her children.

Nothing else meant so much to the town as did its associations with George Washington. By the time Robert was old enough to understand something of the spirit of the Father of his Country, Washington had been twenty years in his tomb at Mount Vernon. But he was alive in the hearts of old Alexandrians. Reminders of him were everywhere. Washington was a part of the life of Robert Lee from earliest childhood. Doubtless his mother remembered the letter in which Washington had written Henry Lee his congratulations upon the marriage. Pride in the friendship of the first citizen of the country had been the consolation of “Light-Horse Harry’s” blackest days, and from his exile he was to write of “the great Washington” and repeat his old commander’s words for the admonition of his son, Charles Carter. The family held fast to this reverence.

In Robert’s young eyes the centre of Alexandria and of all its traditions was the home on Cameron Street. Over it presided his mother, charged for the rest of her days with the entire care of her five children, their finances, their religious training, and their education. Physically it overtaxed her, but spiritually she was equal to it. Ann Carter Lee was thirty-seven when they moved from Stratford, and forty when Henry Lee went to the West Indies. The contrast between the rich ease of her girlhood and the adversity of her married life was sharp. Yet it did not embitter her. She continued to love the author of her misfortune. And he, for all his distresses, kept his devotion to her and his high respect for her. But she had taken Henry’s tragedy to heart, and the reasons for his fall, and she was determined that his grim cycle of promise, overconfidence, recklessness, disaster, and ruin should not be rounded in the lives of her children. Self-denial, self-control, and the strictest economy in all financial matters were part of the code of honor she taught them from infancy. These qualities were inculcated in Robert so deeply that they became fundamentals of his character.

Although Robert lived among the Lees, the atmosphere of his home was that of the Carters. His mother corresponded with them, talked of them, and at least once a year endeavored to take her younger children on a visit to Shirley. It was a gracious place. Built early in the eighteenth century, it had been adorned by each generation of Hills and of Carters, as though they owed it a debt they were eager to discharge with generous interest.

Young Robert had a friendly multitude of close Carter cousins, for hundreds, literally, were descended from the twelve children of “King” Carter. The size and endogamy of the Carter tribe made it socially self-contained. Every true Carter liked everybody, but most of all he liked his kinspeople. Often and joyfully they visited one another. Of journeying and letter-writing and the exchange of family news, the years brought no end. It was at Shirley, amid the infectious laughter and the kindly chatter of his cousins, that the youthful Robert developed early the fondness for the company of his kin that was so marked in his maturity.

When Robert was seven the war that his father had opposed before his departure for the West Indies had been in progress nearly two years and the time had come for Robert to begin his formal education. His first books doubtless were opened to him by his mother. Later he was sufficiently advanced in the rudiments to be sent away to the family school. For the Carters were so numerous and so intimate that they maintained two schools for their children, one for girls at Shirley and one for boys at Eastern View, Fauquier County.

The life of the family changed somewhat during the years Robert probably was at Eastern View. For a time the finances of Mrs. Lee had been less strained. By 1816, and perhaps a little earlier, the family had moved from Cameron Street to a house on Washington Street at the corner of Princess. From this home, in 1816, the oldest of Ann Carter Lee’s children, Charles Carter Lee, started for Harvard. Not long after Carter left, the elder Henry Lee’s letters told of his plans to return home. He was determined to come back to his own state. But months passed, and no ship was available. Finally, Lee wrote that he would sail for Savannah, Ga., and would attempt to procure passage thence to Virginia. The next news was that Robert’s father had been stricken mortally on the voyage and had been put ashore at Dungeness, Cumberland Island, Ga., the property of the daughter of his old commander, General Greene. He had died there, March 25, 1818. The details of his passing were not known to the family until the next autumn. The death of Henry Lee meant financial relief for them, but it was not mourned the less on that account.

Although Robert was only eleven when his father died, responsibility was soon to fall heavily on his shoulders. His sister Ann continued sickly; Mrs. Lee was slipping into chronic invalidism. Carter returned from Cambridge in 1819 but opened his law office in Washington and was not much at home to aid in the management of the household. The next year President Monroe gave a midshipman’s commission to Smith, who went to sea. The duties of son and daughter fell on Robert.

Attendance upon his mother continued until Robert left Alexandria. More than anything else, perhaps, his filial attention to her was the prime obligation of his youth, pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter I: The Education of a Cadet
• Chapter II: Lee Prepares for the War with Mexico
• Chapter III: Twenty Months in Mexico
• Chapter IV: From West Point to Texas and Secession
• Chapter V: The First Campaign
• Chapter VI: Lee Wins the Command
• Chapter VII: The Seven Days
• Chapter VIII: Second Manassas and Sharpsburg
• Chapter IX: Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville
• Chapter X: Gettysburg
• Chapter XI: The Spectre of Want and Disaster
• Chapter XII: The Wilderness
• Chapter XIII: The Twilight of the Confederacy
• Chapter XIV: Surrender? Not Yet
• Chapter XV: Appomattox
• Chapter XVI: The Call to Lexington
• Chapter XVII: The Beginning of the End
• Chapter XVIII: Strike the Tent
• Photograph
• Index
• Copyright