Robert E. Lee

American military leader

• Born: January 19, 1807
• Birthplace: Stratford Hall, Westmoreland County, Virginia
• Died: October 12, 1870
• Place of death: Lexington, Virginia

Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War..

Early Life

One of the famous Lees of Virginia and fifth of seven children, Robert Edward Lee was born at the family estate of Stratford. His father, Colonel Henry “Light Horse” Harry Lee, had served with distinction as a cavalryman in the Revolutionary War and later as governor of Virginia, although he was financially insecure. His mother, Anne Hill Carter Lee, belonged to another aristocratic Virginia family. The family moved to Alexandria in Robert’s fourth year, and he attended the local schools there. Because of the long absences and then the death of his father, Robert gradually took over the major care of his invalid mother.

Desiring to emulate his father and to obtain a free education, Lee attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was graduated second in a class of forty-six in 1829. Entering the engineer corps, he built and maintained coastal fortifications and river works. In June 1831, he married his childhood friend Mary Anne Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of the wife of George Washington, at the opulent Custis estate at Arlington. Their marriage strengthened Lee’s deep roots in his native state, though he resisted the temptation to settle down to the life of a country squire at Arlington, which he managed even while posted elsewhere, and where his seven children were reared. He performed the mundane tasks of a peacetime army engineer and held the rank of captain at the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846.

Life’s Work

Lee’s tenure as a field officer emerged during the Mexican War and placed him in the public eye. He received the brevet rank of major for his performance as a staff officer in the early campaigns, after which he transferred to the staff of General Winfield Scott for the major invasion of central Mexico. Lee contributed materially to the capture of Veracruz in April, 1847; through his placing artillery and reconnoitering in several battles, he was promoted to brevet lieutenant colonel. After the attack on Chapultepec, in which he was wounded, he became brevet colonel.

Soon, however, Lee returned to routine duties, constructing fortifications near Baltimore and then, between 1852 and 1855, improving the course of study at West Point as superintendent. His reward was a transfer out of engineering to the Second Cavalry Regiment, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In July 1857, he assumed the colonelcy of the regiment. Home on leave during the fall of 1859, Lee was ordered to subdue John Brown’s force, which had occupied the armory at Harpers Ferry (then part of Virginia) in Brown’s attempt to incite an uprising of enslaved people in the South. After accomplishing the task, Lee returned to his regiment and, in 1860, assumed command of the Department of Texas.

Lee returned to Washington upon the secession of Texas from the Union in February 1861. The next month, he was made colonel of the First Cavalry. By any measure the most able officer in the army, he was the logical choice to command the forces necessary to subdue the southern rebellion, a command offered him by the Lincoln administration upon the outbreak of the Civil War in mid-April 1861. Following the secession of Virginia, however, Lee decided that his loyalty rested with his home state, whereupon he resigned his commission on April 23. He was given command of the Virginia militia and was soon appointed brigadier general in the new Confederate Army.

Promoted to the full rank of general during the summer, one of five initially appointed, Lee first advised President Jefferson Davis in organizing the Confederate Army. He took command of the forces attempting to hold West Virginia in the Confederacy in August but was soundly defeated the next month at Cheat Mountain. Early in November, he assumed command of the coastal defenses of South Carolina, Georgia, and eastern Florida. Shortages of troops there led him to establish a strong defense against potential Union naval and amphibious penetrations. His strategy was faulty, however, because the Union had no intention of invading the interior in that quarter and instead attacked and successfully occupied key coastal positions merely for use as blockading stations for the navy.

Lee was recalled early in March 1862 to help Davis organize the defenses of Richmond against the advance of General George B. McClellan’s army in the Peninsular Campaign. When the commander of the defending army, General Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded at Fair Oaks, Lee was given command on June 1, and he quickly reorganized his forces into the Army of Northern Virginia, a name he created. He countered McClellan’s forces in the Seven Days’ Battles, concluded on July 1, then swung north to defeat the army of General John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August. Crossing the Potomac, Lee attempted to gain the support of Marylanders but was stopped by McClellan in the Antietam campaign in September. He concluded the year by repulsing the bloody Union assaults on his army at Fredericksburg in December.

Lee’s tactics lay in erecting field fortifications and in his ability to operate from the interior position—that is, to shift his forces between different points in his lines that were threatened by the larger numbers of the opposing Union armies. This tactic was best demonstrated in his victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, when his army was half the size of that of the enemy. His greatest gamble occurred when he invaded Pennsylvania a month later. Frustrated from trying to turn the Union flanks at Gettysburg in July, he tried a frontal assault—“Pickett’s charge”—that was virtually annihilated by the Army of the Potomac under General George G. Meade. As a result of this defeat, Lee was thereafter confined to the strategic defensive.

Lee fought a steadily losing battle against the vastly greater numbers and better-equipped troops of General Ulysses S. Grant’s armies in the Wilderness Campaign during the spring of 1864. Lee’s men stopped every bloody assault, but Lee was obliged to retreat each time, lest the larger Union forces turn his flank and cut him off from Richmond. As a result, Lee withdrew into the defenses of that city and adjacent Petersburg, to withstand what turned out to be a nine-month-long siege. Near its end, in February 1865, he was finally made general in chief of all Confederate armies. He placed Johnston in command of the only other remaining major army, in the Carolinas; then, in April, he attempted to escape a fresh Union offensive at Petersburg to link up with Johnston. Grant cut him off at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, where Lee surrendered on April 9, effectively ending the Civil War. His three sons were with him, two of them major generals, one a captain.

Having lost his home at Arlington, which became the national cemetery, Lee assumed the presidency of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia, in October 1865. Following his death in 1870, the college was renamed Washington and Lee in his honor.

Significance

In terms of military tacticians, Robert E. Lee became a legend in his own time. His achievements on the field of battle established him as one of the greatest army commanders in history. Not merely an inspiring leader, he made correct, informed judgments about his enemy, then struck decisively. As a theater strategist, he became a master of the mobile feint, thanks largely to several able lieutenants. Stonewall Jackson’s fast-moving so-called foot cavalry thrust into the Shenandoah Valley to draw away troops from McClellan during the Peninsular Campaign. J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry dominated the Union armies in every campaign. However, both these commanders were killed, in 1863 and 1864, respectively. At the same time, in grand strategy Lee was not adept, having misjudged Union intentions along the south Atlantic coast early in the war and never having the authority to mastermind Confederate fortunes until near the end of the struggle. He did not attempt to influence Davis beyond the Virginia theater.

By the early twenty-first century, Lee, like other figures symbolic of the Civil War and the Confederacy and their ties to slavery, White supremacist ideology, and the oppression of people of color, had become an increasingly controversial figure as activists had continued to call for racial justice and equality in the United States. This movement had seen publicly displayed statues, flags, and monuments throughout Southern states criticized as offensive to communities of color, particularly Black Americans. In September 2021, the large statue of Lee that had stood in Richmond, Virginia, since 1890 was removed; other Confederate monuments that had been erected in the city that had once served as the Confederacy's capital had previously been removed.

Bibliography

Blount, Roy, Jr. Robert E. Lee: A Penguin Life. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2003.

Connelly, Thomas L. The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Dowdey, Clifford. Lee. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965.

Fellman, Michael. The Making of Robert E. Lee. New York: Random House, 2000.

Flood, Charles Bracelen. Lee: The Last Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Freeman, Douglas Southall. R. E. Lee. 4 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934-1935.

Johnson, Robert Underwood, and Clarence Clough Buel, eds. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. 4 vols. New York: Century, 1887.

Lee, Robert E. Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee by His Son Capt. Robert E. Lee. 2d ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924.

Lee, Robert E. The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee. Edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis Manarin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.

Sanborn, Margaret. Robert E. Lee. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966-1967.

Tavernise, Sabrina. "Virginia Removes Robert E. Lee Statue from State Capital." The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/us/robert-e-lee-statue-virginia.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2021.

Thomas, Emory M. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.