AS USUAL Robert Lee went alone to his new post, a solitary advance party for Mary Lee and the children. He had visited West Point during those twenty-three years since his graduation in 1829—as a member of the Board of Visitors in 1844 and as an unofficial visitor on other occasions, one of them as recent as April 1851. Now in August of 1852 Lee returned with reluctance to be the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy.
At West Point everything and nothing had changed. None of the principal buildings Lee had known as a cadet still stood. North and South Barracks were gone, and a new cadet barracks stood in their place. The messhall and the Academy (classroom) building were new. A cadet hospital, built since Lee’s time, was old enough to be inadequate. A library and observatory facility, the band barracks, the chapel, and an artillery and ordnance laboratory building all dated from the period since 1829, and only two members of the faculty who had taught at West Point when Lee was a cadet were still teaching there in 1852.1
Of course the plain, the Hudson River, and the beauty of the place remained. Although he had left the Academy in 1833, Sylvanus Thayer still lived in spirit there in 1852. Thayer’s Academic Board, composed of department heads and the Commandant of Cadets, still governed the Academy and tended to be self-perpetuating. Thayer-minded men selected other Thayer-minded men to replace Thayer-minded men. Consequently Thayer’s curriculum, recitations, reports, regimen, and discipline continued with little important alterations at the Point.
An Academy mystique sustained the status quo. Cadets at best endured the Academy for four years. Then on that June day when they became graduates, they underwent a mystical transformation: They loved West Point. Graduates had bonded with one another and prevailed. Now they insisted that future generations of young men should have the same opportunity to suffer and survive that they had experienced. And Academy graduates were often in positions to ensure that little or nothing changed at West Point.2
Superintendent Lee had little chance to make much impact upon the place. The case of the cadet dress cap is a good example of the resistance to innovation at West Point. Cadets and common sense had objected to the cap for decades; Lee attempted to change the design. “The present Cadet uniform dress cap is heavy, harsh & uncomfortable to the head,” he wrote. “The black patent leather crown, when exposed to the hot sun in summer is particularly objectionable, causing headache, dizziness, etc.” Lee proposed a slightly different design that was lighter, cooler, and better fitting. He even went so far as to secure estimates from hatmakers in New York and arrange to have a model prepared. However, these efforts accomplished nothing; the traditional cap continued in use during Lee’s time.3
One major change did occur at West Point during Lee’s tenure as Superintendent. In response to continued recommendations from the Board of Visitors, the curriculum prescribed a five-year instead of four-year course. Lee, however, had little to do with the alteration beyond preparations to implement the five-year curriculum.4
Otherwise, Lee did manage to implement a revised disciplinary system which prescribed dismissal for any cadet who acquired 100 or more demerits within a six-month period. The old system (Thayer’s), which set the limit at 200 for an entire year, remained in effect. But Lee contended that in practice that system encouraged cadets to make mischief and ignore regulations until such time as their demerit total neared the 200 mark. Only then did those in jeopardy make concerted efforts to adhere to disciplinary standards. The six-month standard, Lee asserted, would compel cadets to observe the regulations with greater care and consistency.5
Lee carried on the tradition among superintendents of requesting funds for physical improvements at the Academy. He asked for a new riding hall, new stables, an addition to the hospital, more officers and faculty quarters, and a gasworks to light the barracks. He presided over a revised edition of the regulations for the Academy that clarified and codified the wisdom of the Academy Board. And he fought the good fight against political interference with the systems of academic and disciplinary dismissal. Lee lost this fight while Charles M. Conrad, who was Secretary of War to March 1853, insisted upon reinstating young men possessed of influential families. However, Jefferson Davis succeeded Conrad and rather vigorously upheld decisions of the Academic Board.6
Regulations and tradition made the Superintendent of the Military Academy directly responsible for many of the routine operations at West Point and all of the extraordinary incidents in the lives of about 50 members of the academic and military staff and roughly 250 adolescent and post-adolescent males in the corps of cadets. To illustrate Lee’s duties and vexations at West Point, consider the career of Cadet James McNeill Whistler, the son of George Washington Whistler, an Academy graduate and career officer who died in Russia in 1849. Young Jimmy secured an appointment to West Point and enrolled in July 1851. Jimmy’s mother Anna was living in Scarsdale, Westchester County, and within a month of assuming his duties at West Point, Lee had to respond to her request for a leave for her son to bid her goodbye on the eve of a trip to Europe. Lee agreed, but for a shorter leave than Anna Whistler had requested. Before he wrote to her, however, Lee consulted Whistler’s professors and the schedules of the boats and trains on which the young man would travel. And Whistler’s mother was not the only parent who requested some indulgence.7
By year’s end Whistler had collected 116 demerits, more than the number mandating his dismissal. However, Lee and the Commandant of Cadets had the discretionary authority to examine demerit records and excuse some infractions if the cadet’s general conduct and potential justified the mercy. Lee exercised his authority, expunged 39 demerits, and salvaged the young man’s career for the moment.8
The following spring (1853) Whistler became seriously ill, and Lee wrote again to Anna Whistler informing her that her son was not responding to treatment in the cadet hospital. Medical leave and a summer of convalescence restored the young man, and on August 31, Lee informed Anna Whistler that her son had that day appeared before the Academic Board and passed the examination he had missed the previous June. He stood thirty-second in his class, but first in drawing, at the time.9
During Whistler’s second class (third) year, Lee had to write a letter to Engineer Chief Joseph Totten urging a favorable response to Whistler’s request for permission to receive “some articles of underclothing” from his mother. So responsible was the Superintendent for everything that happened at West Point that a colonel and a general had to correspond about Whistler’s underwear.10
But that June (1854) Whistler was principal in what was probably the shortest examination in the history of West Point. Second Lieutenant Caleb Huse commenced Whistler’s chemistry examination by asking the cadet to discuss silicon. “I am required to discuss the subject of silicon,” Whistler responded. “Silicon is a gas.” “That will do, Mr. Whistler,” interrupted Huse. In thirteen words Whistler failed chemistry and flunked out at West Point. Much later Whistler insisted, “Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major general.”11
Superintendent Lee then had to do what he termed “the most unpleasant office I am called on to perform—the discharge of those cadets found deficient at the examination.” Whistler and eight other unfortunates climbed into an omnibus wagon bound for the dock and the afternoon boat to New York on June 29, 1854.
Whistler himself did not return to the Point, but his petition to take another examination in chemistry was on Lee’s desk within a week. So Lee had to review once more Whistler’s record in chemistry and conduct. Having done so, Lee could find reason neither to reexamine Whistler in chemistry nor to excuse enough of his demerits to prevent Whistler’s mandatory dismissal. “I can only regret,” Lee concluded, “that one so capable of doing well should so have neglected himself & must now suffer the penalty.” So instead of becoming a major general, Jimmy Whistler became an artist and immortalized his mother Anna in the portrait entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black.12
Of course all cadets were not as troublesome as Whistler. Indeed, one of the unfortunate circumstances associated with being Superintendent was the large amount of time and energy expended on the relatively few young men who were often in academic or disciplinary difficulty. Lee seldom had time for cadets who studied diligently and accommodated regulations; he interacted most with those most in trouble. Consequently Lee or anyone in his position might easily fall into a skewed perception of cadets in particular and the human condition in general.
Lee’s involvement in Cadet Whistler’s case and his active intervention in Whistler’s demerit record were typical. He fretted about discipline and seemed to worry about each miscreant. Lee held an office hour each day from 7:00 to 8:00 A.M. for cadets. He listened then to excuses and concerns from the young men, and he summoned to listen to him those cadets whose records indicated a need for reform.
Most likely Lee’s most difficult disciplinary situations involved his nephew Fitzhugh Lee, Smith’s son. Young Fitz—along with others—on December 16, 1853, was careless enough to be captured returning to West Point at 5:00 A.M. Fitz Lee’s companions were in civilian clothes and in possession of liquor. Even though Fitz was in uniform and had no liquor in his possession when apprehended, he was in grave danger of dismissal. His classmates came to his rescue, however, and unanimously took a pledge not to commit the same offense (absent without leave). Superintendent Lee wrote Secretary of War Davis, “I believe experience has shown the happiest results from these specific pledges and I therefore recommend it to your favorable consideration.” In this case Davis refused to accept the pledge and ordered a court-martial, which imposed severe punishment short of dismissal upon Fitz Lee.
Nephew Fitz had to forego his furlough the following summer and remain at West Point. He had 197 demerits on his record in July 1854 when he was again caught attempting to sneak back into camp at 2:30 A.M. Yet again Fitz’s classmates took the pledge not to attempt unauthorized leave (for the next academic year). Again Superintendent Lee wrote Secretary of War Davis and recommended mercy. This time Davis accepted Lee’s recommendation, and Fitz Lee went free. He graduated ranked forty-fifth in a class of forty-nine in 1856. By then his uncle was half a continent away from West Point.13
Lee adopted the West Point regimen to the point of imposing Academy standards upon his ten-year-old son Rob in the Superintendent’s quarters. Rob had his own room and his father taught him how to maintain it as though it were in the barracks. “He at first even went through the form of inspecting it,” Rob recalled, “… I think I enjoyed this until the novelty wore off.”
One day as Lee and his youngest son were taking their customary afternoon ride, Rob remembered, “We came suddenly upon three cadets far beyond the limits. They immediately leaped over a low wall on the side of the road and disappeared from our view. We rode on for a minute in silence; then my father said: Did you know those young men? But no; if you did, don’t say so. I wish boys would do what is right; it would be so much easier for all parties!” Lee adhered to the traditional standards and rules at West Point; but his heart did not seem to support the code.14
Some of Lee’s ambivalence about military discipline surfaced in a letter he wrote to Markie just over a year after he began his duties at West Point. Markie had asked his advice about the best school for her younger brother Orton. Lee mentioned a number of institutions—one in Sing Sing, St. James’s College in Maryland, Virginia Military Institute, William & Mary, and what became Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Then he introduced the relative merits of a school in the country versus a school in a city and implied that the former offered fewer temptations. “Young men must not expect to escape contact with evil,” Lee counseled, “but must learn not to be contaminated by it. That virtue is worth but little that requires constant watching & removal from temptation.” As Lee wrote this, he was quite well aware that “constant watching” and “removal from temptation” were hallmarks of the West Point system.15
Although he was not known for his insight, Jefferson Davis displayed rare understanding when he later wrote of Lee that he “was surprised to see so many gray hairs on his head, he confessed that the cadets did exceeding worry him, and then it was perceptible that his sympathy with young people was rather an impediment than a qualification for the superintendency.” Lee would likely have agreed with Davis’s observation. He once wrote about discipline at the Academy: “Cadets can neither be treated as school boys or soldiers.” At West Point Lee confronted an institutional response to his personal quest for the balance between control and freedom.16
Like all American military installations, West Point belonged to the citizens of the United States. Especially did graduates of the Academy feel their ownership. Prominent public servants and Army officers of high rank expected special welcome at the Point. Army commander Winfield Scott certainly adopted West Point as his own, even though he never attended the Academy.
As Superintendent Lee felt an obligation to entertain cadets, and opened his quarters to Custis, his friends, and other invitees every Saturday afternoon. Agnes Lee recorded in her journal, “We also arrange for cadet suppers every Sat. evening, they to be sure need not be very exquisite but must be just right for Papa’s scrutinizing eye.” And Lee gave “he dinners,” as he called them, for officers and faculty.17
In addition to the entertaining he wanted to do, Lee was liable for all sorts of official social functions as Superintendent. He explained one such obligation in the course of a letter to his cousin Anna Fitzhugh. “I must now go home to receive Profr Mitchell … just returned from Europe & who [is] calling on me this morg in the midst of my papers. I had to ask him to dine with us, though I knew it would not be convenient…. But, the Prof rs ideas are so elevated that I hope his thoughts will rise above our frugal table.”18
Another intrusion claimed Lee’s attention in the midst of a letter to Markie. He returned to the letter and explained:
I have been interrupted by the arrival of GenI Scott, who with his son in law & daughter, Mr. & Mrs. Hoyt & some friends called upon the Supt. He has had therefore to conduct them into the library, order a salute in honour of the Commg GenI shew them around the Academies, & conduct them in presence of the Battery, which has just belched forth its thunder. The GenI has now gone to my quarters under Major Porter’s escort, to repose till dinner, when I shall again have the pleasure of his company, & the gentlemen of his suite, with such of our natives as I can collect to do them honour. As my servants have recd but short notice for their preparation for dinner, I fear the Gen1 will again have an opportunity of taking, if not hasty, at least a thin plate of soup, & but for an Arlington ham & some of my Shanghai chickens, which I had purposed for my solitary dinner, I should be in doubt whether their hunger could be appeased, as ten additional guests will have to be provided for. But having given all the required directions, I will wait with patience & hope for their execution.19
At least Lee’s liability for instant dinner parties took no toll upon his wry sense of humor.
Lee had been at West Point eighteen months when he remarked in a letter to cousin Anna Fitzhugh that the plain was still “hard frozen” in April and despite the date, “we are apparently in the midst of winter.” Then he added, “The climate is as harsh to me as my duties & neither brings any pleasure.”20
Yet Lee did derive some benefit from his tenure at West Point, whether or not he understood or acknowledged it at the time. The Scott connection continued, for example. However thin the soup Lee served Scott, the Superintendent remained in Scott’s favor and became indeed his protégé.
Lee also had the benefit of working with the Academic Board at West Point. The board and its powerful role in the life of the Academy rendered Lee unable to work any major changes. But the Academic Board also made the difficult decisions, so Lee did not have to. During Lee’s term and for most of the period before the Civil War, three men dominated the Academic Board: mathematics professor Albert E. Church; physical scientist William H. C. Bartlett; and military scientist Dennis Hart Mahan. Church and Bartlett were assistant professors when Lee was a cadet; Mahan had returned to West Point for good the year after Lee’s graduation. Lee apparently never challenged this trinity and may have learned some professional lessons from Mahan.21
Lee tended to read French military histories, treatises, and manuals, and to study the campaigns of Napoleon as interpreted by Baron Henri Jomini and then reinterpreted by Napoleon himself. The Superintendent made good use of the Academy library, and his contact with the faculty and various visitors broadened his professional vision. At some point Lee must have confronted Mahan and his military wisdom. Among other ideas, Mahan insisted that field fortifications (trenches) were vital to “modern” warfare. Later in life Lee demonstrated affinity with such an emphasis—an understanding that may have begun at the Point.22
While at West Point, Lee also increased his personal wealth substantially. He purchased more bonds from the states of Virginia and Missouri, the cities of Pittsburgh and St. Louis, the New York & Erie and the Hudson River Railroads. These bonds paid 6 and 7 percent, and with his other investments in bank stock, canal bonds and stock, railroad bonds, and state bonds, raised the value of Lee’s invested capital to $64,500 by the spring of 1855. (Nine years earlier, in 1846, Lee’s invested capital totaled $38,750.) On a base military salary of $2,628 per year, Colonel Lee was becoming a rich man.23
However harsh Lee’s duties at West Point seemed to him, as Superintendent he had the advantage of maintaining contact with Scott, of interacting with some strong minds and at least one bright mind among the faculty, of having a second portrait of himself painted by Robert W. Weir, and of increasing his personal wealth. He enjoyed regular visits from Custis while he was a cadet and saw his son finish first in his class in 1854. Like his father, Custis joined the Engineer Corps, and like his father went first to work on the southeastern coast, roughly 100 miles south of Savannah on Amelia Island, in extreme northern Florida.24
Some time during the fall of 1852 Mary Lee journeyed up from Arlington to join her husband in the Superintendent’s quarters. She brought her two youngest children, Rob and Mildred, with her. Mary and Rooney came too, but then went off to schools—Rooney in New York City, Mary to Pelham Priory in Westchester County. Annie and Agnes remained at Arlington with the Custises and their governess/teacher Susan Poor. So at West Point that fall and winter were Mary Lee, Robert Lee, Rob, Mildred, and Cadet Custis.25
The following spring (1853) tragedy struck the dispersed family: Mary Custis died suddenly in April. In poor health of late, she complained of a headache one day, saw a doctor the next, but appeared in no danger. The following day, April 23, the doctor returned and pronounced her dying. Mary Lee received a telegram with the sad news and left West Point immediately for Arlington. Meanwhile, Mary Custis could only worry about her daughter’s reaction to her own impending death—” ‘how terribly she will be shocked when she hears this.’” Mary Lee arrived in time to attend her mother’s funeral on April 27.26
Robert Lee was deeply grieved. On the day of his mother-in-law’s burial he wrote to his wife, “The more I think of our irreparable loss the greater is my grief. But it is for you, your poor father, for myself, the children, relatives, friends, & servants I grieve. Not for her. She has gone from all trouble, Care & Sorrow to a happy immortality.” Lee could not leave his duties at West Point, but he tried to comfort and counsel his wife in writing, if not in person. He reported receiving a letter from daughter Mary “full of attachment for her Grn mother & penitence for the pain & sorrow she had occasioned her.” Rooney also wrote—”He is a dear affectionate boy. Full of good impulses & kind wishes. We must not expect him to be exempt from the thoughtlessness & love of pleasure peculiar to youth.” Custis, too, tried to comfort his father—”His feelings are deep & do not show on the surface.”27
At Arlington, Parke Custis was still distraught, only able to leave his house for a drive in his carriage in early June. Mary Lee cared for her father, and Robert Lee took care of Rob and Mildred. He went to New York City and purchased mourning clothes for the children and also made the transition from winter carpeting to summer straw matting on the floors in the Superintendent’s quarters. He urged his wife to organize everyone at Arlington and bring them to West Point. However, his father-in-law protested that he was not yet well enough for the trip. So Robert Lee went instead to Arlington with Rob and Mildred in mid-July. Custis had to remain at the Academy that summer; Mary and Rooney joined their family a few days after their father and youngest siblings arrived.28
On July 17, the first Sunday after the Lees (minus Custis) were reunited at Arlington, the family attended Christ Church, Alexandria. The Right Reverend John Johns, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, was present and preached a sermon. Then Robert Lee and two of his daughters, Mary and Anne, presented themselves for confirmation. In a brief service Bishop Johns laid his hands upon their heads and prayed over them.
After learning his catechism at his mother’s knee before he could read; after attending the Episcopal Church quite regularly and serving on the vestry of St. John’s Church, Brooklyn; after speaking and writing for many years the rhetoric of evangelical Protestants and Low Church Anglicans, at age forty-six Lee finally, formally joined the church. Why did he wait so long?29
Lee was the product of strong religious impulses within his family and community. He revered the church, at least the Protestant Church, and appropriated its language and the essentials of its doctrine. But Lee was a very private person, and his religious response was private as well. He avoided sectarian exclusivity and believed expansively. Lee did proper things and said correct words; but his piety was practical, grounded in this world, however much he intoned or wrote his litany about dead souls rising to joy in heaven.
Lee certainly believed in sin. Had the church not taught the doctrine of original sin, Lee would have invented it. The human condition was flawed, he believed, and the fatal flaw was absorption with self. Conversely Lee believed that “the great duty of life” is “the promotion of the happiness & welfare of our fellow men.” Good Christians, Lee believed, attempted to make selflessness a habit and eventually an instinctive response to any situation. But even the best Christians failed in this effort because of the evil inherent in human beings. So God resolved this dilemma with His grace and forgiveness.
Although Lee couched his beliefs in evangelical rhetoric, he believed beyond evangelicalism. Lee’s response to God was selflessness, self-control, and service to others. God’s response to Lee was freedom.30
Lee’s religious life underwent no significant change following his confirmation. He presented himself to Bishop Johns to acknowledge his relation to the church. He probably also wanted to support his daughters’ conviction, and he wanted to honor his mother-in-law’s piety.
Back at West Point he still appeared dressed and ready to walk to chapel with his family. Mary Lee was often late. Rob remembered, “When he could wait no longer for her, he would say that he was off and would march along to church by himself, or with any of the children who were ready.” Inside the chapel Lee sat near the front and center—and dozed through the sermon. The preacher and chaplain at the Academy was William T. Sprole, a Presbyterian, who, according to Agnes, was “a little hard on the cadets & too pointed in his remarks.” Perhaps for these reasons Lee quite often took his family to Holy Innocents, which according to Agnes was “a little episcopal chapel—very pretty but a little too much like a catholic one, about a mile & a half from West Point property.” Drawing Professor Robert Weir designed the building and sold paintings to finance its construction. When Lee the Superintendent went the extra mile to attend Holy Innocents, he made a clear statement about sermons that were “a little hard on cadets.”31
When the Lees had returned to West Point in August 1853, they took Parke Custis with them. He enjoyed himself, went to Niagara Falls with his son-in-law, and returned to Arlington in the fall. The following summer, 1854, the Lees returned to Arlington for a relatively short visit there.
During the next academic year (1854—55) Congress stirred in response to the responsibility of the Army for protection of white settlers on the western frontier. In March, Congress authorized four new regiments (two infantry and two cavalry), and very soon after that Secretary of War Davis announced that Colonel Lee would be second in command of one of the cavalry regiments.52
After more than a quarter century in the Engineer Corps, Lee was going to join a combat arm of the United States Army. He was going to command troops instead of advise commanders. This was a major shift in his career.
Lee wrote and said lots of words to rationalize the transition to himself and others. But certainly since his experience in Mexico, Lee had been preparing himself for this change of course. One index of the direction he was taking was his record at the West Point library. Lee believed in purposeful reading; moreover, he had trouble with his eyes during his period at the Point so he probably read more purposefully than ever. He checked out books about and by Napoleon, not engineering tomes. Lee aspired to command and had been thinking of battles instead of battlements for some time.33
To Markie, his confidante, Lee lamented his separation from his family. “The change from my present confined & sedentary life, to one more free & active, will certainly be more agreeable to my feelings & serviceable to my health,” he admitted, and added, “You know Markie how painful it will be to part from you.”34
On March 31, 1855, Lee ceased to be Superintendent at West Point; but he and his family lingered into April, packing or selling belongings and saying goodbyes. On April 9, the Monday after Easter, they all left together in a downpour and started south for Arlington.35
In spite of his misgivings, Lee had had a successful tour of duty at West Point. In June 1854 the Board of Visitors reported Lee’s “eminent qualifications,” and asserted that his feats of heroism in Mexico “have lost none of their lustre in the exalted position he so worthily fills.”‘6
The Board of Visitors in 1853 included in its report a paean for the cadets: “No men living are required to be more industrious. It is the crowning excellence of the institution that arrangements are made by which all their time is suitably employed. They, while here, have no time to contract vicious habits.” Lee, however, was somewhat more skeptical. He once commented perceptively to a friend that “Cadets deceive themselves sometimes by thinking they study, when in reality they do not, & are satisfied by reading over or devoting a reasonable time with their lessons. You know the difference between that & understanding….”37