ROBERT LEE WAS A PRESENCE. What he did and was far surpassed anything he ever wrote or said. Eloquence was not foremost among Lee’s many attributes. He made very few speeches during his life, and nearly forty years of military service reduced his formal prose to passive voice and professional cliché. So Lee entrusted the composition of his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, General Orders No. 9, to Charles Marshall of his staff.
The words were Marshall’s; but the sentiments belonged to Lee, and the message was simple and direct.
After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.
I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them.
But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.
By the terms of the agreement officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection.
With our increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous considerations for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.1
Such was Lee’s closure with his army.
Little else remained to do. Lee and the members of his staff secured their paroles as prisoners of war, and Lee designated officers to execute the surrender of his army. Visitors came and went about the headquarters, and subordinates submitted their reports of the army’s final campaign.2
One of the last tasks Lee completed before leaving Appomattox was his report to Jefferson Davis. Lee waited three days to write to Davis and promised a detailed report later. The letter Lee wrote on April 12, however, was pretty complete, and in it Lee took pains to justify his decision to surrender the army:
… The enemy was more than five times our numbers. If we could have forced our way one day longer it would have been at a great sacrifice of life; at its end, I did not see how a surrender could have been avoided. We had no subsistence for man or horse, and it could not be gathered in the country … the men deprived of food and sleep for many days, were worn out and exhausted.3
When Lee did write again to Davis on April 20, he offered less details, but a broader view of the war and the Confederacy. “A partisan war may be continued,” he wrote, “and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence…. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.” Lee accepted the verdict of arms; he knew the war and the cause were lost. Davis never seemed to come to terms with such realities.4
Lee remained at Appomattox as long as his soldiers did; he was in the vicinity when the survivors stacked their arms in what became a moving ceremony celebrated in Joshua L. Chamberlain’s Passing of the Armies; but Lee did not witness the event.
Then it became time to do something else, so some time on April 12 Lee commenced the journey back to his family in Richmond. Walter Taylor, Charles Marshall, and Charles S. Venable rode with Lee, and they retained the headquarters wagon and the ambulance in which Lee had sometimes ridden when ill or afflicted with “rheumatism.” Giles Cooke, another member of the staff, was sick and so rode in the ambulance until he left Lee and headed home. The “trustworthy Burt” drove the ambulance, and “Bryan” Lynch still served as mess steward and prepared food for the company. Venable soon parted to return to his family in nearby Prince Edward County. But other Confederate veterans joined and left Lee’s party over the 100-plus miles between Appomattox Court House and Richmond.
On the third night of the journey, Lee reached his brother Carter Lee’s farm in Powhatan County, but slept (for the final time) in his tent, because Carter’s house was crowded. During the morning of April 15, Rooney Lee overtook his father and the procession increased to twenty horses.
Lee entered Richmond from the south in the midst of a strong April shower and passed at once into the portion of the city most thoroughly burned in the evacuation fire on April 2. Some citizens saw the horsemen, and word spread that Lee had come home from the war. Lee tipped his hat to those who greeted him but rode the most direct route to 707 East Franklin Street and the house in which his wife and family had lived for just over fifteen months. When he arrived, he dismounted Traveller, gave the reins to someone else, bowed to the bystanders, went inside, and shut the door.5
In the beginning he slept a lot, and left his house very little. His wife and two of his daughters were there; Custis had arrived in Richmond before his father; and Rooney, too, remained in the city with the family. Rob was missing. He had learned of the surrender and gone to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Davis and the government had paused in their flight. Rob then decided to follow the family example, surrender, and secure his parole. So he reached Richmond about two weeks after his father arrived.6
In Richmond many people wanted to see Lee. Matthew Brady took his picture; Thomas M. Cook of the New York Herald interviewed him; and an Irish veteran of Lee’s command of the Second U.S. Cavalry tried to kiss him. Very soon Lee’s family established a roster of doorkeepers to screen visitors and protect Lee from his fame. When he wanted exercise, Lee had to take walks at night to avoid presumptuous people. This shy man for whom social contact with people he did not know well required significant effort had not been in Richmond long at all when he resolved to leave the occupied Confederate capital as soon as he was able.
Lee’s landlord John Stewart informed him that he owed no rent for as long as he wanted to remain, and if Lee insisted upon paying rent, Stewart insisted upon taking payment in Confederate currency, as such were the terms of the original contract with Custis Lee.
Lee had never owned his home during thirty-three years of married life. He had depended upon Mary Lee’s life interest in Arlington to provide a more or less permanent place for his family. But now Arlington was gone—rendered uninhabitable by the many graves of Federal solders that covered the land. Lee harkened back to a familiar refrain: he only wanted “some little quiet home in the woods, where I can procure shelter and my daily bread, if permitted by the victor. I wish to get Mrs. Lee out of the city as soon as practical.”7
Lee could expect to salvage some money from his investments prior to the war. And some of the Custis properties still belonged to his sons Rooney and Rob, or so Lee believed, so perhaps this was his chance to do what he had many times said he wanted to do—buy some land, build a small home, and become a humble farmer.8
But complications threatened Lee’s bucolic fantasy. As Lee should have known, civil wars often end in acrimony and executions. At Appomattox, Lee could believe he had surrendered himself and his army on favorable terms and thus concluded his quarrel with the United States. Grant shared with Lee the hope that North and South would resume “business as usual,” and a United States would revert to status quo ante bellum. But for four years Lee had been a rebel, and during three of those four years he had established himself as the most troublesome rebel the United States ever confronted. As long as the war continued, Lee was a paroled prisoner of war. When the war ended, though, Lee could no longer be a prisoner of war; no one can be a prisoner of a war that does not exist. What would become of Lee when his parole no longer protected him?
Early on the morning of the day Lee rode into Richmond (April 15), Abraham Lincoln died of a gunshot wound in his brain inflicted by John Wilkes Booth in the cause of Southern vengeance. Lincoln was suddenly a martyr, and understandable hysteria swept through the North. If in the flush of impending victory anyone had forgotten that treason was a serious matter, Booth certainly recalled attention to the issue. At the very least some hangings seemed in order. And the most logical candidates for execution were the most prominent traitors. After Jefferson Davis, surely Robert E. Lee was a very likely candidate.
On May 10, Federal cavalrymen captured Davis in flight near Irwinville, Georgia. Davis then was deposited in a cell at Fort Monroe, Virginia, while the United States decided what to do with him.9
What did this portend for Lee? On June 7, a Federal jury in Norfolk, Virginia, indicted Lee for treason. But Lee clung to the belief that his parole protected him and in effect absolved him from such proceedings. On June 13, Lee stated his case to Grant: “I had supposed that the officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia were, by the terms of the surrender, protected by the United States Government from molestation so long as they conformed to its conditions.” Lee included in his letter to Grant his application to President Andrew Johnson for amnesty and pardon that Johnson had required of prominent Confederates: “Being excluded from the provisions of the amnesty and pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th ult., I hereby apply for the benefits and full restoration of all rights and privileges extended to those included in its terms.”10
Lee counseled other Confederate Southerners to do all they could to regain their full civil rights. He believed that they could more quickly recover from the war and the stigma of disloyalty if they displayed wholehearted cooperation with the victors. He realized that recalcitrance would only make a bad situation much worse.
Throughout this trying period when Lee had to confront the consequences of his adherence and contribution to the Southern rebellion, he insisted that he had committed no inconsistency. His explanation, perhaps best expressed in a letter to P. G. T. Beauregard, is extraordinary.
True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. The circumstances which govern their actions change; and their conduct must conform to the new order of things. History is full of illustrations of this. Washington himself is an example. At one time he fought against the French under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain; at another, he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him. He has not been branded by the world with reproach for this; but his course has been applauded.”
Such a statement, especially coming from Lee, smacks of rationalization. After all this was the same man who believed the way to deal with desertion was “to visit the offense, when committed, with the sternest punishment, and leave the offender without hope of escape, by making the penalty inevitable.” Yet Lee offered other examples of his ethical flexibility. In April 1864, for example, he wrote to Mary Lee about a widow who was debating remarriage. “I think the world generally accords to a woman more respect & esteem,” Lee wrote, “who marries but once. There are of course exceptions to this as other rules & there are often valid reasons accepted by all, for departing from it. Every one must judge for themselves in such matters.”12
Few people then and since have ever associated Robert Lee with existential ethics. Lee did adhere to absolute standards—e.g., “the desire to do right.” But within the bounds of rather broad moral and ethical guidelines, Lee followed an ethical code perhaps best described as “situationalist.” At least this was how he justified his altered loyalties between 1861 and 1865.
It was ironic that Ulysses Grant resolved the dilemma of what to do about Lee and other Confederate military leaders on the basis of a very rigid standard—the sanctity of Grant’s word. Grant agreed with Lee that the terms of surrender precluded trials for treason. Grant believed that such lenient provisions had forestalled a guerrilla war, and he intended to honor his promise. Indeed, Grant threatened to resign if Andrew Johnson abrogated what Grant believed was his pledged word at Appomattox. The President relented, and Grant was able to write Lee on June 20 that he need not worry about standing trial for treason.13
While Lee still lived in official limbo regarding the consequences of his Confederate career, he began seriously the search for another home. Around June 1, he mounted Traveller and rode alone east from Richmond, over the Chickahominy, through Mechanicsville, and across the Pamunkey into King William County. He went to a plantation called Pampatike that belonged to Thomas H. Carter, who was a cousin and had recently served as a colonel of artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee arrived unexpected (and thus uninvited); but in the tradition of Virginia hospitality the Carters welcomed him lavishly and prevailed upon him to extend his visit into several days. Neighbors too invited Lee to dinners, and since Rooney and Rob had lately moved to White House in the vicinity, they joined their father on at least one occasion.
Lee wanted a respite from Richmond; he genuinely enjoyed the informal ease of the countryside; and he liked the elegance his more prosperous relatives could afford. He also wanted advice about where he might settle with his family. Carter suggested Gloucester County if Lee liked salt water or Clarke County in the Piedmont if Lee preferred grass. Lee pronounced in favor of grass and continued to explore the possibility of becoming a farmer.
He also felt free to give advice while he visited at Pampatike. He chided his hosts about the quantity and variety of foods they served—“Thomas, there was enough dinner to-day for twenty people. All this will now have to be changed; you cannot afford it; we shall have to practice economy.”
Lee had opinions about using free black labor on Carter’s plantation; he advised his cousin to hire white workers. “I have always observed,” Lee pontificated, “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.” The war and the African American troops that had helped defeat him did not seem to change Lee’s hierarchical assumptions about race.14
But soon after he returned to Richmond, Lee once more confounded those who considered him uncomplicated. The occasion was communion at St. Paul’s Church on a Sunday in June. The Reverend Dr. Charles Minnegerode was still rector of the parish; St. Paul’s was (and is) just across the street from Capitol Square, and during the war a list of communicants read like a Who’s Who of the Confederacy. At this particular service, as soon as Minnegerode delivered the invitation to the people to come forward to receive the consecrated bread and wine, a tall, well-dressed, very black man stood and strode to the rail. There followed a pregnant pause. According to one witness, “Its effect upon the communicants was startling, and for several moments they retained their seats in solemn silence and did not move, being deeply chagrined at this attempt to inaugurate the ‘new regime’ to offend and humiliate them…. Dr. Minnegerode was evidently embarrassed.”
Then another person rose from the pew and walked down the aisle to the chancel rail. He knelt near the black man and so redeemed the circumstance. This grace-bringer, of course, was Lee. Soon after he knelt, the rest of the congregation followed his example and shuffled in turn to the rail. Once again Lee’s actions were far more eloquent than anything he spoke or wrote.15
Peace with the United States made possible a resumption of Lee’s correspondence and relationships with clever young women. One of the first personal letters he wrote after Appomattox was to “Markie” Williams on May 2, 1865. In one of her letters to him, Markie offered to go with him to Europe; but Lee demurred—“there is much to detain me here, & at present at least it is my duty to remain.” He continued:
There is nothing my dear Markie that I want, except to see you, & nothing that you can do for me, except to think of & love me. It would require you to become a Fairy & turn what you touched to Gold to take me to Europe, but I would not desire you to change your nature for my benefit. I prefer you remaining as you are—
In this same letter Lee reported his plan to move to the country—“to Cumberland Co. about six miles from Cartersville on the [James River and Kanawha Canal.” Elizabeth Randolph Cocke had offered the Lees a vacant house on her property, about midway between Richmond and Charlottesville. Elizabeth Cocke was related to the Cocke family at Bremo, where Mary Lee and her daughters had spent the summer and some of the fall of 1864. This place possessed the virtue of being accessible by water and so was more accessible to Mary in her invalid condition. And even though Lee told Markie, “I have … selected a house….,” as though he had bought it, Elizabeth Cocke’s house was rent-free.16
On June 28 the family boarded a packet boat on the canal and teams of horses pulled them upstream to a landing near Oakland, where Elizabeth Cocke lived. The Lees visited at Oakland for a week and made the vacant house, known as “Derwent” (after Derwent water in the English Lake District), ready for habitation. Furnishings came from Oakland; Mary and Robert Lee had never owned much furniture and retained none of that they had purchased or inherited. At last Lee had his little house in the country.
Derwent was a wooden frame house, two rooms over two rooms, front and side porches, dining room in the basement, detached kitchen in the backyard, and another outbuilding suitable for an office. The best feature of the house was the ornamented (doors and millwork) closet in the room to the left of the central hallway which became the Lees’ room.17
Lee described Derwent to son Rob as “a comfortable but small house in a grove of oaks.” To Rooney, Lee wrote, “Our house is small & excessively hot, more so to me than a tent would be. Our neighbors are very kind & do everything in the world to promote our comfort.”18
Mary Lee described her situation less positively:
You would suppose from the title of this retreat that we are in sight of cool lakes and romantic scenery but it is a little retired place with a straight up house and the only beauty it possesses is a fine growth of oaks which surrounds it. Thro’ the kindness of a friend who has given us the use of it, it has been rendered habitable, but all the outbuildings are dilapidated and the garden is a mass of weeds. As we shall probably not remain here longer than a season we shall not attempt to cultivate it…. Our future will be guided by circumstances. I dare not look into it, all seems so dark now, that we are almost tempted to think God has forsaken us.19
The Lees would not last long in the country.
Lee did enjoy much about this quiet summer at Derwent. He took rides on Traveller and visited friends and relatives. He even began to think about writing a history of his campaigns—not to vindicate himself, he insisted, but to reveal the long odds his soldiers faced in battle and thus to laud the courage and gallantry of the men he had led. He wrote to Walter Taylor to try to secure accurate records, and he opened negotiations with a publisher regarding the publication of his history together with a new edition of his father’s memoirs.20
Still, Lee needed more to do—some purpose greater than refighting battles lost and some source of income for himself and his family. Mary Lee would likely never feel much better, and she required considerable care now. Custis confronted embarking upon a new career at age thirty-three; he was hoping for an appointment to the faculty at VMI, but spent most of the summer overcoming a case of dysentery. Daughter Mary (now thirty) was alive somewhere; she rarely rejoined the family, but spent most of her time on protracted visits with relatives and friends. Agnes (twenty-four) became quite ill during the summer at Derwent; she had been her mother’s primary companion during the war and remained at home wherever home might be. Mildred (nineteen) also seemed destined to continue at home. During the summer of 1865 she absorbed herself in her flock of chickens, read novels, and probably became quite bored. Her father called her his “only reliance & support” at Derwent. Rooney (twenty-eight) and Rob (twenty-one) spent the summer at White House trying to make something from a crop of corn. Both young veterans had decided to become farmers and try to support themselves on the land they inherited from their grandfather. So in uncertain times Lee the patriarch confronted equally unsettled family plans. He realized that one of the important ways in which he could help his children was monetarily.21
In August 1865, which Robert Lee termed “a quiet time … delightful to me … I fear not so exhilarating to the girls,” amid what Mary Lee said was “a quiet so profound that I could even number the acorns falling from the splendid oaks that overshadowed the cottage,” as Lee pondered what to do with the rest of his life, to use his metaphor from an early stage in his military career, a ripe pear fell into Lee’s lap. Judge John W. Brockenbrough, who a few days earlier had won election as Rector of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, appeared at Derwent one August day and informed Lee that the board of trustees of Washington College had unanimously elected him president of the college.
Brockenbrough, like Lee, was fifty-eight years old, and unlike Lee had been a Democrat “from infancy.” Brockenbrough had served as a Federal judge member of the Confederate Congress, and Confederate States judge. But in Lexington, Brockenbrough was best known for his law school, which he had conducted by himself since 1849 and which eventually became the Washington College Law School.22
Brockenbrough made a strong case for the college and for Lee’s acceptance of his election, and reinforced his speech with a letter written aboard the packet boat during his return trip to Lexington. The words appealed to Lee: “to make yourself useful to the state, to dedicate your fine scientific attainments to the service of its youth, to guide that youth in the paths of virtue. Knowledge & religion, not more by precept than your own great example—these my dear General are objects worthy of your ambition and we desire to present you the means of their accomplishment.” The board of trustees also prevailed upon William Nelson Pendleton, Lee’s former artillery chief and Rector of Grace Church, to add his encouragement, and Pendleton, too, appealed to Lee’s concern for “the right training of our young men.”
The trustees promised a salary of $1,500 per year, plus a residence and garden, and one fifth ($15) of the tuition each student paid ($75). In exchange for this compensation, the president assumed responsibility for administering the college and traditionally taught a course in philosophy.23
Pendleton insisted that of the institutions of higher learning in Virginia, “Washington College … is perhaps at present most promising.” In retrospect son Rob offered a more candid appraisal of Washington College in the summer of 1865:
Its buildings, library, and apparatus had suffered from the sack and plunder of hostile soldiers. Its invested funds, owing to the general impoverishment throughout the land, were for the time being rendered unproductive and their ultimate value was most uncertain. Four professors still remained on duty, and there were about forty students, mainly from the country around Lexington…. It was very poor, indifferently equipped with buildings, and with no means in sight to improve its condition.
When Lee sought advice from the Reverend Joseph P. B. Wilmer, later Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, who was then living in nearby Albemarle County, Wilmer suggested that Lee might aspire to lead “more conspicuous” institutions than Washington College, which then possessed only “local interest.” In fact the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, and the University of Virginia each approached Lee about accepting a leadership role with them. Lee impressed upon Wilmer his commitment to enlightenment and his unconcern with the status or prestige of an educational institution.24
In the past Lee had expended energy and influence in attempts to avoid association with educational institutions. He had eschewed an assignment as an instructor at the United States Military Academy, done his best to prevent his appointment as Superintendent of the Academy, and transferred from Engineers to Cavalry to hasten the end of his tenure as Superintendent at West Point. But each of those situations involved West Point and the rigidity of barracks life and technical subjects. At Washington College in this period of crisis in Southern higher education, Lee recognized the opportunity to mold the institution himself and work a transformation that he believed to be important.
So after two weeks of pondering Lee wrote his reply to the trustees. At the beginning of his letter Lee listed two reasons why he should not accept his election as president. “I do not feel able to undergo the labour of conducting classes in regular courses of instruction,” he protested. And he added that since he was “an object of censure to a portion of the Country, I have thought it probable that my occupation of the position of President, might draw upon the College a feeling of hostility; & I should therefore cause injury to an Institution which it would be my highest desire to advance.” So, because he was unable to teach courses and because he did not want “to be the cause of animadversion,” Lee believed he should decline the presidency.
Then, in effect, he accepted the position. “Should you however take a different view,” Lee wrote, “& think that my services in the position tendered me by the Board will be advantages to the College & Country, I will yield to your judgement & accept it.” Of course the board did indeed think that Lee’s services would be most advantageous and told him so in resolutions adopted on August 31.25
Accordingly, Lee prepared to commence another career and embark upon adventures in education. Mary Lee confided to a friend, “I do not think he is very fond of teaching, but is willing to do anything that will give him an honorable support.” The trustees of Washington College doubtless cared more than anything else about Lee’s name and fame, and hoped that Lee’s association with the college would attract the students and financial support necessary to rescure the institution from oblivion. Lee himself had plans more ambitious than “honorable support” or affecting a benign persona as hero-in-residence. He soon asserted his determination to become an active educator at Washington College.26
On September 15, Lee set out alone for Lexington mounted on Traveller and made the journey in “four days’ easy rides.” He had never seen the town or Washington College before. Lee arrived about 1:00 P.M. on September 18 dressed in a gray suit from which his military insignia and buttons had been removed and wearing his brown hat. Lexington was a small mountain town of about 2,000 inhabitants and an agricultural marketplace dominated by three institutions—Washington College, Virginia Military Institute, and the Presbyterian church. One of the first residents Lee encountered was Professor James J. White, who taught Greek at the college and who insisted that Lee be the guest of White’s father-in-law Samuel McD. Reid.27
Lee met with the trustees of the college on September 20 and found them solicitous and supportive. The president’s residence was currently leased to a physician; after he vacated the place, repairs were in order, so Lee decided to take a room a the Lexington Hotel and wait to move his wife and daughters until he had the house ready for occupancy. Meanwhile, he spent a week at Rockbridge Baths, a mountain spa only 11 miles from Lexington. There Lee nursed his “rheumatic affliction” and took scenic rides with some of his female friends. He returned to Lexington on September 30 and prepared to open Washington College on October 2.28
The trustees had grand plans for Lee’s installation as president—a brass band, speeches, “young girls robed in white,” songs, and more. But Lee took charge and saw to a simpler ceremony—prayer, brief welcomes and an oath, presentation of the keys, and then Lee walked to his office and went to work.29
“A fine set of youths,” approximately fifty of them, were on hand on October 2 when the college reopened in 1865. In time, 146 students matriculated during the academic year; Washington College denied no one admission that first year and dismissed no one from the academic program.30
President Lee did many of those things the trustees hoped he would do. He attracted students, many of whom had served in his army. He solicited contributions to the college, most notably in this year $10,000 from Cyrus McCormick, inventor and manufacturer of the reaper. Lee went to Richmond and asked the Virginia General Assembly to honor some bonds upon which the college depended for operating funds. And he answered his mail, all by himself during this period, thus generating goodwill toward the college.31
Lee in fact did considerably more than the trustees expected him to do as president. He injected ideas about expanding and altering the curriculum at Washington College. In December 1865, Lee sent a petition to the Virginia General Assembly to apply for money from the Morrill Act (signed into law the day after Lee’s Seven Days Campaign concluded) designed to aid higher education in agriculture and mechanical arts. Specifically, Lee proposed to use the land grant funds to establish and support five new professorships: Practical Chemistry (chemical engineering); Experimental Philosophy (physics) and Practical Mechanics (mechanical engineering); Applied Mathematics (civil engineering); Modern Languages (French, German, Italian, and Spanish); and History and Literature. In this instance Lee was unsuccessful in securing land grant funds; indeed, he never coaxed Morrill Act money from the General Assembly. But Lee was able to expand the curriculum in the way he envisioned when he applied for these funds, and in so doing he began the transformation of Washington College from a nineteenth-century classical academy to a twentieth-century university.32
From the beginning Lee became more involved with the students at Washington College than anyone had expected. Early evidence of Lee’s commitment to his students is his letter to his cousin Anna Fitzhugh about his brother Smith’s son, Robert. The young man was Lee’s nephew; but abundant testimony exists to indicate that Lee took similar interest in students not kin to him.
Robert had interrupted his education, and he arrived late (December) in the academic year to begin his studies at Washington College. “He has commenced his work cheerfully & hopefully,” Lee reported, and then added perceptively, “Like most boys, he has heretofore studied apparently, more with a view to his daily recitations than to acquire knowledge, but now that he sees the distinction, I am sure he will alter his course, & after he recalls what is forgotten of his reading, I think he will go on well.” Lee counseled Robert into courses in mathematics, Latin, and French. He also “made arrangements for him to commence Greek, as I think it important he should commence as broad a base for the structure of his education as possible.” Acknowledging the challenge of such a course load, Lee wrote, “I do not know that he will be able to carry them all on, but he says he is willing to study & try & by Feb. I shall be able to judge what course is best for him.”
When Lee wrote his letter, his nephew was living in the President’s House with Lee’s family. However, Lee noted that Custis, who had now secured the faculty appointment at VMI, had had to live elsewhere for lack of space in the residence. “So Robert can arrange a room in College & I think be less interrupted in his studies than if with us.” Lee did assure his cousin Anna, “Rob will take his meals with us, & you may tell Smith, I shall pay the same attention to him, if he will permit it, as if he was my own Son.” Again, this student Robert was Lee’s nephew; but as president, Lee worked long and hard to learn the names and try to know all the students at his college as if they were family. He perceived himself very much in loco parentis in Lexington.33
Lee did have concerns about his own sons in the aftermath of war. In many ways the father at fifty-eight adapted to defeat and changed circumstances much better than did his sons at thirty-three, twenty-eight, and twenty-two. Custis seemed to be established teaching engineering at VMI; but the fact that he continued to take his meals with his parents and never seriously pursued a wife and family of his own or, it would seem, his independence as a person, troubled Lee.’34
Rooney Lee was the first of the Lee males to plunge into a peacetime pursuit. He went to live on his farm, White House, and with Rob’s help managed to plant corn during the spring of 1865. This experience seems to have convinced Rooney that he did not want to continue active farming, because during the fall of 1865 he leased all of his arable land (2,000 acres) at White House to a Scottish entrepreneur. Rooney had a lawyer draw up the lease; but one of the stipulations of the agreement was Lee’s approval. Unless Rooney’s father gave his consent to the terms within three weeks, the lease became null and avoid. Lee the father did have serious questions about the wisdom of the arrangement—“it has occurred to me if Mr Black [the leasee] can pay himself & you, from the proceeds of the land which of course he expects to do, you might do as well, & thus receive the whole profit, & at the end often years, your estate would be in better condition than I fear you will receive it; especially as you have to endorse his loan of $10,000, & become responsible for it.” But Lee also promised not to stand in his son’s way. Rooney’s primary concern was labor; he wished someone else to take the risk of hiring farm workers and hoping they would prove dependable. Lee concluded this correspondence with an affirmation: “If you are satisfied with the arrangement, I am, & sincerely hope it may result for the best.” But why did Rooney Lee, the twenty-eight-year-old major general, feel the necessity of securing his father’s approval before he leased his own property?35
The youngest son, Rob, also had a farm he inherited from his grandfather Custis, Romancoke on the Pamunkey River in King William County. However, Rob worked with Rooney at White House during the planting season of 1865. He contracted poison ivy then and later fell victim to some sort of fever. He went to Lexington to recuperate during the fall and returned to Roman-coke only on December 20. Robert Lee, Senior, could probably be a formidable father, yet he took pains not to be overbearing. Nevertheless, Lee’s students seemed to derive greater benefit from Lee’s influence than did Lee’s sons.36
One of the tasks Lee undertook and took seriously as president was the repair of buildings and grounds at the college. He worked hard enough at this responsibility to ask in his first annual report to the trustees for a proctor to take over this duty in the future. Among his first renovation projects was his own home. When the physician who was renting the president’s residence finally vacated the place, Lee became a general contractor. He had to locate workers and materials to repair the roof, fences, and plaster. Then Lee became an interior designer; he had to furnish the house with carpets, curtains, and furniture. He also served as landscape architect and designed the walkways, garden, and planting. He seemed to enjoy these projects and led tours through the house when his wife and family arrived in Lexington on December 2.”
At last Lee had a home for himself and his family. But of course the house belonged, not to Lee, but to Washington College. Consequently, in a letter to his brother Smith written barely a month after Lee and his family moved into the president’s residence, Lee wrote out a new verse to an old song: “I shall endeavor to get a little farm somewhere & make such preparation as to afford a home to my family in case of necessity, or of my death, that in either event I may not feel that they will be houseless. I should be perfectly content to be with them where I could make my daily bread, ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot.’ “Some irony attends the use of this quotation; Lee’s mother once used the same phrase about her life at Stratford Hall before Robert Lee was born, and she did not use it to describe perfect contentment.38
Lee seemed to make the transition from Appomattox to Lexington with remarkable ease, and by the close of 1865 he had already established himself as a presence in Lexington and savior of Washington College. But in his life oftentimes what Lee said or wrote and especially what other people said or wrote about him—the apparent and obvious—were not most important. During this period from Appomattox to Lexington, Lee said little about his health. His son Rob’s words described Lee when showing off the President’s House as appearing “bright and even gay.”‘39
But Lee still suffered from angina pectoris, and he was developing arteriosclerosis with uncommon rapidity. He became increasingly aware that something was wrong; he probably knew or sensed that his physicians erred in the diagnosis of rheumatism. Lee’s arteries were clogging, filling with a substance now known as plaque. But neither Lee nor his physicians knew about plaque—or what produced it.