GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE CUSTIS was one of those people Ann Lee had warned her son Robert to avoid. The contrast between Lee and his father-in-law was dramatic. Lee was tall, dark, handsome, diligent, self-controlled, and purposeful; Custis—short, fair, and fat—was dilatory, self-indulged, and aimless. But Custis had great wealth and Lee was poor.
Mediating and ameliorating the differences between the two men were their wives. Mary Lee adored her father and loved her husband; Mary Custis adored her son-in-law and loved her husband. So Parke Custis and Robert Lee endured each other, even though they probably never understood each other.1
Once someone in the Custis family proposed a plan which seems eminently logical. Mary Custis wrote her daughter in October 1831, not many months after her marriage, “David thinks as your Father is so literary a character that he would find it greatly to his advantage to withdraw Robert from his present profession and yield to him the management of affairs.” Mrs. Custis responded, “… that would please me very well if Robert and Mr. Custis were of the same mind, but there did not seem any tendency to such a state of things at least in Mr. C——. Robert I could not answer for.”2
While he was at Fort Monroe, Lee visited Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay (just north of Tangier Island), which Custis owned. On his return he wrote, “My dear Father,” and began his letter, “Supposing you may feel an interest in hearing something relative to Smiths [sic] Island, I take advantage of the first leisure day since my return to give you an account of my visit there. And also to submit to your better judgement my views of the means of turning it to profit.” It would seem from this introduction that Lee’s trip was his own idea and his counsel unsolicited. In his letter Lee described the island and its resources and made sensible recommendations about the wild cattle, sheep, and timber he observed there. He also said that he had intended visiting White House, another large Custis property; but his horse Boliver “took it in his head to die just as he would have been useful,” so Lee was unable to undertake that trip.3
Custis may or may not have responded to his son-in-law’s report. He did not take Lee’s advice, however, and this letter is the only one extant in which Lee assumes any direct role in the “management of affairs” for his father-in-law.
About four years after Lee wrote his description and strategies about Smith Island, he gave Carter an acerbic account of Custis’s activities, rare in its unveiled sarcasm. “The Major [an honorific title which doubtless galled Second Lieutenant Lee] is busy farming. His corn field is not yet enclosed or ploughed [on May 2! ] but he is rushing on all he knows. ‘Montgomerie’ [a play about thirteenth-century Scotland] failed. The ‘big Picture’ has been exhibited in the Capitol, and attracted some animadversions from the Critics, which he says were levelled at his Politics!!”4
In contrast, some of Robert Lee’s regard for his mother-in-law appears in a letter to Mary Lee concerning their transition to independent living and larger quarters at Fort Monroe. The Lees were corresponding during the spring of 1832 about what household items, furnishings, and slaves Mary should bring with her from Arlington. Robert Lee observed, “I know your dear mother will be for giving you everything she has, but you must recollect one thing & that is that they have been accustomed to comforts all their life, which now they could not dispense with and that we in the commencement ought to contract our wishes to their smallest compass & enlarge them as opportunity offers.”5
Lee gave his mother-in-law credit for sharing his conviction as he later phrased it, that “the great duty of life” is “the promotion of the happiness & welfare of our fellow men.” So he knew she would give her daughter “everything,” at the sacrifice of her own comfort. Maybe Mary Custis would indeed have given Mary Lee “everything.” The important fact is that Robert Lee believed she would, and thus believed that she and he shared an ethic of selflessness. So his words were high praise indeed. It may or may not have been significant that Lee did not suggest that Mr. Custis “will be for giving you everything.”6
Mary Lee more than shared her husband’s good opinion of her mother and never seemed to undergo any sort of rebellion against her mother’s authority. She had always depended upon her mother, and when she married Robert Lee, she simply added another person in her life upon whom she could depend to protect her from unpleasantness.
In her portion of the Lees’ joint letter to Eliza Mackay Stiles congratulating her upon her marriage, Mary Lee wrote to this person she had never met, “I suppose you remain in Savannah near your Mother? What happiness! I am with mine now—the past and future disregarded.” Beside invoking the blessing of “our beneficent Creator and Father,” motherhood was the only substantive subject Mary Lee raised.7
When he went to work as assistant to the Chief of the Engineer Department (Corps) in Washington in November 1834, Lee hoped to rent a house in the city for himself, his wife, and two-year-old Custis. He was unsuccessful, however, and commuted to his office across the Potomac River.
But he did rent a room for himself at Mrs. Ulrich’s boardinghouse so that he might remain in Washington when duty required or when the weather turned foul and streets and roads became streams of mud. In the “mess” or dinner company at Mrs. Ulrich’s were Lee’s old friend Joseph E. Johnston, other young officers, and a few consequential politicians, members of Congress and cabinet. Lee entertained at Mrs. Ulrich’s house, and on one occasion he invited five fellow officers to dinner at 4:00 P.M. and added, “Those who can sleep three in a bed will find ‘comfortable accommodations.’” During this period of his life Lee still served wine and stronger spirits to his guests. In time, however, he became concerned that his acquaintances might become addicted to alcohol and offered it to guests less and less.8
Washington was a very young village when Lee first went to the capital. People usually lived there because they worked in the government and so had to live there. And like the young officers Lee invited to his dinner, residents of Washington had to make their own fun. In fair weather Lee rode his horse down the hill from Arlington House, across the Long Bridge over the Potomac River, and up 14th Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. Offices of the War Department were then just west of the White House on 17th Street, between G Street and F Street (where the Executive Office Building would later stand). The offices of the Engineer Department, like most other government facilities, opened at 9:00 A.M. and closed at 3:00 P.M. Then, when his duties permitted, Lee remounted his horse and retraced his route back “home” to Arlington.9
In the beginning Lee probably found his new assignment somewhat exciting. He was a junior officer stationed among the powerful. He saw the great men of his time, living, breathing versions of people who were only names to the vast majority of Americans. Even when assigned to Fort Monroe, Lee had taken advantage of his visits to Arlington to cross the river and spend some time in the galleries of the houses of Congress listening to speeches and debates. In the midst of the Nullification Crisis during the winter of 1833, for example, Lee reported to Talcott, “The South has had to bear some hard kicks from all sides.” He added, “John Randolph of R[oanoke] has arrived in W[ashington] & it is reported that he is to assemble the people in the House of R[epresentatives], deliver a speech from the chair Against Nullification, The Proclamation, Genl Jackson, Mr. Clay, Calhoun & Webster.”10
Lee’s superior Charles Gratiot was from St. Louis, one of the first graduates of West Point, an honored veteran of the War of 1812, and a capable Chief of the Engineer Department. General Gratiot obviously liked Lieutenant Lee; he had brought Lee to Washington, instead of allowing him to languish at Rip Raps, and Gratiot soon trusted Lee to manage the office while the general made his necessary visits and inspections of the various projects in which the Corps was engaged.11
Moreover, Lee had the great good fortune to begin his service in the Engineer Corps during an expansive period of public projects. In addition to constructing forts, the Engineers were involved in “internal improvements” of all sorts—building roads, improving harbors, dredging rivers, and such. Although Congress was less than reliable in its appropriations to fund these ventures, public money did flow, albeit in gushes and trickles, into these projects. For the moment, at least, Lee served a growth industry.
To Lee’s dismay, however, Andrew Jackson and the Democrats possessed power and purse strings during Lee’s first tenure in the capital. By birth, training, marriage, and experience, Lee was a Federalist. He believed in government by the rich, the well-born, and the able. He believed in government sufficiently strong to keep the vulgar mob in its place and to ensure its deference to its betters. He believed in order, in social hierarchy, and in noblesse oblige. The “best” people should have power and exercise authority for the good of the whole people. His profession and his church prescribed hierarchical relationships for soldiers and Christians in matters of power and episcopacy as extensions of the natural order in society.
Like his father, Robert Lee revered George Washington as model and hero, and he looked back upon Washington’s time as a “golden age.” Of course the Federalist era was long over by the mid-1830s. The so-called Second Party System in the American Republic had begun about the time that Lee entered West Point. Americans now tended to be Democrats or something else, and the many and varied expressions of opposition to Jackson and his party were forming a new coalition as the Whig Party. To the degree that Whigs were neo-Federalists, Lee was a Whig.12
Robert Lee believed that he was one of the political elect, the “best” people. He was not rich; but he was well-born and able, and he had followed the Lee family tradition of “marrying well.” To make sure he was well-born, Lee would soon do a modest amount of genealogy in the course of securing an accurate representation of the Lee coat of arms. Robert Lee believed, whether accurately or not, that he was descended from Robert Bruce and other Old World notables.13
In 1832, his half brother Henry had reinforced the family political heritage with the publication of the extended pamphlet entitled Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, With Particular Reference to the Attack They Contain on the Memory of the Late General Henry Lee. A recently published compilation of Jefferson’s correspondence included some letters containing slurs upon Light Horse Harry Lee’s integrity and his capacity to tell the truth. Henry Lee seized the opportunity to laud his father and heap scorn upon Jefferson. Here is a sample of the vitriol:
Stuart, the celebrated portrait painter, used to say, I am told, that he could never take a likeness to satisfy himself until he had discovered to which of the lower animals the countenance to be portrayed bore a resemblance; nor can I distinguish the character of Mr. Jefferson’s mind more expressively than by denominating it as of the chameleon order.14
Carter Lee embraced the attack upon Jefferson and published another edition of the tract in 1839. Robert Lee was more circumspect, but shared his brother’s sentiments, if not their zeal. When Henry Lee’s first volume on Napoleon appeared in 1835, Robert Lee complained that the work “Squints towards Jacksonism.” By this time Henry Lee had sold his political soul to Jackson; Robert Lee continued faithful to patriarchal polity.15
Somehow, Lee believed in original sin and progress at the same time. Human beings are corrupt and tainted; yet mysteriously these same beings are evolving toward perfection. Divine Providence makes it all happen. The Kingdom of God is indeed far off; but God is at work in the world, and in God’s good time the Kingdom will come. “The truth is this,” he wrote later in life, “The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”16
Ostensibly Robert Lee looked backward politically to the Founding Fathers, his own father, and Washington, the father of the country. Yet he looked also forward, toward Social Darwinism, a concept he never heard formulated. Although Charles Darwin (who was two years younger than Lee) would not publish Origin of Species until 1859, Lee anticipated the conservative appropriation of the theory of evolution. He associated social class and human progress with an evolutionary transit from beastliness to beatitude. The common herd were common, because they were a herd—animals who walked upright. People emerged from the herd when they learned to suppress urges toward bestial behavior. They moved up the scale from simply upright to righteous as they developed increasing self-control and transformed their instincts from selfish to selfless.17
Lee might have believed with founding Federalist Alexander Hamilton that “the people is a great beast,” but he was simply too refined to speak so harsh a truth. Indeed, Lee seldom spoke a political word; he seemed content to observe, absorb, and very rarely comment in private.
Robert Lee believed in politics, because he believed in power and control. During the Age of Jackson he likely suffered; but he suffered for the most part in silence. He was profoundly conservative in his politics. But Lee’s conservative convictions did not grow out of disguised greed or spring from some anxious search for security, two common sources of the conservative tradition among Americans. No, Lee was a magnanimous, “progressive,” humane conservative. His silence upon the great political issues of his time was the silence of superiority.
He had plenty of time to ponder the iniquities of Democratic and democratic politics because the work of the Engineer Department was incredibly dull. Much of it involved correspondence.
Your communication of the 19th ulto, remarking on the change made by the local Agent at Erie, in his accounts forwarded a few days before, was duly received; and the acknowledgement postponed until the examination of the Vouchers at this office. This having been done, I have now to inform you that the charge for Superintending of $2 per day, and 2½ per cent for disbursing has been reduced by the Department to conform to the statements furnished by you of the allowances to the several agents of works under your general superintendence which states [illegible name] at $75 per month, and 2 ½ per cent on disbursements; the charge for Office rent disallowed…. The Vouchers for disbursements made during the first quarter of this year by Mr. Hubbard, Agent on Account of the improvement at Ashtabula Creek, Ohio, have been examined in this Department and approved, and in conformity with regulations, paragraph 898, they are, herewith, transmitted to your Office.18
Day after day correspondence continued as reports, queries, estimates, clarifications, vouchers, complaints, requests, and public funds passed through the offices of the Engineer Department. Accounts had to balance; budgets required approval; and appropriations needed channels. However boring, the work was meticulous; it demanded constant attention to detail and the capacity to take “paragraph 898” quite seriously.
During this duty in Washington, Lee became increasingly aware of the dependence of the Army in general, and the Engineers Corps in particular, upon the fickle favor of patronage. In the cause of right and justice for himself and fellow Engineer officers, Lee compiled statistics and composed statements. One such statement he wrote during February 1836 Gratiot placed “in the hands of Mr. [Senator Thomas Hart] Benton, who happened to be in the office this morg and he at least showed great patience in listening to our grievances.” Lee planned to “have several copies made and place them in the hands of some of my acquaintances in the Senate & House, so that should the matter be brought up, if they choose they may speak the truth.” Especially did Lee depend upon William C. Preston, who was a South Carolina senator. “His father and mine were old acquaintances and friends, and once laboured together. Why should not the Sons?” Gratiot was no fool. He had brought Lee to Washington to assist him in more than minding his office. And Lee seemed to relish his role as lobbyist for the Engineer Corps.19
In February 1835, Lee wrote his brother Carter, “I am obliged to spend the most of my time in W[ashington] am constantly occupied till near four & by the time dinner is over it is night. I then most generally go to A[rlington].” He had been on duty in Washington only about four months when he asked for reassignment. Lee told Gratiot that he was “unable to make ends meet”; his salary did not support the life he had to lead. It was, he stated, “impossible for me to hold the station in society at this place to which an officer is entitled.”20
Someone wrote on Lee’s plea “to receive early attention.” But all Lee received for his lament was a clerk and a trip to the woods. James Eveleth had worked for Lee at Fort Monroe, and in July 1835 Eveleth rejoined him in Washington. Gratiot also assigned Lee to an expedition, led by Andrew Talcott, to survey the boundary between Ohio and Michigan during the summer of 1835.21
Mary Lee was once more pregnant—expecting a child in July, in fact. Nevertheless, Robert Lee seemed eager to leave home and rejoin his friend Talcott on the expedition. He left in May, journeying to Albany, New York, where he and the rest of the party had to wait for their instruments to arrive before heading west. Then once they began to survey, Lee and the others encountered still more delays and constantly projected later returns home.22
Meanwhile, Robert Lee was cruising the Great Lakes and roaming what was then the northwestern American wilderness attempting to help Talcott distinguish Ohio from Michigan. He wrote from Turtle Island, Michigan, to the young lieutenant who was his temporary replacement in the Engineer Department in Washington: “Our present abode may have many beauties, but to me they are as yet undiscovered…. The country around savours marvellously of Bilious Fevers, and seems to be productive of nothing more plentifully than of Moschitoes [sic] & Snakes. Of the good people in this country, we have seen nothing.” Lee also informed his friend that this summer excursion would consume some of the fall as well. “I hardly think I shall [?] be in Washington before October—and possibly not then.”23
In this same letter to “Mon Ami” (Lieutenant George W. Cullum), Lee asked his friend, “Tell the Genl. that in my last communication I forgot to confess an act of indiscretion which I now beg leave to do through you.” While on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, Lee and another lieutenant sought to use a lighthouse off Pelee Island as a survey point. Lee recounted the ensuing incident:
The door was locked & we could just not gain admittance, but after some time succeeded i[n] getting through the window i[n] rear when we discovered the keeper at the door. We were warm & excited, he irasible & full of venom. An altercation ensued which resulted in his death. We put him in charge of the men, gained the Top, attained our object, & in descending I discovered some glass lamp shades, which we stood much i[n] need of as all ours were broken. I therefore made bold to borrow two of his Majesty, for which liberty, as well as for that previously taken, I hope he will make our Apology to his Minister at Washington]. We have nothing to offer in our behalf, but necessity and as we found the Lt. House in a most neglected condition & shockingly dirty, & were told by the Capt. of the Cutter that there had been no Light in it for more than a year, I hope it will not be considered that we have lopped from the Government a useful member, but on the contrary—to have done it some service, as the situation may now be more efficiently filled & we would advise the New Minister to make choice of a better Subject than a d——d Canadian Snake.24
Lee’s story of his “indiscretion” was a joke! Told in the mock heroic, Lee’s experience at the lighthouse most likely corresponded to his narrative—except that the “keeper” of the lighthouse was literally a snake, a reptile. Lee was simply trying to liven his letter with a heroic tale of killing a snake in an abandoned lighthouse.25
When the surveying party arrived in Detroit, Lee received a disturbing letter from his wife. Mary Lee, no doubt anxious about her health, apparently implored her husband to come home at once. Robert Lee replied:
But why do you urge my immediate return, & tempt one in the strongest manner, to endeavour to get excused from the performance of a duty, imposed on me by my Profession for the pure gratification of my private feelings? Do you not think that those feelings are enough of themselves to contend with, without other aggravations; and that I rather require to be strengthened & encouraged to the full performance of what I am called on to execute, rather than excited to a dereliction, which even our affection could not palliate, or our judgement excuse?26
Lee chose to persevere in his duty and leave his wife’s care to others.
The surveyors journeyed as far west as Michigan City on Lake Michigan before commencing their return east. In early October Lee reached Washington, found that his family was at Ravensworth, and learned that his wife was quite ill.
Mary Lee had recovered very quickly from the birth of her daughter, Mary, on July 12, 1835, and according to Robert Lee’s analysis she had attempted to be too active too soon. She caught a cold, recovered somewhat, then developed a severe illness of some sort accompanied by “bilious symptoms.” Then she experienced swelling and pain in her groin, most likely severely swollen lymph glands. Her physicians diagnosed this condition as “Rheumatic Diathesis” (a predisposition to rheumatism), ordered her to remain in bed, treated her with applications of moist heat, and drew blood by means of cupping and leeching.27
Lee moved his wife on her bed from Ravensworth to Arlington so that she would be closer to her doctors. Mary remained ill for quite some time. Her husband’s letters to his friend Andrew Talcott and his brother Carter offer some chronicle of his wife’s symptoms and ailments during the next several months.
On October 12, she was “very slowly getting better, still confined to her bed.” On October 21, “the inflamation I told you of pointed & broke outwardly 2 days since. There has been a great discharge & a relief… but she is still as weak & helpless as ever & confined to her bed.” On November 9, “I am happy to say that Mary is improving. The 2nd Imposthume [pustule?]… has been opened & by its discharge she has been much relieved in so much that when she moves a soreness is substituted for acute pain…. She is dreadfully reduced, & so weak that she cannot stand, but being relieved from constant & corroding pain is a great point gained.” On November 18, Lee reported, “Mary gets better & better every day. She can now sit up & has lost all soreness, pain, etc., but is still very weak. Her appetite is famous and the Partridges, Buckwheat muffins, etc. disappear at breakfast, as fast as the Pheasants, chickens, etc. at dinner.” As she continued to feel better, Mary began to care again about her appearance, and her husband wrote on November 25, “Her hair got in such a snarl while confined to her bed, that she on her first sitting up, took the scissors and cut it all off. It is now coming out so rapidly, that when I left today she talked of having it shaved off, and I expect on my return to find her bald.”28
During the winter months of 1836, Lee announced, “We are not very well over the river. Mary is liable to cold and its effects, and I suppose will long be so.” In June he wrote, “Mary’s gen[eral] health I think has been improving this Spring, though she is now laboring under an attack of the Mumps.” Mary Lee’s mumps, Lee later reported, “appeared to throw her all back again… . She became extremely ill, affected with fever, which fell upon the brain, and seemed to overthrow her whole nervous system. During this time she suffered extremely, and what I then experienced could never be repeated.”29
Lee took his wife that summer (1836) with their two children (Custis three, Mary not quite one), Mrs. Custis, and four slaves to attend them in two carriages to Warrenton Springs and other Virginia spas to test the healing capacity of mineral waters. “I myself,” Lee confided to Carter, “have more confidence in the continuous journeys, diversifying the scene, amusing the mind, and endeavoring to strength the body.” Nevertheless Lee would continue to indulge his wife in the medical/social summer season at mountain spas for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the company, while he hoped against reason that the waters might help his wife.
About her condition in August of 1836, Lee concluded: “Her nervous system is much shattered. She has almost a horror of crowded places, an indisposition to make the least effort, and yet a restless anxiety which renders her unhappy and dissatisfied. ”30
Mary Lee’s health eventually improved. But she was never really well again. She bore five more children; indeed, the Lees conceived their next child about a month after Robert Lee wrote his gloomy conclusion quoted above. Still, Mary Lee’s health increasingly conditioned and constrained her. And in turn her malaise continued to afflict Robert Lee.31
General Gratiot did what he could for his young assistant, and during the fall of 1836 (September 21) Lee received a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant. Nevertheless Lee fretted about his career while he worried about his wife’s health.32
To his friend Andrew Talcott, Lee poured forth his frustration over his profession and himself. He wrote of his “talent for procrastination” and continued,
You ask what are my prospects in the Corps? Bad enough unless it is increased and something done for us, and then perhaps they will be better. As to what I intend doing, it is rather hard to answer. There is one thing certain. I must get away from here, nor can I consent to stay any longer than the rising of Cong[ress]. I should have made a desperate effort, last spring, but Mary’s health was so bad, I could not have left her & she could not have gone with me. I am waiting, looking and hoping for some good opportunity to bid an affectionate farewell to my dear Uncle Sam. And I seem to think that said opportunity is to drop in my lap like a ripe pear, for d——1 [devil] a stir have I made in the matter. And there again I am helped out by the talent I before mentioned I possessed in so eminent a degree [proscrastination].33
At the very time that Lee seemed overwhelmed by personal and professional frustrations, opportunity did indeed drop into his lap like a ripe pear. Gratiot found a new assignment for Lee. The good burghers of St. Louis had become alarmed that the Mississippi River would shift its channel away from the city and leave the port and associated commerce quite literally high and dry. Congress appropriated funds to finance an effort to redirect the river, and Gratiot selected Robert Lee to direct the project. The engineering challenge was fascinating; Lee was supposed to change the course of the “Father of Waters”.34
To accomplish this feat Lee of course would have to go to St. Louis. He would have to leave Arlington and his in-laws, Washington and the pettiness of politics, and his wife and two small children. Robert Lee likely had very mixed feelings about his projected sojourn west. His dominent mood, however, seems ebullient as he contemplated the new assignment. To Talcott he wrote, “I shall leave my family in the care of my eldest son who will take them over the mountains somewhere this summer, and his GrMother along with them.”35
Custis Lee was five years old. His father could write such cavalier prose because he was about to flee his frustrations. Flight in his case was fine, even noble, because Lee found escape in doing his duty.