Chapter Five

Long to Be Remembered

Ravensworth 13^th July 1831

So, Captain, you would not come up to Arlington on that memorable Thursday. But I gave you the severest scolding you have had this many a day, from which I hope you will derive great benefit. However you would have seen nothing strange, for there was neither fainting nor fighting, nor anything uncommon which could be twisted into an adventure. The Parson had few words to say, though he dwelt upon them as if he had been reading my Death warrant, and there was a tremulousness in the hand I held, that made me anxious for him to end. I am told I looked “pale and interesting” which might have been the fact. But I felt as “bold as a sheep” & was surprised at my want of Romance in so great a degree as not to feel more excitement than at the black Board at West Point.

The Party all kept together till the following Tuesday, when most of them departed, particularly the Gentlemen. Some of the Ladies remained the rest of the week, and we were then left alone. I would tell you how the time passed, but fear I am too much prejudiced to say anything more, but that it went very rapidly & still continues to do so. We are this far on our way to the upper country, where we shall spend the remainder of my leave of absence, and I there hope the Mother & Daughter will recover from the effects of an attack of the Fever & Ague they have lately undergone. Their health has been reestablished though not their looks. We shall return to the District about the first of August & you may expect me down in the first Boat in that Month. I purchased in Alexandria some few Articles which I directed to be sent by the Potomac to your care, & are to go down next Friday. May I trouble you to have the Bedstead placed in the larger room, (of the two in the Wing) since the Madam prefers that, and such other articles as you may think fit, the rest can be placed in the small room. All Feather beds have been forbid the apartment under pain &c and as I could not procure a Palliasse, the Mattress must answer for the present. The Box of articles I will not trouble you to open or arrange, as I can do that in five minutes after my arrival, and this closes the list of commissions. There is nothing now here except a second edition of the Ingham affair which has been put to press since the arrival of the President & all of which you will get by the Papers. I was over in Washington last Monday, saw the Genl & Mrs. G[ratiot] the first of [whom] was not very well. They talk of going N before going to Old Point. Col. Thayer had arrived that day & was with the Genl. Poor Mansfield had been ordered on to consult Genl Bernard & arrived the very day he resigned, so that he has to go back to N. Port. I was very anxious to see M. but could not find him. Remember me kindly to Mrs. Hale & tell her I am constantly reminded of her by the Good People I am with & that the Madam looks forward with great pleasure to forming her acquaintance. I long to hear little Miss Rebecca’s “Lee”, “Lee” & to see whether Miss Kate is still as “Bwack as Wee”. I write in great haste, with the servant waiting to take this to the Office which will give him a long ride because I actually could not find time before I left the District for anything but——Remember me to every one & Excuse Dear Capt. all the trouble I have given you & Believe me

Yours truly & sincerely
RE Lee

P.S. They are all talking around me at such a rate that I hardly know what I have written & despair of reading it. But please send the boat out for me that first trip the P. makes in August

To

Capt. A. Talcott
     Corps of Engrs.
      Fortress Monroe
       Virginia¹

AWEDDING. A time of intensity. The merriment, the feasting, the gathering of friends and relatives—all mark the fusion of families and the private merger of two dreams. The outward show of gaiety can also mask uncertainty, however, and this marriage, which took place between Mary Anna Randolph Custis and Robert Edward Lee on June 30, 1831, had its share of anxiety. Robert is the one who has left us the most vivid descriptions of the event, and also a sense of the strong sentiment that evolved from this bonding. Together the Lees would face challenges they could not possibly have imagined on that happy summer evening. And together they would forge a marriage as original as the two individuals who entered into it.

In June 1829 Robert Lee graduated from West Point and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. His achievement was tinged with sorrow, however, for while his classmates went on a celebratory trip to Niagara Falls, Lee took a somber journey home to the deathbed of his mother.² At fifty-six, Ann Lee’s delicate constitution was finally exhausted, and she died on July 10. According to those present, Robert was nearly beside himself, taking on his old role as nurse, mixing medicines and doing what he could for her comfort. Ann Lee evidently was content only when he was in the room. When the end came, one cousin recalled, Robert’s distress was “excessive.” Too overcome to attend the funeral, “he paced to and fro, the floor of the bedroom in inconsolable grief.”³ His brother Carter spoke for all of Ann’s children, now scattered about the eastern seaboard, when he bewailed the loss of a family home. “I am left by myself to reflect on how melancholy it is that there will soon be no longer a roof under which we can be gathered as our home,” he wrote to Robert. “This happening at the very time of your departure seems to complete the overthrow of that domestic happiness, which after all the heart appears most to rely on.”⁴

As if to magnify their grief, Black-Horse Harry’s awful business again surfaced. Andrew Jackson had chosen to befriend Henry Lee IV, going so far as to invite him to stay at “The Hermitage.” In return Henry was supposed to write campaign literature, including a biography of the general. When Jackson was elected president, Lee had hopes of receiving a lucrative office, a necessity now that his public disgrace and financial irresponsibility had lost him Stratford.⁵ Though the biography seems never to have been finished, Jackson did appoint Henry Lee to be U.S. consul to Algiers. In a move reminiscent of his father, Lee sailed away quickly, before he had to face further court proceedings on the still-unpaid settlement of Elizabeth McCarty’s estate. But the Senate, on a unanimous vote, chose not to confirm Lee’s appointment. The proceedings were loud, public, and piercing. Henry was forced to leave his post and live in exile in Paris, and the rest of the Lee clan had to relive the humiliation of their family indiscretions.⁶

It was in this disturbed mood that Robert Lee settled into his first army post. He had been sent to Cockspur Island, Georgia, where a fort guarding the approach to Savannah was to be built. The one consolation in the hot, poorly supervised, and mosquito-infested assignment was the proximity of Jack Mackay’s family. Jack had five sisters, all attractive and merry, and they embraced the young Virginian in their Broughton Street home as if he had been a lifelong friend. Lee seems to have had a particular affection for Eliza Mackay; they struck up an intense flirtation, complete with mischievous letters and vows of eternal fidelity. But Eliza and her sisters had other suitors, and Lee was left depressed and terribly lonely. Having heard nothing from his family, he composed a sad letter to Carter, saying that he could “no longer refrain from begging you to write & that quickly”—for, as he noted, “I feel, and doubly feel, a hundred times more wretched than the day we parted.”⁷ His misery must have increased when he received news a few weeks later that his family’s generous protector, William Henry Fitzhugh, had unexpectedly died at the age of thirty-two.

William Henry Fitzhugh’s death was a sorrowful blow to the Lees, but it was a major calamity for the Arlington household. Fitzhugh was the only brother of Molly Custis, and a most beloved uncle of her daughter Mary. He had been an exceptional young man: wonderfully handsome, known for his liberality and charity, an early opponent of slavery, and a benefactor to many of his relatives, the Lees notably among them. His death was mysterious, which increased the family’s gloom. He had been slightly indisposed while on a visit to his wife’s girlhood home, took some medicine, became violently ill, and within a few minutes threw himself back on his pillow and expired.⁸ As his niece would lament, he had been “torn from us all by a lightening flash,” leaving them in “utter wretchedness.” At first Mary Custis felt only a small sadness at her uncle’s passing, confiding to her diary her “feeling of regret that my mourning dress would prevent my entering gay society the winter succeeding.”⁹ Then, on a visit to her devastated aunt, she was suddenly struck by the transience of these temporal conceits, and the experience provoked an intense spiritual catharsis. Mary described it as the defining moment of her life, a revelation so swift and penetrating that it interrupted all conscious thought and superseded every other concern. The experience also initiated a significant change in her character. Where she had once enjoyed self-indulgence, she was now determined to shape a more mature and selfless nature.¹⁰

As the only surviving child of the Custises, Mary probably had been a bit spoiled. Arlington, with its scores of servants, lush surroundings, and near-royal Washington associations, was the kingdom of her childhood. She grew up with an uninhibited personality, a quick temper, a clever intellect, and a mind of her own. She was more skilled in the arts of painting and prose than her amateur father, and as one of her daughters later noted, she possessed “the real artist temperament,” revering nature and caring little for outward structures—such as time—or for societal pretensions—such as dress. Her “artist temperament” fostered some irascibility as well, which manifested itself in acerbic comments. “She spoke whatever came in her mind—but it was over in a moment,” observed one family member.¹¹ Mary had been educated well for a girl of her day, studying history, Greek, and rhetoric in addition to embroidery. A surviving copybook shows some excellent attempts at essay writing and philosophical thought—and also a lack of sustained application. At the same time she was brave and morally strong, and had inherited her mother’s sympathetic nature—a girl more challenging and more interesting than the predictable local belles.¹²

Historians have had a field day with Mary Custis’s sharp features and sometimes equally sharp personality. “By her late teens she was a spoiled, unpleasant woman accustomed to lavish parties and the incessant attentions of her father,” one Lee biographer has written. Another was harsher still: “Expressed bluntly…Mary was careless, self-centered, dependent, undisciplined, and dull.”¹³ Somehow, however, the more one reads about Mary Custis, the more appealing she becomes. A brunette with cinnamon-brown eyes, she attracted many admirers, who praised her “placid and winning face” and laughing expression.¹⁴ In 1830 her portrait was painted by Auguste Hervieu, and the picture shows a thoughtful girl with a rich pile of curled hair.¹⁵ When she was about fifteen, her aunt, Nelly Custis Lewis, found her wonderfully appealing and told a close friend that she “would love this sweet modest girl, so humble & gentle with all her classical attainments. She has wit & satire too, when they are required.”¹⁶ Robert Lee’s sister Mildred, who was a confidante in the years of their girlhood, begged for letters from her, praising “the talent which you possess in such an imminent degree to entertain and amuse one.”¹⁷ Yet another cousin, describing Mary and her mother, remarked: “I wish you knew them. They are my favorite Aunt and Cousin, so good and so very intelligent.”¹⁸

And to top it all, Mary was evidently an accomplished flirt. One of her chums teased her in 1825 about the “mischief you are making upon the unfortunate youths around you,” exclaiming, “pray what have you done with poor Mr Carter—Mr Lloyd—Mr Lee&…a dozen or more swains who seem to be dying with the prevailing Love fever of the day.”¹⁹ “Mr. Lee” could have been Robert—for he teasingly referred to a flirtation with Miss Custis the previous Christmas—or it could have been either Smith or Carter, both of whom notoriously haunted Arlington “to kneel at [her] shrine.” There were rumors of other distinguished suitors, including dashing Sam Houston, then a congressman in his early thirties.²⁰ Though she enjoyed the attentions of the young men who came to call, Mary pronounced herself an “impregnable fortress” and also earned a reputation for a quick, barbed repartee, which, a confidante noted, proved “so fatal to the beaux.”²¹ Such a woman, with her imposing background, her watchful parents, her distinctive personality and self-absorption, was not easy to court. In 1827 Aunt Lewis commented that Mary Custis was “still unattached. There are few worthy of her I think.”²² In 1829 Mildred Lee advised her to carry out resolutions she had “so long formed of repressing and softening” her disposition, and under her tutelage, and the influence of religious awakening, something did come about—a kind of epiphany, which led the girl to shed her self-gratifying amusements.²³ Mary once had told a friend that she would not stand godmother to her daughter because she could not promise “for another what I have never performed myself—to make a solemn vow to renounce for the child those pomps and vanities of the world in which I so much delight.” Now she agonized over her willful nature and asked God to lead her away “from pride, selfishness, indolence.”²⁴

Mary Anna Randolph Custis, by Auguste Hervieu, 1830.
COURTESY OF THE LEE FAMILY AND ARLINGTON HOUSE, THE ROBERT E. LEE MEMORIAL, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

So it was that two spirits came together in the summer of 1830, both buffeted by loss and uncertainty, one homeless and unsettled, the other committed to pursuing a new and demanding path. When weather and water halted the operations at Cockspur Island, Lieutenant Lee was granted a furlough, and he chose to spend it in the company of his kin in northern Virginia. Those who encountered him around this time, at Kinloch, Eastern View, Ravensworth, and Arlington, remembered Robert Lee as “bright, animated and charming.” Lee had inherited his mother’s dark curls and rich coloring—he always referred to his complexion as “black” and laughed at his perpetually red nose. It is to this he is referring when he asked Captain Talcott if his little friend was still “as Bwack as Wee.” The eyes that would one day smolder on the battlefield were hazel brown in the parlor, framed by elegantly curving eyebrows. Everyone commented on his fine appearance in uniform and his lovely manners, but mostly they remembered his enjoyment of flirtation and repartee—“as full of life, fun, and particularly of teasing, as any of us.”²⁵

Just what led the two childhood friends to move from cousinly friendship to lovers’ intimacy, we do not know. In 1824 Robert was apparently courting all the neighborhood belles; his brother Carter laughed at “the old fellow Bob” trying to choose between several Washington beauties and two Miss Campbells: “I left him there a fortnight since in the picturesque situation of the ass starving between two bundles of hay.”²⁶ There is some indication that Robert, for all his flirtation, was hesitant when it came to serious courtship. He enlisted his sister to transmit his admiring thoughts to Mary, and shows uncertainty in his earliest letters to her. Among Carter Lee’s papers was a two-part poem, entitled “Robert to Miss Polly”—Polly being a nickname for Mary. In it Robert laments that Miss Polly has so many beaux “That I alas! must be of those / Who dare not meet such charms as hers.” In the answering couplet Miss Polly remonstrates: “Tell him that faint-heart never won Fair Lady…/None but the brave deserve the fair.”²⁷ Perhaps it was this encouragement that bolstered his spirit; in any case, around the spring of 1830 Lee’s letters begin to show a marked interest in Mary Custis. “Tell [her],” he wrote to his brother Carter, who was staying at Arlington, “that if she thinks I am going to stay here after you go away, without hearing any thing of her…she is very much mistaken. So…she must write to me & if she does not I’ll tell her mother. Or if she will say that I may write to her, she will have to answer me through common politeness.”²⁸

That summer the romance grew more serious, leading to their engagement by September. The glimpses we have of their courtship are endearing: Mary resisting the advances of “worldly young gentlemen who flattered my vanity & pleased me in spite of myself”; Robert buying flowers that he could not afford for Mary and all of her visiting friends; the two reading Sir Walter Scott together in the wide breezy hall parlor at Arlington; a laughing pair as they walked or rode together in the estate’s luxuriant park.²⁹ According to one family tradition it was while Mary was cutting Robert a piece of fruitcake in the Arlington dining room that he leaned toward her and asked her to share his life.³⁰ By the time Robert had to return to Savannah, Miss Custis could write the delicious news to her friends. “Never was I surrounded with more of the joys of life than at this time,” she confided to one of her girlhood companions. “I am engaged to one to whom I have been long attached—Robert Lee.”³¹ The prospective groom also announced the betrothal. “Strange things have happened here this Summer,” he wrote to Carter from Arlington on September 22. “Charles Henry is engaged. Marietta T. is engaged & last though not least I am engaged to Miss Mary C…. That is, she & her mother have given their consent. But the Father has not yet made up his mind, though it is supposed will not object.”³²

They would see nothing of each other in the coming months, but they commenced an exchange of letters that hint at both their closeness and the individuality of each partner. When Robert left Arlington, he took with him a present from Mary: a book of her favorite sermons. He expressed appreciation, but longed so much to see her that the verses swam before his eyes, and while she was contemplating the love of God, he was overtaken by more worldly desires.³³ She encouraged him to write as much as he could, and allowed that her mother no longer thought it necessary to read his missives—“So you are perfectly at liberty to say what you please”—adding demurely that she trusted his “discretion to say only what is right.”³⁴ And he did say just what he pleased. He spoke of his delight in her person, of his longing, and of his desperate loneliness. The stack of love letters he left are among his most agreeable, crackling with sexual tension, filled with irreverent pokes at the military, and always seasoned with his disarming humor. “Do you ever think of me my own sweet Mary?” he taunted her, expressing his frustration at the army that kept him so far away. “I will ask the General for a Furlough & if he will not grant it I will take it. For I declare I cannot wait any longer. And He & his Uncle Sam may go to—France—For what I care.”³⁵ “I wish you were here today to amuse me,” Mary rejoined. “I wish for you very often, though I am still content.”³⁶ Then they waited: for George Washington Parke Custis to give his consent; for Mary to stop hesitating about the date; and for Robert Lee to get a furlough long enough to celebrate the marriage.

Evidently Custis did have reservations—Mary admitted that her father had “not given a decided consent,” and her fiancé continued for some time to speak of the upcoming wedding in conjectural terms.³⁷ Robert allowed that he was “the worst coward” when it came to speaking to her father and cringed at the thought that the decision “should be the wrong one.”³⁸ It may have been reluctance to give up his only daughter that caused Custis to hesitate, but it seems to have been a cautionary feeling about the prospects of Lieutenant Lee. Courtship and matchmaking were a serious business in the early nineteenth century, when not just happiness, but progeny and prosperity were at stake. As an only child, Mary was an important heiress. Her expectations included thousands of acres of prime Virginia land, nearly 200 slaves, and the beautiful seat at Arlington. In addition, William Fitzhugh had sired no children, and his vast property was left to his widow Anna Maria during her lifetime and then to his niece, Mary Custis. She was also Martha Washington’s granddaughter, and the Mount Vernon tradition was her birthright. Quite simply, there were few in the United States that could claim a place in society of equal rank. Robert Lee, for all his personal qualities and historic family ties, could not hope to match this. He had a share in some land in the Blue Ridge Mountains—the remnants of Light-Horse Harry’s folly—and a few slaves, but nothing that would compare to the Custis patrimony.

Then there was the question of his career. Americans liked war heroes, but they were skeptical about the attributes of regular army officers, whose reputation had been sullied by the frequently disreputable performance of their brethren in the militia. Custis, who had served for a short time as a staff officer during the War of 1812, knew exactly what army life entailed, with its rough men, rough posts, and rough pay, not to mention constant absences from family and friends. Army officers expected their wives to follow them loyally, despite deprivation, and Lee believed in this credo, once telling a military bride that she should never “desert her post, which is by your husband’s side.”³⁹ Mary’s father had watched his sister Nelly sink into constant worry when her daughter married a soldier, and he may have been unwilling to accept the same kind of anxiety.⁴⁰ The Custis family was hardly unique in these attitudes. General Winfield Scott had also struggled with a prospective father-in-law who insisted he must make a choice between the army and his bride. The father of Jefferson Davis’s first wife refused his consent on the same grounds, though he was himself an army officer. When Davis and the young woman married without the father’s blessing, it led to a lifelong estrangement.⁴¹ Whatever pressure was put on Lee, we know that he resisted. “But what are you talking of Weddings, & my resigning?” he challenged his brother. “The Wedding, if there is one, will not be till next Spring (so she says). And I am not going to resign till God knows when, for I don’t.”⁴²

The real sticking point, however, was the doubt Light-Horse Harry and his eldest son had created about the desirability of the Lee men. The Custises had remained loyal to their Lee cousinry through debt, villainy, scandal, and flight, but the marriage of their only daughter with one of that clan was a different matter. The recent resurrection of Henry Lee’s troubles was not a ringing endorsement for a young man intent on proving his worth to one of the great heiresses of the land.⁴³ His brothers might insist that he was “good enough for any woman,” with accomplishments that were “already considerable,” but six months after the betrothal Custis had still not given his blessing. Lee considered writing to him again, terrified at what the outcome might be.⁴⁴ It was Mary who finally screwed up the courage to speak to her father on the matter, and persuade him that Robert was his own man. Hugely relieved, Robert wrote in appreciation to his bride: “If you ‘felt so grateful’ to your Father for his kindness, what must I feel…. I only wish that his ‘approbation’ in the one case was as well founded as his ‘objections’ in the other. Of these no one can be more sensible than myself, or less able to devise a remedy. But should I be able to escape the sins into which they have fallen, I hope the blame which is justly their due, will not be laid to me.”⁴⁵

The Lees also had questions about the alliance. Mary’s spontaneous conversion was well known among the family members, and they were worried that it might prove oppressive for the disinclined Robert. Revivalism was popular in the early nineteenth century, and the Lee brothers whispered that it had “afflicted the sweet girl with a little of that over-righteousness which the blue-lights brought into Virginia.” Carter, for one, hoped the impending marriage would “cure her mind of this disorder.”⁴⁶ Henry was also surprised by the match, for he was certain “that Robert cannot be older than Miss Custis.”⁴⁷ He appears to have been nearly correct about this, for the family Bible shows clear tampering with her birth date, changing it from October 1807 to 1808. The earlier date is validated by a letter written in December 1807, praising Mrs. Custis’s new daughter, unequivocally identified as “Mary Anna Randolph.” Another note, also penned months before the date in the Bible entry, was addressed to “my dear little cherub Mary Anna.”⁴⁸

Most important, Mary had her own qualms about the match. It was she who insisted on waiting nearly a year to be wed, opting for postponement even as the day grew close. Women of this time were far from giddy about the prospect of marriage, and more likely than men to view the transition with foreboding. Concerned about separation from their families and the gamble they were making on their future, many young women were inclined to prolong the engagement period. Betrothal initiated a time of withdrawal from the support and laughter of a girlhood circle and a wary entry into the responsibilities of adulthood. An engagement also signaled the end of the heady period of courtship, the one time in her life a belle could count on the deference of men, which was apt to disappear as soon as the flirtation stopped. Nothing illustrates this so starkly as the remarks made by MEA Lewis, a few years after her cousin Mary Custis was married. “The gentlemen in this District seldom find a Lady interesting enough after she is engaged to ride to see her…. My Cousin Mrs Lee and Mrs Powell…spent the winter after they were engaged here; and not one of their numerous acquaintances called once to see them. Sad! Sad! is it not.”⁴⁹ For women, marriage could also mean the loss of personal liberty and the beginning of an existence in which a man’s wishes shaped her fate. Alexis de Tocqueville, who arrived in America the year the Lees were wed, observed that unmarried girls in America were relatively free in comparison to their European sisters, but that “the independence of women is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony.”⁵⁰ Added to this was the loss of virginity, a pivotal event for most young women, and the very real fear of mortality during childbirth. In light of these factors, marriage for many girls denoted separation and death as much as it did union and fresh life.⁵¹

Mary Custis had all of these issues to consider as she contemplated what she called her “new situation.” She was far from single-minded in her desire to wed. She discussed the advantages of spinsterhood with Robert’s sister, frustrated her fiancé by repeatedly delaying the wedding, and would one day caution her daughters and others of marriageable age to appreciate their “blessed” single state and not be in a hurry to leave it.⁵² She was additionally concerned with the way her forthcoming responsibilities might impact her religious contemplation. Her search for faith was entirely genuine, and indeed dominated the year prior to her wedding. Though the rounds of visiting relatives continued, and Mary would express pleasure at being immersed in the “joys of life,” the diary she kept in 1830-31 is filled only with her desire to find peace in biblical principles, overcome worldly aspirations, and serve her God. She believed her fiancé did not exhibit enough spirituality, and once remarked that he lacked “the one thing needful without which all the rest may prove valueless.”⁵³ She spent much of their engagement year proselytizing to a good-humored, but unrepentant, Robert.⁵⁴ Lee is never mentioned directly in her writings, and only indirectly in terms of apprehension about the distraction he might cause to her spiritual quest. “O Lord suffer me not to be drawn aside from Thee in the new situation I am about to enter on,” she prayed two weeks before the nuptials, “but with a single eye may therein live to thy service & by a blameless life & conservation endeavor to shew forth thy praise.”⁵⁵

Mary was conflicted enough that, after postponing the wedding several times, she would have begged a few months more, but the impatient Robert plunged ahead and officially requested a furlough for late June 1831. When Mary tried to put the day off just two weeks before the wedding, Robert teasingly pointed at the courage “oozing out at your finger ends,” but firmly added: “No Miss Molly it is too late to change your mind now….”⁵⁶ Then it was Robert’s turn to feel nervous. “The day has been fixed and it is the 30th of June,” he informed Carter. “I can tell you I begin to feel right funny when I count my days.”⁵⁷ With only a few weeks to plan for the event, both bride and groom began to make hurried preparations. Robert had originally wanted the simplest sort of ceremony: he romantically imagined arriving at Arlington in the dewy dawn with a minister in tow and intercepting Mary on her morning walk. But the Custises had other ideas, and finally Robert acquiesced with a perceptible groan.⁵⁸ Anticipating a house full of guests, Mary and her mother beseeched relatives and friends to loan cake baskets, mattresses, candlesticks, and servants. Robert was concerned by his attire, and anxiously sent Smith on a chase for epaulettes and implored Carter to deal with the tailor. “I believe I will wear my uniform coat on the important night,” he told his brother, “& therefore the white pantaloons must be in character…. Let the material of all be the best &don’t let him charge toomuch.”⁵⁹ Mary chose a half dozen bridesmaids, and Robert struggled to find an equal number of available groomsmen. Standing with the bride were cousins and childhood friends. Smith Lee was best man, and Robert’s West Point and army colleagues filled out the male side. Lee tried to entice both Andrew Talcott and Carter to come. “Can you come on to see it well done?” he asked anxiously, then held out an enticement: “I am told there are to be Six pretty bridesmaids, Misses Mason, Mary G., Martha, Angela, Julia & Brittania & you could have some fine kissing. For you know what a fellow you are at these weddings.”⁶⁰ In the end neither Carter nor Talcott could attend, and Lee left Old Point alone on June 29, stopping one final time at the flower shop, where so much of his precious lieutenant’s pay had been spent. He rode up “pale and breathless,” the florist recalled, “and cried out as he approached, ‘Pierce, old boy, make me six bouquets, and don’t spare pains or expense. It’s the last you will get out of me, for I am going to be married on Thursday night, and then the girls may gather wild flowers.’”⁶¹

Robert Lee in the dress uniform of a lieutenant of engineers, by William E. West, 1838.
WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY

The night of the wedding was one of steady rain, but guests remembered that the bride’s “beautiful home was most happy and bright.”⁶² The minister, the Reverend Reuel Keith, was caught in a shower while riding to Arlington, arrived drenched to the skin, and was obliged to dress in the clothes of Mr. Custis, who was several inches shorter and wider than he. The situation caused much glee among the wedding party, but dignity was restored when the parson covered his ill-fitting garments with clerical robes. Tradition says that Nelly Custis Lewis was there to play the piano as Mary came down the stairs with her father, and that a bell of flowers hung from the graceful arches of the parlor where the couple stood. Bridesmaid Marietta Turner would write that her cousin, “always a modest and affectionate girl, was never lovelier and Robert Lee with his bright eyes and high color was the picture of a cavalier.”⁶³ The service was conducted “in a quiet way” and, as Robert tells us, was solemn enough to remind him of a death warrant. Mary was nervous—her hand shook as Robert held it—and the groom seems to have been a bit intimidated as well, self-deprecatingly describing his feelings as “bold as a sheep.”

After the ceremony there was a supper and dancing, and the celebration carried over to the servants’ quarters, where it was said that unlimited food and drink were provided.⁶⁴ The party kept going for several days in an atmosphere that Dolley Madison liked to term “Virginia hilarity.”⁶⁵ Washington’s punch bowl was filled to the brim each night, and Mr. Custis would allow the company to drink until the hull of the frigate painted in the bottom came into view—then everyone was sent to bed. Flirtation and jesting were the chief occupations of the wedding guests. Bridesmaid Angela Lewis reported that some of the gentlemen were more enticing than others, one of the groomsmen nearly spoiling the merriment by being unable to converse on anything “other than sensible subjects.”⁶⁶ The whole party then traveled on to neighboring estates for a continuation of the festivities. Evidently such extended wedding parties were a purely Virginia custom, for when Lee tried to explain the whole business to Georgian Jack Mackay, he had to give up. “It is useless for me to tell you of the doings on such occasions. Come to Virginia, get married, and then you will know it.”⁶⁷

Some of the friends brought gifts: a pair of delicate etched-glass decanters that were given to the Lees can still be seen at Arlington. More enduring still were the sentimental memories of the event. “The evening was one long to be remembered,” concluded bridesmaid Marietta Turner many years later. “The elegance and simplicity of the bride’s parents, presiding over the feast, and the happiness of the grinning servants…remain in my memory as a piece of Virginia life pleasant to recall.”⁶⁸

“I take this occasion to congratulate you on the happy Union of Robert & Miss Custis they are worthy of each other,” wrote Lee’s first cousin, Zaccheus Collins Lee, a few days after their wedding.⁶⁹ Cousin Zaccheus’s comments proved insightful. The marriage of Robert and Mary Lee would become a partnership of unusual equality, the strength of each spouse reinforcing the relationship—but not without some sparks in the burnishing.

It is tempting to view the Custis-Lee wedding as the merger of two old and distinguished Virginia houses. Some have gone so far as to hint that Mary had few available options, and that Lee’s motive for the marriage was to revive his family’s reputation and fortune. Robert Lee’s status and financial security were undoubtedly enhanced by the union, but his courtship letters show him to be passionately smitten. Moreover, the old assumption of matrimony-as-business was radically changing by the 1830s. The popular eighteenth-century view had been that marriage was either an unapologetic economic alliance or a coupling fitted for low, snickering humor. In the early years of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes were shifting in favor of relationships grounded in friendship and mutual support. Marriage with a true companion, which eased the burdens of life and inspired introspection and self-sacrifice, was seen to be part of the happiness that Americans were entitled to pursue. In a culture that still legally and socially curbed the freedom of women, a “companionate” marriage—one in which the partners showed care and understanding—could help bridge the gender difference and overcome social restrictions. Some scholars have proposed a pattern for southern marriages that was based on starkly separate worlds for husband and wife, in which male patriarchs consciously isolated women by expecting them to live up to unrealistic ideals, or established nonnegotiable boundaries that often resulted in hostility and bitterness. Such a model has no resonance for the Lees’ marriage, which embraced the individuality of both partners, and even on bad days was predicated on communication and mutual commitment.⁷⁰

During their engagement Robert Lee had been the more ardent of the two, and it appears that from the outset he also liked the reality of the connubial state more than did his wife. Early on he told Jack Mackay that he “would not be unmarried for all you could offer me. Hope never again to interfere in the remotest way with the prerogatives of you Bachelors. A Bad life (for me) to lead, Flat, stale & unprofitable.”⁷¹ In this he seems to have been typical of men of his age, who saw marriage as a refuge from the strains of career competition and enjoyed not only the regular sexual contact, but the domestic comfort and community they received in it. In general during the antebellum period men were also in control of their homes, and the pursuits of the family were frequently ordered around their pleasure.⁷² Women were more skeptical of the arrangement, which often resulted in a jolting drop from the status of beloved daughter to that of subservient wife, or put high-reaching individuals in conflict with personal goals. They could also find themselves subordinated to the unreasonable whims of their husbands—or to household drudgery, the rigors of childbearing, societal constraints, and inequitable laws.⁷³

Mary Lee seems also to have been typical here. Her earliest comment on her “new situation,” penned four days after the nuptials, showed concern that “in the circumstances with which I am surrounded my poor vain foolish heart has been too much drawn aside from Thee, Oh my Father….” Throughout her life she continued to feel anxiety about the way marriage distracted her from her devotions.⁷⁴ Clearly claustrophobic, she went a step further and defined a distinctive role for herself, which was independent of either the expectations of society or those of her husband. From her perspective, this was totally appropriate. Mary was certainly Robert’s intellectual and cultural equal, and his superior in social rank. She read four newspapers a day and was used to conversing with the leading figures of the nation, who had shared the family table since she was a child. She had grown confident in this environment, where her opinions were respected. She also came from a long line of spirited Custis women who had been tough and durable enough to challenge male authority. Her mother had lobbied effectively for both religious and social reform, and she counted some incipient feminists among her acquaintances, including Robert’s younger sister.⁷⁵ She saw few reasons to follow unquestioningly her husband’s lead in matters where she trusted her own judgment. “Altho’ my accounts may not seem to you very clear according to your nice mode of keeping yours,” Mary shot back when Robert appeared to question her handling of the family finances, “there is no one more particular to pay all I owe to the uttermost farthing. Do not be uneasy about me—”⁷⁶ Moreover, she expected him to project the same independence. “Mr. Lee desires me to say something handsome for him,” she announced when he tried to get her to tend to his social obligations, “but I think he is well able to deliver his own messages—”⁷⁷

Mary Lee also knew her mind in daily living and showed no inclination to conform to Robert’s style. He was patient, painstaking, and often passive; she was quick, creative, and volatile. He delighted in the children and was intensely engaged in their development—she called them “my brats,” suffered neuralgia from the noise and confusion, and easily passed them off to the servants.⁷⁸ Like her father, Mary cared little for fashion, preferring to dress informally and comfortably, if not eccentrically, and throughout the nearly forty years of their marriage she exasperated Lee by appearing in clothes he felt were unsuitable. The stories about her wardrobe are wonderful. She once was seen at a fashionable resort in a calico dress and blue cotton stockings she had knit herself. She made a frantic search for gloves before an important address by her father, and when they could not be found donned a tatty old pair that were entirely “unharmonious with the rest of her dress.” During a party before the war Lee surreptitiously approached a female acquaintance and said, “Will you please tell Mrs. Lee that her [under]skirt is longer than her dress? If I tell her she will pay no attention to it.”⁷⁹ Once when Mary had been ill, her hair became so snarled in bed that “on her first sitting up took the scissors & cut it all off.” When it started growing out, she again became annoyed, and, Lee told a friend, “when I left today she talked of having it shaved off and I expect on my return to find her bald.”⁸⁰ Mary Lee similarly dismissed her husband’s obsession with household order and punctuality, which she saw as the unpleasant harping of a martinet. “Tell the Ladies that they are aware that Mrs. L. is somewhat addicted to laziness & forgetfulness in her Housekeeping,” Lee only half jokingly told the Talcotts, and to Mary he implied that the slave Cassy, whom he had previously disdained, was the superior housekeeper. Mary’s response was to tell her mother, who scolded Robert for his nagging.⁸¹

The dissimilar personalities caused real frictions in the early years of their marriage, and voices were often raised. Robert “does scold me early & late,” Mary complained. Lee groused in his turn, describing how he had “so many accounts to settle” with his wife and announcing publicly that her “forte is to give advice.”⁸² When Robert failed to provide enough information on the doings of some favorite cousins, a shouting match ensued. “My dame made many an exclamation at these omissions which I echoed back in the profoundest manner,” Lee admitted, “notwithstanding which the Sin was visited upon poor innocent me, because ‘that was just my way,’ & ‘so unsatisfactory.’”⁸³ As the years went on, however, they learned to accept their differences and, where compromise could not be found, to narrow the gap between them. Mary became a tolerable housekeeper, and Robert tried to stop bullying. “I don’t know that I shall ever overcome my propensity for order & methodology,” he admitted to his wife. “But I will try. And as I have lately learned such good reasons against it I hope they will weaken my idea of their necessity, which will tend much to diminish my predilection.”⁸⁴ One of the Lee children recalled how their contradictory perceptions of timeliness came to be accommodated. “My father was the most punctual man I ever knew…. He used to appear some minutes before the rest of us, in uniform, jokingly rallying my mother for being late, and for forgetting something at the last moment. When he could wait no longer for her, he would say he was off and would march along to church by himself….”⁸⁵

Robert and Mary Lee had grown up together, were distantly related, and had a commonality of background that should have made for a smooth entry into married life. Unfortunately, in addition to their strong and distinct personalities, they had a third party to contend with: the U.S. Army. The requirements of the military and Mary’s intense love for Arlington were at odds with each other, causing the most serious disagreement of their marriage. Shortly before their marriage, Robert Lee predicted that Mary, sheltered for so long, might have trouble adjusting. He was soon proven right. She began to be homesick almost immediately after her wedding, describing herself forlornly to a friend as “a wanderer on the face of the earth and know not where we are going next.”⁸⁶ Her husband, still in honeymoon spirits, was stunned when she returned to her mother just months into the marriage. It was the beginning of a lifelong pattern, whereby both partners felt drawn to the Custis estate, but diverged on whether it should become their permanent home. At the beginning Lee addressed the situation with humor: “Just as I have despaired of ever hearing from you again, my dear Mary, & was consulting with Dick how he & I could cut our throats in the easiest manner, one of the Boatman stepped up & said there were two letters on my table…[this] makes two long weeks since I last heard from you. This will never do Molly….”⁸⁷ Soon, however, he grew more serious, questioning whether they should be apart and whether dependence on her family was a wise choice, even in the short term.⁸⁸ He was up against some formidable opponents. His mother-in-law, as well as a host of allied relatives, encouraged Mary to remain at her parents’ home. Believing that her mother was ill, she lingered at Arlington, and when she returned to Old Point she brought Molly Custis with her.⁸⁹

Society expected a wife to cleave to her husband’s bosom—the popular image of the time was of a vine clinging to a sturdy oak. However, as a friend would proudly observe, Mary Lee “never did come to heel.”⁹⁰ In the 1790s her grandmother, Ann Randolph Fitzhugh, had written a finely crafted booklet for her daughters, which counseled finding a man of understanding and then “falling in with his inclinations as much as possible.” If Mary ever saw this well-intentioned advice, she ignored it.⁹¹ Her strongest allegiance was already fixed to her parents, and her religiosity had also given her something that consoled, guided, and fulfilled her that was outside of her husband. She was never disloyal or unsupportive, but she had an identity beyond matrimony and chose to honor it. Robert teased her about her independent ways, calling her the “vixen in the family, whose husband tried in vain to conquer her.”⁹² He was clearly unhappy with her hesitation to fully embrace the army life he had chosen. “This is a terrible life we lead Molly, unsatisfactory, profitless & irksome,” he wrote once when she had left him to return to Arlington.⁹³ One again feels his discomfort in the counsel he gave a new army bride in the 1850s. Cautioning her not to desert her husband, he advised, “I consider it fatal to the future happiness of young married people, upon small provocation, to live apart…. The result is invariably that they cease to be essential to each other.”⁹⁴ Of course Mary Lee did take on the burdens of army life to a considerable degree. In the years before the Civil War she traveled to every one of Robert’s posts, save the Mexican War and the wilderness of Texas, spending more than half of her life at military outposts. But she felt lonely and awkward in new places, and thus the tension continued until the day the war forced them to flee Arlington.⁹⁵ Mary saw their destiny as an extension of her childhood, with its loving care and family associations. Robert wanted a more autonomous profile, a life that included his kin, but also moved beyond their boundaries. In the end both got their way: Arlington remained home, and Lee held on to the army, which gave him the freedom and adventure he needed.⁹⁶

It is fascinating to read about this marriage, which appears so familiar to modern sensibilities. Neither partner chose to relinquish personal desires completely, yet both contrived to maintain the viability of the relationship. Robert realized he should stop moralizing and bring joy into the household, and Mary grew to understand her role in enhancing their life together rather than indulging her own amusement. They fought it out or toughed it out, and in the end they were able to look beyond their differences to build a hard-wearing bond, characterized by affection, humor, and cooperation. Contrast the tone of this circa 1852 letter from Mary to her mother with the couple’s arguments twenty years earlier. “Robert proposed to me last week to go on & stay with you ‘till the first of August but…he really leads such a fatiguing life I thought he’ ought to have some comfort at home….”⁹⁷ They endured years of separation, but it gave them a chance to appreciate each other and to savor some little prerogatives that were not available within a confined relationship. For her part, Mary came to revere her husband’s “excellent judgment” and to be as proud of him as she was of her illustrious ancestry.⁹⁸ The marriage was perhaps more essential to Robert than to Mary Lee—he writes as if adrift whenever apart from her—but it provided important emotional substance to them both. Perhaps more than anything they were friends, and their love shines through in hundreds of letters we were never meant to read. “I am always longing for the hour that will again unite us & more & more wish for its arrival,” Robert wrote tenderly in 1835; and then a few years later: “I am anxious, my dear Mary, to get back to see you all…. I dream of you and the dear little children nearly every night.” As the army ordered him to Texas in 1860, he lamented, “It was very sad to leave you and my departure grows harder to bear with years.” And, most poignantly, on June 30, 1864, from the trenches of besieged Petersburg: “Do you remember what a happy day thirty-three years ago this was. How many hopes and pleasures it gave birth to!”⁹⁹ Mary, less demonstrative in her letters, revealed her deep attachment in prayer, calling on God to “take that loved one of my soul under thy fatherly care.”¹⁰⁰ When death finally parted them, she deeply missed his “strong arm and loving heart” and admitted she knew not how to “continue my weary pilgrimage alone.”¹⁰¹