In the early 1860s, Robert E. Lee received a peculiar memento. It was a slim leather-bound book, the lengths of its linen pages covered with scrawl. Flipping through the brittle pages, among the fragmented quotes and history lessons, he saw his own name.
The book was a gift from J. H. Chandler, whose own father had found it among a bundle of papers years before. The elder Chandler had treasured the artifact for some time; its author and original owner was “the right-hand man of Washington,” known posthumously as “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, in homage to his now fabled revolutionary exploits.1
It was the diary of the father Lee had barely known, arriving amidst a war tearing apart the Union he had helped found. That Robert—Lee’s youngest son, whose name would forever be linked to and overshadow his own—had by chance inherited it was incongruous.
Lee’s oldest son, Henry IV, had received his namesake’s love of words, command of history, and political talents. For a time, he had sat in Virginia’s legislature. Carrying on another family tradition, he married well, winning the hand of Anne Robinson McCarty, the wealthy heiress of Pope’s Creek Plantation.
But he flamed out spectacularly, seducing his eighteen-year-old sister-in-law and ward Betsy McCarty while his wife was mourning the death of their newborn daughter. Disgrace and poverty followed, Stratford Hall slipped through his hands, what little pride the family retained was finally humbled, and the sobriquet “Black-Horse” attached to his name. He found some use for his talents crafting rhetoric for Andrew Jackson before dying in Paris in 1837 and being laid to rest in an unmarked grave on the hill-top village of Montmartre.2
His younger half-brother, Charles Carter Lee, settled in Washington, DC after graduating from Harvard. Like his father, he was a bon-vivant, a storyteller, and an eager if unsuccessful entrepreneur. Carter wrote of Henry Lee admiringly and fondly, remembering his “mighty powers,” describing his mellifluous voice as a “trumpet with a silver sound,” and recalling their happy days together.3 Charles Carter’s casual and never-published memoirs painted a luminous and loving picture of his childhood and a happy life at Stratford Hall—an experience not shared by his parents.
As adults, the two eldest surviving sons defended their father’s legacy and memory, corresponding with and picking the now failing brains of Henry Lee’s friends and allies, men such as James Madison and John Marshall. These exercises ultimately formed a historical shield against the counter-narrative valorizing Thomas Jefferson. The third president’s court historians had hurried to redeem his conduct as governor of Virginia during the Revolution and undermine not only Henry Lee’s chronicle of the era but even his military achievements. The accusation that Jefferson had abandoned Richmond upon Benedict Arnold’s arrival had greatly angered the Sage of Monticello. In 1815, he labeled the originator of this accusation “the lying Lee” and described his memoirs as no more than a “historical novel” full of “romances” written for “the amusement of credulous and uninquisitive readers.”4
The younger Lees’ research and rebuttal culminated in a publication written by Henry IV and edited by Charles Carter that swatted away the “vague charge of malicious slander” leveled at their father. Their Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, with Particular Reference to the Attack They Contain on the Memory of the Late Gen. Henry Lee; In a Series of Letters combed through years of correspondence, offered pointed commentary, and argued, witheringly, that “abuse from Mr. Jefferson affords not the slightest proof of demerit, since he heaped it on the heads of the most illustrious men of his country.”5
For the two younger boys, Sydney Smith and Robert, Light-Horse Harry Lee was a more remote figure. Though they had hardly known him in life, they had heard stories about his battlefield exploits, had glimpsed his pistol and sword, and were drawn to a soldier’s life no doubt in part because of his outsized legacy.
With Smith away from home in the U.S. Navy, his sister Anne crippled by tuberculosis of the bone, and Mildred still of tender age, Robert assumed the role of companion and caretaker for his widowed and enfeebled mother. Anne Lee leaned on her youngest son for both domestic and emotional support; the boy proved to be the steadfast companion to his mother that her own husband had not been, charioting her about Alexandria, helping to keep house, mixing her medicines, and even lovingly endeavoring to cheer her during her continual bouts of depression.6
“How can I live without Robert?” Anne is said to have cried when the boy, succumbing to the family calling, departed for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1825. “He is both son and daughter to me.”7 After graduation in the summer of 1829 Lee returned to Virginia; on July 10, Anne Lee died at Ravensworth, the Fairfax home owned by the Fitzhugh family, with Robert at her side.8
Robert E. Lee’s professional and personal life looked nothing like his father’s. At West Point he was the consummate cadet, placing second in his class. The pace of his career was slow and steady, in contrast with Light-Horse Harry’s meteoric rise. Noticeably absent from his character were the stormy ambition and ego-fueled petulance that had earned the elder Lee equal numbers of admirers and enemies.
Exhibiting a gift for military engineering, Lee was given assignments in Georgia, then back in Virginia, then in Washington. In 1837 he went west to help redirect the current of the Mississippi River around the city of St. Louis, winning a promotion to captain in the process.
He acquired a modicum of glory during America’s 1846–48 war with Mexico, when he tasted battle and witnessed its carnage for the first time. Lee’s brilliant reconnaissance work before the battles of Cerro Gordo and Contreras endeared him to General Winfield Scott, one of that war’s great heroes. What came after this was a distinguished though decidedly journeyman-like career, with postings in Baltimore and surveying work in Florida, before his 1852 appointment as superintendent of West Point.9 After three years on the Hudson, he departed for the Texas frontier.
Robert Lee had married Mary Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington in 1831; her father, George Washington Parke Custis, had built his home, Arlington House, high on an incline overlooking the Potomac and Washington, DC. He filled its rooms with relics inherited from the nation’s first first couple, his grandmother and step-grandfather who had also been his adoptive father. Upon his death in 1857, this shrine to Washington, the man Robert Lee’s father had so revered, was willed to Lee.10
Custis had initially balked at the notion of his daughter marrying a member of the disgraced Lee clan. Robert was aware of the cloud of shame created by his father and elder half-brother, but could do little about it. “Of these no one can be more sensible than myself, or less able to devise a remedy,” he wrote to Mary before their marriage. “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.”11
And in fact Robert E. Lee’s conduct was starkly different from that of his disgraced father and brother. He cared tenderly for his often-ill wife and doted on their children; though during his frequent absences from home he fretted that they would never know him, as he had never known his own father. He feared and avoided debt and unwise investment—physic dreads no doubt lingering from childhood.
Where Henry had been reckless, Robert wielded nearly tyrannical self-control. The father’s Deist faith, typical of many of the founders, was characterized by love of reason and inquiry and reverence for virtue, but suspicion of superstition. The son was a devout Episcopalian, praying and poring over the Bible daily.12 The elder Lee was optimistic to the point of irrationality; Charles Carter claimed it was “a disposition to aim too high, or at too much” which “ruined my great father.”13 The youngest Lee boy was burdened by self-doubt and his own perceived failures as a soldier and as a family man.14
By intention or intuition, Robert E. Lee learned from Henry Lee’s mistakes. He could not, though, forever outride heredity and history.
By the time Lee was stationed at West Point, the nation was in the midst of a paroxysm like those that had bedeviled his father’s generation. States were pitted against one other and in opposition to the federal government. Only this struggle was over a different issue: the fate of slavery and the southern economy and way of life and, ultimately, whether the promises etched in the Constitution that Lee’s father had defended passionately applied to all Americans. And it would not be settled with compromise or a strategic display of federal power.
In the fall of 1860 the badly fractured electorate made Abraham Lincoln, a moderate representative of the recently formed Republican Party, president. Finding the Illinoisan intolerable because of his opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, the southern states, starting with South Carolina that December, began to pull away from the Union. Robert Lee watched the dissolution with horror. He wondered—asking himself a question that would have pleased his father—what George Washington would have made of this budding rebellion. “How his spirit would be grieved could he see the wreck of his mighty labors!” he exclaimed to his wife, Mary.15
In the spring of 1861 Lincoln, now in office, labored to organize a force to oppose this southern uprising; the war had begun after Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston.
Winfield Scott, long in the tooth and too plump to find his way into the saddle, remained the highest-ranking general in the nation. Unable to lead men into the field, he suggested that Lee command the American forces defending the nation’s capital. The offer of this assignment was tendered to Lee during an interview with Lincoln’s seasoned political counsellor, Francis P. Blair, in his home adjacent to the Executive Mansion.
Secession was a sin, Robert Lee told his host. But never would he take up arms against his home country—Virginia. That business settled, he left Blair’s house and reported the conversation to Scott. Two days later Lee forwarded the general a formal resignation of his commission. By April 23 he was in command of Virginia’s militia forces.16 Robert E. Lee would never again in his life be an American citizen.17
In the midst of the Civil War that followed, Lee received the parcel containing his father’s dairy; the letter accompanying it called Henry Lee’s memoirs a monument “to the memory of the gallant soldiers who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in our first war independence as their descendants are doing in the second.”18
To J. H. Chandler, who had sent the small book and accompanying letter, Robert E. Lee’s destiny had finally intersected with his father’s. He was leading a glorious rebel army in pursuit of a people’s freedom. Indeed, in war, the spirit of Light-Horse Harry had emerged in Robert E. Lee’s gallant figure, his inspiring sway over men, his tactical improvisation, and his adrenaline-fueled thrill for battle.
At the onset of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, one Lee had stalked across the American lines, his sword covered in blood, his face full of fury. Watching the violent splendor of the unfolding Battle of Fredericksburg from Telegraph Hill nearly eighty years later, another Lee is said to have remarked, “It is well this is so terrible. Otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”19
But their causes were discordant. Henry Lee had departed Virginia in 1794 and marched an army into Pennsylvania to extinguish an uprising against the American government. In 1863, Robert E. Lee left Virginia leading an invading rebel force into Pennsylvania, fighting against that same government.
At every instance when the embryonic Republic was threatened by rebellion or fracture—during Shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, the introduction of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions—Henry Lee had resisted civil war and endorsed a central government protected by a robust standing army.
Alexander Hamilton’s plans to finance the new nation had incensed the elder Lee and even provoked talk of revolt. But his pique had receded because he continually saw the fate of the nation, as well as his own fortunes, tied to a union of the states and their people, North and South. The alternative—disunion fueled by political discord—would inevitably lead, he knew all too well, to civil war, brother slaughtering brother. He had seen it and participated in it during America’s Revolution and wished never to do so again.
Henry Lee had hoped to be remembered in history as a giant, like his hero Washington. He had asked his sons to study that man’s life in hopes that, in his absence, Washington would guide them to the glory he had never grasped. It is not hard to imagine another scenario, where Robert E. Lee accepted Lincoln’s offer of a high command of the federal force, where many of the Confederate Army’s fabled military glories are erased from history, where the son of Henry Lee saves the Union and joins George Washington in the pantheon of great American heroes.
This is all conjecture. And so too is the belief that Henry Lee would have stood against Southern secession or ever contemplated taking up arms against Virginia, his family’s beloved state, the home of his countrymen. It was, after all, not only Robert E. Lee who had sided with the South; Sydney Smith Lee served in the Confederate Navy. He did later regret the rebellion, though.
Henry Lee was a slave owner. And despite condemnations of slavery, common amongst plantation-owning southern founders, Lee made it clear in Congress that he viewed bondsmen as property that the government had no right to interfere with the ownership of.
In 1869, Robert, with research contributed by Charles Carter, composed a biography of his father to be appended to a new printing of his memoirs. This was a largely bland and sanitized portrait of the man, drawn from previous publications as well as some previously unseen letters, themselves abridged.
Lee did make sure, though, to include a passage seemingly aligning his father’s own views with his own role in the recent war, reminding readers that Henry Lee, when governor of Virginia, had stipulated that he would accept no federal command that would construe “disregard or forgetfulness” towards his state.20
In 1817 Allan McLane, who had served unhappily in his Legion, described Henry Lee as “the monster.”21 Samuel Storrow, a cousin of Anne Lee, described him as a “heartless and depraved profligate” who had “died a Vagrant and Beggar.”22 A refrain supposedly fashioned by a Lee family friend went, “Light Horse Harry Lee a fool was born, a fool he lived, and a fool he died.”23
There is no doubt that Henry Lee left behind an outrageously complicated legacy, pockmarked by scandal and self-immolation. His debt-fueled downfall, though not singular among men of his generation, was certainly stunning.
This much is clear, though: from his entrance into Virginia’s dragoons at the age of twenty to his death in the home of Nathanael Greene’s descendants at sixty-two, Lee never lost faith in the nation he had helped bring into being. He never retreated from the loyalty he had expressed at the Virginia ratifying convention: “In all local matters I shall be a Virginian: in those of a general matter, I shall not forget that I am an American.”24
Lee’s faith in America never withered—even after his political fortunes declined, his dreams of wealth were dashed, and his countrymen battered his body for defending the Constitution.
On this score Henry Lee was a great, if greatly flawed, patriot and a man who deserves to be mentioned among the early heroes of the Republic, in contrast to his son Robert, whose own decisions and definition of country continue to confound and divide, even to the present day.
In 1862, while inspecting coastal Confederate defenses, Robert E. Lee made a pilgrimage to the now abandoned Dungeness to visit his father’s grave.25 Eight years later, in 1870, with the Civil War settled, in the midst of his stewardship of Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia, where the old general would spend his final days, he once again traveled to Cumberland Island.
By then the mansion was no more, burned during the war. The Greene family cemetery, though, remained. Accompanied by his daughter Agnes, Lee gazed at the grave of the father whose life had only briefly crossed his own. Before they left, Agnes strewed “beautiful fresh flowers” atop the little plot. A short time later Lee detailed the visit to Mary, calling it “the last tribute of respect” he would ever be able to pay.26 And indeed it was. He died later that same year. His grave is in the chapel in Lexington bearing the Lee name.27
Only weeks before the assault on Fort Sumter, Virginia’s General Assembly had appropriated funds to move Henry Lee’s body from its resting place on Cumberland Island back to his home state. War, however, intervened. His body remained undisturbed.
But over half a century later, in the spring of 1912, Virginia once again reconsidered reclaiming its old hero. Five hundred dollars were allocated to retrieve the body and place it in the Lee Chapel on the campus of Washington and Lee University—the school’s name now amended to recognize Robert’s postbellum efforts as its president.
On May 26, 1913, a state-appointed committee departed Virginia, making its way to Fernandina in northeast Florida by train. They then continued directly to Dungeness by boat to be greeted by representatives of Lucy Carnegie, now the owner of the rebuilt estate.
A small fleet of automobiles guided the party to the graveyard. A warm breeze carried the scent of oleander and jasmine. Magnolias cast their shadows in the cemetery; the moss dangling from live oaks swayed nearby. As the Atlantic waves somberly beat against the shore, the Virginians raised Lee’s body and transferred it to a new casket. It was then sailed back to the mainland and subsequently put on a train for the Old Dominion, reaching the town of Lynchburg on Memorial Day.
There it was greeted by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and a spontaneously gathered crowd. The rector of the town’s Episcopal church delivered brief remarks before the old hero made his final journey, arriving in Lexington on the evening of May 30. Waiting there were students, faculty, and also cadets from the nearby Virginia Military Institute who escorted the remains to the Victorian chapel sitting in the center of campus.
That night they were placed in a crypt alongside those of his youngest son. An American flag covered the casket.28