Robert E. Lee should not be understood as a figure defined primarily by his Virginia identity. As with almost all his fellow American citizens, he manifested a range of loyalties during the late antebellum and wartime years. Without question devoted to his home state, where his family had loomed large in politics and social position since the colonial era, he also possessed deep attachments to the United States, to the white slaveholding South, and to the Confederacy—levels of loyalty that became more prominent, receded, or intertwined at various points. Lee’s commitment to the Confederate nation dominated his actions and thinking during the most famous and important period of his life.
A letter from Lee to former Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard in October 1865 provides an excellent starting point to examine his conception of loyalty. Just six months after he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Lee explained why he had requested a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another,” stated Lee, “and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. The circumstances which govern their actions change; and their conduct must conform to the new order of things.” As so often was the case, Lee looked to his primary hero, George Washington, as an example: “At one time he fought against the French under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain; at another, he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him.”1 Although he did not say so explicitly, Lee’s “desire to do right” surely stemmed from his understanding of duty and honor. That understanding placed him in the uniforms of the United States, the state of Virginia, and the Confederacy within a period of a few weeks in 1861.
Lee’s complex loyalties too often get lost in both scholarly and popular assessments. Few historical figures are as closely associated with their native state. His decision to resign from the U.S. Army and cast his lot with Virginia has inspired intensive discussion. The issue typically is framed in binary terms: Was he, above all, a loyal Virginian or an American? Charles Francis Adams Jr. stands among a large group of authors and other commentators who, over the past century and a half, have stressed Lee’s identity as a Virginian. A Union veteran of the Army of the Potomac whose ancestors had labored alongside Lee’s in forging the nation, Adams addressed the subject in a lecture titled “Shall Cromwell have a Statue?” Speaking to the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity at the University of Chicago in 1902, Adams presented Lee as a man firmly moored to the Old Dominion. “Of him it might, and in justice must, be said,” averred Adams, “that he was more than of the essence, he was of the very quintessence of Virginia. In his case, the roots and fibres struck down and spread wide in the soil, making him of it a part.” Five years later, speaking at Washington and Lee University, Adams made his point even more strongly: “[T]he child’s education begins about two hundred and fifty years before it is born; and it is quite impossible to separate any man—least of all, perhaps, a full-blooded Virginian—from his prenatal traditions and living environment. … Robert E. Lee was the embodiment of those conditions, the creature of that environment,—a Virginian of Virginians.”2
The most influential writer on the topic of Lee’s Virginia identity has been Douglas Southall Freeman, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning R. E. Lee: A Biography remains by far the fullest reckoning of its subject’s life. A proud Virginian himself, Freeman described Lee’s decision to resign from the U.S. Army in a chapter titled “The Answer He Was Born to Make.” “The rapid approach of war,” wrote Freeman, “had quickly and inexorably revealed which were the deepest loyalties of his soul.” Anyone seeking to understand Lee, believed the biographer, need know only that Virginia always remained paramount in his thinking. Freeman reproduced the entire text of Lee’s letter to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, dated April 20, 1861, that announced his resignation and included one of the most frequently quoted sentences Lee ever penned or spoke: “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”3
This idea that Lee’s Virginia identity, as displayed during the secession crisis, holds the key to understanding his life and career retains great vitality. A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon. Terry L. Jones’s The American Civil War, a massive volume published in 2010, observes that “[a]lthough he loved the Union and opposed secession, Lee’s greatest loyalty was to Virginia.” David Goldfield’s America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, which appeared a year after Jones’s book, takes the same tack. “His fealty to his native state of Virginia,” writes Goldfield, “superseded his loyalty to the Union.” The most widely read single volume on the war, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, similarly describes Lee’s decision to leave federal service after Virginia’s secession as “foreordained by birth and blood.” A literature critical of Lee’s generalship that developed between the 1970s and the 1990s likewise stressed the importance of Virginia. Thomas L. Connelly, prominent among those who questioned Lee’s contributions to the Confederate military effort, portrayed a man unable to look past the borders of his home state and thus blind to the conflict’s larger strategic landscape. “His concept of the war effort was almost totally identified with Virginia,” claims Connelly, “and he felt that other theaters were secondary to the eastern front.”4
Lee the parochial Virginian also appears in the realm of popular culture. Two films directed by Ron Maxwell include scenes that highlight the importance of Virginia to Lee’s actions and attitudes. In Gettysburg, an adaptation, released in 1993, of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Lee and his lieutenant James Longstreet discuss their loyalties on the morning of July 2, 1863. Longstreet remarks that his lie with home state and family, a sentiment with which Lee concurs. Neither manifests a significant attachment to the Confederate nation. In Gods and Generals, which appeared a decade after Gettysburg, Lee makes the same point in a scene just prior to the battle of Fredericksburg. “There is something that these Yankees do not understand, will never understand,” comments Lee while gazing across the Rappahannock River toward Ferry Farm, where George Washington had lived. “You see these rivers and valleys and streams, fields, even towns?” he asks with rising emotion. “They are just markings on a map to those people in the War Office in Washington,” but for Lee and Confederates they are birthplaces, burial grounds, and battlefields where their ancestors fought: “They are the incarnation of all our memories and all that we are, all that we are.” Director Maxwell explained his interpretation of Lee, as well as of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, succinctly: “Virginia was their home. They would fight for their home.”5
Although it illuminates only part of the whole story, Lee’s loyalty to Virginia certainly predominated during the momentous spring of 1861. It is useful to chronicle, in abbreviated fashion, his road to resignation from the U.S. Army. Stationed in Texas in early 1861, Lt. Col. Lee watched the Union he had served for more than thirty years drift toward disaster. The election of Abraham Lincoln had triggered South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860. In rapid order, six other states of the Deep South followed suit, including Texas, which departed from the Union on February 1. Shortly after Texas seceded, Lee received orders from Brig. Gen. David Twiggs, who had replaced him in December as head of the Department of Texas, to report to Winfield Scott in Washington. After a sad parting with friends in San Antonio, he began the long journey home, reaching Arlington on March 1.6
The national crisis deepened soon after Lee’s return to Virginia. Jefferson Davis headed a new Confederate government in Montgomery, Alabama, and tensions escalated regarding the fate of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. In early March, Lee met privately for several hours with Gen. Scott, an interview during which the senior commander likely urged his former staff officer to remain in the U.S. Army. Lee’s promotion to colonel of the First U.S. Cavalry Regiment followed on March 16. In the meantime, Confederate secretary of war Leroy Pope Walker offered Lee a brigadier general’s commission in the Confederate army. Walker’s letter, dated March 15, reached Lee after word of the promotion to head the First Cavalry. Lee apparently did not respond to Walker’s letter, but on March 30 he accepted the colonelcy and assignment to command the First Cavalry.7
The final storm broke in mid-April. Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on the twelfth, the federal garrison formally capitulated on the fourteenth, and Lincoln issued a call on the fifteenth for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the rebellion. On April 17, Lee received requests to meet separately with Francis Preston Blair Sr., the patriarch of a famous Democratic family well known to Lee, and Winfield Scott. The meetings took place on the morning of the eighteenth. Empowered by Lincoln to “ascertain Lee’s intentions and feelings” and by Secretary of War Simon Cameron to make an offer to the Virginian, Blair asked Lee to assume command of the army being raised to put down the rebellion. Among several arguments he deployed, Blair said Scott was too old to take the field and observed that the people of the United States looked to Lee as a “representative of the Washington family”—an allusion to Lee’s marriage to Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the daughter of George Washington’s step-grandson. Lee, who thought Blair very “wily and keen,” declined the offer and proceeded immediately to Scott’s office, where he recounted his conversation with Blair and reiterated that he would not accept the proffered command. Tradition has it that Scott, a fellow Virginian, replied, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life; but I feared it would be so.”8
Powerful emotions must have pulled at Lee as he pondered his future that evening and the next day. Word of Virginia’s secession appeared in local newspapers on April 19, and in the early morning hours of April 20 he composed a one-sentence letter of resignation to Cameron. Later that day Lee wrote a much longer letter to Gen. Scott, the penultimate sentence of which contained the already quoted statement with regard to raising his sword only in defense of Virginia.9
The War Department took five days to process Lee’s resignation, which became official on April 25. By then he had received an offer from Governor John Letcher to take command of all Virginia’s military forces. The fifty-four-year-old Lee traveled to Richmond on April 22, checked into the Spotswood Hotel, and then made his way to the capitol. There he talked with Letcher, who explained that discussions within the state convention had resulted in a recommendation that Lee be given charge of Virginia’s troops. Letcher already had dispatched a courier with the offer; that man was en route to Arlington as Lee made his way to Richmond. Lee accepted his native state’s call, and Letcher immediately sent his name forward for confirmation—accompanied by a brief text explaining that Lee had resigned his U.S. commission before learning that a major generalcy would be in the offing from Virginia.10
On the morning of April 23, Lee set up headquarters and wrote his first order, denominated General Orders No. 1. It stated simply: “In obedience to orders from his excellency John Letcher, governor of the State, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee assumes command of the military and naval forces of Virginia.” A four-man delegation soon arrived from the convention to accompany Lee to the capitol. Shortly after noon, the five men entered the building, where the delegates were in private session. As he waited for a few minutes outside the closed room, Lee doubtless contemplated French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s life-size statue of George Washington—his model of military and republican virtue. Walking into a crowded chamber, Lee drew the attention of an audience that included notables such as Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Superintendent Frances H. Smith of the Virginia Military Institute. The welcoming remarks came from John Janney of Loudoun County, a former Whig and the convention’s president. Like Lee and a majority of the delegates to the convention, Janney had opposed secession until Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers.11
Janney offered effusive praise of the new major general, recounting his service in Mexico and situating him alongside earlier Virginia heroes. The vote for Lee had been unanimous, observed Janney, who then summoned the memory of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee’s famous tribute to Washington: “We pray God most fervently that you may so conduct the operations committed to your charge, that it will soon be said of you, that you are ‘first in peace,’ and when that time comes you will have earned the still prouder distinction of being ‘first in the hearts of your countrymen.’” The glowing tribute probably made Lee uncomfortable, especially the suggestion that he might become the Confederacy’s Washington. None in the chamber really could have imagined what we now know to be the truth, that four years of cruel war would raise Lee to a position in the Confederacy very like that of Washington during the American Revolution. After Janney finished, Lee offered a three-sentence acceptance, closing with this: “I devote myself to the service of my native State, in whose behalf alone will I ever again draw my sword.”12
Lee the Virginian indisputably held center stage during the momentous weeks in early 1861. Letters to family members underscored this fact. As he put it to his sister Anne Lee Marshall, “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” Many members of Lee’s extended family were staunch Unionists, including his sister Anne and many cousins, several of whom fought for the United States during the ensuing conflict. Some relatives never again spoke to Lee after he left U.S. service. Within his own household, Mary Anna Custis Lee and most of their children harbored Unionist sympathies. Only one daughter, Mary, fully embraced her father’s decision to resign from the army. Moreover, approximately one-third of all Virginians who had graduated from West Point remained loyal to the United States. Among the six Virginian colonels in U.S. service in the winter of 1861, only Lee resigned his commission. In short, many Virginians, including some very close to Lee, did not consider the severing of long-held ties to the United States to be their only realistic option during the secession crisis.13
Very strong ties to the United States—the second of Lee’s four loyalties under consideration—certainly complicated his decision on April 20. Indeed, much in his background pointed toward a different “Answer He Was Born to Make.” As already noted, George Washington, the greatest of all Virginians, was Lee’s idol, and the Revolutionary general and first president had been a consistent advocate of a national point of view. There would be no nation without Washington, no regular army, no sense of the whole transcending state and local concerns. Lee came from a family of Federalists who believed in a strong nation as well as the need to look after Virginia’s interests. In 1798, his father had opposed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, with their strong advocacy for state power, because they would have denied the national government “the means of preserving itself.” The Virginia Resolutions, Light-Horse Harry Lee argued, “inspired hostility, and squinted at disunion.” If states could encourage citizens to disobey federal laws, “insurrection would be the consequence.”14
Lee’s devotion to the American republic made sense for one who had served it as a gifted engineer, a staff officer who contributed substantively to American victory in the war with Mexico, and a superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He identified the country’s professional soldiers, and most especially graduates of West Point, as impartial national servants whose labors amid dangerous circumstances highlighted the shallowness of petty political bickering. Correspondence with his brother Carter in February and March 1848 sheds light on this point. Lee expressed unhappiness with wrangling between President James K. Polk and his Whig opponents over terms of peace in the wake of Winfield Scott’s remarkable campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City—a feat of arms made possible, said Lee in seconding Scott’s view, only by the actions of officers trained at West Point. “There are many that cry ‘Hurra for Clay’ & ‘hurra for Polk,’ & how few that raise their voice for their country,” he wrote from the Mexican capital city. Quarrels between Polk and Scott, the latter a Whig whose rumored presidential ambitions irritated the commander in chief, created a situation in which “the Service & perhaps the Country” would have much to lose. “The latter is always first in my thoughts & efforts,” affirmed Lee in language his hero Washington would have approved, “& the feelings & interests of individuals should be sacrificed to its good. But it is difficult to get men to act on this principle.”15
Although Whiggish or even Federalist in his political views, Lee applauded news of Democrat James Buchanan’s election in 1856 as best for the nation. “I am anxiously looking for some arrival to give us the result of the late Presidential election,” he wrote Mrs. Lee from Fort Brown, Texas, in mid-November, adding that he “saw no hope of Mr. Fillmores election, & though I do not fear Mr Fremont’s, I am anxious to see that Mr Buchanans is certain, & that the Union & Constitution is triumphant.” Definitive word still had not reached the far corners of Texas a month later. Yet Lee, limited to scanning “plenty of papers here, but all of old dates,” allowed himself a tentative optimism. “Mr Buchanan it appears,” he wrote, “is to be our next President. I hope he will be able to extinguish fanaticism North & South, & cultivate love for the country & Union, & restore harmony between the different sections.” Earlier that year, Lee had spent a hot and uncomfortable Fourth of July along one of the branches of the Brazos River in Texas. In a political atmosphere of swelling sectional turmoil, he chose to emphasize his devotion to the United States in a letter to Mary Lee relating his frame of mind on the anniversary of the nation’s birth. “[M]y feelings for my country were as ardent, my faith in her future as true, & my hopes for her advancement as unabated,” he assured her on August 4, “as if felt in more propitious circumstances.”16
Lee opposed secession during the winter of 1860–61, and in the already quoted letter to Anne Marshall described his “devotion to the Union” and “feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen.” His letter to Winfield Scott on April 20 further testified to how wrenching it had been, in his words, to “separate myself from a Service to which I have divoted all the best years of my life, & all the ability I possessed.” Earlier that year, Lee echoed his Federalist father in telling Rooney, his middle son, that the framers meant for the Union to be perpetual. They envisioned “establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession.” Lee recently had been reading Edward Everett’s The Life of George Washington, published in 1860, and he thought his professional model’s “spirit would be grieved could he see the wreck of his mighty labors!” He lamented the possibility that Washington’s “noble deeds [would] be destroyed and that his precious advice and virtuous example so soon forgotten by his countrymen.”17
Despite his clear affection for the United States, Lee left its army—which brings us to a third level of loyalty. He strongly identified with the slaveholding South, and this loyalty, which aligned nicely with his sense of being a Virginian, helped guide him in the secession crisis. In letters and comments addressing his decision to resign from the army, he often mentioned the South as well as Virginia. His political philosophy stood strikingly at odds with the virulent rhetoric of secessionist fire-eaters; however, as he wrote to Rooney well before his resignation, “The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North as you say. I feel the aggression, and am willing to take every proper step for redress.” In his meetings with Francis Preston Blair and Winfield Scott on April 18, 1861, Lee proclaimed that although he was opposed to secession, he “would not take up arms against the South” or fellow southerners.18
A desire to maintain racial control figured most prominently in Lee’s southern identity. Often portrayed as opposed to slavery, he in fact accepted the peculiar institution as the best means for ordering relations between the races and resented northerners who attacked the motives and character of slaveholders and seemed willing, or even eager, to disrupt racial stability in the southern states. In late December 1856, he ruminated at considerable length to his wife on the topic. “[S]lavery as an institution,” he wrote in contradiction of those such as John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh, who trumpeted it as a positive good, “is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expiate on its disadvantages.” He also believed slavery “a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strongly for the former.” The fate of enslaved millions should be left in God’s hands: “Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy.”19
Lee unequivocally denounced abolitionists, alluding to what he termed “the systematic & progressive efforts of certain people of the North, to interfere with & change the domestic institutions of the South.” Such actions “can only be accomplished by them through the agency of a civil & servile war.” Abolitionists might create an apocalyptic moment by persevering in their “evil course.” Resorting to a geographical stereotype of New Englanders widely held by white southerners, Lee asked rhetorically, “Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others.”20
In October 1859 Lee confronted John Brown, the northern abolitionist most terrifying to the white South, at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Sent from Washington with a force of Marines, he directed a brief but intense action that resulted in Brown’s capture. Two months later, in a letter to Adj. Gen. Samuel Cooper, Lee characterized Brown’s raid on the U.S. armory as an “invasion … by a band of armed conspirators.” The specter of racial conflict, as well as transgressions against constitutional order, stood out in this letter, which also revealed how Lee’s loyalties to Virginia, the slaveholding South, and the United States conjoined. Bent on “invading the state of Virginia and exciting rebellion in the South,” Brown had been “captured in open resistance to the authority and troops of the Government, and in the perpetuation of treason.” Lee had confiscated the raiders’ weapons “as rightfully as if taken from any other enemy of the Country.”21
Unlike many white southerners, including Dodson Ramseur (as the next chapter shows), Lee never used “northerner” and “abolitionist” as synonyms—although sometimes, as in his letter to Mrs. Lee from December 1856, he relegated New Englanders to a problematical category. Extensive intercourse with officers from the North during his long pre–Civil War career in the army probably promoted geographical tolerance. As a young engineer, he had served under Connecticut-born Andrew Talcott, whose high character impressed Lee and laid the groundwork for a long friendship. In Mexico, he showed no inclination to applaud the efforts of northern comrades any less than those from the South. After Mexico City fell, for example, he wrote warmly of Lt. Calvin Benjamin, a New Yorker, and Capt. Simon Henry Drum, a Pennsylvanian, artillerists who were killed in assaults against the Mexican capital. “They were noble fellows,” thought Lee, “& after fighting their way like lions each with a gun, into the very batteries at the Tacubya gate, were cut down. … Drum in the delirium of death calling to his men, ‘forward.’”22
But Lee certainly resented northerners who would tamper with the South’s racial order, an attitude that continued during the war. Although seldom quoted by historians, his response to Lincoln’s final proclamation of emancipation leaves no doubt about the depth of his feeling. On January 10, 1863, he wrote to Confederate secretary of war James A. Seddon, calling for greater mobilization of human and material resources in the face of U.S. military power that threatened complete social disruption in the Confederacy. Lincoln’s proclamation laid out “a savage and brutal policy,” stated Lee with simmering anger, “which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.” Lee’s use of “degradation,” “pollution,” and “social system”—words often deployed by white southerners in antebellum discussions about the possible consequences of abolitionism—highlight the degree to which Lincoln’s policy menaced more than the integrity of the Confederate political state. Although Lee did not single it out, the passage announcing that freedmen “will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service” must have struck a special chord. It represented nothing less, from a Confederate perspective, than official sanctioning of the type of armed racial conflict that had created widespread anxiety at the time of John Brown’s raid.23
Two years earlier Lee also had spoken of honor, claiming that “there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union, save that of honour.” As a member of the slaveholding aristocracy of Virginia and the South, his sense of honor dictated that he stand with those of his blood, class, and section. Lee hated the idea of disunion but rejected the idea of a country “that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets” and was unwilling to risk forced changes in a social structure predicated on the institution of slavery.24
Those who cling to the idea of Lee as preeminently devoted to his state must come to terms with a fourth important loyalty. Once Virginia joined the Confederacy and he exchanged the Old Dominion’s uniform for that of the new republic,25 Lee quickly, and decisively, adopted a national as opposed to a state-centered stance. His most important loyalty during the conflict was to the Confederate nation—something perfectly consistent with his southern and Virginia identities. Lee’s national viewpoint stands out vividly in his wartime correspondence. From the opening of the conflict until the final scenes at Appomattox, he urged Confederate soldiers, politicians, and civilians to set aside state and local prejudices in their struggle to win independence. The Confederacy, though born in the Deep South of a secession movement censured by Lee during the winter and spring of 1860–61, maintained a social order he deemed essential for a population counting millions of black people amid the white majority.
Lee articulated his views about the relative importance of state and national concerns on many occasions. A letter to Secretary of State Andrew G. McGrath of South Carolina in late December 1861 provides one example. Just eight months into the war, Lee took the long view regarding the topic of subordinating state to nation. In this instance, he laid out a strong case for mustering South Carolina’s “military strength … & putting it under the best and most permanent organization. The troops, in my opinion, should be organized for the war.” The last sentence addressed the problem of twelve-month volunteers, many thousands of whose enlistments from the spring of 1861 would be ending just as spring military campaigning commenced. Lee preferred “emphatically” that enlistments be for the duration of fighting. Lee warned that George B. McClellan’s Union army near Manassas would hold a huge numerical advantage unless the governments of South Carolina and other states met the national challenge. “The Confederate States have now but one great object in view, the successful issue of war and independence,” Lee explained to McGrath: “Everything worth their possessing depends on that. Everything should yield to its accomplishment.”26
Lee pursued a similar line of argument with Governor Henry T. Clark of North Carolina the following summer. Clark had written about an array of Union “outrages and depredations,” to use Lee’s language, that had plagued part of the state, requesting additional military protection. Lee responded with a tutorial on the relative importance of committing manpower to national and state purposes. “The safety of the whole State of North Carolina,” he asserted from Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, “as well as of Virginia, depends in a measure upon the result of the enemy’s efforts in this quarter, which if successful, would make your State the theater of hostilities far more injurious and destructive to your citizens than anything they have yet been called upon to suffer.” In other words, the Army of Northern Virginia, waging a defense of the whole nation, acted on behalf of the parts, including North Carolina, and required the maximum resources to carry on its work.27
The Confederate people debated a number of issues relating to the expansion of national power at the expense of state authority or individual liberties, and in every instance Lee came down on the side of measures that furthered the nation-building project. Although no precise breakdown of sentiment across the Confederacy in this respect is possible, Lee stood among those most willing to accept greater central power to achieve military victory and independence. Three examples reveal his unflinching Confederate perspective: the implementation of national conscription; the impressment of goods and enslaved labor to support the Confederate war effort; and the arming of slaves as white manpower dwindled.
During the winter and spring of 1861–62, Lee instructed his aide Charles Marshall to “draft a bill for raising an army by the direct agency of the Confederate Government.” Lee wanted legislation to extend by two years the service of those who previously had enlisted in good faith for twelve months, to classify all other white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five as eligible to be placed into Confederate uniform, and to give Jefferson Davis the power “to call out such parts of the population rendered liable to service by the law, as he might deem proper, and at such times as he saw fit.” Marshall aptly noted, “This measure completely reversed the previous military legislation of the South. … The efforts of the Government had hitherto been confined to inviting the support of the people. Gen. Lee thought it could more surely rely upon their intelligent obedience, and that it might safely assume command where it had as yet only tried to persuade.” Marshall’s careful language softened the import of what Lee sought: a Richmond government with the power to compel service from its male citizenry. The U.S. government never had dealt with its male citizens in this fashion (although the Lincoln administration would do so in the spring of 1863), and many Confederate citizens regarded national conscription as a significant abridgement of individual rights and freedoms. Those whose enlistments were extended proved particularly disgruntled, alleging a breach of contract between them and their national government.28
Marshall also summarized Lee’s ideas about balancing individual rights and state and national authority. Again, the general took a stalwart nationalist stance that departed radically from state rights advocates who accused Jefferson Davis of usurping power in the name of waging an effective war. “He thought that every other consideration should be regarded as subordinate to the great end of the public safety,” wrote Marshall, “and that since the whole duty of the nation would be war until independence should be secured, the whole nation should for the time be converted into an army, the producers to feed and the soldiers to fight.” Late in 1861, Lee had used virtually identical language and arguments in a letter to Governor John Letcher of Virginia. “The great object of the Confederate States is to bring the war to a successful issue,” he insisted: “Every consideration should yield to that; for without it we can hope to enjoy nothing we possess, and nothing that we do possess will be worth enjoying without it.”29
Lee believed the Confederate government often lagged behind its opponent in adopting necessary measures. In fact, until deep into the twentieth century no administration in American history proved so intrusive into its citizens’ lives as that in Richmond during the Civil War. But Lee, who after the war spoke of “the difficulty of a ‘Confederate Government’ resisting a centralized one,” wanted more. He raised this subject with his son Custis, an aide to Jefferson Davis, while the armies lay in winter camps around Fredericksburg in February 1863. “You see the Federal Congress has put the whole power of their country into the hands of their President,” he reported with grudging admiration. “Nine hundred millions of dollars & three millions of men. Nothing now can arrest during the present administration the most desolating war that was ever practiced, except a revolution among their people. Nothing can produce a revolution except systematic success on our part.” Lee meant military success, which required mobilizing men and matériel on a scale the Confederate government seemed loath to embrace. “What has our Congress done,” he asked his son, “to meet the exigency? I may say extremity, in which we are placed!” The politicians had done little, to Lee’s way of thinking, although they had “concocted bills to excuse a certain class of men from taking service, & to transfer another class in service, out of active service, where they hope never to do service.”30
Eleven months later, Lee revisited the problem of obtaining recruits for national service. This time a conflict between the predilections of some Virginians and the needs of the Confederacy occupied his attention. Too many western Virginians enlisted in units “serving near their homes,” he wrote Jefferson Davis, a phenomenon encouraged by officers “who are naturally desirous to increase their forces.” The enlistees expected to be deployed near where they entered service, which left them far removed from arenas contested by major national armies. “What I have said of Virginia is equally applicable to other States,” fumed Lee, who recommended that the “disposition to enlist in organizations somewhat local in their nature and remote from the principal theatres of hostilities should be checked, and the recruits thrown so far as possible into the more important and active armies.” The Army of Northern Virginia, which campaigned for the benefit of the entire nation, should take precedence over any local commands: “[A]ll the men that can be obtained should be used to fill up the depleted regiments of this army.”31
Beyond his unrelenting efforts to find more soldiers, Lee supported the central government’s right to impress food, animals, and black laborers. During the winter of 1864, he stated that all the Confederacy’s war-related resources should be brought to bear against the enemy. He knew civilians bridled at the loss of crops and other supplies to the Richmond government’s impressment agents. This politically charged reality, thought Lee, obliged Congress to enact legislation that apportioned economic burdens fairly. But he nonetheless took a hard line: “I think the present law and orders on the subject should be so modified as to authorize the Government to impress when necessary a certain proportion of everything produced in the country.” If leather for shoes could be obtained in no other way, “it should be impressed.” And if it required “all the meat in the country to support the army, it should be had.” The Confederacy’s railroads also should be put to the task of delivering supplies to the military fronts. “I earnestly recommend that no private interests be allowed to interfere with the use of all the facilities for transportation that we possess until the wants of the army are provided for,” Lee wrote to the secretary of war. Confederate “railroads should be at once devoted exclusively to this purpose, even should it be found necessary to suspend all private travel for business or pleasure upon them for the present.”32
Late in the war, Lee supported arming some slaves and freeing all who served honorably in the cause of Confederate independence. He did so not because he harbored secret abolitionist sentiment, as some have argued, but because he believed it necessary to win independence. This recommendation followed his earlier call to substitute black men for white men in noncombatant positions in the armies, thereby freeing the latter to shoulder muskets. “A considerable number could be placed in the ranks by relieving all able bodied white men employed as teamsters, cooks, mechanics, and laborers,” he informed Jefferson Davis in the autumn of 1864, “and supplying their places with negroes. … It seems to me that we must choose between employing negroes ourselves, and having them employed against us.”33
Early in 1865, Lee elaborated his thoughts about making soldiers of some slaves in letters to Virginian Andrew Hunter and Congressman Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi. Federal military forces continued to penetrate deeper into the Confederacy, liberating slaves as they went. The enemy’s “progress will thus add to his numbers,” remarked Lee in a hard-eyed assessment, “and at the same time destroy slavery in a manner most pernicious to the welfare of our people. … Whatever may be the effect of our employing negro troops, it cannot be as mischievous as this.” If the enrollment of some slaves in the army would bring victory, the white people of an independent Confederacy would be left in charge of ordering their social institutions as they saw fit, though admittedly some adjustments would be necessary. If the Confederacy did not use black manpower this way and lost the war, abolitionists of the North would be in charge, slavery destroyed, and the societal convulsions unthinkably wrenching. Lee laid out the stark alternatives for Hunter: “[W]e must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions.”34
Lee’s devotion to a slaveholding republic’s “social institutions”—he had used the phrase “social system” in his letter to Secretary of War Seddon regarding the Emancipation Proclamation—does much to explain his fierce loyalty to the Confederacy. Union victory, as he told Hunter, would end slavery in a “manner most pernicious to the welfare of our people” and with “evil consequences to both races,” by which it is reasonable to infer he meant without a guarantee of white supremacy and with massive economic dislocation. He reiterated to Hunter the opinion expressed to his wife in 1856, namely, that he considered “the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment, as the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country.”35 That relation, which was most desirable in Lee’s judgment because it afforded white people control over a huge black population, might be maintained indefinitely if Confederate armies established southern nationality.
Anger at an enemy represented by the Lincoln administration and Union armies in the field deepened Lee’s commitment to the Confederacy. This anger contradicts a hoary convention that he harbored no bitterness against his opponents and typically referred to them as simply “those people.” “In all his official intercourse and private conversation,” claimed one early postwar writer, “Gen. Lee never breathed a vindictive sentiment towards the enemy. … He had none of that Yankee-phobia common in the Southern army; he spoke of the Northern people without malevolence … quite in contrast to the epithets and anathemas which were popularly showered on ‘the Yankees.’” The most quoted example of this phenomenon occurred at Antietam, where Lee encountered his youngest son, Rob, an artillerist whose battery had been handled roughly and was moving to the rear. “General, are you going to send us in again?” asked the young Lee. “Yes, my son,” replied the general with a smile, “you all must do what you can to help drive these people back.”36
The idea that Lee exercised restraint in characterizing his enemy collapses in the face of the most cursory reading of pertinent evidence. In 1870, he spoke to William Preston Johnston, son of Confederate army commander Albert Sidney Johnston, about the “vindictiveness and malignity of the Yankees, of which he had no conception before the war.” That attitude forms a theme through much of Lee’s wartime correspondence and appears frequently in contemporary and retrospective accounts by eyewitnesses.37
Long before 1864, the period most often associated with the “total war” carried out by William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Henry Sheridan in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley,38 Lee repeatedly deplored Union actions and policies. His response to the Emancipation Proclamation, already discussed, was not the earliest example. The conflict’s first autumn witnessed the death of Col. John A. Washington, a member of Lee’s staff and grandnephew of the Revolutionary hero, at the hands of Union pickets. “His death is a grievous affliction to me,” Lee wrote to a cousin, adding, “Our enemy’s have stamped their attack upon our rights, with additional infamy & by killing the lineal descendant and representative of him who under the guidance of Almighty God established them & by his virtues rendered our Republic immortal.” In December 1861, Lee alluded to “the ruin & pillage” inflicted on various parts of the South by what he termed “the vandals” in blue. Writing to one of his daughters about the fate of Arlington, which had been seized by the U.S. government, he betrayed considerable bitterness. “Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies,” he observed, “has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it. I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth … rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes.”39
When Maj. Gen. John Pope arrived in Virginia from the Western Theater in the summer of 1862, he promised a new approach to subduing the Confederacy. In line with congressional Republicans who favored applying harsher policies, Pope announced that he would seize civilian property, hang guerrillas, punish civilians who aided them, and otherwise chastise all Rebels. Pope did not follow through with these threats, but Lee reacted passionately. In late July 1862, he wrote Secretary of War George Wythe Randolph that he hoped to “destroy, the miscreant Pope.” (The nineteenth-century meanings of “miscreant,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, included “depraved, villainous, base” [adjectives] and “a vile wretch, a villain, rascal” [nouns].) Elsewhere Lee stated that Pope must be “suppressed.” Later in 1862, Lee watched from high ground west of the Rappahannock River while Union artillery shelled the city of Fredericksburg as a prelude to heavy fighting two days later. A witness recalled that his chief manifested “a deep melancholy, mingled with exasperation” while looking “fixedly at the flames rising from the city.” After staring toward the beleaguered city for some time, Lee said, “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no defence; it just suits them.”40
Few incidents brought out Lee’s bitterness toward the Federals more dramatically than the hanging of his second cousin William Orton Williams as a spy on June 9, 1863. Several years after the event, a letter from Lee to Martha Custis Williams—Williams’s sister, whom Lee called Markie—indicated the continuing depth of his feeling. “My own grief … is as poignant now as on the day of [the hanging],” he wrote, “& my blood boils at the thought of the atrocious outrage, against every manly & christian sentiment which the Great God alone is able to forgive. I cannot trust my pen to utter my feelings. He alone can give us resignation.”41
A letter from a clergyman in Culpeper Court House, Virginia, in the summer of 1864 confirmed Lee’s low opinion of the Federals. He provided a summary of the letter’s contents to Mrs. Lee, who doubtless shared his obvious sense of indignation. The Reverend Martin Cole reported malicious destruction that had left “not a church standing in all that country within the lines formerly occupied by the enemy. All are razed to the ground & the materials used, often for the vilest purposes.” Although members of the northern Christian Commission apprised the local commander, Maj. Gen. John Newton, of the outrageous behavior, “he took no steps to rebuke or arrest it.” Nothing could be done in the short term, Lee admitted, so “[w]e must suffer patiently to the end, when all things will be made right.”42
Although Lee thought an enemy who hanged Orton Williams, shelled cities, destroyed churches, and issued presidential edicts calculated to promote racial chaos respected neither the laws of God nor the dictates of decency and honor, he did not view the conflict as a crusade to establish a godly commonwealth. He believed God’s guiding hand ordered events but always insisted that humans would decide the outcome of the struggle by fulfilling their duties. Painfully conscious of his own failings, he habitually urged members of his family to strive to be worthy of God’s mercy. In May 1863, he replied to his daughter Agnes’s wish that the war would end. Were that to happen, he wrote, “What pain & anguish would be turned from many a household! I trust that a merciful God in His own good time will accomplish His holy will & give us peace & happiness. … Remember me in your sweet prayers & supplicate the throne of grace for mercy & forgiveness towards me.” Shortly thereafter, during the retreat from Gettysburg, he assured his wife, “We are all well & bear our labors & hardships manfully. Our noble men are cheerful & confident. May God in His mercy bless our efforts to serve our country!”43
Lee’s official correspondence with Jefferson Davis and other political and military leaders did not include many references to God, although orders designed to bolster military morale often connected religion to national purpose. The day after Stonewall Jackson’s death, General Orders No. 61 announced to the Army of Northern Virginia that “an all wise Providence” had taken “this great and good soldier” at the height of his powers. “But while we mourn his death, we feel that his spirit still lives,” observed the commanding general of the famously pious Jackson, “and will inspire the whole army with his indomitable courage and unshaken confidence in God as our hope and our strength. … Let officers and soldiers emulate his invincible determination to do everything in the defense of our beloved country.”44
A final element in Lee’s loyal embrace of the Confederacy rested on his admiration for the soldiers who fought and fell in prodigious numbers under his leadership. The example of Washington and the Continental soldiers cannot be overstated here. During the grim winter encampment at Valley Forge, Washington had bonded powerfully with his suffering men, who, denied adequate supplies by parsimonious state governments and an ineffectual Continental Congress, had maintained an admirable degree of cohesiveness and purpose. “The Commander in Chief again takes occasion to return his warmest thanks to the virtuous officers and soldiery of this Army,” wrote Washington, “for that persevering fidelity and zeal which they have uniformly manifested in all their conduct. Their fortitude, not only under the common hardships incident to a military life, but also under the additional sufferings to which the peculiar situation of these States had exposed them, clearly proves them worthy of the enviable privilege of contending for the right of human nature, the freedom and independence of their country.” To a significant degree, Washington and his soldiers became synonymous with their fledgling nation as the Revolutionary War ground on, surpassing in importance any political leaders or institutions.45
So also did the Army of Northern Virginia, along with its commander, become the most important institutional symbol of the Confederacy, and Lee often reminded his soldiers of their ties to the Confederate nation and to the Revolutionary struggle of their ancestors. In the wake of his victory over McClellan in the Seven Days battles, for example, Lee’s congratulatory order to the army lamented the loss of “many brave men” but urged survivors to remember the slain “had died nobly in defence of their country’s freedom” and always would be associated “with an event that will live forever in the hearts of a grateful people.” The soldiers’ “heroic conduct” was “worthy of men engaged in a cause so just and sacred, and deserving a nation’s gratitude and praise.” The hard winter of 1863–64, when near starvation stalked the camps of the Army of Northern Virginia along the Rapidan River lines, prompted Lee to evoke the suffering and example of Washington’s men. He assured the veterans that he had been doing all in his power to feed them properly and hoped the situation would soon improve. The history of the army, he said, “has shown that the country can require no sacrifice too great for its patriotic devotion.” Then he compared their travails to those of an earlier generation: “Soldiers! You tread with no unequal step the road by which your fathers marched through suffering, privations, and blood, to independence.” If those in the Army of Northern Virginia continued to emulate the Revolutionary generation’s self-sacrificing efforts, prophesied Lee, “be assured that the just God who crowned their efforts with success will, in His own good time, send down his blessing upon yours.”46
Ulysses S. Grant and his armies of blue-clad citizen-soldiers dictated a different end to the conflict, compelling Lee and all other Confederates to confront a profoundly altered postwar world. In General Order No. 9, his April 10, 1865, farewell message to the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee accorded his highest compliments to men who after “four years of arduous service, marked by un-surpassed courage and fortitude,” had “been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Lee’s decision to surrender to Grant had arisen from a determination “to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen”—those Confederate patriots whose best efforts finally had collapsed in defeat. Lee prayed that a merciful God would extend to all “the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles” his blessings and mercy. He closed with references to the nation—not to the states—for which they had sacrificed and to the personal bond between him and the men: “With an increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous considerations for myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”47
Lee’s words, though not offered in victory, echoed those of Washington’s farewell to the Continental army in November 1783. Both featured allusions to courage, intimidating odds, selfless service to nation rather than to individual states, God’s approbation, and personal affection—sometimes in almost identical phrasing. Taking “final leave of those he holds most dear,” Washington had “bid them an affectionate—a long farewell,” reminding them that the fact that they had attained “the object for which we contended, against so formidable a power, cannot but inspire us with astonishment and gratitude.” The soldiers had served the nation, overcoming local attachments and prejudices to “become but one patriotic band of Brothers.” Washington hoped “the choicest of Heaven’s favors both here and hereafter attend those, who under the divine auspices have secured innumerable blessings for others; With these Wishes, and this benediction, the Commander in Chief is about to retire from service.”48 Thus did Washington, the father of a nation, and Lee, the focal point of a failed Confederate nation, conclude their careers with the armies that meant everything to their respective peoples.
Despite lingering personal grievances against the United States, Lee meticulously refrained from public criticism of the victors while president of Washington College for the remaining five years of his life. Meaningful Confederate loyalty was impossible after Appomattox, and the postwar Lee might best be described as a staunch white southerner and Virginian who officially resumed his prewar fealty to the United States. Duty, he believed, obliged him and all other former Confederates to submit to the dictates of the U.S. government. His attitude toward defeat can be summed up simply. The Confederacy had mounted its best effort, had lost irrevocably on the battlefield to a more powerful foe, and must accept the consequences of that defeat. In statements he knew would be reported, he put aside all impulses to lash out at the North for its conduct during the war or its policies during Reconstruction. This was a painful exercise in restraint because the war had hardened him toward the Confederacy’s former enemies.
The Radical Republican political agenda during Reconstruction deepened Lee’s animosity. In 1866, he explained to Sir John Acton, who as a Member of Parliament had supported the Confederacy, that he considered it unfair to disenfranchise or otherwise penalize former Confederates if they took the oath of allegiance to the United States. Lee accepted “without reserve the amendment which has already been made to the constitution for the extinction of slavery” but disapproved of congressional legislation or constitutional amendments designed to place black people on a more equal footing with white Americans. He worried that the federal government was assuming too much power and applying it inappropriately to the former Confederate states. If federal power outstripped that of the states by too wide a margin, predicted Lee darkly, the result could be calamitous: “The consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed” all similar nations in the past.49
Lee knew he was the most prominent ex-Confederate, and from Appomattox through his death in October 1870 he suppressed his bitterness to set an example for the rest of the white South. He was what might be called a situational reconciliationist—someone who said things in public that enhanced progress toward reunion but who never achieved true forgiveness and acceptance vis-à-vis his old enemies. On June 13, 1865, he formally requested a pardon from President Andrew Johnson (no pardon would be granted during his lifetime).50 Later that summer, he pronounced “it to be the duty of every one to unite in the restoration of the country, and the reestablishment of peace and harmony.” He similarly urged Jubal A. Early, who nourished virulent anti-Yankee feelings after Appomattox, to maintain restraint in his writings about the war. “We shall have to be patient and suffer for a while at least,” commented Lee to Early regarding northern publications that seemed to treat Confederates ungenerously. “All controversy, …” continued Lee, “will only serve to prolong angry and bitter feeling, and postpone the period when reason and charity may resume their sway.”51
Lee reacted in almost identical fashion in early 1866 when Varina Davis mentioned that Republican politician Schuyler Colfax had made remarks insulting to former Confederates. Lee had not read about Colfax’s speech but told Mrs. Davis that he would not have answered it in any case. “I have thought, from the time of the cessation of hostilities,” he wrote, “that silence and patience on the part of the South was the true course, and I think so still.” Controversy would not serve former Confederates well because it would keep animosities near the surface. “These considerations have kept me from replying to accusations made against myself,” concluded Lee, “and induced me to recommend the same to others.”52
Lee completed his time on the stage of nineteenth-century U.S. history without a dominant national identity. Intense private grievances and political scar tissue from the war guaranteed that his renewed loyalty to the United States, compelled by defeat on the battlefield, never could approximate what it had been before the secession crisis. Always the realist, he chose to deal with the present rather than linger on the failed effort to forge a new southern nation. He opposed erecting Confederate monuments because they might alienate the North and add to “the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.” His Confederate loyalty, so dominant during the war, did survive when it came to those who had died in uniform. “All I think that can now be done,” he counseled one of his former subordinates, “is to aid our noble & generous women in their efforts to protect the graves & mark the last resting places of those who have fallen, & wait for better times.” His postwar letters and statements abound with evidence that he thought of himself most often as a Virginian and a white southerner, the antebellum loyalties that had taken him away from the United States and into the Confederacy.53
We can never know how often Lee allowed his mind to return to April 23, 1861, when he had entered the capitol in Richmond to accept command of Virginia’s forces. Had he thought about George Washington’s efforts to forge a national resistance from the efforts of thirteen sometimes obdurate colonies as he walked past Thomas Gibson Crawford’s heroic equestrian statue on the capitol grounds, or, a bit later, when he stood beside Houdon’s marble effigy outside the chamber where the delegates met? Did he reflect on how his loyalties to Virginia and the slaveholding South had trumped one national loyalty and soon steered him toward another? On that day in Richmond, Lee the Virginian already had begun the change—his loyalties to home state and the South commencing the transmutation into ardent Confederate purpose.
Gen. Robert E. Lee, portrait by photographer Julian Vannerson, probably from March 1864. At the time of this photograph, Lee unquestionably was the most admired public figure in the Confederate nation and just weeks away from his encounter with Ulysses S. Grant in the Overland campaign. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-cwpb-04402
Thomas Crawford’s equestrian statue of George Washington on the capitol grounds in Richmond, Virginia, photographed in April 1865. On his way to accept command of Virginia’s state forces almost exactly four years earlier, Robert E. Lee passed the monument featuring the man he most sought to emulate—and who shaped his loyalties to Virginia and the United States. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-cwpb-02528
Robert E. Lee leaving the McLean House at Appomattox Court House following his surrender to U. S. Grant. A. R. Waud’s simple sketch managed to capture a sense of stoic resignation, an attitude evident in Lee’s subsequent insistence that former Confederates come to terms with the loss of their nation and focus on the process of reintegration into the United States. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-ppmsca-21320
Stephen Dodson Ramseur (left) and Frank Huger in their West Point uniforms on the eve of the secession crisis. Ramseur and the South Carolina–born Huger were classmates at the academy, briefly officers in the U.S. Army, and eager converts to the Confederate cause. Author’s collection
Cover of the sheet music for Our National Confederate Anthem. It represents Ramseur’s two primary loyalties—to the slaveholding South and the Confederacy—as inextricably linked, while also acknowledging the centrality of soldiers to the national project. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-33407
Artist James E. Taylor inaccurately depicted Ramseur on horseback at the moment of his mortal wounding at Cedar Creek. Conspicuous bravery in combat resulted in five wounds for Ramseur, who, like many other young officers from the slaveholding class, demonstrated his Confederate loyalty at great personal risk. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
Jubal Anderson Early in Confederate uniform. Early often affected less formal military dress, which contributed to his reputation as a colorful eccentric. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-ds-01484
Front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 19, 1859, featuring a portrait of John Brown. Although the accompanying article referred to Brown as “a traitor to the American Union,” many northern newspapers were far kinder. Favorable response to Brown and his raid brought a major change in Jubal Early’s attitude toward northerners. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-137591
“The Ruins of Chambersburg—View of Main Street,” an illustration Harper’s Weekly offered readers three weeks after Early’s cavalry burned the Pennsylvania city in retaliation for Federal destruction of civilian property in Virginia. “The burned district covers all the business portion of the town and some of the finest private residences,” read Harper’s accompanying text. “Bedridden old women even did not elicit any compassion in the breasts of these rebels.” Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1864
“Tracks of the Armies,” a propagandistic print by pro-Confederate artist Adalbert Johann Volck, shows a Confederate soldier returning home to find it in ruins and his wife dead in the rubble. Destruction of civilian property by Union troops embittered Lee, Ramseur, and Early, fueling their determination not to succumb to the United States. Author’s collection
Emancipation threatened the slave-based social structure that figured very prominently in the state, southern, and Confederate loyalties of Lee, Ramseur, and Early. In the minds of all three, U.S. armies carried out on a massive scale what John Brown had attempted in October 1859. Edwin Forbes documented the movement of enslaved people to Union lines in this sketch from 1864, on the bottom of which he wrote, “Contrabands Escaping. May 29th Hanover Town Va.” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-ppmsca-2071
“Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia—Decorating the Graves of Rebel Soldiers, May 31, 1867.” Artist William L. Sheppard, a veteran of Lee’s army, sketched one of the primary ways in which white southerners expressed feelings of Confederate loyalty during the postwar years. Leaders and common soldiers each get attention: Jeb Stuart’s grave is featured in the upper left and the “Soldiers Division,” where most of the Confederate dead from Gettysburg eventually were reinterred, in the upper right. Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1867
