ONCE HE HAD MARCHED at the head of seventy thousand men. Now, following him as he rode Traveller, came an old wagon, an unmilitary quilt rigged over its top and sides to replace rotted-away canvas. Behind that was the captured Federal ambulance that had served as his office, and then another Federal ambulance, this one loaned by the victors to carry home a wounded officer of his staff.
Two years before, Lee had stood on a hillock and taken the salute as eight thousand of his horsemen jingled past on parade. Now there were twenty “bony, weary old horses” with him, some pulling the vehicles, others carrying the few riders who accompanied him east toward Richmond. The group included Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall and Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. Taylor, a slight young man who had mixed his indispensable office work with free-lance participation in every battle he could ride into when not otherwise occupied. A man along the road saw Marshall and Taylor “gaunt and pallid in ragged uniforms.” Major Giles B. Cooke, the wounded staff officer who was lying in the borrowed Union ambulance, was far worse off than the haggard men on horseback. The others, mounted or in the wagons, were a handful of enlisted men, and the few black servants, some riding beside men who had owned them. This exhausted, tattered procession crossed the green, war-slashed country, none of them knowing his future.
For Lee, the future might be short. The attitude of Grant and his men at Appomattox was no indication of Northern public feeling. Three hundred and sixty thousand Union soldiers were dead; their parents, their widows, their children, thought of Confederate soldiers as armed rebels guilty of treason. In this view, there could be no worse traitors than those officers of the United States Army, educated at West Point, who had fought against the government they had sworn to serve. There was a high probability that Robert E. Lee would be indicted for treason, a crime punishable by hanging or a long prison term.
Whatever the action taken against him, Lee’s body might collapse before an arresting officer could appear in Richmond. Two years before, in camp at Fredericksburg, Virginia, he had experienced a heart attack. Neither he nor his doctors had understood what the seizure was. His exceptional strength and determination had kept him going, despite later complications. On this ride from Appomattox to Richmond, he looked more robust than his younger officers and considered himself to be physically sound, though he suffered from pain that the doctors said was rheumatism. In fact, it was angina pectoris, and his deteriorating circulatory system made him vulnerable to another heart attack or to a stroke.
Even if he escaped immediate medical crises and Federal punishment, Lee’s future was clouded. His thirty-nine years as a soldier were at an enforced end. He had no job. Apart from the rented house in Richmond, there was no place where he and his family could live. Arlington, his wife’s estate on the Potomac, opposite Washington, and the place where they had lived with their children many of the years before the war, had been occupied by Federal troops at the beginning of this conflict. Part of its eleven hundred acres had been pressed into service as a cemetery for the Union dead; there were thousands of graves there. Lee had hopes of recovering Arlington for his family, but had no idea of what he might encounter in the attempt. Another family farm in Virginia, known as the White House, had been put to the torch by Union soldiers, its principal house leveled. The third farm, Romancoke, near the White House, was in an area so ravaged by war that there was not a fence post left standing within eight miles.
Lee was not bankrupt—a few of his small investments had survived the war—but waiting for him in Richmond was a wife who was an invalid, and their three unmarried daughters. His sons Custis and Rooney had come through the final battles unscathed; even if he were so fortunate as to find that his son Robert, now missing, was alive and well, it would mean that he had three sons who were emerging from the Confederate Army with neither jobs nor money.
Along this road to Richmond were constant reminders that Lee had been a central figure in a stupendous failure. On the road itself was the wreckage of his army—dead horses, shattered wagons in ditches, bloody bandages in the April mud. When he turned his head, he saw weed-choked fields and burnt houses. Blasted trestles and tom-up railroad tracks were silent witness that there was no public transport, no shipment of goods. There was nothing on the shelves of country stores. In towns, the banks were closed. Confederate money was worthless. Amputees in grey poked along red-clay roads on crutches while blue-clad columns marched to occupy strategic points in the South.
Like his army, Lee was riding into history. In what was left of his life, many millions of Americans would know just where he was and what he was doing, but after his death the national memory would simplify Lee. He would come striding out of some plantation at the beginning of the Civil War, swing up on Traveller, put up a fabulous fight, surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and then—he and Traveller were instantly transformed into a stone statue, with his name revered in the South and his campaigns studied in the world’s military academies.
Future Southern generations would think of Lee as a well-to-do, landed aristocrat, quintessentially a man of the South. It was true that his family had been prominent in Virginia for two hundred years, and that his father was at one time governor of Virginia; but by the time Lee was born of his improvident father’s second marriage he was a poor relation, raised just a cut above genteel poverty by a mother who was in effect abandoned, and later widowed. He had sought the appointment to the United States Military Academy partly because the only way he could get a college education was to be educated at public expense. Thousands of acres had come into his life when, as a young army officer, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, a spoiled only child who was the sole heiress to Arlington and the two other large farms. Even this relationship with the land was deceptive; his military life kept him from taking an active role in farming until the years just before the war. Then, when his charming but inefficient father-in-law died, leaving the mismanaged Custis farms in chaos, Lee took a long leave of absence in a desperate effort to put them back on a paying basis. The war had wiped out the gains he made; as he rode east to rejoin his family in Richmond, the only money that any of the Lees possessed was from the investments that Lee had made from his pay as an officer in the United States Army. It was a long way from the days when his father-in-law had felt that a poor young lieutenant of Engineers, no matter how handsome and pleasant, was not much of a match for his rich daughter.
Others would romanticize Lee. He was a realist who learned from experience, and few Southerners understood how much of that experience, invaluable to the Confederate cause, was acquired outside the South. There was Lee in his cadet days on the cliffs above the Hudson River, getting to know young men from every state, studying under instructors from many parts of the nation, and passing in review under the watchful eye of Colonel Sylvanus Thayer of Massachusetts, the superintendent known as “the Father of the Military Academy.” There was Lee’s early assignment, in 1835, as a topographical engineer surveying the disputed boundary between Ohio and Michigan. Bearing the title of Assistant Astronomer, he paddled a canoe through a wild frontier area of the Great Lakes, reporting in a letter to his young wife an encounter with “a handsome Bark Canoe, guided by one squaw sitting in the stern, and towed by two others on the Beach . . . In the canoe were three small children, the whole party was very neatly dressed the women in short petticoats coming no lower than the knee, with a kind of short gown or jacket above them, their hair in one long plait at their backs and a large silver plate suspended at the breast.”
Two years later Lee was at St. Louis, in charge of cutting a channel for the Mississippi there as part of the first effort by the Corps of Engineers to control the great river’s course. Mary and his little children joined him in his second year of this work; he wrote a friend that the children delighted in imitating the paddle-wheel river boats. “They convert themselves into steamboats, ring their bells, raise their steam (high pressure), and put off. They fire up so frequently, and keep on so heavy a pressure of steam that I am constantly fearing that they will burst their boilers.”
New York City was Lee’s next assignment; with some interruptions, he spent five years there, repairing and improving four forts that guarded the nation’s busiest harbor. He left New York for the Mexican War, during which he impressed General Winfield Scott as being “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” Other duty outside the South included his three years as superintendent at West Point, and a number of inspection trips that took him as far north as Rhode Island. Although Texas was to become a Confederate state, for Lee it was the West in its wildest form; as commander of the United States Second Cavalry, he chased Comanche Indians and tracked down Mexican bandits. Later, as commander of the Department of Texas, he witnessed the experimental cross-country marches being conducted with seventy-five camels imported from North Africa. The man who had ordered the test to determine whether camels would be suitable army pack animals in the Southwest was the nation’s secretary of war—Jefferson Davis.
So it was that the man riding away from Appomattox was a product of more than the South. There was never a more loyal Virginian, but if Lee had been only what most Southerners thought he was, he could never have done what he did in their defense, nor raise himself to certain heights that lay between him and the grave. He was not a typical anything—Southerner, soldier, citizen, man of prayer—and even on this heartbreaking ride through April mists his active mind was probing the future. He knew the feeling for revenge that was in many Southern hearts, and the danger that new fighting might explode anywhere, at any time. The wrong word from Lee—even a word that could be misconstrued—and his veterans would come pouring out of the hills with anything they could get their hands on—pistols, squirrel guns, scythes, axes. “You have only to blow the bugle,” one of his colonels reportedly said to him.
He would not blow the bugle. He would take care that no word he spoke could be taken as a call to resist the realities of defeat. Soon many Southerners would flee the country—to Mexico, to Canada, to Brazil. Some would be going to avoid possible arrest and trial for treason; others would simply refuse to live again under the Stars and Stripes. Lee sensed all this coming. He would stay and meet whatever fate awaited him. When he spoke to the young staff officers riding with him now, he told them that when they got to their homes they should stay there, behave peaceably, and take any kind of job that offered. Like young Marshall and Taylor, he did not know what the Federal government might impose upon the South, but as they rode along he urged them to do whatever would be required to enable them once again to vote and to hold office.
Their third day on the road brought them to the house of Charles Carter Lee, his oldest brother. He dined with him that night, but insisted on sleeping in his tent. It was a continuation of his practice during the war; he wished always to share the field conditions his soldiers must experience. With a literary shake of the head, his aide Taylor wrote of Lee’s doing this even now: “This continued self-denial can only be explained upon the hypothesis that he desired to have his men know that he shared their privations to the very last.”
The next morning, this remnant of headquarters was up and about at dawn. Soon enough Lee’s deep voice was heard—“Strike the tent!”—and the wagons moved off. People living along the road somehow knew that Lee was coming, and from cabins women appeared with food they handed to the men on the wagons. Little girls dashed into the road, half-hiding their faces with aprons, and presented him with bouquets of hyacinths and daffodils.
Lee could not bear it. He turned to Taylor and burst out, “Colonel, these people are kind—too kind. Their hearts are as full as when we began our campaigns in Eighteen Sixty-One. They do too much—more than they are able to do—for us.”
Although the flowers were a tribute to Lee, many of these women, those living in cabins and those in larger houses, were constantly bringing out whatever food they had, to give to passing soldiers. White Southerners regarded these tired, limping boys, from whatever state, as being part of their families. A soldier from Kentucky, forced to surrender many hundreds of miles from home, said that he set off without a penny and was never asked to pay for a meal or a night’s lodging on the way.