DESPITE THE POSSIBILITY that the government might reopen its case against him, Lee had not for a moment lost his hope of getting his family to the country. He was thinking about buying a farm he had seen near the Rapidan River. Only his amorphous status, with the treason proceedings against him suspended but not dismissed, kept him from a decision.
At this moment a letter came from a friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Randolph Cocke, offering the Lees the use of a small vacant house on her estate fifty-five miles west of Richmond.
The Lees accepted, although with differing degrees of enthusiasm. Lee was delighted; this would take them out of the hot Richmond summer, so hard on Mary in her invalid condition, and into a serene countryside. It would allow him to avoid, for the time being, making a commitment to buy a farm, and still give him the private life he craved.
For Mary, at the age of fifty-six, it was another breaking of ties. With the war’s onset she had been forced to leave the house at Arlington—the place where she had been born, was married, and gave birth to seven children. She became a refugee, an honored one, but a homeless person nevertheless. For two and a half years she had visited relatives and friends in parts of Virginia. This rented house at Franklin Street, into which she had moved early in 1864, was the nearest thing to a home she had possessed since Arlington. She and her Richmond friends had become wartime comrades, knitting hundreds of pairs of socks for her husband’s soldiers as they listened to the cannon in the distance. Together, they had read the lengthening casualty lists and coped with the dwindling food supplies. Now she was leaving these friends, for a place still farther from Arlington.
At the end of June, the Lees and their daughters Agnes and Mildred, with all their trunks, valises, hatboxes, and crates, boarded one of the boats that plied the James River and Kanawha Canal. The Lees’ daughter Mary was visiting friends in Staunton; Custis had left two days before, riding Traveller to their destination.
This canal boat would be pulled by a team of three horses that moved along the towpath beside the canal. The team was kept in order by the towman, who rode another horse. A man on the bow used a pole to fend the boat off the bank when necessary, and a black helmsman steered the vessel. There was a cargo hold, and a long cabin that served as both lounge and dining room; when a partition was put up after supper, it became two sleeping compartments, the women having regular berths at their end, and the men making the best of the couches and chairs.
It was late afternoon when the Lees came aboard. A crowd of friends arrived to wish them bon voyage. Presents of flowers surrounded Mary; in this light that was soon to be sunset, there was “a catch in her voice” as she said good-bye to her wartime friends.
Cousins and friends went ashore. Lines were cast off, and the horses pulled forward in their harness, lifting the towrope from the water. The boat began to move; handkerchiefs waved, on shore, on the boat. The Lees glided toward the sunset.
When it was time to go to bed, the canal boat’s captain “had the most comfortable bed put up that he could command,” and this was offered to Lee. Wishing no special treatment, and knowing that every man in the lounge would insist on his taking the best couch, Lee went up on the deck. He lay down, pulling over him his old military overcoat, which he had once called his “house and bed in the field.”
It was the last night he would sleep under the open sky. Lying there, looking up at the stars, he could hear the water passing beneath the boat. There was an occasional snort from one of the horses on the towpath, and sometimes a sudden curse from the mounted towman as he moved his team through the darkness. The black helmsman hummed a monotonous song; when the man at the bow cried, “Vi-ach!” it meant “viaduct,” and was a warning that those on deck should duck their heads because the boat was nearing a low bridge. When they neared one of the canal’s locks, the towman blew the horn he carried, signaling the lock-keeper to open his downstream gates.
Heading west through the night on the James River, Lee was leaving behind most of his past. Each step these horses took pulled him farther from the scenes of his early childhood at Stratford Hall, his boyhood in Alexandria, his married life at Arlington, his defense of Richmond and Petersburg. The scenes of his biggest battles receded in the darkness. Tonight he was severing himself from constant contact with many who had been close to him during the war, or had reason to seek him out in its aftermath. The shooting and dying were over, but as he lay looking at the stars, his wife and daughters asleep in the cabin below, he had no idea of what lay ahead for him, for them, for Virginia, for the nation.
The canal boat slid under the stars.