WHILE LEE was enjoying his quiet life, peacefully riding about on the horse that had carried him through the bloodiest scenes of the war, some men he had never met held a meeting in a little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
These were the trustees of Washington College, a small school that had been nearly destroyed by the war, and whose postwar survival was in doubt. In the first wave of enthusiasm in 1861, its students had gone off to fight. In the 1864 raid that General David Hunter had written Lee about, this town of Lexington, Virginia, had suffered severely. Subsequent occupation of the college by Federal troops had damaged the buildings, scattered the library, and destroyed the laboratory equipment. The troops of a Pennsylvania regiment were still using some college buildings for offices and barracks. During the chaotic past spring, the college had been kept open “chiefly as a Preparatory School,” with four professors as faculty. The student body consisted of some forty boys under military age who attended sporadically while their scattered families were engulfed in the final disaster.
The trustees of the college were meeting on the evening of August 4, four days after Lee had sent out his first batch of letters starting the research for his book. These were stubborn men, the resolute Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Valley of Virginia, determined to nurse back to health the school entrusted to their care.
The treasurer’s report now put before them was an example of how the South’s financial heart had stopped beating. “The following investments may be considered as worthless,” the Committee on Finance wrote, and listed holdings of Confederate 7 percent bonds, Confederate 4 percent bonds, Bank of Virginia stock, and $2458.20 in Confederate currency. There was some hope for such securities as a block of Virginia state canal stock, valued at twenty thousand dollars, that George Washington had donated in 1796, causing the school to change its name from Liberty Hall Academy to Washington College, but even this was paying no income. “No provision has been made by law for the payment of the interest on the State debt and no provision can be made until the meeting of the Legislature in December, and the revenues of the state will not then be sufficient to meet the interest on all the debt.”
The school was in an odd form of bankruptcy. Ninety-four thousand dollars of its prewar endowment was nominally intact, but in the form of securities that in almost every instance were not paying interest, and that could not be sold because no buyer could be sure of their worth. In the meantime, the professors had to be paid something, and there was no money. There were other bills, as well.
The trustees were undaunted. Having failed in an earlier effort to borrow five hundred dollars to open the college this coming September, they now resolved to try to borrow forty-six hundred, on the theory that it might be easier to get a big loan than a small one. While they were at it, they passed this motion: “Resolved, that a committee of three be appointed to wait upon the Commandant of the Federal forces now at Lex. & ask that the college buildings be at once vacated by the troops.”
Because the prewar college president had been a Union sympathizer who was driven from the campus, it was necessary to name a new leader. Several names were placed in nomination, and a vote was about to be taken, when one of the board members rose and told his colleagues that he had heard something he felt they should know. A friend in Staunton had recently been talking to Miss Mary Lee, daughter of General Lee, while she was visiting there. Miss Lee had said that, although the people of the South stood ready to give her father everything he might need, what he really needed was a job by which he could earn a living for himself and his family.
The idea shone in the room. “Then various members of the board said what a great thing it would be for the college if the services of General Lee could be secured, and wondered if there was any chance of doing so.”
They could not resist. A few minutes later, Robert E. Lee, who knew nothing about it, was unanimously elected president of Washington College, by men who had no reason to suppose that he would accept. They were thinking of Lee as a famous battlefield leader, but they had just named a former superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point who knew more about educational administration than they did.
“Then there was a pause, and silence prevailed for some moments. The board seemed oppressed with the gravity of the situation, and seemed to feel that they had acted rashly.” A participant later said that it suddenly struck them as a great presumption to have elected Lee head of a “broken-down college.”
They had done it; they plunged on. The committee appointed to draft a letter to Lee agreed that such a proposal could not drift in through the mail; they asked Judge John Brockenbrough, the head of the board, to carry this invitation to General Lee, wherever he was, and urge him to accept.
The tall, heavyset judge stood, looking down at his threadbare clothes, and said that he did not have a suit that was in good enough condition for a man who was supposed to call on General Lee. He had no money for clothes or travel expenses, and neither, he reminded them, did the college.
Men who could elect Lee were not going to be stopped by that. One man loaned Brockenbrough a suit, and another arranged to borrow fifty dollars from a Lexington woman who had recently sold some tobacco from her farm. That fifty dollars—new United States greenbacks that were slowly coming into circulation among those who were so fortunate as to have any money—was all the cash at the disposal of Washington College. It was about to be used as venture capital.
And so it was that Judge John Brockenbrough, wearing a borrowed suit and representing a college that borrowed the money to send him, arrived unannounced at the tenant house in which Robert E. Lee was living through the courtesy of a friend. The worldly fortunes of both men, and of the college one represented, were at their lowest.
Lee listened. The college’s offer included the use of a house and garden, and a plot of land on which vegetables could be raised. He would receive a percentage of the tuition fees. The salary would be fifteen hundred dollars a year—dollars the college did not have, but hoped to take in.
At length Judge Brockenbrough departed, and in the days that followed Lee considered the matter. He still wanted a private farming life; his personal inclination was not at all for a college presidency. He knew it would mean that his days would be packed with people, and his desk piled with problems. Lee detested public speaking; this job would involve presiding over all manner of occasions. It was clear that Washington College was struggling to survive, at a time when most Southern families were worrying about food for their stomachs rather than college educations for their sons. Leading the effort to save Washington College would put his body back under the strains he had just removed.
Although Lee respected education, the interests of his career had always lain elsewhere. In 1852, when he had received the orders assigning him as superintendent at West Point, he had within hours written a request that the job be given to someone else—anyone else. When that failed to move the War Department, he did his usual meticulous job, and after the three-year tour moved on as soon as he could to his next assignment, with the Second Cavalry in the West.
On the other hand, that had been in another life, when he was a professional soldier, trying to practice his profession rather than to prepare cadets for it. Now, with his profession barred to him and his beloved South slumped in defeat, the idea of educating young men to be useful peacetime citizens was a different matter. Even during the war, the future of the troops who would live through it was on Lee’s mind. Near the climax of the Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee had sat astride Traveller, watching his men advance to the chilling high-pitched sound of their Rebel Yell, and had spoken quietly to a German military observer. He talked not of the battle, but of what the survivors among those grey-clad troops would do after the war, and of the educational needs of the South.
And here was this unsought offer. As in the lives of all persons, Lee’s essence was to be found not in what he said, but in what he did. There were other dimensions to Lee, but his life was one long response to whatever struck him as being the call of duty. For thirty-five years, as cadet and officer, he had given himself unsparingly to the United States Army. When he believed that his duty as a Southerner required that he “take no part in an invasion of the Southern States,” he had resigned from the United States Army. Knowing that his native Virginia was soon to be attacked by the United States Army, his sense of duty led him to accept when he was offered the command of Virginia’s forces. Now here was a new responsibility that perhaps he should undertake.
On one of these hot August days, Lee rode more than thirty miles over to Albemarle County to discuss the matter with his old friend Reverend Joseph Wilmer, an Episcopal clergyman. Wilmer’s initial reaction was this: “I confess to a momentary feeling of chagrin at the proposed change (shall I say revulsion?) in his history. The institution was one of local interest, and comparatively unknown to our people. I named others more conspicuous which would welcome him with ardour as their presiding head.”
Lee was not worried about the relative prestige of various Southern universities and colleges. As Wilmer discovered within a few more minutes, Lee felt “that this door and not another was opened to him by Providence, and he only wished to be assured of his competency to fulfill his trust.” Leaving Wilmer’s house the next day to ride back to Derwent, Lee was still concerned about some other factors, things that he wished were irrelevant, but were not. It seemed to him that, with his name anathema to so many in the North and the chance that he might still end up behind bars like Jefferson Davis, he might prove to be Washington College’s biggest and final liability. It was a point that he had raised in talking with Brockenbrough. There was his health, which would limit what he could even try to do. Finally, he was an Episcopalian, and Washington College had until now been in practice a Presbyterian school.
Lee was not left to ponder these matters unassisted. Judge Brockenbrough wrote, again urging him to accept. He assured Lee that, far from hurting the college by associating his name with it, “you have only to stretch forth your powerful arm to rescue it,” and went on to express what was certainly the hope in Lexington: “You alone can fill its halls, by attracting to them not the youth of Virginia alone but of all the Southern and some even of the Northern States.”
There were two other letters from men Lee knew well, residents of Lexington who could judge some aspects of the situation better than he could. One was from John Letcher, a wartime governor of Virginia who had been imprisoned for six weeks at the war’s end, and a man whose judgment Lee greatly valued. Lee and Letcher had already been in correspondence about the postwar fate of the South; both were optimists in a dark time. Letcher wrote: “You can do a vast amount of good in building up this institution, and disseminating the blessings of education among our people.”
The other letter was from William Nelson Pendleton, the rector of the small Episcopal church in Lexington, and a man whose life had embraced both religion and the military. Graduating from West Point a year behind Lee, he had eventually recognized a religious calling and had resigned from the army to enter the ministry. Not without soul-searching, he had entered the Confederate Army as an artillery officer rather than as a chaplain, and had risen to be one of Lee’s generals. Now he was back in his prewar position at Lexington’s Grace Church. While acknowledging in his letter to Lee that “Lexington is, as you are aware, a place of no great importance,” Pendleton pointed out the attractions of its mountain scenery, and added that “the house & appliances provided for the President would present many comforts.”
It was not on these grounds, however, that he put his case to Lee. He knew his man, and he said the magic words, expressing “my hope that it might accord with your views of duty & with your tastes to accept the important trust.” Pendleton explained why he thought this was such a significant opportunity:
One great reason why I hope you may judge favorably of this invitation is, that the destiny of our State & country depends so greatly upon the training of our young men. And now our Educational Institutions are so crippled that they need the very best agencies for their restoration and the revival of high aims in the breasts of Virginian & Southern youths.
An old soldier was calling a comrade to arms in the cause of peace. The general and doctor of divinity summed up his view with the words, “I have thought Dear General while thus doing an important service to the State & its people you might be presenting to the world in such position an example of quiet usefulness & gentle patriotism, no less impressive than the illustrious career in the field.”
After considering the matter for close to three weeks, during which he received private assurances that Washington College would favor no particular Christian denomination, Lee wrote the trustees a conditional acceptance. He stressed that they must weigh the fact that he had not received a pardon and might never receive one. “Being excluded from the terms of amnesty . . . and an object of censure to a portion of the Country, I have thought it probable that my occupation of the position of President might draw upon the College a feeling of hostility.” Previous presidents of the college had taught classes, but Lee did not feel that his health was up to that. “I could not, therefore, undertake more than the general administration and supervision of the institution.”
He was explicit about what this Southern school, in the town that proudly claimed the Virginia Military Institute, might expect his political views to be:
I think it the duty of every citizen, in the present condition of the Country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony, and in no way to oppose the policy of the State or General Government directed to that object. It is particularly incumbent upon those charged with the instruction of the young to set them an example of submission to authority . . .
The trustees met and on August 31 sent him a letter, assuring him that they believed he would be an asset and not a liability, and agreeing that he would have no classes to teach. Since Lee had made it clear that if these matters were acceptable he would take the job, he became the president of Washington College, a school he had never seen, in a place he had never been.
Five months after Appomattox, all had changed for him again. It was not to be a quiet life in the country. Efforts on his book would have to be squeezed in among new and pressing matters; in fact, his projected history of his campaigns would never get beyond his collecting of materials for it, although eventually he would write an introduction for the new edition of his father’s Revolutionary War memoirs. Lee would leave Derwent and go to Lexington ahead of his family, sending for them when the house he had been promised was ready.
Twenty weeks since Appomattox. The man who had said, “Then there is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths,” was now writing, “The decision of war, having been decided against us, it is the part of wisdom to acquiesce in the result, and of candor to recognize the fact.” He was urging “the healing of all dissensions.”
Of those dissensions between North and South, some were more obvious now than in the hours after the guns fell silent. White Southerners accepted the fact that slavery had ended, but they had their own ideas about what should come next where the blacks were concerned. Northerners who heard of it were staggered to learn that many former slaveholders believed that the victors should compensate them financially for the loss of those blacks, formerly their property under Southern laws, who had walked out on them when they received their freedom. From the Southern point of view, the slaves had indeed been property—one estimate placed their collective value at two billion dollars—and it was common practice to use slaves as collateral for loans, just as a man might take a mortgage on a house. In purely economic terms, to strip two billion dollars’ worth of property from its former owners overnight was to create an entirely new class of paupers.
Dimly, many white Southerners perceived a truth. Unless the North was even richer than they thought, the blacks were still dependent on the whites of the South for their livelihood. Throughout the South, labor contracts were entered into between white employers and black workers, and at the same time vagrancy laws were enacted. The blacks believed that the labor contracts were to put them into their old bondage under a new guise, and that the vagrancy laws were to keep them from leaving the areas where they had been exploited as slaves. Soon there would be an entire set of “black codes,” drawn up by Southern whites to limit the rights of blacks.
From Washington, President Andrew Johnson was trying to implement a moderate policy toward the recent Confederacy. As Lincoln had, he believed that the Southern states had been out of their “proper practical relation” to the Union while in rebellion; now that the rebellion had failed and there was no longer a nation known as the Confederate States of America, those Southern states, whether they liked it or not, were once more part of the United States. In Johnson’s view, there was nothing else that they could be. Under the plan that he had proclaimed and was almost single-handedly enacting, the former Confederate states were in the process of electing new governors, legislatures, and congressmen. Johnson’s plan required, among other things, that these postwar legislatures should declare their secession in 1861 to have been illegal, and that they must ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery. Those matters accomplished, the former Confederate states could send their senators and representatives to Washington when the Congress convened in December. Once they were seated, the President would revoke martial law in the South, the Federal occupation troops would be withdrawn, and the South would be fully restored to the Union on an equal political footing.
Although they remained bitter about their defeat and the presence of Federal garrisons among them, Southerners were inclined to view President Johnson as the best friend they had in Washington. This was doubtful. By leading them to believe that he was in sole control of the process of reinstating them in the Union, he was causing them to think that all of their recent enemies endorsed his program and saw the South’s compliance with it as evidence of sufficient political rehabilitation.
That was an immense misconception. In the dominant Republican Party, even moderate congressmen were upset that the President was dealing with the Southern states as if readmission were a matter for the executive branch alone, something to be presented as a fait accompli to the Congress when it convened. As for Southern compliance with Johnson’s plan, most Northerners had not expected blacks to have a part in reorganizing the Southern state governments, but they did expect the whites to give them equal protection under the law. Now they saw that, despite military occupation and the presence of Freedmen’s Bureau offices and agents throughout the South, white Southerners were enacting black codes to ensure that there would be one law for the whites and one for the blacks. Until this moment, the idea of a vote for the blacks had been entirely secondary in Northern thinking, with many opposed to the idea. The war had been fought to end secession and to abolish slavery, rather than to extend the franchise to blacks, but now increasing numbers of Northerners began to think that giving blacks the vote would be the best way to help them defend themselves.
If the black codes were disturbing to moderates, they were infuriating to the Radical wing of the Republican Party. Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the House leader of this steadily growing faction, held that the Southern states should be treated as “conquered provinces” that were on a lengthy period of Federally supervised probation. Some Radicals wanted to confíscate the land belonging to former slaveholders and redistribute it among the blacks. The Radicals unceasingly told the Northern public that the sacrifices of war were being negated by a policy that was putting Southern state governments back into much the same hands that had guided them into the war.
Five months since Appomattox. As Lee prepared to go to Lexington, new emotional battle lines were being drawn. Suffering, resentful, and unrepentant, eight million white Southerners believed that if all this oath-taking meant that they were American citizens again, then they should be represented in Washington and should be granted a free hand in running their state and local governments, in which they felt that blacks were not qualified to participate. Twenty million Northerners were determined that the deaths of three hundred and sixty thousand Union soldiers should mean something, and that four million blacks should not have their fate decided for them by those who had held them in their absolute power for generations.
In his little borrowed house in the country, Lee cleared up his correspondence before leaving. He wrote, “I believe it to be the duty”—that word again—“of everyone to reunite in the restoration of the country, and the reestablishment of peace and harmony.” To his friend John Letcher, who agreed with him, he outlined what he thought public-spirited Southerners should do. It was just what he had told his young staff officers, on the road from Appomattox to Richmond. “They should remain, if possible, in the country; promote harmony and good feeling; qualify themselves to vote; and elect to the State and general legislatures wise and patriotic men, who will devote their abilities to the interests of the country.” The definition of what was “wise,” what was “patriotic,” and what were the best “interests of the country,” would be the source of endless contention between North and South.
In answer to letters from those in despair, Lee counseled patience, moderation, and hope. “I look forward to better days,” he said, and meant it.
As Lee packed the baggage that was to be sent ahead of him, the nation was reading about his new position in its newspapers. In the South, approval, and one more lesson by example from Lee—go to work, do something, even if it’s not what you did before, and let’s get things going again. In the North, the New York Independent said of Lee’s future relationship with his students, “As president, he must look after the morals of his young men. If he desires to impress upon them the obligations of truthfulness, he can remind them of the oath he took to support and defend the Government of the United States, and how he has kept that oath the last four years . . . the bloodiest and guiltiest traitor in all the South, that man we make president of a college.”
Mail descended on Washington. Among the letters that President Johnson received, he read this: “Aren’t you ashamed to give Lee the privilege of being President of a college? Satan wouldn’t have him to open the door for fresh arrivals.”
For his family, however, he was husband and father, going somewhere. On September 14, 1865, Mary Lee wrote a friend, “He starts tomorrow en cheval for Lexington. He prefers that way, and, besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.” As for the job itself, “I do not think he is very fond of teaching, but he is willing to do anything that will give him an honorable support.”
So a rapidly aging man with a clear head and a bad heart swung up on the horse he loved, and headed west into the hills.