BEFORE BREAKFAST the next morning, Lee went downstairs and wrote Mary a letter. There was something they had not told him, and now he had to convey it to his wife. The house normally assigned to the president of the college had been rented for some time to a doctor, and in the postwar shortage of livable houses, the doctor had not yet been able to find another. So Lee had to write Mary, who was back at Derwent expecting to join him soon, “I do not know when it will be vacated.”
Lee told her that Lexington was truly in the mountains. It was only September ig, but “last night I found a blanket and a coverlid rather light covering, and this morning I see a fire in the dining room.”
A new place, new people, a new job. In these minutes before any of his host’s family came downstairs, before a day in which he must meet many people and be pleasant to them all, Lee found himself missing his family. For the moment he simply told Mary that “I have thought much of you all since I left,” but before the week was out he would write, “I wish you were all with me. I feel very solitary and miss you all dreadfully.”
The next three days proved as busy as Lee had expected. He was shown the college buildings, on a slope of what a local wit called “the outsquirts” of town. Lee found them “beautifully located,” with the white pillars in front of the rank of brick classroom buildings forming a handsome classic colonnade, but every structure was in terrible condition, with some undergoing repairs and all of them needing attention. The grounds were so tom up and neglected that there were more patches of bare soil and weeds than there was grass. “The scarcity of money everywhere embarrasses all proceedings,” Lee reported to Mary; the doctor who occupied the house that was promised to Lee might be moving from Lexington because his patients could not pay him. The Lexington Gazette, after commenting that there was no bank in this remote town, told a joke about dollars being so scarce that their owners had to introduce them to each other when they met on Main Street.
Beneath the battered but seemingly peaceful surface of this town that was Lee’s new home, passions were still burning. William Nelson Pendleton, the Episcopal clergyman and recent artillery general who had urged Lee to come to Lexington, was in trouble with the officers commanding the Federal military garrison. In his services at Grace Church, he had omitted the prewar prayer for the President of the United States, using instead a prayer for “rulers and all in authority,” the wording of which he compiled from various parts of the Book of Common Prayer. He also delivered some sermons that were deemed “very inflammatory” by the same men who were prepared to see the Virginia Military Institute reopen.
Retribution was not slow. Pendleton was arrested as he walked off the altar and into the vestry room at the close of a Sunday service, and was confined in the garrison’s guardhouse until late that night; after his release, his church was shut until further notice. Pendleton had some old gloves from his days in the United States Army after graduating from West Point, and one day soldiers of that army stopped him on the street and cut the United States brass buttons from his gloves. The temporary wooden marker at the grave of his son “Sandie,” a young lieutenant colonel who had died as a Confederate hero, was mutilated by knives and had insults penciled on it in an act of vandalism by Federal troops. When Pendleton asked for permission to reopen Grace Church, and in the same letter attempted to justify his omitting the prayer for the President, he received this reply, without salutation:
Your quibbling would be impertinent were it not contemptible. When you are prepared to use the prescribed form of prayer—not a garbled quotation from another part of the Prayer-Book—I will request the proper authorities to permit your church to be opened.
Robert C. Redmond
Major Commanding
It was during this autumn that a Northern woman who had come to Lexington to teach black children in a new Freedmen’s Bureau school said that the students of Washington College habitually greeted her on the street with “Damn Yankee bitch of a nigger teacher.”
Lee met with the trustees twice during his first four days in Lexington. All was cordial and constructive, but there were things that he did not know. The trustees were immensely proud of Lee and honored to have him among them, but their difficult stewardship of Washington College moved them to think of him as a magnet for attracting both students and financial gifts. Even as they discussed other matters, the trustees were considering a fund-raising campaign that would center on the idea that the Southern public would be contributing money to pay Lee’s salary. When he finally learned of it, Lee angrily forbade this tactic, but the notion was to appear again in several guises.
On one matter, Lee and the trustees quickly collided. They wished to make a great occasion of his installation as president, two weeks hence, just before the college opened for the new session. “It was proposed . . .” a contemporary wrote, “to send invitations far and wide, to have a band of music play enlivening airs, to have young girls, robed in white and bearing chaplets of flowers, to sing songs of welcome; to have congratulatory speeches, to make it a grand holiday.”
Lee would have none of it. He detested this type of attention, but there were graver reasons than that. In just these four days there had already been an incident that worried him. As he rode Traveller down the street, a crowd had gathered in an outburst of cheering and the Rebel Yell that had so disconcerted him that he rode straight back to his host’s house. With the town under martial law, the last thing he . wanted was to become the focus of random, unpredictable public demonstrations. He was not a martyr; what he wanted to do had to be done outside the Federal garrison guardhouse. Lee knew that the Confederacy was dead, even if others saw it suddenly alive in him as he rode by; it was the South he wanted to help, and he knew that had nothing to do with brass bands and speeches that inevitably would allude to his recent past.
The trustees gave in. At nine o’clock on the morning of October 2, recently returned from a few quiet days at the nearby Rockbridge Baths, a hot-springs resort, he was ushered into the physics classroom on the second floor of what was then known as South Hall. It was filled with early-arriving students, the faculty, local officials, and the ministers of Lexington’s churches. Lee had enough news value for the New York Herald to send a staff correspondent to Lexington for this moment, and the reporter described Lee as being “dressed in a plain but elegant suit of gray”—one of his uniforms, stripped of insignia; he had no other suits at this time. To the reporter’s surprise, when the assemblage rose for the invocation given by the minister of Lexington’s Presbyterian church, “he prayed for the President of the United States.” This was followed by a short speech of welcome addressed to Lee by Judge Brockenbrough. Then Lee took the oath of office, administered by Squire William White, justice of the Rockbridge County Court.
After Lee had signed a copy of this oath, Judge Brockenbrough handed him a metal ring from which hung the keys to the college buildings. The simple ceremony closed with Lee, the trustees, and the faculty all passing into the next room, which was to be his office. This immediate procession into the place where Lee would work was more symbolic than any of them then knew. It was from this office—“a good-sized room,” the reporter noted, “but very plainly and tastefully furnished”—that Lee was to exert his singular influence on everything from the drinking habits of a boy from Georgia to the reconciliation of North and South.
This same day Lee signed another document in addition to his oath as president of the college. In June he had petitioned President Johnson for the restoration of his civil rights. Although he had then counseled others to take the controversial oath of allegiance, he had not included such a signed oath in his application for pardon, because word had not yet been received in Richmond that such a document must be among the papers required in special cases such as his.
Now, to perfect his appeal and to do all that he could to protect the college, he signed the oath of allegiance to the United States. Being a meticulous man, Lee sent this vital document to Washington through reliable channels, but no Federal authority acknowledged its receipt. Believing that this indicated the government’s desire to keep him just where they had him—neither pardoned on the one hand, nor brought to trial under the treason indictment on the other—Lee did not pursue the matter.
What in fact happened to this piece of paper was bizarre. It came to the desk of Secretary of State William H. Seward, the man who was soon to buy Alaska from Russia. Apparently thinking that the routing of this document to him guaranteed that it had already been recorded on Lee’s behalf, he gave it to a friend for a souvenir. The friend put it in a pigeonhole in his desk and forgot about it. It was found in a bundle of papers in the National Archives one hundred and five years later.