THE DAY AFTER he was inaugurated, Lee sat down in his office and came to grips with an enormous correspondence that was not to stop until his life ended. The entire nation knew where Lee was; a large wicker laundry basket overflowing with letters of every sort awaited him. This correspondence was to be a seamless web; letters written to him on one subject nevertheless touched on others, and in even the smallest matters, Lee was in effect offering a lesson to those he answered, by what he did and did not say. In this bare office next to a classroom that in three days would be filled with young men’s voices answering questions, Lee was meeting by mail the vast constituency that considered him the unelected but undoubted leader of the South.
He tried to answer some of the most important letters during the seventy-two hours before classes began. One of the first to which he gave his attention was from Major General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the proud and fiery professional soldier from Louisiana whose varied service had included fighting under Lee in Virginia. Egotistical and given to planning military operations too ambitious for the supplies and transport available, Beauregard had sometimes failed to cooperate with Lee, but now, in these complicated postwar months, he again turned to him as a leader.
Beauregard was one of the principal officers from whom Lee was hoping to receive records and reports for his projected history of his campaigns. Lee now read that Beauregard’s papers were missing and, for the moment at least, unavailable.
Then Beauregard addressed the question that so many recent Confederate leaders, both civilian and military, were asking themselves:
What position should I take in relation to defeat? Beauregard and Lee had both heard from Confederate generals who had left the country. These recent comrades were writing from Havana, from Mexico City, from Canada, from England. Before long there would be an entire colony of Confederates and their families in Brazil, a nation in which slavery was still legal; wanting enterprising immigrants who knew how to work with slaves in clearing land for new farms, the Brazilian government would offer them free transportation and free land. Matthew Fontaine Maury, the internationally known oceanographer and recent commodore in the Confederate Navy, was in Mexico, trying to start a settlement of his fellow Virginians. Confederate officers would enter the military service of the Khedive of Egypt, the Prince of Rumania, the Emperor of Korea.
And what, Beauregard respectfully asked Lee, did Lee think of all this, and, by implication, what did Lee think that he, Beauregard, should do?
Sitting next to a silent classroom on the first working day in his office, Lee picked up his pen and wrote a famous letter to a famous man. Beauregard was not Lee, but what he did would have great influence with many thousands of veterans and with a Southern public that held his name in esteem.
“I am glad to see no indication in your letter,” Lee wrote, “of an intention to leave the country. I think the South requires the aid of her sons now more than at any period in her history. As you ask my purpose, I will state that I have no thought of abandoning her unless compelled to do so.”
Lee reviewed for his Napoleonically inclined lieutenant who had suddenly become humble his own efforts to regain full United States citizenship. His concluding passage was to be quoted for generations:
I need not tell you that true patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. The circumstances that govern their actions, change, and their conduct must conform to the new order of things. History is full of illustrations of this: Washington himself is an example of this. At one time he fought 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. He has not been branded by the world with reproach for this, but his course has been applauded.
As classes got under way in October, Lee made a point of meeting every student in the college. Only fifty had been on hand when he was inaugurated; drawn by the knowledge that he was in Lexington, a few more arrived each day from different parts of the South, until a hundred and forty were enrolled. The Lexington Gazette made a point of stating that there was still plenty of room so that qualified applicants would not think all places filled, but in the desperate condition of the South, a hundred and forty young men able to pay their way in one form or another was a sizable number.
Many of these young men were veterans of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia; some had been wounded on battlefields only a few yards from Lee. The war had made some into libertines and some into serious, sober men, but it had left its mark on all of them. Givens B. Strickler, coming back as a sophomore, had joined the Liberty Hall Volunteers at the end of his freshman year and had risen to be its twice-wounded captain before being captured when he led a charge into the Union lines at Gettysburg. Strickler was the soul of responsibility; it was shocking to think of all that he had experienced between his freshman and sophomore years, an interval usually bridged by one pleasant summer.
Most of the veterans were serious about their studies, but some found the saloons and billiard parlors of Lexington more congenial than the classroom; others, used to sleeping on the ground and walking endless miles, spent their days hunting foxes afoot, with hounds. Many had shotguns for birdshooting; others had pistols with them because their travels to Lexington had taken them through parts of the South where gangs of highwaymen were robbing travelers. A student said, “At times we were a wild and excitable bunch of youths. War and race prejudice still ran high, and more than once some of our number were guilty of indiscretions.”
In their meetings with Lee in his office, these bearded veterans did not always know whether they were talking to the college president or the general. Speaking freely to Lee of his plans, one of them said, “I am so impatient to make up for the time I lost in the army—”
He got no further, because Lee turned red and his deep voice said loudly, “Mister Humphreys! However long you live and whatever you accomplish, you will find that the time you spent in the Confederate army was the most profitably spent portion of your life. Never again speak of having lost time in the army.”
“And,” recalled that veteran, who went on to take a doctorate at Leipzig and have a long career as a classics professor at three American universities, “I never did.”
With the boys who had been too young for the war, Lee took a gentler tone. One of these “yearlings,” as the nonveterans came to be known, fearfully approached Lee’s office for his first meeting. “My heart cut all kinds of capers, and my knuckles could make but a very gentle rap on the office door. I was not sure what would happen when I really stood face to face with the General . . . But I did at last timidly rap, and the voice which told me to come in seemed to bring with it a sort of strengthening and sustaining power. Within two minutes, I was seated in a chair, talking to the General as if I had known him and played at his feet since childhood.”
One of these incoming younger students was so taken aback by Lee’s gentleness that he thought he was in the wrong office and that this was not the recent Confederate commander: “He was so gentle, kind, and almost motherly, that I thought there must be some mistake about it.” Once this boy was convinced that he was indeed talking with Robert E. Lee, he saw something more. “It looked as if the sorrow of a whole nation had been collected in his countenance, and as if he were bearing the grief of his whole people. It never left his face, but was ever there to keep company with the kindly smile.”
Lee met all of his students individually in his office, and to their astonishment he was able to remember their names from then on. “If he met one or two of the students walking on the street,” an undergraduate from South Carolina recalled, “it was his custom to call each by name. If he had had no other gift for the college presidency, this would have gone far towards qualifying him.”
Even as the students settled into their classroom work, they were thinking of their president as something more than an educator. “It was a general belief in all the Southern States,” a young man from Maryland said, “as expressed by the students therefrom, that the example of General Lee would weigh far more in the restoration of normal conditions and true peace than any other factor in a war-torn country.”
If the trustees and faculty thought that Lee might be an esteemed figurehead rather an active president, they instantly learned otherwise. This was a man who had commanded a field army five hundred times the size of this student body; now, despite a bad heart, he focused his energy and attention on this smaller group.
Within a few days, Lee had arranged his daily schedule. At the Lexington Hotel, where he was living until his house was ready, he breakfasted at seven o’clock. At a quarter to eight, he was in the college room that served as a chapel, ready for the brief morning devotions that were conducted in rotation by the ministers of Lexington’s churches.
At eight in the morning he entered his office and did not leave it until two in the afternoon, when he would go to the hotel for his midday dinner, which he took at that hour. These six hours were Lee’s great resource in dealing with the river of paperwork that never ceased flowing through his office. He seldom returned to his office after his midday dinner; after a brief nap, if there was no faculty meeting or other college business, he would go for a long ride on Traveller, returning to the hotel in the early evening. After a light supper at seven-thirty, he would read the newspapers or the pocket Bible he had carried for many years. At ten o’clock he went to bed; it was Lee’s belief that every hour of sleep before midnight was worth two afterward.
His output in the office was prodigious. During the war he had always had able staff officers and at least four clerks to whom he could dictate; here, he wrote everything himself. In addition to answering the tremendous flow of correspondence from the general public, from former officers, from family and friends, he replied to every letter that came to his office concerning every aspect of the college. He answered every inquiry about admission; after a while, parents of Washington College students would cease to be startled by the frequency with which Robert E. Lee was writing them about their sons’ progress, or lack of it. An admiring professor wrote of his attention to college administration, “He audited every account; he presided at every faculty meeting; studied and signed every report.”
Lee’s working relationship with his faculty soon resembled the one he had developed with his generals. It was up to him to evolve or to approve the overall plan; they must execute their parts of it as circumstances dictated. They were teachers; let them teach. From time to time he would appear in the back of a classroom, listen to the recitation in progress, and depart. It was enough.
Lee was sitting in his office when his door swung open without anyone knocking. A little boy, his cheeks blazing, marched in and stood in front of his desk. Lee took off his reading glasses and asked him what he wanted.
Indignantly, the boy said that his father had been killed in the Confederate Army, but because his mother was originally from New York, his playmates kept taunting him by telling him that he was a Yankee. He had decided to come to headquarters for justice.
“The next boy that calls you ‘Yankee,’” Lee growled, “send him to me.”
The boy nodded and departed, armed with a threat that “struck such terror into the hearts of his small comrades that the offense was never repeated.”
No one, not even Lee, knew just what was going to happen next in his office. He had sent word that he wanted to see a young Kentuckian whose behavior was causing bad reports. The student appeared chewing tobacco.
“Chewing is particularly obnoxious to me,” Lee said. “Go out and remove that quid, and never appear before me again chewing tobacco.” The young man went into the hall, and came back into Lee’s office, still chewing.
Lee took one look, wrote briefly on a piece of paper, and told the student to read what was on it, because it would be posted on the college bulletin board in ten minutes. The boy saw that the first thing on it was his name, followed by “is dismissed from Washington College for disrespect to the President.”
As Lee took hold, each day some miscreant found himself called in. Veterans of savage wartime fighting emerged from Lee’s office with their eyes red because Lee had spoken to them of their mothers, and told them how pained their families would be by their riotous behavior and inattention to studies. Lee was acting out what he had said to his general A. P. Hill: “You’ll have to do what I do: when a man makes a mistake, I call him to my tent, and use the authority of my position to make him do the right thing the next time.”
The approach was tailored to the offender and the offense. One young man simply disappeared before classes one morning and was not seen again until dark. When called in to explain himself, he readily admitted that he had spent the entire day fox-hunting.
Lee looked at him for a minute, and then said softly, “We did not come here to hunt foxes.”
“That boy,” one of his friends said, “never even wanted to go after foxes any more.”
Lee’s verdicts were seldom harsh, but they were final. Although they did not know it, these students felt as had a private of the Second Cavalry, before the war, when brought before Lee for a minor offense. Seeing that the young soldier was scared, Lee said gently, “You shall have justice.”
The boy answered, “That is what I am afraid of, sir!”
Remote as Lexington was, there were unannounced callers who came just to see Lee. A book salesman had sent Lee a copy of a hastily compiled volume about the war, and now appeared in his office. He began, “I sent you the other day, General, a copy of this book which I am engaged in selling.”
Lee promptly answered, “Yes, sir, I received it, and am obliged to you for your kindness.”
Mistaking politeness for encouragement, the salesman pressed on: “I called this morning to get you to give me a recommendation of the work. A line from you would be worth a great deal to me.”
“You must excuse me, sir,” Lee said in his formula for indicating that a meeting was at an end. “I cannot recommend a book which I have not read, and never expect to read.”
On another of these autumn mornings the agent of an insurance company called on Lee and told him that he was authorized to offer him its presidency. He mentioned a salary of ten thousand dollars, more than six times what Lee was making.
Lee explained that he was unwilling to resign the college presidency he had just begun, and said that he could not do both jobs at once.
“But, General,” the insurance salesman said, “we do not want you to discharge any duties. We simply wish the use of your name; that will abundantly compensate us.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Lee said. “I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render.”
Always there was the silent pile of letters. Even an inquiry about admission could be a ghastly footnote to the war.
Knoxville, Tenn.
Nov. 5, 1865
Gen. R. E.
Lee Dear Sir,
I offer my best respects and well wishes for the prosperity & happiness of yourself and kind family—I have to say to you that I am a wouned soldier of the Confederate Army I lost my right arm at Vicksburg Miss and was taken prisoner and remain in prison until last,Feb. I then volteered in the 7th S.C.C. as courier I remain there until the surrender at Appomattox Court House Va.
I have neather father nor mother living so you must excuse me for this time. I have no body near me but a granmother and she says that she will give me a good education and I am not fit for this life with out I have a good education Will you be so kind as to inform me what my tutition and board will be for twelve month I am twenty years old. I am indited here for treason and my trial does not come up until the fourth Monday in this month so if you will attend to this for me I will thank you very much This is written with my left hand I have been in the service for four years so please excuse me.
John H. Finley
Even before Lee had been offered the presidency of Washington College, his son Custis had applied for a position as a professor of mathematics at the Virginia Military Institute. He had been appointed to the job at V.M.I., and Lee was happy when Custis arrived to take up his work and joined him in living at the Lexington Hotel. Although the handsome, cigar-smoking Custis was so silent that some found him morose, Lee enjoyed his son’s company. Sometimes Custis would join him on his late afternoon rides, but near four o’clock, with or without Custis, Lee and Traveller would set off on one of the roads that took them through the beautiful hills surrounding Lexington.
The students at Washington College, many of them out for long walks between the end of classes and supper, now saw their president as the veterans among them remembered him. The afternoon ride was for exercise and to clear his mind, but Lee wore virtually what he had dressed in for battle—cavalry gauntlets, top boots, spurs, grey uniform, now without insignia, and “a large light-colored hat with a military cord around it.”
These students doffed their hats as Lee went by. They thought he looked splendid, and it was not Confederate sentiment that made them think that: Lee on Traveller was a genuinely magnificent sight. The former commander of the Second Cavalry was a lifelong professional horseman, and in Traveller his expert eye had picked a superlative mount. At a review in the summer of 1863, the occasion had called for Lee and a number of other mounted officers, most of them far younger than he, to ride a distance of nine miles around a major part of his army, drawn up at attention on a plain. Lee’s son Rob described how the reviewing party set off. “Traveller started with a long lope, and never changed his stride. His rider sat erect and calm, not noticing anything but the gray lines of men he knew so well.” After a few minutes of this pace, horses and riders began to drop out. At last, as the troops waited with their eyes to the front, only one horse and rider came galloping out from behind the drawn-up divisions: Lee on Traveller, blazing toward the reviewing stand. “Then arose a shout of applause and admiration from the entire assemblage, the memory of which to this day moistens the eye of every old soldier.”
A seven-year-old boy who watched Lee heading out of Lexington on Traveller later put it this way: “‘Traveller’ was a mighty proud horse. I’ve seen him many a time coming up the street, and he wouldn’t look to right or left. He looked like just the horse for General Lee.”
There were moments, however, when Traveller did indeed stop. A man standing across the street watched Lee bring Traveller to a halt as he stopped to greet two pretty Lexington girls. As Lee sat astride his mount with his hat in his hand, chatting with his blushing admirers, the man noticed that Traveller was prancing handsomely and pawing the ground with his forehooves. This striking effect was secretly being produced by Lee with what the man across the street noted as a “dextrous and coquettish use of the spur.”
On the country roads far from town, Lee found the serenity that was not to be had in his office. Gazing over the beautiful valleys with their brilliant autumn foliage, he would talk quietly to Traveller as he patted him, but even in the most peaceful setting, their thunderous past occasionally faced them. Riding Traveller through a forest north of Lexington, Lee saw a plainly dressed countryman riding toward him. The stranger reined in and responded to Lee’s usual pleasant greeting by identifying himself as one of his veterans. Then the man said, “General Lee, I am powerful glad to see you, and I feel like cheering you.”
As Lee told it, he replied that there was no point in that; there were just the two of them here in the forest.
The man who had followed him in battle said he just had to do it. Waving his hat, he began shouting, “Hurrah for General Lee! Hurrah for General Lee!”
Lee rode off; the veteran kept cheering until he and Traveller were out of sight.
In the definition of intelligence that calls it the ability to decipher the environment, Lee had scored brilliantly as a soldier; now he demonstrated a peacetime application of meeting challenges by maneuvering one’s resources. From his first postinaugural meeting with the trustees, held when he had been president for only three weeks, there emerged a new and practical vision of education at Washington College.
The trustees had been greatly impressed by Lee’s energetic leadership, and the faculty had found him eager to listen to the ideas they put forth at their weekly meetings with him. The result, almost immediately after Lee took over, was a synthesis in which plans were made to reorganize and expand the curriculum while the trustees, believers now in Lee’s ability as well as his reputation, set out to raise the money to do it.
Lee saw the need to give students an education that would prepare them for postwar realities. No one wished to abandon Latin or Greek, but the shattered South needed men who could design bridges, develop chemical compounds for fertilizers, restore the railroads and canals, and work up blueprints for factories.
The trustees’ minutes of a meeting on October 24, 1865, three weeks after Lee took over, were a shopping list of the South’s needs. Five new professors were needed to open up these new fields, and money must be found to hire them. The proposed professorship of practical chemistry would include metallurgy and chemical aspects of mining. There would be a separate chair for mechanical and civil engineering, an area completely understood by Lee, who had spent most of his United States Army career in the Corps of Engineers. There would be three additional chairs. Practical mechanics was to embrace subjects ranging from architecture and building materials to thermodynamics. Modem languages were to have a department of their own. English literature and composition, and modern history, were moved as a group away from the classics, so that a student need not see English history, or Shakespeare, through the lens of ancient Greece or Rome.
The proposed new curriculum was the fusion of many minds, but one idea was entirely Lee’s. His experience in the Mexican War and in Texas had convinced him of the need for Americans to understand the Spanish language and the Latin American civilization. At a time when only a few of the nation’s largest universities offered Spanish courses, Washington College would join their number.
What was emerging from all this in the months following Lee’s installation was one of the first elective systems in the country. It was a sharp and conscious departure from the classics-steeped prewar education of Southern gentlemen, all of whom were expected to take exactly the same courses in college, no matter what they planned to do in life. Lee had deciphered the environment; seeing that most of his West Point experience was not applicable here, and never having been through a rigid liberal arts curriculum, he was ready to experiment. He had created a climate in which his faculty was encouraged to suggest new things.
When these plans took their larger form at Washington College, they would attract national attention, and praise in the Midwest and North as well as the South. Under Lee’s guidance, the thrust of this reorganization would result in ten new departments, expanded graduate studies, and a range of special programs and offerings, including a proposed course in photography, that would make the school one of the most innovative in the nation.
All this lay ahead in the autumn of 1865; there would be moments of crisis for Lee and the college, but it was he who created the climate of hope, the feeling that all things were possible for Washington College. By the time he died and the school was renamed Washington and Lee University, Robert E. Lee was entitled to a position in the first rank of American educators, without reference to his military past.
Even a modest start on all this was going to take money, and an idea formed in the mind of Judge Brockenbrough. Three clergymen were acting as fund-raisers for the college, two soliciting by mail from Lexington and one traveling about the nation, but Brockenbrough wanted to try for a large gift from Rockbridge County’s most prominent son. This was Cyrus H. McCormick, the inventor of the mechanical grain reaper. Nineteen years before, McCormick had moved from Lexington to Chicago, then a small city, to build his revolutionary machines near the vast Midwestern wheat fields where they would be used. Ironically, this Virginian’s horse-drawn invention had helped to defeat his native South by freeing for military service huge numbers of farm boys who would otherwise have been swinging scythes to feed the North.
To approach this rich inventor and manufacturer, Brockenbrough and Lee devised a masterful combination of what a later generation would call the “soft sell” and the “hard sell.”
Lee went first. On November 28, he wrote to McCormick, whom he had never met, a chatty letter about new developments at Washington College. A contribution was not mentioned, but the proposed new curriculum was. Lee told this mechanical genius that the college was increasing its science courses “to meet the present needs of the country” and to enable its graduates “to enter at once upon the active pursuits of life.” He was sure that McCormick would see “the benefit of applying scientific knowledge and research, to agriculture, mining, manufacturing,” and other business fields.
Lee then pointed out that the people of Rockbridge County, “notwithstanding their impoverished condition,” were generously responding to the need for “funds”—that was as close as Lee came to speaking of a donation—“for the execution of this project.” Having conjured up the picture of McCormick’s poverty-stricken former neighbors gallantly digging into their pockets to support science courses that would rebuild the shattered South, Lee bowed himself out of his letter with this: “Their efforts, I am sure, will be strengthened by your sympathy; and your influence will cheer them in their meritorious work.”
The hard sell was provided a few days later by Judge Brockenbrough, who wrote McCormick that what was needed was a classroom building—to be named after him, of course—to house these new and useful departments. “Can you come down with a good round sum to build up a school with which your name will be associated in all time to come?”
McCormick decided that ten thousand dollars was a round number, and sent along a check for this amount—a princely gift for the time—with indications that more would follow. The school was on its way.