BACK IN LEXINGTON, Lee thankfully slipped into the domestic life that had been so dramatically interrupted by his summons to Washington. Although he had lived through catastrophe and change, he was a creature of habit. Each morning he expected Mary, his daughters, and any guests to be at the table at seven for the prayers he led before breakfast. From the school’s chapel service he would go to his office, and at two he would return to the house for a midday dinner that was removed from the oven when the cook saw him coming. A rest after dinner, a ride on Traveller in all but the worst weather, and supper at seven-thirty. When there was an afternoon faculty meeting or a long meeting of the vestry of Grace Episcopal Church, the ride on Traveller might have to be sacrificed.
The evenings were given to the Lees’ version of an open house. After eight-fifteen, friends were free to call, and every night a number of them did. Each student received at least one invitation to call on a specific evening during the school year, and many came often. Food and drink were seldom served, and it would seem that this was no loss for the guests. Of all the thousands of admiring words written about Robert E. and Mary Lee by those who stayed at their house or were invited to dinner, the sole compliments about food concerned some pecans from Georgia and some raw oysters on ice from Maryland.
Social life revolved around the Lee daughters: Mary, who was known to Lee as “Daughter,” and Agnes and Mildred. Mary now was thirty-one, Agnes twenty-five, and Mildred twenty, so the gentlemen on hand ranged from bachelor professors through returned veteran students down to the “yearlings.” Some young married couples from the faculties of the college and V.M.I. also appeared, and there frequently were young women house guests, friends from other places.
The custom was for the Lee daughters to greet each guest at the door; if the man was a frequent caller or seemed well able to take care of himself, he was turned on into the house without further specific introductions to other guests. A shy undergraduate would find himself taken under one wing after another, introduced to everyone with words that it was hoped would establish something in common, and never neglected as the evening progressed. The entertainment was the world’s simplest—sitting or standing around, talking, with an occasional gathering about the piano when Mildred played.
All of this took place in the front parlor. Back in the dining room, Mary Lee would sit on one side of the fireplace, invariably doing some kind of needlework. Guests were surprised to find her mending the underwear of the Hero of the South, or darning socks for her son Custis. As Mary Lee worked, Lee would read to her in his rich voice, either excerpts from the Lexington Gazette or one of the newspapers that arrived by mail or from some book of her choice. If a young man new to the house arrived, one of the daughters would bring him back here for a few words with her parents.
At ten o’clock the general would appear in the front room and begin closing the shutters. Wise young men would have left before that, first bowing to General and Mrs. Lee; the shutters were the last call. A “Captain W.,” informed that Lee had a high opinion of his character, replied that this was because he always got out of the house before the first shutters closed.
It was a scene that appeared to be a happy one, and for Lee it was. For the women of the family, life was not that easy. Mary Lee was frequently in agony from her arthritis. The house had no porch; once a good horsewoman and an avid gardener, she had to be carried down the steps to enjoy an hour of spring sunlight in the yard. Mary Lee seldom went anywhere; when she did, she had to be placed into a carriage. Most hours of most days she was confined to her “rolling chair” inside the house. As she saw all these youths dashing about while she became more of an invalid, she wrote a friend, “It often seems to me that my affliction is peculiarly trying to one of my active temperament.” She noted that much was happening at Washington College and V.M.I., “but I am unable to mix in anything that is going on & am often very sad and lonely.” She wished that one of these boys would call on her rather than pay his respects to the general or spend the entire evening in the front room with her daughters. “There are so many students. I suppose they are studying very hard, as they never seem to find time to visit me.” Always she thought of Arlington, empty, Union graves in the garden where she had spent so many hours. The house, the garden, the pine groves were to her like children crying for her, but she could not go to them. The ladies of Lexington were kind, she wrote a friend, but “with the exception of my own immediate family I am entirely cut off from all I have ever known & loved.”
The situation of the South was an even greater sorrow for her. Before the war, she had written against secession in terms as eloquent as her husband’s, “Secession is nothing but revolution.” As she saw the crisis overtaking the nation she said, “I would lay down my life could I save our ‘Union,’” and to a friend she wrote that no evil could be “greater than the Division of our glorious Republic into petty states.”
War had changed her. Arlington had been taken from her. Friends had been killed. Friends of her sons and daughters had been killed. Early in the war, Rooney’s house had been burnt to the ground by Union troops. Later, she had watched a Federal raiding party carry him flat on his back into captivity, seized while he was convalescing from a wound at a supposedly safe place behind the lines. Rooney’s wife, Charlotte, never in good health, had died from the shock of that moment and her subsequent terror that Rooney would die in a Federal prison.
Mary Lee was through with the North, but from Washington there now came a stream of news that she regarded as salt in her wounds. In the weeks after her husband returned from his interrogation, the Congress had hardened and had passed, over President Johnson’s veto, legislation strengthening Federal control of the South for the purpose of protecting the blacks. A message was being sent to white Southerners: You are on probation for an indefinite period. If you want to rejoin the Union, show us a willingness to treat your former slaves as equals under the law. To make sure that Confederates got the point, on April 9, 1866, the first anniversary of Lee’s surrender, the Congress passed a Civil Rights Act. This conferred citizenship on blacks and strengthened their status in legal proceedings and property rights, but did not touch the question of a vote for blacks.
The body before which Lee had appeared, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, was now putting forward the recommendations that would be the basis for the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among this amendment’s several provisions was a measure to reduce the representation of states that refused to extend the vote to blacks, and a section controlling the re-entrance of former Confederates not only into the Federal government, but into the government of their own states. At the same time that Congress was studying these resolutions, it overrode President Johnson’s veto and passed a bill that authorized funds as part of an indefinite extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau beyond the time it had been scheduled to cease its activities.
Mary Lee’s reaction to all this was:
I think the last resolutions of the committee exceed all that has yet been done or said for the injury & oppression of the South & what do you think of their appropriating 11 millions for the support in idleness of lazy negroes who throng the Capitol & are now robbing the South quite as much as the Yankees ever did. Even in this little place Every House has been robbed & even the spring plants pulled up out of our garden . . . There has been lately a Yankee store set up here which is strongly suspected of receiving these stolen goods tho’ as yet there is no proof. If our people could have realised all they were to suffer at the hands of the ungenerous & unprincipled party who are unfortunately now in power they would never [have] relaxed their efforts to obtain their independence. It is too late now to say what might have been.
The problems of the Lee daughters were of a social nature. Lexington was part of a culture that was alien to them. Until the war, their lives had been spent among the landed Virginia aristocracy, in a mansion high on a bluff that looked straight at the Capitol dome in the distance. To their table had come lively, sophisticated men and women from all over the United States and from foreign countries. In their society there was nothing unusual, let alone suspect, about wine with dinner, or dancing the waltz, in which the man’s arm was about the woman’s waist.
They were making the best of Lexington, but the beginning had been a disaster. Soon after arriving, Mildred wrote a friend, “I believe it was you who told me Lexington was such a delightful place. I disagree with you in toto. I am dreadfully lonely, know no one well in the whole town . . . Lucy do you know what starvation of the heart & mind is? I suffer, & am dumb!” In a reminiscence, she complained of “the provincial society,” and on another occasion called Lexington’s permanent residents “Saints.”
As for the Saints, they were less than enchanted with the Lee girls. A young professor who himself was none too fond of Lexington balanced it out thus:
I have recently been to call on the Miss Lees, and found them exceedingly agreeable. They don’t seem to like Lexington much, think the people stiff and formal, which is very much the case. I only saw Miss Mary and Miss Agnes. Miss Agnes I like very much, her seeming haughtiness and reserve which offend the Lexingtonians so much, I particularly admire.
Miss Mary Lee’s reaction to Lexington was to spend a lot of time away from it, on an almost endless round of trips and visits to friends. Her mother said of her, “We rarely hear from Mary; she is a bad correspondent.” When she was in Lexington, Daughter startled everyone by taking long walks by herself through a countryside where robberies sometimes occurred. Men seemed to have a nearly identical reaction to the tall, angular Mary: one called her “wholly devoid of fear,” with a “strong, but somewhat eccentric character”; another called her a “very masterful type, not afraid of anything or anybody.” In the family she was known for her sharp tongue. It was of her as much as anyone that Lee was thinking when he wrote to Rooney on his farm, “We are all as usual—the women of the family very fierce and the men very mild.” Agnes, whose “haughtiness and reserve” concealed the grief and shock she felt over the death of Orton Williams, visited away from Lexington with some frequency, but became part of the domestic scene. Mildred, sweet and enthusiastic, crazy about cats, her father’s favorite child, was home most of the time.
Soon enough, Mary and Agnes were in the company of professors from the college and from V.M.I. Ice was on the river. “No lady skates,” the Lexingtonians said. “If she does, it is a Yankee lady.” All three sisters loved to skate; they skated, and found plenty of young men joining them on the ice. Mary and Agnes went for a sleigh ride through the darkened winter countryside with two professors from V.M.I. With spring, the Lee daughters had a skiff on the North River. Mary and Agnes and Mildred founded the Reading Club, a group of twelve young women who met at different members’ houses, with male guests invited. Lee wrote of this organization, “As far as I can judge, it is a great institution for the discussion of apples and chestnuts, but is quite innocent of the pleasures of literature.”
Some of these young men declared themselves to be seriously interested in Mildred, who was described by a friend as “not beautiful, but had a bright, interesting face and a pleasing personality, and fine literary taste and culture.” A student from Arkansas, a nonveteran younger than Mildred, became a good friend of hers, with “no romance in our relations.” She confided in him. “Miss Mildred was much sought after by men whose alleged love, she knew, was ‘mingled with respect that stood aside from the entire point.’”
That was half the problem. To be a daughter of Robert E. Lee was to be in the position of an heiress who does not know whether professions of love are genuine. By the same token, Lee was held in such reverence that many a Southern man would no more have seriously approached one of his daughters than he would have embraced a statue at a shrine.
There was more than this to complicate the emotions of Mary, Agnes, and Mildred. Lee wanted his sons to marry but was possessive of his daughters. He appeared to exert no control over his daughter Mary, but he was constantly writing Agnes and Mildred to come home whenever they were visiting friends and particularly when they were off at weddings. One letter to Mildred said: “Experience will teach you that, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, you will never receive such a love as is felt for you by your father and mother. That lives through absence, difficulties, and time. Your own feelings will teach you how it should be returned and appreciated.” He wrote to Agnes, who was in Baltimore for the wedding of a friend, “I miss you very much and hope that this is the last wedding that you will attend.”
Mary, wherever she was, did not seem to form any serious attachments, and Agnes and Mildred could hardly be expected to admire their father less than did eight million other white Southerners. Here was the military leader of the Lost Cause, striding into the house in his riding clothes, boots, gauntlets, and campaign hat, cheerfully calling out in his deep voice, “Where is my little Miss Mildred? She is my light-bearer; the house is never dark if she is in it.” Seventeen years after his death, Mildred wrote, “To me he seems a Hero—and all other men small in comparison!” Rob, who came up from his farm on the Pamunkey to visit when he could, described part of the daily routine: “After his early and simple dinner, he usually took a nap of a few minutes, sitting upright in his chair, his hand held and rubbed by one of his daughters.”
What did their mother make of all this? The modern study of personality was in its infancy. A later generation might speculate that, married to an invalid, Lee was sublimating his feelings in an innocent but smothering relationship with his daughters. “As to the girls,” Mary Lee wrote a friend, “they seem to be in the condition of ‘poor Betty Martin’ who, you know the song said, could never ‘find a husband to suit her mind.’ I am not in the least anxious to part with them; yet think it quite time, if they intend to change their condition, that they were taking the matter under consideration.”
None of them ever married—not Mary, not Agnes, not Mildred. Lee would have been dismayed if he had understood the degree of his possessiveness and his daughters’ acquiescence in it. He just did not want them to marry now. Long after his death, Mildred wrote, “Most women when they lose such a Father, replace it by husband and children—I have had nothing.”
Near the end of the first year of Lee’s presidency there suddenly arose a situation different from any other. In these troubled postwar months, horse-stealing had become common, and a recently enacted law gave Virginia juries the choice of sentencing a convicted horse thief to death or to a minimum of eighteen years in prison. The small Federal garrison in Lexington had been moved to Staunton, nearly forty miles to the north; to combat the subsequent increase in crime, Lexington had only a magistrate-mayor, a sheriff, known as the town marshal, and a jailer.
A man named Jonathan Hughes had become particularly skillful at stealing horses in the vicinity of Lexington. People knew who he was and what he did, but they could not catch him. On a May afternoon, the word suddenly spread that Hughes had been apprehended and was in the Lexington jail. Farmers, some of whom had lost valuable horses to Hughes and intended that he should never steal another, mounted and rode into town. Soon an angry crowd was in the courthouse yard, surrounding the jail. Men began to talk of pulling Hughes out of his cell and hanging him from a nearby tree. Voices grew loud and uncontrolled; men shook their fists at the barred windows. The town marshal was nowhere to be seen.
The word flashed through town and across the college campus—there was going to be a lynching any minute. A student named Charles Graves was one of those who ran to the courthouse to see what was happening. “At the top of the jail steps,” he reported, “in front of the locked door, stood the old jailor, Thomas L. Perry, holding the jail keys high above his head, and facing, with grim and resolute aspect, the would-be lynchers who surrounded him. For some reason, perhaps respect to the old man’s gray hairs, the men next to him had forborne to seize him and snatch from him the jail keys, as they could easily have done.” Events were building to the moment when they would take those keys, open the jail door, and pull their man out and kill him.
Then the student turned and saw Lee. He was “moving quietly about the crowd, addressing a few words to each group as he passed, begging them to let the law take its course.” Many of the men were his veterans. Lee continued to move through the mob. Men stopped shouting and shaking their fists. Silence fell.
“The end was there,” the student said. “Those stern Scotch-Irishmen, whose tenacity of purpose is proverbial, remounted their horses and rode out of town. They could not do a deed of lawless violence in the presence of ‘Marse Robert.’” The horse thief was duly tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
At the end of June, during the week of Commencement Exercises, Lee sat down with the trustees and reviewed this first academic year of his presidency. With a sense of wonder, they looked at the money now at their disposal. Cyrus McCormick had sent five thousand dollars to add to his initial ten thousand. Warren Newcomb of New York, whose widow was to establish Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane, had given ten thousand dollars to endow ten scholarships. One of the college’s fund-raisers, a traveling clergyman who had been admonished not to say that contributions were for Lee’s salary but who constantly referred to “General Lee’s College,” had raised $45,280 in cash and subscriptions. Two other fund-raisers had brought in a total of twenty-seven thousand dollars. Including tuition fees, Washington College had received more than a hundred thousand dollars in the ten months since the trustees had borrowed fifty dollars so that Judge Brockenbrough could make the trip to offer Lee the presidency.
The ambitious program evolved by Lee and the trustees and faculty now went into action. The college was reorganized into ten departments, each designated as an independent school, although latter-day students would recognize them more readily as ten different “majors.” Professors could now be hired; the faculty for the coming autumn would number fifteen, as compared with four at the close of the war, A local law school run independently by Judge Brockenbrough would be brought into a loose initial affiliation with the college. The preparatory department, which during the war had kept the school going by educating students under military age, would be continued, partly for younger boys from areas where schools were still closed, but also to assist Confederate veterans whose secondary school educations had been interrupted and who were not ready for the full college curriculum.
All this—students, donations, new curriculum, ability to hire new professors—had been attracted or inspired by Lee during his ten months at Washington College. His touch was felt in several recommendations that the trustees now approved. A new chapel, Lee’s pet project, was to be built. There was to be a program for improving and beautifying the campus. A superintendent of buildings and grounds would be hired. A woodyard was to be set aside, and wood bought cheaply during the summer to heat the students’ rooms the following winter. That was Lee the commander, thinking ahead for the welfare of his troops.
The trustees paid tribute to Lee as best they could. They decided to find someone to take on the position of “clerk to the faculty”; his principal task, unknown to Lee, was to lift some of his staggering load of paperwork. Lee’s salary was doubled, to three thousand dollars a year.
The final item involving Lee was a resolution that “a mansion” be built for him and his family, a new and larger President’s House, construction to begin when funds were deemed sufficient. The significance of this was not only the compliment to Lee and the desire that he and his family should have a more spacious and comfortable house; it meant that Lee, who had accepted the presidency with many doubts about his suitability for the job and a near-certainty that he would rather do something else, was going to stay, for a time at least.
The most important thing was not dollars or the bricks and mortar or even the additional professors that the college could buy or hire. It was the high morale and strength of purpose felt by most of the students and all the faculty. Setting forth their sentiments concerning not only reorganization but academic standards, the faculty, in a memorandum outlining the new curriculum, spoke of a determination to bring Washington College “to a level with the best institutions in the country.”
By the end of his first year as an educator, Lee presented an interesting picture of a soldier turned civilian. In his bare, whitewashed bedroom, next to Mary’s much more elaborate room, he slept on his old camp bed. His service revolver hung from a corner of that bed. In an umbrella stand in the corner was a fabulous collection of swords: two that had been presented by the Continental Congress to George Washington and had been handed down in the Custis family, one that had belonged to Lee’s father, and two of Lee’s—the one, presented to him by the Confederate Congress, that was known as “the Sword of the Confederacy,” and the one he had worn when he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The line between what a former professional officer would and would not do was in some instances visible only to Lee: he had no hesitation about being seen with a market basket on his arm, shopping for groceries, but he would not use an umbrella in even the heaviest rain.
The students and townspeople were learning to make no assumptions about what Lee might do or say. A student, walking through a pelting rain, suddenly found himself face to face with Lee, who, with a grey cape about his shoulders and rain dripping from the wide brim of his campaign hat, was the very picture of silver-bearded military dignity. The boy halted at something approximating the position of attention, and found that Lee was asking after the health of the several young ladies for whom he had signed photographs of himself as a favor to this boy, whose correspondence with the girls at home had greatly profited thereby. The student answered that they were all well and was starting to say something else when the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia said, “This is a good day for ducks. Good-by,” and was gone.
Lee never stretched for wit, but occasionally he found a pun irresistible. A Miss Long, one of his daughters’ friends, was staying at the Lees’ for a visit. She was very petite, and she had an ardent suitor, a Lexington gentleman who had fallen in love with her and was calling at the house several times a day, with the most serious intentions. When a lady remarked on this man’s obvious devotion to the small and pretty Miss Long, Lee said, “Yes, he is different from most men; he wants but little here below, but he wants that little Long.”
On political matters, too, people learned not to anticipate his reactions. Just days before he handed their diplomas to the first seniors to graduate under his administration, he wrote to a man in Richmond who was soliciting funds for a monument to be erected in honor of Stonewall Jackson. Lee told him that his students and local residents were too poor to be asked to donate, much as they honored Jackson’s memory, and went on to oppose the plan itself, saying, “I do not think it is feasible at this time.” Although Lee believed that the erection of Confederate monuments would keep alive the wartime passions that he was trying to eradicate, the sight of Northern soldiers in Southern streets bothered him as much as it did any Confederate. Walking through downtown Lexington, Lee saw a student stagger out of one of the town’s saloons, and burst out to his companion, “I wish these military gentlemen, while they are doing so many things that they have no right to do, would close up all these grog-shops that are luring our young men to destruction.”
Still, conciliation was his creed. Lee knew that the war was over and that everything depended on a new attitude for a new day. He was taken to call on a lady who lived north of Lexington, and she promptly showed him the remains of a tree in her yard. All its limbs had been shot off by Federal artillery fire during Hunter’s raid, and its trunk torn by cannonballs. The woman looked at him expectantly as she showed him this memento of what she and her property had endured. Here was a man who would sympathize.
Lee finally spoke. “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”