THE STUDENTS quickly dispersed for summer vacation. The previous summer Lee had sent Mary and his daughters to the nearby Rockbridge Baths resort while he remained in Lexington, catching up on his correspondence and starting his work as editor for the new edition of his father’s Revolutionary War memoirs. This year he decided to take his first real vacation since the war.
The first part was an expedition with Mildred to the Peaks of Otter, a mountain thirty miles to the south that offered particularly beautiful views. Lee rode Traveller, and Mildred was on Lucy Long, a second-string war horse of Lee’s that had been lost at the war’s end and only recently recovered. All the clothes they would need for this five-day trip were in their saddlebags.
“We started at daybreak one perfect June day,” Mildred said. Her father was “in the gayest humour, laughing and joking with me,” and Traveller “seemed to sympathise with his master, his springy step, high head, and bright eye clearly showing how happy he was and how much interest he took in this journey.”
At noon they dismounted and ate a picnic lunch while sitting on thick grass under a wild-plum hedge; it was the first time that Lee had eaten under the open sky since the war.
After lunch, they rode on to the James River. There was no bridge here. The man who ran the little ferry was one of Lee’s veterans; he took them across and refused to accept payment, despite Lee’s efforts to have him do so. Lee and Mildred thanked him and led their horses ashore. Mildred’s account continued:
Further on the road, as our horses were climbing a steep rocky ascent, we met some little children, with very dirty faces, playing on the roadside. He spoke to them in his gentle, playful way, alluding to their faces and the desirability of using a little water. They stared at us with open-mouthed astonishment, and then scampered off up the hill; a few minutes later, in rounding this hill, we passed a little cabin, when out they all ran with clean faces, fresh aprons, and their hair nicely brushed, one little girl exclaiming, “We know you are General Lee! We have got your picture!”
The next morning, having spent the night at a small inn at the foot of the mountain, Lee and his daughter set off for the higher slopes on horseback, accompanied by the proprietor. They managed to get their horses to a point nearer the peak known as Sharp Top than anyone had previously ridden; then, tying their mounts to trees, they climbed the rest of the way on foot.
“When the top was reached,” Mildred said, “we sat for a long time on a great rock, gazing down at the glorious prospect beneath. Papa spoke but a few words, and seemed very sad.”
The plan was to ride south from here, visiting friends and returning to Lexington by a different route. That afternoon a thunderstorm overtook them.
We galloped back to a log cabin we had just passed. Papa lifted me off Lucy and, dripping with water, I rushed in, while he led the horse under an adjacent shed. The woman of the house looked dark and glum on seeing the pools of water forming from my dress on her freshly scoured floor, and when papa came in with his muddy boots on her expression was more forbidding and gloomy. He asked her permission to wait there until the shower was over, and praised her nice white floor, regretting that we had marred its beauty.
Lee’s manner somewhat softened the woman; she asked them into the cabin’s best room, which had on its walls colored prints of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and General Joseph E. Johnston.
When the shower ceased and papa went out for the horses, I told her who he was. Poor woman! She seemed stunned, and kept on saying: “What will Joe say? What will Joe say?” Joe was her husband, and had been . . . a soldier in the “Army of Northern Virginia.”
That evening they arrived at the house of friends in what is now the town of Bedford. When Mildred appeared for dinner in a crinoline hoop skirt, her father could not imagine how this dress had made the journey, and was much amused when Mildred explained that it was possible to squeeze the hoops into saddlebags without breaking them. Two mornings later they rode on to the prosperous farm of Captain Pascal Buford, with whom Mary Lee, Daughter, and Agnes had spent a visit during 1863. In writing ahead to Captain Buford, Lee had said that he was bringing his “little girl,” and Buford was expecting Mildred to be a child.
“Why, General,” this robust old farmer in shirt sleeves said as he threw his arms open in greeting them, “you called her your ‘little girl,’ and she is a real chunk of a gal!”
Supper was an experience: “his table fairly groaned with good things.”
Before he went to bed, Lee asked his host what time he wanted them to appear for breakfast.
With no idea that it might be considered funny, the captain replied, “Well, General, as you have been riding hard, and as you are company, we will not have breakfast tomorrow before sun-up.” This meant that he expected them to be at the table at five A.M., and they were.
Back in Lexington after this very satisfactory trip—Captain Buford soon sent along a Jersey cow so that the Lees could have a milk supply right in their yard—Lee began planning a longer vacation for the entire family.
By the summer of 1867, two years after the war, a number of Southerners who could again afford it resumed their prewar practice of spending time at the famous hot-springs resorts of the South. It had been one of the great Southern social customs. While engaged in for pleasure, to escape the summer heat of New Orleans or Charleston or Baltimore by sojourning in the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, or Tennessee, these yearly migrations had a subtle effect in unifying the South. Families from places as disparate as Texas and Florida—and their eligible sons and daughters—would generally divide their time among two or more of these resorts. The men would talk politics; their wives would become friends; their children sometimes married each other. Many who had graced those prewar summers were dead, and many more were too poor to come again, but those who could now did. It was said of one war-impoverished Virginia belle that she set off for her former haunts with “one black silk dress and her grit.”
The Lees had occasionally gone to some of the best-known springs before the war, and now Lee was seriously interested in any relief that their thermal baths might afford Mary. The family decided to go to what was perhaps the most famous of these resorts, the White Sulphur Springs, later known as the Greenbrier. One of its historians called it “practically the clearing house of the South”; before the war many political meetings had been held there, and many large financial ventures were planned by partners from different parts of the South who met there for discussions. Fifty miles west of Lexington, the hotel and its hot springs had formerly been in Virginia, but the war had changed that, along with so much else. In 1862 the western counties of Virginia had seceded from the secession, and the State of West Virginia, in which the White Sulphur was located, was born. Traveller would be returning to his birthplace, Greenbrier County.
They set off in July, making the trip in easy stages. Lee rode Traveller, accompanied by Professor White, the young former Confederate captain who had taken Lee to stay at his father-in-law’s house his first night in Lexington. At the end of their day’s ride they would rendezvous at a wayside inn with the rest of the party, who were traveling by a combination of carriages and stagecoaches and, where it was available, railway. Others in the group were Mary, their daughter Agnes, and their friend Mary Pendleton, a daughter of Lee’s former general who was Lexington’s Episcopal clergyman. Custis was traveling with them, carrying his mother on and off the different forms of transportation and placing her in her rolling chair at the stopping places.
At a roadside tavern where all the Lee party was stopping for midday dinner, a stagecoach from Covington pulled up, and a group of girls from Maryland, and their chaperones, climbed down from their uncomfortable seats. One of them was a young beauty named Christiana Bond. Like her companions, she was on her way to the White Sulphur and had no idea who was inside the little two-story tavern beside the road. Inside, she found out.
. . . we were aware of some one standing at the turn of the steep stairway above us. Looking up, at the sound of a rich, beautifully modulated voice, we knew that we were in the presence of General Robert E. Lee, the hero of our dreams.
The man who stood before us, the embodiment of a Lost Cause, was the realized King Arthur. The soul that looked out of his eyes was as honest and fearless as when it first looked on life. One saw the character, as clear as crystal, without complications or seals, and the heart, as tender as that of ideal womanhood. The years which have passed since that time have dimmed many enthusiasms and destroyed many illusions, but have caused no blush at the memory of the swift thrill of recognition and reverence which ran like an electric flash through one’s whole body.
General Lee stood above us on the stairway, clad in Confederate grey, his wide, soft hat in his hand, which still wore his riding gauntlet. He looked very tall and majestic standing there, beaming down upon us with his kindly, humorous smile and the wonderful beauty of his dark eyes. When we recovered our wits we found a courteous invitation was being extended to refresh ourselves in the rooms which had been reserved for Mrs. Lee’s party.
That was the beginning of one more friendship between Lee and a young woman—innocent, needed by him, treasured by her.
The White Sulphur centered on an immense hotel building, white wood with large columns and wide-roofed porches that ran its length. Across stretches of lawn shaded by handsome old trees were rows of small whitewashed cottages, some yellow and some white. The Lee party was established in a cottage in Baltimore Row—a pleasant, modest structure with vines climbing around a roofed front porch. Mary Lee took her meals there.
The hotel’s high-ceilinged rooms were filled with the news that Lee had arrived. That summer a tense social situation existed. Northerners, some of them army officers and their families, had come there on vacation, and were being left to themselves by the Southerners, who made up a large majority. On the first evening that Lee and his party were to appear in the huge dining room, some of the Southern hotel guests held hasty and inconclusive discussions about what they should do to acknowledge that Lee was about to dine in their midst. They were determined that, whatever the Northerners might do, some sign of respect must be paid to Lee, but when the dinner gong rang on the long verandah, nothing had been decided.
The Southerners need not have worried. When Lee entered the enormous room in his grey frock coat, Miss Mary Pendleton on his arm and Agnes following with Captain White and Custis, every one of the five hundred guests spontaneously rose and stood silent until they were seated.
In the evenings at the White Sulphur, there was a custom known as “the Treadmill.” This was a great promenade. The guests walked up and down the long uncarpeted parlor in lines of three or four, stopping to chat and to make introductions. This was followed by a dance in the dining room, which was nightly converted to a ballroom by the removal of many of its tables. The Northerners had stayed out of this, even the prettiest Northern girls remaining seated on the sofas along the walls.
Lee sized up this situation, and one evening soon after his arrival had an opportunity to do something about it. Even though they were now in West Virginia, many of the Southerners felt particular bitterness toward those West Virginians who had broken away from Virginia and fought the South. They reasoned that a man from Massachusetts did not know any better, but there was no excuse for one of these former Virginians.
There was a West Virginia girl at the hotel who was, a former Confederate major said, “very beautiful and very attractive and more handsomely dressed than any woman at the Springs.” The major had a less enthusiastic view of the girl’s father: “The man had been a Union man during the war and had remained at home and made a fortune, while the men in the South had gone into the army and lost all they had”
The Southern men at the hotel would have been happy to forgive the splendid daughter her father’s political sins. “But the women would have none of her,” the major said, and their menfolk dared not risk their wrath. She became “very lonely.”
One evening, when the Treadmill before the dance was in progress, this lovely girl was sitting in one of the parlors some distance away, reading. While some of the Northern girls sat near the Treadmill and later watched the dance, even though they were not asked to join in, this beauty felt more comfortable in being entirely away from the music.
She became aware that a brilliantly shined pair of black shoes had stopped before her. Looking up from her book, her eyes met those of General Robert E. Lee. He smiled, bowed, and asked for the honor of her company in the Treadmill. The young woman murmured something, put down her book, and took Lee’s proffered arm.
The major knew a happy ending when he saw one: “When the promenade was over and General Lee led the girl to a seat, there was a general rush for introductions, and from that time on the girl not only had all the partners she wanted but actually became the belle of the season.”
The mornings of his vacation Lee kept to himself, riding Traveller through the beautiful surrounding hills. Returning his horse to the stables, he would walk about the resort’s spacious grounds. Soon he found that two Englishmen who were touring the United States had heard that Lee was at the White Sulphur and had hastily come there to meet and spend time with him. In the noon hour, while some other guests were either immersed in the sulphur baths or drinking the hot mineral water, they would catch up to him in his walk and accompany him.
A young woman who knew the general asked him if this intrusion did not annoy him.
“Yes,” Lee said, “they trouble me a little, but I think I get even with them. When they join me in my walks, I always take them down to the Springs and make them drink the water. They are too polite to refuse, when I hand them the glasses, and I fill them up with that nauseous water, and thus have my revenge.”
At two o’clock, Lee would sit down to midday dinner in the large dining room. At his table was a new acquaintance, W. W. Corcoran, a millionaire banker from Washington who was to give the nation the Corcoran Gallery of Art, derived from his personal collection. He was sixty-nine; at the age of fifty-six he had retired from his eminently successful career as a banker and had begun a new career of giving away the money he had made. He had founded the Louise Home for Women in Washington, and his philanthropies embraced religious and educational institutions. Washington College was soon added to the list; in all, Corcoran would give the school thirty thousand dollars.
The late afternoon hours Lee spent with Mary, sitting on the porch of their cottage, often chatting with friends they had not seen for years. Even here, the public would intrude. Preceded only by the briefest introduction performed by companions who were passing the cottage, one man advanced up the steps to the porch where the Lees were sitting with friends. “Do I behold,” this man said, “the honored roof that shelters the head of him before whose name the luster of Napoleon’s pales into a shadow? Do I see the walls within which sits the most adore d of men?” The self-styled orator had gained the porch; he turned to Mary. “Dare I tread the floor which she who is a scion of the patriotic house of the revered Washington condescends to hallow with her presence?”
Lee was speechless. The man was continuing, “Is this the portico that trails its vines over the noble pair—” when Mary smiled at him and cut in with, “Yes, this is our cabin; will you take a seat upon the bench?”
In the evenings, during the dance, Lee sat at its edges, surrounded by a coterie of adoring Southern girls. This suited him perfectly; not only did he enjoy their lively company, but it protected him from Southern men who wanted to talk about the war or postwar politics. As for the younger men, some of whom had empty sleeves as evidence that they had been on the same battlefields with Lee, they were satisfied simply to approach his group long enough to ask one of the young ladies to dance.
On occasion Lee would sally forth from his defensive position to draw into the social mainstream those he felt were being neglected. One evening in the ballroom before the dance began, Lee was already sitting surrounded by his court of belles. Christiana Bond said that he looked far across the room, where “a group of recent arrivals sat somewhat apart, with the air of mere lookers-on. They were from a Northern State and the name was one celebrated in the annals of the war.” It was the party of Andrew Gregg Curtin, the wartime governor of Pennsylvania and a man who had been one of Lincoln’s closest advisers. Curtin’s creation of the “Pennsylvania Reserves” and his efficient and energetic mobilizing, equipping, and supplying of his state’s abundant manpower had played no small part in the Confederacy’s defeat.
Lee asked if any of his young friends had made the Curtin group’s acquaintance. They shook their heads; what they meant was “Certainly not!” Lee pointed out to Christiana and the others that “we were on our own soil and owed a sacred duty of hospitality.” The girls busied themselves with their fans.
Lee stood. “I have tried in vain,” he said, dropping his cheerful manner, “to find any lady who has made acquaintance with the party, and is able to present me. I shall now introduce myself, and shall be glad to present any of you who will accompany me.”
These girls thought, at least, that they would be willing to die for General Lee, but as he stood waiting, there were no volunteers to cross the ballroom and be introduced to the Pennsylvanians. Finally Christiana rose and stood beside him. “I will go, General Lee, under your orders.”
“Not under my orders,” Lee said gently, “but it will gratify me deeply to have your assistance.”
As the young girl and the general crossed the ballroom, he stopped at its center, under a chandelier on which many candles were burning. Fifty-eight years later Christiana remembered exactly what he said to her: “He told of the grief with which he found a spirit of unreasoning resentment and bitterness in the young people of the South, of the sinfulness of hatred and social revenge, of the duty of kindness, helpfulness and consideration for others.”
Christiana impulsively replied, “But, General Lee, did you never feel resentment towards the North?”
Standing in the colors thrown by the candlelight through the crystal pendants of the chandelier, Lee told her that he was neither bitter nor resentful. “When you go home,” he added, “I want you to take a message to your young friends. Tell them from me that it is unworthy of them as women, and especially as Christian women, to cherish feelings of resentment against the North. Tell them that it grieves me inexpressibly to know that such a state of things exists, and that I implore them to do their part to heal our country’s wounds.”
They walked on across the ballroom toward the Pennsylvanians, who rose to welcome them as they came.
During his vacation, Lee had some promising news. Although he was possessive of his daughters, he truly wanted his sons to marry, and had been heartbroken when Rooney’s wife died. Now Rooney wrote his mother from his farm on the Pamunkey that he was in love with Mary Tabb Bolling, a girl from Petersburg, and hoped that she would marry him.
Lee was delighted. During the long and terrible siege of Petersburg, he had sometimes gone to the Bollings’ house to share what little they had to eat, and had admired the tall young girl, now nineteen, who might become the bride of his six-foot-three son Rooney, who was thirty. “I saw the lady when I was in Petersburg,” he wrote Rob, “and was much pleased with her.”
In the August 10 edition of the White Sulphur Echo —the motto of the spa’s newspaper was “We Purge the Truth of Its Impurities”—there were two advertisements, one above the other, that were symbolic. One was for Washington College, and had been placed there by Lee. The one that happened to appear directly beneath it was from the Brazil Emigration Agency, advertising here as elsewhere in the South: “The Government of Brazil will advance passage, provisions for six months, the first seeds and implements, 150 acres of land, with a provisional home, to emigrants.” There had been severe crop failures in parts of the South during the summer. Some areas had virtually recovered from the war, but others were still suffering.
Through all that he read and heard, Lee hewed to a line that was clear to him, if not to others. A rumor swept the hotel that General and Mrs. Grant had made a reservation and would arrive in a few days. One of Lee’s circle of belles, tired of being told by him that she should be friendly to every Northerner in sight, turned to him and said, “Well, General Lee, they say General Grant is coming here next week; what will you do then?”
Christiana Bond said that “some of us would gladly have slain her on the spot,” but Lee was already answering, an “earnest, far-away look” in his eyes.
“If General Grant comes I shall welcome him to my home, show him all the courtesy that is due from one gentleman to another, and try to do everything in my power to make his stay here agreeable.”
Grant did not come, but Lee’s example was beginning to penetrate even the hardest young Confederate hearts. Christiana said that “we saw, moreover, his absolute loyalty to the allegiance he had sworn when he laid down his arms. His whole soul was engaged in the work of reconstruction, and he lost no opportunity to promote it socially.”