Skeptics of Lee’s character make much of his thoughts and actions during the slavery debate that led to civil war. As the crisis rose in Washington, he was a cavalry colonel on the southwest frontier. A strict soldier, he did not air his opinions in public, but privately he agonized over events that were tearing apart the country the Lees had served so long.
From Texas in late 1856, he wrote to his wife that “Slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any Country.” At the same time, he deplored the “evil Course” of the abolitionists. “How long [the slaves’] subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. . . . “
Lee happened to be on home leave in October 1859 when an abolitionist band raided Harpers Ferry to incite a slave uprising. President James Buchanan ordered him to put down the insurrection. Lee’s force captured the raiders’ leader, John Brown, who was tried and hanged. But Brown had ignited something that would end in the death of hundreds of thousands and the liberation of millions.
Back in Texas, Lee was against the cotton states’ threatening secession. He was devoted first to the land that had produced Washington and Light-Horse Harry—the father who said, “Virginia is my country, her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.”
With the Deep South states pulling out, Robert Lee wrote home that he could imagine no greater calamity than the breakup of the Union. Still, “a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. . . . If the Union is dissolved . . . I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.” Later, he wrote, “I wish for no other flag than ‘the Star spangled banner’ and no other air than ‘Hail Columbia.’”
Thus he was deeply conflicted when he got orders to return east. As the crisis over Fort Sumter broke, General Scott, himself a Virginian, called him into Washington.
There at the home of Montgomery Blair, across the avenue from the White House, Lee was offered command of the United States Army. He refused and returned to Arlington.
Looking out across the city where the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome still stood unfinished, Lee paced the floor from afternoon till past midnight. Only after the Virginia convention voted to secede did he make the decision to resign from the army that had been his life. To his sister, Lee explained, “with all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.”
The next evening, a message from Virginia’s Governor John Letcher summoned Lee to Richmond.
He could not know when he left his beloved Arlington that he would never set foot there again. He passed Fairfax, Manassas, and Culpeper and crossed Bull Run, the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, undistinguished towns and streams whose names would soon burn into the nation’s history.
As the train clacked southward, he could rethink all that had brought him to this trip of no return. Hundreds of other professional soldiers also had to choose, but few had historic associations, family memories, or personal regrets so deep. Better than most, Lee understood the enormity of the decision he had made.
Wearing a civilian suit, Lee stepped off the train at Richmond, not realizing that the protection of this city would soon become the great mission of his life.
When Letcher asked him to be major general in command of all Virginia’s forces, Lee agreed without hesitation. But the honor did little to cheer him. Soon after, he was asked by Episcopal Bishop Richard Hooker Wilmer whether he thought the war would perpetuate slavery. “The future is in the hands of Providence,” Lee said. “If the salves of the South were mine, I would surrender them all without a struggle to avert the war.”
In those two sentences, the bishop heard Lee the religious fatalist, who could lament war and slavery yet leave both in the hands of God, and Lee the traditionalist, who like Washington believed that the soldier must stand apart from politics. A British officer maintained that “his subservience [was] more utter, more abject, than that of any other noted general to any other Government in history.” Despite it, “what [his] bootless, ragged, half-starved army accomplished is one of the miracles of history.”
More than a year of war went by before the real Lee emerged. In the spring of 1862, George B. McClellan brought his massive Union army down the Chesapeake Bay to move on Richmond from the east. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston withdrew his defenders mile by mile until he was wounded at the battle of Seven Pines. Only then, with 100,000 invaders on Richmond’s doorstep, did Jefferson Davis turn to Lee, who was 55 years old when he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
By first ordering defensive earthworks around the capital, the new commander got nicknames like “Granny Lee” and “King of Spades.” A young captain named E. Porter Alexander doubted whether Lee was bold enough to lead an army.
A colonel with the captain knew Lee better. “Alexander,” he said, “if there is one man in either army . . . head and shoulders above every other in audacity, it is General Lee. His name might be Audacity. He will take more desperate chances and take them quicker than any other general in this country, North or South, and you will live to see it, too.”
Within days, Alexander saw it. Lee threw his divisions into a series of furious counterattacks, driving McClellan away. Despite grievous losses, he had saved Richmond. Never again would soldiers wonder whether he was bold enough. The many Southern casualties that poured into Richmond from those Seven Days battles influenced rivals and some friends to argue later that he was too bold.
After turning back McClellan, Lee expected that Union army to join another advancing from Washington. He determined to strike first. Sending Stonewall Jackson on a sweeping flank march, he brought up James Longstreet’s corps alongside, and together they routed Union General John Pope at Second Manassas.
Reporting to Jefferson Davis, Lee said, “We mourn the loss of our gallant dead in every conflict yet our gratitude to Almighty God for his mercies rises higher and higher each day, to Him and to the valour of our troops a nation’s gratitude is due.” Thus he spoke after every victory, with never a hint of the self-congratulation rife among many other generals—but with a characteristic note of sanctimony, of assurance that he and not the Yankees was doing God’s will.
To follow up this success, Lee took his army across the Potomac into Maryland, confident that he could outmaneuver McClellan. But by pure luck, McClellan’s soldiers outside Frederick had found a lost copy of Lee’s complex battle plan wrapped around three cigars. McClellan moved to confront Lee along Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862. Their armies surged back and forth from early morning till near dusk. By the end of the day, more than 23,000 soldiers on both sides were killed, wounded, or missing, making it the bloodiest single day in American history. Only Lee’s tactical skill and the bravery of his outnumbered troops prevented disastrous defeat.
When that day was over, the Southern army was “worn & fought to a perfect frazzle,” wrote artilleryman Alexander. He added, “No military genius, but only the commonest kind of common sense” was needed to see that if McClellan had attacked all-out the next day, he could have “destroyed [Lee] utterly.”
But McClellan did not. If the Union commander was lucky to have found Lee’s order, Lee might seem luckier to have faced McClellan again instead of some less cautious general.
Lee created his own luck: Repeatedly, he gambled against heavy odds, and his aggressiveness convinced opponents that he was stronger than he was. He understood that if he showed caution more in keeping with his true numbers, the war would be short.
That December, looking on as his troops shredded Union attackers at Fredericksburg, Lee said. “It is well that war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it.” He did not habitually spout pronouncements suitable for framing, but his biographer believed that sentence “revealed the whole man in a single brief sentence”—the battle glow instinctive in Light-Horse Harry’s son, tempered by the brooding understanding of how many men were still to die.
Lee’s battlefield decisiveness created his “supreme moment as a soldier” when he defeated “Fighting Joe” Hooker at Chancellorsville. In early May of 1863, Lee defied all textbook rules by dividing his force and sending Stonewall Jackson far around Hooker’s flank. In the vicious battle, Jackson was fatally wounded in the moonlit thickets by his own men.