by Ty Seidule
The vast majority of senior officers did stay. Lee went with his home state of Virginia—for a few weeks. He quickly resigned his commission leading the State of Virginia’s forces to accept a role in the Confederate States of America’s army. As historian Gary W. Gallagher has noted, Lee became a Confederate nationalist, almost overnight.54
Lee and Lee alone among Virginia colonels left the United States. When one tries to answer the question of why Lee left, the simplest reason works best. Lee left for the same reason the southern states seceded. The southern states went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery because they felt threatened by Lincoln’s election. Lee said in 1861, “The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North as you say. I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress.” What acts “aggrieved” Lee? The threat to end slavery.
Lee chose the Confederacy because of his abiding belief in slavery. A senior army colonel as intelligent as Robert E. Lee knew full well why the states seceded; they told the world why they seceded—to protect and expand slavery. Lee chose to fight for a new nation whose explicit, constitutional guarantee was human bondage—forever.55
While Lee believed in slavery, he also profited from it far more than other army colonels. At the age of twenty-four, two years after graduating from West Point, Lee married Mary Custis, the only child of George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington. Custis earned his money through inheritance, and that inherited wealth derived from the work of enslaved labor. Enslaved labor created much of his wealth including the prestigious, Doric-columned Arlington House with its commanding view of the capital. Custis owned two other enslaved labor farms—Romancoke and White House.
A year after marrying Mary Custis, Lee inherited enslaved workers from his mother’s estate. During his many years in the army, Lee hired out those enslaved workers and pocketed the profit, creating wealth. By the time he wrote his only will as a U.S. Army officer in 1846 as he headed to fight in Mexico, he estimated his net worth at $40,000 in stocks, bonds, and property, including enslaved workers, or more than $1.3 million today. His salary as a second lieutenant was $62.50 a month (about $1,700 today). That increased to $126 as a captain in 1846 (about $4,000 today). Lee invested well in stocks and bonds, and the proceeds from hiring out enslaved servants helped build his substantial nest egg.56
During his army years, Lee used enslaved labor borrowed from Arlington. Of course, his father-in-law never charged him, despite the large fees the enslaved servants could have generated. When Lee’s wife, Mary, accompanied him on his many army assignments, she brought even more enslaved servants from Arlington, far more than most army officers. Up to 1857, Lee benefited financially from hiring out his enslaved workers, while he also had the use of his wife’s enslaved servants.57
As superintendent, Lee brought an enslaved servant to West Point named Burke, even though an 1841 New York law ordered all slaves freed if they had spent any time in New York. Few slave owners risked bringing enslaved people into New York for that reason.58 The scholar Walt Bachman has looked at the pay records for every officer in the antebellum army and found that during Lee’s time as superintendent at West Point more enslaved people were at the academy than at any other period before or since. Lee set the example of using enslaved servants, and younger army officers followed his lead. Bachman also found that while most officers listed their enslaved servants as “slaves” on their pay records, Lee concealed his ownership of humans more than any other officer in the antebellum army.59
While West Point showed Lee’s use of enslaved labor, the greater influence was his wife’s home of Arlington. Six of his seven children were born there, and Mary Custis Lee spent more and more time ensconced in the comfort of Arlington House with its nearly two hundred enslaved people and less time with Lee at lonely frontier posts. Lee joined Mary at Arlington in November 1857 after George Custis, Lee’s father-in-law, died. Until January 1860, Lee served as the executor of the will with no army duties. Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the army, gave Lee more than two years of administrative leave at full pay to sort out his father-in-law’s estate. Lee’s paid leave was more than twice as long as that of any other officer during the entire antebellum period.60
While his regiment was on the Texas frontier, Lee stayed at the Arlington mansion, serving as a slaveholding planter. After 1857, he spent far more time running an enslaved labor farm (twenty-eight months) than he did with his regiment as an army officer (thirteen months). Officers like Braxton Bragg and Jefferson Davis left the army to seek their fortunes with enslaved labor farms, but Lee was the only senior officer who was actually in charge of hundreds of enslaved workers and in the U.S. Army in 1861.61 By the time he chose secession, Lee identified far more with the southern slaveholding class than he did with his fellow officers. He certainly spent more time managing enslaved workers than he did leading soldiers.
As the executor of Custis’s will, Lee had several competing tasks. The first remit was to pay all debts, which proved to be substantial. The second task was to provide a legacy of $10,000 to each of his daughters, and the final task was to free all Custis’s enslaved people within five years. As Lee would later say, “He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” Despite turning his formidable engineering and management skills to Arlington, Lee felt as if executing all three provisions were nearly impossible within the five-year time frame. Yet he could have chosen to sell land to pay the debts immediately. If he had done this, he could have freed the enslaved workers within months.62
Instead, Lee chose another path, keeping the enslaved workers as long as he could to pay off Custis’s debts and build money for the family. To do this, he broke families apart using the hiring system. During Custis’s time running Arlington, he recognized marriages and kept families together, never selling them or hiring them out. By 1860, Lee had used the hiring system to such a degree that only one enslaved family remained together at Arlington. Lee separated husbands, wives, and children and hired them out across Virginia to make more money. Additionally, Lee used the hiring system to make “troublemakers” go away, or at least move them to another farm. He did this to a man named Reuben whom Lee called a “great rogue and rascal.” Whenever Lee made a decision regarding enslaved people, he chose profit over human decency.63
The enslaved community at Arlington had heard from Custis that they would be freed at his death. Instead, Lee planned on keeping them as long as possible. He demanded efficiency and hard work, as though they were soldiers. The enslaved fought back, often successfully, while calling Lee “a hard taskmaster” and the “worst man I ever saw.” The result was even less work done by the enslaved and open protest. Many felt they were already emancipated and escaped to freedom.64
An enslaved worker at Arlington, Wesley Norris, gave testimony about his escape and recapture. Norris believed Custis had promised the enslaved workers their freedom after his death. After his recapture in Maryland, Norris, his sister, and his cousin spent two weeks in jail in Maryland, before their return. Once they were back at Arlington, Lee ordered the lash for all three, telling them he would give them a lesson they would never forget. The Arlington overseer refused to be the whip hand, so Lee brought in the constable, ordering him to “lay it on well” with fifty lashes for Norris and twenty for his sister. After the whipping on their bare backs, Lee ordered salt water poured over their lacerated flesh.65
Lee followed the law in ordering the whipping of Norris, a runaway. Slaves were property, things, possessions. The enslaved had no rights under the law. The entire system of slavery was so evil, so morally corrupting, that the law required slavers to whip the enslaved. Papers in the North, including abolitionist tracts, reported the case extensively. Lee’s Lost Cause biographers found ways to dismiss the case, but today the most careful biographer of Lee finds the case compelling. So do I. Arlington had a whipping post, and the details Norris described, including the overseer’s and constable’s name
s, match the historical record.66
Lee finally emancipated his enslaved workers, but only after losing a court case in which he tried to keep them longer. After five long years, Lee ended their bondage, at least for those who had not already escaped. Then he sold land to create the legacy for Custis’s granddaughters, a course of action he could have taken in 1857. After owning human beings for nearly thirty years and managing three enslaved labor farms after 1857, Lee identified more with his fellow slaveholders than with army officers who kept their oath.67
In addition to his keen financial interest and belief in human bondage, Lee loathed those who fought for emancipation. He deplored the “evil passions” of abolitionists who stirred “disloyalty” among slaves. Lee believed abolitionists created problems by enticing slaves to rebel, forcing action by slaveholders. Antislavery zealots were meddlers in a system they did not understand. Lee wanted the abolitionists to “leave the slave alone if he would not anger the master.” Those who wrote against the evils of slavery, not the system itself, Lee believed, were creating the problems of human bondage.68
While Lee usually wrote in anodyne phrases about slavery, occasionally he did slip and let his true feelings show. After the slaveholding president Franklin Pierce’s castigation of antislavery militants in his State of the Union speech in 1856, Lee wrote that Pierce’s views were “true and faithfully expressed.” Lee believed abolitionists had “neither the right nor the power” to force the South to change. Another reason for choosing secession was his hatred of abolitionists because they promised to end the South’s social system—slavery.69
During the war, Lee’s actions and words about enslaved people also show that he fought the war to maintain slavery. On January 10, 1863, Lee wrote to the Confederate secretary of war after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, calling it
savage and brutal policy … which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.70
That letter stands as the most damning indictment of Lee’s belief in slavery. Here, Lee discusses what will happen if the United States wins and emancipates four million African American enslaved people. The loss of racial hierarchy would be degradation worse than death. The white women of the South would have to worry about the constant threat of rape or “pollution.” Black male sexuality, which Lee so openly fears, paled in comparison to the very real rape culture of white southern men against Black women.
In his next line, Lee was right that the “social system” of racial hierarchy through enslavement would be gone if the United States won. The Emancipation Proclamation declared the enslaved in the rebelling states “forever free.” Then Lincoln declared that freedmen “will be received into the armed service of the United States.” Armed, emancipated African Americans wearing U.S. Army blue in vast numbers would fight against the Confederates who wanted to enslave them. Lee and the Confederates sowed the wind, and with the Emancipation Proclamation the whirlwind began.71
The Emancipation Proclamation brought out Lee’s anger and his true feelings. After Lincoln announced the new policy, an enraged Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress argued about how to respond. Secretary of War James Seddon suggested summary executions for all African Americans wearing the U.S. Army uniform. Beauregard also recommended executing every single U.S. soldier no matter their color after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet if Confederates executed African American soldiers, the previous owners would lose valuable property. One proposal allowed Confederate soldiers to sell captured Black fugitives and pocket the money.72
As the Confederate army began to plan for an invasion into Pennsylvania, the Emancipation Proclamation was part of their calculus. Lee’s army captured hundreds of African Americans, both emancipated freedmen and free Black civilians, for forced enslavement in the South. The total number might have approached a thousand.73 No military necessity demanded the kidnapping. The purpose was racial control through violence, the prospect of booty, and retaliation.
In Harrisburg, the state capital, the entire African American community of eighteen hundred fled or was captured. An anguished clergyman in Mercersburg, Philip Schaff, described the Confederate unit’s raid into Mercersburg “as a regular slave hunt.”74 He had written a biblical defense of slavery during the secession crisis, but after seeing the Confederate unit parade Black captives through the street, he declared it “a most pitiful sight, sufficient to settle the slavery question for every humane mind.”75
While the vanguard of Lee’s army invading Pennsylvania conducted much of the kidnapping, every one of Lee’s infantry and cavalry corps participated in the capture of freedmen. Lee’s best corps commander, James Longstreet, gave orders to George Pickett’s division to come forward for the famous day 3 assault. The last part of the order declared, “The captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition.” The New York Times singled out Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee for directly capturing Black civilians as a part of J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry corps. One of Jubal Early’s sergeants wrote, “I do not think our Generals intend[ed] to invade except to get some of our Negroes back which the Yankees have stolen.”76
The kidnapping of African Americans on Lee’s Gettysburg campaign was probably even more widespread than the evidence we have suggests. When Lee’s army left Pennsylvania after its ignoble defeat at Gettysburg, they took hundreds of African Americans with them. But not everyone. The U.S. Army lieutenant Chester Leach reported that one African American man accepted torture, mutilation, and eventual death at the Pennsylvania border rather than submit to enslavement in Virginia.77
The more I read about Confederate policy toward emancipated African Americans, the more the true nature of the southern states’ war becomes apparent. Lee led an army whose purpose was to support a new nation dedicated to subjugation. Of course, the Confederates would see free Black men as a threat. The enslaved fought for their own freedom, first by escaping to U.S. camps and then by fighting as soldiers. If African American soldiers could fight valiantly, which they did, the entire argument of slavery was bankrupt.78
We should also remember that Lee had African Americans in his army, as enslaved servants and workers, not soldiers. The Army of Northern Virginia hired thousands of enslaved workers from owners to dig fortifications and bury bodies.79 The South used enslaved workers to free more white men for combat. After Grant took command and the likelihood of victory diminished, Lee wanted even more enslaved workers in the army. He wrote to Jefferson Davis in the fall of 1864,
A considerable number could be placed in the ranks by relieving all able bodied white men employed as teamsters, cooks, mechanics, and laborers and supplying their places with negroes … It seems to me that we must choose between employing negroes ourselves, and having them employed against us.80
In no way did Lee want emancipated slaves in his ranks, but he desperately needed more men to contend with the U.S. forces under Grant and his own lack of manpower, exacerbated by the losses of the Gettysburg campaign.
By early 1865, he advocated using enslaved men as soldiers because he saw no other way to continue fighting. The South lost enslaved workers in factories and farms as the U.S. Army controlled more and more territory. Emancipated men joined the U.S. Colors, while others worked in a variety of industries or as laborers. For every Black person the Confederacy lost, the United States gained. Lee said the U.S. “progress will thus add to his numbers.” Lee saw that the United States would end slavery on its terms. In fact, the U.S. Army and the effects of war had already devastated slavery in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.81
If the Confederate army used enslaved soldiers who were promised emancipation, perhaps the peculiar institution could still survive. Lee was desperate to win, and there were few options available in 1865. Lee argued, “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us or us
e them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions.” Lee understood that the U.S. victory would destroy slavery “in a manner most pernicious to the welfare of our people” with “evil consequences.”82
Even when advocating for arming Black men and emancipating them if they served as soldiers, he was fighting for the Old South based on the “social system” of racial hierarchy through slavery. Arming the enslaved was a last gasp to try to save the system the United States was ending by force. Lee’s attempt to arm slaves did not show he was for emancipation; it showed how desperate he was to defeat the United States and maintain at least a semblance of racial control.83
Many in the Confederacy fought against putting Black men in gray uniforms including Monroe, Georgia’s own Howell Cobb, who understood the stakes involved. Cobb wrote to Secretary of War James Seddon agreeing that the enslaved should be supporting the war effort, but he pleaded in a letter not to arm slaves, calling it “the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”84 Cobb need only to have looked at his enemy to know his biblically sanctioned notions of slavery were wrong. The 180,000 Black soldiers in the U.S. Army fought bravely for the cause of freedom and Union.
In March 1865, the South began a limited type of Black conscription. It was far too late. The war ended before one single African American soldier in Confederate gray fired a weapon against the forces of freedom. Yet by passing a bill to allow the enslaved to fight for a white supremacist regime, Cobb was right. The paradox of Black men fighting for the rights of white men to hold their brothers and sisters in bondage meant that the revolution had failed.85
Thank God it failed. Thank God Lee failed. Lately, I’ve been reading one of the best chroniclers of the Civil War and its meaning, Frederick Douglass. Born enslaved, Douglass understood the evil of human bondage. One of the most gifted writers in American letters, Douglass reminded his fellow citizens that “victory to the rebellion meant death to the Republic.” He said the country was “indebted to the unselfish devotion” of U.S. Army soldiers who died to ensure a “united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage.” In eloquence few can match, Douglass came to the essence of the war and those who fought for the United States and eradicated slavery.86