In Philadelphia “a public prayer meeting” was held at just the moment Brown dropped through the trap to hang “between heaven and earth.” In Albany, New York, a slow hundred-gun salute was fired, to honor the martyr. In Cleveland, Ohio, Melodeon Hall “was draped in mourning for a meeting attended by fourteen hundred persons.” In New York City and in Rochester and Syracuse, New York, huge prayer meetings were held—as they were in Concord, Plymouth, and New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire. All over the North bells were tolled mournfully at the moment of Brown’s death, and in Boston churches, halls, and temples were filled with mourners—in Tremont Hall, a packed meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society heard the abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison declare: “I am prepared to say: ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’ And I do not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in making that declaration. . . . Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of a Southern slave-plantation.”
Once it was north of the Mason-Dixon Line the train carrying Brown’s body—transferred to a new coffin that was not of southern origin or manufacture—was halted by huge crowds at every station along the way, until he was at last laid to rest before a giant boulder at his home in New Elba, New York, in the shadow of Whiteface Mountain.
Showers of meteors had marked Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, his trial, and his execution, prompting Walt Whitman, in a poem about Brown, to ask himself, “What am I myself but one of your meteors?” Thoreau too, described Brown’s life as “meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live,” and Herman Melville, in The Portent, described Brown prophetically as the “meteor of the war.” It was Melville’s phrase that stuck, appropriately, since it would be only seventeen months between John Brown’s execution and the firing on Fort Sumter that brought about the war.
Whatever else Brown had done, the reaction to his death effectively severed the country into two opposing parts, making it clear to the South, even to moderates there who were searching for a compromise, that northerners’ tolerance for slavery was wearing thin. Until Brown’s death, the issues had been whether or not slavery would be extended into the “territories,” and the degree to which escaped slaves in the free states could be seized as property and returned to their owners. Now Brown had made the very existence of slavery as an institution an issue—in fact the issue.
Southerners were dismayed and angered by the enormous outpouring of sympathy and grief in the northern states for a man who had been convicted of treason, rebellion, first-degree murder, and “conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel,” while northerners were outraged by the speed with which the Virginia jury had decided Brown’s fate—forty-five minutes—in view of the seriousness of the charges against him, and by his execution, when many felt that a pardon or imprisonment would have been more appropriate. “Marvellous old man!” the eloquent abolitionist Wendell Phillips declaimed in a magnificent funeral oration that rivals the Gettysburg Address in simplicity and passion as one of the noblest statements of American history. “He has abolished slavery in Virginia. . . . True the slave is still there. So when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it does not live—hereafter.”
This was exactly what people throughout the South feared. Assigned temporarily to command the Department of Texas, Lee returned there in February 1860 to resume his pursuit of Mexican bandits and Comanche bands on the frontier. He did not dwell on his face-to-face meeting with John Brown, or on his own role in one of the most striking dramas in American history, but one senses in his correspondence with friends and family a growing alarm, intensified by his experiences at Harpers Ferry, at the speed with which the Union appeared to be unraveling. He was as little pleased with the extravagant demands of what he called, with the natural distaste of a Virginia aristocrat for the noisy and violent nouveaux riches of the great cotton plantations, “the ‘Cotton States,’ as they term themselves,” as with the strident hostility of the abolitionists toward the South. He was appalled at southerners’ talk about “the renewal of the slave trade,” to which he was “opposed on every ground,” and his experience of dealing with his father-in-law’s slaves had further soured his view of slavery as an institution. He regarded secession as “revolution,” dismissed it as silly, and “could anticipate no greater calamity for our country than a dissolution of our union.” He was depressed, lonely, and homesick in San Antonio, deeply conscious of the fact that he was a fifty-two-year-old officer who had spent over thirty years rising slowly from lieutenant to the rank of lieutenant colonel; and at his age he had little hope of ever reaching the rank of brigadier general, since there were twenty-two men senior to him on the promotion list. He had reached an age, in short, to begin to question, now that it was too late, whether his choice of profession had been wise. He had not the slightest inkling of the glory that awaited him.
Never much interested in politics, perhaps because politics had led his father to disgrace and an early grave, Lee was dismayed by the increasing violence of political rhetoric as the country moved toward the election of a new president, and by the threats he heard all around him of secession in the event that Lincoln was elected. “I hope,” he wrote, “that the wisdom and patriotism of the country will devise some way of saving it, and that a kind Providence has not yet turned the current of His blessings from us.” Robert E. Lee was a Virginian who had lived for over thirty years outside the South, except for brief periods at Arlington and his service in Texas. He was a cosmopolitan, who felt as much at home in New York as he did anywhere in the South; he was opposed to secession; he did not think that preserving slavery was a goal worth fighting for; and his loyalty to his country was intense, sincere, and deeply felt.
He was careful, amid the vociferous enthusiasm for secession in Texas once Lincoln was elected, to keep his opinions to himself, but in one instance, when asked “whether a man’s first allegiance was due his state or the nation,” he “spoke out, and unequivocally. He had been taught to believe, and he did believe, he said, that his first obligations were due Virginia.” This simple, old-fashioned point of view was to guide Lee through the next four years, during which he would become the foremost general, and indeed the figurehead, of a cause in which he did not completely believe. He compared his position to that of Washington, who was not a remote historical figure for Lee, but his wife’s step-great-grandfather and his own father’s friend and patron. He read Edward Everett’s Life of Washington as the bad news of secession came flooding in, and although he was too modest ever to have identified himself with the great man, he could hardly have failed to recognize in Washington’s dilemma a parallel of his own. “Washington,” Everett wrote, “by nature the most loyal of men to order and law, whose rule of social life was obedience to rightful authority, was from the first firmly on the American side; not courting, not contemplating even, till the eve of the explosion, a forcible resistance to the mother country, but not recoiling from it when forced upon the colonies as the inevitable result of their principles.”
“Secession,” Lee wrote, “is nothing but Revolution. . . . Anarchy would have been established, and not a government by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the revolution. . . . Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.” As a result of the principles he shared with his fellow Virginians, Lee too, however reluctantly, would be obliged to take up arms when “the explosion” came.
He was still in Texas, the great moral decision of his life was still ahead of him, the country he loved was still—just—held together by bonds that were growing more strained with every day that passed, but already Lee
was being forced to think about taking the same course as the man he had surrounded and captured at Harpers Ferry. In the short time the two men had spent together in the paymaster’s office in the armory at Harpers Ferry, they may not have recognized how much they had in common. The Virginia gentleman and the hardscrabble farmer and cattle dealer from New England were both deeply religious, both courageous, both instinctive warriors, both gravely courteous, both family men, both guided by deep and unquestioning moral beliefs. John Brown may have been, as Robert E. Lee believed, a fanatic and a madman (the first was certainly true, the second not at all), but like him Lee too, despite his firm opinion that “obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character,” would himself become, at last, a rebel—perhaps the greatest rebel of all.
CHAPTER 1
“Not Heedless of the Future”
Ne Incautus Futuri
—The Lee family motto
State patriotism in the United States is much diminished in our time in favor of national patriotism, and indeed has been on the decline ever since the end of the Civil War. Today Americans move quickly and easily over great distances, settle in states far from the one in which they were born without giving the matter much thought, and hardly even notice in which state they are traveling except for the change in most of the license plates they see on the highway. Of course this was always a country where tearing up roots and moving farther west to start all over again was a tempting option for those who had failed where they were, or who had greater ambitions, but loyalty to one’s “home state” was at one time an important fact of American life. Robert E. Lee’s belief that he was first and foremost a Virginian, and owed to Virginia an allegiance stronger than that which he owed to the United States, may seem to some extreme now, but it was by no means so in his lifetime.
Of all the original thirteen states, Virginia had perhaps the strongest claim to the first loyalty of its citizens. It had been the largest, oldest, richest, and most populous of the British colonies in North America, the one where English ideas of class, religion, and social order were the most deeply entrenched, and its role was so central to the creation of the United States of America that the country’s capital was built on Virginia’s border and four out of America’s first five presidents were Virginian.
It was also the colony in which the English ideal of rule by a landed aristocracy took root most deeply. Even as Virginia developed representative forms of government, they were dominated, as in England, by those who possessed wealth and land, or by their sons and other relatives. Since many of the early English settlers were royalists who had fled from Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the idea that Virginians were gentlemen—“Cavaliers” who had fought for the king and been defeated, as opposed to New England Puritans who had repudiated the very idea of kingship—took hold early on in the colony’s history, and helped to develop Virginia’s reputation, or at least its self-image, as a place of elegance, refinement, good manners, and genteel behavior. Certainly it produced, to the astonishment of English visitors, any number of handsome manor houses set on estates that rivaled an English county in size, and a society of a refinement that was perhaps unique in North America. Behind that gracious image, however, it was also a place where huge fortunes were made—and all too often lost—in reckless land speculation on a vast scale; where dueling was not uncommon and often fatal; where going head over heels into debt was commonplace; and where much of the principal crop, tobacco, the mainstay of its commerce with Britain, was grown, picked, and cured by slave labor, with all the moral and practical difficulties of that “peculiar institution.” By the time of the Civil War more than a third of the population consisted of black slaves (and a small minority of “freedmen”), in a state that was then 425 miles in width and over 300 miles from south to north at its widest point—bigger than some European countries.
The “First Families of Virginia” formed its aristocracy, and after an initial experiment in marrying the daughters of the more important Indian chiefs, of whom Pocahontas, who became something of a celebrity in Elizabethan England, is the best-known example, the First Families tended to marry within their own rather small social class, quickly producing, as had happened in the English aristocracy, a world in which almost anyone who mattered was related however remotely to everyone else. “Cousinage—c’est une dangereuse voisinage,” as Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace about a different slave-owning aristocratic society, and certainly in Virginia cousins and vaguely defined “kinsmen” seemed to proliferate to an extraordinary degree, linking all the First Families together in a mesh that was as hard for outsiders to unravel as Penelope’s shroud. The Lees would never have boasted of being first in this social order, nor even “first among equals”; they were too well-mannered for that. But they were widely regarded as one of the most respected and best-connected families in Virginia: wealthy, cultured, devoted to public service, patrician in the best sense of that word. Of course, as in every family, there was over time the occasional black sheep or scandal, but for almost 200 years they acquired great estates and plantations, married well, filled major public offices with credit and honor, and when necessary fought for their mother country and colony, and later for their state and country.
The first Lee arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1639, only thirty-two years after the establishment there of the first permanent English colony in North America. He disembarked not as an impoverished immigrant, but as an ambitious and well-connected one. Colonel Richard Lee (“The Immigrant”) was armigerous, bearing the coat of arms of the Lees of Cotton Hall in County Shropshire, England (which oddly enough includes a squirrel eating a golden hazelnut atop an elaborate medieval helmet), who traced their descent back to a Richard Lee, high sheriff of Salop in the mid-fifteenth century, and far beyond him into the misty antiquity of Anglo-Norman genealogy, possibly to a Hugh de Lega who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and to a Lionel de Lee who accompanied the ill-fated Richard the Lionhearted on his attempt to take Jerusalem during the Third Crusade in 1183. In short, Richard Lee was a gentleman.
He was also tough, shrewd, fearless, and skillful at climbing the rungs of the colonial political ladder. He arrived with nothing more than the “patronage” of Sir Francis Wyatt, the first governor of Virginia, and soon became attorney general, then secretary of state, then a member of the King’s Council, high sheriff, and a colonel of the Virginia Militia. He was also at various times a fur trader, an Indian fighter, a slave trader, and a tobacco planter, and went on to become one of the largest landowners in Virginia, one of the richest men in North America, and the founder of a flourishing dynasty. Two of his descendants would be signers of the Declaration of Independence; two others (Robert E. Lee and his father) generals; and one, Zachary Taylor, not only a general but a president.
Richard Lee was not just a slave trader, in the days when that was still considered a respectable business, but a slave owner on a large scale, and a major employer of “indentured servants,” mostly young British men and women who signed up for three to seven years of work without wages to pay for their passage to America, and the chance of a new life once they had completed their indenture; unlike slaves, they could not be bought and sold as chattel property. Thus, almost from the beginning, Virginia had three classes: the landed gentry; impoverished English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots who came over as their indentured servants with the intention of eventually becoming independent farmers or workmen; and black slaves. The idea of a poor man acquiring land of his own was almost impossible to achieve in Britain, or anywhere in Europe—land was the magnet drawing people all the way across the Atlantic to work under conditions not much better than those of the slaves, and forming the basis for the land speculation that so obsessed their betters. Winning “land grants” from the crown, and turning the vast, seemingly endless forest to the west—from which the Native Americans were slowly receding or being driven, or where they were being decimated by disease—into what we would now call de
veloped real estate was an even bigger and more profitable business than growing tobacco, and Richard Lee was as successful at that as he was at all things.
He was as fortunate in his children, ten of them, as he was in business and politics; indeed the family motto might almost have been replaced by Dr. Pangloss’s famous remark in Voltaire’s Candide, “Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.” (“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”) He had so much land that on his death he was able to leave large parcels of it to his children. They built impressive houses of their own on it and thus created several branches of the Lee family, all of which produced in every generation men of distinction and merit, and women who married well. By the time of the American Revolution John Adams of Massachusetts, by no means an unqualified admirer of the South, was of the opinion that the Lees had “more men of merit . . . than any other family.”
One branch of this fast-growing and mighty tree descended from the third of Richard Lee’s seven sons, Richard Henry Lee II, known in the family as “Richard the Scholar” because he was educated at Oxford University, collected one of the largest personal libraries in North America, and wrote fluently in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. He, like his father, filled numerous colonial offices, serving in the House of Burgesses and the King’s Council. He had eight children, one of whom, Captain Henry Lee I, the father of Henry Lee II, who married Lucy Grymes, “the low-land beauty,” a distant relative of George Washington—in fact Washington admired her greatly and was widely supposed by the Lees not only to have been in love with her, but to have lost her to Henry Lee II.
Clouds of Glory Page 4