Henry Lee II built a handsome manor house for himself, the Lee House, at Leesylvania, and there he and Lucy had eight children together, the first of whom, Henry Lee III, better known as Light-Horse Harry Lee, would grow up to become perhaps the most famous cavalry commander of the Revolutionary War, and a friend, trusted subordinate, and protégé of George Washington’s—it was Henry Lee III who gave Washington’s funeral oration, calling him, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” a phrase that is still remembered by millions of people who have no idea who its author was.
Henry Lee III, who despite many disappointments rose eventually to become governor of Virginia and a Virginian representative in Congress, was the father of Robert E. Lee. The Lee House at Leesylvania was therefore Robert E. Lee’s “ancestral home,” which George Washington visited several times, perhaps drawn by the still beautiful Lucy, and which represented for Robert E. Lee, although more in his imagination than in reality, a whole intricately linked, gracious world of stability, wealth, privilege, good manners, and family connections all his life, even though it passed out of his family’s ownership while he was still a youth. Other great houses haunted him throughout his life, much of which was spent in modest rented quarters, barracks, and tents: Shirley, built by Robert “King” Carter, then the richest man in Virginia, its roof surmounted by a carved, gilded pineapple, the symbol of hospitality, one of the grandest and most graceful mansions in Virginia, was his mother’s home; White House, one of his father-in-law’s plantations, would play a significant part in Robert E. Lee’s adult life; Stratford, built by Thomas Lee, another son of Richard the Scholar, with an unrivaled view over the Potomac River, set on a plantation of 6,600 acres, a brick mansion of great size and harmonious design, more impressive, perhaps, than beautiful, with magnificently proportioned steps sweeping upward to the entrance and one of the most admired formal gardens in America, was where Robert E. Lee was born; and Arlington, in Alexandria, Virginia, with its white columns and its associations with George Washington, was the mansion Lee would inherit by marriage, only to have it occupied by Federal troops at the beginning of the Civil War.
Beyond the Lee family itself, there were two major influences in Lee’s life, each of which was to play a major role in forming not only his character, but his tactics and strategy as a general. The first was George Washington himself, for although Washington died ten years before Robert E. Lee was born, the young Robert grew up in his shadow. Everywhere around him in his boyhood there were associations with Washington, to whom he was distantly related (as he was to Thomas Jefferson); his beloved father had been as close to Washington as it was possible to get to that slightly reserved and chilly personality, and the older members of his family had all known Washington well, as a neighbor and fellow Virginian grandee, before, during, and after the war, and in the tumultuous politics of the infant republic. Washington was not ever for Robert E. Lee a remote or distant historical figure; he was an almost living presence, by whose august standards Lee measured himself, as a boy, as a man, and as a general. Washington’s strict devotion to duty; his formidable dignity; his firm hold on his own temper; his genius for leadership; his ability to keep a ragtag, poorly supplied army together for years against a foe superior in numbers, weapons, and resources; his courage and resilience in the face of defeat; his magnanimity in victory were all qualities that Robert E. Lee admired and sought successfully to acquire.
Modeling himself upon “the father of his country” would represent a challenge to any young man, but in Lee’s case it was complicated by his deeply ambivalent feelings about his own father, whose role in what Freud called “the family romance” was deeply conflicted, an example to be at once copied and avoided at all costs. Light-Horse Harry Lee was one of those men whose good advice to his children was seldom matched by his personal behavior—a courageous and innovative soldier, he was in peacetime an inveterate and increasingly reckless gambler on what we would now call risky investment schemes, mostly land speculation, which invariably failed, saddling him with enormous debts. His status as a Revolutionary War hero; his bluff, hearty good looks, somewhat spoiled in later life by a tendency to put on weight; his charm and the fact that he was a Lee led people to forgive him too easily and too often for his own good—and theirs—the end result being that he was a loving but often absent father, and that he left his large family virtually penniless.
Henry Lee III was born in 1756, and as the eldest son of the wealthy landowner Henry Lee II and the beautiful Lucy Grymes Lee, he must have seemed destined by birth for a brilliant career—a feeling which he clearly shared from earliest boyhood. He attended Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey), was graduated in 1773, and would have studied law in England if not for the outbreak of war. The years between 1773 and 1776 were as exciting and eventful in Virginia as they were in Massachusetts—prompting Dr. Johnson to ask, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”—and the young Henry Lee gave up any ambition he may have had to be a lawyer, and joined the army instead, as a captain in a light cavalry regiment raised by one of those many “kinsmen” with which life among the First Families of Virginia was so rich. Although he received no formal military training, he probably needed none—Henry Lee III might have been born to be a soldier. Tall, powerfully built, a natural horseman, he quickly made a name for himself. Though his nickname, Light-Horse Harry, is supposed by some to be a tribute to his horsemanship, it in fact recognized his skill at organizing and leading what was then known as “light horse,” that is, cavalry mounted on relatively small, nimble horses—in contrast to dragoons, or “heavy cavalry,” big men who rode big horses and wore thigh-high heavy boots, a polished steel cuirass, and a brass helmet and whose purpose was to charge stirrup to stirrup en masse.
“Light horsemen” were intended to carry out daring raids, to move quickly over long distances on missions of reconnaissance, or to dismount and fight as light infantry, for they carried a short musket or pistols as well as a short, curved saber. The idea of light-horse formations had been brought to France early in the eighteenth century by one of those typically charming and ubiquitous Hungarian emigrants, Count Laszlo Bercsenyi, who introduced the French to the huszár—the traditional Hungarian light cavalryman with his short, gold-laced, fur-trimmed cape thrown over one shoulder; a fur cap; skintight embroidered riding breeches; short, tight-fitting soft boots; a curved, Turkish-style saber; and a pair of pistols. Bercsenyi’s ideas were adopted enthusiastically by the French army, and in the days when France was still the leader in military innovation and fashion they spread rapidly to other countries in the form of countless lancer, hussar, chasseur, and “light dragoon” regiments, with glamorous names and uniforms, and even more glamorous officers, unquestioned as the elite of every army until the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava brought about increasing skepticism on the subject. Light cavalry was well suited to North America, where there were few opportunities for big, formal European battles. It was cheaper too—big horses consumed more fodder, and heavy cavalry uniforms and equipment were notoriously expensive (the Household Cavalry in Great Britain is the only heavy cavalry still in active service).
Henry Lee’s high spirits and taste for taking daring risks made him a perfect light-cavalry leader, and he became the talk of the army when he beat off a surprise British attack at Spread Eagle Tavern in 1778. This earned him the opportunity of becoming one of Washington’s aides-de-camp—an honor he turned down because he preferred to fight in the field, gaining himself Washington’s lifelong respect, and promotion to major. A year later he stormed Paulus Hook, a British fort at what is now Jersey City, on the lower Hudson River, a daring, if not entirely successful action that won him Washington’s “unstinted” praise, and a gold medal awarded by Congress. Washington, recognizing Lee’s special skills, then put him in charge of a mixed infantry and light-cavalry formation, something of an innovation at th
e time, which was “officially known as Lee’s partisan corps,” and promoted him to lieutenant colonel. He was just twenty-five. Along with Henry Lee’s dash and competence there were, however, worrisome signs of a certain lack of judgment, a dangerous side. It was one thing for him to hang a deserter who had gone over to the enemy, but quite another to have the man’s head cut off and sent with the noose still around the neck to Washington’s headquarters “much to the horror of the commander-in-chief.”
Sent south to serve under General Nathanael Greene, Henry Lee quickly proved himself to be a commander of extraordinary talent in the Carolinas, amazing both the enemy and his own superiors by the skill and speed of his raids and forays, and by the distance his men and horses covered in some of the most brutal fighting of the war—though not otherwise resembling either of them, he had many of the qualities that would make Colonel T. E. Lawrence such a gifted leader of “irregular” warriors in World War I, or Major-General Orde Wingate in World War II. His role in General Greene’s successful campaign to free the Carolinas and Georgia was a major one, and earned him the honor of carrying dispatches from Greene to Washington in time to be present at the historic moment when Lord Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington at Yorktown.
This was, in some ways, the high point of Henry Lee’s life, or at any rate the moment before things began to go badly wrong for him. He became, in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, “sensitive, resentful, and imperious,” apparently feeling that his services had not been sufficiently appreciated, even though he was one of the recognized heroes of the war, and the only officer below the rank of general to be awarded a gold medal by Congress, and resigned from the army in 1782, determined to win “riches and . . . eminence” in public life. It is possible that he had expected to be promoted to general, and was offended when he was not; in any event, portraits of Henry Lee III do indeed appear to bear out Freeman’s description of him, and reveal a certain degree of petulance or dissatisfaction in the downturned corners of his lips. Despite the handsome features, it does not look like the face of a man you would want to buy a horse from.
Henry Lee III seems to have begun as a charming rogue, an eternal optimist, not at first dishonest in the conventional meaning of the word, but he swiftly degenerated into a gifted and persuasive confidence man, careless with facts, convinced of the merit of every harebrained scheme he devoted himself to, always promising more than he could deliver, and apparently neither able to add and subtract nor to learn from his own disastrous experiences—in short, a well-bred crook. Members of his family eventually learned to put codicils in their wills or their financial arrangements to make sure that Henry Lee III could make no decisions regarding their property or their estates, but they do not seem to have been any less fond of him for that. Every family needs a black sheep, and that was the role of Henry Lee III in the Lee family.
At first he seemed to be stepping in the right direction after Yorktown. He married a second cousin, Matilda Lee, known as “the divine Matilda,” who had inherited from her father the great mansion of Stratford and its 6,600 acres. Their marriage at Stratford was attended by George Washington, and it appears to have been a happy match. Following in the Lee tradition of public service, he became a member of Congress and then governor of Virginia, and Matilda bore him three children, one of whom, Philip, the eldest, died at the age of ten. Already, however, his business affairs were getting in the way of his other duties, and causing alarm in the widespread Lee family. When Matilda died in 1790 she left Stratford to her children rather than her husband, so she must already have been aware of his poor judgment and unreliability when it came to money—Henry’s own father left him only “some of his lesser lands,” apparently sharing Matilda’s concern. Typically, Henry Lee managed to persuade Matilda’s trustees to let him sell off much of the land around Stratford, and within a year of her death the house was beginning to deteriorate, many of the furnishings were sold off, and tenant farmers were working what remained of the farmland.
A story about him demonstrates the kind of reputation he was developing among his neighbors. He apparently arrived at a friend’s home claiming to have lost his horse. “The obliging acquaintance lent Harry a steed and a slave to ride along to lead the horse back. Weeks passed with neither the slave nor the two horses reappearing. When the footsore black came limping back, he told his master that Lee had sold both horses. When the astonished owner asked: ‘Why didn’t you come home?’ the slave replied: ‘Cause General Lee sold me too.’”
In a half-baked scheme to restore his fortunes he attempted to secure a commission as a general in the French revolutionary army until Washington gently pointed out to him the impropriety of serving in the French army at the height of the Terror while he was still governor of Virginia, but Washington was soon able to congratulate Henry Lee on exchanging the pursuit of Mars for that of Venus when he learned that Henry was thinking of marrying again. On a visit to Shirley, the home of Charles Carter, then the richest man in Virginia, “he became attached to Ann Hill Carter, then twenty, Charles Carter’s daughter by his second wife.” Henry Lee was seventeen years old than Ann, and beginning to put on weight; still, he was a Lee, governor of Virginia, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and a man of expansive charm, and having secured Washington’s blessing (and, less easily, that of her father) they were married at Shirley in a lavish ceremony that was the talk of Virginia. Washington’s wedding gift to Ann was a miniature of himself mounted in a gold frame as a brooch; it was one of her most cherished possessions, and she wore it attached to her décolleté in the only known portrait of her. In this portrait, she is holding a bouquet of flowers delicately in her right hand, but her eyes and her mouth look a good deal harder and more practical than her husband’s, as they would need to be, considering what was in store for her. Her father, who was no fool, made every effort to ensure that Henry Lee would have no access to, or control over, Ann’s money, but for all that the marriage seems to have been a love match, although it plunged Ann from the luxuries and elegance of Shirley, where she had been surrounded by servants, into the then tiny and uncomfortable governor’s “mansion” in Richmond and the even less congenial surroundings of Stratford, with its vast, drafty, and increasingly bare rooms, and barren fields. They would have six children together, of whom the first died in infancy and the next to last was Robert E. Lee.
Henry Lee may have suffered from folie de grandeur as well as a complete lack of business sense and honesty—he gives the constant impression of a man seeking to take on a role much larger than the one he has—and in the next few years of his life he burned up whatever credit he had left with his family, his friends, his fellow Virginians, and even George Washington, transforming himself into an object of commiseration, as well as an object lesson in how to fall from grace. When the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in 1794 in protest over the imposition of a federal excise tax on whiskey, Governor Lee, no doubt hoping to please President Washington, mustered the Virginia militia, and led them into Pennsylvania, where they accomplished nothing. It was an unpopular move; Virginia makers of home-brewed whiskey were just as opposed to the tax as Pennsylvania farmers, and in many places rioted against being drafted into the militia. While Lee was away “in the field,” his governorship was declared vacant and he returned to find that he had been replaced. The Lee name was enough to win him a seat in Congress, where he most inopportunely managed to make an enemy of Thomas Jefferson and even briefly offended his patron George Washington by writing him a check that bounced. As usual, he was forgiven, and when Washington was briefly appointed general in chief in 1798—a war with France was expected—he had Henry Lee appointed as a major general. Washington’s death in 1799 at last brought to an end the benevolence that he had always shown toward Henry Lee, and marked the start of Lee’s steeper descent into debt and other problems.
He involved himself with a plan to purchase part of the Fairfax estate, in which he lost $40,000 and almost bankrupted his old friend R
obert Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; he speculated unsuccessfully on the sale of “western lands”; he even involved himself in the chimerical and possibly treasonous attempt of Aaron Burr to create a western empire, another folly along a path that his own son Henry would describe as “a course of sanguine and visionary speculations.” There was seemingly no investment so unwise that he did not pursue it, or persuade others to invest their money in it. He put chains on the door of Stratford in an attempt to keep his creditors and the sheriffs out, but by 1809 he was effectively ruined, and in April he suffered the disgrace of being arrested and jailed for debt. He remained in debtors’ prison for almost a year, keeping himself busy by writing his Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, a book that he hoped in vain might recoup his fortune, but when he was finally set free it was obvious even to Henry Lee that nothing could save him.
Stratford, which now belonged to his son Henry by his first marriage, had by then been stripped bare, and young Henry could hardly afford to keep his own father’s large and growing family there as well as his own, while Ann’s trust fund produced an income that was barely sufficient to feed them. Her health had declined sharply—she complained of being “an invalid”—most of the servants had been fired, there was not even enough money to keep the rooms of the great house warm in the winter, so the older Henry was eventually obliged to move his family to a series of rented lodgings in Alexandria, Virginia, and finally to a small brick house rented from yet another “kinsman,” William Fitzhugh.
In these modest circumstances, Henry Lee continued to work on his book, and he and Ann conceived another, last child, despite Ann’s increasing illness and fragility, which had prompted her to write to a pregnant friend when she was about to give birth to Robert, “I do not envy your prospects, nor wish to share in them.” There was not much room in the house to add a newborn child, and life cannot have been easy, even for people born in the eighteenth century, when crowded rooms and a complete lack of privacy were commonplace realities, for the gentry as for others, but perhaps in the cramped quarters of the tiny house, Henry Lee had the time and opportunity to become a heroic figure in the eyes of his son Robert, then three years old.
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