Those who have spent a summer in the Hudson valley and experienced its heat, high humidity, and flourishing insect life may feel that living in a tent would be a severe test, but the cadets seemed to prefer it to life in the barracks, and perhaps with reason: the barrack rooms were small, crowded (four cadets to a room in the North Barracks, three to a room in the South), poorly ventilated in warm weather, heated only by a coal fire in the winter months, and furnished only with a study table and four chairs. Each roommate had to unroll his mattress and lay it on the floor in a kind of cubbyhole with curtains, a space better suited for a dog than a human being. Inside or outside there was as yet no plumbing, and cadets filled their own basins with water for shaving and bathing (the latter obligatory once a week). Then, as now, personal cleanliness and the perfection of one’s uniform were drummed into the cadets from their first day, as was unquestioning obedience. The new cadets were given four hours a day of drill instruction, and by July 2, less than a month after their arrival, were apparently good enough to be inspected by the aging Marquis de Lafayette, who had visited the Lee household in Alexandria when he was last in the United States. The marquis was greeted by an artillery salute, and he found “the cadets drawn up in military array, the superb band playing national airs, the whole presenting a fine martial appearance.” He dined at the mess and met several of the cadets, but there is no knowing if Lee was one of them. It must, however, have been a splendid military event for young Lee to be part of, linking the heroic eighteenth-century past with the nineteenth-century present, and he can hardly not have been moved by the fact that his father and Lafayette had been friends and comrades in arms.
The scholastic year began on August 27, when the cadets moved from their summer tents into the barracks, and it is impossible not to be awed by the curriculum, much of it devised by Thayer, which concentrated on mathematics and French. A knowledge of higher mathematics was of course essential for a military officer, particularly for service in the engineers or the artillery, while French was not only the language of America’s oldest—indeed only—ally but, more important, the language of most of the military textbooks the cadets would have to master, few of which had been translated into English. Thayer had himself been sent to France, to study among other things the curriculum at the famous École Polytechnique in Paris, one of France’s grandes écoles that specialized in science, engineering, and military science, and at the time certainly the most distinguished and advanced institute of its kind in the world. Nothing even remotely comparable existed in America, and insofar as possible Thayer attempted to model West Point intellectually after it; not surprisingly, the rate of failure among the cadets was—and was intended to be—high. For Robert, who had spent a year assiduously cramming in Alexandria, the mathematics courses presented no great difficulty—all his life he had a “head for figures” and a passion for mathematical exactitude, qualities in which his father had been tragically lacking. Even so, the schedule of a West Point first-classman seems to have been designed to test the mind, body, and character of a cadet to the extreme limits, even for one as well prepared as Robert. His day began with reveille at 5:30, following which he rolled up his bedding, washed, dressed, and answered the first of the many roll calls of the day. Cadets then had half an hour to prepare their quarters for inspection, then an hour of study, after which they were marched to breakfast at seven o’clock. Half an hour was all they were allotted for the meal, following which they formed up for inspection and another roll call, and were marched to mathematics class from eight o’clock to eleven o’clock; then they were marched back to their barracks for two hours of study, after which they were marched to lunch, or, as it was then called, dinner, their main meal of the day. At two o’clock they were paraded again and marched to their French class for two hours, after which they performed drill until sundown, ending with a full-dress parade and inspection, followed by half an hour for supper (bread, butter, and molasses); then they were marched back to their quarters to study until 9:30. Another roll call and inspection ended the day at last at ten o’clock.
This was a schedule well calculated to keep cadets out of mischief, though young men being what they are, it often failed. The list of things forbidden to a cadet was long and unambiguous: “No cadet could drink or play cards, or use tobacco”; nor could cadets cook in their quarters, read fiction in any form, or subscribe to more than one periodical, their choice to be approved by the superintendent. Fistfights, hazing of junior cadets, practical jokes, and duels were all strictly prohibited, as was bathing in the river or going beyond the limits of the academy without permission. At chapel, which was compulsory, the sermon sometimes ran for two hours or more. Robert appears, even at this early age, to have been unusually serious, hardworking, and obedient. Unlike third-year cadet Jefferson Davis, the future U.S. Senator, secretary of war, and president of the Confederacy, Robert would never get himself court-martialed for going off grounds to a tavern and drinking (Davis was found guilty but owing to his previous good record was “allowed to remain at the academy”). Other future Confederate generals among the cadets included Joseph E. Johnston, who would become a lifelong friend of Lee’s, and whom Lee succeeded after Johnston was wounded on the second day of the Battle of Seven Pines early in 1862; Albert Sidney Johnston, who was killed toward the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh; and Leonidas Polk, who became both bishop of Louisiana and a Confederate lieutenant general. Future Union generals included Napoleon B. Buford, half brother of John Buford, Jr., whose bold decision to hold Seminary Ridge with his dismounted cavalrymen against the Confederate division of Major General Henry Heth early in the morning on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg made him a northern hero; and Silas Casey, who commanded a brigade against Lee at the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862.
By the end of his first year at West Point, Robert was third in his class, with no demerits and an academic rating of 285¼ points out of a possible 300; he was placed on the list of “distinguished cadets” that was furnished to the secretary of war and published in the Army Register and promoted to staff sergeant, an unusually high rank for a plebe, or first-year cadet. Lee’s academic record was and would remain outstanding, although he never managed to beat out his indefatigable rival Charles Mason, who would go on to graduate number one in their class, only to resign from the military, take up law, and die at the age of seventy-seven in comparative obscurity in Iowa. Lee’s physical perfection, his erect soldierly posture, and his graceful movement on the drill field had already led his fellow cadets to describe him as the “Marble Model”—ironically, since as a general he would become known as the “Marble Man,” after his impassive expression in the face of both victory and defeat: self-control was perhaps the virtue that he sought hardest to achieve, and that he prized most in others. His bearing impressed other cadets, even those senior to himself. One of them later said, “His personal appearance surpassed in manly beauty that of any other cadet in the corps . . . his step was elastic as if he had spurned the ground upon which he trod.” Lee’s classmate Joseph E. Johnston added: “he was full of sympathy and kindness, genial and fond of gay conversation, and even of fun, while his correctness of demeanor and attention to duties, personal and official, and a dignity as much a part of himself as the elegance of his person, gave him a superiority that everyone acknowledged in his heart.” That is pretty much what Grant and the other Union officers thought of Lee at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 when they accepted Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia—as Lee rode away on Traveller, they all instinctively removed their hats out of respect for him, which he acknowledged with grave courtesy. The boy was father to the man.
In Robert’s second year, drawing was added to his list of studies, on the sensible grounds that an officer ought to be able to draw a neat and usable map quickly and without difficulty; and Robert was made a “senior cadet,” acting as an “assistant professor of mathematics” to tutor fellow cadets who were having difficulties
. He was paid $10 a month for this work—welcome news to him and his mother. He also showed the first signs of a deep and lifelong interest in the campaigns of Napoleon, taking from the library three volumes of General Montholon’s memoirs of Napoleon dealing with the early campaigns, and the first volume of General Ségur’s Expédition de Russie, describing Napoleon’s advance to Moscow in 1812. Both of these were comparatively new books—it had been only five years since Napoleon’s death—and this fact argues both for the excellence of the West Point library and for Lee’s command of French, at least so far as reading is concerned. It would be thirty-four years before Robert E. Lee would have the opportunity of putting into practice Napoleon’s battlefield tactics, and at the age of nineteen he can have had no reason to imagine that he would one day lead a large army in a series of brilliant campaigns, but when the time came it was exactly the qualities of the young Napoleon that Lee brought to the battlefield: the restless dynamism; the unwillingness to take up a defensive role for a moment longer than necessary; the constant, fast-paced attacks; the ability to concentrate all his forces rapidly before the enemy realized it; the sudden, unexpected, and risky flank attack against a weak point that caught the enemy by surprise—all the things that made Lee such a formidable commander from 1861 to midsummer 1863 were, whether he knew it consciously or not, Napoleonic. In no sense did he imitate Napoleon, nor did he ever express admiration for Napoleon as a man, but perhaps the most important thing he learned at West Point was not in the curriculum, but in the few hours he had in which to reward himself by reading for his own interest and pleasure, and during which he tucked in the back of his mind the basic lessons of Napoleon’s generalship: that with speed, audacity, and élan a well-led army could defeat one twice its size, and that hammer blows repeated at brief intervals could demoralize even the largest and best-equipped armies—that, in the final analysis, numbers counted for nothing. “In war men are nothing; one man is everything. . . . Only the commander understands the importance of certain things, and he alone conquers and surmounts all difficulties. An army is nothing without its head”—these words might have been written to describe Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Oddly enough, the assigned reading for Robert’s French course included Gil Blas, a very long picaresque novel from the early eighteenth century by Alain-René Lesage about an ambitious valet, popular among teachers of French because it combines the maximum of difficulty with an absolute minimum of fictional excitement or pleasure for their pupils; and Voltaire’s Charles XII, a curious choice for West Point because while the Swedish king was a brilliant tactician, a born soldier and inhumanly indifferent to pain, he failed again and again by taking on larger enemies than he could defeat, and by advancing so far that his supply line was stretched or broken. He might have been chosen, though it seems unlikely, for the very purpose of discouraging cadets from dreams of military glory; in Dr. Johnson’s gloomy words,
His fall was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left the name, at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.
As a commander Lee too would be willing to take great risks with his supply line, and he was never dismayed at being outnumbered; these were certainly characteristics that he shared with Charles XII, along with the charisma and reputation for bravery that still hover around the Swedish warrior-king almost four centuries after his death. If Lee as a youngster was inspired by reading about the exploits of two such famous generals, it is ironic that he was fifty-four years old at the time he first took to the field in full command of an army, an age when most of history’s great generals have long since retired or been killed. It had been thirty-six years since he had read Napoleon, or Voltaire on Charles XII, at West Point as a cadet (though he would refresh himself on the former when he became superintendent of West Point), and yet in 1862 he was able overnight to summon up their lessons and experience on the battlefield as if they had been firmly imprinted on his mind, ready and waiting there for the moment they were needed.
The truth is that there was always something going on in Lee’s mind that he shared with nobody and that his famous “Marble Face” concealed, whether by a happy accident or by sheer willpower—a cold and calculating brilliance; a mind that could quickly produce an alternative tactical solution to any problem; impatience with men whose minds worked less quickly than his own or who hesitated where he would have plunged ahead; and a ferocity that would, when put to the test in battle, astonish and dismay most of his opponents, except perhaps Ulysses S. Grant, himself a past master at concealing military genius and boldness under an unprepossessing appearance.
Probably no man can truly be called modest or humble who has seen a whole army corps parading before him, regiment after regiment, banners and battle flags unfurled, gleaming bayonets and swords offered in salute, all men’s eyes fixed on him, or who has been cheered by men advancing at his orders to their certain death. “It is well that war is so terrible, or else we should grow fond of it,” Lee said to General Longstreet as they watched the hapless General Burnside’s troops advancing toward them to their death at Fredericksburg in 1862, a remark that is hard to reconcile with the martyr of the “lost cause,” or the image of Lee as a man who fought unwillingly and with a troubled conscience. Whether it was what he wanted to be or not, Lee was the perfect warrior: battle stimulated him, and brought out the feelings and qualities that lay behind the carefully cultivated stoic mask. No other American general has ever so clearly or effectively put into action Georges Danton’s famous recommendation to the generals of the French Revolution on September 2, 1792: “Il nous faut de l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.” Politically conservative as Lee was—his argument against secession was that it was merely a disguised revolution—audacity was always the key factor in his strategy and in his battlefield tactics; his specialty was the sudden, daring exploitation of a momentary opportunity that he alone perceived in the enemy’s deployment or position.
At the end of Robert’s second year at West Point, his record continued to be enviable, and he was confident enough to apply for a furlough. He had saved enough money to pay for his journey home, and he wrote to his mother for a letter approving his application for leave, though permission would depend on the results of his examination. He had no reason to be apprehensive: in his studies, he was “fourth in his class and earned 286 of a possible 300.” This, together with his unblemished record of conduct, placed him second in his class—as usual, Charles Mason was first—and he continued to be a staff sergeant and was placed on the list of “distinguished cadets.” He was able to leave for Virginia on June 30 for his first visit home in two years.
“Home” was hard to define. Robert’s mother, although only fifty-four, was increasingly weakened by the course of her disease and the cares of bringing up her children on the slenderest of incomes, and was living with Robert’s oldest brother, Carter, in Georgetown. Carter, after being graduated from Harvard, was practicing as a lawyer in Washington, but a lack of ambition, a dislike of the law as a profession, and a certain dolce far niente were already having an unfortunate effect on his career, although he did not seem to care. He summed himself up accurately enough: “I am amused and amusing,” a very different spirit from Robert’s, or from that of the middle brother, Sydney Smith, a serious and dedicated naval officer. Robert had always been the one who had taken care of their mother, so it is not surprising that once he was home he managed to get her out on a round of visits to Carter kinfolk, despite her failing health. Everywhere they went, Carter was admired for “his songs and stories, his wit and high good humor,” while Robert, considerably shier, and less ambitious to be the life of the party everywhere he went, was admired above all for his good looks, his impeccable manners, and his appearance in uniform. This is not to say that he was a younger version of the solemn and dignified public figure he later became—he had an
impish sense of humor; he danced well; he was flirtatious (within the strict bounds of decency); and he attracted a good deal of attention from the young women of the extended Lee and Carter clans, including Mary Anna Randolph Custis, whom Robert addressed as “cousin,” the daughter of Martha Washington’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, owner of Arlington, the impressive, columned mansion resembling “an Athenian temple” he had built overlooking Washington. Arlington would come to be like a second home—or even a first, since he had no other.
Robert’s enjoyment of his furlough—and his pleasure at being back among his family at the height of the Virginia “visiting season,” on display in his tightly fitting gray uniform with its rows of gleaming buttons—may have been overshadowed by the unfolding of another Lee family scandal, of which he can hardly have been unaware, particularly since his Carter kin would have been only too anxious to whisper about it. Light-Horse Harry Lee’s oldest son, Henry Lee IV, owner of Stratford Hall, where Robert had been born, was now being called “Black-Horse Harry,” as if he was determined to outdo his father in disgrace and debt. Twenty years older than his half brother Robert, Henry Lee had already managed to make himself a figure of notoriety on a scale dwarfing that of his father, and threatened to bring shame to every member of the Lee family, however remote and respectable. All this, and yet the worst was still to come!
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