Thus, by 1831, the fear of being sent south, away from family, children, friends, and familiar surroundings, with no hope of being reunited and every prospect of being physically abused and worked to death, had hugely exacerbated the misery of being born a slave—it was not only a threat of exile, but in the view of most slaves a sentence of hard labor and death. Only in Russia, where the ancient custom of serfdom produced slavery on a far larger scale (the biggest slave owner in the South possessed just over a thousand slaves, but in Tolstoy’s War and Peace Pierre Bezukhov’s father, the count, is described as owning “40,000 souls”), and where exile to Siberia to clear virgin forests was a virtual sentence of death, could any equivalent to Southern slavery be found in the 1830s.
In the legal proceedings that followed the rising, fifty slaves and freed blacks were tried, of whom nineteen were hanged. Nat Turner himself was not found until nine weeks after the revolt, and was tried, convicted, and hanged on November 11; afterward his body was skinned, beheaded, and quartered. One of the doctors who dissected the body had a “money purse made of his hide,” while another apparently kept his skeleton as a souvenir.
At Fort Monroe, Colonel Eustis sent three companies of artillery to Southampton County by steamer the moment he heard news of the revolt, but by the time they arrived, it was all over and their presence was not needed. Fear of further slave insurrections prompted the colonel to request five more companies of artillery and to “put into execution a series of regulations for the exclusion of Negroes from the post.” This outraged the engineers: their workforce consisted largely of hired slaves who needed access to the fort for water with which to produce cement and mortar, and their personal servants were also slaves. A brisk objection on Lee’s part, in the absence of Captain Talcott, escalated into a “post war,” the kind of bad feelings between one branch of the service and another that could quickly render army life in the confined space of a camp or fort poisonous—a good lesson for Lee about the importance of firmly preventing this kind of thing, which, once it started, could rapidly weaken an army, in which cooperation by infantry, cavalry, and engineers was essential. The arrival of five more companies, and the exclusion of slaves, made living conditions in the fort much more crowded and less comfortable, so it is perhaps not surprising that after the Lees went home for Christmas Mary remained at Arlington for several months, while her husband continued his duties at Fort Monroe by himself.
As for the revolt, Lee would have of course heard about the bloody details when the officers who had been sent to Southampton County returned. He reassured his mother-in-law that “much mischief” was prevented by confusion over the date of the uprising—a reference to Nat Turner’s misreading of the eclipses and his poor communications with his closest collaborators—and added, “It was ascertained that they used their religious assemblies, which ought to have been devoted to better purposes, for forming and maturing their plans.” The same thought also occurred to the Virginia legislature, which quickly passed strict laws against teaching slaves and freed blacks to read and write, and requiring a white clergyman to be present at any black religious meeting. Notwithstanding his sensible effort to calm any fears Mrs. Custis might have for the safety of her daughter, however, Lee has been described as “profoundly concerned” about it, as every southerner was. Lee was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for slavery, particularly the kind of slavery that was being practiced by the “Cotton Kings” in the “deep South,” but his feelings on the subject were firmly held and remained remarkably consistent.
Like many southerners, Lee disliked slavery not so much for its consequences for the slaves as for its effect on whites. He defined his view very precisely in a letter to Mary some twenty years later: “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as institution, is a moral and political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.”
This was not an uncommon view of slavery among moderate southerners, and for that matter among a good many northerners as well before the Civil War. Lee’s belief that the end of slavery was a matter for God to bring about in His own good time, rather than something for politicians or white slave owners to deal with, was a little more pessimistic than the more popular and prevailing idea that the problem of slavery might be solved by compensating their owners and deporting the blacks en masse, perhaps to somewhere in South America, or back to Africa—indeed by 1820 three philanthropic Virginians, two of them relatives of Robert E. Lee—Henry Clay, John Randolph, and Richard Bland Lee, cofounders of the American Colonization Society—had already made ambitious plans and raised money to create Liberia (its capital was named Monrovia to honor another Virginian, President James Monroe) and set the process in motion by sending freed blacks there. Even those Americans who were opposed to slavery were not necessarily in favor of free blacks participating in the political process or living as equals with other Americans. Lincoln himself had been a mild but persistent enthusiast for the idea of Liberia, and famously remarked during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, “There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality,” an opinion not so very different from Lee’s.
Lee’s opinion in the 1850s was the one that he had always held, and which he retained to his death—it never changed. Indeed, in 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, when he was called to testify before a Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, far from recanting or softening his opinion, he repeated it in stronger terms: “My own opinion is that they [blacks] cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the [vote] would lead to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways. . . . I think it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them. . . . I think everybody there would be willing to aid it.”
To be sure, Lee’s feelings about individual blacks differed from his belief that as a race they were better off as slaves. Just as he had shown kindness to Old Nat, his mother’s former coachman, he signed a letter in the 1868 presidential campaign that read, “The idea that Southern people are hostile to the negroes and would oppress them, if it were in their power to do so, is entirely unfounded. . . . They have grown up in our midst, and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon them with kindness.”
Even though Lee was still a mere brevet second lieutenant, he appears to have prevailed over Colonel Eustis at Fort Monroe, possibly because General Gratiot, the chief of the Corps of Engineers, pulled more weight in Washington than the chief of artillery. In any case, Lee returned to work, his principal task being to oversee the transportation and dumping of large quantities of stone and sand into the Hampton Roads to extend and reinforce the fifteen-acre “artificial island” called the Rip-Raps (after riprap, a grade of loose stone of different sizes and shapes from which it had been created), where Fort Wool would eventually be constructed, and, for the work on both forts, to keep the strict accounting of expenses that the Corps of Engineers required. The island, on the south side of the navigation channel, was intended to support Fort Monroe, and provide cross fire against enemy vessels entering the Hampton Roads. The work gave Lee responsibilities but did not excite him, and he may already have begun to suffer the doubts about the wisdom of having chosen a military career that were to plague him before the Mexican War gave him a chance to experience combat and command—and sped up his promotion—and which would resume and worsen with peace until the
secession of Virginia unexpectedly made him a general. Strangely, self-doubt and dissatisfaction about his own abilities would haunt this most competent of men most of his life.
He was fortunate in having Talcott as his superior officer, since they became close friends; the presence of the unneeded extra companies of artillery, which had been sent to put down any further slave insurrections, also increased the pace of social life at the fort, though since the newcomers consisted mostly of young officers with time on their hands, it was predominantly masculine and hard-drinking. Lee was tolerant of drinkers, but he seldom drank himself, and found it hard to understand those who drank to excess. Drinking, card playing, and chasing after the few available women being the chief recreations of the younger artillery officers at Fort Monroe, Lee tended to stand apart from them, although he was the same rank, as did his friend Joe Johnston, who was also abstemious. It is worth noting that even at this early stage of his career—among army officers nobody is lowlier than a temporary second lieutenant—Lee was set apart from his fellows both by his physical bearing and by his innate dignity. He was not censorious or stuffy, he was good company, he joined in such fun as there was (provided it did not interfere with duty), but there was a certain reserve to his character that he was to retain all his life, and that made him stand out from the beginning, even though he was too modest for this to have been his intention. He had about him the loneliness of a great commander even when he was still the most junior of officers: it was not something he learned, or assumed; it was something he was born with, accentuated perhaps by his identification since early boyhood with George Washington.
After the Christmas visit to Arlington, Mary Lee did not return to Fort Monroe until June 1832. She then came with her mother and two slaves, so life must have been for a time very crowded indeed in Lee’s quarters, particularly since Mrs. Custis brought with her enough furnishings from Arlington to make her daughter’s new home more comfortable. By that time, Mary Lee was pregnant, and of course she went home to Arlington to have the baby there in September with the help and support of her mother and the servants. The baby was a healthy boy, George Washington Custis Lee (he was always known as Custis, rather than George), named after his grandfather, George Washington’s adopted son; this name was another sign of Lee’s instinctive emotional connection with the father of his country.
After the boy’s birth, Mary spent almost as much time at Arlington as at Fort Monroe, obliging Lee to be in constant correspondence with “Molly,” as he often addressed her in his letters, and sometimes chiding her for not living up to his own high standards. It was not just a question of neatness, orderliness, and perfect housekeeping, about all of which Lee was gently but firmly critical; when Talcott’s brother-in-law Horace Hale died while Mary was away in Arlington, for example, she clearly did not come up to her husband’s expectations in dealing with the grief of their friend and neighbor at Fort Monroe. “I am sorry,” he wrote to her, “it has so happened that you have not been with Mrs. Hale, when in the one case she needed your assistance, & in the other your sympathy.” This sounds like a pretty stiff rebuke, coming from a man as devoted to his wife as Lee clearly was, and may also indicate a certain, perhaps subconscious, impatience with the amount of time Mary was beginning to spend away from the fort being cossetted by her mother and father at Arlington. There does not seem to have been any friction between them—his letters to her are affectionate, if sometimes exasperated, although he is sometimes obliged to apologize to others on her behalf: “Tell the ladies that they are aware that Mrs. L. is sometimes addicted to laziness & forgetfulness in her housekeeping. But they may be certain that she does her best. Or in her mother’s words, ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’” This is the voice of a loving and forgiving husband, but also one who does not close his eyes to his spouse’s defects, and is surprisingly candid about them to their acquaintances—a certain patronizing tone seeps through, making one suspect that although Lee may have been the most understanding of husbands, he may not have been all that easy to live with on a day-to-day basis; perfectionists seldom are.
Mary, it is equally clear, expected to be looked after and protected as she always had been at Arlington, and Lee did his best, though with fewer resources and less time to do so—he was, after all, a busy and ambitious young engineer, whereas Mr. and Mrs. Custis had always been at home and on hand to see to her wants and needs, not to speak of a large number of devoted servants with nothing much else to do. Neither Robert nor Mary Lee could have foreseen the amount of time the army would separate them from each other in the years to come, which was probably just as well, or the way she would become her husband’s confidant and sounding board, with strong, and strongly expressed opinions of her own. He held nothing back from her in writing about his political opinions and his career, and she replied with equal frankness and sensible advice. He never hid from her his need for women friends, or his admiration for a pretty face—he was always happiest in domestic surroundings, even if they were not his own, or chatting with women about their lives, their feelings, and their children, although his tone with women was usually avuncular rather than passionate, like that of a graybeard content to sit in their company over a cup of tea, not shy of paying the occasional compliment, or flirting just enough to bring the occasional blush to somebody’s cheek. He made no effort to hide this from Mary, and she does not seem to have minded. While she was away the outbreak of the Seminole War in Florida caused many of the artillery officers to be sent south, leaving their wives behind, and for a time Lee luxuriated in being “in the right position to sympathize with them, as Mrs. Lee and her little limb are at Arlington.”
When she returned with “Master Custis,” as Lee referred jokingly to their infant son, their domestic arrangements at the fort improved. Captain Talcott had married Harriet Randolph Hackley, known to all, including Lee, as “the beautiful Talcott,” and his widowed sister and her children had moved out. The Lees were thus able to move upstairs, into larger quarters than the two small rooms they had originally shared, and also gained a greater amount of privacy. However, since Harriet Talcott was soon pregnant and Mary Lee had a small child, there must have been enough domesticity in the quarters set aside for the engineer officers to satisfy even Robert E. Lee. At that time, Lee owned four of his mother’s slaves, while Mary brought one of her own from Arlington, so they were not short of help, though Lee remarked that they were substituting quantity for quality, without being able to suggest a sensible alternative, beyond saying that Mary might try to hire one who was better trained. This was, of course, precisely the practical, as opposed to the moral, problem of slavery—the slaves had no particular incentive to hone their skills, and the owner was stuck with them for life, unless he sold them or hired them out.
Harriet Talcott was to play a large—perhaps an outsize—role in Lee’s life. Even so devoted a biographer as Emory M. Thomas refers to their relationship as “an extended mock love affair,” though whether or not Harriet shared in this fantasy is hard to determine. Lee certainly did nothing to keep his interest in her secret—he went so far as to include what amounted to billets-doux in letters to Harriet’s husband when they were away from the fort, and in the engineers’ wing of Fort Monroe it cannot have escaped Mary’s attention that Lee was enamored of Harriet, or at the very least chose to play the part of a love-smitten swain for his own amusement. Whereas the portrait of Mary Custis shows a rather plain face with thin lips, the portrait of Harriet Talcott shows by contrast a somewhat luscious beauty: shoulders extravagantly bared; a mouth resembling that of Clara Bow’s, the “It girl” of the 1920s with the famous bee-stung lips; a long, graceful neck; and a pile of blond hair. She appears to have been witty and clever as well.
No doubt all this was innocent enough—there is no indication that Lee ever betrayed Mary with Harriet, or anyone else—but it is an odd side of Lee’s character, this need to play the whimsical lover, not only with Harriet, but with other women as we
ll. When Harriet gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Lee wrote her a gushing note pressing on her his son “Master Custis Lee” as her daughter’s husband-to-be, and even suggesting, in a roundabout way, that he was the father of her girl, and referring to an “Affaire du Coeur” between himself and Harriet, which was largely if not totally imaginary on his part. None of this altered his love for Mary, and indeed he wrote to her often about these fantasies, as if she would share his pleasure at flirting with other women. He wrote to Mary, who was then away in Arlington, of escorting “Miss G,” adding, “How I did strut along. . . . How you would have triumphed in my happiness.” He wrote to his old friend Mackay in Savannah that pretty girls made his heart “open to them, like a flower to the sun,” and again, “As for the daughters of Eve in this country, they are formed in the very poetry of nature, and would make your lips water and your fingers tingle. They are beginning to assemble to put their beautiful limbs into this salt water,” a reference to the then fashionable belief in sea bathing, almost fully clothed, as a health measure. The romantic, lyrical side of Lee was fully formed and powerful, was apparently not satisfied by marriage, and would remain a constant throughout his life. It was not so much that he was a roué manqué, though that may be true—he was, after all, the son of a robust eighteenth-century roué and the half brother of a man hopelessly mired in sexual scandal—as that he had a lifelong need for the admiration and girlish chatter of young women, in whose company his normally reserved character expanded and took on a new dimension. Mary, to her credit, seems to have understood that this offered no threat to their marriage. His male friends and contemporaries, like Mackay and Talcott, seem to have understood it as well—after all, Talcott was Lee’s superior and close friend, as well as Harriet’s husband—but it is a side of Lee that would certainly have surprised those who fought under his command in the Civil War.
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