Because of this, Lee is often accused of “fatalism,” but that implies a certain lack of control over events, or a lack of effort, or at least indifference to outcomes of things, and these attitudes were entirely foreign to Lee’s character. He was neither passive nor resigned—in everything large or small he demanded of himself the maximum of effort and attention to detail—but as he matured he became more and more convinced that the final arbiter in all matters was the Lord, and this conviction runs like an unself-conscious litany through his letters, and even in his conversations on the battlefield with his generals.
As a boy, and throughout his adult life, he was a devout Episcopalian—Episcopalianism was the “established” church of Virginia—and always punctilious about attending service; but his lifetime almost exactly coincided with the Christian revival movement that began around 1800 and peaked around 1870, the year of his death. Central to this rapidly spreading movement was the individual’s personal relationship with God, and his willingness to be “born again.” Lee himself moved, by slow and painful steps, toward a form of what we would now call fundamental Christianity, though still within the shelter of the Episcopalian Church, which was undergoing its own revolution.
He was influenced by the prayers and exhortations of his wife and her mother, Mary Fitzhugh Custis, both of whom were passionate converts to evangelical Christianity: Arlington was a house in which “prayers were said morning and evening,” and religion was a constant subject of discussion between mother and daughter, despite the old-fashioned deism and worldliness of George Washington Custis, a pleasure-loving and self-indulgent figure straight out of the eighteenth century, for whom piety was never a guiding interest, but who knew better than to interfere with or question the religious enthusiasm of his wife and daughter so long as he was left in peace to follow his own pursuits and interests without criticism or interference. Much as Lee admired his father-in-law—a sentiment that was by no means universally shared—and appreciated the connection to George Washington that Mr. Custis represented, he was much more strongly influenced by his mother-in-law, and of course his wife, for both of whom the saving of Lee’s soul by conversion to evangelicalism was a first priority (they had apparently given up on Mr. Custis).
Lee’s personality was complex—he was determined to avoid the all too public mistakes of his father, but still strove to equal Light-Horse Harry Lee’s military exploits. Coming from a family in which there was no shortage of scandal, he set himself unusually high standards of behavior and almost always met or exceeded them. A perfectionist, obsessed by duty and by the value of obedience, he might been a grim figure, except for the fact that he had another side, charming, funny, and flirtatious. The animal lover, the gifted watercolorist, the talented cartographer—the topographic maps he drew for the Corps of Engineers are works of art, as are the cartoons he drew for his children in Mexico. The father who adored having his children get into bed with him in the morning, and telling them stories, or having them tickle his feet; the adoring husband; the devoted friend—these are all facets of the same man. He was the product of a rationalist education and at the same time a romantic, who sought for a spiritual answer to the problems of life—a man of contradictions, whose natural good manners and courtly bearing disguised his lifelong soul-searching.
Lee’s enduring status as a noble, tragic figure, indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people, sometimes prevents us from appreciating the degree to which Lee enjoyed life, or from understanding the genuine joy that accompanied his final, wholehearted surrender to the evangelical beliefs of his wife and mother-in-law. In a very real sense he accepted the Lord, and that acceptance guided his actions in the years to come. He sought, always, to do his duty, to guide others into doing the same, and to submit humbly to God’s will.
Hardly any two things are harder to reconcile than deep Christian belief and skilled generalship. It is even more difficult to combine the role of a heroic leader with deep humility, but Lee did so. It is hard indeed for a man commanding up to 100,000 soldiers in battle to be modest. The massed, obedient, admiring ranks; the battle flags waving in the wind; the knowledge that most if not all of these men are willing, even eager, to follow your orders to their death, has bred vanity, arrogance, pride, and hubris in great generals throughout history, but Lee excluded such feelings entirely. In victory and in defeat alike he retained his composure, his dignity, his self-control, his modesty, and his prayerful hope that he was fulfilling God’s will. Throughout the Civil War he did not even have the conviction that slavery and secession were necessarily worth fighting for. To paraphrase Grant, nobody ever fought “so long and so valiantly . . . for a cause”* as Lee—and for one in which he did not totally believe. In that sense he was indeed a martyr to his cause. Lee not only bore this burden uncomplainingly; he struggled mightily throughout his life to remind himself of his own imperfections and shortcomings—he would have had no need of the slave whose task it was to stand beside a victorious Roman general in his chariot and whisper into his ear during his triumph: Sic transit gloria mundi.
Lee’s concern with behaving in a gentlemanly way to everyone, regardless of rank; his dislike of open confrontations; and his instinctive tact, which never deserted him, even in moments of crisis, made him almost universally admired, but not always an effective commander. He worked best with those who could guess what he wanted them to do without being told, and for whom even the slightest frown of displeasure or the faint flush on Lee’s cheeks that signified he was suppressing his anger was recognized instantly as a rebuke. He could be tough—when the brash young Union cavalry commander George A. Custer proposed to execute Confederate prisoners Lee simply ordered that a Union prisoner be hanged for every Confederate who was executed.† He also had no hesitation in having his own soldiers executed for disobeying his order to respect enemy property, or for desertion. But he never used harsh words, and he went to great lengths to avoid an angry “scene,” so much so that his aides were charged with keeping those who might stage one away from Lee.
This is not to suggest that Lee was perfect, but he aimed at perfection at all times, even under extreme provocation. He felt anger, certainly, and those who were close to him recognized the warning signs: “No man,” his aide Colonel Venable wrote, “could see the flush come over that grand forehead and the temple veins swell on occasions of great trial of patience and doubt that Lee had the strong, high temper of a Washington.” He set himself to control it, however, at whatever cost to himself. His generosity of spirit, undiminished by ideological or political differences, and even by the divisive, bloody Civil War, shines through in every letter he writes, and in every conversation of his that was reported or remembered.
His willingness to take on tasks that did not promise much in the way of a reward and his good nature were both sorely tried by his return home in the summer of 1848. It was one thing to write long letters of advice from Mexico to Mary and the older children, and quite another to resume the role of paterfamilias and husband under the same roof. “Lee not only loved his children, but enjoyed them” is a very true observation, but he was also a tireless fount of advice and religious exhortation who, at least in writing, sounds to the modern ear a bit like a latter-day Polonius, a failing that Lee himself recognized and occasionally made fun of: “You see I am following my old habit of giving advice, which I daresay you neither need nor require,” he wrote to one of his sons, and then went on to add in self-justification, “But you must pardon a fault which proceeds from my great love and burning anxiety for your welfare and happiness. When I think of your youth, impulsiveness, and many temptations, your distance from me, and the ease (and even innocence) with which you might take an erroneous course, my heart quails within me, and my whole frame and being trembles at the possible result. May Almighty God have you in his holy keeping.”
“My heart quails within me” is a wonderful phras
e; it might seem quaint or forced coming from most other men, but in Lee one senses the depth and sincerity of his concern, a “devoted tenderness” that is unmistakable. Nobody could have worked harder to set his children a good example, or to judge their actions with more unflinching, if tactful, attention, but with never a trace of anger. Lee’s boys seem to have benefited from this torrent of advice and care, and far from resenting it, took it as a sign of their father’s love for them. About his daughters, it is harder to judge, but Lee’s devotion to them and his good humor regarding their occasional failures to live up to his expectations were never in doubt.
As a forty-year-old father of four daughters, with three sons to educate, and without a home to call his own, Lee worried ceaselessly about money, and was enormously careful and exact about it, “frugal and thrifty in the little affairs of daily life,” parsimonious in what he spent on himself, but always generous with others. “The necessity I daily have for money,” as he put it, haunted him—he had no “family fortune” or estates to draw on, and it cannot have escaped his attention that although his father-in-law possessed three great houses in Virginia—Arlington, White House plantation in New Kent County, and Romancock in King William County—among them adding up to a total of over 13,000 acres of land and almost 200 slaves, Mr. Custis’s attention was fixed on his attempts to be a painter and a successful playwright, and on his view of himself as the keeper of George Washington’s flame, rather than on managing his estates productively. His life was not unlike that of many of the aristocratic Russian landowners, improvident, pleasure-loving, dreaming about utopian schemes while their serfs mismanaged their estates.* Self-indulgence was Custis’s besetting sin. Unlike his son-in-law, he was more interested in spending money than earning it; his agricultural interests were more in the nature of a gentleman’s hobby than a business, and he begrudged neither his wife and daughter nor himself anything in the way of luxuries and adornments, while the houses went unrepaired, the land was poorly farmed, and the slaves were shiftless and—in the opinion of many of Mr. Custis’s neighbors—pampered and overindulged. Lee did not expect, nor would he have accepted, financial support from his father-in-law, but he was too shrewd not to be at least partially aware that when Mary Lee and their sons eventually inherited the Custis estate it would bring them problems and debts rather than a fortune.
Lee’s duties at the War Department through the summer of 1848 consisted of completing the maps he had begun in Mexico, slow, painstaking work. He was reappointed as a member of the board of engineers for the Atlantic coast defenses. Later he would rather dourly say that the work reacquainted him with “the routine of duty.” Still, it had its advantages: he could live at Arlington, and being at the hub of things he was “in contact with the high officials of the Government.” Lee scrupulously refrained from any attempt to lobby on his own behalf; most people meeting him were favorably impressed by his soldierly bearing and, more important, by his professional competence. In September, he was assigned to oversee the construction of a new fort that was intended to defend Baltimore, as a kind of support to the venerable Fort McHenry. Lee was sent to Boston for a meeting of the board of engineers and then on to Florida with a view to building further fortifications—a long and difficult journey in those days. The Corps of Engineers and Congress were still acting on the assumption that Great Britain would continue to be the enemy to worry about. Whatever Lee thought of that, he was once again involved in building stone-and-mortar fortresses. This expertise, together with the gift he had shown for rapidly building “earthworks”—well-designed trench systems and carefully sited, dug-in artillery batteries—would turn out to be a substantial element of his military genius: his experience as an engineer would save Richmond in 1862 and extend the Civil War by over a year in 1864 and 1865. Lee would prove to be one of the great masters of earthworks in the history of warfare; his experience in Mexico had shown him time and again and that the pick, the shovel, and the sandbag were as important in battle as the musket and the bayonet. Unfortunately, the Corps of Engineers remained wedded to the construction of fortresses, so Lee took up his new position in April 1849, and made preparations to move his family to a rented house in Baltimore while he spent his days examining the shoals and mudflats around Sollers Point and Hawkins Point, halfway between Baltimore and the Patapsco River. He commuted there every morning in a boat rowed by two oarsmen, had his dinner (what we would now call lunch) in a house on Sollers Point, and in the evening was rowed back to the nearby mainland, now an area of hazardous-waste landfills and industrial pollution aptly named Quarantine Road, which was then known chiefly for its thriving mosquito population.
Not surprisingly, Lee “came down with a fever,” very likely malaria, and it was not until the autumn that he was back at work. As usual, his work progressed rapidly and efficiently, as piles were purchased and driven and wharves completed in the first stage of construction. Lee’s orderly career was briefly interrupted by a most unusual opportunity. “The Cuban revolutionary junta in New York” had been preparing for yet another attempt to free Cuba from Spanish rule, and had been shopping for an experienced American military leader to command it. The Cubans had offered the job to General Worth, but he died before making his decision; they then offered it to Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a West Point graduate, chairman of the Senate committee on military affairs, and of course the future president of the Confederacy. Senator Davis declined the honor, but recommended Lee.
The cause of Cuban independence from Spain was a popular one in the United States, particularly among southerners, many of whom dreamed of expanding slavery into the Caribbean, and anticipated annexing Cuba as a slave territory, perhaps eventually as a slave state—which in view of its climate, its agricultural wealth, and its mixture of races was by no means an impossible ambition, though not one for which Lee would have had any sympathy. He was not an opponent of slavery, but like many of the founding fathers he hoped to see it gradually removed in God’s good time—possibly by God’s intervention—and he was firmly opposed to expanding it. Lee’s personal experience with slavery was such as to lead him to the conclusion that there were already too many slaves in the South, not that more were needed.
Daily labor overseeing the driving of piles and pouring of tons of concrete may have made the prospect of leading an army of insurgents against the Spanish crown seem attractive, however. He was tempted enough to meet with members of the junta in Baltimore, but in the end, Lee declined on a point of personal honor: whether it was proper for a commissioned officer of the United States to accept an offer of command from the representatives of a foreign power—or in this case, from rebels against a foreign power. Not for the last time in their relationship, Davis and Lee disagreed in a gentlemanly way; Davis felt that Lee should accept the offer, but Lee would not go without full assurance that the army would not object, and that Davis could not give him. Lee was right about army regulations, though it is ironic that when he became a general thirteen years later, the same issue would be raised. He would have to resign his commission in the U.S. Army to accept command of the Virginia state forces. It is hard to imagine Lee leading a colorful army of Cuban insurgents, or playing a role as a kind of freebooting military adventurer, and Freeman speculates that if Lee had gone to Cuba he might have ended his life before a Spanish firing squad as a yanqui filibuster, for the expedition eventually failed; of course it is also possible that Lee’s expertise might have crowned the expedition with success, but either way his strict sense of duty prevented him from taking part in an exotic, if doomed, uprising, and he does not appear to have had any regrets about it.
Those who write about Lee as a strategist often point out that in the Mexican War he had had no field experience of modern weapons or technology—for example, the replacement of the smoothbore musket by the rifle, which increased the killing range of the standard infantry weapon from 50 yards to 400 or 500 yards; or the huge changes in logistics and tactics brought about by the r
ailway—but to portray him as opposed to or unknowledgeable about what we would now call technology is to underrate him. He helped to design and install on the unpromising Sollers Point flats a steam pile driver, as well as a steam-driven saw, a dredge, a crane, and even a diving bell that permitted his workers to excavate deep underwater. His mastery of modern machines allowed him to complete the first phase of the foundations of what would become Fort Carroll on the site in only a year. (It is useful to remember that Lee’s connection with the Revolutionary War made it seem nearer to him than to most men—Charles Carroll of Carrolltown, in whose honor the fortress would be named, not only had known Lee’s father, but had been the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.)* Lee’s interest in science and mechanics continued throughout his life. There was hardly anybody in the U.S. Army who knew more about artillery, particularly how to site it in the most scientific way, or who had more experience with and enthusiasm for the changes that steamboats and railroads had brought about. Although his bearing and manner seemed to be of the late eighteenth century, his feet were firmly planted in the nineteenth.
As work on the fort proceeded, the Lee family settled into their new home. As usual, Mary had fought a skillful, but ultimately futile, delaying action against leaving Arlington. Lee, in his gentle, tactful way, won her over by urging on her the need for the children not to start the new school year in Baltimore late. “We must not for our own pleasure lose sight of the interest of our children,” he wrote, seizing the moral high ground that was his weapon of choice in persuading Mary to do something she didn’t want to. Baltimore was full of Lee and Custis connections, beginning with Lee’s sister Anne Marshall; and it was hardly more than fifty miles from Arlington, so this cannot have seemed like a major move, even to Mary. The Lees participated in the busy social life of the city, which may have been some compensation to Mary for the move, and Lee himself was a man who enjoyed good company and was considered a lively guest. Indeed his youngest son, Robert, remembered most of all his father’s “bright smile” and “playful way,” and remarked on the fact that he was “a great favorite in Baltimore, as he was everywhere, especially with ladies and little children.”
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