Scott was at odds with Davis, and would have preferred Lee as colonel of the Second Cavalry, with Johnston as his second in command; he reaffirmed his belief that if the United States were ever to be faced with a war in which the existence of the country was at stake, even on his deathbed he would tell the president “with his dying breath” that Lee should command the army, but in the end he accepted the secretary of war’s decision after several bitter exchanges of letters.
Lee gained nothing in terms of compensation, since he was already being paid as a brevet colonel. Always prudent with money, not only did he manage to live on his salary, but by the time he reached West Point he had put aside $64,500, most of it invested in state and municipal bonds at 6 or 7 percent,* not an inconsiderable amount of capital for the time, and the equivalent of about $1.68 million today. It is understandable that Lee felt poor—he had seven children, and although Custis attended West Point at government expense, the cost of sending the other boys to college no doubt seemed just as appalling to him as it would seem to parents today. Also, he had before him the prospect of four girls to marry in a style acceptable to the Lee, Carter, and Custis families. He was certainly pained at leaving the Corps of Engineers after twenty-seven years of service, as well as “bitter in the extreme” at the necessity of being parted from his children, but it is also possible that getting out from behind a desk held a certain appeal for him. He would be leading troops in the field, he would have direct military responsibilities, and given the rising tension along the frontier he was almost certain to see action. Then too, the cavalry was still seen as an elite, and Lee was a born horseman. That he gave the matter some consideration, possibly to discuss the ramifications with Mary Lee, is demonstrated by the fact that it took him twelve days to reply—a long delay for Lee, but his acceptance was never in doubt.
Lee had about a month in which to move his family back to Arlington and prepare his affairs for his departure. It was already clear that the Second Cavalry was unlikely to be stationed anyplace where Mary and the children would be able to follow him. On April 12, 1855, he left for Louisville, Kentucky, where the regiment was being formed. For reasons that remain unclear, the War Department was unable to locate Colonel Johnston, so for the time being Lee was in command. Even before his men’s uniforms and equipment had arrived, he was ordered to proceed with them to Saint Louis, Missouri, where he set about drilling his troopers. Lee would later say that he could make a soldier out of any man—he was referring to the daring proposal to arm Negroes to fight in the Confederate Army in 1864—and he does indeed seem to have had a gift for turning reluctant men into proper soldiers. In fact, a good many of the recruits for the Second Cavalry were regular soldiers from lesser regiments, who may have needed almost as much whipping into shape as civilians to come up to Lee’s standards. The Second Cavalry would eventually become so perfectly drilled, uniformed, and equipped that they became known throughout the rest of the army as “Davis’s pets,” a reflection of the secretary of war’s personal interest in the regiment.
Lee himself was not to enjoy the comforts of Jefferson Barracks, on the Mississippi River, since the army decided he should use his time attending courts-martial as far afield as Kansas, Texas, and Pennsylvania, one of the wearisome duties of line officers which he had been spared as an engineer and superintendent of West Point. He was on the move from the beginning of September 1855 to March 1856, when he finally rejoined the regiment at Fort Mason, 100 miles north of San Antonio. It was one of a chain of small, crudely built, isolated forts intended to protect settlers from raids by Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians, or by marauding Mexican bandits. The sheer tedium of travel between army posts, much of it on horseback, not to speak of the tedium of the cases being tried, was enough to make Lee write a warning to his daughter Agnes that she “must expect discomforts and annoyances all through life,” a prediction that was to prove more accurate than her father can have foreseen.
At the end of March, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who had finally appeared to take command of the regiment, put Lee in command of two advance squadrons of the Second Cavalry encamped under canvas on the Brazos River, in the heart of Comanche country, at a site named Camp Cooper, really no more than a couple of lines of tents, about 170 miles north of Fort Mason, an isolated encampment in the middle of a largely unexplored and forbidding wilderness of brush and thorny mesquite inhabited by wolves, coyotes, and snakes, and sparsely populated by bands of hostile Comanche. Lee’s orders were to overawe the Indians and prevent them from following their proud tradition of tribal warfare, murderous raids on exposed Anglo settlements, cattle and horse theft, and the scalping of their enemies. Lee had a tent of his own, a few chickens to supplement the army rations with eggs, and for a time a pet rattlesnake, since no cat or dog could survive the bold depredations of the wolves. He was to spend nineteen months in this unpromising place, his only pastime the search for a site to build a new fort, accompanied by Lieutenant John Bell Hood.
The nearby Comanche encampment downstream of Fort Cooper held little interest for Lee. The Native Americans did not seem to most Americans of the mid-nineteenth century either romantic or worth studying, and Lee was no exception. In the post–Civil War effort to turn Lee into a kind of secular saint, his views on race have been almost altogether eliminated from his portrait. He believed that Negroes were better off as slaves than they had been in Africa, and after the Civil War he opposed giving them the vote; he thought that Mexicans were only slightly better (and lived more poorly) than slaves in the South; and he did not think that the government’s efforts to “humanize” the Indians, as he put it, were worth the trouble or likely to succeed. His attitude can be summed up by his comment to Mary on the Comanche after he got to know them: “These people give a world of trouble to man and horse, and, poor creatures, they are not worth it.”
Lee was no anthropologist, and he had scant patience with the troublesome Comanche, or with the squalor of their village. Soon after Lee’s arrival at Camp Cooper the local chief, Catumse, paid him a ceremonial visit, which he felt obliged to return, and which he described shortly afterward in a letter to Mary: “Yesterday I returned his [Catumse’s] visit, and remained a short time at his Lodge. He informed me that he had six wives. They [the Indians] are riding in and out of camp all day, their paint and ‘ornaments’ rendering them more hideous than nature made them, and the whole tribe is extremely uninteresting.” Lee was polite to the chief but minced no words: “I hailed him as a friend, as long as his conduct and that of his tribe deserved it, but would meet him as an enemy the first moment he failed to keep his word.” That Chief Catumse might have his own standards of behavior, and a code of honor as rigid in its own way as Lee’s, was not a thought that ever crossed Lee’s mind.
The dullness of life on the frontier eventually brought Lee back to his old regrets about his choice of profession. Clearly there was not much gain or glory to be had in fighting the Comanche, and still less in pursuing them, since they left few traces of their passage and knew every square mile of their barren territory like the back of their hand. Lee was now a forty-eight-year-old brevet colonel, 1,000 miles from his beloved wife and children, accomplishing nothing. “Monotony of the darkest and dullest descended again,” Freeman writes, and it is a fair description of Lee’s state of mind—like many another soldier on the frontier, he felt that his life was being wasted, and that his military career was drawing to its end with no hope of further promotion.
His boredom was relieved when he was placed in command of an expedition to subdue a rogue band of Comanche under the leadership of a warrior called Sanaco—or possibly the more famous Buffalo Hump—which had been raiding in the vicinity of Fort Chadbourne, more or less equidistant from modern Fort Worth and Midland, and about eleven miles northeast of what is now Bronte.* This was some of the roughest and most barren country on the Texas frontier, and the chance that Lee’s troopers could locate Sanaco or Buffalo Hump† in it was about zero, but the pr
ospect of action seem to have cheered Lee up. He was given four squadrons of cavalry drawn from several forts, perhaps 400 to 500 men, plus supply wagons, guides, and an interpreter—not much with which to cover a huge area whose only features were ravines and dry riverbeds. To the west, stretching for hundreds of miles, was the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, featureless grassland virtually the size of New England into which the Indians could (and did) simply disappear without leaving a trace. Lee and his men covered many miles and rode for days without seeing anything more than smoke on the horizon—smoke that turned out on closer examination to be a prairie fire. He commented that the grass was poor and what little water could be found was salty, but he managed to get close to the source of the Wichita River, probably the first white man to do so, or at any rate the first white man since the conquistador Coronado. One of his squadrons actually succeeded in killing two Indians, though whether they were part of the raiding party seems doubtful. After a thirty-mile ride he spent Independence Day, July 4, 1856, camped on a branch of the Brazos River under the shade of a blanket suspended from four sticks sunk in the ground. From this barren campsite he wrote a description of his whereabouts to Mary: “the sun was fiery hot. The atmosphere like the blast from a hot-air furnace, the water salt.” He wrote, movingly, that “my feelings for my country were as ardent, my faith in her future as true, and my hopes for her advancement as unabated, as if called forth under more propitious circumstances.”
In the end, despite his exertions—he covered 1,600 miles in forty days—he found no trace of the Indian raiders. “I saw nothing,” he would report bitingly of the land around the Brazos, “to attract Indians to the country, or to induce them to remain.”
Eventually the troopers returned to their forts, and Lee returned to Camp Cooper, where the searing heat had dried up the river and killed Lee’s vegetable garden. There he learned that his sister Mildred—Mrs. Edward Vernon Childe—had died unexpectedly in Paris. Mildred, who was four years younger than Robert, had bravely determined to marry a stranger and a northerner when she was only nineteen, despite the doubts of her brothers, who were not convinced by a letter of recommendation from Daniel Webster himself. That Edward Childe was a wealthy Boston lawyer with literary ambitions did not immediately mollify them, but Mildred stood up for herself, married Edward, and went with her husband to live in Paris, from where she “thereafter resisted all efforts to coax her into returning” to the United States. Lee’s grief over her death was increased by his loneliness and sense of failure at Camp Cooper. “The news came to me very unexpectedly,” he wrote to Mary, “and in the course of nature I might never have anticipated it, as indeed I had never realized that she might precede me on the unexplored journey upon which we are hastening. . . . It has put to an end all hope of our meeting in this world. . . . I trust that our merciful God only so suddenly and early snatched her away because he saw that it was the fittest moment to take her to himself.” The letter perfectly expresses Lee’s literal and heartfelt belief in the evangelical Christianity of his wife and late mother-in-law, and this religious tone would enter all of Lee’s correspondence, even correspondence of military or political significance. It is no accident that in so many popular portraits of him, although mounted and in uniform, he is shown in an attitude of prayer.
It was perhaps fortunate that the army, which like all armies was reluctant not to make full use of a soldier’s time, removed Lee from Camp Cooper and sent him off on a seemingly endless round of courts-martial. Officers of field grade were in short supply on the frontier, and Lee was a punctilious and careful member of any court-martial. He paid the same strict attention to the papers and evidence as he had to the work of the cadets at West Point. Merely assembling the witnesses, the documents, the lawyers, and the required number of officers as members of the court-martial in one place might take weeks or months, and often the charges do not seem to have been of great importance in the first place. It took Lee twenty-seven days to cover the 700 miles from Camp Cooper to Ringgold Barracks in Rio Grande City, about as far south as you can go in Texas, and from there he rode on to Fort Brown, San Antonio, and Indianola, a circuit that took him from September 1856 to April 1857, before he returned to Camp Cooper. Luckily for Lee, the forts and camps he visited were full of officers he knew, sometimes with their wives, and he was able to enjoy a small taste of domesticity and to catch up on the news of the day.
Military gossip was that the First and Second Cavalry might be disbanded because of northerners’ fears that Jefferson Davis had staffed them with too many southern officers—a dispute which began on the pages of the New York Times, but which in the end came to nothing. Lee was distressed by the possibility of disbandment, and to his further annoyance he discovered that his friends in Virginia had been circulating a petition to the president to have him promoted to a vacant brigadier generalship for “his brilliant and pre-eminent distinctions,” an effort which he gently but firmly discouraged.
Political news was concentrated on the issue of Kansas, where something approaching open civil war was now raging; and on the entire issue of slavery, which was beginning to subsume all other matters. The incumbent president, Franklin Pierce, managed to lose his fight for renomination by his own party, a unique event in American political history for an elected president. The Democratic Party was now sharply divided between northern Democrats and southern Democrats, and in danger of collapsing as the Whig Party had done in the previous election, and Pierce was too much of a “doughboy” to satisfy those who were opposed to slavery. Instead, the party nominated James Buchanan, American minister to the Court of St. James’s, after fifteen ballots, and chose Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, a future Confederate major general, as the vice presidential candidate. Buchanan had actually been “born in a log cabin”—this was then considered an advantage for a presidential candidate—and he was popular in his home state, Pennsylvania; but his determination to keep an even balance between the slave states and the North made him the butt of ridicule on both sides of the issue. The threat of secession by the slave-owning southern states was sharply increased by events in Kansas, by the steady rise of abolitionist feeling in the North, and by the division of the Democratic Party into two warring factions, as well as by the collapse of the old Whig Party and the rise of the new Republican Party from its ashes. Although the vast majority of southerners were not slave owners, and although abolitionists were a small minority in the North, the issue of slavery was effectively dividing the country and revolutionizing its political institutions. Buchanan was a man of considerable charm and an experienced diplomat, but he fancied himself as a skillful compromiser at a moment in American history when compromise was rapidly becoming unacceptable.
Lee was opposed to secession, dismissing it as “silly” and the equivalent of revolution. He was, in fact, rather like Buchanan, a man who would certainly have been open to compromise if it would keep the Union together. He was no enthusiast for extending slavery in the territories, or for resuming the slave trade, which he abhorred; still less did he favor the annexation of new slave territory in Cuba.
President Pierce’s defense of his controversial and ill-starred repeal of the Missouri Compromise and his arguments against the wisdom of northerners’ attempts to interfere with slavery in the South were the main subject of his message to Congress in December 1856. Unlike the president, Lee saw slavery as a spiritual issue, not a political one. He was not himself the owner of more than a few slaves, whom he had determined should be liberated on his death, and most of his contact with slaves had been with familiar and sometimes beloved house servants, rather than with field hands, but in general he had found the responsibilities of owning them more onerous than any benefit that could be derived from their labor. So far as can be ascertained, he had never actually purchased a slave; he had either inherited his slaves or received them as a gift from Mr. Custis. He shared the interest of several members of the Lee family in sending freed slaves to Liberia, a cause
still eliciting cautious if somewhat skeptical support on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but very little from those whom it was proposed to send there. The last place freed blacks wanted to go was back across the Atlantic to Africa as part of a large-scale social experiment intended to expiate the guilt of white Americans. Lee put most of his thoughts in a letter to Mary. After a few line of cautious optimism about the president’s message to Congress, a sense of an approaching crisis over northerners’ growing determination to limit slavery pervades his letter to Mary.
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