Back in direct command of the Second Cavalry at Fort Mason, Lee found his officers and troopers bewildered by events. On December 20 South Carolina seceded from the United States, and six days later Major Robert Anderson moved his troops from Fort Moultrie, where he feared they could be surrounded, to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, thus unintentionally providing both the Federal government and the South Carolina secessionists with the means to turn a political crisis into a war. On January 9, 1861, the Union steamer Star of the West was fired on as it attempted to land reinforcements and supplies at Fort Sumter, and within a few days Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia joined South Carolina in seceding from the Union.
Many of Lee’s men were divided in their loyalty, as he himself increasingly was, and supplies, pay, and mail to a remote outpost like Fort Mason were now long delayed, as were any sensible orders. Lee passed the time reading Edward Everett’s Life of George Washington, sent to him from home, as if seeking answers to his dilemma from the past.* He found little there to console him. “How his great spirit would be grieved if he could see the wreck of his mighty labors,” he lamented in a letter home on January 23. “I will not, however, permit myself to believe till all ground of hope is gone that the work of his noble deeds will be destroyed, and that his precious advice and virtuous example will so soon be forgotten by his countrymen.” To Custis, he wrote almost in despair: “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than the dissolution of the Union. . . . I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. . . . Secession is nothing but revolution.” Lee went on to further describe secession as “anarchy,” but also defined as clearly as he could his own position: “A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets . . . has no charms for me. . . . If the Union is dissolved, and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”
Clearly, between December 14, 1860, and January 23, 1861, however much Lee desired to see the Union preserved intact, he had made up his mind about what it would take to make that possible: the Federal government must not tamper with the institution of slavery or give in to the demands of abolitionists in the North or attempt to use force against the southern states. Custis would have known his father well enough to recognize the significant reservation (or, as we might call it today, escape clause) in the phrases “save in defence” and “my native State.” With anyone else but Lee these words might have been a rhetorical flourish, but Lee always wrote exactly what he meant, and meant what he wrote. Much as he wished to preserve “a government by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the Revolution,” if the United States used armed force against Virginia he would join in its defense, whatever the cost or the personal anguish.
Events were moving quickly. On January 26 Louisiana seceded, and on February 1 Texas followed, turning the U.S. Army forces in the state into the enemy overnight in the view of many secessionists. General Twiggs,* who had replaced Lee as commander of the Department of Texas, believed that it was his duty to surrender his troops, a position that Lee did not share, but Lee was spared the embarrassment of deciding what to do with his regiment by an urgent message for him to return to Washington, D.C., immediately and “report in person to the general-in-chief by April 1st.”
Rightly assuming that he would not be returning to Texas, Lee traveled to San Antonio in a horse-drawn “ambulance,” probably the only closed vehicle in a cavalry regiment that could carry all his kit and belongings. These were “bulky and somewhat valuable,” the home away from home of a professional soldier, and would serve Lee throughout the Civil War. He described it to his daughter Agnes: “On the right of the entrance of the tent, stands an iron camp bed. On the left a camp table and chair. At the far end a trunk. On the side near the entrance a water bucket basin & broom, clothes hung around within easy reach of all points, & a sword & pistol very convenient. A saddle & bridle at the foot of the bed on a wooden horse.” Of course there was more to it than that—but Lee’s needs were Spartan: writing desk, books, his Bible, his bedclothes, his uniforms, and his boots were all the kit he needed.
No sooner had Lee arrived at the hotel in San Antonio than he was surrounded by armed men in civilian clothes. The wife of a friend who happened to be passing by informed him that General Twiggs had only that morning surrendered his command, and that all Federal troops were now “prisoners of war.” Lee was shocked, and outraged at the possibility that he might be treated as a prisoner of war. He prudently changed into civilian clothes and made his way to headquarters, where he found that the secessionists were already in charge, and not disposed to treat him with the courtesy he expected. He explained that his allegiance was to Virginia and the Union, in that order, and that he was returning home, but the “Texas commissioners,” as they called themselves, were not mollified. If Lee agreed to resign his commission and accept one in the Confederate Army, he was told, he would be free to travel home with his belongings, but if not he would have to leave them behind.
This seems like an odd decision. If the Texas commissioners were willing to let him go home, why hold on to his luggage? Lee was infuriated, and went immediately to the home of a friend, Charles Anderson, a lawyer and an outspoken Unionist and abolitionist, who would become colonel of the Ninety-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry and eventually governor of Ohio. It speaks volumes for Lee that he was a friend of a man like Anderson who disagreed vehemently with him, although at this stage, at any rate, he and Anderson were of one mind about the Texas secessionists. Perhaps because he was angry, Lee was franker about his position than he had been with anybody else except his family. “I cannot be moved by the conduct of those people [the “Texas commissioners”] from my sense of duty. I still think . . . that my loyalty to Virginia ought to take precedence over that which is due the Federal Government. And I shall so report myself at Washington. If Virginia stands by the Union, so will I. But if she secedes, then I will follow my native state with my sword, and if need be with my life.” Though he told another friend that he planned to go home and plant corn, and that the world would have “one soldier less,” he cannot have imagined that Virginia would be neutral, or that he would be left alone to cultivate his garden. Lee asked Anderson to hold on to his belongings and have them shipped to Arlington, which Anderson agreed to do. That problem solved, Lee set off for home by way of Indianola (then a thriving Texas seaport, though it became a ghost town after the Civil War) and New Orleans.
He arrived at Arlington on March 1, three days before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln—the first presidential inauguration in Washington since Thomas Jefferson’s that no member of the Lee or the Custis family attended.
Although Mary Lee was badly handicapped by rheumatoid arthritis and occasionally gave the impression of being a helpless southern belle, she was in fact a dauntless and outspoken woman, who did not share her husband’s dislike of confrontations or his relatively moderate opinions about the growing divide between North and South. Medical knowledge being what it was in the mid-nineteenth century, the only treatment doctors could prescribe for her condition was “taking the waters,” that is to say bathing in or drinking the water of mineral springs, of which there were and still remain a great number in Virginia, including Hot Springs, Warm Springs, White Sulphur Springs, and Rockbridge Baths. Jones Springs was just over the border in North Carolina. Mary visited them all in search of relief. Though travel was excruciatingly difficult for her, she managed to make the journey to an amazing number of spas; and while Lee was in San Antonio she even managed to get as far as Canada, to Saint Catherine’s Well, just north of Niagara Falls, a “long journey via Baltimore, New York City, and Elmira,” which she made in the company of her son Custis, her daughter Agnes, and her cousin Markie Williams, leaving her daughter Annie to supervise the servants at Arlington and get Millie (the Lees’ youngest child) off to boarding school. Even with three relatives to help
Mary, it cannot have been an easy journey, but she seems to have enjoyed the principal scenic attractions—Niagara Falls and Lake Ontario—though even more than a century and a half ago she complained about the many buildings close to the falls, and the commercialism. She was struck by the large number of runaway slaves living in Canada, just across the border from the United States, and the terrible conditions in which they lived. “I am told,” she wrote to Annie, “that they suffer a great deal here in the long cold winters.” Perhaps fortunately, she did not recognize any familiar faces among them.
Leaving Agnes and Markie behind in New York City, she returned at the end of the summer, despite the “increasingly polarized atmosphere” of the North. It seems unlikely that Mary concealed her own feelings on the subject. She was appalled at southerners’ threats of secession—she was not George Washington’s step-great-granddaughter for nothing—but was equally affronted by the growing abolitionist sentiments of northerners she met. Even when Mary Lee returned home to Virginia, it was to discover that feelings there too had risen very high. In consequence, when Custis “had to be away for several days,” he asked a fellow officer at the War Department, Orton Williams, Markie’s brother, to stay at Arlington “to look after us lone feminines,” as Mrs. Lee put it.
As state after state seceded, both Custis Lee and Orton Williams were eager to resign from the U.S. Army and take commissions in the Confederate Army then being formed. This produced an anguished letter from Lee—it was exactly the kind of thing that he would not do himself, and did not want any of his family to do; and it may have contributed to his opinion that Orton Williams was a hothead, which would later have serious consequences both for Williams and for the Lee family. He was determined to remain loyal to the United States until, or unless, Virginia seceded, and once he arrived home he firmly discouraged any loose talk or speculation on the subject. This, however, did not prevent Mary from expressing her strong opinion that having won the election, Lincoln should have resigned before taking office, “if he had been a true or disinterested patriot,” as a gesture of conciliation toward the South: “Nothing he can do now,” she continued firmly, “can meet with any favor from the South.”
Even if Lee agreed with her—and there is no indication that he did—this was just the kind of extreme opinion that he most wanted to avoid. He was acutely aware of the importance of exact language at this point, when he was walking a fine line between his duty to the U.S. government and his loyalty to Virginia. He was not alone. Mary Chesnut, the sharp-witted and indefatigable South Carolinian diarist, whose comments are full of good gossip and formidable common sense, and who seems to have known everybody of any consequence in the Confederate government, noted that Lee’s elder brother Commander Sydney Smith Lee wished “South Carolina could be blown out of [the] water . . . for disrupting his beloved” U.S. Navy, a feeling that Robert E. Lee might well have shared on the subject of the U.S. Army.
Apart from a “long interview” with General in Chief Winfield Scott shortly after he arrived home, in which Lee presumably made his position clear to Scott, while Scott urged him to do nothing hasty, he did nothing except enjoy the company of his family and wait for news, which was not long in coming. On March 16 he was at last promoted to the rank of full colonel (he had previously been a lieutenant colonel with the brevet rank of colonel). His new commission was signed by President Lincoln. Under normal circumstances this would have gratified Lee, but it is hard not to see in it the hand of General Scott. Had Scott already revealed to the president that he considered Colonel Lee the best-qualified man in the U.S. Army to command an army in the field in case of war? Was the new commission, signed by the president, a discreet hint of much higher promotions to come, not so much a quid pro quo—Lee was above that kind of thing, as Scott knew very well—as a test to see if Lee would accept it? In any case, he did so on March 28, ironically about a week after he had received a courteous letter from the Confederate secretary of war, L. P. Walker, offering him a commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Lee ignored Walker’s letter; he clung to his formula, which was that he would do nothing until Virginia decided its own fate.
On April 4 a “test vote” by the members of the Virginia Convention, which had been called to decide whether or not the state would secede, “showed a majority of two-for-one against secession,” which essentially left Lee in limbo. Virginia having declined to join the other southern states in secession, the convention appointed a three-man delegation to ask Lincoln what his intentions were toward Fort Sumter, one of the forts commanding the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, which had become the potential flash point of civil war. Major Robert Anderson was sharply criticized on both sides of the conflict for having moved his garrison into such an exposed position with insufficient food or ammunition, turning the fort into a highly visible casus belli: “Why did that green goose Anderson go into Fort Sumter?” Mary Chesnut moaned in her diary. “Now they have intercepted a letter from him, urging them [the Federal government] to let him surrender. He paints the horrors likely to ensue if they do not. He ought have thought of all that before he put his head in the hole.” Though he may well have shared Mary Chesnut’s feelings, Lincoln made it clear to the Virginia delegation that he felt entitled to defend any Federal installation that was threatened—something that Buchanan had notably failed to attempt. The president specifically warned against the consequences if “an unprovoked assault on Fort Sumter” was made. “I shall,” he said firmly, “to the best of my ability, repel force with force.”
Events were now moving so rapidly that no message from the president, however carefully written, could halt them. On April 7 Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, believing that Fort Sumter was about to be reinforced by sea, ordered all supplies of fresh food to the island from the mainland stopped. The next day, in response to this, Lincoln ordered U.S. ships to resupply the garrison, and five days later, at daylight on April 12, 1861, massed Confederate artillery opened fire on the fort. The first rounds were fired by the young cadets of The Citadel and by the vehement secessionist Edmund Ruffin, who, with his unmistakable shock of shoulder-length white hair, had been a prominent figure at John Brown’s hanging. The next morning the Charleston Mercury hailed the opening bombardment as a “Splendid Pyrotechnic Exhibition,” as if it were a fireworks display, and described the beauty of the first shot, “which, making a beautiful curve, burst immediately above Fort Sumter.” The New York Times, with passionate fury, declared, “Whatever the leaders of this conspiracy may believe, the civilized world will have but one opinion of their conduct; they will be greeted with the indignant scorn and execration of the world.”
Two days later Fort Sumter surrendered and President Lincoln called for the raising of 75,000 men to suppress the rebellion and “cause the laws to be duly executed.” During the night of April 16–17 the Virginia convention went into a “secret session.” The next morning, Lee received an urgent note from General Scott, who asked Lee to call on him at the War Department the following day. Lee also received a message that Francis Preston Blair (Sr.) wished to see him.
The note from General Scott would not have surprised Lee, but the message about Francis Preston Blair certainly would. Blair was a wealthy journalist and publicist from Kentucky, a longtime Washington insider and former member of President Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet” who still exerted considerable political power and was a friend and confidant of President Lincoln. One of Blair’s sons, Montgomery, who had been a friend of Lee’s in Saint Louis, was now the postmaster general, and an influential adviser, political “fixer,” and dispenser of patronage on behalf of the president.* Francis P. Blair had already discussed with both Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron the possibility of making Colonel Lee the commander of the Union Army that was being raised, and Lincoln had authorized Blair “to ascertain Lee’s intentions and feelings.” Lincoln, a consummate politician, wanted to make sure, before making the offer, that it wo
uld be accepted, and chose somebody he trusted who was not a member of the cabinet to sound Lee out privately. Appointing a southern officer to command a northern army was a risky political move, but having him decline the offer publicly was riskier still, and would look like a humiliation for the new president. It was Blair’s task to prevent this.
Early in the morning on April 18 Lee rode from Arlington to Montgomery Blair’s home at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Francis P. Blair was waiting for him, and the two men sat down “behind closed doors” for a talk. There were no witnesses and both men were reticent on the subject afterward, but Blair almost certainly told Lee that an army was being raised “to enforce Federal law,” and offered Lee the command with the rank of major general. For a man who only a few weeks earlier had been lamenting the failure of his military career, it must have been an ironic moment. Already promoted to colonel by Lincoln, Lee had been offered the rank of brigadier general by the Confederacy. Now Lincoln was prepared to make him a major general in command of the largest army in American history. Could he possibly have been tempted, or at least felt a momentary pang of regret? It seems doubtful. Lee had already made up his mind, about what he would not do, and his integrity was unshakable. Blair spoke at great length, and no doubt with persuasive effect, but Lee stuck to his guns. “I declined the offer he made me to take command of the army that was to be brought into the field,” he wrote much later, “stating as clearly as candidly and as courteously as I could, that though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” He had no idea what the Virginia Convention was deciding, and of course no way of knowing that on the night of April 17 it had already voted to secede. Given the number of his Lee, Carter, and Custis relatives who were involved in Virginia politics, it seems unlikely that Lee didn’t have a good idea of what was going on in Richmond, but he had already decided that he could not agree to lead an army “in an invasion of the Southern States,” whatever Virginia decided. Now Lee was unwilling to participate in military action against any of the southern states. Once he announced his position to Francis Blair, he was anxious to move on quickly. He realized he could not honorably remain an officer in the U.S. Army knowing that he might have to disobey an order from his superiors. He went directly from Blair House to see General Scott.
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