Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  In Lee’s case, his application for a special pardon was complicated by the fact that a Federal judge was seeking to indict him for treason—an attempt which Grant tried to “quash,” since it was in conflict with the surrender terms he had written—and the outcome was that the application was “spiked” by some bureaucrat. Lee himself had predicted that “we must expect procrastination in measures of relief.” He was certainly right—it would take more than 100 years before his pardon was finally signed and his American citizenship restored.

  In the meantime, by one of those happy accidents that occurred so frequently in Lee’s domestic arrangements, his decision to leave Richmond was solved for him when a wealthy widow offered him a cottage on her extensive 3,000–acre plantation, Oakland, about fifty miles west of the city, on the south bank of the James River. Mrs. Elizabeth Cocke promptly followed up her letter by journeying to Richmond herself to talk to Mrs. Lee, who was quickly won over to the idea, no doubt to Lee’s relief. Better still, Oakland could be reached by river and by canal, sparing Mrs. Lee the pain and fatigue of a journey of that length by road. This was a part of the state that had not been fought over by the opposing armies, nor totally denuded of forage and crops, and it seemed to Lee an excellent opportunity to get his wife and his three daughters out of the city.

  As usual, Lee did not waste time once he had made up his mind to accept Mrs. Cocke’s offer and Mary Lee had agreed to it. He did not, apparently, consult his daughters, whose enthusiasm for the move was a good deal less than their mother’s. Mary Coulling, in her book The Lee Girls, points out that Lee’s daughters, like so many women in the South, had experienced four years of hardship during the virtual absence of their father and their brothers. Whatever Lee might suppose, they were no longer his “little girls.” They had nursed their invalid mother; lived through the death of their sister Annie; shared with Agnes the shock of Orton Williams’s hanging and their wounded brother Rooney’s kidnapping by a Federal raiding party; lost their home; learned to cope with household tasks that for much of their life had been performed without question by slaves; and gone out after the burning of much of Richmond to seek for enough food to sustain the family, through streets that were full of enemy soldiers, angry fleeing Confederates, and freed slaves. They were spared, by their name alone, the extremes of humiliation and desperation that many women experienced on farms that were overrun or burned out by Federal columns, and where the “lady of the house” was left to fend for herself without any adult male to protect her, and with a dwindling workforce of slaves—who were likely to run off or to turn surly and rebellious—to farm the land. Behind the glamorous make-believe of Gone with the Wind there was a brutal reality: southern women, rich and poor alike, were left to save what could be saved from the disaster of war and defeat, to scrape out a living from the neglected land, to endure occupation, and to make decisions that had hitherto been made by a husband or a father. Those families who had money in a bank lost it when the Confederate dollar became worthless, and those who had counted slaves as part of their capital could no longer do so. Federal occupation was not as benign as it has been portrayed by many northerners, and even small restrictions grated on southern sensibilities, as a constant reminder of defeat.

  Once he returned to Richmond from Appomattox, Lee had been in the habit of giving a uniform button to his daughters’ friends who asked for one as a souvenir; but after a Federal order forbade the wearing of Confederate buttons, he stopped, worried that they might get into trouble. He himself thought it necessary to inquire from the Federal provost marshal of Richmond whether he required permission to leave the city. The Federal sentry outside the door of 707 Franklin Street began to seem like an intrusion, rather than a gesture of protection or respect. Coulling properly describes the atmosphere in the city as “oppressive.”

  The Lee girls were of course better off than many, perhaps better off than most, but the war years had been traumatic for them too, and now they were being taken away from friends and whatever amenities the city still afforded to live in a house they had never seen, with no certain future in view. Nor were they really “girls” any more. Mary Custis, the eldest, was thirty; Agnes was twenty-four; Mildred, was nineteen. The fact that “his girls” were now young women did not change Lee’s views about their behavior or his belief that they belonged at home helping their mother and keeping him company until such time as, subject to his approval, they married. As for “the girls,” it cannot have escaped their attention that where they were going “there would be an ample supply of fresh vegetables, but few visitors.” They were unlikely to find at Derwent, the secluded country cottage Mrs. Cocke had offered Lee, any suitable young men. It is therefore not surprising that no sooner had Mary Custis arrived there than she left for Staunton, to stay with relatives.

  Lee had sent his eldest son, Custis, on ahead to ride Traveller to Oakland, while he, Mary, and their three daughters took the James River and Kanawha Canal packet boat, which was hauled by draft horse on the towpath—a slow journey in a day when people had grown used to the speed of a railway train. The canal had been a favorite scheme of the young George Washington, the idea being to link the James River and the Ohio River and thereby open up what was then “the West.” It was a major public works project of his presidency, and was still far from completion. It had been dug, at considerable expense, by the labor of slaves, and travel on that part which had been finished was slowed by the number of locks along the way. Washington had left a considerable portion of his shares in the canal company to a then obscure college in Lexington, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, named Liberty Hall Academy, which in gratitude for the gift renamed itself Washington College.

  Although travel on the canal boats has sometimes been described as idyllic it seems to have been nothing of the sort. The constant clatter of hooves and snorting of the draft horse, and the frequent, noisy stops as locks were laboriously filled and then opened, made sleep difficult; and the quarters below were cramped and hot (Mary Coulling describes them as “tiny” and “stifling”). After the evening meal a curtain was drawn to separate men and women. It speaks volumes that Lee, who was accustomed to Spartan living, chose to sleep on deck.

  The packet arrived at Pemberton Wharf shortly after dawn, and the Lees were met by Custis, riding Traveller; and by one of Mrs. Cocke’s sons, Edmund. Mrs. Lee had to be carried off the boat and into a carriage for the short trip to Oakland, where they were to stay for a week while Derwent was being readied for them. Oakland had all the comforts of a Virginia mansion—Federal raiding parties had reached it but had not stripped or vandalized the house—and Lee visibly relaxed there. During that week a revealing incident occurred. While the Lees and the Cocke family were at table, Mrs. Cocke’s butler, a former slave, entered the dining room “to say farewell as he was leaving to try his fortune as a freedman.” Lee rose from the table and shook the man’s hand “cordially,” interrupting his meal to give the man advice, and “asked Heaven to bless him.”

  Not every southerner in those days would have shaken a black man’s hand—Lee was to bring a gasp of surprise to onlookers several times by doing so—still less give his blessing to the departure of a man who had been the property of his hostess until only a few weeks ago. In racial relationships, as in other matters, Lee set an example of warmth, sympathy, kindness, and dignity. That did not, it should be noted, change his opinion about blacks. Only a few weeks before, while visiting Colonel Thomas Carter at Pampatike, he had advised his cousin not to depend for labor on his former slaves. “I have always observed,” Lee told him, “that wherever you find the Negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.” Lee’s view of blacks had always been at once benevolent and skeptical. He had not enjoyed owning slaves, either his family’s or those Mrs. Lee had inherited from her father, and he had broken what was then Virginia law by setting up a school for them. Following Mr. Custis’s will to the letter,
Lee had emancipated them in 1862, but his view on their participation in politics remained unchanged. His final word on the subject was made before a congressional committee eight months later: “My own opinion,” he replied to a question under oath, “is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagoguism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways. What the future may prove, how intelligent they may become, with what eyes they may look upon the interests of the state in which they may reside, I cannot say more than you can.”

  Before the war Lee had expressed the belief that slavery was a greater evil for the slave owner than for the slave, and that it was a “moral and political evil.” He also thought that slavery was part of God’s process for civilizing the blacks and could be ended only when God chose to end it. This opinion was widespread in the South before the war, and would remain so in various forms well into the twentieth century. Lee’s belief that the progress of blacks from slavery should have been left in God’s hands, rather than legislated or imposed on the South by force, was one he held quietly but firmly throughout his life. He did not modify it, nor apologize for it, and his frankness on the subject before a congressional committee at least has the merit of sincerity. Perhaps the key phrase in Lee’s statement to the committee is “at this time.” He did not attribute to blacks a permanent inferiority, as many did in the South, but allowed that time (and God) might change their condition in ways he could not foresee or predict. It was, or should be, as he was fond of saying, “all in God’s hands.” By the standards of many Confederates his opinions were moderate, and efforts on the part of northern congressmen to draw him out further on the subject failed.

  The importance of this lies in the increasing and systemized transformation of Lee into a flawless, faultless symbol, in which the real man was rapidly overshadowed by the gleaming marble image. This was no doing of Lee’s; he had too much modesty (and robust common sense) to assume the mantle of perfection. The mythic Lee of southern history became in time a man who never made a mistake, and who had no faults: not only the perfect gentleman, but the perfect warrior. Thus the blame for Malvern Hill was transferred to Jackson; the blame for Gettysburg was assigned to Longstreet, or at least to Longstreet, Stuart, and Ewell; and Lee’s dislike of the institution of slavery was given more prominence than his pessimism about the future development of the former slaves and freedmen. That Lee was human; that he sometimes made mistakes, even major ones; that his deeply held, sincere views on race do not measure up to contemporary standards, or even the standards of some enlightened northerners in his own time, should not be flinched from. Lee loses nothing by being portrayed as a fallible human being. His strengths were his courage, his sense of duty, his religious belief, his military genius, his constant search to do right, and his natural and instinctive courtesy—he did not hesitate to shake a black man’s hand or kneel beside him in prayer—but he did not aspire to sainthood; indeed the idea would have seemed to him blasphemous, and he would have been appalled by the fact that he has been elevated to a kind of secular sainthood since his death.

  After a week of comfortable living in Mrs. Cocke’s home—no doubt a replacement for the departing butler was soon found—the Lees moved into Derwent, a small four-room “tenant’s house.” Deep in the woods, it was a lonely place—disappointing to Mrs. Lee and the girls, who felt it was “cramped” and poorly furnished. As usual, Lee was forced into the role of “cheerleader,” working hard “to keep up the family’s spirits,” and making light of what his youngest daughter, Mildred, described as “petty trials of wretched service, cooking, marketing—an ugly, meanly-built little house with ordinary surroundings [and] provincial society.” For Lee, it was enough to be back with part of his family after four years of living in a tent, to have an opportunity to recuperate from the constant stress of high command, and to take an occasional ride on Traveller to the nearest store, where there was an ample supply of fresh vegetables; but none of that would have been likely to sooth the angst of Agnes and Mildred, intensified by a bad scare when Agnes came down with typhoid fever. Then, by another happy coincidence, Mary Custis attended a party in Staunton where she complained that “the people of the South are offering my father everything but work, and that is the one thing he will accept at their hands.”

  Of all Lee’s daughters, Mary Custis was the boldest and most outspoken. Her words were overheard by another guest, Colonel Bolivar Christian of Lexington, Virginia, a trustee of Washington College, the institution to which George Washington had left some of his canal shares. The college had been starved of students during the war and looted by Federal troops (who had also burned down much of the nearby Virginia Military Institute), and it was in the process of seeking a new president, one whose name and reputation would bring in students and donations. Colonel Christian mentioned Mary Custis’s comment about Lee at the next meeting of the trustees; they decided to send their rector, Judge Brockenbrough, in person to Derwent to offer Lee the presidency, and as a gesture of their good faith voted unanimously to elect Lee to the office. Lee had been contemplating, without much enthusiasm, a book about his campaigns, and had no warning of Brockenbrough’s visit until the judge, a tall, bulky man, appeared at the door and asked to see him. Brockenbrough’s appearance was a good example of the penury into which the citizens of Lexington, like so many southern towns, had been plunged. He had been obliged to borrow a decent suit for the trip, as well as the money to make it. Still, what he lacked in worldly goods he made up by his powers of persuasion and his evident sincerity. Nor did he come empty-handed. He carried a letter offering Lee a salary of $1,500 a year, plus a share of the tuition fees and a house and garden. Lee was not unfamiliar with Washington College—his father had been among those who had urged George Washington to make a gift of some of his canal shares to the institution—and the idea of becoming a college president would not have seemed a reach for a man who had once been a successful superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy.

  After a short period of reflection, and with the somewhat lukewarm consent of Mary Lee, who felt herself being drawn farther and farther from her friends, Lee wrote to the trustees on August 24, saying that he would accept the presidency, unless they felt that his exclusion from the amnesty of May 29 and the fact that he was “an object of censure to a portion of the country” made him unfit for the post. The trustees felt no such thing, and on September 1 announced that General Robert E. Lee was the new president of Washington College. On September 15 he set off alone for Lexington on Traveller, his luggage following him by canal. “He prefers that way,” Mrs. Lee wrote to a friend, the day before his departure, “and, besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard fought battle.”

  A new chapter was beginning in Lee’s life, this time as an educator and college administrator and, more important, as a symbol of the desire “to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony,” as he wrote in his letter of acceptance, “and in no way to oppose the policy of the State or General Government directed to that object.” For the former general in chief of the Confederate Army, who had surrendered his army in the field less than six months ago, this was a bold move. His object had hitherto been to keep what we would now call a low profile, but his rapid transformation into a college president, charged with educating young men, stirred up angry criticism in the North, and fears that his students would be brought up as rebels. That, of course, was to underrate Lee’s sincere determination “to set them an example of submission to authority.” For the rest of his life he was to achieve the difficult act of striking a balance between his belief in the need to submit to Federal authority and his unrivaled prestige as the Confederacy’s most admired military figure.

  The president’s house at Washington College, where Stonewall Jackson had once lived after marrying the daughter of the then president, was partly occupied and in need of much repair. Arriving in Le
xington, Lee found it difficult to avoid being mobbed by admirers—not surprisingly, since he was still wearing his old Confederate gray uniform and riding Traveller, by then almost as famous as his owner. He spent some time at one of the nearby hot springs that surround Lexington and did not return until September 30; he then lodged in a hotel. Despite every effort to speed the work on the house, it was not ready for the Lees to occupy until the beginning of December. They had not had a home of their own since 1861, and their furniture and possessions were scattered. Lee managed to recover the carpets from Arlington; these had been saved and stored at Tudor Place, across the Potomac in Georgetown Heights, by Mrs. Brittania Peter Kinnon, a distant relative who was a descendant of George Washington’s. Although they were much too large, even with their edges folded back, for the rooms of “The Presidential Residence on College Hill,” they at least provided a touch of luxury and a faint reminder of Arlington. Mrs. Cocke had contributed some of the furniture and an admirer had provided a piano. The Lee family silver, which had providentially been sent to Lexington for safekeeping and buried, was soon unearthed and laboriously cleaned, and on December 2 Mary Lee, accompanied by Rob and Mildred (Agnes was in Richmond), arrived to join her husband, having made the journey from Oakland to Lexington by canal boat. She was, by this time, confined to her “rolling chair,” but judging from all accounts, she instantly took charge of the household with firm authority, and of her husband too.