Immediate challenges confronted him. The best officers were often unwilling to serve there as faculty, his first experience at personnel management, and a problem that never went away.5 He naturally gave close attention to removing temptations for cadets to misbehave, and kept parents fully advised when a son’s demerits became a hazard, reminding them that demerits were military infractions, not moral misconduct. “I hope you will not allow yourself to be too much disturbed,” Lee consoled one mother. “He is young, of fine capacity, & can succeed in whatever he applies himself to.”6 In serious disciplinary cases, he gave benefit of the doubt and allowed credit for good intention and sincere contrition, albeit along with appropriate punishment.7 When cases went beyond forgiveness, he recommended court martial or dismissal.8 “There must be a limit to everything,” Lee declared.9 When the punishment had to be imposed, he did not quail, explaining that “true kindness requires it should be applied with a firm hand.”10
Lee believed a young man “must think, judge & act for himself, & not according to the say of pretended friends & fine fellows.”11 He set standards high and exemplified them in his own deportment, leading cadets to dub him the “Marble Model.”12 They admired him in spite of his expectations. “Our Superintendent Col. Lee is liked,” one cadet wrote home in 1853. “He has the highest notions of military duty of any man I ever saw.”13 Every Saturday evening he held suppers for selected cadets, being himself quite particular on even the smallest matters of the table setting.14 “He takes some interest in us,” noted another young man. “He has an eagle eye and looks like a man.”15
Besides dealing with discipline, Lee oversaw the maintenance of the physical plant at the Academy, striving to improve everything from the water supply to the library, and personally proofread Academy publications meticulously.16 He accounted for every expenditure, himself calculating mileage allowances for the board of visitors when they came for examinations.17 With an eye on boosting operating funds, he even recommended that a treasure hunter with a story of buried money on the grounds be allowed to dig if the post fund received half of anything found.18 Lee pressed for expansion of the course from four years to five, and required everyone to attend chapel as he did himself. The current Presbyterian chaplain’s sterner God may have accelerated his own shift toward a more providential faith.19 When a cadet died, he told parents “you will find consolation in your loss, by reflecting upon his gain.”20
After almost three years at the Academy he received promotion to lieutenant colonel and a shift to line service in the newly created 2d United States Cavalry, to serve under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston.21 He preferred to stay in the Engineers, “but so long as I continue an officer of the Army, I can neither decline promotion or service, & must leave to those in authority to say where my poor services can be best applied.”22 The prospect of active service suited him even though it would take him from family and friends. “A soldier’s life is one of toil & self-denial,” he confessed, but his only alternative was to resign when he could no longer stand the separation.23
He spent the next two years in Missouri and Texas building his new regiment and enjoying it.24 Granted, he found little to say for the Plains Indians, an uninteresting race in need of humanization, made hideous by nature. He assumed everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, and expected they would have to be killed, since violence was “the only corrective they understand.” They meant only trouble and he thought them “not worth it.”25 As with Mexicans, Lee saw nothing in them to warrant his father’s deistic notions of the natural dignity of all men. What sustained him on the frontier was that it was his duty. By now duty assumed the delineation of a faith for Lee, an obligation that was virtually God’s will.26 The tenuousness of life itself demanded every exertion to “fulfill our duties, & the work set before us, before we go home.”27 In fact, duty unselfishly performed was “the greatest happiness that any can enjoy in this world, for if done in its full sense, it holds out the prospect of happiness in the next.”28
Duty unified all conflicts in his mind, especially religion. Shortly before marriage he thought Mary’s notion of finding happiness only after death was unnatural.29 He took his irreverent tone to war with him in 1846, joking to others that “I think a little lead, properly taken, is good for a man,” yet at home Mary proudly read to others the Christian expressions in his letters as rather cynically he told her what he knew she wanted to hear.30 Then the war itself changed him, and it came quickly. Returning home in June 1848, Lee told his brother Smith that “I have much cause for thankfulness & gratitude to that Good God, who has once more united us.”31 Just a year later he asserted that only obeying the Commandments and worshipping God as they prescribed could save him from “evil & calamity.” Man was weak and selfish, drawn toward “folly, excess & sin” that made Lee “sometimes disgusted with myself & sometimes with all the world.” He wanted to be better, yet even in prayer he felt inadequate. His only hope, he concluded, “is in my confidence, my trust in the mercy of God.”32 He might engage in a little hypocrisy for Mary’s sake, but he had no reason to mislead his closest brother.
That trajectory over the next few years propelled him toward a providentialism that resigned him neither to resist nor resent the immutable will of God. All afflictions were the price of a better life to come. When his beloved mother-in-law died in 1853, grief accelerated his journey. He hardly saw how he could go on, looking on his remaining years with “apprehension & resignation.”33 He felt his life halted in its course, and he could not find the will to continue.34 Of course he did continue, now with a wholly fatalistic view of man and God. In Texas his God promised protection even in the wilderness as he prayed and read the Bible, and accepted the Almighty’s gifts of truth, justice, and duty to fight sin.35 Even long absence from home was a divine gift to teach him and punish him for his sins. God scourged people to make them resist sin. “I acknowledge the justice of his afflictions,” he told Mary in 1855, “& tremble to think how much mine may have contributed towards them.”36 Praying that he had the strength to seek comfort only in repentance, he began to speak of death as a release from life’s sufferings, and that “the day of my death will be better for me than the day of my birth.”37
Interestingly, Lee never wrote of Jesus by name, referring only occasionally to his “saviour,” yet spoke often of the “Heavenly Father” and “Almighty God.” His expressions sounded formulaic, and sometimes he sent the same sentiments verbatim to multiple people.38 For a man prone to aphorisms, Lee easily adopted the argot of faith. Still, though he wrote often of “my prayers” or “our prayers” in a colloquial manner, he rarely mentioned himself actually kneeling in prayer, though surely he did. Perhaps that is because, ironically, his new belief in God’s domination of man’s fate rather neatly laced with the Deist view he heard in youth of a god who ignored prayer. In both man was powerless and must accept events as God’s will. Lee even rationalized that unanswered prayer was a blessing, “a greater advantage than we imagine,” because submitting to unrelieved suffering today brought promise of reward tomorrow.39
There was a streak of intolerance in his conservative Protestantism, one that may have been present before his conversion. He did not like Catholicism, thinking its ceremony ungodly, and its services “incomprehensible,” a perversion of the teachings of Christ.40 After attending a mass he left horrified at the icons and multiple offertories and “the exhibition of ignorance & superstition in the worship of the true living God.”41 At a baby’s christening he saw “the poor child pawed over, sprinkled, wiped & salted,” while the mumbled Latin ritual meant nothing to those assembled.42 He thought what he called “High Churchism” was elitist and un-American.43 Even an Episcopal nativity service he found not to be as “simply and touchingly told as it is in the bible.”44
By the summer of 1860 Lee believed his journey to faith was complete. “I cannot render due thanks for all the mercies bestowed upon me,” he told Mary in June. “Such as I can I give, & heartil
y beseech God to accept my daily sacrifice of thanksgiving.”45 Though he may never have considered it, a universe in which man only proposed while God disposed was one where no matter what risk a man took, the outcome and the responsibility were preordained in His hands. In peace that release from responsibility was some comfort. For a believing commander in time of war it might be liberating.
Even in Texas Lee felt war’s icy hand approaching. He shifted toward the Democratic Party in the 1850s thanks to perceived threats to Southern slave-holding society. Being away from Arlington in 1852 and 1856 he did not vote in those elections, though in the latter he hoped that pro-Southern Democrat James Buchanan would win.46 Knowing little of him, still Lee expected him to stand for the Union and the Constitution, discourage the fanaticism that Lee saw both North and South, and subdue party partisanship gone out of control.47 Buchanan did nothing, and what Lee saw instead was a Congress filled with extremists, the anti-slave Republicans and the ultra-Southern-rights crowd posturing over secession.48 With Kansas in turmoil between pro- and anti-slave factions, he thought each courted explosion to serve its own ends.49
An unexpected event thrust him into the heart of the unrest. On October 25, 1857, George Washington Parke Custis died. As executor of Custis’s will, Lee got leave to return to Arlington to settle the estate. What he found shocked him. Custis had so neglected his affairs that everything was in a precarious position. He bequeathed Arlington to his daughter Mary Lee for the rest of her life, and after her to Custis Lee, while other estates were to go to the other Lee sons, and the four daughters were to have $10,000 each. Further, Custis wanted his roughly two hundred slaves emancipated once his debts were paid and the bequests to his granddaughters fully funded. It would require the labor of those slaves to produce that money, so he stipulated that they might be retained up to five years after his death before being freed, or until October 25, 1862.50
Lee could only exclaim, “what am I [to] do?” when he saw the mess. He was a soldier, not a farmer.51 Custis’s creditors immediately presented demands, and he had to use his own money to meet the most urgent.52 Before long he had at least $10,000 in debt tied to the properties, with more expected.53 The house was run down and uninsured against fire.54 The fields sat fallow and overgrown. Lee had no choice but to extend his leave, and when that expired, more extensions followed. Eighteen months passed, yet by May 1859 he expected it would take another year to get the properties in order and the debts retired, and that did not begin to fund the bequests.55
Then there were the slaves. There is no record of Robert E. Lee buying, selling, or freeing a slave of his own. Those few he owned he inherited from his mother and rented to others, and at least three of them were children whom he called “plagues” and “ebony mites.”56 He and Mary had the use of her father’s slaves when at Arlington, but could not take any when stationed in New York. Lee hired one or two slaves when posted on his own in Texas, and in 1860 briefly considered buying a slave on a rent-purchase arrangement to replace the hired “boy” then acting as his servant, though confessing that “I would rather hire a white man than purchase if I could.”57 Even when they lived in Baltimore he was hesitant to take any from Arlington, fearing that “the abolitionists are very active here,” and the opportunities for running away great.58 Like her father, Mary was interested in the American Colonization Society, and in Baltimore her husband went to the society’s offices in the fall of 1853 to make application for the family of thirty-year-old mulatto William Burke, whom Custis had freed several years before, to embark as colonists to Liberia.59 Lee occasionally kept a body servant for himself when in Washington, Philip Meriday, one of the Arlington people, and rented him out when unable to take him to a free state.60 Lee’s views mirrored his mother’s, that slaves were an untrustworthy nuisance, yet slavery was a necessary evil. By 1857 events began to add dimension to his feelings.
Three years earlier he read Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Party Leaders, which spoke of the elevating effects of slavery on the lives of their masters, and accused abolitionists of retarding “the cause of humanity to these unfortunates” by fifty years.61 Lee agreed and believed the book “richly deserved” wide readership.62 When textile magnate Abbott Lawrence of Massachusetts died in August 1855, Lee said it was “a national loss, but his deeds live after him.”63 He failed to say what earned his admiration, but Lawrence, like Baldwin, stood strongly for the Union, personally opposed slavery’s spread, but denied that Congress could regulate it, saying, “I have no sympathy with the abolition party.”64
Then in December 1856, now-president Franklin Pierce accused the Republicans of planning to kill slavery by preventing its spread into the territories, and predicted that abolition would lead to civil war. Lee agreed, and something in Pierce’s message impelled him to share his thoughts at length with Mary, though presumably she ought already to know how he felt about something so important. Believing that most Americans regarded slavery as “a moral & political evil,” he argued that it was worse on whites than on the slaves. Slavery elevated them “morally, socially & physically.” Their bondage was a “painful discipline” sent by God to prepare them for eventual freedom. In other words, slavery was their duty. Only God, not men, could free them, and it would come sooner “from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy.” If the abolitionists meant well for the slave, then they must not anger the master. Moreover, he accused Yankees of hypocrisy for honoring their Pilgrim fathers’ immigration for “freedom of opinion,” while they denied “the spiritual liberty of others.” In short, somehow he conflated slavery with religious freedom.65 Slavery elevated a race, preserved social order, and allowed white and black to occupy the continent peacefully until God decided the black’s place in America.
Managing the Arlington slaves only confirmed Lee’s beliefs. He had barely arrived before anonymous letters appeared in the local press saying old Custis promised immediate freedom to his slaves from his deathbed.66 Much as he hated to see his name in the press, Lee responded that the will was available in the Alexandria County court for anyone to see, and that no one with Custis at the end saw him speak to the slaves about freedom.67 He did not add that the will’s wording was confused. Custis’s statement “then I give freedom to my slaves” followed a stipulation that his plantations be cleared of debt and the Lee daughters’ legacies be funded. The former seemed contingent on the latter, but in the next clause he stipulated keeping the slaves no more than five years after his death.68 If the debts and legacies were incomplete by that time, were they still to be freed? Believing the will’s intent was that the debts and legacies be settled first, Lee applied to the court for a decision, asking that the deadline be extended until all other obligations in the will had been met.69 Even then Mary Lee thought it would be impossible to fund the legacies in even ten years. Meanwhile the slaves would be a burden, and when their freedom did come, it would benefit none but the Lees, “who will be relieved from a host of [the] idle & their useless dependents.”70
Unidentified agitators told the slaves that they were free at Custis’s death. Then Lee told them otherwise, and his troubles commenced. He wanted an overseer who while “considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty”; he had to act as overseer himself for months before he hired John McQuinn.71 When Lee tried to get the slaves to work they accused him of being “a hard master,” and he met resistance all through 1858 and on into 1859. One flatly refused to work.72 The coachman ran away and had to be apprehended. Within weeks two women left claiming they had his permission, and they, too, had to be brought back at Lee’s expense. Then others rebelled at working, and Lee may have had to use some force in subduing them. To keep the troublemakers from infecting the rest, he sent them to a Richmond broker to hire them out.73 Slaves already working at hire ran away and Lee had to pay rewards for their apprehension, while one Arlington fugitive stole a jewelry box containing heirlooms of Martha Washington’s.74 T
he women irritated Mary, and Lee wanted them hired out if possible to relieve her.75 Privately he feared for her safety if he returned to his regiment with the blacks still there.76 Still, despite the trouble they put him to, he hoped to free the slaves as soon as possible. It was “justice to them,” and meant freedom to him.77
That all made May of 1859 a bad time for twenty-nine-year-old Wesley Norris and his younger sister Mary to run for freedom.78 With their cousin George Parks they struck north for the Mason-Dixon line and Pennsylvania and missed it by less than ten miles when authorities in Carroll County, Maryland, apprehended and jailed them in Westminster.79 Lee sent a constable to retrieve and return them to Arlington in mid-June.80 What happened next became a matter of public dispute that haunted him the rest of his life. On June 19 an anonymous letter in the New York Tribune said that “Col. Lee ordered them whipped,” and that when the officer returning the slaves refused to lash Mary, Lee stripped her back bare and did it himself.81 Two days later another letter added detail. Lee was known as a cruel master, cut the slaves’ weekly ration of corn meal, stopped their fish allowance, and kept elderly women nearly a hundred years of age working dawn until dark sewing. He ordered the Norrises taken into a barn and stripped to their waists, whereupon the “slave-whipper” gave the men thirty-nine lashes but balked at whipping Mary, so Lee administered her lashes himself.82
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