Robert E. Lee: general of the Confederacy

Robert E. Lee was the most famous Confederate general of the American Civil War, and he lost it. For almost three years his Army of Northern Virginia beat or held off larger Union armies, and his victories made him the idol of the Confederacy. Then the tide turned at Gettysburg, and Ulysses S. Grant ground him down to surrender. He fought, it should be said plainly, for the Confederacy, a rebellion of slaveholding states, and he shared the racial views of the class he came from.¹

Compare: Grant vs Lee, Lee vs Meade

Early life

Lee was born on 19 January 1807 at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into one of the great families of the state. His father, Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, had been a hero of the American Revolution, but he fell into financial ruin and in 1813, when Robert was six, left for the West Indies. He never came back, and the family was left in straitened circumstances.²

Lee entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1825 and graduated second in the class of 1829, which entitled him to a commission in the elite Corps of Engineers. In June 1831 he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington, and heiress of the Arlington estate overlooking Washington. They had seven children.³

The US Army, 1829 to 1861

For some seventeen years Lee served as an army engineer building and inspecting the country's coastal defenses. War with Mexico gave him his first battlefield. On the staff of General Winfield Scott, in the campaign of 1847 that ended with the capture of Mexico City, he impressed his superiors and won three brevet promotions, the last to colonel.⁴

From 1852 to 1855 he was superintendent of West Point, and then lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Cavalry in Texas. In October 1859, then in Washington, he was sent with a detachment of US Marines to Harpers Ferry, where they captured the abolitionist John Brown and ended his raid.⁵

Slavery and the Arlington estate

Lee belonged to the slaveholding gentry and owned enslaved people himself, about ten to fifteen over his lifetime according to Britannica. In a letter to his wife in December 1856 he called slavery "a moral & political evil," yet held it a greater evil to whites than to Black people and left emancipation to God, while he denounced the abolitionists.⁶

When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became executor of an estate whose will freed nearly 200 enslaved people within five years. He imposed a harsher regime than Custis had, hired many of them out, and asked the courts to let him keep them in bondage longer; the courts refused. He was accused of cruelty toward those who ran away. Wesley Norris, who escaped in 1859 with two others and was caught, said in 1866 that Lee had them whipped; Britannica concludes that Lee denied the charges but certainly condoned whipping. He signed the deed of manumission in December 1862.⁷

The choice of 1861

Virginia seceded on 17 April 1861. The next day Lee was offered command of the army being raised to put down the rebellion. He declined, explaining that he opposed secession but could not take the field against his native state, and on 20 April he resigned from the US Army. Within days he accepted command of Virginia's forces, and later a commission as a Confederate general.⁸

His first year in Confederate service was unhappy. He was beaten at Cheat Mountain in western Virginia in September 1861, oversaw coastal defenses in the south, and in March 1862 became military adviser to President Jefferson Davis in Richmond.⁹

The Army of Northern Virginia, 1862 to 1863

On 31 May 1862, with George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac a few miles from Richmond, General Joseph E. Johnston was wounded at Seven Pines and Davis gave Lee the army, which he named the Army of Northern Virginia. From 25 June to 1 July Lee attacked again and again in the Seven Days Battles and drove McClellan away from the Confederate capital.¹⁰ › The Seven Days Battles, 1862

He went over to the offensive, beating John Pope at Second Manassas (Second Bull Run) on 28 to 30 August 1862. In September he invaded Maryland. At Antietam on 17 September he fought McClellan to a standstill on the bloodiest single day of the war and then withdrew to Virginia.¹¹ › Battle of Antietam, 1862

On 13 December 1862 he crushed Ambrose Burnside's assaults at Fredericksburg. In May 1863 came his masterpiece. Facing Joseph Hooker's far larger army, Lee divided his army in the face of the enemy, sent Jackson around the Union flank and forced Hooker back across the river at Chancellorsville. The victory cost him about a fifth of his army and, above all, Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded by his own men.¹²

Gettysburg, 1863

Lee carried the war north again. On 1 July 1863 his army met George G. Meade's at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, and for three days he attacked. On 3 July the great assault on the Union center, Pickett's Charge, failed, and on 4 July he retreated toward the Potomac. Lee took the blame on himself and offered Davis his resignation, which Davis refused.¹³

Grant and the end, 1864 to 1865

In May 1864 Grant crossed the Rapidan, and the Overland Campaign became a running battle: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna and Cold Harbor. Lee lost about 35,000 men and could not replace them, and by mid-June the two armies were dug in around Petersburg, where a siege of more than nine months followed.¹⁴ › Siege of Petersburg, 1864 to 1865

On 6 February 1865 Davis named Lee general-in-chief of all Confederate armies, too late to matter. In the first days of April Lee had to abandon Richmond and Petersburg. A week's retreat west ended at Appomattox Court House, where on 9 April 1865 he surrendered the remnant of his army to Grant.¹⁵ › Battle of Appomattox Court House 1865

Command style

In every campaign Lee sought the initiative. He was bold and aggressive, ready to divide an outnumbered army in the face of the enemy, and his victories of 1862 and 1863 were won by maneuver and attack. He also inspired an extraordinary devotion in his soldiers, and the Army of Northern Virginia became the institution on which the Confederacy pinned its hopes.¹⁶

The same aggression had a price. Critics have questioned his strategic judgment and the lives spent in his attacks: he lost more men than McClellan in the Seven Days, about a fifth of his army at Chancellorsville, and his assaults at Gettysburg failed against a strong position. In a war in which the Confederacy could not replace its losses, his offensives used up the manpower it needed to last.¹⁷

Later life and death

In the late summer of 1865 Lee became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, today Washington and Lee University. He urged white Southerners to accept defeat, while opposing equal political rights for the freed people. In 1868 he signed a petition against giving them political power. He received a pardon in the Christmas amnesty of 1868. He suffered a stroke on 28 September 1870 and died at Lexington on 12 October 1870.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

After his death former Confederates made Lee the centerpiece of the Lost Cause, the legend of a brilliant Christian soldier defeated only by the North's numbers and resources. Later the cause of reconciliation turned him into a national icon, and Congress made his old home at Arlington a memorial to him. Historians today weigh his skill against the cause he served, his views on race and the lives his battles cost, and in the twenty-first century he has become a far more contested figure.¹⁹

Read on with his lieutenant Stonewall Jackson and the man who beat him, Ulysses S. Grant, meet them all in the commanders of the American Civil War, or see what else happened on his birthday in 19 January in military history.