Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  It cannot be said that he seems to have paid much attention to an adoring and hero-worshipping little boy, but then again, in Alexandria Henry Lee was a hero, despite his straitened circumstances, and it would have been hard for Robert not to notice. There were many in the small town who had served under his command in “Lee’s Legion,” and for whom he was now “General Lee,” Light-Horse Harry Lee at last promoted to the rank he and they thought he should have had at Yorktown. When he walked down the narrow streets he was greeted with respect, doubly so because of his relationship with George Washington, who had himself been an everyday figure riding in the streets of Alexandria to the post office or the Masonic Hall, and the small house was full of warlike memorabilia attesting to the military triumphs of Henry Lee, as well as the maps and records he needed for his book. It was something that could not fail to make an impression on a boy’s mind: the daily evidence, inside the house and outside, that his father was a soldier and a hero.

  The older members of the household might have their doubts about Henry Lee’s wisdom, and might compare their present circumstances with life at Stratford before he finally slipped into bankruptcy and disgrace, but Robert would have been too young to make such a comparison, and as a result he grew up largely ignorant of the depth of his father’s fall, or the fact that Henry Lee had been responsible for his own destruction. On the contrary, the supposed example of General Henry Lee III as a kind of second Washington guided and formed Robert E. Lee as he became a soldier himself, and rose in fame far beyond his father.

  However, children often know (or guess) more about their parents than anybody supposes at the time. Throughout his life Robert E. Lee would be scrupulous about money, determined never to get into debt and to pay every bill on time; he was so exactly the opposite of his father that it is difficult to believe he was entirely ignorant of Henry Lee’s failings. Even as a child, he cannot have been unaware of the long absences of his father or a certain strain in the family atmosphere, and since he spent a good deal more time with his mother’s family, the Carters, than with the extended Lee clan, he may have picked up at Shirley an undercurrent of disapproval toward his father. His mother certainly never breathed a word of criticism about Henry Lee, least of all to her children, but on the other hand she took good care to teach the young Robert the importance of thrift, modesty, truthfulness, economy in all things, unshakable faith in God, and scrupulous accounting of every penny—just the virtues that her husband so conspicuously lacked.

  As for Henry Lee, the final act of his life was about to begin, in dramatic, indeed melodramatic circumstances. Having quarreled with President Jefferson, he now proceeded to quarrel with President Madison over the question of war with Britain, to which he was strongly opposed. He wrote a series of violent letters to Madison, with no effect except to disqualify himself from any of the diplomatic posts he had been trying to solicit in order to put some distance between himself and his creditors. When war finally broke out in June 1812, Henry Lee became a lightning rod for those who opposed it, and took up the cause of a young Baltimore newspaper publisher who had been run out of town by an angry mob, which also destroyed the premises of his paper. Whatever Henry Lee lacked in financial judgment, he was never lacking in courage—he not only encouraged the young man to return to Baltimore and resume publishing his pieces against the war, but went there himself to support him. Lee may have underestimated the sanguinary fury of American big-city politics at the time, and unfortunately for him he was in the temporary office of the newspaper when an angry mob assaulted it. Henry Lee helped to barricade the premises and sent for “additional arms,” and during the ensuing firefight one man in the street was killed. The militia arrived just in time to separate the two sides, and the publisher, Lee, and their friends were escorted to the Baltimore jail for their own safety, but by this time the entire town was in an uproar and the mob broke into the jail. “Death seemed so certain that Lee proposed to his companions that they should take the few weapons they had and shoot one another rather than let themselves be torn to pieces by the mob.” This proposal was not taken up with any enthusiasm by his companions, but perhaps it ought to have been, since the mob tore down the door of their cell and dragged them out into “a confused mêlée,” in which one of them was killed, and eleven others were savagely beaten. Eight were thought to have been killed, and their bodies were piled up in the street, and subjected to “continued mutilation.” Henry Lee was one of them.

  It is difficult to assess how badly he was hurt or the degree to which he was permanently injured, but apparently his tormentors stuck knives into him, poured “hot candle grease” into his eyes, and tried to cut off his nose, as well as subjecting him to vicious kicks. It is some kind of tribute to his strength and courage that he not only survived all this, but refused to react or scream, so eventually they left him for dead. He was, to quote Freeman, “weak, crippled and disfigured,” as well as hounded by ever more angry creditors, including his own brother, to whom he had sold a piece of land in Kentucky that he had already sold to someone else eleven years earlier. “Broken in body and spirit,” Henry Lee was carried back to his family, but rather than face another term in jail he determined to flee the country, ignoring his debts and the sizable bail bond that had been posted to release him from jail three years before, in the hope of restoring his health in some of the English-speaking Caribbean islands.

  There may or may not have been a sorrowful departure. Douglas Southall Freeman, author of a monumental biography of Lee, imagines one in which Robert “shared the final embraces of his father,” but given Henry Lee’s pattern of behavior it is as likely that Robert simply woke up one morning to find his father gone—after all, he was skipping bail and leaving his wife and his family to pick up the pieces. He wandered from island to island for five years, until a severe illness—it may have been stomach cancer—made him decide to come home to die. He didn’t even manage to get all the way to Savannah. “Mortally ill” on the voyage, he was put ashore at Dungeness, Cumberland Island, Georgia, the home of the daughter of his commander in the Revolutionary War, Nathanael Greene. A naval surgeon urged Henry Lee to undergo surgery, but he refused, perhaps with good reason, given the pain and the dangers of surgery in the early nineteenth century. “My dear Sir,” Harry Lee said, “were the great Washington alive, and here, and joining you in advocating it, I would still resist.” Clearly something of his bold spirit was still present in the old reprobate, but shortly afterward he died in great pain, and was buried in the Greene family graveyard at Dungeness.

  Robert E. Lee visited his father’s grave for the first time in 1862, and it was noted that he spent only a few brief moments there. Perhaps the boy had known more than the man was willing to admit.

  At the very end of Robert E. Lee’s life, in 1870, Charles C. Jones published a book about Light-Horse Harry Lee that contained a fairly frank account of his life and death. When it was brought to Robert E. Lee’s attention, his wife wrote that he was “painfully” shocked by it, and that his first instinct was “to deny the ‘allegations’ in it if they were untrue.” Poor health may have prevented Lee from undertaking an effort to defend his father, but it is more likely that he already knew the allegations were true, and was wise enough not to stir up another storm by denying them in public print. That had been tried before—there had already been a considerable fuss in 1822 when a book by Associate Justice William Johnson of the U.S. Supreme Court was published pointing out “errors” and “false claims” in Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, the book Henry Lee had written in debtors’ prison. Johnson’s book had prompted Robert E. Lee’s older half brother to write and publish an angry 500-page defense of their father, interwoven with a virulent attack on Jefferson, so controversy on the subject of Light-Horse Harry Lee cannot have come as a surprise to any of his children. The likelihood therefore is that Robert E. Lee was aware, both consciously and unconsciously, of the darker side of his father’s lif
e, but sensibly chose to remember him instead as a Revolutionary War hero and Washington’s friend.* What he did not want to know, he suppressed, as many people suppress knowledge about a parent. When he grew up and moved away from Virginia and the embrace of the Lee and the Carter families—where there were plenty of victims of Henry Lee’s irresponsibility and dishonesty—going first to West Point and then into the army, where most of the people he met were unaware of Light-Horse Harry Lee’s long history of troubles and debts in Virginia and regarded him merely as one of the famous names of the American Revolution, he took a more positive view of his father than he may, at some deeper level, have felt.

  None of this means of course that Robert E. Lee wasn’t influenced by his father, or didn’t inherit some of his better characteristics. Like Henry Lee, Robert was tall, physically strong, a born horseman and soldier, and so courageous that even his own soldiers often begged him to get back out of range, in vain of course. He had his father’s gift for the sudden and unexpected flank attack that would throw the enemy off balance, and also his father’s ability to inspire loyalty—and in Robert’s case, virtual worship—in his men. On the other hand, perhaps because of Henry Lee’s quarrels with Jefferson and Madison, Robert had an ingrained distrust of politics and politicians, including those of the Confederacy. But the most important trait that influenced Robert was a negative one: his father had been voluble, imprudent, fond of gossip, hot-tempered, and quick to attack anybody who offended or disagreed with him. With Henry Lee, even minor differences of opinion escalated quickly into public feuds. Robert was, or forced himself to be, exactly the opposite. He kept the firmest possible rein on his temper, he avoided personal confrontations of every kind, and he disliked arguments. These characteristics, normally thought of as virtues, became in fact Robert E. Lee’s Achilles’ heel, the one weak point in his otherwise admirable personality, and a dangerous flaw for a commander, perhaps even a flaw that would, in the end, prove fatal for the Confederacy. Some of the most mistaken military decisions in the short history of the Confederacy can be attributed to Lee’s reluctance to confront a subordinate and have it out with him on the spot, face-to-face.

  The person who did the most to instill in the young Lee the instincts and the obligations of gentlemanly behavior was his mother—his father had long since stepped over the line that separated a gentleman from a scoundrel. Although Ann Carter Lee seems somewhat overshadowed by the tangled and tragic drama of her husband’s life, she was very clearly a much stronger character. She brought up five children in his absence, kept the household going without any financial support from him, and still managed to send one son to Harvard, one to the navy, and another to West Point. The contrast between her childhood at Shirley, with all its luxuries and countless servants, and the straitened circumstances of her life in Alexandria must have been severe and painful, not to speak of the absence of her disgraced husband, who was away so much of the time that she sometimes referred to herself as a “widow” while he was still alive, and whose responsibilities she was obliged to take over herself at a comparatively young age—she was only forty when Henry Lee fled the country. Her health, always a concern, declined steadily into chronic invalidism; the consensus is that she suffered from tuberculosis, then, of course, an incurable and fatal illness, a diagnosis perhaps borne out by the fact that one of her daughters, Anne, was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, and had to have an arm amputated. Invalidism seems to have plagued Ann from an early age. She may have suffered from narcolepsy from childhood on—there are stories that even as a young woman at Shirley she sometimes needed to be helped up and down stairs, and that early on in her marriage she may have slipped into a narcoleptic coma, which lasted so long that she was declared dead, woke up in her coffin, and was only just able to summon help before she was buried. Fear of being buried alive was common in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, in part because medical diagnosis was still so primitive, and in part because embalming had not yet come into vogue,* and examples of people waking up after they had been declared dead by a doctor were by no means infrequent—even so levelheaded a man as George Washington left instructions that he was not to be buried for three days after his death, just in case the doctors were wrong.

  For somebody whose health was as frail as hers, Ann Carter Lee seems to have had an active and determined spirit and a busy life. Perhaps she was kept going by strong willpower, unquestioning religious faith, “missionary zeal,” and a deep sense of responsibility toward her children. Despite her ill health, she moved about a good deal in times when she could afford horses for her carriage, staying with close or distant relatives in their great houses, where she and her children were always welcome: Shirley, where she had grown up; Ravensworth, with its 22,000 acres, and Chatham (both homes of William Fitzhugh, a distant kinsman who had befriended Ann and made his house in Alexandria available to her); Arlington, the home of William Fitzhugh’s sister Mary, who married George Washington Parke Custis, Washington’s adopted son; Stratford, now owned by Henry Lee IV, her husband’s oldest son from his first marriage—a succession of stately mansions, with innumerable servants and slaves, that must have brought some relief from the crowded house in Alexandria and her constant financial worries, as well as giving her children an opportunity for the rough-and-tumble of country living.

  Ann Carter Lee seems to have picked out Robert early on in his childhood as the most responsible and reliable of her children. She entrusted him with the keys to the cupboards and storage rooms, and sent him out to do the shopping with a basket on his arm, and the all-important task of bringing home the right change. She delegated to him the task of overseeing the four Carter family slaves in the household, and of acting as the family nurse in case of illness, of which there was a good deal. His solicitude for her when he was a young boy is remarkable. He accompanied her on drives, which were supposed to be good for her health, and on cold days “he sometimes pulled out his jackknife and pretended to keep out the wind by stuffing paper into the cracks” of the family carriage.

  She was determined that Robert would not grow up to be like his father, so she devoted a good deal of her time and energy to his spiritual well-being. For this task she was extraordinarily well suited; her few surviving letters reveal formidable theological knowledge, as well as a precise sense of right and wrong and a deep spiritual belief. “Self-denial, self-control, and the strictest economy in all financial matters were part of the code of honor she taught [him] from infancy,” and in his later years Robert E. Lee frequently said that he “owed everything” to his mother. This is not to suggest that she was in any way a religious fanatic; her strong religious enthusiasm and absolute faith in God’s will were normal in her day and age, and although in a different form no more out of the ordinary than Abraham Lincoln’s or John Brown’s. Although her family’s religious roots lay in the milder and more formal Protestantism of late-eighteenth-century Virginia, a transplant from the Anglican Church of England, Ann Carter Lee was in many ways a child of the Second Great Awakening that swept through America in the early nineteenth century, creating sometimes startling new religious denominations and laying greater emphasis on the need to be saved and on personal piety rather than simply attending traditional religious services. Her beliefs were what we would now call evangelical, and she had the strength of mind and purpose to impress them on her son Robert for life—indeed the most striking thing about his letters is his lifelong, simple, unshakable belief in the need to accept God’s will uncomplainingly, and his deep faith. “It is all in God’s hands” is a phrase he used often, not in a spirit of fatalism, but in one of confidence. The intensity of Lee’s religious convictions was one of the elements that would make him a formidable warrior, and also one of the reasons why he remains so widely respected not just in the South, but in the North as well—not only as a hero, but as a kind of secular saint and martyr.

  That religious intensity, however, did not make him humorless, or less hi
gh-spirited than any normal child. When he first went away to school, at the age of seven, he “became a trifle headstrong” and imperious—perhaps this was a natural tendency in a boy with Lee and Carter blood in his veins—and on inquiring into his behavior, his mother was informed that the best advice was “to whip and pray, and pray and whip,” so it is likely that he was not free from the occasional naughtiness of childhood, despite the efforts of his biographers to give him, like his idol Washington, an improbable perfection. Throughout his life he had a taste for family jokes, teasing, mild flirtation, and good conversation—it was only the public man who displayed the “marble face” that so impressed those who fought for him.

  His extended family was enormous, particularly on the Carter side. His maternal grandfather, Charles Carter, had “eight children by his first marriage, and by his second, thirteen.” Charle’s grandfather, the fabulously rich “King” Carter, had no fewer than twelve children, and Charles’s first cousin Robert had sixteen. Perhaps because Ann Carter Lee was more comfortable with her own family than her husband’s, she spent as much time as she could with the Carters, so that Robert E. Lee grew up in a vast and, to the outsider, confusing swarm of first and second cousins, aunts and uncles by marriage, etc.—“kinspeople,” as they were called—to whose “journeying and letter-writing and the exchange of family news, the years brought no end,” and who would, throughout Robert E. Lee’s life, provide a pleasure second only to the company of his own children. Even at the height of the Civil War Lee’s letters home are full of mentions of Lee and Carter relatives, however remote, whom he has seen, and inquiries about the health and well-being of countless others.