Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  As a child he was surrounded by relatives, many of them close to his own age, in a family as famous for its “geniality and friendliness” as for its wealth—on Charles Carter’s death one obituary remarked that “his immense wealth flowed like the silent stream, enlivening and refreshing every object around”—and so he never lacked playmates. His home in Alexandria was surrounded by the homes of so many Lee relatives that it almost seems like a Lee family compound, but the Carters were even more numerous, and when he was ready for school he was sent away to one of the two “family schools” the Carters maintained for their own children, “one for girls at Shirley, and one for boys at Eastern View, Fauquier County,” the home of Ann’s sister Elizabeth. This first experience of being away at school was cushioned, no doubt, by the fact that all the boys attending it were Carter cousins of one degree or another, rather than strangers, and that it was run by his aunt.

  His departure for school coincided with what must have been an exciting time for a child. In August 1814 a British naval squadron fought its way up the Potomac and anchored off Alexandria, Virginia; its commander threatened to destroy the town unless all merchant ships and goods were handed over. The mayor of Alexandria was rowed out under a white flag and surrendered the town, and for three days British redcoats and Royal Marines occupied it, seizing tobacco, cotton, wine, spirits, and cigars, while the smoke from the burning capital could be seen rising on the other side of the Potomac. Whether Robert E. Lee witnessed any of this is uncertain, but as a seven-year-old boy he must certainly have been aware of it, and would have heard tales of the occupation from those who remained in Alexandria. It accentuates the feeling that Robert E. Lee was a man more firmly anchored in the eighteenth century than the one in which he lived, with a father who had fought the British under Washington, a mother who had entertained Lafayette in her modest Alexandria home, relatives on both sides of his family who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and a hometown that had been occupied and looted by the British in his childhood. As a boy, he was surrounded everywhere by reminders of George Washington—Charles W. Peale’s famous full-length portrait of Washington hung in the dining room at Shirley, Arlington contained his uniforms and swords and much of his furniture, and there were still slaves in the house old enough to remember serving him. It is not surprising that throughout his life Lee looked toward the past with a combination of nostalgia and reverence, or sought there for the lessons that would teach him how to confront a very new and different America.

  At about the age of twelve he entered Alexandria Academy, a day school founded in 1785—of which George Washington had been one of the first trustees, unsurprisingly—where he was introduced to Latin and the classics, acquiring over the next three or four years a taste for the former that he would retain throughout his life; and to mathematics, for which he had a remarkable aptitude, which would stand him in good stead.

  It had been hard enough for Ann Carter Lee to send her oldest boy, Charles Carter Lee, to Harvard; there was no way she could afford to send Carter’s younger brothers to college as well. The next in age, Sydney Smith Lee, she sent to the navy, seeking from President Monroe a midshipman’s commission for him—in those days there was no naval academy; you still learned the profession of being a naval officer by shipping to sea as a midshipman. So it must have seemed natural to send the third, young Robert, to the army; after all, he was healthy, a good horseman, bold, energetic, good at mathematics (the indispensable foundation of military science) and the son of a famous general. At the time the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, New York, was only fifteen years old, still something of an innovation, and by no means a popular one, since many if not most Americans had no wish to create an “officer class” like that of Great Britain and European countries, and cherished in any case the myth that the Revolutionary War had been won by state militias, and by sturdy farmers like the minutemen, who took a rifle and powder flask down from the wall and went off to fight the redcoats. In fact one of Washington’s greatest contributions to victory was the creation of a trained and professional army that could fight alongside the even more professional French army, and nobody recognized more clearly the country’s need for a well-trained officer corps. For Ann Carter Lee the most important advantage was that West Point offered the chance of a free college education, as well as a stepping-stone to an honorable, if poorly paid, profession.

  It is hard to guess the extent to which Robert’s wishes were consulted. In later years he would often regret having taking up the profession of arms, but he may have been more enthusiastic about it when he was sixteen, and had just been graduated from Alexandria Academy. It seems to have been a carefully thought-out family decision about what to do with young Robert, rather than a result of any desire on his part to become a soldier. The difficulty was that West Point was small, and very hard to get into in 1823. At that time there was not as yet any competitive examination for entrance into the U.S. Military Academy; appointment was “at the pleasure of the President, on the nomination of the Secretary of War, who at that time followed no rule regarding geographical distribution.” This meant that family reputation and what we would now call political clout played a major part in getting a boy appointed as a cadet. President Monroe was a Virginian, and the name Lee could be counted on to carry great weight with him; after all, he had already made Robert’s brother a midshipman. But the secretary of war was John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian firebrand of states’ rights, nullification, and slavery, who was deluged with requests from worthy southern families to nominate a son to the U.S. Military Academy. A strategy had to be found to ensure Robert’s nomination, and what is surprising is the degree to which Robert himself, a sixteen-year-old boy, carried out a canny, well-planned, and successful campaign to do so, suggesting that he already possessed excellent organizational skills, good political instincts, and an ability to get beyond the shyness that everybody attributed to him. When something mattered to him, he already went for it boldly, though without ever seeming to show ambition—perhaps another lesson quietly learned from the disastrous fall from grace of his father, whose ambition was only too obvious to everybody.

  The choice of his mother’s benefactor and adviser William Fitzhugh to write a letter of recommendation to Calhoun was a natural one—Fitzhugh, though hugely rich and well connected, was a distant relation, not a Lee or a Carter, and might seem a little more objective in recommending young Robert than a closer relative. Indeed, perhaps the most important thing about Fitzhugh’s letter was its heading: “Ravensworth, Feb 7th 1824.” Ravensworth was among the most famous of the great houses of Virginia, and almost guaranteed the close attention of the secretary of war.

  In case that was in any doubt, Robert himself called on Calhoun at the War Department and presented the letter to him personally. Whether that was Fitzhugh’s idea or Ann Carter Lee’s or Robert’s is impossible to know, but in any case it would have required a substantial degree of self-confidence and determination on Robert’s part, as well as a considerable sense of entitlement. We know that Robert was then about five feet nine inches tall, broad-shouldered, and athletic; in a few years he would be considered the handsomest man in the U.S. Army, and portraits bear this out, so the youth very likely made a good impression on Calhoun. Fitzhugh’s letter referred to the late Major General Lee with supreme tact and made the obligatory appeal to southern chivalry on the subject of Ann Carter Lee: “He [Robert] is the son of Genl. Henry Lee, with whose history, you are, of course, acquainted; and who (whatever may have been the misfortune of his latter years) had certainly established, by his revolutionary services, a strong claim to the gratitude of his country. He is the son also of one of the finest women, the State of Virginia has ever produced. Possessed, in a very eminent degree, of all those qualities, which particularly belong to the female character of the South, she is rendered doubly interesting by her meritorious & successful exertions to support, in comfort, a large family, and to give to all her children exc
ellent educations.”

  Calhoun was sufficiently impressed to tell Robert exactly what he would need in the way of further letters of recommendation, a helpful piece of advice from the man whose ideas about nullification and slavery Lee would be defending thirty-seven years later. He got an endorsement from his teacher at Alexandria Academy, and since it seemed a little too general in nature, basically no more than a character reference, he managed to persuade the teacher to write a second one, emphasizing his knowledge of “arithmetic, Algebra & Euclid.” Clearly, Robert knew exactly what was wanted. Acting on Calhoun’s suggestion, the boy persuaded two Virginia congressmen to write letters of recommendation, and even managed to get a letter of endorsement circulated around the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and signed by five senators and three congressmen, as well as letters from his half brother Henry Lee IV and his oldest brother Carter, now a lawyer practicing in Washington, D.C. Calhoun was so swamped with applications from Virginia that he had to reject twenty-five of them in the year 1824, but it comes as no surprise, given Robert’s efforts, that he was accepted into West Point on March 11, although he would have to wait a year before being admitted, owing to the number of successful applicants. Showing a lifelong habit of not wasting time, he spent the intervening year being tutored in advanced mathematics—as usual he was a brilliantly successful pupil—and by the spring of 1825 he was collecting the kit he would need to pack in his trunk for the journey to West Point. When he left in June, he was not only going far from home; he was going away for a long time—he would get no leave until he had completed the first two years at West Point successfully.

  “How can I live without Robert?” his mother asked plaintively. “He is both son and daughter to me.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Education of a Soldier

  The journey from Alexandria, Virginia, to West Point, New York, was still an experience for the most part closer to the eighteenth century than the nineteenth. The young Robert E. Lee, together with his regulation leather trunk, traveled overland by stage, just as people had done in his father’s time. Currier and Ives lithographs, Christmas cards, and the illustrations in nineteenth-century English novels have given a jolly gloss to travel by stagecoach—“stage” refers to the place where the coach stopped to exchange winded horses for fresh ones—but bumping and swaying on creaking springs along rutted or muddy roads and being confined in a crowded coach with malodorous straw on the floor, freezing cold in the winter and baking hot in the summer, cannot have been a comfortable experience, hence the alacrity and pleasure with which people abandoned it very shortly for the railroad, happy to give up the smell of horse manure for the cinders and smoke of a locomotive. It is worth recalling that among the many innovations that still lay ahead for Robert in June 1825 were railroads, the telegraph, indoor plumbing, and the revolver.

  As he left Virginia and Maryland behind and crossed into Pennsylvania Robert cannot have failed to notice one important change. For the first time in his life he was in a part of the country where slavery did not exist. In the South, blacks were omnipresent, and at the same time their presence was hardly even noticed. They toiled in the fields, the barn, and the stable; they did menial labor in the towns; in well-to-do households they were servants in the kitchen and the home; they could be (and were) bought and sold like cattle, or left to one’s heirs like any other form of property in one’s will, or used to pay debts, but in whatever form they were a constant, familiar presence. Despite her straitened circumstances Robert E. Lee’s mother had four slaves who had been given to her by her father, and in the great houses that she visited, most of the servants and all of the field hands were black. In Pennsylvania, blacks were comparatively few, and those few who lived there were free—not necessarily treated as equals, but at the same time nobody’s property, able to marry legally, and able to bring up their children without the fear that they might at any time be sold to plantations in the deep South to pay off a debt, and never see their family again. The farther north Robert’s journey took him, the fewer black faces he would see, and none of them in bondage.

  New York City was then a bewildering and noisy metropolis of over 200,000 people, and from it steamboats departed regularly up the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie and Albany. They did not dock at West Point, just under forty miles upstream, but only paused there long enough for the visitor to be rowed ashore in a small boat. This was a reflection both of the physical isolation of the U.S. Military Academy—it was situated on what amounts to a peninsula, surrounded by farmland and a few small villages, with roads that were poor and in winter often impassible—and of its still ambiguous place in national life. Although presidents Adams and Jefferson had both been in favor of a national military academy, without which the United States might once again have to rely on foreigners as artillery experts and military engineers, as had been the case in the Revolutionary War, neither they nor Congress wished to establish a military elite; and President Jefferson, whose utopian views were well known, wanted to combine the Military Academy with a school of science and what would later be called civil engineering. Placing it in West Point was at once a salute to the then-recent heroic past, when West Point had been the key to the Hudson River, the main link between the New England colonies and their sister colonies farther south, and a prudent fiscal move. There was already a barracks there, and a company of the “Corps of Artillerists and Engineers.” The first superintendent of the U. S. Military Academy accepted the post only on the confident assumption that the academy would be moved to Washington, D.C., as soon as it was up and running, but in this he was to be disappointed; congressional parsimony regarding the military obliged the academy to grow slowly and by fits and starts where it was, in the lower Hudson valley, rather than make the move to a grand new campus in the capital, after the example of Les Invalides in Paris. The first years of the academy were marked by political infighting; an uncertain curriculum; open hostility between the superintendent and the faculty; and reports of insubordination, drunkenness, and occasional riots among the cadets. In age, the cadets ranged between boys of ten and married men with children of their own, and the cadets, the faculty, and the superintendent sent frequent letters of complaint about each other to the secretary of war and even to the president. The appointment of Brevet Major (soon to be Colonel) Sylvanus Thayer as superintendent at last brought order, discipline, the famous West Point “honor system,” and competitive examinations to the academy, and transformed it gradually into a popular institution resembling its modern form; and the cadets—in their gray coats, starched white trousers, and plumed black patent-leather hats with chinstraps of polished brass scales—became a cherished national attraction.

  But the institution toward which Robert E. Lee was rowed in June 1825 was dramatically smaller than it is now, with about 200 students ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-one, and the impressive gray stone buildings rising like cliffs from the river to the chapel had yet to be built. It was, however, together with Bunker Hill and Valley Forge, among the great historic sites of the young republic. Here, Washington had once made his headquarters; Kościuszko had wintered in a cabin overlooking the Hudson; a British squadron of men-of-war had stormed the forts on both sides of the river; everywhere there were monuments, memorials, graves, and the remains of stone fortifications—remnants of the war and of “patriot gore” enough to inspire the soul of all but the dullest of cadets. The academy still consisted of only two four-story stone barracks covered in stucco, a single two-story academic building, and a makeshift “long mess-hall . . . a forlorn place, used as a hotel by the mess contractor . . . who nightly crowded into its ten rooms most of those who came to the Point to visit friends” or a family member. The stone wharf on which visitors landed was guarded only by a sentry box with an artilleryman posted in it, to prevent cadets from receiving guests who were inappropriate, or in excessive numbers. An English visitor with an eye for detail—West Point was already becoming a tourist attraction—
noted with some amusement that the academy had ten cannons of different sizes, besides a howitzer, and two mortars, and that among the cannons were “two beautiful brass field-places . . . brought to the United States by the French in the revolutionary war,” inscribed, somewhat ironically for a republican institution, with the motto Ultima ratio regum, which Louis XIV had ordered to be placed on all French artillery: “The final argument of kings.” The same visitor was amazed at the extent and difficulty of the curriculum for cadets, and awestruck “by the natural beauties of the place.” Except for the magnificent and much admired view up and down the Hudson, and the steep and wooded landscape, however, the U.S. Military Academy itself was not as yet a place to inspire awe in those who approached it, and still resembled what it was: a fairly shabby, run-down army post, particularly since the cadets were housed during the summer months in tents set up in neat rows on The Plain and called Camp Adams, after John Quincy Adams, who was then president.

  After a brief oral examination conducted by Colonel Thayer, so cursory that it can have served only to eliminate idiots and misfits, the cadets were marched off and each was assigned to a tent, which, as for most of the rooms in the barracks, he would share with three other cadets. Tent mates were obliged to purchase together “their joint toilet—a looking glass, a washstand and basin, a pitcher, a tin pail, a broom and a scrubbing brush,” spartan equipment that would serve them summer and winter; and each cadet had to buy his uniforms. Most cadets complained bitterly about the food, but Lee did not venture an opinion—then, as later, he was not fussy about food. Meals were ample, but the quality of the ingredients was somewhere between poor and wretched, and the monotony of the menu was described best (though perhaps overoptimistically) by the contractor who owned the hotel and had put in the successful lowest bid for catering the cadets’ mess: “Give young men plenty of first-rate bread, butter and potatoes, and they will require little meat, and never complain of that.” Cadets who could afford the price sneaked out to nearby Gridley’s Tavern to eat (and drink, although alcohol, as well as tobacco in all forms, was forbidden), but since Robert E. Lee was graduated with no demerits we can be certain he was not among them.