Henry had begun well enough, serving in politics, and commissioned as a major during the War of 1812. By one of those odd ironies of fate, there being no money to send him to Princeton, his father’s alma mater, or to Harvard like his half brother Carter, he attended the then-obscure Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia, which his half brother Robert would make famous when he agreed to accept its presidency after surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia in 1865, and where he would spend the last five years of his life as the venerated martyr-hero of the defeated South. Henry inherited Stratford from his mother, but not the money needed to maintain the great house in style. This problem he solved neatly by marrying Ann Robinson McCarty, “a distant cousin” of course, and a wealthy heiress whose lands abutted Henry’s. Blond, beautiful, and spoiled, Ann brought to Stratford not only the money and the furnishings to restore it to elegance, but her equally beautiful younger sister Elizabeth (“Betsy”) McCarty to live with them. By a complicated set of legal maneuvers, Henry managed to make himself legal “guardian” of Betsy and her fortune, which was considerable. Ann and Henry had a single child, who was said to have inherited her mother’s beauty, but who died at the age of two in 1820 when she slipped on the top step of Stratford’s famous, dramatic curved entrance stairway and fell to her death (she was the second Lee to die this way in Stratford’s short history).
With this tragedy, Henry’s life, like his father’s, descended rapidly into melodrama. Unable to forgive herself for her daughter’s death, Ann became addicted to morphine and laudanum (liquefied opium, a favorite medicine of the time), while Henry began a passionate affair under the same roof with her sister Betsy. Whether Henry provided Ann with the substances of her addiction to prevent her from noticing that he was having an affair with Betsy is unknown, but in any case morphine and laudanum could be bought at any pharmacy in those days without a prescription; indeed laudanum was the main component, together with alcohol, of all those quaintly named elixirs and patent medicines that were hawked from door to door in the mid-nineteenth century.
Unfortunately for Henry, Betsy became pregnant, or said she was, and wrote to her stepfather and former guardian, who swiftly carried her off to her grandmother’s home. Later on, rumors spread that the baby had been disposed of, possibly by Henry and Betsy, but it seems more likely that Betsy had a miscarriage, or that it was merely a hysterical pregnancy. Before then, however, the story was out, both because Henry and Betsy talked of nothing else to anyone who would listen, and because Betsy applied to a court (successfully) to have Henry’s guardianship revoked. Even in the days before tabloid newspapers, the testimony of Betsy to the court about how her brother-in-law and guardian had taken advantage of her spread like wildfire, to the mortification of the Lees.
Henry’s difficulties were increased by the facts that in Virginia sexual intercourse between in-laws was considered incest, and that by his extravagance and his poor head for business (he was, after all, his father’s son) he had frittered away most of his wife’s money, and a good deal of Betsy’s as well. He waged a vigorous campaign to get Betsy married off to a friend—basically, Henry wanted to sell her to a physician turned writer named Robert Mayo in return for a loan that would allow him to keep Stratford—but Betsy’s grandmother thwarted this plan. With the collapse of this scheme, which far from being secret was the subject of interminable letters in both the Lee and the McCarty families, Henry was forced to sell Stratford to pay off his debts and fulfill the court’s order to restore the money he had stolen from Betsy’s inheritance. He and Ann, now homeless, entered on a peripatetic life, and were left with no source of income except hiring out the few slaves that remained to her.
To his credit, perhaps, Henry never denied his guilt, but he seems not to have realized that accusations of adultery and incest made him virtually unemployable. In 1825, the year Robert entered West Point, Henry had managed to secure the promise of a “modest” job in the U.S. Post Office from President John Quincy Adams, but even this was withdrawn when the story of his seduction of Betsy was revealed to the president. By the time Robert came home to Virginia on leave Henry and Ann were living in Nashville, Henry attempting to write what would now be called a campaign biography of Andrew Jackson, while Ann sought in vain to overcome her narcotics addiction at a newly opened warm spring, named by its promoter “The Fountain of Health” and reputed to heal almost every disorder.
In a climax worthy of a nineteenth-century romantic novel, a series of events eventually led to Betsy’s marriage, and to her husband’s purchase of Stratford, the house where Robert E. Lee had been born; where she had been seduced by her brother-in-law, or had seduced him; and where she then proceeded to live, wealthy and respectable, for the next fifty years. Meanwhile Henry and Ann, temporarily reprieved in the aftermath of Andrew Jackson’s victory by his appointment of Henry as U.S. consul in Algiers, sailed for North Africa, only to learn that the appointment had been withdrawn when the record of Henry’s adultery, incest, and financial depredations was read aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate, to the horror of the Lee family.
Heredity is not an exact science. Nobody can say, at any rate of human beings, that X plus Y will produce Z. Biographers of Robert E. Lee have contrasted the wildness and irresponsibility of Henry Lee III’s son by his first marriage with the respectability of his children by his second marriage, but there is no simple explanation for this. Of course his children by Ann, except for Carter, had never been directly exposed to their father’s precipitous decline and fall, but on the other hand they had before them the unavoidable example of their half brother Henry Lee IV to steer them toward the straight and narrow, and keep them there. Certainly Robert E. Lee avoided all his life any kind of excess, scandal, or inappropriate behavior, and so did his siblings, though Carter had a weakness for business schemes that did not meet with Robert’s approval, and that Robert almost always managed to talk him out of, with considerable tact and effort. However, wildness comes in different forms. In Robert E. Lee it did not take over his personal life or his business judgment—he was always a paragon of rectitude—but it profoundly affected his judgment and his behavior on the battlefield. He took extreme risks with his own safety: even as the commanding general of the Confederacy he plunged into the fiercest fighting to see for himself what was happening, exposing himself to artillery fire and volleys of musketry at close range, apparently without any hesitation or thought for his own safety even though his aides and his soldiers begged him to retire. And once his blood was up, as General Longstreet complained about Gettysburg, Lee was unsparing of his troops and unshocked by fearful casualties: he would fight it out whatever the odds and whatever his losses. Just as Napoleon depended on the famous furia francese to get him out of tight spots, so did Lee depend on the southerners’ fury in battle—the rebel yell, the bayonet charge, the sheer élan of his own troops. He did not have, as Grant did, a reputation as a “butcher,” but there is not much to choose between Grant’s costly frontal assault on Lee at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864, which he acknowledged as being the decision he most regretted in the war, and Lee’s determination to attack the center of the Union line on the third day of Gettysburg, Pickett’s famous charge—both failed, with casualties that shocked even their closest aides (nearly 7,000 for Lee, and over 10,000 for Grant).
Robert returned to West Point at the end of August 1827 to begin his third year there. This involved, above all, the addition of “natural philosophy,” as physics was then called, and chemistry, both subjects that he enjoyed, as well as tactics at the battalion level and an introduction to artillery. He continued to read voraciously for his own pleasure, though for the time being his interest in Napoleon was supplanted by a mixed bag of reading, none of it easy: Machiavelli, Alexander Hamilton, Rousseau (in the original French), a biography of John Paul Jones, a work on navigation, another on astronomy, and another on optics. It is not surprising that throughout his life Lee would surprise people by his knowledge of subjects far
removed from military engineering or tactics, or that in the last years of his life he would turn himself, apparently without effort, into an excellent college president. Whatever else he may have been, he was never a narrow soldier—his intellectual curiosity was always intense and well grounded but, like his sense of humor, carefully concealed.
Despite his ambitious reading program, Lee completed his third year at West Point as number two “on the roll of general merit”; Charles Mason always seemed to be just a few points ahead of him in examinations. For his final year Robert was also named adjutant of the corps, the highest rank a cadet could achieve; this added both to his responsibilities and to the need to maintain a constant level of perfection in his person, his drill, and his conduct. The arduous course of studies in the first three years of a cadet at West Point was merely a preparation for the formidable challenge of the fourth year, with more advanced military training and engineering added to an already crowded curriculum.
Perhaps the most intense part of his studies was the course in military science, which covered “field fortification, permanent fortification, the science of artillery, grand tactics, and civil and military architecture,” and which was taught from three formidable French textbooks. This course particularly interested Robert, and he excelled at it. His knowledge of “field fortification,” gained from the two volumes of S. F. Gay de Vernon’s Traité élémentaire de l’art militaire et de fortification, à l’usage des élèves de l’École polytechnique, et des élèves des écoles militaires, would stand him in good stead in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee would be that rare general who combines two forms of military genius—he was a gifted and experienced engineer, capable of planning and constructing fortifications on a grand scale, and at the same time a master of maneuver, able to move a large army rapidly and to outfox his opponent in the field.
Robert’s position as adjutant of the corps eventually gave him the privilege of moving out of the barracks into Cozzen’s Hotel, where he could study late into the night, long past the regulation “lights out” at ten o’clock. At last, on June 1, the rigorous final examination began; it continued for two weeks, a grueling experience for both the cadets and the examiners, one would have thought. It is interesting to note that one of the group of visiting examiners was General Pierre Van Cortlandt of the distinguished Dutchess County family, another of those links between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had studied law under Alexander Hamilton, and as a militia commander “had named [the novelist] James Fenimore Cooper as one of his aides.” As was so often the case with Robert E. Lee, his connections with the Revolutionary War were widespread and intensely felt; it can never have seemed like mere history to a son of Light-Horse Harry Lee, and had the effect—along with his natural tendency to identify with the southern past, as well as its standards of gentility and its traditions, which were his own—of making him faintly suspicious of the new and bustling world that was fast emerging in the North: a world of rapid industrialization, immigration on a huge scale, and mass democracy, as opposed to the genteel, agricultural oligarchy in which the Lees had lived, served their country, and prospered.
At the final examinations Robert earned 1,966½ points out of a possible 2,000 in conduct, receiving perfect scores in artillery and tactics, which placed him second in his class, as always a few points behind Charles Mason. Still, this was an extraordinary record, which earned him the right to choose to be commissioned in the Engineer Corps, then the most prestigious and intellectually demanding arm of the U.S. Army, and the one for which his scientific and mathematical abilities best suited him.
On graduation—West Point in those days did not run to a huge, formal event, and no caps were thrown high in the air—Brevet Second Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, U.S.A., took the steamer south to New York City for a two-month furlough, and from there went by stage to Virginia, where a family tragedy awaited him.
Although Douglas Southall Freeman states, “Already his character was formed and his personality was developed,” this can hardly have been true on his departure from West Point. Lee was just over twenty-two years old, a handsome, fit young man five feet ten inches tall, broad shouldered and narrow waisted, his figure accentuated by his uniform; but his character was by no means “formed,” at this moment of his life, any more than his education as a soldier, which was hardly even begun. Lee had not yet experienced love, nor a profound personal loss, though he was about to experience the latter; nor had a life full of disappointments, glacially slow promotion, and the increasing tension between his own southern way of life and his country made their mark on him. As a soldier, he had not yet experienced being under fire or giving orders that would certainly cost the lives of some of those he commanded, nor the exaltation of triumphing over fear—or at least over self-doubt, for Lee would discover he was one of those fortunate individuals gifted with instinctive courage—and being acclaimed as a hero. As a man, he had not yet experienced the joys and pains of marriage and fatherhood, and as an American he could not yet even begin to imagine the depth of the tragedy to come, in which he would play such a major role. The Lee we tend to think of—weary; solemn; dignified in victory and in defeat; furious in action; bearing on his shoulders responsibility not only for an army but for a nation, as well as for the honor of its cause—did not of course yet exist: he would be formed by accretions and layers of experience good and bad in the three decades to come, as a pearl is inside its shell. The most one can say of young Second Lieutenant Lee as he journeyed home to Virginia with his trunk was that he had the makings of an exceptional soldier, the technical knowledge that would make him an accomplished civil engineer of projects on a grand scale, and the moral character and sense of honor that would sustain him throughout his life. That is already a lot to build on.
By the time Robert arrived home his mother was dying. “My disease is an unconquerable one,” she had written to his brother Sydney Smith Lee, two years before Robert’s graduation from West Point, and she had long since faced the inevitable with resignation, just as her relatives wisely refrained from encouraging her with false hopes. She was staying at Ravensworth, the palatial home of her cousin William Fitzhugh, in as much comfort as could be provided, and Robert instantly fell back into his role of being her nurse and companion. “When he left her room, her gaze followed him, and she would look steadily at the door until he entered again.” She died a couple of weeks after his return, at the age of fifty-six, and was buried at Ravensworth.
Robert no doubt spent some time mourning, and going through the painful business of settling his mother’s modest estate. His sister Anne had married William Marshall, a Baltimore clergyman who was a cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall; William soon changed his profession and became a successful lawyer. Robert’s brother Sydney Smith Lee was at sea, and his sister Mildred was only nineteen, so the responsibility for carrying out their mother’s wishes fell largely upon Carter and Robert. To Anne, her mother left her black maid and the maid’s infant, as well as three other slaves, while to Mildred she left the elderly black family coachman and house servant Nat. Slaves, of course, were property, to be left to one’s heirs just like the carriage horses, the carriage, the china tea set, the silverware, and the table napkins. Mrs. Lee’s trust fund, on the income of which she had scrimped and saved to educate her sons and equip her daughters for marriage, was split between her children: $10,000 to each of the girls, $3,000 to each of the boys.
These are not such small amounts as they seem; $3,000 would be the equivalent in purchasing terms, adjusted for inflation, of somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 in today’s money. The value of Mrs. Lee’s slaves is harder to estimate, since except for Nat we do not know their age or health, but “prime field hands” in their late twenties or early thirties sold for between $800 and $1,000 in the 1830s, the equivalent of between $20,000 and $25,000 in today’s money, and a well-trained maid with one infant might go for as much, or more if she was still of “breeding age.” These considerations
must be taken into account in writing about the economic life of the antebellum South, where in Robert E. Lee’s time the number of slaves had risen to 4 million, and their total value exceeded $4 billion. Mrs. Lee was hardly a major slave owner, but the value of those slaves she did own cannot be excluded from her estate. To the boys she also left about 20,000 acres in western Virginia; this acreage was then of little value, and heavily burdened by unpaid taxes.
Once freed from these cares, Robert set about visiting one after another the great houses of his relatives and friends, and particularly Arlington, in Alexandria, Virginia, overlooking Washington D.C., the home of George Washington Parke Custis, who was Martha Washington’s grandson and the adopted son of George Washington. Custis was a relation of Robert’s by marriage—he had married Mary Lee Fitzhugh—and in the small and somewhat incestuous world of the Virginia aristocracy, there were countless connections between Mr. and Mrs. Custis and Ann Carter Lee and her children, enough so that Robert had come to look on Custis as a kind of indulgent surrogate father, and Arlington as a second home. Kind as he was to the Lee boys, Custis was a very different sort of man from their father. He rejoiced in being known as “the child of Mount Vernon,” for he had grown up in Washington’s home, and therefore tended to think of himself as a kind of national institution. His widespread interests—“hobbies,” might be a more appropriate word—which included painting “huge canvases” of historical scenes, composing epic poems, preserving and displaying the belongings of George Washington, serving as his own architect, and breeding sheep, inevitably took a toll on the amount of time he was able to spend looking after his estates, and he was in any case more interested in the magnificent facade he had built for Arlington than in what lay behind it, or how it could be paid for. Like Thomas Jefferson, Custis was self-indulgent and interested in everything, but without Jefferson’s universal genius, or Jefferson’s perfect taste. In print, Custis comes across as fussy, slightly pompous, and hugely self-important, and a portrait of him with the casual open collar of an artist, in the style of Rodolfo in La Bohème, suggests a rather pinched face and downturned mouth, with an expression that conveys in equal amounts a touchy pride and a degree of carefully disguised self-doubt, as well as a morbid fear that people are making fun of him. He does not look like an easy man to deal with.
Clouds of Glory Page 9
