In fact two of the older Lee boys, Henry and Carter, did make fun of Custis, whose nature was very different from that of their own impetuous and heroic father, but there is no evidence that Robert did. On the contrary, Arlington impressed him deeply, with its noble facade, sweeping view, and rooms full of Washington memorabilia, and he felt for Custis some measure of the filial respect and affection that his father had never been home long enough to appreciate. Arlington, with its curious dissonance between the immense columns of the classical porch and the rather poky rooms of the house behind it, was closer to being Robert’s home, or at least what he wanted as a home, than any other place he would ever live in. Even at the very end of his life he still grieved over the loss of Arlington, and there is no doubt that it inspired in him an even deeper reverence for George Washington than any son of Light-Horse Harry Lee would naturally feel.
His interest in Mr. and Mrs. Custis’s only surviving child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, was formed early on, certainly by the time of his first leave from West Point in 1827, when he had cut such a dashing figure at house parties in his gray cadet’s uniform. In accordance with the standards of the time, the friendship between Robert and Mary grew at a glacial pace—there is no evidence of a coup de foudre on either side—and only in the most carefully watched and chaperoned circumstances. Still, it escaped nobody’s attention that young Lieutenant Lee spent a great deal more of his leave visiting Arlington than anywhere else, and that Mary Custis was always blushingly pleased to see him dismount. They both enjoyed sketching, at which Robert was a fairly accomplished amateur. By the time his leave ended there may have been some sort of understanding between him and Miss Custis: nothing improper or binding—both of them would have understood that Mr. Custis’s blessing would have to be sought and given—but enough to give both of them the hope of a closer relationship to come.
They were a curiously ill-matched pair. Robert was enormously handsome—a fellow cadet described him as “beautiful” without any hint of homoeroticism, simply as a statement of fact—while Mary had her father’s long, narrow nose and sharp chin, and a hint of the downturned mouth. It is possible that the portrait painted of her in her youth is unskillful, or does not do her justice, and the hairstyle of the day does not do her any favors, but it is not the picture of a great beauty. Their personalities were not perfectly synchronized either. Robert was punctual to a fault, furiously organized, a careful planner; Mary was “scatter-brained,” careless, often late, and—despite the attention of her mother and numerous slave maids—frequently “unkempt.” Early in life she had become deeply religious, in what we now call an evangelical way, whereas Robert’s religious interest was, for the moment, far less intense, and more conventional, as if attending church regularly was merely one of the requirements of an officer and a gentleman. He was amazingly energetic, athletic, and fit; capable of riding many hours a day in all weather. She was an indoor person, already given to fits of dizziness and faintness, and to a need for rest. She was “frail” and tiny, he was nearly six feet tall, and powerfully built. He was poor and used to fending for himself, while she was the spoiled only child of wealthy, indulgent parents, and used to having her own way at all times.
As usual when people are in love they felt themselves ideally suited to each other.
By far the most important letter so far in Robert’s life as a soldier was sent to him from Washington on August 11, 1829, ordering him “to report to Major Samuel Babcock of the corps of Engineers for duty in Cockspur Island, in the Savannah River, Georgia” by mid-November, and signed by “C. Gratiot, Brig. Gen. Comndg.” If Robert was disappointed, he did not express his feelings to anyone; but as he surely knew, it was a dismal place, not far from the island where his father was buried, a tide-swept coastland island where the Corps of Engineers had been attempting for some years to build a fort to protect the approaches to Savannah, and so plagued by heat, humidity, fever, and mosquitoes that work was not even attempted during the summer months.
The members of the Corps of Engineers were America’s busiest soldiers, and its officers by and large the brainiest ones—from the very beginning an elite. That is not to say their work was necessarily glamorous. In war, they built fortifications, bridges, roads, and trench works, and dug in artillery as needed (“batteries”). In peacetime they functioned as civil engineers on projects of vast scale (as of course they still do); they improved and deepened harbors, drew up maps, planned the course of canals, made and kept rivers navigable, built dams and levees and locks—fulfilled, in short, just those functions that Thomas Jefferson had foreseen when he drew up his plans for an American equivalent of France’s École Polytechnique, recognizing from the first that America’s need for what we would now call an infrastructure was far too big a job for anything but the Federal government to carry out. Their third function was to protect America’s ports and harbors from foreign invasion—since the only potential enemy in the eyes of most Americans was Great Britain, this involved building a chain of fortresses guarding the approaches to the principal ports of the East Coast. Such forts had proved useful in the recent past—after all, “The Star-Spangled Banner” still celebrates the inability of a British naval squadron to silence the guns of Fort McHenry and take Baltimore in 1814—and as a result Congress and the Corps of Engineers were committed to a hugely ambitious building program of “coastal defense,” much of it in places where the construction of even a modest shack would have presented problems. Cockspur Island was one of these places. Twelve miles downstream from the port of Savannah, in the southern channel of the Savannah River, it was about a mile long and two-thirds of a mile wide, most of it underwater at high tide, and all of it underwater in any serious storm. Its major moment in history was in 1736, when John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, landed on the island and conducted a service on its muddy beach, and today it boasts a unique lighthouse, built in the mid-nineteenth century on a bed of mussel shells and clamshells, with a foundation in the shape of a ship’s prow, the better to resist the waves.
Lee journeyed north to New York by stagecoach and sailed from there for Savannah toward the end of October, accompanied by the family’s elderly black coachman and house servant Nat, who suffered from “some slow, devitalizing malady” and who, it was hoped, would recover or at least be more comfortable in what Freeman refers to as the “mild” climate of coastal Georgia. Although this is usually cited as an example of Robert E. Lee’s care of and for slaves, and it may be, we do not have Nat’s side of the story—as in all stories about masters and slaves there is an element of doubt. Did Nat want to be torn away from what had been his home and family all his life? Did he have a wife, children, grandchildren whom he was leaving behind? Did he have any say in the matter at all? Is it also possible that Lee simply needed a servant and took an old family retainer for whom his sister Mildred had no use now that the family carriage and carriage horses had been sold? The moral ambiguity of slavery leaves even what appears to have been a benevolent gesture open to doubt.
Whatever Savannah may have done for Nat’s health, Lee found it agreeable enough. There was a small garrison of artillery, and he had several friends who were officers in it, one of whom, Jack Mackay, was from an old Savannah family. Lee was made instantly welcome. He was given a room in the Mackay home, and he soon found his place in Savannah society, where he quickly assumed his lifelong habit of innocent flirtation with pretty girls. The Mackays, like the Lees, were a large family—Mrs. Mackay was a well-to-do widow with six children, four of them daughters—and Lee must have felt right at home. All his life he liked nothing better than to be surrounded by a large family, if not his own, then someone else’s.
On the other hand, Cockspur Island, when Lee first saw it, presented “a drab and desolate” appearance, which closer examination would not improve, and it must have looked like the most improbable place in the world on which to construct a fort. Major Babcock, to whom Lee was supposed to report, had already been
sickened by the climate and the “exertions” involved in trying to find a site for the fort, and was soon to drop out of the picture altogether. Lee seems to have plunged in at once and taken over from his ailing commanding officer, and was soon building embankments to keep back the tide, and a canal to drain the area—in effect his first task was to create enough dry land for a construction site in what amounted to a tidal swamp. Since this was his first job as an officer in the Corps of Engineers, he labored at it as hard as he could, even digging himself day after day in water up to his armpits.
Work on the island ceased for all practical purposes with the approach of summer, since even a hardened labor force of hired whites and leased or rented black slaves was not expected to excavate there during the summer months, when the combination of heat and mosquitoes made it almost uninhabitable. Taking Nat with him, Lee went home on a long leave—that is, he returned to Virginia and stayed with friends who lived close to Arlington, for by this time he really had no family home, and his brother Carter had moved to New York City. In any case, his attention was fixed on Mary Anna Custis, whom he seems to have wooed gently all summer long. It can hardly have escaped his attention that while Mrs. Custis was pleased by his obvious affection for her daughter—Mrs. Custis was a “kinswoman” of Lee’s, a matter of some importance in Virginia, as well as a devoted reader of romantic fiction—Mr. Custis was not. He was fond enough of Lee—who was one of the few young men willing to listen to his interminable recollections of George Washington, and apparently was even interested in them, such was his respect for the “father of his country”—but Custis had known Light-Horse Harry Lee well enough to have reservations about his sons, he was au courant on the scandal about Robert’s half brother Henry, and in any case he did not see how Robert Lee, on the pay of an army lieutenant, could support Mary in the style she was accustomed to. Behind this concern, which was very natural for the period, lay the problem of Custis’s own financial position. Despite Arlington’s grand appearance from the outside as one arrived at its famous portico, and despite his ownership of many thousands of acres, several other houses, and 200 slaves, Custis was always desperately short of ready cash. He was neither a prudent nor a careful manager of his own affairs, and liked to live in opulent style as “Washington’s adopted son,” in his own eyes at least a figure of national importance, without the income to maintain it. It may be that he had hoped Mary would solve his problems by marrying a wealthy young man, or that he feared the cost of the elaborate wedding that she and everyone else would expect her to have, or both, but either way young Lieutenant Lee did not seem to him a suitable husband for her, and he let it be shown.
This did not, of course, deter either Robert or Mary, and there was clearly some understanding between them when Robert returned to Savannah in November to resume work—they regarded themselves as “engaged,” probably relying on the fact that Custis would in the end give way to his daughter, who certainly had the stronger will.
On Cockspur Island, Lee was dismayed to find that storms had washed away much of the work that he had done in the previous season. Major Babcock did not reappear, so Lee and the few laborers who had remained on the island set out to redo it all from scratch—not a cheerful prospect. Nat, who had sailed from New York some weeks later than his master, did not arrive until Christmas, and was in even worse health than before because of a nightmare voyage that had taken twenty-five days in stormy seas. Far from being “mild” the winter in Georgia was abnormally cold, and Nat soon sickened and died. Lee’s social life in Savannah was busy—so busy that he complained about it—but he cannot have enjoyed the monotony of digging, although the continued absence of Major Babcock gave him a taste of what every young officer wants—responsibility, and an independent command, even if it was merely over a handful of civilians armed with picks and shovels. In January word finally arrived from the War Department that the missing Babcock would be replaced by Lieutenant J. K. F. Mansfield—accounts differ as to whether Babcock resigned or went absent without leave and was arrested, and there were rumors that Mrs. Babcock had fled with their child. No sooner had Mansfield arrived than he decided that Cockspur Island would never bear the weight of the fort the Corps of Engineers wanted to put there, which was estimated at 25 million tons. Mansfield conveyed his doubts to Washington, and in April the Corps of Engineers finally got around to sending a more senior officer, Captain Delafield, to Cockspur Island to survey the site. The two men then set about redrafting the plans for the fort, with Lee’s help as draftsman.
This sorry tale of delay and wasted effort was in many ways a good lesson in Army life for Lee. First of all it prepared him for the ponderous slowness of the Corps of Engineers in making any decision, however minor, and for the strain on its officers of carrying out enormous building projects in inhospitable places with insufficient funds, and with promotion that came, when it came at all, at a snail’s pace—Major Babcock’s sad story was a perfect example of that. Second, it taught him the value of getting things right before you started, rather than the reverse. Third, it apparently suggested to him that when you are placed in a hopeless position, the best thing is to get out of it as quickly as you can, a very good lesson indeed. Lee managed to use whatever markers he had in Washington to get himself posted to Old Point, Virginia, where Fort Monroe was under construction and almost complete, and which was only eighty miles distant from Arlington and Mary Custis. Some measure of Lee’s strategic sense can be gleaned from the fact that Lieutenant Mansfield, who had been graduated from West Point, like Lee, as number two in his class in 1822, would remain on Cockspur Island for the next fifteen years building what became Fort Pulaski, which was not completed until 1847.
Lee arrived at Old Point on May 7, 1831, and managed to combine a remarkable speed of movement for the day with an innate sense of tactics—a bold frontal attack, in this case—which not only got him off Cockspur Island, where he might have remained until he was old enough to retire as a gray-haired captain or a major, but at last won him Mary Anna Custis as well. Shortly after he arrived back from Georgia, he took the steamboat from Fort Monroe, Virginia, up the Potomac to visit Mary at Arlington, where he was welcomed as a guest by everyone except Mr. Custis, who may have been counting on the Corps of Engineers to keep Lee on Cockspur Island until Mary lost interest in him. Lee laid siege to Mary’s mother by reading aloud to her and to Mary from the latest novel by Sir Walter Scott—this seems likely to have been Anne of Geierstein—until, as if by prearrangement, Mrs. Custis mentioned to Mary that her guest must be “tired and hungry,” and suggested she take him into the dining room and offer him a bite to eat, thus deftly providing a good reason for the two of them to be together without a chaperone. As Mary was slicing a piece of fruitcake for him at the sideboard, Lee popped the question, and she accepted.
Mrs. Custis was delighted (but surely not surprised), and took care of the problem of squaring things with Mary’s father at once. It would be wrong to see Mr. Custis as a tyrannical father figure, however. Like Count Rostov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he was putty in the hands of his wife and daughter, and gave in with hardly a protest, and perhaps with relief, to what he must have known was inevitable. Indeed, there is something charmingly Tolstoyan about the whole scene, which in many other ways reminds the reader of Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century—the great estate; the imposing, but badly maintained, mansion; the elegant furnishings, silverware, and china in a rustic, rural setting; the presence of house servants who were slaves, at once indulged and feared; and of course the assumption on the part of the master and his family that slavery was a blessing for them, and that in their simple way they too would share the joy of Miz Custis’s engagement to Marse Robert. Unlike Russian serfs, the slaves were black, but in every other respect it all resembles the world of the Russian landed aristocracy: the elegant young officer sans fortune who comes as a suitor for the daughter; her loving father, who pretends to be an autocratic authority figure but behind the fac
ade is as soft as jelly and a self-indulgent spendthrift; her mother, who, despite all those romances by Sir Walter Scott, has a more realistic view of the situation than her husband; and outside, stretching to the horizon, the land itself, which is in fact badly farmed by poorly supervised slaves, and burdened with debt.
Once set in motion by his womenfolk, Mr. Custis was an energetic father of the bride, and determined to make a good show of things. The wedding date was set for June 30, only seven weeks after Lee had arrived in Virginia—a brilliant victory on his part—and Mary herself made the decision that she would share her husband’s modest quarters at Fort Monroe, and that they would live on his pay, without an allowance from her father. Mary’s decision doubtless came as something of a relief to a man with thousands of acres but a constant shortness of ready cash—even paying a bill of $65 a short time before the wedding caused Mr. Custis great and embarrassing problems. Still, he was determined to marry off his only surviving child in great style and with all the trimmings called for by a society wedding. Mary was to have no fewer than six bridesmaids; the great mansion at Arlington, “which usually wore a somewhat neglected look,” was painted and, where possible, repaired; and guests from all the First Families of Virginia were invited. Sydney Smith Lee, Robert E. Lee’s older brother, splendid in his naval uniform, would be best man; the mansion was so crowded that people were forced to sleep three to a bed; and the house slaves worked day and night to prepare a memorable feast and to decorate the rooms.
Clouds of Glory Page 10
