Owing to Talcott’s frequent absences on “other duty,” it fell largely to Lee to defend the position of the engineers at Fort Monroe against the artillerymen. The feud (no other word will do) had its origin in Colonel Eustis’s belief that he did not need two young engineer officers to tell him how to complete a fort that was designed for the purpose of housing artillery in the first place. It was a typical military “turf war,” in this case one between the “pioneers” who sited and dug in the guns and the “gunners” who aimed and fired them that had been going on since the fifteenth century.
Lee labored to complete the details of the counterscarp wall and ramparts of Fort Monroe, but his principal task was still to order boatloads of riprap at the best price he could negotiate and have it dumped into the waters of Hampton Roads to create a solid foundation on which Fort Calhoun could be built. Each load of stone simply pushed the preceding one deeper into the soupy bottom, so the visible progress was minimal, no doubt causing the artillerists to question whether the fort there would ever be built, and Lee to wonder whether he would have to spend the rest of his career on this thankless task. The only good news for him was that he ceased to be a brevet second lieutenant in July 1832 and was promoted to the same rank as a regular—a commissioned officer of the army, no longer a temporary and acting one.
Throughout 1833 and much of 1834 Lee fought a lone rearguard action against the artillery in defense of the right of the engineers to complete the work on Fort Monroe and the Rip-Raps. He did so both on the spot and in Washington, at the War Department, where the layers of intrigue were thicker and could have destroyed his career at this early stage, as well as Talcott’s. The situation reached a nadir, from Lee’s point of view, when Talcott was transferred to the Hudson River and Lee was forced to move to improvised lodgings on the Rip-Raps—a triumph for the artillerymen—but then this order was revoked; the artillery school was broken up and its officers were dispersed to their original units; and Lee was vindicated. He cannot have been pleased at being obliged to live for a time on the equivalent of Elba, instead of enjoying the busy domestic life and admiring ladies of Fort Monroe, but he continued do his job, buying stone and chucking it into the water. That he did his work well is proved by the fact that Fort Wool was still in active service until the end of World War II, after which it was decommissioned and became a modest tourist attraction. Lee’s dedication to duty in difficult circumstances was so evident, and so highly appreciated by the chief of engineers, General Gratiot, that in November 1834 he was transferred to Washington as Gratiot’s assistant. Since this transfer would have the additional advantage of making it possible for Lee to live at Arlington with Mary, and ride back and forth to work every day, it was something like a complete victory.
The years from 1832 to 1834 were not wasted ones, professionally. Apart from teaching Lee a good deal about how the army worked, they gave him a firm grounding in both artillery and fortification. Napoleon himself was an artilleryman by training, and believed that “God fights on the side with the best artillery.” When he took command of the army of Italy in 1796 it had only sixty guns, but sixteen years later at the Battle of Borodino in Russia, the combined artillery of the French and Russian armies was over 1,250 guns, firing over 15,000 rounds an hour on a two-mile front.
The fight between the engineers and the artillerymen had been settled in favor of the former for a time under Louis XIV by the genius of Vauban, whose immense system of fortifications—the military equivalent of Versailles in cost, and also the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Maginot Line—protected France, but Napoleon was always by instinct more interested in attack than defense, and equipped his armies with lighter, faster-moving guns so as to concentrate a mass of artillery fire against the enemy’s weak point as quickly as possible. His lack of interest in fortifications cost him dear in 1814, when the Allied armies invaded France, but during the long period when he dominated all Europe, the speed at which his armies moved, his gift for seeking out the decisive battle, and the skill with which he directed the awesome power of French artillery made him almost unbeatable by any combination of enemies until he made the mistake of adding Russia with its vast distances to the list of them.
Like Napoleon, Lee always sought to move quickly, surprise his enemy, and concentrate his artillery—no American general before or since has ever understood how to use artillery to better effect than Lee—but unlike Napoleon, Lee was also able to build formidable defensive positions when he had to. Fort Monroe taught him a lot about the design and construction of defensive works, and he would put it to good use early in 1862 when he made his men dig the elaborate trench system that constituted the defenses of Richmond, despite widespread grumbling among them and criticism in the southern press; and in 1864 and 1865, when his complex, brilliantly improvised defense lines around Petersburg, Virginia, kept the Confederacy alive for nearly a year.
Although skill at playing army politics is not usually something for which Lee is given any credit, it is worth noting that he managed to get out of the thankless task of reinforcing the Rip-Raps just as gracefully as he had managed to get himself clear of Cockspur Island. The first move brought him closer to Arlington and Mary, and the second made it possible for him to move into Arlington, and also gave him a job in Washington at the right hand of the chief of engineers. He could not have done better had he been the most skilled of intriguers! He had at first thought of renting a house in Washington, but with its muddy streets, open sewers, and uncompleted public buildings it was not the attractive city it is now, and we can be sure that Mary Lee was the first to point out to him the advantages of living in Arlington surrounded by more than a thousand acres of land, for a growing family—all seven of their children would be born in Arlington and grow up there, so over time it became, in a real sense, the only home Robert E. Lee had ever known, cherished not just because of its many associations with George Washington but because wherever the army sent him, it remained the stable center of his family and his life. For a man who had been born in Stratford, an imposing mansion, but who grew up in a small, crowded house in Alexandria, and went straight from there to West Point, Arlington was like the home he had never had, and returning every evening to its stately Greek Revival portico with the six gleaming white columns must have given intense pleasure to someone whose extended family, both Lees and Carters, owned so many great houses in Virginia. None of them, though, was more famous than this—indeed, except for Washington’s own Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s Monticello there was no house in Virginia grander or with more historical associations than Arlington.* It was already a tourist attraction—according to a family joke, carriages full of strangers would turn up from time to time, and finding Mr. Custis near the entrance with his collar open at the neck and his disheveled appearance, tip him a dollar to show them around the house, supposing him to be the caretaker.
What we would now call the commute from Arlington to the War Department, then close by the White House, on horseback was longer than Lee might have wished, and in bad weather tiring and difficult for both horse and rider, but that was more than compensated for by Mary’s joy in living at home with her parents and the familiar servants who had looked after her since her birth—Lee could hardly have made any decision that made her happier. With his usual care for details, Lee sought out a blacksmith in Washington named Schneider whose shop was on his way to the War Department, “on the corner of Twentieth and G Streets,” and left his horse there after giving Schneider careful instructions about exactly how he wanted the horse to be shod, remarking with approval when he came back after work to examine the horse’s hooves, “You are the first man I have ever come across that could shoe a horse by my directions.” As a result Mr. Schneider would become blacksmith for all of Arlington’s horses until the Civil War, and even after Lee went south to join the Confederacy in 1861, he still managed somehow to send Mr. Schneider $2 he owed him.
Lee’s duties at the War Department were not onerous an
d he soon became fond of General Gratiot, the chief of engineers, a Louisiana-born hero of the War of 1812 (no fewer than three cities were named after him, in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan) who took a personal interest in all of his officers and their far-flung projects. Despite his admiration for Gratiot, Lee chafed mildly at the dull routine of office work, and struggled with doubts about his self-worth and his future in the Engineer Corps. There was hardly any prospect of promotion, the pay and allowances of a second lieutenant were ridiculously low, and what he saw of the struggle to squeeze a little money out of Congress for even the most necessary and beneficial of projects was enough to sour Lee on politics and politicians for life. Since Gratiot was frequently absent on inspections of the corps’ projects, Lee became the equivalent of the general’s office manager, assisted by his trusty clerk from Fort Monroe. The amount of correspondence, paperwork, and red tape generated by even the smallest disbursement of the government’s money makes his work seem almost Dickensian, so it must have come as a relief when Gratiot sent Lee off to help his old friend Talcott settle a border dispute that had grown into an armed confrontation between the militias of the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan in the spring of 1835.
The origins of this dispute could be traced all the way back to 1787, and involved a narrow strip of land of nearly 500 square miles, varying in width between 5 and 8 miles. The original boundary line across the Lower Peninsula of Michigan had been defined by Congress before any accurate map of the area existed, indeed before any white man but the occasional trapper had even reached there, and subsequent attempts to survey it more precisely seemed to bear little relationship to what was on the ground. The “Toledo War,” as it became known after the major town in the disputed area, ended with nothing more serious than a few shots fired in the air (raised to the status of the “Battle of Phillips Corners” by the participants) and a Michigan deputy sheriff wounded by a boy with a penknife, but from May to October 1835 Talcott and Lee meandered through the forests and lakes of the area attempting to conduct a scientific survey threatened only by dense clouds of “Moschitoes,” as Lee called them, and the occasional snake. Lee remarked that if there were any inhabitants of this wilderness he never encountered them, and although at one point he reached Pelee Island, Ontario, in the middle of Lake Erie more or less opposite Cleveland, it too appeared to be uninhabited except by one snake in the dilapidated, deserted lighthouse. Evidently, neither the scenery nor the Great Lakes themselves made much impression on him.
Lee’s low opinion of the area may have been affected by the duration of the survey, which stretched from the original estimate of one month to five, and by the fact that Mary was pregnant and gave birth to their second child, a daughter, in July while he was absent. The child was healthy, but Mary had a difficult delivery and her recovery was marked by the first of the many illnesses that she would suffer throughout her life, and which eventually made her an invalid. She apparently wrote to Lee and asked him to come home, for he replied to her sternly from Detroit late in August: “But why do you urge my immediate return, & tempt one in the strongest manner, to endeavour to get excused from the performance of a duty, imposed on me by my Profession, for the pure gratification of my private feelings?” The apparent harshness of this letter may be a result of Mary’s reluctance to tell him frankly how ill she was, for when he returned home at the beginning of October he was alarmed by her condition, which he attributed to her being “too active too soon,” although her symptoms seem to have been more serious than any that could have been caused by activity alone, and may have included “a pelvic infection of some sort.” In the heroic medical tradition of the day, the doctors bled her, by cutting open a vein, and “cupped” her—a painful treatment that consisted of heating small glass cups with fire and applying them to the skin—without producing any improvement. Eventually two large “abscesses which had formed on her groin broke” (actually the second abscess was cut open by the same surgeon who did the bloodletting and the cupping); this seemed to help, but Mary remained for some time weak and bedridden, while the children came down with “whooping-cough,” following which their mother caught mumps. Mary had five more healthy children, but from this point on her own health would always be her husband’s major concern, though the only thing he could do for her was to take her at intervals to one or another of Virginia’s many warm “mineral springs,” which in the nineteenth century were thought to be restorative. It seems likely that she benefited from the social life at these spas as much as from the waters, and they became a regular part of the Lee family’s routine. Frequent pregnancies surely took a toll on her, though they were of course considered normal in that day (Queen Victoria set the standard for the English-speaking world with nine children), and she became increasingly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis.
Throughout 1836 Lee was worn down by Mary’s illnesses, and by the sheer tedium of his work. The dashing young West Point graduate had become an overworked military bureaucrat and a husband constantly worried by the health of his wife and children. “I have never seen a man so changed and saddened,” one of his relatives remarked. Lee seriously considered resigning from the army, and complained to his friend Talcott of his own “procrastination” and poor luck. He was not consoled by his promotion from second to first lieutenant, a modest step up for a man who had been an officer in the army for nearly seven years. Talcott himself had resigned from the army to begin a successful career as a civil engineer, but nobody reached out to tempt Lee into what is now called the private sector, and he seemed unable to take the first step—after all, the army had been his life since 1825, and he had never contemplated anything else. A slow (but temporary) improvement in Mary’s health and the natural beauties of Arlington cheered Lee up a bit, and encouraged him to describe to Talcott the Virginia countryside he loved: “The country looks very sweet now,” he wrote, almost lyrically in May 1836, “and the hill at Arlington covered with verdure, and perfumed by the blossoms of the trees, the flowers of the garden, Honey-suckles, yellow jasmine, etc.” This, like the flirtatious Lee, is a very different person from the dignified “Marble Man” of legend or the stern commander whom he later became and whose grave, gray, bearded face adorns countless statues and paintings. He continued to add flirtatious asides to “Talcott, My Beauty” in his letters to her husband, describing her as “the masterpiece with blue eyes,” and speculating on how many children she would have and whether matters could be arranged so that when they grew up they married his.
He was an adoring parent, who rushed home every evening to see his children; he was delighted when Mary presented him with another son in May 1837, and there is no question that Lee’s family life consoled him for the fact that he was stuck in a job that offered him no excitement or challenge. He was always happiest in the company of his children, and with Arlington as his home; nevertheless, when General Gratiot finally gave in to his pleas for a major engineering challenge only two months before his second son was born, Lee accepted at once, despite the fact that it would take him away from Arlington for an undetermined length of time, and with no certainty that Mary and the children could join him.
His biographers ascribe this as devotion to duty, and of course with Lee that was always a factor, but it also seems likely that he was simply unable to resist an adventure that would take him out of the office of the chief of engineers and into the field, farther away and with a bigger job and much more independent responsibility than he had enjoyed as Talcott’s aide on the survey of the Ohio-Michigan border. Although the element of ambition has been carefully erased from Lee’s character (along with every other flaw) over the 144 years since his death—indeed already in his own lifetime he was considered by most people to be almost inhumanly selfless—the fact is that he was hugely motivated by personal advancement, then and later, but chose always to represent to others, and perhaps to himself, that he was only doing his duty, and that although the choice had fallen on him, he was probably not the right m
an for the job. It was a refrain throughout his life that he wished somebody more able had been chosen for whatever post he was about to assume. In this case, once he had the job he coveted, it was typical of Lee to write in a spirit of good-humored self-deprecation to his old friend from Savannah Jack Mackay that “they wanted a skillful engineer . . . and sent me.”
The truth is that he was by far the best man for the job, and knew it, and that the job was an immensely challenging one. This was not a mere survey, but a huge and urgent task: to tame the Mississippi River.
The great river that Indians called the “Father of the Waters” was then America’s most important path of trade and communication, linking the grain of the Northwest and the cotton of the upper Mississippi with the thriving port of New Orleans. At the same time, then as now, the Mississippi had a will and a mind of its own—it was not just a river, but a huge natural force of nature, and one by no means always friendly to man. Sometimes the river flooded, inundating hundreds of square miles; at other times its level sank and it filled some stretches with debris, making navigation by steamboat impossible; at still other times the river changed its own course, creating a channel where there had been none before and leaving settlements built along its old course high and dry. To the Indians, who merely fished in it and traveled by canoe, none of these things had mattered; they accepted the river’s unpredictability and power, and built no permanent settlements. But to Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century the course of prosperity, trade, commerce, and the development of cities and ports made it necessary to impose some kind of order on the river—a task on which the Corps of Engineers has been working uninterruptedly for the past 200 years, with limited success and not always happy consequences for what we now call the environment. At best, the battle between the Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River can be said to have resulted in a draw. Ease of navigation has certainly been achieved; levees have been raised; bridges, dams, and locks have been built across it—but the river’s ability to counterattack with destruction on a vast scale remains unimpeded, as was proved when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
Clouds of Glory Page 13
