Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Saint Louis was by no means a hardship posting, in the army phrase, like a fort on the frontier, but even Lee, who was indifferent to discomfort, complained about the summer heat, and the fact that the streets were choking dust storms when the wind blew in the summer, were ankle-deep mud when it rained, and turned into frozen ruts in the winter, and Mary wrote home about being “devoured alive with moschetas, for they are as thick as a swarm of bees every evening.” Fortunately, she enjoyed the company of the Beaumont family, with whom they shared the house, and cozy evenings with guests when “‘Tasy’ Beaumont, the doctor’s lovely and amusing sixteen-year-old daughter,” played the piano while Lee turned the pages for her; but the sight of fur trappers, Indians, and riverboat gamblers in the streets, however exotic and colorful they may have looked, does not seem to have aroused her interest much. Despite its mansions and social pretentions, Saint Louis was at the edge of what was then the frontier, and still a brash, rough-and-ready place.

  Although the Lee family eventually adapted to life in Saint Louis, Mary was ill a good deal of the time, or at any rate suffered from what Lee referred to as either “a bilious attack” or “lassitude.” One suspects that frequent pregnancies, homesickness, and the prevailing medical ignorance and blundering of the time were probably part of the problem. If one reads between the lines, she seems to have regarded Missouri as a kind of enforced temporary exile from her home in Virginia, and not to have wanted or felt able to look after the boys on the rare occasions when Kitty was absent. Even at home in Arlington surrounded by servants Mary complained of her “brats squalling around,” and with only one servant to look after them, they must have been harder to control. Her indifference to what were then considered the “wifely” duties of housekeeping—at least overseeing from a distance the cooking and the disciplined child rearing—was a constant source of annoyance to her husband, though he mostly disguised his disapproval with rather forced good humor.

  For Lee himself, “lassitude” was never a possibility; he was always dauntingly energetic. He was frustrated by inadequate funding to accomplish the job, and by the slowness of the workforce, but all the same, he managed to begin blasting the channels through the Des Moines and the Rock Island Rapids and to start work on the dike that would redirect the main current of the river toward Saint Louis. One observer comments on Lee’s diligence: “He went in person with the hands every morning about sunrise, and worked day by day in the hot, broiling sun—the heat being greatly increased by the reflection from the river. He shared in the hard task and common fare and rations furnished to the common laborers—eating at the same table . . . but never on any occasion becoming too familiar with the men. He maintained and preserved under all circumstances his dignity and gentlemanly bearing, winning and commanding the respect of every one [sic] under him.” Clearly, the sunburned young first lieutenant prefigured the august commanding general.

  In July Lee was at last promoted to the rank of captain, ten years after he had been graduated from West Point—a long wait even by the standards of the day, especially considering his responsibilities. To set against this modest achievement, his work obliged him to remain in Saint Louis until winter, so he and Mary missed the traditional Christmas celebration with her parents at Arlington; this cannot have been easy for Mary, who set great store by such things—this was the first time she had ever been away from home at Christmas. She was also pregnant again, and in midwinter ice on the river prevented travel by steamboat, while the overland route was notoriously difficult even for the most hale and hearty of travelers, let alone one who was “in a delicate condition,” in the euphemism of the time. It cannot have been easy for Mary to spend Christmas away from her daughter and her parents, and although she would have four more children,* one doubts that she looked forward to another delivery, given her experience at the hands of the doctors, but she was at any rate determined to have the baby at Arlington rather than in Saint Louis.

  Although Freeman speculates that Lee feared “his family was increasing more rapidly than his income,” in fact Lee seems to have been pleased at the prospect of another child; however much he might complain about the low pay in the army, a large family was what he wanted most, and few fathers have taken more interest in their children, or enjoyed their company more than Lee did—he loved them with an intensity that his own father, who was often absent and seldom showed much interest in his children, had never shown toward him. It was as if the adult Robert E. Lee wanted to make up for what he had not received as a child from Harry Lee by becoming a perfect father himself, a role in which he succeeded remarkably, even when he was swept up by history and became a major figure in great events.

  As it turned out, the Lee family would not leave Saint Louis until the spring of 1839, by which time Mary was in her eighth month. They returned home in what may be close to record time for the day: by steamship to Wheeling, Virginia; by private stage to Frederick, Maryland; then by train to Washington—a total of eleven days, the last few of which even Douglas Southall Freeman, who from time to time betrays a certain impatience with Mary Lee’s problems, describes as “hard travel.”

  Lee stayed at Arlington for only two weeks before setting out to return to Saint Louis, so he was not present for Anne Carter Lee’s birth on June 18, and did not receive the news of it until around July 1, by which time he was back in Saint Louis. His haste to return was caused in part by the unavoidable fact that his work on the Mississippi could be carried out only in the summer months when the water was low, and in part by the fact that his mentor General Gratiot had been dismissed from command of the Corps of Engineers in December 1838 after a long feud about his accounts, which was finally decided against him by the president. To put the matter in modern terms, it was a question of whether or not Gratiot had been justified in putting certain sums on his expense account and being reimbursed for them; in hindsight, this seems to have been a matter of politics rather than arising from any proof of dishonesty on Gratiot’s part, but Lee took the outcome badly, and feared correctly that Gratiot’s successor would be less interested in saving Saint Louis as a port—Saint Louis was, after all, Gratiot’s hometown. It may be that Gratiot’s problem was merely that he did not share Lee’s almost obsessive determination to account for everything down to the last penny. Typically, Lee’s correspondence with Henry Kayser is incredibly detailed about money: “I paid Mr. Ricket’s account for taking care of and caulking the Pearl, which is the amount of check No. 24, $48.22 . . . this, according to my mem. would leave in said Bank to my credit $841.77 in stead of $840.57 as you state” is one example of Lee’s lifelong effort to keep perfect control over his finances, however low his pay, and still more so over the public money entrusted to him. He plunged into Gratiot’s defense with a will, and gathered the general’s accounts and papers while he was in Washington; but even he was unable to unravel the truth from them, and eventually concluded that Gratiot had been the victim of political intrigue and that the irregularities of which the general was accused had been merely a pretext for removing him. In any event, one consequence of Gratiot’s fall was to increase (if that was possible) Lee’s exactitude about money and the amount of time he spent balancing his accounts.

  The improvements Lee had made by beginning work on the dikes at Bloody Island were already starting to deepen the channel to Saint Louis and wash away some of the sand around Duncan Island just as he had predicted—indeed the fact that Lee was on the right track was strikingly demonstrated when irate citizens of Illinois opened fire with cannons at some of his work crews, fearing that his plans would reduce the depth of the channel on their side of the Mississippi and cut them off from a potentially “lucrative” trade; perhaps this is another example of the rising irritability and turn toward violence of the states against one another that would intensify over the next twenty years. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, and a landowner on the Illinois side of the river—where there were hopes of building a port city to rival or even eclipse Sain
t Louis—turned to more peaceful means, and sought for and secured an injunction from the judge of the Second Illinois Circuit to halt the work on Bloody Island. Lee was dismayed—the case would not come before the regular session of the court until February 1840, and in the meantime he could make no further progress at Saint Louis. Instead, he turned his attention to the two rapids upstream, where his workforce had already begun removing huge boulders and slabs of limestone, each weighing over a ton, to start clearing a navigable channel in both the north and the south rapids—a remarkable feat of civil engineering. Still, one detects a growing sense of disappointment in Lee’s letters, as if the dismissal of General Gratiot and the injunction had convinced him that his work on the Mississippi as he had planned it would go unfinished, or at least not be completed by him. If so, he was correct.

  After an extended journey to suggest improvements that could be made on the Ohio River, and a trip down the Mississippi to Saint Louis to report on the number of snags still remaining, Lee returned home for the winter of 1839, partly on extended leave, partly to serve on “temporary duty” in the office of the new chief engineer while Congress lackadaisically debated whether or not to budget more money for the improvements on the Mississippi River, and then—as was (and remains) so often the case—adjourned without doing anything, effectively halting any further Federal appropriations for the work. In the summer of 1840 Lee returned to Saint Louis, again somewhat reluctantly, mostly to settle his accounts and sell off at public auction the boats and equipment he had acquired; then he returned to Washington in October to await the birth of his fifth child, Eleanor Agnes Lee.

  In its frugal way, the Corps of Engineers did not cut him loose from the Mississippi altogether—despite other duties, Lee would continue for years to be responsible for giving advice to the authorities in Missouri who would continue the work he had begun, but his own role in taming the great river was over.

  Only three months before Lee’s death in 1870 there took place one of the most famous sporting events in American history, one that his work on the river from 1837 to 1840 had made possible—the “Great Steamboat Race,” in which two riverboat leviathans competed to steam up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Saint Louis.

  “This race found two huge 300 foot plus steamboats racing all out up the Mississippi River . . . at speeds up to 23 mph. . . . The race was our country’s first great media event as huge sums of money were wagered, large crowds traveled considerable distances to line the banks of the river, and the new telegraph broadcast the progress of the race to a national audience.”* The race was won by an Indiana-made boat that had cost over $200,000 to build in 1866, a fortune for the day. It could carry over 5,000 bales of cotton weighing 1,250 tons, and it had 61 luxury “staterooms” paneled with richly carved, polished rosewood, and a dining salon that seated 240 people under huge, dazzling chandeliers and stained-glass skylights. It was a product of the dawning Gilded Age, with all the lavish appointments and cuisine of a great ocean liner, tall twin stacks belching sparks and smoke as it steamed at full speed day and night—with no risk now of striking a rock, a snag, a sandbar, or a shoal—to reach Saint Louis on July 4, 1870, and beat the Natchez: 1,154 miles in three days, eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes, a record that stood unbeaten until 1929. Its name, very fittingly, commemorated to this day in headlines, paintings, photographs, folklore, literature, and song,† was the Robert E. Lee.

  Of course all that—the epic steamboat race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez, the millions of people gathered to watch it, the awe and respect in which his name was held not only in the South but even in the North—was far ahead of him in 1840 when he returned to Washington as a mere captain. In the absence of his old friend General Gratiot, Lee’s success in Missouri did not win him much in the way of a new assignment; he was sent off to inspect coastal forts in the Carolinas and draw up plans for badly needed repairs. Not every engineer was as careful a builder as Lee had already proved himself to be at Fort Monroe—it is some measure of the forced economies and makeshift construction of the times that although most of these forts were less than ten years old they had all been badly damaged by the sea and were already in need of major work. It may be true, as Douglas Southall Freeman suggests, that Lee’s tour of the Carolinas would prove useful to him twenty years later when he placed Fort Fisher on “a narrow spit” at the mouth of Cape Fear River to safeguard the Confederacy’s last unblockaded port, but if so this prescience was the only benefit of his journey. In each case he made practical, economical suggestions for improvements, and detailed drawings to accompany them. Despite his constant doubts about the value of his work, and about his own choice of profession, it is evident that Lee was now a trusted engineer. He returned home for Christmas, and after a protracted leave he was appointed to repair and update the fortresses that guarded New York City, a much larger and more responsible task, though he still remained in charge of the work at Saint Louis and in the Carolinas as well—the Corps of Engineers was undoubtedly getting its money’s worth out of Captain Lee.

  Today, of course, it is hard to understand the importance of the forts in New York Harbor, which survive mostly as place-names, but in the days when, in anybody’s mind, the only potential enemy of the United States was still assumed to be Great Britain, forts Hamilton and Lafayette at the Narrows and the two artillery batteries on Staten Island were of national importance, the major defenses of New York City and its harbor against a raid or landing by the Royal Navy. After all, there were still men alive who could remember the last time, in 1776, when a British fleet lay anchored in New York Harbor, and the Union Jack had flown over the city until 1783. Of course we know in hindsight that by 1841 the defense of New York Harbor against the British was a waste of time and money, but it was a measure of Lee’s growing reputation that he was chosen to oversee what was then considered a vital element of national security.

  A quick inspection was enough to demonstrate that this was going to be a long job—long enough to make Lee determined to have his family around him, though he could hardly have imagined it would take up nearly five years of his life. Married officers’ quarters were available just outside Fort Hamilton, placed in what was then a quiet, leafy Brooklyn neighborhood, but they had been allowed to deteriorate badly, like the fort itself. Apparently everybody else at Fort Hamilton assumed that Mary Lee would hurry north and make quick work of putting things right, but Lee knew his wife better than that, and dealt with the matter in the usual jocular but sharply critical style of so many of his letters to Mary. He took care to praise the countryside around the fort and the healthful effect of the “Sea breezes,” which he described, a little optimistically so far as the winter was concerned, as “very cool,” but went on to say, of their quarters, “A nice Yankee wife would soon have it in fine order.” Clearly he did not expect his Virginian wife to whitewash the walls or polish the floors, although his fellow officers were surprised that he was looking for servants to do work they expected a wife to perform. “I receive poor encouragement about servants & everybody [here] seems to attend to their own matters,” he wrote, meaning that wives did their own cooking and housekeeping. “They seem to be surprised at my inquiring for help & have a wife too & appear to have some misgivings as to whether you possess all your faculties.” Interestingly, Mary did not bring any of the servants from Arlington north with her; perhaps this is a reflection of the difficulty of preventing slaves from running away once they were in a northern state. In any event, Lee himself shopped for most of their needs in the way of furniture and household goods, though the prices of such items in New York City dismayed him, and he managed to find a cook and a maid for Mary.

  In Mary’s defense, she had already given birth to five children between 1832 and 1841 (and would go on to have two more), despite poor health and the onset of severe arthritis, and had spent most of her life being looked after by attentive slaves and spoiled by her indulgent parents. Mary was much tougher and shrewder than she is
given credit for being, as she would demonstrate during and after the Civil War, but Lee must have known perfectly well that housework and cooking were not among her skills. He pretended to be tolerant of and amused by her failings in this area, but from time to time there is a note of criticism, or perhaps exasperation, that cannot have escaped her notice.

  In any event, with whatever difficulties, they settled into life in Brooklyn, which was then a place of rolling fields and farms, and Lee got on with the task of bringing New York City’s defenses up-to-date. Lee was content, as he always was, to have his children around him, and his work, while time-consuming, soon settled into a routine—he was basically, in modern terms, the manager of several large and rather widely separated construction sites. As with a famous later West Pointer, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lee’s loftiest ambition might have been to retire from the army having reached the rank of colonel, but even so modest a goal must have seemed out of reach to him in the summer of 1841. “He seemed to be weighted down by the very stones of the fort,” Freeman remarks, and Lee cannot have been cheered up by the fact that his first round of repairs on Fort Hamilton made it possible to re-garrison the fort, so that he had to give up the quarters he had gone to such trouble to refurbish. He sought the chief engineer’s permission to rent a house for his family, at $300 a year (a house in the same area of Brooklyn, similar in size to the one Lee describes, was for rent as of this writing at $2,800 a month). As usual, Lee had to scale down his plans for forts Hamilton and Lafayette because Congress failed to appropriate enough money, but by the autumn of 1842 he had completed the most essential work on the forts, and since it was impossible to undertake further repairs on the sea walls in the Narrows during the winter months, he returned with his family to Arlington. Mary and the children accompanied him back to New York in the spring, but she soon went home again, pregnant with their sixth child, Robert Edward Lee Jr., while Lee got on with overseeing what must have seemed to him like increasingly routine work: pointing masonry, painting, laying down new drainpipes. Even his warmest admirer, Freeman, calls it “drab labor for a man of action,” though in fact Lee had not as yet even been given an opportunity to become a man of action. It was in some ways the low point of Lee’s career, comparable to that of another West Pointer and captain whose career reached a low ebb some years later, in 1854, and who could see no future for himself in the army: Ulysses S. Grant. Unlike Grant, of course, Lee was not a drinker; nor had he made a muddle of his accounts; nor did he resign his commission in despair as Grant did—but one recognizes the same sense of midlife futility and failure at a career that seemed to be leading nowhere. Lee, after all, was thirty-five years old, with six children to support, and had been in the army since 1825 (if you include his four years as a West Point cadet) without much to show for it, and with not much likelihood of better things to come.