Lee’s first contact with him was when Whistler requested a special leave to say good-bye to his mother (the model for Whistler’s most famous painting),* who was sailing for Europe. Lee seems to have agreed to this request rather reluctantly—possibly Whistler had already attracted negative attention. In any event, Lee felt impelled to write directly to Mrs. Whistler to emphasize the importance of her son’s returning to West Point on time. His next contact was after Whistler’s mother returned, when the young man was hospitalized with rheumatism, and possibly the symptoms of tuberculosis, and sent home on sick leave. That Lee fussed over each of his cadets like a mother hen is borne out by the number of letters he wrote Mrs. Whistler about her son’s health and the importance of his making up for lost time in his studies—care wasted on Whistler, who returned to the academy after an absence of nearly three months; scraped through with a “1” in drawing but otherwise mediocre grades; and then proceeded to roll up a remarkable quantity of demerits, followed by his famous failure to identify silicon, which resulted in his flunking chemistry and subsequent dismissal.
Whistler appealed to decision, but Lee’s letter to General Totten makes it evident that he had made every possible effort to save Whistler, even though he had no reason to expect Whistler’s gratitude, or to suppose that anything short of a miracle would turn him into a soldier.
Lee was spared any such trouble from his son Custis, whose record as a cadet, after his initial misstep, was every bit as good as Lee’s own. Lee’s nephew Fitz Lee, the son of Smith Lee, gave him considerable anxiety, increased of course by Lee’s determination to be impartial when it came to his own family. Fitz was a charming, popular, and adventurous young man, and capped a long record of demerits by slipping “out of camp with another cadet about twelve o’clock one night and [not returning] until 2:30.” When he was caught and put under arrest, Lee may have wished to spare his brother the disgrace of Fitz’s being dismissed, but as usual he was scrupulously fair, and was saved from the necessity of harshness only because Fitz’s whole class took the unusual step of offering “a pledge not to commit his offense during the academic year.” This, unfortunately, was enough to persuade the secretary of war to pardon Fitz. This somewhat archaic use of the honor code saved young Fitz to serve with credit in the cavalry corps of the Army of Northern Virginia.
All accounts of Lee’s three years as superintendent dwell on his constant preoccupation with the moral and academic trials of his cadets—Lee was not a man who would ever fail to get to the bottom of a moral problem, however small or difficult to resolve, and however contradictory the evidence—and of the pain and exhaustion this caused him. But of course as head of the academy he had other concerns: he had to keep a strict accounting of expenses; and he lobbied hard for an appropriation to build a new riding school, drawing up plans for it, based on France’s Saumur Cavalry School, founded by Napoleon to perfect French horsemanship,* as well as conducting an army-wide talent search for instructors, improving the officers’ housing, building new stables, and acquiring more horses and better saddles.
Lee was fortunate that midway through his command the election to the presidency of Franklin Pierce, who had known Lee in the Mexican War, brought to the War Department as secretary of war Lee’s old friend Jefferson Davis, a fellow southerner and West Pointer. General Winfield Scott, as commanding general of the U.S. Army, continued to be Lee’s strongest supporter. Scott even paid a surprise visit to West Point with his suite, and put Lee to the trouble of preparing a dinner at the last minute. In a rare burst of sardonic humor, Lee described it in a letter to a friend: “I fear the Genl will again have an opportunity of taking, if not hasty, at least a thin plate of soup, & but for an Arlington ham and some of my Shanghai chickens . . . I should be in doubt whether their hunger could be appeased.”
The joke here is that during General Scott’s protracted struggle with President Polk at the beginning of the Mexican War in 1846, Scott had been away from his office when then-Secretary of War Marcy called on him bearing a detailed account of President Polk’s displeasure. On returning to his desk Scott dashed off a sycophantic letter of apology for his absence to Marcy, lavishing praise on the president’s “excellent sense, military comprehension and courtesies,” and containing the unfortunate phrase that he had been out his office only “to take a hasty plate of soup.” The letter, when “leaked,” as Scott should have known it would be, provoked nationwide ridicule in the press, often accompanied by grossly unflattering cartoons, both for Scott’s abject surrender to Polk and because Scott, already putting on substantial weight around his middle, was well known as a hearty and discriminating gourmet, for whom mealtimes were both lavish and sacred—a man less likely to take “a hasty plate of soup” for a meal would be hard to imagine. This led a friend of Scott’s to conclude (correctly) that he had “committed political suicide.” Scott did in fact run for the presidency as the Whig candidate in 1852 and carried only four states.
Biographers of Lee tend to write about him as if he had no interest in politics, but this was not entirely true. Although Lee came to mistrust all politicians, whether of the Union or the Confederacy, and sought to portray himself as a man without politics, he was actually a shrewd if discreet observer of political events, and since a good part of his military career until 1861 was spent dealing with congressional committees on behalf of the chief engineer or the secretary of war, he had a highly developed knowledge of politics for a comparatively junior officer.
The period during which Lee served as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy was one of intense political turmoil and increasing anger between the northern and the southern states over the burning issue of whether—or how far—slavery could be extended into the vast area seized from Mexico in 1848. The level of political acrimony was rising sharply. Although most “moderate” people in the North were still resigned to the existence of slavery south of the so-called Mason-Dixon Line, that is to say in those states where slavery had been an established institution before the American Revolution, they were to varying degrees opposed to its extension in the new territories. Abolitionists were still a small, fringe group of extremists in the North. Even those who favored the eventual elimination of slavery were for the most part in favor of accomplishing it slowly, perhaps with some form of compensation for the slave owners, but without any thought that the former slaves might someday become fellow citizens with full voting rights. Except for wealthy slave owners in the plantations of the deep South and those who worked in the slave trade, most Americans treated slavery as a kind of tragic national mistake. Lee’s own attitude toward slavery was typical of “moderate” southerners—they owned slaves, they depended on slave labor, and they made some effort to treat slaves well within the reality of the master-slave relationship; but they hoped that in the far future slavery might eventually be eliminated, with the majority of the slaves moved elsewhere, perhaps to Liberia, in a benevolent fashion. In the meantime, life for slaves on the Lee farms continued unchanged, as it did everywhere else in the South: long, numbing toil from generation to generation, with little or no hope of advancement.
During Lee’s years at West Point the subject of slavery was already becoming the flash point of American politics, and although succeeding presidents and Congress struggled mightily at increasingly short intervals to find a new compromise that would replace the previous one, each accession of territory, every new proposition for statehood for former territories, and even so farsighted and benevolent a proposal as the building of a transcontinental railroad sparked off bitterly acrimonious sectional argument at the heart of which was slavery. As if it were a portent, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the second best-selling book of the nineteenth century in the United States (after the Bible), was published in 1852, further inflaming passions on both sides of the divide.
Tension rose rapidly during the presidency of Franklin Pierce, a northerner who sympathized with the southern states. He hoped to replace the o
ld Missouri Compromise of 1820–1821—in which Missouri was allowed into the Union as a slave state, in return for the prohibition of slavery north of the parallel 36 degrees 30 minutes N in the former Louisiana Territory. In 1845 the compromise was extended farther west as part of the Texas Annexation Resolution. Also in 1845, the hugely controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers in the two territories to determine “by popular sovereignty” whether they wished to allow slavery there. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri summed up the feeling of many when he said, “What is the excuse for all this turmoil and mischief? We are told it is to keep the question of slavery out of Congress! Great God! It was out of Congress, completely, entirely, and forever . . . unless Congress dragged it in by breaking down the sacred laws which settled it!” The two senators from Ohio attacked the bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge . . . a criminal betrayal of precious rights,” intended to transform the new territories to the west “into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
This rhetoric is calm and modest compared with most of the flood of angry debate and raging editorials that accompanied the lengthy and stormy passage of the legislation through both houses of Congress, and in the process fatally eroded the reputation of President Pierce. The policies that he followed as president might as well have been designed for the specific purpose of dividing the United States into two warring camps. No sooner had the legislation passed than the Kansas Territory descended into political turmoil, murder, and finally open warfare, as pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” and free-soil “Jayhawkers” fought out the question of slavery. “Bleeding Kansas” soon acquired a pro-slavery and an antislavery, or “free state,” capital,* and became an awful example of just where the dispute over slavery was heading. Not more than a year after the Kansas-Nebraska Act John Brown, the “meteor of war,” arrived in Kansas, marking the beginning of a new and more bloody conflict, as the state filled with outsiders who wanted to abolish or to extend slavery, a situation apparently beyond the control of the Federal government.
During this time Lee’s interest in slavery was lukewarm at best, and his personal involvement with the day-to-day realities of slave ownership on any substantial scale had not yet begun. Of course he had spent all of his life, except when he was in the North or at war in Mexico, surrounded by slaves—they were, if nothing more, part of the background of genteel southern life, a constant presence.
Then his beloved mother-in-law, Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis, died in April 1853. Lee had long since come to think of her as a second mother, and as his spiritual mentor, and to think of Arlington as his home. His wife, Mary, managed to reach home shortly after her mother died, but Lee was unable to return for the funeral because of his duties at West Point. He had called Mrs. Custis “Mother,” and had depended on her as a kind and stabilizing element of family life, unlike her mercurial husband; he described her death with no exaggeration as a “sudden and crushing” blow, and writing to Mary he expressed the fundamental Christian belief that Mrs. Custis had been at such pains to inspire in him, and which would sustain him in the years ahead and make him seem to almost everyone who met him, friend or foe, a noble and almost saintly figure, even on the battlefield: “May God give you strength to enable you to bear and say ‘His will be done.’ She has gone from all trouble, care and sorrow to a holy immortality, there to rejoice and praise forever the God and Saviour she so long and truly served. Let that be our comfort and consolation. May our death be like hers, and may we meet in happiness in Heaven.” Of course people strive to write consoling phrases to those who have just lost a loved one, and in Victorian times they were more apt to use religious terms than they are today, but Lee’s letter to Mary is nothing like that; it clearly expresses his own basic faith, a firm belief in the goodness of God’s purpose, the need to submit to it and the certainty for those who did so of a place in heaven. Lee’s religious belief, in part thanks to Mary and her mother, was unshakable, and surely the most important part of his character—he believed absolutely. There was no pose about it, no doubt in his mind, no need for outward show; figuratively, it lit him from within, and it helps to explain his extraordinary appeal, the respect given him as a leader during the war to come, and the unique place he came to fill in American life in the century and a half after his death—a strange combination of martyr, secular saint, southern gentleman, and perfect warrior. It is surely no accident that Mrs. Custis left him a ring “with General Washington’s hair and pearl initials,” since she understood perfectly the degree to which Robert E. Lee’s code of behavior was anchored in the previous century, and the strength of the “mystic bonds” that tied him to George Washington.
These qualities made Lee a daunting example to his cadets, all of whom seem to have recognized in him the virtues he was trying to instill in them. Classes were small then, by comparison with today (forty-three cadets in the class of 1852, thirty-four in the class of 1853),* and their spiritual welfare troubled him as much as or more than their academic standing. Only one West Point graduate managed to combine the seemingly contradictory careers of general and clergyman—Leonidas Polk, who attended the academy at the same time as Lee but two classes behind him and would become the Episcopalian bishop of Louisiana and a Confederate lieutenant general—still, Lee’s constant concern was for “inculcating those principles of manliness and honour which are the only safeguard of a soldier.” Much of his correspondence with the War Department has the tone of a sermon. It was not the demerits of cadets that caused Lee grief so much as the wayward spirit behind them. “You must not infer,” Lee wrote in a polite letter of warning to the parents of one cadet who was in danger of dismissal, “that his conduct has been in the least disgraceful or calculated to affect his moral character. . . . His amount of demerit has arisen from acts of carelessness [and] inattention to his duties.” Lee considered discharging cadets “the most unpleasant office I am called upon to perform.” His pride in inspecting the first graduating class of his superintendency, in 1853, was appropriate: it included four future Civil War generals. One of them was Philip Sheridan, who would rise to become commander of Grant’s Cavalry Corps in 1864, and was the first Union general to institute a scorched-earth policy, in the Shenandoah Valley; and another was John Bell Hood, a bold, reckless Texan who rose to become a Confederate lieutenant general and led the attack against the Union left on the second day of Gettysburg. The following year Lee had the pleasure of seeing his son Custis graduated first in his class of forty-six, of whom no fewer than seven would become Confederate generals. The most famous of these was a dashing young horseman named J. E. B. Stuart, of whom Lee was almost as fond as he was of his own sons.
Lee’s tenure at West Point was one of the most peaceful and satisfying periods of his life. Most of his family was with him, and Mary, however much she missed the South and the visits to the warm springs that were her only relief from the rheumatism that was slowly crippling her, seems to have enjoyed life as the wife of the superintendent, which involved a good deal of entertaining, both of cadets and of visiting “celebrities,” although she found the Hudson valley winters hard to bear. She brought several of the familiar Arlington servants north with her, including “a cook, a waiter, and Eliza, Rob’s childhood ‘mammy,’ now a fully-fledged housemaid.” Bringing one’s household slaves to northern states did not yet present the difficulties it soon would as the issue of slavery heated up, and as abolitionists became more numerous and daring. The grounds and gardens at West Point were beautiful and well cared for, and although the atmosphere was inevitably more martial and disciplined than that of drowsy Arlington, with the sounds of marching, drilling, bands, and trumpets in the background, Mary Lee seems to have settled in, and even made use of the greenhouse “to propagate cuttings from the Arlington gardens.”
How content Lee was is harder to say. He felt that he had improved the discipline and the moral condition of the cadets, and set in motion a number of improvements in the academy, rangin
g from the introduction of gaslight to the beginning of work—at last—on the new riding school he had designed; but he may have also feared that he was slipping into a backwater of the army. The board of visitors praised his conduct “in the exalted position he so worthily fills,” and this was gratifying, but Lee himself was constantly aware that however “exalted” his position might be in the eyes of others, he was growing older without any realistic hope of promotion or higher command, and with two sons remaining to be educated and four daughters to marry. (Rooney would disappoint his father by failing to obtain an appointment to West Point, but then succeeded in winning a place at Harvard University. Rob, the youngest boy, would attend the University of Virginia.) Lee used his spare time to read prodigious numbers of books from the West Point library, a significant number of them about Napoleon, including O’Meara’s two-volume Napoleon at Saint Helena; no fewer than eight volumes of memoirs about the emperor; and Napoleon’s own Considérations sur l’Art de la Guerre, in which, as Freeman points out, Lee would have read the emperor’s recommendations for protecting a capital city against an enemy army of greater numbers, a situation that Lee himself faced in 1864 and 1865.
But steps were being taken in Washington that would radically change the direction of Lee’s career, and send his family back to Arlington. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was dismayed by the small number of American troops available to defend settlers in the West—the entire U.S. Army consisted of fewer than 15,000 men, approximately the size of a division. Fewer than 10,000 were combat troops and perhaps half were available to guard and protect the entire western frontier against something like 40,000 hostile Indian warriors. Again and again small detachments of American troops were besieged in their fort or cut down when they journeyed outside it by superior numbers of Indians. The culmination was the notorious Grattan Massacre of 1854, in which twenty-nine American soldiers; their, commander Lieutenant Grattan; and an interpreter were killed by over 1,000 angry Lakota Sioux braves in what is now Wyoming. Davis was determined to impose what we would now call law and order on the frontier. He asked Congress for two new regiments of infantry, and two of cavalry specially trained and equipped for frontier service, the First and Second Cavalry. For once, the legislators listened and appropriated the money, though not without complaints. Davis immediately appointed Albert Sidney Johnston, a Texan who had been two classes behind Davis at West Point, as colonel of the Second Cavalry; and Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel, or second in command. Johnston was a distinguished soldier who would serve in three armies: that of the Republic of Texas, the U.S. Army, and the Confederate Army. He had won the admiration of Jefferson Davis, who rated his military skills above those of Lee. A good many of the officers of both new cavalry regiments were southern: in the Second Cavalry, as well as Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee, both E. Kirby Smith and John Bell Hood would become generals in the Confederate Army; and the lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry was Lee’s best friend at West Point, Joseph E. Johnston, who would become not only a Confederate general but codesigner of the Confederate battle flag.
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