“I was much pleased with the President’s message & the report of the SecY of War, the only two documents that have reached us entire. Of the others synopsis [sic] have only arrived. The views of the Pres: of the Systematic & progressive efforts of certain people of the North, to interfere with & change the domestic institutions of the South, are truthfully & faithfully expressed. The Consequences of their plans & purposes are also clearly set forth, & they must also be aware, that their object is both unlawful & entirely foreign to them & their duty; for which they are irresponsible & unaccountable; & Can only be accomplished by them through the agency of a Civil & Servile war. In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. This influence though slow, is sure. . . . While we see the Course of the final abolition of human Slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a Single day. Although the Abolitionist must know this, & must See that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means & suasion, & if he means well to the slave, he must not Create angry feelings in the Master; that although he may not approve the mode by which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no Concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbours when we disapprove their Conduct; Still I fear he will persevere in his evil Course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?”
Lee was of course not wrong about the religious intolerance of the Pilgrim fathers toward faiths other than their own, but it may seem strange at a first reading of his letter to link that to northerners’ intolerance for slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. Until one reads the letter carefully to the end, one does not see that Lee’s belief is that slavery is God’s will, and can be ended only by allowing “Merciful Providence” to work at its own pace. In the course of the later metamorphosis of Lee from a southern into a national hero, his opinion about slavery has been very largely swept under the rug, all the more easily because his distaste for the institution was genuine. His firm belief on the issue helps to explain his eventual decision to resign from the army and take up arms for the Confederacy. Despite his dislike of slavery, he was fighting for what he held to be right and moral. He would not have fought for less.
He regarded slavery as a moral and religious issue, not one that could be solved by politics. It is difficult for us, more than a century and a half later, to understand that something we regard as immoral and unjust could have been thought of as part of God’s plan, but such was the fact, and to ignore it is to underestimate both the strength of Lee’s religious beliefs and the fact that he saw all events as a demonstration of God’s will.
By Easter Lee was at last in Fort Mason, on his way back to Camp Cooper where he learned for the first time that during his absence there had been several clashes with the Comanche, in which two of his troopers and twelve “hostiles” had been killed. Two weeks later James Buchanan was inaugurated as the fifteenth president of the United States. In his fatally optimistic inauguration speech, he counseled the nation to be calm on the subject of Kansas, since the matter would shortly be settled by the Supreme Court, leaving people to suppose that a soothing decision would be handed down. Instead, only two days later, the unobliging Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced the court’s bombshell decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. It held that “persons of African descent cannot be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens of the United States,” and that Congress had no power to “ban slavery in the territories,” thus undermining both the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney further declared that the “Due Process Clause” of the Fifth Amendment “prohibits the federal government from freeing slaves brought into federal territories.” The Court thus removed in one stroke every ground on which President Buchanan might have hoped to negotiate a settlement satisfactory to the North. As if to rub salt in the wound, Taney added, “Negroes had no rights which the white man was obliged to respect.”
Apart from threats of impending Indian raids, which did not materialize, life at Camp Cooper was uncomfortable and tedious: the temperature exceeded 112 degrees in the shade, and the wind was so hot that it brought no relief, just sand and dust. “I have been out four days the past week reconnoitering the country & looking for springs,” Lee wrote to Mary, “in which I have not had much success. We have also had an alarm that a large body of Indians were coming down from the North to attack our camp. . . . I confess I was incredulous & went to bed with no expectation of being aroused.” Lee continued to suffer patiently through his duty on the frontier until July 1857, when he was recalled to Fort Mason to serve on yet another court-martial, only to find that Albert Sidney Johnston had been ordered back to Washington by the War Department and that he was now commanding officer of the Second Cavalry in Johnston’s place.
Lee rode 113 miles across the prairie from Fort Mason to San Antonio to take up his new command. San Antonio was a pleasant town with tree-shaded walks along the San Antonio River, and handsome Spanish houses, one of which Lee took over from his predecessor as his headquarters, a huge improvement over a windblown tent on the Brazos. “The weather here is excessively hot,” he wrote to his daughter Annie, then eighteen. “In the day, the houses afford more protection from the sun than the tents I have been living in. But having been accustomed to sleeping in the open air for so long, the nights are oppressive to me & are wretchedly long.” He quickly found a surrogate family, with the two young daughters of the paymaster, but there was little to stimulate his professional interest; it was the dullest and most routine peacetime garrison soldiering, with none of the intellectual challenge of engineering. Not surprisingly he still expressed his regret at having chosen the profession of soldier, and longed for the company of his own children. He was particularly concerned about Rooney, who after failing to get into West Point had succeeded in gaining admission to Harvard—where, his father complained, he was “running around amusing himself.” Rooney caused further consternation by leaving Harvard without taking a degree; with the help of General Scott his father obtained a commission for him in the army. Nothing could be more troublesome to Lee, however, than a lack of direction or a lack of purpose in one of his sons—Rooney, Lee complained sadly, “adds more than years to the gray hairs on my head”; and to make matters worse, the young man had run up debts, had fallen in love, and was determined to get married. Young Rob was still in school and would soon be attending the University of Virginia, and seems to have been sufficiently pious and well behaved to suit his father; but between Rooney’s debts at Harvard and Rob’s tuition, Lee must have felt hard pressed. He was further troubled by Mary’s health, which seemed to be failing—she was increasingly crippled with what we would now call rheumatoid arthritis, for which the only treatment in those days was frequent visits to hot springs; and with an aging father, four daughters to look after, and three spirited sons she was finally obliged to address a few sharp words to her husband. “I
will do my best,” she wrote to Lee, “but you can do so much better . . . it is time now you were with your family.” Nothing could have been more painful for Lee than to be faced with deciding between two opposing duties—one to the army, the other to Mary and his family—and he seemed unable to resolve the conflict.
Then, in October 1857, the dilemma was suddenly solved for him. He received the news that his father-in-law, George Washington Custis, had died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six, leaving a grief-stricken Mary with no male relative at home to help her deal with Mr. Custis’s considerable estate. Whatever others might think of Mr. Custis and his numerous eccentricities, Lee had always cherished his father-in-law, perhaps as his last living link with George Washington. Mr. Custis, after all, had been born in 1781, only seven days after Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown—an event that was the effective end of the American Revolutionary War, and at which Lee’s own father had been present.
In the 1850s, when communications and travel were so slow, it was understood that for an officer of Lee’s rank and social class a death in the family required time off, and he had no difficulty in obtaining two months’ leave. He summed up his position in a letter to his friend Albert Sidney Johnston: “I can see that I have at last to decide the question, which I have staved off for 20 years. Whether I am to continue in the Army all my life, or to leave it. . . . My preferences which have clung to me from boyhood impel me to adopt the former course, but yet I feel that a mans [sic] family has claims too.”
The family’s problems nearly overwhelmed Lee the moment he arrived back at Arlington on November 11. His first shock was the extent to which Mary Lee had become an invalid—nothing in her letters had prepared Lee for the pain she was in, or for the fact that at the age of forty-nine she could hardly even move around the house without assistance. The second shock was Mr. Custis’s will. As anyone who knew him might have guessed, Mr. Custis had written his own will rather than relying on a lawyer, and the result was hodgepodge of good intentions and self-contradictory stipulations. Mr. Custis was generous in his bequests to his heirs, but had given little or no thought to how to produce the cash to pay them.
Resolving matters would have been a full-time job for a skilled lawyer, but since Lee’s wife and his children were the principal beneficiaries, Lee felt obliged to take on the duty of trying to straighten out the mess—a task which would occupy him almost entirely over the next two years, and which would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. He had already had the thankless task of trying to unravel a dispute between Mr. Custis and the manager of the White House and Romancock estates, each of about 4,000 acres. During the course of his investigations Lee discovered that Mr. Custis had neither visited the estates nor scrutinized the manager’s accounts for at least ten years. Lee can hardly have been unaware of what was in store for him, but he was nevertheless dismayed at his father-in-law’s negligence. At once Lee began to look into things in the same patient, methodical way he had administered West Point or any of the projects he had undertaken for the Corps of Engineers.
In theory Mr. Custis’s estate should have been a prize to his heirs. He was rich in land, stately homes, and possessions of extraordinary historical value. But in reality everything was burdened by debt and years of mismanagement. Mr. Custis had attempted to divide up his estate as fairly as he could. He left Mary Lee a “life interest” in Arlington, which after her death would pass on to the Lees’ eldest son, Custis. He left White House to Rooney and Romancock to Rob, while each daughter was to receive $10,000 (no small amount for a girl in those days, perhaps equivalent to $200,000 today) from the sale of other, smaller properties and the income from White House and Romancock. Each of these places was of course a proverbial white elephant, with a badly run-down house,* land producing no income, and an unwilling, disgruntled slave labor force.
The slaves, in fact, constituted the largest problem Mr. Custis had left to his executors, of whom Lee quickly became the chief and most active. At the time of his death there were 196 slaves on the three major properties, and Mr. Custis stipulated that once the estate had been settled—that is, when the necessary sales of land were completed to raise cash, all debts were paid, and the distributions to his heirs were made in full—they were all to be “emancipated” no later than five years from his death.
However well-intentioned Mr. Custis’s decision to free his slaves had been, it was almost impossibly difficult to do. In the first place, in Virginia the law held that freed Negroes must leave the state, but in order for the Custis slaves to lead an independent life with any hope of gainful employment away from Virginia, they would need at least the rudiments of reading and writing. And in Virginia it was a crime to teach a black person to read or write.
There were further problems as well. Even a cursory examination of Mr. Custis’s affairs was enough to make Lee doubt that the land sales which could be made within five years would be sufficient to settle his father-in-law’s debts, let alone provide money for the distributions to his heirs to take place and for undertaking, as well, some kind of responsible preparation for the emancipation of the slaves. “I can see little prospect of fulfilling the provisions of your Grd father’s will within the space of five years, within which he expected it to be accomplished & his people liberated,” he wrote to his oldest son, Custis, although Robert and Mary Lee did in the end succeed in accomplishing Mr. Custis’s wishes in respect to his slaves—something of a miracle in the circumstances. An inventory of the Arlington slaves made after the death of Mr. Custis gives a hint of the difficulties facing Lee: there, in neat columns, in the elegant penmanship of the time, Lee enumerated the slave families (a matter of convenience, since neither slave “families,” nor slave “marriages” had any legal standing in Virginia), although some individuals are listed only by a single name—“Fanny,” for instance, or in one case “Baby.” Lee no doubt knew the household servants, but did he know the field hands, or recognize who “Obadiah Gray” was? He was deluged with statistics about the taxable Custis property, from the twelve “working oxen” (down from twenty-six the previous year, a bad sign) to the 2,500 bushels of Indian corn, all of which had to be meticulously accounted for, and of course examined, to ensure, for example, that the sixty “swine” were actually there and alive and healthy. The slaves were certainly more troublesome property than the elegant Custis carriage and the carriage horses or Mr. Custis’s gold watch, but all of it was now Lee’s responsibility. He had often dreamed about taking up a life of farming, but not on this scale, or with so many problems.
To Lee’s great embarrassment he was obliged to apply for one leave after another, as he applied himself to the Augean task of making the Custis properties self-sustaining and profitable in the interest of his wife and children. In the end, he would be separated from his regiment from November 1858 to February 1860, with a few interruptions to attend courts-martial and once to take command of the troops sent by the government to restore order in Harpers Ferry. Lee’s friend and mentor General Winfield Scott raised no objections to this extended period of leave, and did his best to ensure that Lee’s career did not suffer, but Lee chafed as men less able than himself were promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
An inspection of the White House and the Romancock properties further depressed him—houses and land were in a dreadful state—and the only thing he could accomplish quickly was to change the name of the latter to the less offensive Romancoke. Both his older boys were serving in the army—Custis was in the West; Rooney was about to join an expedition to Utah to subdue the Mormons (the fact that it was called “Buchanan’s Blunder” is enough to describe its place in American history)—and Lee thought it proper to give both boys the opportunity to resign from the army and take over their inheritance immediately, but both declined. Custis generously sent his father “a deed to Arlington and all the other property inherited under his grandfather’s will,” reasoning that his father should certainly own Arling
ton if he was obliged to spend so much time and effort restoring it. Lee returned the deed with an affectionate letter of thanks, adding characteristically that he regretted “the expense you incurred [in having the deed drawn up], which I fear in that country is considerable, as I wish you to save all your money. . . . The necessity I daily have for money has, I fear, made me parsimonious.”
The slight parental bite is uncharacteristic of Lee’s correspondence with his children, but although he was an unfailingly generous father, if there was one subject he was sharp about it was the waste of small amounts of money. No doubt his irritation with his late father-in-law made the subject all the more painful to him.
However difficult it might be to deal with the numerous problems of the Custis estate, nothing caused Lee more suffering or singed his reputation as much as his father-in-law’s slaves.
Of course at that time no subject was more apt to produce moral dilemmas than slavery. Lee, who had owned only a few slaves, mostly family servants of one kind or another, had little or no experience in dealing with a disgruntled workforce of almost 200 people, who represented among them a considerable portion of the value of the Custis estate. As a military man Lee was no martinet, but when he gave an order, however courteously conveyed, he expected it to be obeyed. Unfortunately for Lee, the Custis slaves were not West Point cadets—they had long since grown accustomed to their late master’s unwillingness to pay close attention to their work, and they resented Lee’s eagle-eyed attention and his schemes for making the Custis lands profitable, which of course depended on their labor. Neighbors complained that the Custis slaves were indolent, spoiled, and impudent, and it is certainly true that apart from taking a sporadic interest in his various agricultural hobbies, like breeding sheep, Mr. Custis allowed his slaves to do pretty much as they pleased. They farmed their own gardens, rather than looking after his lands; they were free to fish as they pleased; in the eyes of most observers they ruled Mr. Custis rather than the other way around.
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