Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  His task at Washington College was an enormous one. The college had at that time “about one hundred students,” but its library and its scientific equipment had been pillaged. Reluctant as Lee was to appear in public, the plight of the college made him travel to Richmond in midwinter to appear before “a committee of the general assembly of Virginia,” to plead for the state to resume payment of the interest on loans taken out by educational institutions. His brief appearance was greeted by “cheers on all sides.” Soon afterward, Lee was summoned to appear before a joint Senate and House subcommittee inquiring into political conditions in Virginia and the Carolinas. Unlike the general assembly of Virginia, this was hostile territory, and Lee was the most conspicuous Confederate figure to appear before it. He journeyed to Washington toward the end of February 1866, his first visit since April 1861, when he had ridden home to write his letter of resignation from the U.S. Army. Now, he was famous, so much so that the subcommittee’s questions seem both tame and irrelevant. Asked whether in the event that Great Britain or France declared war against the United States Virginia might join the attacking power, Lee correctly treated the prospect as remote and far-fetched. Later he affirmed his opinion that giving blacks “the right of suffrage” was a mistake “at this time.” His replies throughout the lengthy questioning were polite, wary, and uncontroversial. If the members of the subcommittee were hoping to trip him up, they failed.

  His administration of Washington College was thorough and painstaking. It involved a huge quantity of correspondence, a task he had always found distasteful, but he pursued it uncomplainingly, with staggering promptitude and attention to detail. His experience in Washington, as well as his inclination, prompted him to stay out of the limelight as much as possible. The one time he stepped out of his role was in the spring of 1866, when, having learned that a horse thief was about to be lynched by an angry mob, he went straight to the town jail to persuade the mob to disperse and let justice take its course. The sight of the victor of Chancellorsville was enough to calm (or possibly shame) the citizens and reaffirm the authority of the aged jail keeper.

  Lee had no trouble asserting his authority over the students of Washington College. After all, he had handled the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy. In Lexington as at West Point he was patient, firm, and profoundly respected. He did not attempt to impose any kind of military discipline. This was not VMI (which was only a short distance away), and he was not training young men to become officers. All the same, his vigilant eye and the fact that he knew the strengths and the weaknesses of every one of his students were the same qualities that had made him such an admirable commander at West Point. He was not so much a strict disciplinarian as a wise and enlightened one, but there was no appeal once he made up his mind, and in addition he expected a sustained and maximum effort, absolute truthfulness and the manners of a gentleman, and impressive self-control. Within a year of his accepting the presidency, the student body had increased from about 100 to nearly 400,* the curriculum had been boldly updated and expanded, and the finances of the college were secure.

  There was, of course, no way Lee could shield his students from the effects of defeat or from the rising tide of Reconstruction—inevitably there were “incidents.” The passions that had separated North and South persisted, and not even Lee could keep “his young men,” a good many of whom were in fact veterans of the Confederate Army, from the occasional conflict with the Federal authorities, or enforce on them the kind of “submission” that he had forced on himself. He managed to defuse the occasional rumor that he would run for governor, and he tried to prevent the expression around him, even in his own home, of opinions that might inflame northerners. Lee’s object—like Grant’s—was to preserve the peace and restore the Union.

  This was not an easy task. Lee’s students, like Lee himself, accepted that the war was lost, but they did not accept the right of the Federal government to uproot ancient southern institutions and racial assumptions. Lee had not hesitated to shake a black man’s hand, and when another black man had entered St. Paul’s Church in Richmond and walked to the chancel rail to receive communion before a shocked, indignant, silent white congregation, Lee rose from his pew, joined the man, and knelt beside him. Lee was determined to treat blacks with the same dignity and courtesy he showed toward everyone else, but that did not mean he accepted full equality for them. He had testified under oath that he did not think they “could vote intelligently,” and also that “it would be better for Virginia if she could get rid of them,” though he added that he had always believed in “gradual emancipation.” The key word here is of course “gradual.” Like his students, Lee did not fully accept that the defeat of the South would lead to the destruction of the traditional southern social system, a restructuring that was intended to favor blacks over whites politically and to erase the social barriers between the races, and his students were still less likely to accept this policy than he was. On the other hand “gradual emancipation” was not what northern reconstructionists wanted, nor were they willing to wait for these changes to be brought about incrementally by God in God’s own good time, as Lee was.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that his tenure at Washington College was marked by at least four racial incidents, which received considerable attention in the North. The first involved four students, one of whom was accused of beating a freedman with a pistol during an angry argument—not exactly a student prank. The second and more serious quarrel, known as the “Johnston affair,” occurred between a group of students and an armed northerner who had expressed strong sympathy for blacks. The third problem was a complaint from a northern women teaching black children that she had been insulted and hounded by students and called a “damned Yankee bitch of a nigger teacher.” The fourth incident stemmed from an accusation that some of the college students had apprehended a “Negro youth” who had shot and wounded one of the sons of Judge Brockenbrough, and marched him to the courthouse with a noose around his neck, with the apparent intent of lynching him.

  Lee inquired carefully into all of these incidents—all of which proved to have been exaggerated—and removed those whom he found guilty (the schoolteacher’s accusation that those insulting her were students of Washington College could not be verified). But he received an unwelcome amount of attention in the northern press. He was accused of running “a school for rebels,” and of being unfit to run an institution of learning, by no less a figure than the renowned abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison savagely questioned the ability of “the vanquished leader of the rebel armies” to teach his students loyalty to the Union “which he so lately attempted to destroy!” Lee, who might have been a prisoner in Fort Monroe alongside Jefferson Davis, but for the intervention of General Grant, ignored the temptation to reply or to justify himself. Still, the problems illustrate the depth of the bitterness that reigned on both sides between North and South, and the fine line Lee had to walk to keep the college functioning. Lee was indifferent to his own reputation, but his character “as a gentleman and a Christian” was such that it protected the college, and even earned the praise of the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, whose sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher told a New York audience that Lee “was entitled to all honor,” and praised him for devoting himself “to the sacred cause of education.”

  Despite all the pressures on him, Lee testified at the trial of Jefferson Davis in Richmond. He even accepted Grant’s invitation to visit him in the White House. Aside from these things Lee seems to have settled back into the kind of quiet domestic life in which he always took the greatest pleasure. Although Mrs. Lee was unable to cross a room without the use of crutches, the house was always full; his daughters were often home to keep him company; he and Mildred, when she was home, went riding together, with Mildred on Lucy Long, the mare Jeb Stuart had given him. The horse had been lost and presumed captured by the Federals in the spring of 1864, but was returned to
Lee in 1866. The Lee daughters enjoyed ice-skating when the ponds froze, and there were plenty of gentlemen callers to keep them amused, but no serious suitors to worry their father. Mildred, a born animal lover, collected cats, including Tom the Nipper, who had been reared in the stable next to Traveller’s box stall before moving into the house. Tom the Nipper would become a major character in Traveller, a novel by Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, 122 years later.

  Lee frequently took Mrs. Lee to one of the spas around Lexington, since bathing in the waters was her only relief from constant pain. They both enjoyed the social life. Lee was always happiest in good company, so much so that it seems sad that he spent the best part of his life as a soldier. Despite the catastrophe of the defeat and its consequences for his beloved Virginia, the years from 1866 to 1870 seem among the happiest of his life, and this was the period when the formidable hero thawed into a far less august, less remote figure. He remained a loving father and husband, with a strong interest in agriculture, and a teasing, affectionate sense of humor, very much the man Mary had married. Those who met him then described him as bright and cheerful, and despite the awe in which he was held he seems to have had as good a time as his health would allow. But there was no question that his health was deteriorating, and that the pains in his left arm and his chest which were ascribed to rheumatism were in fact angina, signaling blocked arteries and a failing heart. His decline was so noticeable that the board and the professors of Washington College constantly urged him to take a holiday—a suggestion that he courteously resisted. Even so, Lee was in constant pain, and found walking increasingly difficult. His workload continued to be as formidable as ever—he was completing a revised and corrected edition of his father’s book, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department, not so much a labor of love as of duty; running what was now a fast-growing college; and working fitfully at a history of his campaigns, while continuing to deal personally with the moral welfare of his students and maintaining a truly astonishing volume of correspondence, all of it in his own hand.

  When he at last consented to take the vacation that everybody had been urging on him for so long, it was a significant choice. Accompanied by his daughter Agnes he decided to visit his daughter Annie’s grave, near White Sulphur Springs. This was a pilgrimage he had long wanted to make, and although it was no great distance, it taxed Lee’s failing strength. It took him two days to reach Richmond, by canal boat and train. What would once have been an easy trip for him was now fraught with difficulties, and rendered more difficult by the number of people who recognized him. In Lexington, people had grown used to him, but as he approached Richmond his journey started to resemble a Roman triumph or a medieval progress, attracting public attention that tired him still further. The senate of Virginia “unanimously extended to him the privilege of the floor,” which he courteously declined; crowds waited outside his hotel; he was deluged with invitations. He accepted a visit from Colonel John S. Mosby, the controversial Confederate cavalry leader* whose depredation of Union supply lines had once prompted Grant to order Sheridan to hang “without trial” any of Mosby’s men not in recognizable uniform. Mosby returned bringing with him a reluctant Pickett. Lee was happy enough to see Mosby, but is said to have greeted Pickett with icy courtesy. As for Pickett, once he was outside Lee’s rooms he turned to Mosby and said, “That old man had my division massacred at Gettysburg.” Mosby had already made his peace with Grant, and there is some dispute over whether his description of the meeting is correct. It seems likely, however, that Lee had already heard about Pickett’s accusation; indeed Pickett made much the same remark directly to Lee shortly after the attack failed, and Lee may well have resented his presence.

  Lee and Agnes proceeded to Warrenton, where Lee saw for the first time the truncated obelisk that had been placed over Annie’s grave; at its foot, Agnes placed “white hyacinths and gray moss.” From there they proceeded, by slow and ever more tiring stages, and facing ever larger crowds, toward Lee’s final destination, his father’s grave on Cumberland Island. Lee wrote to Mary that the grave was in good order, but “the house had been burned and the island devastated.” As he passed through Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; and Jacksonville, Florida, he was greeted by brass bands playing “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and by masses of his former soldiers, with cheers, speeches, parades, and rebel yells. Whether he wished it or not, Lee’s journey to say good-bye to his daughter Annie and his father turned into a huge, protracted Confederate celebration, which he could neither prevent nor discourage. Yet the purpose of his journey remained clear, at any rate to Lee himself. He was saying farewell to a father whom he had never known all that well, and whose erratic political career and irresponsible personal behavior Lee had sought always to avoid; and to a daughter he had hoped would comfort him in his old age.

  Agnes herself fell ill under the strain of the voyage, and Lee felt obliged to return along the coast via Charleston, where he was greeted rapturously. After making another spiritual farewell at Shirley, the great house where his mother had grown up and where she and his father were married, he continued on to White House, where Mary and Markie Williams, for so many years Lee’s favorite correspondent, had already joined Rooney. The house itself, to whose front door Mary Lee had pinned a contemptuous note to Federal troops in 1862, had been burned to the ground, and Rooney now lived in the crude, poorly furnished home of the former overseer.

  After ten days, Lee returned to Richmond, where, despite his dislike of posing for portraits, he stayed long enough to allow the young artist Edward V. Valentine to take measurements and make sketches for a bust. This was perhaps an example of foresight, for Valentine would be chosen to create a white marble recumbent statue of Robert E. Lee, which was completed in 1875 and placed in its final position in the center of the Lee Chapel in 1883.

  In Richmond Lee consulted once again with his physicians, who were no more helpful about his condition than before. Lee may already have guessed from his breathlessness that his heart trouble was more serious than they knew, or were willing to tell him. That was probably why he had decided to undertake the long and tiring trip, aware that he would not have another opportunity of making it.

  He returned to Lexington to resume his duties. The previous year, he and Mary had settled into a new house, designed with every possible innovation in terms of heating and plumbing that was available for the day, and built by the college at cost of over $15,000, a considerable amount in the mid-nineteenth century. Lee had accepted the house with many doubts and second thoughts, and in the end agreed only because he thought Mary would be more comfortable there. It had a great veranda where she could sit in her “rolling chair” in good weather. With rare prescience the trustees of the college had agreed that Mrs. Lee should have the use of the “new president’s residence” for life, should Lee predecease her, as well as a generous life annuity.

  On September 28, 1870, Lee put in a normal day’s work. After dinner—what we would call lunch, then still the principal meal of the day—he put on his old blue military cape against the rain and walked to a church meeting. When he returned, half an hour late for supper, something in his expression caught Mrs. Lee’s attention, and she asked him if he was chilly. As she poured him a cup of tea, he moved his lips to say grace, but no words came. Clearly, Lee had suffered a severe stroke, or perhaps an aneurysm, and was unable to speak or move.

  Doctors were sent for, and he was carried to a couch in the dining room, which would soon be emptied of other furniture to make a sickroom for him. Over the next two weeks he lay there, visited by friends and family, occasionally indicating by an indistinct word or a gesture that his mind was still active. He seemed to dismiss any suggestion that he would recover, or ride Traveller again, with a resigned upward gaze.

  By midnight of October 9–10 he seems to have reached a crisis—perhaps another stroke, perhaps the onset of pneumonia, since his breathing was irregular and he suffered “a chill.” Those ar
ound him—Mrs. Lee was now constantly at his side—claimed that he roused himself to say, “Hill must come up!” It is possible that his mind was wandering. Then, after a long pause, at dawn on October 10, he said, firmly and distinctly, as if he were preparing for battle, “Strike the tent.” Soon afterward he died.

  The announcement was telegraphed to the Richmond Dispatch, and from there to the world:

  LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA, October 12, 1870

  10 a.m.

  General Lee died this morning at half past nine o’clock. He began to grow worse on Monday and continued to sink until he breathed his last this morning. He died as he lived, calmly and quietly, and in the full assurance of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The places of business are all closed, the bells are tolling, and the whole community thrown into the deepest grief.

  He died with the same stoic dignity that had always defined his character in life. His place in history is unique: “a Caesar without his ambition: a Frederick without his tyranny; a Napoleon without his selfishness; and a Washington without his reward.” His character has been best defined by Stephen Vincent Benét, in John Brown’s Body:

  Yet—look at the face again—look at it well—

  This man was not repose, this man was act.

  This man who murmured “It is well that war

  Should be so terrible, if it were not

  We might become too fond of it—” and showed

  Himself, for once, completely as he lived

  In the laconic balance of that phrase;