Of Robert Edward Lee’s youth we know little with certainty. He was born January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall in Virginia’s Westmoreland County.1 His father was General Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a hero of the Revolution. His mother was Ann Hill Carter, daughter of Charles Carter of ancient aristocracy in the Old Dominion. When the boy was ten Harry Lee recalled that “Robert was always good,” but spent barely more than two years with his family after good Robert was born.2 Arrested for debt in 1809, Lee spent more than a year in jail. Released in 1810 and nearly impoverished, he moved his family to a rented house at 611 Cameron Street in Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington, where the family probably lived on Ann’s income, and it was Ann who tugged on family ties a year later to persuade the leaseholder of her uncle William Henry Fitzhugh’s “commodious dwelling house” at 607 Oronoco Street to sublet all or part of it to her family. It sat at the edge of town on a one-acre lot; it was an area some thought unhealthy, and Ann Lee was already unwell.3
When the second war with Great Britain came, the hero of the first one opposed it. In July 1812 Henry Lee went to Baltimore and bravely inserted himself between a pro-war mob and an anti-war newspaper. Authorities put Lee and others in the town jail for their own safety, but the mob would not be denied, and on the evening of July 28 it broke into the jail and seized Lee. They repeatedly stabbed him with pocket-knives. One assailant tried to amputate Lee’s nose and left it a bloody mess. Others poured molten tallow into his eyes. The mob only failed to kill him from being too drunk.
He returned to Alexandria the ruin of a once-great man and stayed less than a year, broke, and broken in body and spirit. When Lee sat crumpled in the family pew at Christ Episcopal Church, his bandages made him a terrifying apparition to children.4 He wished now only to get away, to seek peace and perhaps prosperity elsewhere. Counting on his relations and Ann’s to care for his family, he left the country in the summer of 1813, never to return in life. His youngest son was just six, but Lee scarcely knew him.
Young Robert was born into debt. Less than three weeks after his birth his father advertised the auction of six thousand acres to settle just one debt of $16,666.5 At least Ann Lee had independent income.6 When Charles Carter died in 1806 he left his daughter more than £2,000 in cash, plus a share of a number of properties in Tidewater and northern Virginia, specifically providing that her inheritance go into a trust managed by his son and others to provide her income “free from the claim, demand, hindrance or molestation of her husband Genl Henry Lee or his creditors.”7 Then on June 8, 1807, her twenty-one-year-old sister Mildred died, leaving all but £60 of her estate to Ann, most of it in slaves. Mildred also stipulated that the monetary bequest go into a trust “free from the controul of her husband General Lee” until she passed it on to her children at her death.8 Trustees converted both inheritances to more than a hundred shares of stock in the Bank of Virginia worth about $14,500. From 1807 onward the shares paid a yearly dividend of $1,440 until about 1812, and $1,210 a year thereafter, while Ann derived more revenue from hiring out Mildred’s slaves.9 With annual income of $1,800 or more, several times what most Virginians earned, she was not wealthy, but hardly destitute.10
Childhood is the forgotten chapter of biography. Robert Lee casts barely a shadow in his own story until early manhood. He was said to be an attractive child, teased by older sisters, and spoiled by relations in Fauquier County where he was tutored with cousins.11 If he returned a willful child it did not last long. At home he loved to play in the fenced yard among the viburnum “snowball” trees.12 From the West Indies Henry Lee tried to exert some influence in shaping his older sons, and through them the youngest.13 There was some degree of a breach between husband and wife that his years of absence hardly healed. More than once he asked Carter to tell him of his family in Alexandria. He could not remember his children’s ages.14
Harry’s letters to sons Henry and Charles Carter on life and character filtered to good Robert. He enjoined them to prefer “virtue to all other things,” to shun falsehood and cherish truth, emulate the great men revealed in a study of mankind, and know right from wrong. He valued the sciences far less than the ethical development of their minds, quipping that “we are called to moralize daily, but we seldom turn to geometry.” They should study life rather than nature and regard virtue as the greatest aspiration.15 They should eschew profanity, especially with their social “inferiors,” for it was low and degrading.16 “Avoid all frivolous authors; such as novel writers,” he said, something young Robert took much to heart. “I never could read a novel, because it was the narrative of imaginary action.” He recommended particularly the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with its commentary on command of temper, modesty, piety, abhorrence of vice, and simplicity of diet.17 Most of all, a man should win his reputation “without noise,” be always master of himself, and never yield to passion. His sons must have “complete self-command,” for that was “the pivot upon which the character, fame, and independence of us mortals hang.”18 They must stand for their rights and their beliefs, for often adversity brought forth “the greatest display of genius.”19 Years later Robert called these relics of the father he did not know “letters of love and wisdom.”20
Young Robert Lee’s tutorial instruction probably began around age eight, and for the next two or three years he got a sound introduction to Latin and Greek grammar and vocabulary, rhetoric, and perhaps some rudimentary elements of logic. At ten or eleven he was ready for secondary education, and it was not a good time for financial worries to erupt. Recession and a desperate shortage of cash followed the war with Britain. In May 1816 when Robert was nine, Ann told her son Carter that “there never was a period, when it was so difficult to procure money.” She suffered a fright when it appeared that her Bank of Virginia shares dividend might be halved during a hard currency shortage.21 Then that summer she and other Carter heirs were named in a series of suits to which her absent husband was also a party, which dragged on for a decade.22 She had entered young Carter at Harvard College in 1815, carefully setting aside funds to see him to graduation when the expense of board and tuition approached $300 a year. She still had sons Sidney Smith and Robert to educate, house servants to maintain, and a nominal rent to pay for their house.
Ann was highly sensitive to debt, a concern exaggerated by the return of ill health.23 “I, and my family, must greatly restrict ourselves,” she wrote Carter that same summer. “We have no alternative.” She hired out two more slaves and might do a third, and traded down her carriage horses to garner some cash. Unable to collect the money due her for slave hire, she feared she might have to tap Carter’s college fund, though said that chiefly to admonish him to watch his expenses. Life with Henry Lee clearly made her something of a penny-pincher and alarmist. She even complained that every evening she and Robert and the others had to debate what they could afford to buy at market the next day for dinner, and rarely put two meat dishes on the table at the same time, Robert preferring veal when it was to be had. An unusual cold spell lasting into July forced her to burn more firewood than usual, and even that caused concern.24 In May 1816, in the interest of economy, she moved the family just one block south from Oronoco to her brother-in-law Charles Lee’s house at the corner of Washington and Princess streets. Before too long, however, the family moved back to Oronoco Street.25
She saw a possible solution in the slaves inherited from Mildred. As Ann said herself, slaves were “a species of property extremely inconvenient and disagreeable.” She did not need them herself, but hiring them out was always precarious. The rates for hire fluctuated, and thanks to “the facility of their elopement” when out on hire, she had lost two as runaways in the past nine years. Meanwhile, she complained that the females had been “hitherto and will continue unproductive,” meaning they bore no children. She feared that by the time her children inherited the blacks on her death, an estate of old men and childless women would probably be of no great value. She needed “a more cert
ain, more punctual, and easily obtained, income for the maintenance of herself and the maintenance, education, and rearing of her said Children.”
She asked the county court to allow her to sell the slaves and use the proceeds to buy dividend-producing stock to yield income now and for her children later. A local court denied the plea, but she soon had a petition before the legislature.26 The petition reached the House of Delegates on December 17, and on January 7, 1817, a committee reported finding the petition reasonable. Finally on February 15, 1817, it passed.27 While Ann may have kept a few of her sister’s slaves out at hire, sale of the rest commenced as quickly as possible, and in the end raised enough capital for her to purchase several thousand dollars in shares in Alexandria’s Potomac Bank. It is just as well that she did, for that summer she hired out two more remaining slaves and before the end of the year one of them ran away, putting Ann to the expense of offering a $40 reward.28
Fortunately the Bank of Virginia paid a dividend after all in 1816, though reduced by half that year, but with the addition of the Potomac Bank shares, plus income from slave hire and other lesser sources, Ann’s family income in 1817 was about $3,000, and more than $4,000 in 1818.29 For a change the timing was propitious, for in the fall of that year the family learned that Light Horse Harry had died on March 25, 1818, on the Georgia coast while en route to Virginia. There would be no revival of family fortunes from him. All he left his sons, through their mother, was several thousand valueless acres on the south slope of Buffalo Mountain in faraway Montgomery County in southwestern Virginia, as many more acres in Hardy County in western Virginia that he transferred to their names before his death to protect it from seizure, and surface rights to sixteen hundred acres at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, next to the U.S. Armory.30
The Lees had to move on, and Ann Lee had her own ideas about education. Her sons must learn to write well. “A man who cannot write a good letter on business, or on the subjects of familiar letters, will make an awkward figure in every situation, and will find himself greatly at a loss on many occasions,” she warned. “Indeed I cannot imagine how he could pass through life with satisfaction or respectability.” Writing well would be essential to eminence in any profession, so her boys “must write often now, in the days of your youth, and form a good style.”31 Over all, “attend to your studies,” she told her sons. “A Man is of little importance in society without education. You will regret in after-life, if you neglect to lay in a store of knowledge now.” Sensitive to her husband’s disrepute, she wanted her sons to be respected. “Oh! Let me hear that all respect & love my Son,” she told them, her most ardent wish for each being “that he should deserve the esteem of the whole world.”32 They must “repel every evil” and “indulge such habits only as are consistent with religion and morality.” Robert inculcated her view of “the vanity of every pursuit, not under the control of the most inflexible virtue.”33
She found an affordable school for Robert near at hand. George Washington helped to found the Alexandria Academy in 1786.34 The town’s most distinguished families composed its board of trustees, including Robert’s uncle Edmund Jennings Lee.
In the winter of 1819 the trustees hired Irishman William B. Leary as principal, and during this period of transition Robert Lee probably enrolled for his first term.35 Leary revised the curriculum, replaced history with English grammar, and held his first examinations on July 27, 1820, where two of Robert’s cousins won distinctions.36 In the fall of 1821 Robert E. Lee was quite definitely enrolled.37 Again cousins won premiums after their exams, but not Robert.38 Leary would win no prizes either. He could not manage the business of the academy and handle his classes, and the state of the institution began to deteriorate.39 By May 30, 1822, it owed nearly $1,000, and its bank threatened to seize the property if not repaid. Finally on January 7, 1823, he announced that his school would move to St. Asaph Street for its spring term.40 He moved yet again for the fall, but a bailiff jailed him on October 28 for debt.41
This near chaos was the backdrop for Lee’s secondary education.42 He applied himself to learning ancient history through the language of Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, Xenophon, and likely Herodotus and Thucydides. He studied rhetoric and writing in Longinus’s On the Sublime, poetry in the odes of Horace and Virgil’s works, and history and literature combined in Homer. Besides those titans, Lee read what he called “the small authors,” as well as Andrew Dalzel’s Collectanea Graeca Minora and Collectanea Graeca Majora, anthologies of classical Greek writings. If that were not enough, there was arithmetic, algebra, and the first six books of Euclidian geometry.43 This diet did not form the man, but it informed him, fleshing a frame made by heredity, experience, and his free will. He would never be at disadvantage in learned company.
Ordinarily such a regimen took up to four years of study.44 At the least, Lee spent three terms under Leary in 1821–1822, and probably more like three years, but not after Leary’s arrest.45 Since Leary taught both at the academy and elsewhere, Lee might have studied at any of his venues.46 Withal Robert Lee managed still to be a boy. He ran in the hunt with his Fauquier cousins as the hounds chased foxes, loved riding, and acquired a thorough familiarity with horses.47 He enjoyed an extended cadre of relations, especially uncle Edmund’s boy Cassius F. Lee, as well as friends among the children of Alexandria’s better families. Uncles Fitzhugh and Carter Williams treated him with paternal affection and, as he recalled four decades later, “made my days so happy.”48
There was attention to the metaphysical, but neither parent stressed religious zeal. Henry Lee was an Enlightenment Deist, accepting a unique and benevolent god, but rejecting organized religion, revelation, miracles, and evangelism. He found God in reason and the natural world, but He did not interfere in its affairs, making prayer pointless. The Enlightenment shaped Ann Lee as well, but as a rationalist. Her God actively ordered human affairs and gave purpose to prayer, but still man was helpless in the face of God’s will. Her religion arrayed virtue and morality in daily life to earn God’s favor.49 There being no formal ritual other than prayer, Ann joined family and friends in attending Alexandria’s Christ Episcopal Church, where she saw Robert baptized, and where the Reverend William Meade often ran him through his Anglican catechism, though he never sought confirmation in his youth.50 “Pray fervently for faith in Jesus Christ,” Ann told her sons. “He is the only rock of your salvation, and the only security for your resurrection from the grave.” She accepted a holy trinity and original sin, and that Christ was a god not a man.51 Robert’s faith lagged well behind hers. He might hope for Almighty favor, but expecting little, he expended little to secure it. Thus far his was a very conventional, rather arm’s-length sort of Christianity.
He learned much more from his mother. When the navy gave Smith Lee a midshipman’s appointment and he left home in 1820, thirteen-year-old Robert became the man of the family, and necessarily helped Ann run the house.52 They suffered a substantial blow in 1819 when the Bank of Virginia sustained a serious fall in the depressed economy. Its share value plummeted from $130 to $80, and in the next few years fell as low as $72. It paid no dividend at all for the first half of that year, and for the next two years paid barely half its previous yield. The financial crisis hurt the Potomac Bank less dramatically, but still its dividend fell more than one-third.53 Fortunately both recovered in 1820, and over the next nine years Ann’s annual income averaged almost $3,000.54 Now an attorney, Carter moved his practice to Oronoco Street in 1823, probably to their house and sharing expenses, though she complained that if he made money, “little of it is seen at home.”55
Even moderately constrained circumstances could be spirit breaking for a daughter of the proud Carters. Willful from youth, high spirited and a bit of a snob, Ann Lee had also been active, witty, and popular in a wide circle. The buffeting of the years reduced her now to what one cousin called a “great invalid,” middle-aged, growing ever weaker and self-pitying, a mother who could trap a care-giving child.56 Robert
looked a likely victim of the snare. With Carter at Harvard, older brother Smith off for the navy, one sister too frail to be of use and the other too young, caring for Ann Lee and tending household affairs fell to him. He went to market, oversaw maintenance of the house and grounds, helped the aged and inept slave coachman Nat look after the carriage horses, and held the keys of the house.57 Almost daily he took Ann for carriage rides and conveyed her mail and messages about the town, recalling that “I was my mothers outdoor agent & confidential messenger.”58 She found him indispensable, and often said that he was both son and daughter to her.59 People who knew them saw more of her than his father in young Lee.
All that responsibility came at a cost. Lee spent his teen years repressing feelings, a habit that proved hard to break in manhood.60 He kept doubts, hurts, and disappointments to himself, resolved that he could show joy but not grief.61 He could not open himself. “I am not very accessible,” he confessed later, “and am as niggardly of my friendship as if it was worth having.”62 He had little time for that if he was to leave a better legacy than his father.63 There would be many acquaintances, a few close friends, and one or two surrogate fathers, like “good old Uncle Fitzhugh” and George Washington Parke Custis of Arlington, whose paternal concern young Lee never forgot.64
It may have affected his studies, for his name was absent from the lists of top scholars.65 Leary could be effusive praising students, as with Lee’s contemporary William Maynadier, whom he extolled for “a desire to improve, to be preeminent in his studies, to yield to none the post of honour in the class.”66 His comments on pupil Lee were blandly economical. “I flatter myself that his information will be found adequate to the most sanguine expectations of his friends,” the professor wrote. “I am certain that when examined he will neither disappoint me or his friends.”67 Leary praised Lee’s “conduct and his literary information,” and his “correct and gentlemanly deportment.”68 Yet he won no prizes even for that. Lee himself confessed that he found Leary’s words “less flattering and rhetorical” than he might wish.69
Crucible of Command Page 2
