Ironically, Lee blamed democracy itself. A tyranny lurked within the will of a majority that lacked protections for the minority. “It has been evident for years that the country was doomed to run the full length of democracy,” he said, “to what a fearful pass it has brought us.” If the border slave states like Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri should secede, fourteen slave states would face sixteen free states. “One half of the country will be arrayed against the other,” he said. Any attempt to maintain Federal authority must lead to war.68
Lee pinned small hope on Senator John Crittenden’s proposed compromise calling for amendments to the Constitution reinstating the Missouri Compromise and instituting a number of protections for slavery, including a bar on any future amendments interfering with it. Though he thought them “fair & just,” and hoped for popular support, he knew it was too late. Seceding states had already seized undefended Federal property within their borders, and to him that meant they were beyond compromise. “Their course is taken,” he said, and should all the slave states array themselves in unison, no compromise could keep the peace now.
Lee wanted Virginia to stand the right ground. “I would wish that she might be able to maintain it & to save the Union,” he told family in January, but at the same time advised them not to invest in state bonds, and to convert bank deposits into property or secure personal loans to protect it against financial collapse. They were all waiting on the turn of events, and for him in faraway Texas, where news came slowly, he feared the country could be at war for days before he found out. “God rescue us from the folly of our acts,” he prayed.69 Should Texas secede, he expected state authorities would order his regiment to leave, which was fine with him, affirming that “I have no desire to serve a foreign Govt.” Meanwhile, his officers and men weighed allegiances. Lee found “all are anxious & uncertain,” but as always, he felt powerless to do aught but “trust to the overruling providence of merciful God.”70
Lee was a man in the middle, balancing his loves and loyalties, his patriotism, and his sense of where or whether he belonged in a Union no longer what he remembered from youth. “Our country requires now every one to put forth all his ability regardless of self,” he told Custis at the beginning of February, yet Lee himself watched passively as events unfolded.71 He had not lost his conviction that it was improper for soldiers to meddle in politics, and perhaps he felt that as a serving officer he should not speak out. In any case, there was little he could do except perhaps try to influence Virginia’s course, and probably not even that. On February 23, 1861, with seven states out to form a new Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama, he felt helpless, saying “I must try & be patient & await the end for I can do nothing to hasten or retard it.”72
Two weeks earlier he had received orders to report to Scott in Washington. He reached Arlington on March 1 and met immediately with Scott, who no doubt informed him that Colonel Edwin V. Sumner of the 1st Cavalry in Kansas was being promoted brigadier general, and Lee was now to be full colonel to take command of Sumner’s regiment. Kansas was still a tinderbox, and for some years the mission of the 1st Cavalry had been to keep the peace, a politically sensitive mission that warranted face-to-face consultation with Scott.73 Lee’s commission reached him on March 28, signed by the new president, Abraham Lincoln, but he waited two days before accepting.74
The state of the country constantly occupied his thoughts now. A Virginia convention had been debating secession for six weeks with no decision. Since his first loyalty was to his state, its actions must guide his. If secession was imminent, that could put him in an equivocal position should he accept a commission now and leave for Kansas, only to resign later. “Honour” meant good faith with the Union as well as the Old Dominion. Lee preferred to avoid inner conflicts just as much as personal confrontations, and mused almost wistfully that he might rather be a farmer, much as he had disliked managing Arlington. By March 30 the pro-Union forces in the state convention still appeared ascendant, and rumors in Washington suggested that Lincoln would back down from confrontation over Federal garrisons in Fort Sumter at Charleston and Fort Pickens at Pensacola. Events suggested that without a more direct challenge to the well-being of Virginia itself, the state was not going to jump, making it safe for Lee to accept his commission and hope for the best. It was a slim hope, for within two days of accepting he advised Custis not to resign his own commission “till I did.”75
In fact, the Confederacy had offered him a brigadier’s star in its new army two weeks earlier, and politicians from seceding states probably made similar overtures to him before they left Washington.76 Lee quite properly did not respond. But then his two loyalties collided when Confederate batteries in Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the garrison capitulated two days later. He visited his Unionist aunt Anna Fitzhugh at Ravensworth just after the news reached Arlington. “I hope you are not going to leave your position in the army and go South,” she told him. He replied that “I have no idea of such a thing.”77
Lincoln issued a call on April 15 for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. Two days later the Virginia convention went into secret session one more time to debate secession. That same day Scott summoned Lee to meet on the morrow, and Lee received a note from Lincoln’s advisor Francis Preston Blair, father of the St. Louis politician, asking him to call the next morning before seeing Scott. When Lee left Arlington for his meeting all he knew was that the convention was still in secret session late the previous afternoon. Rumor did circulate that it adopted a secession ordinance, but no one was yet sure.78 He could expect that in this emergency his services would be needed, just as Scott called on him in the Harpers Ferry business. In fact, Blair offered him a soldier’s dream. There were only four field-grade general officers in the army. Scott was seventy-five and John E. Wool was seventy-seven, both too old. William S. Harney, though only sixty, was a Tennessean not entirely trusted. Twiggs was the fourth, but he had already gone over to the rebels, replaced by sixty-four-year-old Sumner, now on his way to the Pacific Coast. Lincoln and Scott needed someone vigorous, experienced, reliable, and most of all loyal, to raise and energetically lead the new army. Scott thought only of Lee. A Virginian himself, Scott knew that a Southern officer could put duty to the nation above his native state. Blair conveyed to him Lincoln’s offer of a major general’s two stars and command of the new army. Only the aged Scott would outrank him, putting Lee in line to become commanding general within a few years at most.
Lee already knew his answer. He politely but firmly declined, assuring Blair that he deplored secession, but he opposed an invasion of the South to quell it, especially since any campaign must march across Virginia. Then he went to the War Department. While he waited in the anteroom, others there saw him pacing, unable to sit or stand still, clearly troubled and on his face what one thought an “expression of intense distress.”79 When he gave Scott his decision the old general was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. “He had fallen into that delusion [of] State rights,” Scott said three years later, “and followed its lead, while his heart was with the old flag.” Over the years he had seen in Lee no greatness in any one particular, but rather what he called “a combination of excellencies.” He loved Lee and knew that Lee loved him.80 But Scott, too, had come to a decision. An officer unwilling to accept any assignment given ought to resign, and he advised Lee he should do so immediately. It was a suggestion, not an order.
Lee went to the navy yard to see his brother Smith Lee, since the same dilemma confronted both. Hasty action now could needlessly end their careers if Virginia did not secede, and Lee was not yet settled on resignation. He asked his brother for his thoughts on “the correct course for me to pursue.”81 Since the only choices before him were resignation or taking the promotion and army command, Lee’s struggle was to find a course that allowed him to accept. Smith Lee had been pondering the question all that week. “It was a severe struggle with h
im,” his wife wrote soon afterward. He would be giving up a profession he loved in return for uncertainty, “taking sides, North or South, to fight against his own people or for them,” she said, or “to fight against your State, where your kindred & children were, or with them.”82
They parted still undecided, but not so Virginia. Lee went into Alexandria the next morning and learned that the convention had voted for secession in its secret session on April 17, but only now released the news. When he stopped in a pharmacy to pay a bill, he heard yet more fulminating on leaving the Union. Sadly, he told the apothecary that “I am one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of secession.”83 A popular referendum on May 23 was to be held, and Lee saw a slim hope of averting resignation if the voters rejected the act.84 Nevertheless, the convention had already asked Governor John Letcher to mobilize volunteers in defense, which meant that in a few weeks Virginia would have some kind of army just across the Potomac from Lincoln’s.
Even while Lee was in Alexandria, Virginia volunteers took over the ruins of the United States Armory at Harpers Ferry, burned the day before by its evacuating garrison, while in Richmond state authorities seized Union vessels in the James River and the customs house and post office, acts that made avoiding a more serious clash before the referendum unlikely. “War seems to have commenced,” Lee wrote brother Smith when he got back to Arlington, “and I am liable at any time to be ordered on duty which I could not conscientiously perform.” Now his position was untenable. Even if he went to his regiment in Kansas, it would likely be ordered east in the emergency, and meanwhile he could receive orders at any moment that would pit him against Virginians then and there. To resign after receiving orders would be dishonorable. The only way to avoid that was to resign immediately. Early the next morning, on April 20, on coming downstairs from his bed chamber, he drafted his resignation and sent it to the War Department.85 With it he enclosed a heartfelt letter to Scott, saying he would have resigned when they met “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life.” He hoped never to take arms again, “save in defense of my native state.”86 “I had to act at once,” he told Smith. “I am now a private citizen and have no other ambition than to remain at home,” he said. “I have no desire ever again to draw my sword.”87
For some time afterward, Lee clearly felt he needed to explain his action to family and friends, and perhaps himself. “I suppose you will all think I have done very wrong,” he told his family that morning after reading to them his note to Scott. He still hoped Virginia could avoid secession, but having refused a command, there was nothing else for him in the army that could save him from choosing sides, and he told them that “I thought I ought to wait no longer.”88 Hours later he told his sister Ann Marshall that “with all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” In an echo of his earlier aphoristic “save that of honour” exception, his explanations for resignation were virtually verbatim: “save in defense of my native state” and “draw my sword.”89 Asked to advise others on their course, he responded only that “I merely tell you what I have done that you may do better.”90 As before, he protested that if it had been left to him he would have “forborne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed,” though true to form, he declined to enter the public debate while in uniform. Even as a private citizen it would have been out of character for him to speak publicly, besides which he assumed—almost certainly correctly—that nothing he could say would sway Virginia’s course, or the South’s, or the Union’s. They were all now “in a state of war which will yield to nothing.”91
That same evening came a message from Letcher asking for a meeting. Lee could guess the import of that. The next morning he sat quietly at the end of his family’s pew at Christ Church, but disappeared immediately after the service, so distracted that he left his daughter waiting outside in the carriage while he took a long walk along the canal with Cassius Lee, to share his uncertainty should the governor ask him to command Virginia forces. Cassius advised him to do nothing until and unless the referendum to secede was ratified. Lee preferred that course, but felt unsure that it would be possible to postpone yet another difficult decision.
Waiting back in her carriage, his daughter told a cousin that since her father’s resignation, “it is like a death in the house.”92 The next day Lee rode again to Ravensworth to see his beloved aunt. When he found her still in bed asleep he decided not to have her disturbed. “Give my love to her,” he told a servant, “and tell her that I am going to Richmond.” When Anna Fitzhugh finally awoke and heard the news, she exclaimed, “I am so sorry that such a good man would take up such a bad cause.”93 On Monday April 22 he boarded the morning train for Richmond.
In the days and years ahead many who had known and loved R. E. Lee echoed her refrain, among them his old teacher Benjamin Hallowell. “It was a matter of great regret to me that he thought it right to take the course he did,” he said, “but I never entertained the least doubt that he was influenced by what he believed to be his duty.”94 For the rest of his life Lee tried to convince people that he had done just that, but privately he feared they did not understand. “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same,” he would say a few years hence. “The circumstances which govern their actions change; and their conduct must conform to the new order of things.”95 Circumstances had changed, and he had tried to do right. Still, he never forgot Dominguez, guerilla and sometime scout for Lee in Mexico, whose aid the army applauded even while he seemingly betrayed his countrymen. People often despised a traitor, while praising his treachery, which Lee thought “seems to be the universal sentiment of man.”96 How would the world regard him—as patriot or traitor? Anna Fitzhugh feared she knew, crying that “he has ruined himself forever.”97
Sometime later Lee reduced his view of the case before him to an abstract. “Whenever propriety, talent & virtue are all on one side, & only ignorant numbers, with a mere sprinkling of propriety & talent to agitate them & make use of them, or misinformed or mistaken virtue to sanction them on the other side, an honest man can take time to deliberate which side he will choose.”98 In his mind now the South had that “propriety, talent & virtue,” while the North had “ignorant numbers” and all the rest. He, the “honest man” in the middle, took his time and plotted his course carefully, deliberately, by a series of mileposts. First he positioned himself by the priority of his loyalty to Virginia. Then he established the limits within her course and Washington’s that determined when he should or should not take action, which even left open the possibility of accepting army command. He made secession his last landmark, and then—and only then—did he commit the decisive act. As with every decision of his life to date, there was nothing precipitate or impulsive in his decision. Certainly he was concerned with appearances, with his perception of honor and his need for others to think him an honorable man, but in the end it was a rational decision based on his values and the circumstances before him. Ironically, considering the man he was to become before long, it was neither a bold nor daring act, for two-thirds of the other Virginia-born officers took the same step. He consulted with others, but made his decision himself. He took longer than some to make it, and did so in the absence of acceptable options rather than as a man taking a risk. It was the move of a conservative man joining a revolution.
Captain Grant watched that revolt unfold with dismay, as slave state radicals prepared to make good their threats once it was clear that Lincoln was elected. Now his evening reading to Julia was the speeches echoing in Congress and around the South. By December 10, 1860, he expected at least five of the slave states to secede and prepare to fight, if not more.99
“It is hard to realize that a state or states should commit so suicidal an act,” he wrote a friend, yet he predicted that “the present granny of an Executive,” Buchanan, would do nothing. Rather, he feared the administration would somehow generate sympathy for the seceding states among those still in the Union. He kept his eyes on Missouri, where armed civil war threatened before a single state seceded. Rumors of an invasion by a legion of anti-slavery Kansans called “Jayhawkers” had prompted General Daniel M. Frost of the Missouri militia to lead several hundred pro-slavery volunteers to the western border to stop them. Frost was an old friend, one of those who endorsed Grant’s application for county engineer, but he dismissed the campaign as “the farce no[w] going on in Southern Kansas,” and feared having several hundred armed pro-slave—and presumably pro-secession—men at large. “Just a few men have produced all the present difficulties,” he observed, “and I dont see why, by the same rule, a few hundred men could not carry Missouri out of the Union.”100 He had known many Southern men in the army, knew how they felt, and what they might do.101
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