Lee, Robert E.

Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870), Confederate Civil War general.Born at Stratford, a family plantation in Virginia, Robert E. Lee was the son of Henry Lee (“Light‐Horse Harry”) of the Revolutionary War. He graduated with great distinction from West Point in 1829, and in 1831 he married Mary Custis, daughter of Martha Washington's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who was also George Washington's adopted son. The Lees made their home at Arlington, the Custis mansion overlooking Washington, D.C. The marriage produced four daughters and three sons. The sons— George Washington Custis Lee, William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, and Robert E. Lee, Jr.—all served as officers in the Confederate army.

Lee's continuous and distinguished service in the U.S. Army before the Civil War included highly acclaimed action in the Mexican War, the superintendency at West Point from September 1852 to March 1855, and western Indian fighting. Lee was a protégé of Gen. Winfield Scott, general‐in‐chief of the U.S. Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. When Virginia seceded, Colonel Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army (he had previously been offered high Federal command, but rejected it) and accepted command of his state's military forces. After service that included a position as military adviser to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Lee in June 1862 succeeded Joseph E. Johnston as commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia. Three years later, in February 1865, he was also appointed general‐in‐chief of the Confederate forces. In April 1865, having been besieged in the Richmond defenses, he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. Lee and his soldiers were paroled by Grant to go home.

After the war, Lee rejected lucrative business opportunities and accepted the presidency of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia. An excellent educational administrator, Lee's leadership was marked by curriculum development in advance of the times. He died there in 1870 and is buried on the campus of the college, subsequently known as Washington and Lee University.

Lee was a man of high personal character and intelligence, charismatic and charming, a natural leader. As a leading actor in the Civil War legend of martial glory, he has become a legendary figure, an American hero of exceptional nobility. The legend rationalizes or rejects characteristics of the man that might lessen his appeal.

Lee's fame rests principally on his leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia. Having driven a numerically superior Federal army from the Virginia Peninsula near Richmond in 1862, Lee, ably supported by “Stonewall” Jackson, won a series of brilliant tactical victories in 1862 and 1863 at the Second Battle of Bull Run, and the Battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and he fought George B. McClellan to a standstill at the Battle of Antietam. These battles were followed, however, by defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Subsequently, Lee conducted a skillful, costly defense against Grant's Overland Campaign in Virginia in 1864–65, but in this he eventually failed.

Questions have been raised about Lee's leadership. In strategic terms, Lee believed that the South had to defeat the North militarily, that is, by actual combat in the field as distinguished from conducting the contest so that the North would give it up as too costly in blood and treasure. Thus, in a letter to President Davis on 6 July 1864 he wrote that it was necessary for the Confederacy to “defeat or drive the armies of the enemy from the field.” Accordingly, before being besieged, Lee took the offensive whenever possible. Critics argue that in view of the South's manpower and materiel disadvantages, it could not defeat the North militarily. Lee's strategic and tactical aggressiveness produced unnecessarily large and disproportionate Confederate casualties, which the outnumbered South was unable to replace. These casualties significantly reduced the number of troops, increasing the South's disadvantage. This, in turn, deprived his army of mobility and ultimately led to its being caught in the fatal siege.

Lee's defenders reply that a desperate situation required desperate gambles, and that his battlefield successes were perhaps the principal encouragement to the continued Confederate resistance. Whatever his shortcomings, Lee became the white South's greatest hero, and many northern and foreign commentators have praised both the man and the general.
[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Civil War: Changing Interpretations; Petersburg, Siege of; Wilderness to Petersburg Campaign.]

Bibliography

Douglas Southall Freeman , R. E. Lee, 4 vols. 1934–35.
J. F. C. Fuller , Grant & Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, repr. 1957; 1982.
Thomas L. Connelly , The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society, 1977.
Alan T. Nolan , Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History, 1991.
Emory H. Thomas , Robert E. Lee, 1995.
Joseph L. Harsh , Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–1862, 1997.

Alan T. Nolan