By Tom Morrow
He spent most of his military career as a U.S. soldier. When the war between the state broke out, he was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). Abraham Lincoln offered him high command of the Army, but from 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee chose to return to his native Virginia and command the Confederate forces.
Lee was born Jan. 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He was the son of the Revolutionary War’s Maj. Gen. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III.
One of Lee’s great-grandparents, Henry Lee I, was a prominent Virginia colonist of English descent. The Lee family is one of Virginia’s first families, with Richard Lee originally arriving from England in the early 1600s. Robert E. Lee’s mother grew up at Shirley Plantation, one of the most elegant homes in Virginia. Lee’s father “Light Horse Harry,” was a not very successful tobacco planter, who suffered severe financial reverses from failed investments.
A top graduate of West Point, for more than 30 years, Robert E. Lee was an exceptional officer in the U.S. Army’s combat engineer corps. He served at many posts throughout the United States, and distinguished himself during the Mexican-American War. He then was appointed as superintendent of at West Point.
When Virginia declared its secession from the Union in April 1861, Lee reluctantly chose to follow his home state, despite his personal desire for the country to remain intact and despite Lincoln’s offer of senior Union Army command.
In the early days of the Civil War, Lee didn’t lead troops in the field. During the first year, he served as a senior military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Once Lee took command of the main field army in 1862, he quickly emerged as a shrewd tactician and battlefield commander, winning most of his battles, all against far superior Union armies.
However, Lee’s strategic foresight was more questionable, and both of his major offensives into the North ended in defeat. Historians have questioned Lee’s aggressive tactics, which resulted in high casualties at a time when the Confederacy had a shortage of manpower. An example was the bloody battles at Gettysburg and Antietam. Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s campaigns bore down on the Confederacy in 1864 and 1865, and despite inflicting heavy casualties.
There was much animosity against Lee’s battlefield success, so much so that the Union Army confiscated his wife’s plantation in Arlington, Va., outside of Washington, D.C., and began burying fallen soldiers in the front lawn of the mansion. Today, Lee’s home still sits on a hill at the end of Arlington Cemetery, overlooking the nation’s sacred national military burial grounds.
Unable to turn the war’s tide, on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. By then, Lee was supreme commander of the remaining Southern armies; other Confederate forces swiftly capitulated after his surrender. While a number of rebel pockets of resistance remained, Lee rejected a sustained insurgency against Union forces and called for reconciliation between the two sides.
It is generally believed that Lee, personally, was against slavery and openly opposed secession. After the war, he became president of what is now Washington and Lee University. Lee supported President Andrew Johnson’s program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, but he opposed the radical Republican proposals to give freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates.
Lee urged the radical Republicans to rethink their position between the North and the South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation’s political life.
Since the Civil War, Lee has become the one of the great heroes of the Civil War, as his popularity has become almost mythical even in the North, especially after his death in 1870. He is buried in Lee’s Chapel at Washington & Lee University.
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