Commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War.
military leadercivil warconfederate
Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall, Virginia, into one of the state's oldest families. His father, the Revolutionary War cavalry hero Light-Horse Harry Lee, squandered the family fortune and abandoned them, and the boy grew up determined to be everything his father was not: disciplined, dutiful, and careful with money. He graduated second in his class at West Point in 1829 without a single demerit, married Mary Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, and spent seventeen years as an army engineer before winning fame in the Mexican War, where General Winfield Scott called him the best soldier he had ever seen in the field. He served as superintendent of West Point, and in October 1859 he led the Marines who captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry.
In April 1861 Lincoln's advisers offered Lee command of the Union army. He refused, resigned his commission, and went with Virginia, saying he could not raise his hand against his family and his home. He also owned enslaved people through his wife's estate, opposed abolition, and fought for a nation founded to preserve slavery; his letters called slavery a moral evil while insisting it was God's problem to solve, not man's. In June 1862 he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia and turned the war around. He drove McClellan from the gates of Richmond in the Seven Days, crushed Pope at Second Bull Run, fought the bloodiest day of the war to a standstill at Antietam, and won his masterpiece at Chancellorsville in May 1863 by splitting his smaller army in the face of the enemy. Two months later he lost a third of that army at Gettysburg, and he took the blame himself.
For the last year of the war he held Ulysses S. Grant at bay through the Overland Campaign and the siege of Petersburg with an army that was starving and shrinking. On April 9, 1865, he surrendered at Appomattox, told his men to go home and be good citizens, and refused calls for guerrilla war. He spent his final years as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, urging young Southerners to accept the Union, and died there on October 12, 1870. His home at Arlington had already become a national cemetery for the Union dead. Later generations turned him into the marble saint of the Lost Cause; the record shows a brilliant commander and an honorable man by his own lights who chose the wrong side of the central moral question of his age. Follow the war he fought in the Civil War journey.
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