The General in His Study

The writing is blurred and the paper nearly translucent, but the scene it portrays is vivid. In a recently discovered letter, Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of Robert E. Lee, describes how her father wrestled with the decision to resign his commission in the United States Army and side with the South. The letter, found in a folder of fragments at the Virginia Historical Society, was written in 1871 to Charles Marshall, Lee’s former aide-to–camp, as he prepared to write a biography of the great general.

It provides the most reliable information currently available to historians, overshadowing the questionable second-hand accounts that scholars once had to rely on. Not only was Mary Custis Lee an eyewitness to the scene, but her letter was written just a few years after the war, whereas the traditional depictions did not appear until decades later.

And her words fundamentally alter the story of Lee’s fateful choice. Lee biographers have long claimed that his decision to leave the Army was an inevitable one, driven by the pull of relatives, state and tradition. However, as his daughter shows us, in the end the decision was highly personal, made in spite of family differences and the military conventions he revered.

Lee’s decision to give up his 35-year Army career came after a week of cataclysmic events: the southern capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to protect federal property and, on April 17, the secession of Virginia.

The days had been personally traumatic as well. Like many border-state families, the Lees and their friends were sharply divided on the issues. When Lee consulted his brothers, sister and local clergymen, he found that most leaned toward the Union. At a grim dinner with two close cousins, Lee was told that they also intended to uphold their military oaths. (Samuel Phillips Lee would become an important admiral in the Union navy; John Fitzgerald Lee retained his position as judge advocate of the Army.) Sister Anne Lee Marshall unhesitatingly chose the northern side, and her son outfitted himself in blue uniform. Robert’s favorite brother, Smith Lee, a naval officer, resisted leaving his much-loved berth, and Smith’s wife spurned her relatives to support the Union cause. At the same time, many of the clan’s young men, such as nephew Fitzhugh Lee, were anxious to make their mark for the South in the coming conflict, creating a distinct generational fault line.

Matters became more complicated when, on April 18, presidential adviser Francis P. Blair unofficially offered Lee the command of the thousands of soldiers being called up to protect Washington. Fearing that such a post might require him to invade the South, Lee immediately turned down the job. Agitated, he went to tell his mentor, Gen. Winfield Scott, the Army’s commander in chief. Another dramatic scene followed. Scott, though a proud Virginian, had dismissed as an insult any hint that he himself would turn from the United States. When Lee offered to sit out the troubles at his home, Arlington, the general told him bluntly: “I have no place in my army for equivocal men.” Greatly distressed, Lee returned to Arlington to contemplate his options.

Although his wife called it “the severest struggle of his life,” historians have long trivialized Lee’s decision. It was “the answer he was born to make,” biographer Douglas Southall Freeman put it. “A no-brainer,” said another. But daughter Mary’s letter, along with other previously unknown documents written by his close family and associates, belies such easy assessments. These newly found sources underscore just how complex and painful a choice it was to make.

The conventional wisdom holds, for example, that Lee disdained secession, but once his state took that step he was duty bound to follow. But these documents show that he was not actually opposed to disunion in principle. He simply wanted to exhaust all peaceful means of redress first, remarking in January 1861 that then “we can with a clear conscience separate.”

Nor was he against the pro-slavery policies of the secessionists, despite postwar portraits of the general as something of an abolitionist. He complained to a son in December 1860 about new territories being closed to slaveholders, and supported the Crittenden Compromise, which would have forbidden the abolition of slavery. “That deserves the support of every patriot,” he noted in a Jan. 29, 1861 letter to his daughter Agnes. Even at the moment he reportedly told Francis Blair that if “he owned all the negroes in the South, he would be willing to give them up…to save the Union,” he was actually fighting a court case to keep the slaves under his control in bondage “indefinitely,” though they had been promised freedom in his father-in-law’s will.

The decision was made yet more difficult by Lee’s pacifism. Haunted by the prospect of prolonged and bloody warfare, he warned of it repeatedly at a time when few others were anticipating a lengthy conflict. He saw destruction and possible ignominy in the future, not the glory anticipated by the Southern masses.

He was “worn and harassed,” Mary Custis Lee tells us, yet she recalls that he remained calm, and counseled others to do so. This is at odds with conventional stories which portray Lee melodramatically pacing and praying as he weighed his future. Instead, her father made the fateful choice alone in his office, without fanfare. Before breakfast on April 20, he quietly entrusted his resignation letter to a slave, for delivery at the War Department.

“I have been unable to make up my mind to raise my hand against my native state, my relations, my children and my home,” Lee wrote to a kinsman, only minutes after he penned his resignation. With minor variations, this was his lifelong mantra, elegantly extricating him from the more uncomfortable aspects of decision. Yet even as he wrote it he must have known that no matter what he decided he would be in conflict with some relation. Moreover, the Army, which another daughter called Lee’s “home and country,” was also divided: forty percent of Virginian officers would remain with the Union forces.

But what is most astonishing about Mary Custis Lee’s letter is that it shows how Lee made his decision despite the feelings of his own wife and children. Lee at first did not tell his immediate circle that he had resigned, and when the announcement finally came, he apologized. “I suppose you will all think I have done very wrong,” he lamented. Noting that she was the sole secessionist in the group, and that her mother’s allegiance to the Union was particularly strong, Mary described how the words left them stunned and speechless. Lee then remarked that he did not believe Virginia had reason to secede — at least not yet. But after refusing command there was no military role for him, and now, he acknowledged, “it had come to this and after my last interview with Gen. Scott I thought I ought to wait no longer.”

The turmoil Lee’s resignation caused at home was mirrored within the Army. Mary Custis Lee describes how a cousin on Scott’s staff rode over to Arlington, informing the family of the disarray at the War Department. Several other officers had quickly followed Lee’s example, and Scott had taken the news hard: “He laid on his sofa, refusing to see anyone and mourning, as if for the loss of a son. To some one … who rather lightly alluded to the fact, he said with great emotion, ‘don’t mention Robert Lee’s name to me again, I cannot bear it.’”

These are riveting details. But what is most striking about this description is the loneliness of Lee’s decision. For the stunning message of Mary Custis Lee’s account is that that there was no pressure from kin or colleagues for Lee to give up the allegiances of a lifetime. Some would later become dedicated Confederates, but in April 1861 their feelings were with the Union. If even his wife, and most of his children, did not support his stand, Robert E. Lee must personally have wanted very much to take this path. This was not an answer he was compelled by home and heritage to make. It was a choice — and it was his alone.

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Sources: Mary Custis Lee Papers, Lee Family Papers, Robert E. Lee Papers and George Bolling Lee Papers, all Virginia Historical Society; Lennig Collection, Washington and Lee University; Robert E. Lee Papers, Duke University; Cornelius Walker Diary, Museum of the Confederacy; Robert E. Lee, Jr., “Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee”; Blair Family Papers, Library of Congress; Custis EXR vs. Lee and Others, Virginia File Legal Papers, Kate Waller Barrett Library, Alexandria, Va.; Mary Boykin Chesnut, “Mary Chesnut’s Civil War,” C. Van Woodward, ed.; “Elizabeth Blair Lee, Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee,” Virginia Jean Laas, ed.; Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters.”

For earlier, unsubstantiated accounts see J. William Jones, “Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee”; Thomas Nelson Page, “Robert E. Lee, the Southerner”; George Upshur, “As I Recall Them: Memories of Crowded Years”; Douglas Southall Freeman, “R.E. Lee,” Vol. I; Shelby Foote in Ken Burns “Civil War,” episode 2.

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Elizabeth Brown Pryor is the author of “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters.”