Robert Edward Lee (19 January 1807 – 12 October 1870) was a general of the Confederate States Army who served as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. Regarded as the most capable general of the Confederacy, Lee became a revered figure in the South, admired for his tactical acumen and personal dignity. Though a skilled defensive commander, his two major offensives into the North, Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863), ended in failure.
Biography[]
Lee in 1838
Robert E. Lee, the quintessential Virginia gentleman, was the son of the American Revolutionary War hero and former state governor Major-General Henry Lee. Second in his class at West Point, he entered the elite Corps of Engineers and spent almost two decades supervising both civil and military engineering projects. His evident ability earned him a place on General Winfield Scott's staff for the invasion of Mexico in 1847.
Entrusted with reconnaissance missions, he twice led troops on routes he had discovered around the flanks of Mexican forces, thereby contributing to American victories at Cerro Gordo and Churubusco. These excitements were soon over, though, as Lee returned to a quiet career in the peacetime army and by the late 1850s was a lieutenant-colonel commanding cavalry in Texas. By chance, he had returned to Virginia in 1859 when antislavery activists led by John Brown attacked the US Arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Lee was ordered to the scene and directed the assault that captured Brown.
The Harper's Ferry raid was a sign of increasing division on the slavery issue. Although Lee owned slaves himself, he considered slavery a bad thing. He did not want the breakup of the Union, but was loyal first and foremost to Virginia. Turning down an offer of senior command in the Union Army, in April 1861, he sided with the Confederacy. President Jefferson Davis made him a general and took him as his closest military adviser. As Lee set men to digging fortifications in front of Richmond, no one suspected this courteous professional soldier would turn out to be an aggressive field commander. Appointed to succeed the wounding Joseph Johnston in charge of the army in the Peninsula, Lee quickly launched the offensive known as the Seven Days' Battles.
Initial errors[]
Commanding in battle for the first time, not surprisingly, Lee made plenty of mistakes. It was his good fortune that his opponent, George B. McClellan, was so easily unnerved and so willing to withdraw when attacked. Lee's other great stroke of luck was to discover an ideal partner in Stonewall Jackson. He and Jackson had contrasting temperaments - Lee cool and poised, Jackson driven and intense - but they shared the view that only aggressive tactics and an offensive strategy offered the South any hope against the Union's much larger, better-equipped armies. Lee was prepared to risk dividing his forces, giving Jackson free rein to strike at the enemy's weak points through swift and unexpected maneuvers. This was the secret of the joint victories at the second Battle of Bull Run (known as the second battle of Manasass to the Confederates) and Chancellorsville. This commitment to the strategic offensive overstretched Confederate resources. Lee's September 1862 invasion of Maryland nearly ended in disaster at Antietam, and at Gettysburg the next year, his invasion of Pennsylvania came to grief. In fact, it was when the Union side took the offensive that Lee and his troops performed best.
Lee in his tent
At Fredericksburg in December 1862, Union troops were slaughtered in an ill-advised assault on Lee's well-prepared defensive position, and his subsequent fine victory at Chancellorsville was a decisive counter against an advancing Union army, brilliant in conception and execution. The loss of Jackson in the aftermath of Chancellorsville was a serious blow to Lee. He had no other subordinate with an independent capacity for aggressive maneuver. In the absence of Jackson, Lee saw no alternative at Gettysburg to frontal assaults that climaxed in the infamous Pickett's Charge, repulsed with grievous losses. For the rest of the war, the Confederates were forced on to the defensive. Lee offered to resign, but no one could be found to replace him. Facing Ulysses S. Grant in 1864, Lee fought a skillful series of defensive actions and imposed heavy casualties on advancing Union forces that outnumbered his troops by two to one. His dwindling army was then pinned down in trenches outside Petersburg - it was sheer loyalty to Lee as their commander that held the men at their posts. Eventually cornered at Appomattox, Lee opted for a dignified surrender.
Post-Civil War[]
Lee as college president, c. 1869
After the surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, Lee returned briefly to Richmond, where he found his home looted and the city in ruins. Though indicted for treason, he was never tried, and instead applied for a full restoration of his civil rights. His citizenship, however, was not formally reinstated until more than a century later, in 1975. Despite lingering resentment in some quarters, Lee accepted the outcome of the war and publicly urged former Confederates to reconcile with the Union and abide by federal authority.
Rejecting lucrative commercial offers, Lee chose instead a life of quiet service. In the autumn of 1865, he was appointed president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia; a small, struggling institution that would later bear his name as Washington and Lee University. Lee proved an able and reform-minded administrator. He expanded the curriculum, encouraged moral development, and introduced courses in business and engineering to prepare students for the demands of the postwar South. His model of leadership emphasized personal integrity, duty, and honor, and his example drew admiration even from former Union officers.
While he remained a figure of immense symbolic importance to Southerners, Lee kept largely aloof from politics during Reconstruction. He opposed retaliation, discouraged continuing resistance to federal authority, and even supported the education of freedmen, though he did not advocate full civil equality for African Americans. He remained a committed Virginian and conservative by disposition, but he believed national healing required mutual respect and restraint.
Lee's health declined steadily through the late 1860s. A series of strokes weakened him, and on 12 October 1870, he died at his home in Lexington. His death was mourned throughout the South, and even in the North many paid tribute to his character.
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