1858 (12 page)

He had been in the military for twenty-nine long years and was often bored and exhausted by his job and depressed from the long absences from his family. He was married to a woman whom he loved deeply and missed desperately when he was away in the army, whether fighting Mexicans, chasing hostile Indians, training cavalry, or administering forts thousands of miles from home. His wife was stricken with rheumatism in 1835, when she was thirty-seven, and had suffered from lengthy bouts of it, plus arthritis, throughout the rest of her life. Her health had disintegrated rapidly since 1856, when she last saw her husband following the end of his tenure at West Point and transfer to the West. With little mobility, she was unable to spend much time overseeing the housekeeping at the mansion. In her personal life she had become untidy, leaving her rooms messy and continually complaining of tiredness. She was now practically an invalid. The family wondered if she could run Arlington House without her father and her husband away in the army.
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Colonel Lee, always concerned about his wife, was shocked to see how much her health had deteriorated during his latest absence. The arthritis had practically immobilized her right hand and arm and caused her substantial pain. The arthritis often forced her to wake up in the middle of the night and she had difficulty falling back to sleep, spending much of the day tired from lack of rest. She had trouble holding on to banisters and plates and moved about very cautiously. She was a forty-nine-year-old woman who had the mobility of a disabled woman in her eighties. She had hid the spread of arthritis and her declining health in letters to her husband in San Antonio. “I almost dread him seeing my crippled state,” she wrote a relative just before his arrival from Texas. Now that he was home again, he would know what had happened to her and how she suffered.
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The shock of her condition was one more reason Lee now thought seriously about leaving the army. Not only could she no longer live with him at army posts, but she needed him at home in order to live at all. By 1858 she had deteriorated so badly that she was no longer able to attend balls, dinner parties, and other social functions with her husband; she and he had become prisoners of their home because of her decline. A melancholy Lee wrote upon his return to Arlington House after Custis’s death, upon seeing his wife for the first time in seventeen months, “I fear Mary will never be well enough to accompany me in my wandering life.”
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Lee’s dream of the quiet life of a planter was not new. He had expressed that yearning often to members of his family for more than twenty years. Wrote his son Rob, “He often said that he longed for the time when he could have a farm of his own, where he could end his days in peace and quiet.”
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As the winter of 1858 progressed—amid the growing rancorous arguments just across the Potomac River in Washington over slavery in Kansas—and his inspections and meetings with lawyers and plantation overseers continued, Colonel Robert E. Lee had a decision to make as he attempted to fulfill his responsibility as the will’s executor. Should he spend the rest of his life in a monotonous and uneventful career in the army, never promoted to general, away from his ill wife and seven children, or should he become a gentleman planter and live a life of ease?

Arlington House was one of the grand old homes of Virginia, a large, elegant mansion with a lovely two-story-high portico held up with eight thick, Doric columns on the southern shore of the Potomac River, directly across the water from the nation’s capital. Its grassy lawns stretched to the edge of the Potomac in gentle slopes, many of them lined with sweet-smelling flower gardens filled with jasmine, lilacs, jonquils, hyacinths, violets, and roses, and clusters of fruit trees, such as apple and apricot. Visitors who saw it for the first time said that Arlington House and its grounds looked as magnificent as those of any European palace.

Lee felt comfortable at the mansion. He wrote that it was “where my affection and attachment are more strongly placed than at any other place in the world.” Lee’s wife Mary spent nearly all her life there and missed it dearly when she was away with her husband on an army assignment. “What… would I give for one stroll on the hills of Arlington this bright day,” she wrote during one absence. All in the family knew of her love for the plantation. Daughter Mildred wrote that “[Mother’s] heart was ever turned to Arlington and the fair scenes of her life’s best happiness. Her thoughts were ever in the past at Arlington—always Arlington.”
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Lee’s daughters loved Arlington House too, as did all who visited the home of the Custis family. Daughter Mildred luxuriated in smelling the yellow jasmine flowers in the gardens and gathering up flowers that she and her siblings wove into necklaces that they laid on their bedsheets. “None [gardens] ever seemed so fair to me as this Kingdom of my childhood,” Mildred recalled wistfully as an old woman. Her sister Agnes agreed. She wrote when she turned sixteen, “Arlington, with its commanding view, fine old trees, and the soft wild luxuriance of its woods, can favorably compare with any home I’ve seen!”
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Custis, Robert E. Lee’s father-in-law, had lived a checkered life. An irresponsible teenager who was ejected from three different colleges, Custis moved to his father Jack’s 1,100-acre plantation and its four-room brick cottage in 1802. Ownership of two other Washington family plantations, White House and Romancoke, were also passed down to him by the president.

Custis hired experienced managers to run the much larger farms at White House and Romancoke, and they were reasonably successful; he used the Arlington plantation for experimental farming and the cultivation of his beloved flower and vegetable gardens. Custis wrote several plays that were produced, many articles about his grandfather, and delivered memorial addresses about George Washington. He also memorialized his grandfather in dozens of paintings of his military exploits during the Revolution. Many of his patriotic paintings adorned the walls of the rooms in Arlington House. During the last year of his life, he helped to oversee plans for the Washington Monument, still in the planning stages in 1858 (it would only be two-thirds completed when the Civil War began).
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Custis also became an accomplished landscape painter and used the Potomac and the rolling lands of his plantation for backdrops for those works. His niece once encountered him standing alone on one of the hilltops of the plantation. She wrote, “I saw G.W.P. standing, wrapped in contemplation of the western sky robed in all its gorgeousness of color. I asked him if he was enjoying nature’s painting, he replied, ‘I am studying the effect for my picture.’”
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When the president died, Custis wanted to continue living at Mount Vernon, but Washington had left that home to Bushrod Washington, a cousin who himself later became an important public figure in Virginia. It was understood that Parke would move to his father’s plantation. Intent on living in a mansion as grand as the manor house at Mount Vernon, Custis hired architect George Hadfield and contractors to build Arlington House, a large, eye-catching edifice modeled after old Roman and Greek temples. The rooms in it were oversized and the family made much use of them. Mary Lee, the colonel’s wife, and Custis’s other children joined him for breakfast each morning (Lee placed a rose on the plate of each lady at the table on those days when he was home on furlough or living there while working in Washington), and then adjourned to the family parlor, where Curtis lead morning prayers. Much of the evening was spent in that room; Parke Custis sat for hours in a large chair next to the fireplace, a succession of cats on his lap. A north wing housed the Lee family following the marriage of Robert E. Lee and Custis’s daughter Mary in 1831. The Lees, like the Custises, celebrated many holidays at Arlington House. Christmas was everyone’s favorite; Lee obtained furloughs from the service so he and his family could spend the holiday together. The Lees spent twenty-four of the thirty Christmases prior to the Civil War at the mansion.

Robert E. Lee missed any Christmas he was not home with his wife, children, and the extended family at Arlington House. He wrote sons Custis and Rooney at the 1846 Christmas, when he was away in the Mexican War, “I hope good Santa Claus will fill my Rob’s stocking tonight; that Mildred’s, Agnes’s, and Anna’s may break down with good things. I do not know what he may have for you and Mary, but if he only leaves for you one half of what I wish, you will want for nothing!”
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And when any of his sons were away from Arlington at Christmas when he was at the mansion, he wrote lengthy letters describing the holiday festivities, sometimes in mouth-watering language. “The children were delighted at getting back [on a visit] and passed the evening in devising pleasure for the morrow. They were in upon us before day on Christmas to overhaul their stockings…I need not describe to you our amusements, you have witnessed them so often; nor the turkey, cold ham, plum pudding, mince pies, etc., at dinner,” he wrote Custis, at West Point during Christmas 1851.

Besides the mansion, Custis oversaw the construction of several gardens, a dance hall, and a dining pavilion several hundred yards from the home, a grove of bushes, trees, and vegetation, a spacious horse stable that was designed as a miniature Arlington House, with a portico and four Doric columns serving as its entrance. Nearby were large wooden sheds for carriages and some cattle. An eight-hundred-square-foot ice house was located near the slave quarters, along with an outbuilding that served as a kitchen.

The highlight of the plantation was a large park called Arlington Springs that was similar to city parks. Anyone in Washington, DC, Alexandria, or other nearby communities could use “the park” without charge for picnics and parties. The park was a succession of lawns and English-style gardens off the Alexandria and Georgetown Turnpike entrance to the plantation, easily reached by carriage or horseback on the Virginia side of the Potomac or from the Washington, DC, side on the Georgetown Ferry. The park contained walking and bridle paths through its woods that were populated with oak, chestnut, and elm trees, well-manicured lawns, and several stone benches where visitors could sit and look out at the Potomac and the nation’s capital. A writer for
Harper’s
magazine wrote, “In front, sloping towards the Potomac, is a fine park of 200 acres, dotted with groves of oak and chestnut and clumps of evergreens and behind it the dark of forest.”
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Visitors who walked into one of the gardens often encountered Mary Lee, along with several of her children and some slaves working feverishly on the rows of flowers. Daughter Mildred remembered, “My mother spent hours here, digging, weeding, and directing Old George, Little George, Uncle Ephraim, Billy, and the swarms of small Ethiopians. I can see her now with a white sun bonnet hanging down her back! Visitors from Washington, Alexandria, and Georgetown always ended by a stroll in the gardens.”
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Everyone who saw them was enraptured by the Arlington gardens. Wrote Lee’s niece Elizabeth Calvert of them, “Is it at the touch of memory only that flowers bloom here in such exquisite perfection, or did the yellow jasmine from its raised arbor in the center of the garden send forth a widespread fragrance and shower its countless trumpet shaped flowers down? Did the encircling bed of daily roses send their offering of perfume in the air from their brilliant blooms, did the pines in points of the garden beds shade masses and masses of lily of the valley from which we gather in lavish quantities beauty and fragrance? Did hyacinths, tulips, tall lilies all the ‘beauties of sisterhood’ bloom in unconstrained delight?”
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The residents of Alexandria and Washington, who visited the park often, remembered them, and the hospitality of G. W. P. Custis, who greeted many fondly. The editor of a Washington travel guide wrote in 1852, “Still, retired walks, inviting lawns, shaded by beautiful groves, and the finest view of the river and the city imaginable. The fine manners and instructive conversation of the venerable proprietor often add to the life and social enjoyment of those who seek [refuge] from the dust and crowds of the city a few hours’ relaxation and retirement amid the charms of this cool and quiet spot.”
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The park had numerous visitors. From April through October, several hundred area residents strolled through the park or picnicked there each weekend, and on holidays there were far more. Between five and ten thousand visitors jammed the park for the annual Fourth of July celebrations, sitting on the grassy lawns to watch the fireworks displays in Washington.
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The Lees enjoyed the grove, too. It was a place to play but also a place of reverence. The children buried their cats there. “The grove was a place of mystery to me,” wrote Mildred Lee. “It was the part of the park enclosed in the garden and was the special resort of squirrels, blue bells of Scotland, and grape vines, where we used to swing. Here too there was an arbor covered with a grape vine, with a big mossy natural stone for a seat, a capital place to crack hickory nuts… Just on the edge of the grove, under a spreading tree, was my own little garden, a white lilac in one corner and the violets forming the borders of the beds…”
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