1858 (13 page)

No one loved Arlington more than Mary Lee, who wrote of it, “I never saw the country more beautiful, perfectly radiant. The yellow jasmine in full bloom and perfuming the air…”
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Her husband, the colonel, had enjoyed Arlington on visits as a teenager and never lost his appreciation for the home and the grounds around it, especially in springtime. Early one May when the cherry blossom trees and gardens were in full bloom, he wrote, “The country looks very sweet now, and the hill at Arlington covered with verdure and perfumed by the blossoms of the trees, the flowers of the garden’s honey-suckles, yellow jasmine is more to my taste than at any other season of the year.”
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Custis fell ill with pneumonia on the evening of Saturday, October 3, 1857, and his condition became much worse by morning. The family was summoned and told by his doctor that he was going to die and only had a few days remaining. They had to pay their final respects. Custis met with all of his family during the mornings and afternoons of the next few days and slipped away quietly on October 10. One of his last acts was to thank his daughter Mary and her husband, Colonel Lee, stationed in Texas at the time of his death, for their love and devotion throughout their lives.

Lee’s daughter Agnes, who had lived most of her life at Arlington House with her mother and father (when he was back from the army), was grief stricken at the death of her grandfather. Agnes described his death in her journal on October 11, 1857, “just to try to relieve my bursting heart.” She wrote, “Who will supply his place to me? O, no one. No one! We knew death had to come. I trust I am grateful that he was given to us for so long. But each year I prized him more…clung to him. What is Arlington without its master? None can ever fill
his
place. So kind he was, so indulgent, loving us so fondly.”

The grief that fell like a veil over Arlington House lasted for months. On January 3, 1858, Agnes was still in deep mourning, writing in her journal that she had lived yet another year, but with her grandfather gone, lived “with a sad, sad heart.”
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Lee’s heart was sad too, as he arrived at Arlington House from Texas, but just walking on its rolling lawns and sleeping in the huge mansion conjured up wonderful memories. It was here that he visited so often as a young man and here that he met and married his wife Mary.

The colonel was born in a mansion on his family’s plantation, Stratford, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, but his childhood was not a happy one. His father, despite his political influence, had gone bankrupt after a series of irresponsible financial investments and often left home to raise money or hide from his debtors. Lighthorse Harry was also a sickly man and traveled to find cures for his ailments. His wife and children rarely saw him, and Lee’s mother barely paid her bills and clothed and fed her children and the slaves on the money the Carters gave her. Her husband had to sell some of their land and assets to pay off some of his debts. She left Stratford when Robert was three. Lighthorse Harry left his family to roam through the Caribbean when Robert was six. The boy never saw his father again; Harry died on Cumberland Island, Georgia, in 1818, at the age of sixty-two.

The Lees moved to Alexandria, Virginia. The Carters and Lees were friendly and young Robert was permitted to enroll in a private school the Carters ran at their plantation nearby for their children. The Lees were also friendly with the Custises because Henry Lee and his father had been friends with President Washington; the family often visited Arlington House to see Custis, the president’s stepgrandson. Robert and Mary Custis played together often as children, developed longings for each other as teenagers, and finally married in 1831, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-three. Mary bore him seven children.

Friends were eager to have him admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1804, but a lengthy waiting list put that off until 1825, when Lee was eighteen years old. The Virginian was a superb student, graduating second in his class. At the military academy, he had the opportunity to meet men from all over the country, including Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who was one class behind him. Lee chose the Corps of Engineers for his life’s work in the army; it was considered a prestigious position in the military.

Upon graduation in 1829, Lee was granted a two-month leave of absence. His mother died just as he arrived home, bequeathing him some money and six slaves. Shortly afterward, he married Mary Custis at Arlington House. He explained to her very carefully that as a soldier he would often be away, serving his country at posts around the United States. Some might be as nearby as Washington, DC, and Baltimore, but others might be in the West, near the Mississippi River or the plains territories. She would be able to accompany him to some posts, but not to others. Mary was not happy about it, but agreed. Her great-grandmother Martha had been able to spend each winter of the Revolutionary War with her husband when he served in the rebellion, but that was because he was the commander-in-chief.

Lee left soon afterward. He had been assigned to Savannah, Georgia, to build Fort Pulaski. That assignment kept him away for two years, but he was back home in 1831, brought back to help plan and construct Fortress Monroe in Virginia. That was followed with work on a military post in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and then an assignment at army headquarters in Washington, where he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1836. One year later, the army sent him to St. Louis, Missouri, to oversee work on the reconstruction of the Mississippi River harbor of that city. Lee spent three years there and then four years in New York City working on improvements for its harbor, one of the largest in the nation. His life was changed in 1844 when he was asked to sit on the annual examinations board at West Point. On that board, he met and became close friends with General Winfield Scott, the army’s highest-ranking officer, who liked Lee immediately.

The United States became entangled in a war with Mexico in 1846 and Lee was sent there to help the engineers build roads and fortifications for the army. The U.S. Army was led by Scott, who plucked Lee out of the engineering department and gave him the authority of a battlefield leader. Lee the engineer scouted and developed attack routes at several battles—bringing victory to American troops—and at one battle personally led a group of reinforcements from Scott’s army back to his division to ensure a triumph over the Mexicans the next day. He had taken it upon himself to embark on dangerous night rides across the plains of Mexico to meet with other officers and confer with General Scott, rides on which he might easily have been captured or killed. He once spent a night hiding in a gully within a few hundred yards of the enemy, while scouting terrain and trails for what turned out to be one of the most successful assaults of the conflict. General Scott called his reconnaissance work “indefatigable and daring.”
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He was also instrumental in assisting Scott to lead American forces to victory in the battle of Chapultepec. For his valor and leadership in the Mexican conflict, Lee was first promoted to captain and then to lieutenant colonel. In the battles in Mexico, he met many men he would not have encountered had he been restricted to the Corps of Engineers. He was certainly not the dashing hero that his classmate Jefferson Davis was in the widely publicized war, but Lee was mentioned in numerous newspaper accounts and applauded for his work at army headquarters back in Washington. The war had shown his administrative skills, courage, grit, determination, and the ability to use foreign terrains to his advantage, all skills that would help him later in life.

His mental capacities were admired by all. Jefferson Davis later wrote that “his mind led him to analytical rather than perceptive methods of obtaining results.”
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All saw him as a rather complete man, with a fine military education at West Point, and a good family; a man who loved children and animals and led a good Christian life.
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His family did have the chance to reunite with him when the war in Mexico was concluded. He was transferred to Baltimore, where his wife and family happily joined him. In 1852, classmate Jefferson Davis, who became the secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, and fought with Lee in Mexico, named the Virginian the new superintendent of West Point.

Lee had his hands full at the Academy as he tried to establish tighter discipline. Jefferson Davis, who had nearly been kicked out of West Point when he was a cadet, chuckled after one visit there that the disciplinary problems of the Academy had not changed since his escapades. Lee, too, had been exasperated by the rowdy cadets. Davis wrote that he was “surprised to see so many gray hairs on his head” and that they had been caused by his sympathy for the problems of young people. Lee wrote that his troubles came from the unusual nature of West Point, that was neither completely a college nor a military school. “Cadets can neither be treated as schoolboys or soldiers,” he wrote.
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The real pleasure of that assignment, however, was that he could once again bring his family to live with him at West Point, a school that sat on the western banks of the Hudson River, one of the prettiest locations in the country. Mary Lee and the children loved their time there.

Davis, a hard-working and effective secretary of war who saw himself as a visionary, started two new cavalry units to help the army secure the new territories in the West that the United States had won from Mexico. He pulled Lee away from West Point in 1855 to put him in the Second Cavalry, second in command to Albert Sidney Johnston, a West Point classmate and friend of Davis’s and an acquaintance of Lee’s. The Virginian became a lieutenant colonel in the cavalry and eventually replaced Johnston as head of the unit and remained in charge of it, assigned at first to St. Louis and then to posts in Kansas and Texas. In those positions, as in all of his posts in the army, he showed significant administrative abilities and an ability to get along with everyone—veterans in their forties as well as young lieutenants fresh out of West Point and the enlisted men. Lee worked well with peers and higher-ranking officers in the army and, happily for the army, with civilian leaders wherever he was stationed. Although he continually tried to get promoted to general, he was not a politician, as were so many officers in the army, to the delight of his superiors.

Those who knew him in those years remembered that he was a reserved man who kept his distance from the rowdier officers. His men did not see him as aloof though, and many referred to his personality as a “quiet dignity.” Lee had a mercurial ability to remember people’s names and faces, and later in life could recall the names of men he had met in the Mexican War in 1846. Sometimes he would forget the name of a man he saw at a church service or reception and become angry with himself because of it; sometimes, forgetting a name, he would seek out others who knew the man, obtain his name, and then find him and address him properly. He was an obsessive letter writer and answered just about every piece of correspondence sent to him in the army, regardless of the sender. Officers and men who knew him noted that one of his skills as a commander was the ability to listen to the comments of others, much like his wife’s great-grandfather, George Washington. Like the leader of the Continental Army, Lee listened to all and then made up his own mind.