1858 (14 page)

Colonel Lee did not smoke, drink, or curse and he attended church regularly. Although often away from home, he did not enter liaisons with other women, although he was known to flirt with some from time to time.

When engaged in disputes with his wife, he would deliberately write her to say that he had accompanied some woman to a church service or reception as part of his army duties, although apparently his relationships with other women went no further.

Throughout his career, unlike Jefferson Davis, he was never involved in a dispute with superiors or fellow officers or enlisted men. Lee was parsimonious, a holdover reaction from his youth, when his family was nearly bankrupt, and instructed his children to be careful with their money. The colonel always paid his own debts, remembering them despite the considerable stress in his life. In 1860, while a farmer at Arlington, Colonel Lee purchased a piece of equipment from a store in Washington for two dollars. During the next eighteen months the federal elections, secession, bombardment of Fort Sumter, and the outbreak of war carried him far from Arlington. The store owner had long ago forgotten the small debt. One morning a boy arrived at his store and handed him two dollars, informing him that it was the money Lee owed him, and that Lee was very sorry it had taken him so long to pay the bill.
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He was always immaculately turned out in his blue U.S. Army uniform, wore fashionable wide-brimmed hats in the scorching western sun, was a superb horseman, became an expert at firearms and cannon, was well read in military history and tactics, and exhibited a genuine love for the army, even though as he aged, he became restless in it.

Lee’s children loved him and missed him whenever he was away, stationed thousands of miles from home in New York, Mexico, Texas, or elsewhere. In the fall of 1855, after Lee had been sent west with the cavalry, his daughter Agnes wrote that “Our dear Papa is at Jefferson Barracks, far away from those he loves. It is too bad.”
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Lee, in turn, missed his family. On Christmas 1856, he wrote several emotional letters home that described his longing to be with them and to be back at Arlington House rather than his dusty army barracks. He wrote his wife, “The time is approaching, dear Mary, when I trust that many of you will be assembled around the family hearth at dear Arlington to celebrate another Christmas. Though absent, my heart will be in the midst of you. I shall enjoy in imagination and memory all that is going on. May nothing occur to mar or cloud the family fireside and may all be able to look with pride and pleasure to their deeds of the past year. I can do nothing but love and pray for you all.”

Several days later, at the holiday, he wrote a mournful letter home and told his loved ones that he hoped they had a joyous Christmas and knew that they would have many more. He reminded them that he had purchased a Dutch doll, one of the new crying babies, and little French teapots for the girls and knives and books for his sons. Their father, he wrote sadly, had Christmas dinner with a fellow officer and a clergyman. “Mine was gratefully but silently passed,” he said.
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One flaw in Lee’s make-up was his refusal, in either his professional or private life, to confront people over disagreements. The colonel avoided adversarial conversations with his wife and children as well as superiors and fellow officers in the army. His disdain for disputes often caused delays in the completion of tasks, military or personal, and when he returned to Arlington House in 1857 that unwillingness to confront people would bring him face to face with the biggest decision of his life and the life of his country.

Custis named Lee as the executor of his estate because the colonel was an accomplished administrator. If he could run the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he could certainly run Arlington House. It is unclear, though, why he wrote a convoluted will. Custis must have realized that work on the will would be extraordinarily time-consuming for Lee and might require a lengthy furlough to come back to Virginia to fulfill its requirements. Since the will involved every member of the family, and debt that had to be paid, it might take years to straighten out.

Custis knew how debilitating that could be. His own grandmother, Martha Washington, found herself in that same predicament when her father-in-law, John Custis, died. His will, which also included the payment of numerous debts, was intricate, filled with inane dictates, such as one that required anyone who received money from the estate to carry the name Parke. Martha had to hire several lawyers to begin to administer the estate after her husband died. George Washington then took that responsibility upon himself when he married Martha and spent another decade working on it, constantly frustrated by the job. Custis had heard his grandparents complain about the Parke estate will and its troubles; why did he leave a similarly difficult will for Robert E. Lee to administer? Did he secretly hope that the estate and his daughter’s illness would combine to make Lee leave the army? He had no male heirs, only his daughter Mary. Did he do it in order to force Lee to come home to Arlington House to take over the Custis heritage and the legacy of George Washington?

Under the terms of the will, Mary Lee was given Arlington House and its grounds, plus all of George Washington’s furniture and relics that were housed there. It would pass to her son Custis upon her death, not her husband. The plantation at White House was not bequeathed to Lee, but to his son Rooney. Romancoke was not left to Lee either, but to his son Rob. Lee’s daughters Mary Anne, Agnes, and Mildred were given the sums of $10,000 each from the sale of Smith Island, in Northampton County, and other lands in Stafford, Richmond, and Westmoreland counties, and the income from the plantations, but their father was given nothing. In fact, all Robert E. Lee was left was a small lot in Washington, DC.

Custis, like his grandfather George Washington, also freed all of his slaves in his will, directing that they be given their freedom within five years of his death, but—he added, in a line that would cause Lee innumerable troubles—they could only be emancipated within that period of time if his debts were paid.
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The problem with the terms of the will was that the Custis children and grandchildren were left money that he did not have and money that would not be available until the total sum of $10,000 in debts was erased. The old man seemed to owe everyone money, even the manager of his mill at Arlington, who had not been paid in six years. From time to time as he rode about Virginia, Lee was accosted by men who had been owed money by Custis, some as much as $1,300; he promised to pay them all. The sale of Smith Island would bring little. His run-down farms did not turn much of a profit. There were also no Lee men in Virginia to run those farms. Lee’s son Custis was in the army and posted in California; his son Rooney had just left for an army expedition to Utah to put down what President James Buchanan termed a Mormon revolt. In fact, the only male member of the family left in Virginia to renovate and run those farms was Colonel Lee.
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His sons understood his predicament and wanted to help him financially. Custis sent him an official document transferring his inheritance of Arlington House to his father, insuring his financial security if his mother passed away first. Lee, as always, never wanted his sons to give up anything in order to lend him assistance, even if it was needed.

He wrote a gentle letter back to his son, telling him, “I am deeply impressed by your filial feeling of love and consideration, as well as your tender solicitude for me, of which, however, I required no proof, and am equally touched by your generosity and disinterestedness… I cannot accept your offer. It is not from an unwillingness to receive from you a gift you may think proper to bestow, or to be indebted to you for any benefit great or small. But simply because it would not be right for me to do so. Your dear grandfather distributed his property as he thought best and it is proper that it should remain as he bestowed it. It will not prevent me from improving it to the best of my ability, or of making it as comfortable a home for your mother, sisters, and yourself as I can. I only wish I could do more than I shall have it in my power to do.”
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Complications with the Custis will began immediately and Lee had to hire lawyers to help him sort out the provisions of the document and assess the conditions of the old man’s finances. Everything the colonel did with the lawyers took time, and the two-month furlough he had been given by his superiors in the army ran out in December. He was granted another furlough, this one for an entire year, and a frustrated Lee wondered, as the paperwork piled up at Arlington House, if even that would give him enough time.

Lee had moved back into Arlington House and loved the stately home, but it too had fallen into disrepair since his departure in 1855 for the frontier cavalry posts. The aging Custis had no real enthusiasm for the management of the plantation. The roof of the mansion leaked, many wooden fences on its 1,100 acres had collapsed, and the fabled lawns, neglected by Parke Custis for years, had been infested with weeds.

Lee’s return to Arlington House brought him back to slavery and once again challenged his feelings about the institution and the conflicting opinions about blacks that plagued him all of his life, views that had been evident to all at Arlington since he married Mary in 1831. The colonel always maintained that he was morally opposed to slavery, but like so many in the South, he did nothing to end it, always writing that Southerners against slavery had to leave its eventual elimination to God, Congress, or the courts.

In 1856, he wrote his wife Mary, “Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted on behalf of the latter, my sympathies are most strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. While we set the course of the final abolition of human slavery and we give it all the aid of our prayers and all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences and with whom two thousand years are but a single day.”
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After the war, publicly, Lee told anyone who would listen that he was in favor of the elimination of slavery. He expressed his disdain for slavery after the war too, telling a congressional committee that “I have always been in favor of emancipation—gradual emancipation.”

John Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, later backed him up, telling biographers that Lee was “a thorough emancipationist.”
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So did Herbert Saunders, a British journalist who interviewed Lee when the Civil War ended. He claimed that Lee told him he had always been in favor of freeing his slaves, and had in fact freed some during the war. Saunders said Lee assured him that many Southern planters wanted to abolish slavery because it was no longer a productive labor system. The abolitionists had created such an uproar over slavery, he told Saunders, that the same people intent on releasing their slaves kept them so that it would not appear they were backing down in the face of Northern harassment.
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Lee told a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Leyburn, a pastor in Baltimore after the war, that the purpose of the war had not been to continue slavery. In fact, he told the minister, he was glad that the result of the war was the end of the institution. “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it [emancipation] will be greatly for the interests of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this, in regards to Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war and have suffered all I have suffered, to have this object attained.”
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