1858 (15 page)

Yet another journalist who talked to Lee after the war, Myrta Avery, a reporter for the
New York Herald
, said Lee claimed again that he was against slavery. He said he was one of many Southerners who felt that way. “The best men of the South had long desired to do away with this institution and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject, the question has ever been: what will you do with the freed people?”
¹⁹⁰

George Washington frequently questioned how pre–Revolutionary War Americans could complain that they were slaves to England and yet hold black slaves themselves. Lee felt the same quandary. He wrote, “Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”
¹⁹¹

The family of G. W. P. Custis had been publicly opposed to slavery for decades. Custis, his wife Mary, and his daughter Mary Lee were members of the American Colonization Society, a group started in 1817 to educate blacks and to transport emancipated slaves to Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, to form a new colony there. The society’s leaders reasoned that these educated and Americanized slaves would help build a democratic, Christian civilization in Liberia. The group raised money throughout the United States; the three Custises were substantial contributors. Mary Custis and her daughter had also been influenced by the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical Christian movement that swept the country in the 1840s. The movement taught that people who wanted to go to heaven had to lead moral lives—and moral lives meant fighting slavery.

The two women not only gave their own money to the group, but organized a group of slaves to pick sweet-smelling “nosegay” flowers, such as roses, lilies of the valley, and chrysanthemums, from the Arlington gardens and, with the two women and Mary Lee’s daughters, bundle them into bunches. The slaves would then be sent to flower markets across the river in Georgetown to sell the flowers. The proceeds from the sales were turned over to the Colonization Society. Over the years, the Custises contributed a significant amount of money to the society and sent one of their slave families, William and Rosabella Burke and their four children, to Liberia with other Colonization families.

Agnes Lee taught the plantation slaves how to read and write at a small one-room schoolhouse her father built at Arlington. She told visitors that Robert E. Lee fondly referred to her young pupils as “the ebony mites.”
¹⁹²

Custis lost interest in the Colonization Society after a decade or so, but on his own he manumitted nearly a dozen slaves over the years. They were all mulatto men and women, and neighbors gossiped that some of the females were his lovers and the others his offspring. Still, the total number of slaves freed by the Custises in their lifetimes amounted to less than twenty; they kept hundreds of others, over several generations, in bondage. In his will, the old man intended to make up for all those years by granting freedom to all of them. He left that to Robert E. Lee, who was ambivalent about the idea.

Lee had owned several slaves most of his life, as had many of the members of the Lee family. The colonel maintained a low opinion of blacks, and until 1856, in a single letter to his wife, never protested their condition. When he was thirty-two, he disdainfully told his wife that at best, they might have two good workers in an entire household of slaves and that the rest were useless. He told Mary to “do with all of them as you please if opportunity offers, but do not trouble yourself about them as they are not worth it.” He cautioned his son that “you will never prosper with the blacks, and it is abhorrent of a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury.”
¹⁹³
He even adapted a policy of always having as many slaves as possible in order to make up for the lazy workers. “What they want in quality we must make up in quantity,” he said. Exasperated by the behavior of slaves all of his life, he sometimes told his wife to simply ignore them and hire free whites to get things done.
¹⁹⁴

Lee made no effort to disguise his low opinion of blacks, and all of the slaves at Arlington knew that he felt they were worthless. Lee wrote in 1839 that Arlington’s proximity to the Alexandria canal and capital city, and its public park, distracted the slaves. He wrote, “The whole place will be exposed to the depredations of the public; his [Custis’s] own people [slaves] will have more opportunity for gossip and idleness and greater temptations and inducement to appropriate the small proceeds of their labor to themselves.”
¹⁹⁵

Over the years, those opinions never changed. He once wrote fellow planter Thomas Carter about blacks that “I have always observed that wherever you find the Negro, everything is going down around him, and whenever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.” He wrote Virginia senator Andrew Hunter that “the relationship between master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races…”
¹⁹⁶

At the end of the Civil War, he very reluctantly agreed with a plan to grant freedom to Southern slaves who fought in the Confederate Army. He only did so because he needed troops desperately, reminding the Confederate Congress of his dim view of slaves as he went along with the proposal. He wrote, “Considering the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment, as the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country, I would deprecate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both. I should therefore prefer to rely upon our white population to preserve the ratio between our force and those of the enemy, which experience has shown to be safe…”
¹⁹⁷

So when Robert E. Lee took over the stewardship of Arlington House and its farms in 1858, the slaves there were not happy about it. They knew that he did not like blacks and had little interest in their welfare. He exhibited that feeling when he announced that he was going to make money by hiring out dozens of his slaves to work for other farmers in the Virginia and Maryland area. He engaged a hiring agent who specialized in that work, a Mr. Winston who lived in Richmond, and sent him three male slaves and three females who had experience in domestic work.

He wrote Winston, “I wish you to hire them [women] out, in the same manner as the men, for one or more years, to responsible persons, for what they will bring—should you not be able to hire any or all of these people, you may dispose of them to the end of the year to the best advantage, on some farm, or set them to work at the White House, as you may judge best.…”

A rather cold-hearted Lee also told Winston that if he could not find work for the slaves, he should turn them over to any other agent he knew for the same purpose. He told Winston that if the man bringing the slaves did not reach his office during working hours, he would not rent rooms for them in the city overnight, but told the man to put them in the local jail. He advised Winston of his blacks, too, that “I cannot recommend them for honesty.”
¹⁹⁸

His hiring schemes often backfired. Workers whom he had sent to some other owner quickly realized that if they performed poorly they would be sent right back to Lee. This happened often. In one scheme, three of his hired-out men were returned after only one day. They claimed the work was too hard and would not do it. A disenchanted Lee wrote of the men, “Among them is Reuben, a great rogue and rascal whom I must get rid of some way.”
¹⁹⁹

Lee wrote his son Rooney that his workers rebelled, that some had fled and had to be forcefully apprehended. “I have had some trouble with some of the people, Reuben, Parks, Edward…rebelled against my authority—refused to obey my orders and said they were as free as I was, etc. I succeeded in capturing them, however, tied them and lodged them in jail. They resisted till overpowered and called upon the other people to rescue them.”
²⁰⁰

The new master of Arlington House was attacked by some critics, who wrote to newspapers accusing him of flogging his slaves and inventing the codicil in Custis’s will that the slaves could not be freed until the old man’s debts had been paid. The published letters also charged that Custis fathered fifteen children with slave women. Lee refused to answer the charges, but someone else did, calling them malicious. Few paid any attention to the newspaper letters, Lee included.

What did concern Lee was the news that unhappy slaves had set fire to the barn of a Virginia neighbor. It struck home at Arlington House. In 1801, Lee’s wife’s great-grandmother, Martha Washington, announced that she was going to free her slaves upon her death. The slaves of Mount Vernon insisted that she free them immediately and when she refused they apparently set fire to a barn there. Martha’s friends feared that they would torch the manor house itself or even harm the former First Lady, and they convinced her to emancipate her slaves right away. Lee did not want history to repeat itself at Arlington House and attempted to calm down the slave fervor there with more lenient work practices. He later wrote his son Rooney of any dealings with slaves when he came back from the army, “I trust you will so gain the affection of your people, that they will not wish to do you any harm.”
²⁰¹

Mary Lee was even angrier than her husband. After all, she had educated many slaves, raised money for the Colonization Society, and sent an entire slave family to Liberia. What kind of thanks was this? She called her slaves “a host of idle and thankless dependents” and sarcastically wrote that “we should be most deeply indebted to their
kind friends
the abolitionists if they would come forward and purchase their time and let them enjoy the comforts of freedom at once.”
²⁰²

The slaves at Arlington quickly discovered that Custis had granted them freedom in his will and were angry that they had to wait until the old man’s debts had been paid. Abolitionists, who visited Arlington’s park as members of the public and talked to numerous slaves on the plantation, reminded them of the will whenever they could. It seemed unfair, they told the slaves. Why couldn’t the Lees free them right away? The slaves’ response was to complain loudly about it to the Lees, to exhibit disagreeable behavior, and to engage in work slow-downs.

Lee may have understood their feelings; he scowled to his son Custis in a letter that “He [G.W.P. Custis] has left me an unpleasant legacy.”
²⁰³

However, he did not appreciate their constant complaining and continually criticized them. Lee and his wife reminded the slaves that the hiring program he had initiated, that they may not have approved, was to raise money to pay Custis’s debts so that he could free the very slaves who complained about him. His workers scoffed at the idea.

Lee could not ignore the slavery issue, though, because in 1858 it seemed to be the only topic of conversation in Washington, DC, and at Arlington House. Lee’s inspection tours of his plantations and meetings with his lawyers took place during the same weeks that the debate in the Senate over the proposed slavery constitution for Kansas raged. He read the newspaper accounts like everyone else of all the Senate speeches—such as those by his friend Jefferson Davis—and the opinions of newspaper editors.

Lee loved his country, but he did not fear that the storms raging in those years would tear it apart. He wrote, “I wish for no other flag than the star-spangled banner and no other air than ‘Hail Columbia.’ I still hope that the wisdom and patriotism of the nation will yet save it…the North would cheerfully redress the grievances complained of. I see no cause of disunion, strife, and civil war and pray it may be averted.”
²⁰⁴

He added also that he was against any division of North and South. “Secession is nothing but revolution,” he wrote. “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.”
²⁰⁵

However, Lee, like so many Virginians, saw the attacks on slavery by Northerners not as mere criticism of the institution, but as a serious assault on the Southern way of life.

“The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North… I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress… A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me,” he wrote, but told radical Southerners that he did not support any of the public figures loudly advocating secession. He recognized, though, that the country was approaching a crisis. He wrote later, “As far as I can judge by the papers, we are between a state of anarchy and civil war. May God avert both of these evils from us.”
²⁰⁶

Like many Southerners, Lee placed the blame for the North-South bitterness squarely on the shoulders of the abolitionists, charging that they were deliberately provoking the South. He wrote, “The abolitionist must know this and must see that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and [per]suasion and if he means well to the slave, he must not create angry feelings in the Master; that although he may not approve the mode by which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be the same…”
²⁰⁷

Yet at the same time that he was spouting these antislavery and pro-Union sentiments, he vilified his slaves on a daily basis.