Robert E. Lee, page 25
Lee arrived in San Antonio to the applause of Texans who saw him as the hero of Harpers Ferry and “an accomplished gentleman and a finished soldier,” and just the man to deal with Cortina. The demands of Texans that the Army come “to the defence and rescue of our fellow-citizens” were mounting, and Sam Houston, who made no secret of his interest in establishing an American protectorate over Mexico, was vaguely threatening President Buchanan that “circumstances may impel a course on the part of Texas which she desires to avoid.” (Houston might have sanctioned one “filibuster” promoter to approach Lee in the hope that Lee would be “willing to…pacificate Mexico”; Lee declined.)
The first orders Lee received from Washington on February 24 instructed him to “put a period to the predatory operation…of Cortinas and his followers on American soil.” With what, though? The constant pursuit of Comanche and Kiowa raiders meant that “the troops are always out” and “the Cav[alr]y horses are nearly worn out and sometimes drop dead on the trail.” Moreover, the War Department gave him no authority to cross the Rio Grande in pursuit of Cortina; at best, he was authorized only to send official letters of protest to the Mexican authorities from the Texas side of the river. Nevertheless, Cortina could not be ignored, and less than a month after arriving in San Antonio, Lee, accompanied by “but a single Compy of Cav[alr]y,” was on the road to the Rio Grande, hoping that “if I can hear of the whereabouts of Mr. Cortinas, I will endeavour to pick him up.”19
Lee reached the Rio Grande, only to find that “all the alarms about Cortinas at that place were false.” Through April, he scoured the valley of the lower Rio Grande with both infantry and cavalry. But even though “I hear various reports about Cortina,” the man himself had disappeared “into the interior and was 135 miles off.” Lee was reduced to submitting a protest letter to the governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, asking him to “cause to be dispersed any bands within the States under your jurisdiction, having for their object depredations upon American soil.” When the Mexican military commandant at Matamoras tartly replied by pointing out that the Americans had violated Mexican sovereignty fully as much as Cortina had American, Lee diplomatically turned the complaint into a compliment for the Mexican resolve to “pursue and punish Cortinas and his followers.”
Lee found the Mexican authorities more reasonable to deal with than the Texans and so “vastly civil & polite that it is impossible to quarrel with them.” But he did not expect anything to be done by them, and he certainly had no intention of plunging blindly into the Mexican interior “with broken down horses,” in “barren, mountainous” terrain, in pursuit of Cortina. When rumors of Cortina’s return to the Rio Grande began to fly in May, Lee took them seriously enough “that I laid a plan to take him by surprise,” if only to show “that it is not entirely safe to approach the river too near.” But the Cortinistas would not be back until long after Lee was gone, in 1861, and only for a brief time. After that, Cortina’s attention would be consumed with opposition to the French occupation of Mexico and the ongoing convulsions of Mexican politics, until his death under house arrest in 1894 in Mexico City.20
Which suited Lee very well. “You know I am a great advocate of people staying at home & minding their own affairs,” and he had more than enough in San Antonio to keep him peaceably occupied through the summer of 1860. At the end of April, he began reorganizing the deployment of the Army’s Texas-based infantry and cavalry, parceling out two companies of the 8th Infantry to the Ringgold Barracks, another company to Fort McIntosh, and four companies of his own 2nd Cavalry to Brownsville. He also handed down a particular bit of praise for Samuel Heintzelman’s “great prudence and ability” in the pursuit of Cortina, all the while hoping that the end of the Mormon confrontation in Utah could bring two more regiments to Texas to deal with the Comanche troubles. In 1857, the Army experimented with introducing thirty-three camels from Egypt as the basis for a new mounted unit that could traverse the western deserts, and in June 1860, Lee arranged for twenty of the camels to be used by “an exploring expedition to a rough corner of the upper Rio Grande.” Otherwise, he was preoccupied with “the various wants & applications” of the department and assuring irritable Texans (starting with Sam Houston) that “at this time there are no disturbances on this frontier & that I hear of the presence of no banditti on either side of the river.”
He was slightly cheered by the news, in June, of the promotion of Sidney Johnston to command of the Department of the Pacific, because that might “move everybody…one round up the long ladder of promotion.” But not Lee. His old friend from West Point Joe Johnston wangled an assignment as the Army’s quartermaster general, with a brevet promotion to brigadier general, and Lee stiffly conceded, “My friend Col Joe Johnston is a good soldier & worthy man” for the promotion. But it was evident that Johnston owed his good fortune to his close family connection to Secretary of War Floyd, and Lee privately suspected “that it never was the intention of Congress”—merely the favoritism of Floyd—“to advance him to the position assigned him by the Sec[retar]y.” Meanwhile, David Twiggs boldly announced that he now intended to return from leave and resume command of the Department of Texas by the end of the year, thus bumping Lee from departmental command back to command of the 2nd Cavalry.21
At least in Texas, Lee continued to earn high marks, even among the most impatient Texans. Although Lee was critical of the “exuberant sympathy of our people with filibusterers & protectionists,” the commandant of the Texas Rangers, John Salmon Ford, was impressed by Lee in spite of himself, and on precisely the terms that might have drawn a rare self-congratulatory smile from Lee:
Colonel Lee’s appearance was dignified without hauteur, grand without pride, and in keeping with the noble simplicity characterizing a true republican. He evinced an imperturbable self-possession, and a complete control of his passions. To approach him was to feel yourself in the presence of a man of superior intellect, possessing the capacity to accomplish great ends and the gift of controlling and leading men.
Another Texan watched him observing a squad of new recruits at drill and came away thinking that Lee “seemed a column of antique marble, a pillar of state—so calm, so serene, so thoughtful, so commanding…and I said involuntarily to myself: ‘There stands a great man.’ ” He mixed easily and serenely with San Antonio society. When he attended a soiree hosted by Richard McCormick, the governor’s secretary, he coaxed the teenage Kate Merritt to play the piano, even leading “me to the piano” and standing beside her, thanking her “in the most gracious terms, and when supper was announced he took me in to supper.” He was, she remembered, “one of the most charming and gracious gentlemen I ever met.”22
But privately, the dreariness of departmental administration and the separation from his children wore him into new ruts of depression. He had no sooner returned to Texas in February than he was complaining to his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Annie (who was becoming the favorite confidante among his offspring), of “my distress at parting with you all, & my longing desire to see you again.” These “departures grow harder to bear with” as the years rolled on, he wrote to Mary, even as he reproached himself for “useless repining.” He lamented bitterly to Anna Maria Fitzhugh that he had suffered for too long from “a divided heart…& a divided life….My military duties require me here, where as my affections & urgent domestic claims call me away.”
It was not Arlington that called to him, but his children and wife, yet they were as fully devoted to Arlington as he was to them. “I long to see you,” he wrote to Annie, and thought that “if I had one of my daughters to keep house for me, I could be set up.” But his daughters regarded “dear dear Arlington” as “my home of joy,” and Mary Lee turned her increasingly immobilized attentions to the publication of an edition of her father’s Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, with her own memoir of G.W.P. in which Arlington almost became a third parent, “a place of frequent resort to many of the eminent and good of this and other countries.” Lee had never been able to supplant Arlington in the hearts of those whom he loved, and thanks to G.W.P.’s will Arlington would always have a life for them apart from any control he could exert. The rivalry this created was, in his mind, “one cause of the small progress I have made on either hand [in] my professional & civil career.”23
Lee struggled to resign himself to what he now had to assume was the twilight of his Army years. “We must…lay nothing too much to heart,” he wrote to Mary, in a letter that was supposed to console her for the stealthy onslaught of her disability but that had as much to say about himself. “Desire nothing too eagerly, rejoice not excessively, nor grieve too much at disasters.” He could always have taken the course of resignation from the Army, but that would only land him back at Arlington, and even as he received letters from Annie extolling “the trees & hills at A[rlington],” he gently pushed away any suggestion that he return there for good. “I do not think my presence would add anything to their appearance,” he replied, in a peculiar mix of regret and self-pity, “& it is better that I am away.”
When Annie pressed the suggestion again in August, he calmly but firmly told her that it would be far easier if “you will come out here….I will endeavor to make you as comfortable as possible. I have a nice little pony on which you can accompany me in my ev[enin]g rides, & a commodious travelling wagon that can carry you wherever I go.” There was no point in his returning to Arlington. He was, and always would be, a stranger there. “You know I am much in the way of everybody & my tastes and pursuits did not coincide with the rest of the household”—and certainly not with the Arlington slaves. “Now I hope everybody is happier.”24
This did not prevent Lee from dispensing his usual ladles of patrimonial advice. To Custis and Rooney, he warned “never exceed your means.” Mildred, now fifteen, must “learn & improve herself…that she may have the enjoyment of doing good & of being appreciated by the wise & virtuous in the world.” “Dear little Agnes” has to develop “a great deal of patience in this world & a great deal of waiting upon events.” Young Rob needs “to learn to write a good hand.” And while he coaxed Mary to take care of herself, he also warned Custis to keep an eye on his mother’s spending habits. She “from time to time will be wanting a little money,” but he should be prepared to corral any excessive expenses, “as she is always wanting to do a little shopping.” Not even Mary’s edition of G.W.P.’s Washington memoirs escaped his urgings for improvement. “You might,” he wrote, “encourage the publisher to issue another edition” and take that as an opportunity to “make some improvement in the text, & add to the illustrations,” and especially “cut and retain the remarks of the various papers.”25
The one unalloyed delight Lee had in 1860 was the birth of Rooney and Charlotte’s first child, an eight-pound baby boy whom they named for his grandfather. The debut of the first grandchild was epochal enough that Mary, even with her arthritis, made it down to White House, rejoicing “at another baby in the house,” and Charles Dana of Christ Church made the steamboat journey from Alexandria to perform the baptism. But even this new Robert Edward Lee could not quite pull Lee out of his despond. As much as he congratulated Rooney “at his prosperous advent,” Lee could not suppress the dreary anticipation that “this promising scion of my scattered house” will somehow “resuscitate its name and fame,” as though the shade of Light Horse Harry were still smothering it. He might even “do his part to supply the deficiencies of his Gr[an]dfather,” which was Lee’s way of signaling how little he imagined he had accomplished in that direction.
Lee no longer anticipated being able to do much toward those deficiencies now, in his fifty-fourth year. He began to warn Agnes for the first time in June 1860 of “rheumatism” of his own, although this was much more likely the first sign of heart disease. At nearly six feet in height, Lee was not overweight—he estimated his “respectable weight” at 155 pounds—but he was now resorting to “my spectacles” for close objects, and during his first tour in Texas he had tried to grow a beard, only to have it turn a heavy gray. “I am sure,” he drily told Mary, “I am not getting young.” And if he needed a reminder of that, the “rheumatism” struck again late in August. “My attack was a slight one,” he informed Annie, “though you know a little in that way goes hard with me.”26
* * *
—
John Brown’s body was buried in North Elba, New York, on December 8, 1859, and from that moment the country proceeded to slice itself to ribbons. Whatever hope James Buchanan entertained for heading the Democratic presidential ticket again in 1860 disappeared in the debacle over Kansas and his inability to prevent the reelection to the Senate in 1858 of his chief Democratic critic over Kansas, Stephen A. Douglas. Yet, for precisely that reason, Douglas was utterly unacceptable to Southern Democrats. His challenger during the 1858 reelection campaign was the antislavery Whig turned Republican Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln had pinned Douglas publicly during the campaign into conceding that Douglas’s favorite solution—popular sovereignty—meant that settlers in the new western territories could as easily decide to ban slavery as legalize it.
Southern Democrats were incensed at Douglas’s admission that under popular sovereignty enough territorial settlers could, even theoretically, bar slavery from the west. Not only did slaveholders feel a raw economic need for new territories; they fell delirious at even the vague possibility that popular sovereignty might add to the free-state column in Congress, where free territories and additional free states would end forever their dominance of national politics. Popular sovereignty, which a decade before seemed like a sensible compromise for slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, was no longer even faintly acceptable to the South. “Congress cannot destroy the property of a citizen in his slave in a Territory,” Louisiana’s senator Judah P. Benjamin declared, and Stephen Douglas was now a heretic “when he assumed the power of the people of a Territory to exercise what he terms squatter or popular sovereignty.”27
Northern Democrats like Douglas thought popular sovereignty was exactly the equitable solution North and South alike should embrace, and Douglas “had the heart of the Northern Democracy.” When the Democratic National Convention met in Charleston on April 23, 1860, every expectation pointed to a Douglas presidential nomination, until eight Southern delegations walked out rather than permit Douglas to be nominated. A second convention was hastily arranged for the Front Street Theatre in Baltimore in June, only to run aground even more furiously over Douglas, with more than a third of delegates walking out and, this time, withdrawing to Baltimore’s Mechanics Hall to nominate their own pro-slavery presidential candidate, John C. Breckinridge. Douglas had to be acclaimed by what remained of the Front Street Theatre convention, which ensured a fatal split of the Democratic Party and that Breckinridge and Douglas would “aim, specially and primarily, to defeat the other.”
And then, to dim Democratic prospects still further, a third political convention, under the banner of the hastily contrived Constitutional Union Party, nominated an old Whig, John Bell of Tennessee, for the presidency. Bell’s nomination guaranteed only that neither Breckinridge nor Douglas could expect much from the slaveholding states of the upper South, where Whiggism still had nostalgic sympathizers. By contrast, when the Republicans gathered in Chicago in May to nominate their candidate, they enthusiastically united on choosing Douglas’s old nemesis Lincoln. At best, there was some fleeting hope that these divisions would “carry the election into the House of Representatives.” What was more likely was that Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas would only succeed in shivering the Democratic vote into three impotent pieces and allow the election of the first avowed antislavery, anti-extension Republican to the presidency.
With the power to control the entire mechanism of federal patronage in Lincoln’s hands, Southerners could only imagine the Republican president slyly posting to every federal job in the South antislavery appointees who would feel no compunction whatsoever about encouraging more John Browns to take their chances, or using patronage to seduce the loyalties of Southerners who hungered for political patronage salaries more than slaves. The election of Lincoln had only one attraction for the slaveholding states: it would convince the fainthearted that the handwriting was on the wall and that it was time to leave the American Union. The “extremists,” reported The New York Times, “are delighted at the prospect…which will give them an opportunity to rally the South in favor of dissolution” and “plunge the cotton states into revolution.”28
From his lonely perch in San Antonio, Lee beheld the fracturing of the Democratic Party—and the ease with which Southern Democrats talked about disunion as a result—with the same incredulity with which he had treated John Brown. It was essential to his own relationship to slavery to believe that slavery was fundamentally evil, but an evil that was wasting away on its own, and it neither justified Brown’s raid nor deserved the sacrifice of the Union. Mary agreed. “My unsuspecting mind,” she recalled, refused to embrace “the possibility of the dissolution of that Union so long our boast & pride & to maintain which we would even then have gladly laid down our lives.” With the Whigs a dead letter and the Democrats a suicidal one, politics once more bobbed ominously to the surface of Lee’s letters, beginning less than two weeks after the Baltimore convention debacle. In a letter to one of his 2nd Cavalry officers, Earl Van Dorn (a Mississippian who might have discreetly sounded out Lee on political matters as a fellow Southerner), Lee admitted that the “news of the Baltimore convention” chilled him. But he laid the blame on Douglas and hoped that “Douglass would now withdraw & join himself & party to aid in the election of Breckinridge”—not so much because he loved Breckinridge and his fire-eating disunion supporters as to ensure that “Lincoln be defeated.”29
