Robert E. Lee, page 5
Light Horse Harry spent the next six months recovering from “the extraordinary Atrocity of the unpunished Baltimore mob.” Limping into Christ Church in Alexandria, he frightened a small girl who remembered that “his bright penetrating look was made a terror to me” because of the surrounding swath of “white bandages that bound his brow and others passing over his head and chin.”6 He convinced himself that he required a warmer, happier climate to speed his return to health and strength, and in May 1813 he left for the West Indies. This put distance between himself and not only vengeful Jeffersonians but also his remaining creditors, who were still hounding him for unpaid bills.
He wandered, homeless, through the Caribbean—Barbados, Cuba, the Windward Islands—living off charity and sympathy, always promising to return as soon as his health was permanently restored, always offering charming letters of encouragement and advice, especially to his oldest son, Charles Carter Lee, who was now preparing to enter Harvard College with the support of Ann’s brother William. “My eldest boy,” wrote the absentee father, “has been from the hour of his birth unchangeably my delight.” He claimed to have his next-oldest son, Smith Lee, “ever in my thoughts,” and wrote to him, “I long to get a thorough knowledge of you.”
In the spring of 1818, he left Nassau, hoping finally to return to Virginia. But he was too feeble to make it. He was put ashore at the first American landfall the ship could make, which turned out, in one last turn of good fortune for Harry Lee, to be the Cumberland Island property of Nathanael Greene’s daughter. Two weeks later, he died, without ever having again seen Virginia, his wife, or his youngest son, Robert.7
* * *
—
Henry Lee III was sixty-two when he died, but Virginia had already left him far behind, and in more ways than just commerce. Virginia was now part of a republic that knew no prelates, no landed nobility, no hereditary monarchs, and the mob that assaulted Light Horse Harry in Baltimore was indicative of a new political culture in which the lower orders no longer yielded an instinctive deference to the high mightiness of an earlier generation of Lees. Anyone who imagined that the new Constitution would ensure “that the representatives will generally be composed of the first class in the community” awoke to the unwelcome surprise that politics, as Benjamin Rush complained, fell no longer naturally and effortlessly into the hands of men of quality but into “the young and ignorant and needy part of the community.”
In just the same way that evangelical religion had assaulted the hierarchy of Virginia Anglicanism before the Revolution, consumer exchange replaced patronage as the sinew of the social order, and social status became a mere temporary rung on which any ambitious white man could place his foot. “Every tradesman” became “a Merchant, every Merchant is a Gentleman, and every Gentleman one of the Noblesse.” The American, as Hector St. John Crèvecoeur explained in 1782, “is a new man, who acts upon new principles” and has passed from “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour…to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” There would still be “gentlemen,” but the word would no longer define the few who had no need to labor with their hands, in distinction from many leather-apron men and farmers; it would instead become merely a synonym for someone of sincere or kindly manners. Similarly, there had been mobs before, in colonial times, but they had been directed and targeted by their betters, who managed their violence at a discreet distance; the mob that nearly destroyed Light Horse Harry was a different affair entirely, democratic, spontaneous, and headless.8
If Virginians of ancient birth wished to live as gentlemen, they would have to do it not by hauteur and honor but by a new bourgeois code of gentility. “It is a common phrase among the rich…that a man (naming him) was born a Gentleman,” warned The Virginia Gazette, but to “talk of a man’s being born a Gentleman is as inconsistent as to say he was born a fiddler, and with a fiddle in his arms.” The mark of the gentleman had once been his participation in society balls, horse races, cockfights, and fish feasts. “Taste and Politeness” were measured in the old days by “so much Elegance in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, so much Musick and Dancing, so much Fencing and Skaiting, so much Cards and Backgammon, so much Horse Racing and Cockfighting, so many Balls and Assemblies, so many Plays and Concerts that the very imagination of them makes me feel vain, light, frivolous and insignificant.”
In the new republic, Americans would guide themselves by an entirely different set of standards, “Strength, Hardiness, Activity, Courage, Fortitude and Enterprise.” Or, as Catharine Maria Sedgwick distilled it into one word, “manners”: “There is nothing that tends more to the separation into classes than difference of manners. This is the badge that all can see.” And the relationship between classes would be marked by respect rather than deference; leadership would be marked by humility and reticence rather than the assertion of power; virtue would be demonstrated through perspective and resilience, not honor and style; even bodily movement would unstiffen, and frock coats and trousers would replace skirted coats and knee breeches. Politeness would supplant dueling and argument; courtesy would take the place of childish impulsiveness. “The old barriers are down,” Sedgwick announced. “Talent and worth are the only eternal grounds of distinction.”9
This gentility might express itself in the study of moral goodness, the reading of history and biography, modesty, politeness, cheerfulness, delicacy and sensibility in conversation, unostentatious material competence, and voluminous self-revealing letter writing and diary keeping. And despite the demands of the evangelicals for repentance, abasement, and humility in their converts, the genteel style soon converted the revivalists, too, by setting out refinement and decency as equally acceptable goals for a Christian public. Above all, competence (a non-flamboyant economic style that was content with sufficiency and shunned excess) and independence were the great goals. No longer were braggadocio, arrogance, and swagger to be tolerated as the special behavior of social superiors; one and all, in Virginia’s fading shadow, would be judged and governed by the rule of the genteel.10
And even though she was the offspring of the mighty Virginia Carters, the genteel ruled Ann Carter Lee, too. Frugality came as a necessity, because, as she plainly told Robert’s brother Carter at Harvard, “we have no alternative—We cannot borrow money, because we cannot repay it; the interest of our money being only sufficient for each years expenditure.” Hence, no more freewheeling debt mongering: she urged on him “that noble independence of spirit, which would cause you to blush at incurring an expense, you could not in justice to your family afford.” And though she never swayed from her allegiance to the Episcopal Church, even the Episcopal Church in Virginia took on a strongly evangelical tinge that contrasted smartly with the High Church snobbery that prevailed among the holdover colonial Episcopalians in New England and New York and that Ann Lee absorbed as her own. She was “singularly pious” and determined that Robert and his siblings should be, too. “You must repel every evil,” she lectured Robert’s brother Smith Lee, “allow yourself to indulge in such habits only as are consistent with religion and morality.” Light Horse Harry preferred to think of his wife’s piety as shaped by the same sort of featureless deism that formed his own, based on “love of virtue…not from fear of hell,—a low, base influence.” But as in so many other misestimates of Ann Lee, Harry was wrong again. “Pray fervently for faith in Jesus Christ,” Ann urged her children, because “he is the only rock of your salvation, and the only security for your resurrection from the grave.”11
Like all the Lees, Robert had been born unremarkably into the fold of Virginia Episcopalianism, and though no record of his baptism has survived in the records of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, it is likely that he was baptized at Stratford and imbibed the rudiments of Episcopal Christianity at Christ Church while growing up in Alexandria. With his oldest brother at Harvard, and Smith Lee determined to gain an appointment in the Navy, Robert became the domestic runner and manager for his mother and his two sisters (the second sister, Catharine Mildred, was born shortly after the family relocated to Alexandria). It was Robert who “carried ‘the keys,’ attended to the marketing, managed all the out-door business, and took care of his mother’s horses.” When his mother was ill—as she was increasingly after the move to Alexandria—it was Robert who ordered up the family’s shabby brougham “and would then be seen carrying her in his arms to the carriage, and arranging her cushions with the gentleness of an experienced nurse.” One of the flock of Lee cousins in Alexandria remembered that Robert became legendary for “his devotion to his Mother, and the great help he was to her in all her business and household matters.” Years later, he would describe himself simply as “my mothers outdoor agent & confidential messenger.”12
Certainly it was a devotion Ann Carter Lee needed, because the income from her father’s trust gradually diminished over the years. Dividends paid by the Bank of Virginia fell from a modest $1,440 per annum in 1812 (perhaps $25,000 in modern equivalents) to as little as half that after Light Horse Harry’s death, while another $1,000 a year was paid in dividends from the Potomac Bank. In the waning days of Light Horse Harry at Stratford, the Lees had been surrounded by more than thirty African American slaves; after Alexandria and after Light Horse Harry was dead, there might have been only six, and at least three of those seem to have been hired out to generate income. Ann Lee could scrimp in other ways, spending large parts of the year on the circuit of her relatives’ plantations, at Shirley, where the Carters maintained a school Robert could attend, at Chatham, on the Rappahannock, and even at Stratford, where his half brother, Henry IV, now presided. There, the boy could grow into adolescence on the land where he had been born, becoming “very fond of hunting” and sometimes following “the hounds on foot all day.”13
Nevertheless, necessity continued to pinch. After Light Horse Harry’s departure, Ann Lee was forced to move yet again, to a house around the corner from Oronoco Street, on North Washington Street, which had been owned by her late brother-in-law; she would then move back once more to Oronoco Street in 1820. But if necessity pinched too greatly, there was as a last resort the vast network of Carter and Lee cousinage in Alexandria upon which Ann Lee could fall back, chief among whom was Edmund Jennings Lee, the younger brother of Light Horse Harry and the mayor of Alexandria from 1815 to 1818, and her Alexandria benefactor, William Henry Fitzhugh, who opened doors to her at the Fitzhugh farm of Ravensworth, outside Alexandria. The Fitzhugh clan had married into not only the Carters but also the Washingtons; William Henry Fitzhugh’s sister, Mary Lee Fitzhugh, had married Washington’s only surviving step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. Meanwhile, Jennings Lee and his son Cassius Francis Lee (who would bear a striking resemblance in later life to his cousin Robert) became the pillars of Alexandria’s Episcopal society at Christ Church; they lived nearby at the corner of North Washington and Oronoco Streets. They were, all of them, case-hardened Federalists “of the Washington school” who “opposed…the rise and domination of” Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Party, convinced that the Democrats were “that party which has consummated the ruin of the most glorious Republic the sun ever shone on.”14
Growing up in Alexandria, Robert would remember the humiliation the town endured during the War of 1812—the looting of Alexandria by British warships in the Potomac in 1814, the impotent potting of the Alexandria militia’s artillery at the British warships in the river, the tame surrender of the town in the mayor’s office, and the burning of the public buildings in Washington by Admiral Sir George Cockburn on August 24, in retaliation for the destruction of the Canadian town of York. But he would also remember a happier moment, ten years later, when the aged compatriot of his father from the Revolution the Marquis de Lafayette stopped in Alexandria on his valedictory tour of the United States and paid a personal call on Light Horse Harry’s widow. He would also remember fondly his education, which began at the Alexandria Academy, a school that offered free tuition for the offspring of Revolutionary veterans. His first teacher was “an Irish gentleman,” William B. Leary, and it is likely that he was under Leary’s tutelage from 1820 (when he was thirteen) to 1822. “A Man is of little importance in society without education,” Ann reminded her son. “You will regret in after-life, if you neglect to lay in a store of knowledge now.” Leary was likable and diligent and put Robert through the paces of “all the minor classics in addition to Homer & Longinus, Tacitus & Cicero,” and complimented him for his work in “Arithmetic, Algebra & Euclid.” It must have come as a surprise to both Leary and Robert’s mother when, sometime in 1823, Robert announced that he desired to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and thus follow in the professional footsteps of his father, as a soldier.15
West Point, however, would require more than a head full of Greek and Latin, and for the next year Lee was shifted to a school next to his old home on Oronoco Street, where a Quaker and student of astronomy, Benjamin Hallowell, presided. Hallowell’s school was new, and Hallowell himself laid down only two rules for its management for his young male students: “Be good boys” and “Learn all you can” (it was a simplicity that Lee would imitate forty years later in a similar situation). But Hallowell’s classes soon became a roaring success, drawing between eighty and a hundred boys as boarders and as day students.
Lee surprised himself and Hallowell by turning into “a most exemplary student” in mathematics. Half a century later, Hallowell could still remember how he had assigned Lee some “very complicated” diagrams in conic sections, which Lee “drew…with as much accuracy and finish, lettering and all, as if it was to be engraved and printed.” The one person who had no enthusiasm for Robert’s decision for West Point was Ann Lee. “How can I live without Robert?” she wailed. “He is both son and daughter to me.” She would have been more disturbed still if she could have sensed how much Robert, for all his uncomplaining gentility, longed to be free and unencumbered. “I thought & intended always to be one & alone in the World,” and from the day he reported on the parade ground at West Point in June 1825, he would strive to be.16
* * *
—
Robert E. Lee was a compulsive letter writer, most of them multipage epistles, many of them written on the same day as two or three others, and all in a fine, spidery cursive that he signed “R. E. Lee.” No letters remain from before his seventeenth birthday, though; it was not until February 24, 1824, that his earliest surviving effort as a letter writer occurs, and it arrived on the desk of Secretary of War John Caldwell Calhoun as part of Robert Lee’s application for admission to West Point. “Having just heard that it was always agreeable to you to receive from every applicant for a Cadets Warrant, a statement of his age, studies, &c. made by himself, I take the earliest opportunity of sending you the following”; what comes after is a listing of Lee’s reading, which included “Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus” in Latin, along with Xenophon and Homer in Greek, and finally the most critical for his purposes at the military academy, “Arithmetic, Algebra, and the first six books of Euclid.”17 It was correct, proper, and undemanding. He wished to be noticed but did not strain to be more than noticed. He had already absorbed the finesse of the genteel.
No one of Calhoun’s generation, or from Calhoun’s state of South Carolina, would have needed much of an introduction to a son of Light Horse Harry Lee. But as secretary of war, Calhoun was then the single individual who (apart from the president) held admission to the military academy in his hands, and Lee’s relatives had been careful to make as polite an impression as possible on young Robert’s behalf. Arrangements for personal interviews with both Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson had been followed by letters from William Henry Fitzhugh; Robert’s half brother, Henry; Robert’s teachers, Leary and Hallowell; and eight members of Congress. All of them touted “the revolutionary services of the father.”18
Yet Robert’s own letter contained an odd lapse. He misdated his birth, giving it as January 29 (it was actually January 19) and placing himself in his “eighteenth year.” The muddle over the birth year might have been the fault of Ann Lee. In the Lee family Bible, where she recorded the births of her children, Robert’s birth year was first given as 1806, then corrected at some point to 1807, and that might have generated a confusion that it took years to correct. What was more peculiar was that January 29 was the birthday of Light Horse Harry.
There is no record of Calhoun’s eye being snagged by these oddities, and Robert Lee’s next letter, written five weeks later, is a brief and formal acceptance of his “appointment to the station of a Cadet in the service of the United States.”19 The slipup in the birth year must have soon been rectified, because Lee could not in fact be formally inducted into the Corps of Cadets until the summer of 1825, after he had turned eighteen.
