Robert E. Lee, page 8
This at least gave Lee an opportunity to return on leave to Virginia, where his chief goal would be the engineering of his romance with Mary Custis. Once his mother’s death had freed him from his heavy sense of obligation to her, he was intoxicated with the prospect of letting his fancy run free in “confused sentences about beauty.” After “so many years in the habit of repressing my feelings, I can now scarcely realize that I may give vent to them, and act according to their dictates.” The freedom of his leave in 1830 was spent in the customary round of relatives’ visits to the Fitzhugh places at Ravensworth and Chatham, and the Carters at Kinloch and Woodstock in the Piedmont. By the end of the summer, this pilgrimage had brought him to Arlington, and it was there that he proposed to Mary, after a dramatic reading aloud from Sir Walter Scott.
It was clear that she already regarded him as “him who I love.” But it was not quite so clear to George Washington Parke Custis that Robert Lee was the man to whom he could conscientiously see his daughter married. Whether from Custis’s own predilection for dithering over decisions, or from a darker hesitation at the soiled reputation of Lee’s father and half brother, or simply from a fear that a junior lieutenant with no great material prospects in this world would attach himself to the Custises like some impecunious barnacle, the master of Arlington balked at giving his paternal blessing to the engagement. Robert might well consider himself “engaged to Miss Mary C.,” but he admitted to his brother Carter that while “she & her mother have given their consent…the Father has not yet made up his mind.” That meant that any wedding would “not be till next Spring”—to which Robert inserted the qualifier “if there is one.”15
As the year waned, love was compelled to pause, because Lee was due to return to Cockspur Island in early November. What he found there, in the wake of the seasonal “Gales,” was disheartening: the housing whose construction he had supervised had survived intact, but “nearly all the embankments were broken down, ditches filled…and what was worse than all the wharf which cost us so much time & money is destroyed,” just as he had predicted. Not that Babcock would be around to accept responsibility. The ailing major was in Philadelphia, “nor did the packet from Philadelphia…bring any intelligence of his movements.” (In fact, Babcock was dying, his wife had left him, and he would live only until June of the following year.)
In Babcock’s place arrived Joseph F. K. Mansfield, an 1822 West Pointer who assumed command at Cockspur Island on January 21, 1831. Mansfield had his own opinion of Babcock’s work, which he promptly threw to the winds, and ordered Lee to commence a new “Survey and Plan of the Island,” after which “commencement of the body of the work will immediately be examined, fixed and take place.” The survey revealed what Lee had suspected all along, that the site Babcock had originally chosen for the fort was too spongy to support serious construction. But in Mansfield’s mind, the solution would require more expertise than Lieutenant Lee could lend. In March, the veteran Captain Richard Delafield was dispatched to Cockspur, which now saddled Lee with two taskmasters instead of one. “I have been dreadfully harassed by these two men, who call themselves Engineers,” Lee grumbled. “Will you believe that they are still at it…with ‘Lee give us a sketch of that.’ ” Like so many other Third System fortifications, the Cockspur project would not be completed for another fifteen years—when, as Fort Pulaski, it would once again, but only briefly, come under the command of Robert E. Lee.16
The work at Cockspur Island taxed everything Lee had learned about coastal engineering. “We have cut a canal ½ mile long through the Island,” he explained to Mary Custis:
Embanked the exposed side, wharfed all around the end to about 200 ft. in order to secure it. Constructed a wharf nearly 300 ft in length. Built three houses. Laid out the Fort & made an Embankment all around it, 8 ft. high, 6 ft. at top & 20 ft. at bottom, in case of storms. Made machinery of different descriptions, and among the rest, Screw Pumps, pile drivers, Cranes tread Wheels &c. &c. Made the necessary surveys, soundings, drawings. Kept in steady employ 150 men & upwards, for all of whom we have to lay out their work, whether it be in wood or on the ground.
It also bored Lee. “To be out early & late urging a set of poor creatures to the top of their strength to erect that, of which the next tide will destroy half, & perhaps all,” was not what he wanted to see in his future, and for the first time notions of resignation from the Army twitched in his head. “Had I felt when with you, as I do now,” he wrote to Mary Custis, “I believe I should almost have refused to come.” He was made even more unhappy by the arrival of Nat, his mother’s old slave coachman, on Christmas Day 1830. There is no record of how closely Lee might have been attached to Nat as part of the Lee household in Alexandria. He had been willed by Ann Lee to Mildred. But Nat was old and sick, and because Mildred was about to marry Edward Vernon Childe, she wished on her brother what she had no desire to keep for herself, and “after a long & boisterous passage of 25 days,” Nat arrived at Cockspur, weak and coughing from the tuberculosis that killed him that spring.17
Lee found amusement and hope in only two sources, one being his letters to Mary Custis and the other being the Mackay family of Savannah, to which he escaped whenever opportunity beckoned. Jack Mackay, the son of a Savannah merchant, had been Lee’s classmate at West Point, only three months younger than Lee and six places beneath him in academic standing, and “the friend which I love above all things.” Mackay’s first posting as a second lieutenant in the artillery had been, conveniently, to the Oglethorpe Barracks in Savannah, and under the widow Mackay’s pointed roof on Broughton Street the two newly commissioned lieutenants swam effortlessly into the stream of Savannah society, which “has been quite gay so far in dinners, dances &c.” Society included Jack Mackay’s five glamorous sisters. “They were blessed creatures,” Lee remembered, and he was “so taken up with” them “that I could make myself agreeable to no one else.”18
For all of their charms, Mary Custis was in no real danger of losing him to the Mackays. Robert Lee had spent most of his childhood in a world where women held a central place, both as rulers and as servants. Ann Lee had made the decision to leave Stratford; Ann Lee had assumed the role of matriarch after Light Horse Harry’s departure and dominated Robert’s early life. Hence, his relationships with women would always be happier, more cozy, and more uninhibited than those in the masculine world, where genteel propriety and dignity would rule his behavior. “No one enjoyed the society of ladies more than himself,” Mary wrote years later, and the letters he wrote to Mary that winter from Georgia sparkle with the same flirtatious teasing that filled his days with the Mackays. She was “My sweet Mary” and “My Sweet Cousin,” and he “would even now give the world if you were here, on this desolate and comfortless Island.” In his imagination, he “could almost hear you speak and read, and laugh,” and he had no other desires than “to read to you, walk with you, ride with you.”
She had desires, too, although those now included a determination that her future husband should embrace the same evangelical Virginia Episcopalianism to which she and her parents subscribed. Before his departure for Cockspur, she promised to send him a New Testament, and she extracted a pledge from him to read it, “especially on the Sabbath.” He humored her, although it was not much more than humoring. West Point had done nothing to water whatever religious seeds had been planted in Lee’s soul as he grew up in Christ Church, Alexandria; it was, as many other cadets discovered, “a hard place to practice religion,” and the Army as a whole had a reputation for discouraging anything in the way of holy zeal. So he read the New Testament Mary sent, but dutifully rather than piously. “I found my eyes were running over verse after verse, while my mind was far otherwise engaged,” he admitted. He even “followed your wishes exactly & went to Church” in Savannah on Christmas Day, “& listened to the sermon.” Still, she should not “expect miracles in my case,” and he hoped she would be willing to “leave something to time, and more to opportunity…and so seek that I may find.”19
Lee was delighted to learn in April that his father-in-law-to-be had at last given his “approbation” to the wedding, and when orders arrived in March, transferring Lee to Fort Monroe, planning for a June ceremony at Arlington shot ahead. “The day has been fixed,” he wrote to his brother Carter, who had returned to New York after the breakup of Ann Lee’s Georgetown home and was making a second try at a law practice there, “& it is the 30th June.” He planned to wear his “uniform coat on the important night,” and he assigned Carter the job of having a New York tailor make a new pair of white dress trousers to match. Remember, he added with his usual precision, “the white pantaloons must be in character.”
Like many a groom, he admitted, “I begin to feel right funny when I count my days.” But he had a particular anxiety at the prospect of becoming George Washington Parke Custis’s son-in-law, “especially when I consider the novel situation in which I shall be placed.” He had no permanent home outside the Army. Mary, on the other hand, was as wedded to Arlington and her parents as she would be to him, and nothing would delight her more than for Robert to resign his commission and live with her, happily ever after, on the blessed heights above the Potomac. Certainly Arlington would make for easier living than coastal swamps. But if he yielded to that impulse, the likeliest result would be for Robert Lee to be sucked into the orbit of the Custises, with himself cast as Arlington’s junior squire and his father-in-law’s general factotum. If old Custis worried that the fortuneless lieutenant of engineers would become a burden on Arlington, he needn’t have been concerned. Robert Lee had lived long enough under his mother’s thumb to find no cheer in living under his father-in-law’s. (If anything, Custis would soon enough regret that Lee hadn’t resigned from the Army and joined him at Arlington.)
For the moment, Fort Monroe resolved that question for both of them. Lee would still be the junior engineering officer at what remained the largest of the Army’s Third System fortifications. But his superior would be Captain Andrew Talcott, ten years Lee’s senior but newly wed himself and an ingenious inventor of a method of determining latitude by observing the zenith distances of stars. “Capt. Talcott…is a man of a first rate mind, of great acquirement, & gentlemanly feelings,” Lee exulted, “& one in whose society I can derive much profit, as well as pleasure.” Moreover, Lee’s principal task would be the construction of a new fortification, Fort Calhoun, on an artificial shoal known as the Rip Raps, flanking the ship channel formed by Hampton Roads and guarded by Fort Monroe, and there Lee would have more latitude for self-oversight. “This is a very pleasant Post,” he wrote to Carter, “& I have charge of Ft Calhoun…on the other side of the Channel.” Whether Mary would find it pleasant was another story. But he set out, even before the wedding, to convince Mary that it would be perfectly agreeable to set up housekeeping there. It might not be Arlington, he conceded anxiously, but “there are very good quarters over at the Rip Raps & we might live there.”20
Even the wedding itself generated some nervous flutters. Lee had been unsure down to the end of May whether he could obtain leave from Fort Monroe, and Mary’s mother came down with “chills” in mid-June. The evening of the wedding brought on showers that drenched the presiding clergyman, Dr. Reuel Keith, the Virginia Theological Seminary’s founder and a particular friend of Mary’s mother, on his way to Arlington. The “tall and slender” Keith “had to change his dress, and Mr. Custis supplied him with garments ill-befitting so tall a man, for Mr. Custis was short in stature, so that there was something ludicrous in the Doctor’s appearance.” At least, as Lee explained afterward to Andrew Talcott, “there was neither fainting nor fighting, nor anything uncommon which could be twisted into an adventure.”
Keith had no lengthy sermon to preach, although the “few words” he did utter as a charge to the newly married couple were serious enough, in evangelical fashion, to make Lee feel “as if he had been reading my Death warrant,” and he noticed in Mary’s hand “a tremulousness…that made me anxious for him to end.” But everything proceeded without greater trouble, and Lee actually confessed to feeling no “more excitement than at the black Board at West Point.” He did not expect to return to Fort Monroe until the beginning of August, and in anticipation of Mary’s new role of wife he had ordered a “new bedstead” in Alexandria, to be shipped down the Potomac in time for their arrival at Hampton Roads. The newlyweds would take up residence in a second-floor two-room apartment in the officers’ quarters near the south postern gate.21
* * *
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The Lees had scarcely returned to Fort Monroe before Southampton County, forty miles southwest of Hampton Roads, erupted in the most ferocious slave uprising in the new republic’s history. A slave preacher, Nat Turner, “began to receive the true knowledge of faith” in visions of blood falling “in the form of dew” and in May 1828 “heard a loud noise in the heavens” which announced that he must “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” An eclipse of the sun in February 1831 was Turner’s signal to prepare an insurrection, and a second eclipse in August provided the trigger for the uprising. In a two-day rebellion that eventually recruited seventy slaves for Turner’s band, Turner killed more than sixty whites—men, women, and children, without discrimination—before hastily organized white militia surrounded them and crushed it, equally without discrimination. Turner eluded capture until October, but eventually eighteen of his slave allies and one free black were hanged, while others were sold out of state.22
The artillery companies that garrisoned Fort Monroe were mobilized for action, but by the time they were ready, the Virginia militia had already poured its own vision of blood onto the rebels, and as an engineering officer nothing necessarily required Lee’s services. Lee was busier trying to calm nervous white reactions to Turner’s revolt. Writing to his mother-in-law, he blamed Turner’s “religious assemblies, which ought to have been devoted to better purposes,” for the outbreak, and downplayed the actual scale of the uprising. “There are many instances,” he reassured her, of slaves “defending their masters,” while “the whole number of blacks taken and killed did not amount to the number of whites murdered by them.”23
Some of Lee’s indifference to the Turner uprising was calculated as a balm for soothing his in-laws’ nerves. But another part of it was rooted in the sense of distance he felt from slave owning himself. When Ann Lee died in 1829, no slaves were named as part of the vague “remainder of my estate,” which was to be divided among Robert and his two older brothers. Still, this “remainder” probably included at least one un-itemized slave family in Ann Lee’s estate, because Robert would mention, almost in passing, in a letter to Carter Lee in 1835, “Mrs. Sally Diggs” and “Mrs Nancy Ruffin & her three illegitimate pledges,” who “are all of the race in my poss[ession].” Beyond that, he had little direct connection to slave owning.24
On the other hand, Robert Lee certainly benefited indirectly from slave ownership. The bulk of the workforce at Fort Monroe were black slaves, hired out by their owners, or free blacks, because “Blacks in this Country are mostly Labourers, & Mechanics white.” He also had another hand in slavery through the Custises, who owned a vast slave workforce at Arlington, White House, and Romancoke. Lee might not have felt much incentive to acquire slaves in his own name, but the personal needs slaves served were more than met through the Custis slaves, who would provide the bulk of Mary’s “goods & chattels” at Fort Monroe and attend the family’s summer vacation peregrinations to visit various relatives as part of “a squad of children, Negroes, horses, and dogs.”
Not that the Custises were themselves easy-minded about slavery. As in so many other things, G.W.P. was notoriously lax in managing his enslaved laborers, leaving them an unusual amount of “opportunity for gossip and idleness and greater temptation and inducement to appropriate the small proceeds of their labor to themselves.” And like many elite Virginia slave owners, the Custises took the opportunity of slavery’s steady drain toward the southwestern states to profess their distaste for the “peculiar institution”—although without necessarily doing anything about it. Custis even described slavery as a “vulture” that gnawed at the “vitals” of Southern society and “the mightiest serpent that ever infested the world,” while Custis’s brother-in-law, William Henry Fitzhugh, had scheduled the postmortem emancipation of his own slaves. Custis publicly favored colonization as the best solution to ending slavery, but neither G.W.P. nor his son-in-law showed any interest in immediate emancipation, nor did they oppose in any public way the fanatical turn in Southern thinking generated by the Turner uprising toward claiming slavery to be a positive good, to be defended at all costs—including, if necessary, at the cost of the American Union.25
Lee had a more immediate problem in coping with his new wife. She tried to persuade Robert to bring her mother to Fort Monroe to manage the new housekeeping arrangements, and when Mrs. Custis wisely declined, Mary tried to persuade him to induce his sister Anne to join them from Baltimore. Moreover, he discovered that Mary “is somewhat addicted to laziness & forgetfulness in her Housekeeping.” Certainly, “she does her best,” but “in her Mothers words, ‘The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ ” For her part, Mary found the cramped quarters at Fort Monroe a trial. “It is so public you can never go out alone,” she complained to her mother, nor was there a chaplain on post to hold regular services. She waited only three months at Fort Monroe before planning an extended return to Arlington for the Christmas holidays. “I am a wanderer on the face of the earth,” she wrote—except at Arlington, where “the past and the future” could alike be “disregarded.”26
