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Deja Vu for Robert E. Lee
Being a good soldier and a good father
was difficult even for a man who played both roles superbly.
Finding someone who knew Robert E. Lee personally and did not like him was always a difficult task. Handsome and unfailingly well-groomed, he might have been thought egotistic, but his nature was to consider others before himself. As a teenager, he cared for his ailing mother, and rather than celebrate his 1829 West Point graduation with friends, he sat at her bedside during her final weeks. Years later, Lee made every effort to see to the comfort of his invalid wife.
As a father, Lee disciplined his children firmly but kindly. He saw them as distinct individuals and encouraged their various interests. Unfortunately, duty frequently separated him from his family, such as when he served in the Mexican War.
After nearly two years in Mexico, Lee arrived in Washington on June 29, 1848. From there, he rode on horseback to the home of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, at Arlington, Virginia. Awaiting him there were his wife, Mary, along with their seven children.
The older children– Custis, Mary, Rooney, Agnes, and Annie– were eager to reconnect with their father. Only eight months old when Lee left for Mexico, the youngest child, Mildred, had no memory of him.
Lee's youngest son wrote a fascinating account of the general's private side.
Robert E. Lee, Jr. was the next oldest child. Not yet three when Lee left, the boy had only what he later termed “indistinct and disconnected” memories of him. Nevertheless, Rob was excited about his father’s homecoming and wanted to impress him. In his 1904 book Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, Rob recalls that he insisted upon wearing his favorite shirt–“blue ground dotted over with white diamond figures,” and that his hair was “freshly curled in long golden ringlets.”
Proud of his appearance, young Rob waited impatiently as Lee greeted the adults gathered to welcome him home. Then he watched Lee walk toward him asking, “Where is my little boy?”— as he swooped up and kissed a quite astonished Armistead Lippit. Lee had mistaken another little boy with ringlets, the child of one of Mrs. Lee’s friends, for his own son.
Rob recalled feeling “shocked and humiliated” by the incident, and his father likely felt the same. Lee certainly would have regretted that this blunder constituted Rob’s first clear memory of him. Neither of them knew that, for very different reasons, Lee would twice more fail to recognize his namesake.
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Seventeen-year old Rob Lee was a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville at the outbreak of the Civil War. When he told his father he wanted to volunteer for service in the Confederate Army, Lee advised him to remain in school. Rob did as his father wished.
Less than a year later, however, Rob again expressed a desire to become a soldier. This time, Lee did not object, and Rob joined the Rockbridge Artillery on March 15, 1862.
On May 31, 1862, General Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, was severely wounded. The next day, June 1, President Jefferson Davis, appointed Robert E. Lee, his chief military advisor, to replace Johnston.
Thus, by the summer of 1862, both Lee and Rob were in the field with the Army of Northern Virginia.
*****
During the last week of August, Stonewall Jackson’s forces, including the Rockbridge Artillery, fought the Union army under General John Pope in the Second Battle of Manassas. Jackson had led his men on a wide flanking march to capture the Union supply depot. The Confederate forces then withdrew, set up defensive positions, and engaged in an inconclusive two-day battle before the arrival of General Longstreet’s corps tipped the scales in favor of the Confederates.
During the battle, two guns from Rob’s battery were detached from Jackson to assist Longstreet’s advance artillery. After some rapid positioning and firing, the battery was ordered to cease firing. As Rob and the other weary artillerists took the opportunity to rest by leaning against their guns, Lee and his staff rode up to assess the scene. In Recollections, Rob recalls that Lee reigned in Traveller a mere fifteen feet from his gun.
Realizing that his father did not recognize him because his “face and hands were blanketed with powder-sweat,” Rob took the opportunity to play a joke on Lee. He identified himself to Captain Mason of Lee’s staff. Amused by the situation, the Captain approached Lee and said, “General, here is someone who wants to speak to you.”
Rob recalls the general’s reply as, “Well, my man, what can I do for you?” Only when he responded, “Why, General, don’t you know me?” did Lee recognize the begrimed young man carrying a sponge staff as his son.
Both Lees, the general’s staff, and Rob’s fellow cannoneers enjoyed a few moments of comic relief following a hard-fought victory.
*****
The tone was decidedly different on September 17 near Antietam Creek in Maryland. Rob’s battery had been in the thick of the battle, losing many men and horses. With three of its four guns disabled, it was ordered to withdraw from the field, but not told where to go. Seeing Lee and his staff on a nearby knoll, Captain Poague halted the cannoneers’ retreat and rode to Lee for instructions. In Recollections, Rob writes that he and some of his fellow artillerists walked along to hear what would be said. Lee listened carefully to Poague’s questions then told him to return to the front with his remaining gun and his most fit horses and men.
As he spoke, Lee looked at the soldiers but took no note of Rob. When Captain Poague turned away from Lee, Rob walked up to his father and spoke to him. Again, it was his voice rather than his soiled appearance that his father recognized.
Rob recalls that his father congratulated him on “being well and unhurt” on what would come to be known as the bloodiest day of the war.
Unlike at Manassas, this was no time for levity. Rob asked, “General, are you going to send us in again?” He recalls his father’s smiling as he replied, “Yes, my son. You all must do what you can to drive these people back.” It was, however, Lee’s thrust into the North that was driven back at the end of that September day.
*****
Shortly after the Battle of Antietam, Robert E. Lee, Jr. was promoted to Lieutenant. For the remainder of the war, he served as an aide de camp to his brother W. H. F. (Rooney) Lee, who had assumed command of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry.
Trivia
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All three of Robert E. Lee’s sons survived service in the Civil War. At the end of the war, they held the following ranks in the Confederate Army: Custis, Major General; Rooney, Brigadier General; Rob, Lieutenant.
What You Can Do
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Read one of the many biographies of Robert E. Lee. Rob’s book, The Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, gives an insider’s view of the General. Other books focus on his ancestry, his service in the United States Army, and his role in the Civil War. Douglas Southhall Freeman won a Pulitzer Prise for his four-volume biography with the deceptively short title Lee. Dozens of one-volume Lee biographies, such as James I. Robertson’s Robert E. Lee: Virginian, Soldier, American Citizen are also good reading.