Robert E. Lee as an American Hero

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Robert Edward (E.) Lee, a man born for battle, but not necessarily leadership. In fact, Lee would go on to call his decision to join the army one of the “greatest mistakes of his life.” But yet, he was still thrown into the role of General not for his hunger for power or his charisma, but rather for his voracious love for his country. Reluctant yet willing, fearful yet courageous, he dove headfirst into a battle that seemed would be turned in his favor, until his shortcomings acted as weights and dragged him down, deeper and deeper until it seemed like the entire Confederacy had been cut off from the light.

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Through Robert E. Lee’s dedication, daring, and love for his state, he was able to put up a hard fight for the Confederacy, and would have led them to victory, if not for his tragic flaws.

Family shapes who we are. Our minds are constantly framed by what we hear around us, and they are the people who meld our mind from the beginning.

Therefore, to fully understand Robert Edward Lee, we must understand the environment in which he was raised in. Lee was born to two parents, one a saint, the other tainted with the mark of corruption. His father was a respected general named Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and had married his mother Ann Carter for the money. He held no affection in his bitter heart except the affection for Ann’s money, and preferred to spend his nights with other women while reaping the benefits of her inheritance.

Though he was at his peak in the American Revolution, leading his cavalry as an American hero, he eventually fizzled out, ended up in debtor’s prison, and fled from his debt by escaping to the West Indies, leaving his family without a backward glance. Lee’s mother, Ann, showed no animosity toward the awful man, and continued to raise her family with love and affection. Lee saw his father for the last time at the age of six. The American hero and loser Light-Horse Harry died on his way back home when his injuries from a beating he took several years prior caught up with him and his bad health brought him down. This happened when Lee was eleven, and Light-Horse Harry never lived to see his family again. Growing up with no father figure did not stop Lee in the slightest. He loved his mother with a fierce passion, and was her favorite child as well as her confidant and nurse.

When the time came to leave the house for college however, there was no money left for Lee, the fifth child, and he chose to attend military school at West Point, which though he would later come to regret, would not be a sentiment many in the South shared with him. This is not just a story about a man's overwhelming failure, it is a story about a man defying the odds and rising above. Robert E. Lee did not let the struggles his family faced hold him back from becoming one of the best generals in history. He did not back down when his father left him, when his mother depended on him, or even when they did not have a single drop of money left for him, and we can see this fight for survival reflected in his acts during the Civil War.

After graduating from West Point second in his class in 1829, Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis in 1831 and remained an engineer in the army, where he would spend thirty years in the United States (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers. However, by 1836, Lee had become unsatisfied with life, and still searched for something to satiate his hunger. He bore this hunger for many years to come, and when the Mexican War came in 1845, Lee could finally hear the calling in his veins. It is in this war that Lee proves himself to be a competent, courageous, and daring soldier. From riding out alone into the night to inspect Mexican armies, to engineering the removal of obstacles to lead a clear path for the army, to finding a route across a lava bed through which the American forces could attack the Mexican army, Lee proved himself again and again.

Robert E. Lee’s career as a soldier was far from over, as he might have hoped before the start of the Mexican War, when he was depressed and unsatisfied with his path. Instead, his career was set aflame, and he gained the respect of many through his work in this war, most notably General Winfield Scott. After the capture of Mexico City, thanks to Lee, Scott said, “I tell you if I were on my deathbed tomorrow, and the President of the United States would tell me that a great battle was to be fought for the liberty or slavery of the country, and asked my judgement as to the ability of a commander, I would say with my dying breath, ‘Let it be Robert E. Lee!’” Lee carried this fame with him all the way to 1861, where he would fight for Virginia, and in doing so, would also begin his ill-fated fight for slavery.

In 1852, nine years before the beginning of the Civil War and following the Mexican War, Lee was appointed as commander at West Point, where he would serve for a mere two years, and then go off in search of adventure once again in Louisville, Kentucky. There he was severely disappointed to find no action, but by the mid-1850s, trouble had started to brew over the matter of slavery in the newly acquired territory won in the Mexican War. Lee claimed to be against the institution of slavery, and supported the gradual replacement of slaves, rather than immediate emancipation of them like northern abolitionists.

Throughout the tension that surrounded northerners and southerners in these years, Lee bounced around multiple cavalries, until finally, in 1857, he was notified that his son had died, and had left his estates in shambles and a huge debt in his wake, and that his wife was suffering from a severe form of arthritis. He immediately rushed home, and cared for his wife, but after many months of the same boring routine, Lee grew depressed as well as resentful of the life he had to look forward to, a life placed on hold. However, on one fateful October morning in 1859, a man named Jeb Stuart made his way to Robert E. Lee with a message, a message to head straight to a place called Harper’s Ferry, by the Potomac River on the Maryland border, to deal with a slave revolt. Though at the time, Robert E. Lee saw this as an escape from his trite life, this message turned into an event that would change the course of American history.

The slave revolt at Harpers Ferry was started by the infamous John Brown, known for Bleeding Kansas, in which he slaughtered southern slaveholders. Brown’s plan was to capture the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but when only twenty slaves showed up, his plan fell apart, and was brought to its knees with the arrival of the strategic and demanding Robert E. Lee. Though Brown’s plan was a failure, like many things in history it carried a grave meaning that ran deeper than a simple slave revolt. Brown, in starting the revolt, had sparked a nationwide conflict.

In this revolt at Harpers Ferry, we saw northern abolitionists place Brown as a martyr for the northern cause, and we saw the southerner’s worst fears and insecurities about the antislavery sentiment being confirmed. In putting down the rebellion, Lee was merely delaying fate, and in doing so, we see the irony in this. In fighting at Harpers Ferry, Lee confirmed his own tragic end, and when Abraham Lincoln is finally elected in 1860, it is seen as the final straw for the southern states, and they immediately secede. Thus, the stage is set for the beginnings of the Civil War, and America holds its breath as Robert E. Lee emerges from the haze to claim his title.

On April 12, 1861, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired at the Battle of Fort Sumter, where Robert E. Lee failed to appear. However, six days later on April 18, Lee was given the opportunity of a lifetime. Abraham Lincoln had offered Lee the position of general in chief of the Union armies. However, Lee refused to take up arms against his home, the South, and most importantly, Virginia. Though he opposed slavery, opposed secession, and did not believe that the South stood a fighting chance, Lee put this all aside for his home. We see the struggle between his love for his country versus his love for his state reflected in a letter to his sister on April 20, 1861:

With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up by mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword. I know you will blame me; but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavoured to do what I thought right.

Though we might see this as loyalty and love towards Virginia, this move gave passage for Lee’s failure. It was Lee’s inability to fight for what was right, instead of what he could not let go, that foreshadowed his failure in the Civil War more than anything else. If he had fought for the greater good, the Union, then he would have gone down in the eyes of all Americans as a hero.

After his declination of general of the Union armies, Lee wasted no time at all in resigning from the army as a whole. Then, on April 21, Lee was given the title of major general of Virginia of the Confederate armies, which Lee graciously accepted, love of his state still enclosing his heart, mind, and soul. Lee’s first test as major general presented itself in late July, when Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America ordered Lee to go the mountains of western Virginia. There he was to bring together three Confederate armies to fight in coordination against the Union. When Lee arrived, he faced an impossible task. Everything had turned to sludge from the rain, and the supplies as well as the soldiers were drenched and defeated.

Moreover, many soldiers refused to give Lee the respect he commanded as major general, and Lee was not able to complete his task of unionization, failing miserably. On September 10-15, the Battle of Cheat Mountain took place, where the Confederacy was crushed by their inability to work together and overthrow the opposition. When people in Virginia heard of what happened, Lee was demonetized to the strongest extent. The son of the legendary Light-Horse Harry, in their eyes, had turned out to be nothing but a failure, and they even started referring to Lee as Granny Lee. Though this first failure might seem like an opportunity to point out his shortcomings, this failure seemed to be the result of nothing but poor luck. Lee had the qualifications of a great soldier, but the Confederacy had not yet gained the respect of Lee it required to pull together and coordinate against the Union.

Jefferson Davis saw this potential in Lee, and instead of punishing him for Cheat Mountain, he kept his trust in Lee and sent him out to Charleston on November 7, 1861, where Lee was again met with the same bout of bad luck. The U.S. Army had already taken over Port Royal Sound in South Carolina, and with this they could travel between South Carolina and Georgia quickly and efficiently. Therefore, Lee had little time to gather forces and was defeated once again, and at this point it is still not Lee’s tragic flaws that brought him down, but rather just poor fortune. In 1862, Davis called Lee back to Richmond, which was in a state of peril. General George B. McClellan was gathering a force of more than 120,000, twice the number of the Confederate troops, to launch an attack on Richmond.

It is at this point in the war the Robert E. Lee realized something that would turn him into the hero of the South. He realized that the whole time, the Confederate army had been waiting in the defense for attacks by the Union, and so he took the offense. During this time, General McClellan had started making advances, and by now was on the peninsula between the York and James rivers. Joseph Eggleston Johnston’s army, who were supposed to be confronting McClellan’s army, had broken off contact, so finally, Lee and Davis rode out to find out what was going on. There they found the Battle of Seven Pines, where there were 5,000 Federal casualties and 6,000 Southern casualties, amongst them Johnston himself. It is then that Lee truly got his chance to rise to fame. Davis, seeing that the army quite obviously needed a new commander, appointed Robert E. Lee, and though it turned out to be a brilliant idea at the time, we now see what a terrible mistake it was. Perhaps, however, no one could have stopped the fall of the Old South and the inevitable rise of the New Nation.

Lee had finally gotten what he had hoped and dreamed for, his own army, which he deemed the Army of Northern Virginia. His first task was to kick McClellan off his home turf, and he did so in the last week of June with the help of Stonewall Jackson in the battles famously named the Seven Days battles. In these battles Robert E. Lee finally proved his worth and kicked the name Granny Lee into the dirt, burying it deep, where no one could ever dig it up after his victories. In seven days, Robert E. Lee polished the tarnish off of his name, and was able to transform himself into the hero of the Confederacy.

Soon after, Lee became determined to reclaim Richmond fully, and launched an attack against the Union Army of Virginia against John Pope. In the second Battle of Manassas, Robert E. Lee would again prove his heroism, but at a great cost. At this battle, he would lose 25% of his army, compared to the previous 19% he had lost in the Seven Days battle. Though at the time, Lee believed that he could survive through the losses if only given more men, this drive without care for the losses ultimately lost Lee the rest of the war. After the second Battle of Manassas, Lee was dead set on claiming the prize jewel of the war, invasion of the North. Lee had his eyes locked on the ultimate challenge, and even with the casualties, even with half his army deserting and the other half starving, Lee pushed on.

Whether you see this as brave or foolish, it aided in the downfall of this tragic hero. However, this much can be said. Lee failed to grasp the full social and cultural meaning of the war, and instead focused on single moves, single battles, that would lead him to the goal. Not once in all of the Civil War did Lee take a step back to look at the bigger picture. As soon as he claimed one victory, he moved farther and farther into the mouth of the beast. Ulysses S. Grant saw the meaning of the war, he grasped what he was fighting for and acted accordingly. Lee however, could not see what he was leading his troops into, and maybe that is what led to a series of failures that eventually led to a stain on Lee’s career that he could not remove, the Battle of Gettysburg.

Before we delve deep into the Battle of Gettysburg, it is important to point out a startling fact. Before this battle, Lee had been victorious at two battles, the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville. Both these victories took place after the battle known as the “bloodiest single day of the war,” the Battle of Antietam. These served to boost Lee’s morale as well as his conceitedness. Some might say that the victories got the Lee’s head, and off the high of his success, he took to the North like a mad man. Despite being stripped of his right-hand man Stonewall Jackson, despite having little to no other strategy but single-minded stubbornness, Lee was still determined to gain a victory on Northern soil. Though Lee was incredibly smart and decisive, Jackson had provided a new outlook on strategy and was an extremely beneficial asset to Lee’s team, and without him the odds were significantly lowered in his favor. Despite all of this, in a sort of deranged madness, he believed that a southern victory on northern soil was the only way to defeat the opposition, and commenced to his doom.

Gettysburg took place on July 1-3 in 1863, and even though Davis had replenished Lee’s troops for the battle, Lee had suffered major casualties in his troops and it was showing. The Army of Northern Virginia was suffering greatly, but in another show of weakness, Lee believed he could beat the North no matter the number of men he had to back up his movement. On July 1-2, the Confederates won many victories, but it is on the third day of the battle, known as Pickett’s Charge, where everything fell apart. In this battle, one of Lee’s commanders, Richard Ewell, had not received one of Lee’s commands to wait out the opposition, and instead decided to charge into battle, stripping Lee of his chance for an organized attack. With this disadvantage, as well as a bone-tired army, Lee was demolished and crushed into the ground, and he lost 35% of his army, 28,000 men.