Robert E. Lee

Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His father, Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee, was a Revolutionary War hero and former governor of Virginia, and his mother was Ann Hill Carter Lee; several relatives had signed the Declaration of Independence or served in Congress. When Lee was six his father left for the West Indies and never returned, leaving the family in financial difficulty.⁠[1][2][3][4]

Lee entered the United States Military Academy in 1825 and graduated second in the class of 1829; classmates called him the “Marble Model.” He joined the Engineer Corps as a second lieutenant on July 1, 1829, and was promoted to first lieutenant on September 21, 1836, and to captain on July 7, 1838. He spent seventeen years in the Corps of Engineers supervising coastal defenses.⁠[3][4][1]

The United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry declared war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. From March to September 1847 Lee served on the staff of Gen. Winfield Scott in the campaign that ended with the capture of Mexico City; he won recognition as a scout and received brevet promotions to major, lieutenant colonel and colonel. Scott called Lee “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.”⁠[3][1][4][2]

Lee was superintendent of the United States Military Academy from 1852 to 1855 and later served as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Cavalry in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry.⁠[3][4]

After the abolitionist John Brown raided Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West VirginiaWest VirginiaWest Virginia is a U.S. state formed from the western counties of Virginia during the Civil War; its capital and largest city is Charleston. It became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Its population was 1,793,716 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry), in 1859, Lee, who was in Washington, was summoned to the War Department on October 17; the next morning he led U.S. Marines in capturing Brown, whom he called an “enemy of the Country.”⁠[3][1]

Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861. Lee had been offered command of the Union forces being raised to protect Washington but declined; arguing that he could not fight against his own people, he resigned from the U.S. Army as a colonel on April 20. Mary Lee called the moment “the severest struggle” of her husband’s life. On April 23 Lee took command of Virginia’s forces.⁠[4][2][1]

Lee’s first Civil War engagement, at Cheat Mountain on September 11, 1861, ended in a Union victory; he then served as military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis until June 1862.⁠[4]

After Gen. Joseph Johnston was wounded on May 31, 1862, Lee took command of the army defending Richmond, which he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia and led for three years. In 1862 he fought the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25–July 1), Second Manassas (August 28–30) and the MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry campaign; at Antietam (Sharpsburg) on September 17 he fought George McClellan’s army to a stalemate and withdrew under cover of darkness, and on December 13 he repulsed Union attacks at Fredericksburg.⁠[1][4][2]

At Chancellorsville, May 1–6, 1863, Lee won a victory, but more than 20 percent of his soldiers were killed, wounded or missing. At Gettysburg, July 1–3, after Pickett’s Charge by 12,500 men was repulsed, Lee ordered a retreat and said to his men, “It is all my fault”; he wrote to Jefferson Davis offering his resignation, which Davis refused.⁠[2][4]

In the Overland Campaign of 1864 Lee fought a relentless series of battles against the Union army under Ulysses S. Grant, in which his army suffered about 35,000 casualties. From June 16, 1864, to March 25, 1865, his forces were locked in trench warfare outside Petersburg. On February 6, 1865, Jefferson Davis appointed Lee general-in-chief of all Confederate forces.⁠[2][4]

After Union forces blocked his retreat, Lee raised a white flag. On April 9, 1865, he arrived at Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox Court House at about 1:00 p.m.; Grant and his staff arrived about half an hour later, and the meeting ended with a handshake at about 3:00 p.m. Under Grant’s terms, Confederate soldiers surrendered their weapons, equipment and flags and were paroled and allowed to go home rather than to prison camps, while officers kept their side arms, private horses and baggage; Lee asked that enlisted cavalrymen and artillerymen keep their horses and mules, and Grant agreed to issue a separate order allowing it. Grant also offered 25,000 rations for three days. The National Park Service notes that “Lee had only surrendered his army, not the Confederacy.”⁠[5][6][1]

On April 10 Lee issued General Orders No. 9, his farewell to the army, saying it had yielded to “overwhelming numbers and resources”; Encyclopedia Virginia judges that the message supports the “Lost Cause” narrative and downplays Union generalship and Confederate desertions during the campaign. On April 12 Confederate troops under John B. Gordon formally laid down their arms before Union troops commanded by Joshua Chamberlain; neither Lee nor Grant was present. The American Battlefield Trust judges that the surrender effectively ended the Civil War.⁠[6][4]

Lee returned home on parole and in September 1865 became president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, a post he held until his death. In 1867, at his request, the college began building a chapel, completed in time for the 1868 commencement.⁠[4][2][7]

In August 1868 Lee signed a petition recommending that political power be withheld from African Americans; Encyclopedia Virginia records that he advocated their disenfranchisement and worked to establish a conservative state government. On December 25, 1868, President Andrew JohnsonAndrew JohnsonAndrew Johnson (1808–1875) was an American politician who served as governor of Tennessee and as a U.S. senator, and who succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 as the 17th president of the United States, serving until 1869.Open the full entry proclaimed the Christmas amnesty, under which Lee was pardoned.⁠[2]

Lee’s last visit to his office was on September 28, 1870. He died in Lexington on October 12, 1870, of what Encyclopedia Virginia describes as a probable stroke. He was first buried beneath the college chapel; in 1883 an addition housing Valentine’s “Recumbent Lee” sculpture and a family mausoleum was completed, and Lee’s remains were moved there.⁠[7][2][1]

In June 1831 Lee married his distant cousin Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the only daughter of George WashingtonGeorge WashingtonGeorge Washington (1732–1799) was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. Earlier he commanded the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War and presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787.Open the full entry Parke Custis, a grandson of Martha Washington, and heiress of Arlington House. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry notes that Lee took seriously the ties to George Washington, whom he sought to emulate throughout his life. Their marriage lasted thirty-nine years, and they had four daughters and three sons: George Washington Custis Lee (1832), Mary Custis Lee (1835), William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee (1837), Anne Carter Lee (1839), Eleanor “Agnes” Lee (1841), Robert Edward Lee Jr. (1843) and Mildred Childe Lee (1846). During the Civil War their daughter Annie died and their son Rooney was taken prisoner.⁠[3][1][2]

In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, Lee called slavery “a moral & political evil” and “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race,” adding that its progress and result should be left in God’s hands. The National Park Service notes that Lee’s direct ownership of enslaved people is documented through about 1852, when he hired out Philip Meriday, the last direct evidence; there are no records of his freeing or selling the people he owned.⁠[8]

After George Washington Parke Custis died in 1857, Lee became executor of his will. Custis held 197 enslaved people on three plantations, and his will directed that they be freed within five years, after legacies and debts were paid; Lee managed them but did not personally own them. The National Park Service describes his management as marked by “strife and discord”: many had expected immediate freedom at Custis’s death, and some defied Lee or tried to escape. Wesley Norris, formerly enslaved by Custis, recalled in the Anti-Slavery Standard in 1866 that after he and two others were caught fleeing north, Lee ordered them whipped. In December 1862 Lee executed a deed of manumission freeing all the enslaved people of the Custis estate.⁠[8]

Lee was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1900. Britannica calls him a “central figure in contending memory traditions of the American Civil War.” Arlington House, the Lees’ former home, is administered by the National Park Service as Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial. A recruit training post established in 1917 was named Camp Lee after him.⁠[9][1][10]

Virginia contributed statues of Lee and George Washington to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol in 1909. On December 21, 2020, the Lee statue was removed from the Capitol and taken to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond; a commission established by the Virginia General Assembly selected the civil rights activist Barbara Johns to replace it. Gov. Ralph Northam said, “The Confederacy is a symbol of Virginia’s racist and divisive history.”⁠[11]

The Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond was erected in 1890; the statue weighed 12 tons and its pedestal stands about 40 feet tall. After the Supreme Court of Virginia cleared the way, the statue was removed on September 8, 2021, while the pedestal was left in place pending discussions about the future of Monument Avenue.⁠[12]

On June 4, 2021, the Washington and Lee University board of trustees voted 22 to 6 to keep the university’s name while renaming Lee Chapel as University Chapel, its original nineteenth-century name, adopting a diploma design without images and discontinuing Founders Day, which had been held on Lee’s birthday. The board said Lee’s name had been added in recognition of “his leadership in saving and transforming the school” and expressed regret for the school’s “past veneration of the Confederacy.” In 2023 a partition was installed on the chapel stage separating the 1868 auditorium from the 1883 annex containing the Recumbent Lee sculpture; both spaces are open to the public.⁠[13][7]

On April 27, 2023, following the recommendations of a special committee, Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Lee, was redesignated Fort Gregg-Adams in honor of two Black officers, Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams. In 2025, on the order of President Donald Trump, it was renamed Fort Lee once more, this time in honor of Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Medal of Honor recipient and Buffalo Soldier of the 10th Cavalry.⁠[14][10]

Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial (National Park Service): Web page: https://www.nps.gov/arho/learn/historyculture/robert-lee.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Washington and Lee University (University Chapel): Web page: https://www.wlu.edu/academics/libraries-and-museums/institutional-history-museum-and-galleries/university-chapel-and-galleries/history-and-evolution (opens in a new window).⁠[7]