Robert E. Lee

Lee's father was Henry ''Light Horse Harry'' Lee, a cavalry hero of the Revolution who spent a fortune, went to debtor's prison, and sailed for the West Indies when Robert was six, dying on the voyage home in 1818 without seeing the family again. His mother, Anne Hill Carter Lee, moved the children into rented rooms in Alexandria and raised them on relatives' charity and her own strict economy. Lee kept her account books as a boy and nursed her through a long illness. West Point admitted him in 1825 on the strength of the Lee name, and he graduated second in his class in 1829 without a single demerit in four years — discipline imposed on him early, and never set down again.

He married Mary Custis in 1831 and spent three decades as an army engineer, then a staff officer under Winfield Scott in Mexico, then superintendent of West Point. In 1859 he marched federal troops to Harpers Ferry and took John Brown prisoner. Two years later he turned down field command of the army meant to defend Washington and rode south instead. What that choice cost the country over the next four years, and what the war made of his name afterward, is BriefHistory's subject — this page stays with the parts of him that story leaves out.

Lee did not free the people he personally enslaved until the law forced it: the will of his father-in-law required manumission within five years, and Lee filed the papers on December 29, 1862, the final day the deadline allowed, having used the interim to hire out families and pursue a group who tried to escape in 1859 — an episode that produced sworn accounts of a whipping he denied delivering himself. He called slavery ''a moral and political evil'' and also called enslaved people better off under it than free in Africa. Arlington, the estate his marriage had given him, was gone before the war ended: seized for unpaid taxes in 1864, and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered Union dead buried in Mary Lee's rose garden specifically to make the grounds unlivable for the family that had owned it.

His son sued to recover Arlington, and in 1882 the Supreme Court agreed, 5 to 4, that the seizure had been illegal. The family took cash rather than the house — 150,000 dollars, paid in 1883 — and the several thousand graves already on the grounds stayed where they were. Washington College, which Lee had run for five years, renamed itself for him within months of his death and is Washington and Lee University still. He is buried in the campus chapel he had built as college president, a few steps from the office the university has kept exactly as he left it.

Robert E. Lee's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fort Pulaski building
  Engineered early in his army career, on Cockspur Island, Georgia 1831
• Army of Northern Virginia company
  Commanded from June 1862 until the surrender at Appomattox 1862
• Washington College honor system other
  A single-sanction code of student self-governance he introduced as college president 1865
• University Chapel building
  Built on the Washington College campus during his presidency, and now his burial place 1868
• United States v. Lee case
  His son's suit for Arlington, decided 5 to 4 for the family after Lee's death 1882

• January 19, 1807 aged 0 Born at Stratford Hall, Virginia
• 1818 aged ~11 His father dies at sea, returning from exile in the West Indies
• 1829 aged ~22 Graduates West Point 2nd in his class, with no demerits
• June 30, 1831 aged 24 Marries Mary Anna Randolph Custis at Arlington House
• September 13, 1847 aged 40 Wounded at Chapultepec, in the final assault on Mexico City
• April 20, 1861 aged 54 Resigns his U.S. Army commission rather than fight against Virginia
• January 11, 1864 aged 56 Arlington is auctioned to the federal government for unpaid taxes Union dead were buried in Mary Lee's rose garden months later to make the estate unlivable.
• April 9, 1865 aged 58 Surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House
• October 12, 1870 aged 63 Dies at Lexington, Virginia, age 63

• Winfield Scott 1786–1866
  Commanding general whose long career, Mexico City campaign, and Anaconda Plan shaped nineteenth-century U.S. military strategy. commander who urged him to stay Union
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. accepted his surrender
• Stonewall Jackson 1824–1863
  Confederate general whose Shenandoah Valley campaign became a standard study in maneuver warfare. led his most trusted corps
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. commander in chief
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. condemned the myth built after his death