Save for his abhorrence of debt, never something to bother the arrogant cavaliers of preceding generations, Lee’s conception of honor and allegiance owed more to Virginia’s landed gentry of the eighteenth century—or England’s feudal lords of the fourteenth—than the new values of the American republic. The world Robert E. Lee was born into, among the antebellum aristocracy of tidewater Virginia, was one that still worked on networks of kinship and personal patronage rather than modern abstractions like the rule of law or the democratic institutions of government.
