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September 28 - October 4, 2025
“The long battle had traveled,” wrote Dr. Holmes, “like one of those tornadoes which tear their path through our fields and villages.”
“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell asserted in his study of meaning and memory of the First World War.
His loyalty was always to his family, and his sense of honor was mainly the personal dread of financial ruin.
As his biographer Allen Guelzo concluded, “Lee never ceased to believe that nothing but the Army stood between him and poverty.”
Duty is usually thought of as obligations owed others; to Lee, duty was the means to avoid such obligation altogether.
Lee would later insist that he had “never been an advocate for slavery,” a “moral and political evil in any country.”
“the painful discipline” slaves were subject to “is necessary for their instruction as a race.” Only “a wise & merciful Providence” knew “how long their subjugation might be necessary.” But, Lee pointed out, “The doctrines & miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small part of the human race,” which offered a hint as to God’s timetable for emancipation. “We must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands, . . . who Chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but a single day.” God was clearly in no more of a hurry
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Mary Custis Lee left a melodramatic account of the great moral dilemma of her husband’s life, his decision in April 1861 to renounce his commission in the United States Army and accept command of the troops of his seceding state of Virginia. Weeping “tears of blood,” falling to his knees to beg divine guidance, he wrestled with his conscience, pacing the floor all night, torn between loyalty to the Union and loyalty to his native state.
The five other Virginians holding the rank of colonel in the United States Army suffered no recorded agonies: they remained loyal to their oaths, and their nation.
Lincoln’s “savage and brutal policy,” Lee insisted, “leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.”
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.
Lee’s father, a hero of the Revolution, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was the model of the type. Commanding his troops like a feudal baron, dispensing personal punishment and favor, he once had a deserter’s head displayed on a pike as a warning to others until George Washington told him it might make a bad impression; on another occasion he rallied a detachment of horsemen under his command caught in a British ambush by promising that, if they refuse...
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Harry Lee’s second marriage in 1793 to Ann Carter, the daughter of a wealthy tidewater family that owned Shirley Plantation on the James River, brought five children who survived infancy—Robert the second-to-last child, and the last son, born in 1807—and no relief from financial woe; sponging on his new wife’s relations to the limit, he still could not pay off his previous debts and ended with a stint in debtor’s prison.
Stratford fell into the hands of another family ne’er-do-well, Robert’s half-brother Henry Lee IV, who after the tragic death of his young daughter in a fall down Stratford’s stone front stairs and his wife’s ensuing mental collapse, proceeded to impregnate his wife’s nineteen-year-old sister, and then, as her guardian, embezzle her trust account. To escape scandal and prosecution he fled to France, “persecuted unrelentingly by my enemies,” he moaned, “and still more unrelentingly neglected by my friends.”
Education at the Alexandria Academy was free, as it was at the United States Military Academy, and there Lee determined to go, his mother’s heartbreak in bidding farewell to her last son (“both son and daughter to me”) notwithstanding.
The West Point which Robert E. Lee arrived at in 1825 excelled at producing engineers. If none of them knew how to fight a war, that was as much by design as neglect. The same widely shared sentiment in the young republic that regarded a standing army as an invitation to adventurism abroad and oppression at home cast a beady eye on the national military academy, with the extra animus Jeffersonian and Jacksonian republicanism reserved for anything that smacked of elitism or social superiority. Populists derided cadets as dandies, fops, arrogant and pretentious “lily fingered” aristocrats, the
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His proposal to establish the academy at West Point as part of the 1802 Military Peace Establishment Act almost foundered, however, when he injudiciously added that it could supply professionally trained officers to the state militias: politicians weren’t about to give up their patronage in doling out militia commissions.
When Jefferson objected to a proposal to construct a series of coastal forts, arguing that the job should be left to the states, Knox interrupted to say that Jefferson was obviously wrong, but the point was moot anyway since no one in America knew how to build a fort.
More generally, the army saw its Corps of Engineers, established by the same 1802 act, as its best public relations tool to justify what Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin termed “that perhaps necessary evil” of a peacetime army to a public that remained deeply skeptical.
The four-year program at West Point when Lee arrived in 1825 began with two years of intensive study in mathematics—algebra, geometry, trigonometry, plus calculus for more advanced students—along with French (the language in which the leading texts in military fortification and related subjects were written), followed by two years of topographic drawing, physics, engineering, chemistry, metallurgy. The engineering instruction by Lee’s time covered roads, tunnels, inland navigation, artificial harbors, and railroad construction.
The top graduates were always assigned to the engineers, those next in line to the other technical branches, artillery and ordnance, while those at the bottom of the class were relegated to the cavalry, and last of all, to that place where ambition and intellect went to die, the infantry.
The other activity that recommended itself to many was filing charges and countercharges against fellow officers, which was so much an occupation to members of the old army that it reached to the top, the most famous instance being the long-running feud in the 1850s between General-in-Chief Winfield Scott and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, which had begun with a dispute over reimbursement of Scott’s travel expenses during the Mexican War. When all the cross-accusations were published in a Senate document, it ran to 354 pages of insult and venom.
What the mastery of official duties did encompass was perfectly reflected in General Scott’s 1825 General Regulations for the Army, which devoted three of its 425 pages to the topic of how to fight a battle.
George Washington Parke Custis, was, much like Light Horse Harry Lee, full of undisciplined enthusiasms and the self-assurance of unaccountable privilege.
Arlington was even more an artificial showplace than Stratford, its massive Doric columns actually concrete-covered wood painted to look like marble, the surprisingly small interior behind its massive Greek-temple front slowly going to decay.
The other obstacle to American officers’ learning useful lessons from the experience was that the United States won. In his Elements of Military Art and Science, Halleck approvingly quoted a critical observer who noted that there are three kinds of generals: martinets, who know “only the mechanical part of their trade”; self-proclaimed “practical men,” who have “no other or better guide than their own experience”; and theorists, who by “study and reflection” have mastered the principles that can be adapted to new circumstances. But winning does not tend to stimulate “study and reflection.”
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From the war with Mexico, America’s future Civil War commanders would draw the lessons they wanted to.
Frederick Douglass acerbically remarked upon the “nauseating flatteries” of Lee that filled the newspapers on his death in 1870, from which “it would seem . . . that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.”
Another English traveler a few decades before Trollope noted that “every man is conscious of his own political importance, and will suffer none to treat him with disrespect.”
The members of the social elite that led the Revolution had imagined, Wood wrote, of “raising ordinary people to their level of gentility and enlightenment” as the path to greater social homogeneity in the new republic. Instead, “ordinary folk were collapsing traditional social differences and were bringing aristocracy down to their level.”
He wrote his mother that he preferred to associate with the Southerners among his fellow students; as “gentlemen,” their “manners, feelings & opinions” were more to his taste.
It would take Cox, like most of McClellan’s early admirers, almost no time at all to discover that lurking just one layer deeper than “no lack of confidence” was a paralyzing terror of failure.
He “wages war not to defeat the foe,” wrote Marx, “but rather not to be defeated by the foe and thus forfeit his own usurped greatness.”
He told Scott that he had learned from him in Mexico the one great lesson of war: “Not to move until I know that everything is ready,” an ideal attained by no army that ever existed outside the mind of George B. McClellan.
Fatal hesitation and belief in one’s own God-given destiny are an odd combination, but McClellan’s extreme manifestation of the two together speaks to the tragic void within him where in other men character is found.
A man like Lincoln saw the will of God in America’s ordeal, but the lesson was nearly always a humbling one. In a private “Meditation on the Divine Will” that Lincoln wrote in September 1862, he wryly reminded himself,
“Each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong.”
His messianic delusions only grew from there.
He genuinely expected to be applauded for the skill he had shown in retreat,
With “all the plans of the rebels” in his hands, McClellan promised, he “would catch them in their own trap” (“will send trophies,” he boasted)—before adding the weaselly proviso, “if my men are equal to the emergency.”
“I immediately gave orders for a rapid and vigorous forward movement,” the only accurate adverb or adjective in that statement being the word “forward.”
Though he would always hold fast to the American democratic belief in the leveling force of personal virtue—that “patriotic zeal and devotion” were more important than professional qualifications and that when it came to the essential qualities of a commanding officer, “a bold heart, a cool head, and practical common-sense were of much more importance than anything taught at school”—he himself had studied war more seriously than most West Point graduates.
But it would take much bloody experience, and the courage to break free of some of the oldest military shibboleths regarding the valor of attack and the cravenness of defense, before American commanders learned to adapt to war as it was.
He carried the special burden of a man whose burning drive is to make things work, but who lacked the compensating inner resources—Hooker’s ambition, McClellan’s self-regard, Lincoln’s humor—of other great organizers.
readying of plans for reception of the injured, they feared, would be bad for morale.
A week later 600 wounded men remained on the battlefield.
It was a milestone when Letterman succeeded after nearly a year in his position in having an order enforced that men must change their underwear once a week, and change their shirts and bathe twice a week.
Pus was always on tap.”
The most striking fact was that gangrene all but vanished in hospitals with good ventilation.
(“The general valued his lost leg away above the one that is left,” Mark Twain, one such friend, remarked.)
