Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

by Ty Seidule

Instead, Lee chose another path, keeping the enslaved workers as long as he could to pay off Custis’s debts and build money for the family. To do this, he broke families apart using the hiring system. During Custis’s time running Arlington, he recognized marriages and kept families together, never selling them or hiring them out. By 1860, Lee had used the hiring system to such a degree that only one enslaved family remained together at Arlington. Lee separated husbands, wives, and children and hired them out across Virginia to make more money. Additionally, Lee used the hiring system to make “troublemakers” go away, or at least move them to another farm. He did this to a man named Reuben whom Lee called a “great rogue and rascal.” Whenever Lee made a decision regarding enslaved people, he chose profit over human decency.63