Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee was a career officer of the United States Army who resigned in 1861 to fight for the Confederacy, the slaveholding states that had seceded from the Union. He won several major battles against larger Union armies, but his invasions of the North failed, and he surrendered in April 1865. Lee held people in slavery and, after the war, opposed voting rights for Black Americans. His record and his place in Southern memory remain sharply debated.

Lee was born at Stratford Hall in Virginia on 19 January 1807. His father, the Revolutionary War officer Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, was ruined by failed investments and left for the West Indies in 1812. He graduated second in his class at West Point in 1829. In 1831 he married Mary Anna Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, whose family owned Arlington House near Washington.

Lee served for years as an army engineer, building forts and improving navigation on the upper Mississippi. In the Mexican–American War he was one of General Winfield Scott's key staff officers on the march to Mexico City. He was superintendent of West Point from 1852, served with the cavalry in Texas, and in October 1859 commanded the troops who captured John Brown and his raiders at Harpers Ferry.

When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became executor of an estate burdened with debt and nearly 200 enslaved people, whom the will required to be freed within five years. Lee kept them working to pay the debts. When three men protested in 1858 that they were already free, he had them jailed and then sent them, with three women, to a slave trader to be hired out elsewhere. In 1859 three people who had escaped, among them Wesley Norris, were recaptured; according to Norris, Lee had them whipped and their wounds washed with brine. Lee denied mistreating anyone; biographers disagree, though Elizabeth Brown Pryor judged the account verifiable. He freed the Custis slaves on 29 December 1862, the last day the will allowed. In an 1856 letter he called slavery an evil, chiefly for its effect on white people, but he opposed immediate emancipation.

Lee privately called secession "nothing but revolution", but when Virginia seceded in April 1861 he declined a senior Union command, resigned on 20 April and took charge of Virginia's forces. He then served as military adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

Lee took command of the main Confederate army in Virginia in June 1862, during the American Civil War. In the Seven Days Battles he drove George McClellan's army away from Richmond, then defeated John Pope at Second Bull Run. His invasion of Maryland ended at Antietam on 17 September, the bloodiest single day of the war, which gave Abraham Lincoln the occasion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He won at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and Chancellorsville in May 1863. During his invasion of Pennsylvania that summer his army was defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg after a costly frontal assault on the third day. The historian Eric Foner notes that Lee did nothing to prevent his men from seizing free Black farmers and selling them as slaves.

From 1864 Ulysses S. Grant pressed Lee in a series of costly battles and then a siege of Petersburg that lasted from June 1864 to March 1865. Lee was named general-in-chief of all Confederate armies in February 1865 and reluctantly backed arming enslaved men. After Petersburg and Richmond fell, he surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, rejecting calls for a guerrilla war.

Lee became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, now Washington and Lee University, and urged white Southerners to accept defeat. In 1866 he told Congress that Black people should not be given the vote. He died in Lexington on 12 October 1870 of pneumonia, two weeks after a stroke. Revered in the "Lost Cause" view of the war, he became a Southern icon; many of his monuments have been removed since 2017.

No map year falls during the Civil War, so our 1878 map shows the reunited United States a few years after his death.