Remembering Robert E. Lee 2010 with William C. Davis, "Robert E. Lee, The Man in the Middle"

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the remembering robert e lee program for 2010 precisely 140 years ago tomorrow at approximately 9:15 a.m. in the president's house on this campus robert e lee passed from his earthly life and into the annals of history Lee had served five very challenging years as the president of Washington College from the fall of 1865 until the fall of 1870 at his death it is those five years of service that we remember here today and for those of us connected with this institution it is his work here at Washington and Lee University and its students that comprise Lee's living legacy today we are pleased to have with us William C Davis who serves as the director of programming at the Virginia center for civil war studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University a graduate of Sonoma State University in California he is an award-winning author of more than 40 books on the American Civil War and southern history in 1993 his alma mater recognized him with their Distinguished Alumnus award the Lee chapel staff earlier this morning had the pleasure of spending an hour with dr. Davis and learning more about how he came to make civil war and southern history his life's work over his career Davis has not only authored but he has also served as editor consultant and contributor to most articles books films and publications he has served as the film productions such as the blue in the gray Gettysburg the final fury ABC television series about the Civil War that some of you may recall north and south he has also assisted the BBC The History Channel and Graystone Communications in a number of their projects recently in conjunction with his colleague dr. James I Robertson jr. of Virginia Tech he wrote and narrated the wpr a public television series Virginia at war this series was just completed in 2009 some of his other read writings include the lost cause civil war photographers a taste for the culinary history of the blue and the gray and two books series images of war and the Civil War library he is accompanied today to Lexington by his wife Sandra and their houseguest from England mr. Tony Hall today's topic robert e lee the man in the middle will discuss the year of 1860 and the run-up to the american civil war please join me in welcoming to Washington and Lee University and to the Lee chapel stage William C Davis good afternoon thanks to all of you for coming it's delightful to see the the chapel so full of people who are as yet so awake we will try our best to keep it that way Linda mention that we do have a guest here from England Tony Hall who was once my editor on some of the books I did because believe it or not the Civil War is a very popular topic in England as well as here Linda mentioned work for the BBC I did a few things for him so what will be most memorable as an interview I did for BBC radio while I was living over there and it was clear that the interviewer had not really prepped himself very well on who this guy was that someone else had sent to speak to him so he introduced himself I introduced myself he then said well tell me about this book you have written and I said well this book is about the Civil War and he said the Civil War that's when you all won your independence from us isn't it and I said no as a matter of fact it's not it was the war between the North and the South he said oh I had no idea that North America and South America ever fought a war and that was the high point of the interview so it's very kind of you all to come I should point out as well I'm delighted to see my pharmacist from Blacksburg out here in the crowd there's Katie someplace it's always handy to travel with somebody in the medical profession in case people reacted badly to what I say hoping she has they pharmacopoeia with her as Linda said I do I do come from Virginia Tech it's a wonderful place I just love it there but I confess to feeling a bit of envy for Washington and Lee tour of Washington Lily because your name up here says what you are the first name of the first great Virginian the second name that of the next greatest Virginia you know your name speaks of your history your heritage for anyone who knows about robert e lee's commitment to education it speaks about your commitment to education our name at Virginia Tech sends some mixed messages I think you hear it is in fact Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University which is quite a mouthful to say after two beers so it's been shortened to Virginia Tech to most people this conjures an image of of the technical arts entity Virginia Tech's architecture and engineering and other schools are among the finest in the nation but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the faculty and staff are part of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences the other thing that Virginia Tech is known for of course is that eight or nine times every fall 22 genetically altered Giants run around a lovely green field for three hours chasing a ball that doesn't roll this is very new to me as Linda mentioned I went to Sonoma State University in Northern California this was in the late 60s and I'm living to like living proof that there are people who grew up there and lived through that era who do remember most of it we had known the late wonderful British comedian Robert Morley what's maintained that all all human misery all conflict all war throughout human history is the result of someone inventing the ball because then people choose up sides and fight over the ball have there been no ball there would be no war I guess the founders of my small school took that to heart because we had no intercollegiate sports that involved a ball we had no football no basketball no baseball whoo no tennis no field hockey we didn't even have golf because a small ball it can lead to a big ball which can lead to war we had one intercollegiate sport believe it or not I was on the team and that was fencing so think about it this miss school that's peace and love and brotherhood for everyone has won intercollegiate sport in which the goal is to replicate maiming or killing someone consequently when I hear stories about you know statements by Lee and others that I'm going to take the sword I think they're just going out for collegiate athletics if Lee had ever seen you know picked up a football and said that Jefferson Davis send the end coach then I would know he meant war Lee of course did talk a great deal in 1860 and then in 1861 about that issue and in those terms of drawing his sword or sealing it you all know the scene I'm sure you've read the story on March 28 1861 Lee received and accepted promotion as colonel of the first United States cavalry a commission that was signed by the new President Abraham Lincoln by that time we had already received an overture from the Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker in Montgomery Alabama representing the new Confederacy offering you the Commission as a brigadier general in their new army so far as we know Lee never responded to Walker which would be entirely proper for a serving United States Army officer and Leon no allegiance to Walker or the new Confederate government Lee had at that moment only two loyalties the United States and Virginia so it was easy to ignore approaches from the memory without any strains on his conscience but then those two loyalties collided the firing on Fort Sumter on April 14 in 1861 led to Lincoln's call the next day for 75,000 volunteers to put down what he called the rebellion on April 17 even as the Virginia state convention went into secret session one more time to debate seceding Lee receive a summons from General Winfield Scott in Washington and also a request for a meeting with Francis Preston Blair the next day Lee met first with Blair who informed him that Lincoln had authorised Blair to offer Lee command of the new 75,000 man army to be raised to put down the insurrection and with that command would go the two stars of a major-general after more than 30 years in the Army Lee had gained only four promotions thanks to the glacial pace of promotion of the old army now he faced the possibility of jumping three grades in rank in just three weeks to the very pinnacle of his profession and yet as you all know Lee politely but firmly declined asserting his opposition to secession along with his even greater unwillingness to participate in what would have to be an invasion of the south and in particular of Virginia when he went to his interview with Scott and informed him of what he had told Blair Scott was not surprised but when he said he still hoped to stay in the Army so long as Virginia did not secede Scott told him that any officer unwilling to be actively employed in any assignment handed to him must resign his commission and that of the circumstances we should do so we met with other people to discuss this issue occurring that day and evening as he tried to see his way through the sudden chaos the next morning April 19th he went into Alexandria and had decisions forced upon him when he learned that Virginia's convention had voted to secede it was the talk on all lips and when Lee stopped in a pharmacy to pay his bill he heard yet more fulminated on leaving the Union and he sadly told the Apothecary I am one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of Secession that was surely the worst night of his life to date he set up so we're told and I'm sure it's true and pondered and struggled with a host of conflicting emotions before sometime after midnight he wrote the single sentence letter to the government in which he resigned his commission in a stroke ending the career that had occupied all of his adult life he enclosed within a heartfelt letter to Scott saying he would have resigned immediately during their last meeting but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life he hoped now he said never to dawn uniform or take arms again save in defense of my native state it was said Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman the answer he was born to make Freeman's oft repeated quotation makes Lee's moment of truth sound virtually as preordained as Christ's moment of sacrifice but lease was also an answer molded by his family his blood his family history his years in the military by the by the public affairs that swirled around him and by the nature of his individual personality and character which no amount of blood can predetermine he had been virtually a man-in-the-middle trapped between conflicting emotions in contesting loyalties but by the way this juxtaposition of references to Lee with Jesus in the same sentence is not accidental a man named Marcus Hinton an Englishman a toy soldier modeler who also dressed in frock coats and bowler hats and was the founder as well as the self-appointed major general commanding what he styled the United Kingdom branch of the Confederate High Command wrote a letter to members of his organization in Nashville Tennessee at Christmas 1964 parenthetically I should note that this is not the same Marcus Hinton who was recently a tight end for the Oakland Raiders in the New Orleans Saints a black man from Mississippi who so far as I'm aware has shown no interest in being a major general in any Confederate organization have you ever wondered asked Hinton if there was ever any other being born on earth after Christ that may have been of they have had a similar message general robert e lee Hinton continued was a man of deity forgiveness and probity a careful study of generally and the many great and noble deeds he performed would present all men with a pattern of life that God and his son would smile upon he is the patron saint of the Confederate High Command said Hinton that great general robert e lee our commander in chief the lord in heaven so there you have it lee is the only human being in almost twenty centuries who is a match for jesus and in fact at least as of Christmas 1864 in tadlo England he had been canonized as a saint and apparently had displaced Christ's father as the Lord in heaven now this being Lexington Virginia of course I take it for granted that none of you will disagree with that we actually know rather little about these political views rather he seems strangely muffled saying virtually nothing publicly and very little even to friends or family to give us some clues as to where he stood in the maelstrom of controversy going on from the 1830s up to 1860 we have no certain knowledge of any political party identification and we have no evidence as to how he voted prior to the war or even if he voted well Lee was eligible to vote in eight presidential elections from 1832 to 1860 it's almost certain that he didn't vote in eight of them and quite probable that he didn't vote to the other two in his time voting by people in the active military was the exception not the rule absentee balloting was not an option in that era nor did soldiers begin voting in the field until 1864 a man had to vote in his home County which meant that men in uniform on distant postings had no opportunity to exercise the franchise the only elections for which he was in or within easy reach of his home county or 1836 when he was working in Washington DC in 1848 when he was briefly home between assignments now officers in the professional army then as now were not immune to politics they acted under the same influence as a family friends regional origin popular fears and excitements that motivate all of us but they live in a rather different environment from other citizens the pre officer the pre-war officer corps was and to some degree still is an enclave not unlike the faculty and administration of a college or university I have lived in both enclaves of my life and I can testify at least from my observation that they can be a bit detached from what most of us would regard as the real world I'm sure this doesn't apply to W&L Holt so no worries they not only work together they live together their friendships are almost exclusively formed among their peers the degree of intermarriage among their families I believe far exceeds that of any other profession at least of which I know a very definite culture develops not only in the profession at large but also within its individual component parts whether it be an Army Post or a particular campus and as a tendency for people in both to view outside events chiefly through the lens of those events impact upon their professions each feels underappreciated frustrated at slow career advancement and historically operate under some degree of siege mentality in the face of a perceived underfunding and lack of public appreciation and respect we will express those feelings privately on occasion which just put him in the mainstream of the old army corps officer corps which in his time numbered fewer than a thousand men we felt the precarious position of the professional military in that era this may be hard for us to believe now and that era much of the public resented the cost of maintaining a standing professional army many politicians particularly in the South objected to the US Military Academy at West Point which provided education at public expense the War Department represented overwhelmingly the lion's share of the federal budget every year even during peacetime and too many of the army seemed a costly extravagance providing employment for officers who were the sons of the privileged and enlisted ranks who were scoured from the dregs of saloons and immigrant ships there's no question that Lee like all others resented the public and press criticism of West Point as expensive and elitist he wouldn't have been human had he not nor is there any doubt I think that he shared to some degree in the feeling of being elite that was prevalent among the officer class their professional experience their absence from home long absences from home for years sometimes slow promotion low pay and frequent isolation on distant frontier posts made them band together naturally they took mutual comfort from each other leading to a certain insularity of Outlook that combined with their isolation and their sense of under appreciation to breed a disdain for politics and for the presumably excitable and fickle masses who decided elections by the 1850s feeling themselves vulnerable to public whim officers learn to keep their mouths shut outside the confines of their quarters and their posts while the barracks and the officers mess may have reverberate it with debate and heated discussion on issues of the day echoes of those discussions seldom extended beyond fortress walls or picket line it was simply good sense and self-preservation to keep their views to themselves rather than risk offending anyone with influence and nothing has changed about that you have only to look back to the advance at the beginning of this summer to see what happens when an officer unwisely speaks out consequently glee is not at all exceptional in the almost complete absence of any public statements from him on political matters prior to the war what separates him from most of the others however is that he carried that reticence over even into his personal correspondence or at least what survives other than a few comments on secession and slavery he's almost mute on the major issues like expansionism tariffs internal improvements and above all the issue of the extension of slavery into the territories which will be the catalyst for the cataclysm to come we can however interpolate a reasonable guess as to what these basic political ideology might have been according to his cousin Cassius Lee at some unspecified time in the 1840s or early 1850s robert e lee told him that he regarded the Whig party's principles as being superior to those of the Democrats if he said that we don't have this in these own words this is second-hand if he said that then even if we did not personally think of himself as a Whig still he look more favorably on their policies than on those of their opponents and that would be entirely consistent with his family background and his own personal experience his father Revolutionary War hero General Henry Lee was a federalist in the years after independence the Federalists stood for strong central government a National Bank protective tariffs and the judicious expenditure of Treasury funds on public projects to promote enterprise and commerce they were also in large part representatives of upper-class families like the Lee's and were bitterly opposed by Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party which of course eclipsed them after 1800 in fact these father Henry Lee was attacked and beaten by a Republican mob in 1812 and died six years later largely as a result of his injuries that fact alone might have influenced his son to embrace his father's politics and reject those of the people who had virtually killed him by the time Lee left West Point in 1829 the Federalists were dead and Jefferson's party had split into a new alignment of conservative elements coalesced into Andrew Jackson's new Democratic Party while the more liberal wing of Whigs joined with most of the old Federalists to create what became the Whig party as he commenced his professional career and manhood in the 1830s Lee witnessed a public debate marked by the Whigs advocacy of Henry Clay's American system promoting industrial and economic growth through a National Bank internal improvements roads and canals the creation of public schools and colleges and modernization in general all of which best suited northern interests by contrast the Jacksonian Democrats advocated keeping America largely an agrarian society and culture and keeping government small and local which at that time best represented southern interests now despite the fact that Lee as a Virginian naturally considered himself a southerner it's not to see not hard to see why he identified more with the Whigs first there the party of his father and many of his family as well as of many of the first families of Virginia throughout his life Lee's correspondence revealed a definite sense that his class the old landed families had a special place and a special mission to lead it would be going way too far to say that lead looked down on or disdained the common people but there's no question that he felt himself and his class to be somewhat different from them and that he did not entirely trust their wisdom or intellect and even to some degree their morals by extending the vote to uneducated and unprompted commoners masses of them recent immigrants Jackson's Democrats risked handing government over to a rabble or that's how the Whigs saw it in 1839 when he was serving in st. Louis Lee commented that and I quote the lower-class are a swaggering noisy set and he observed that even the local economic elite in Missouri were still new money there were no old families of landed aristocrats with a tradition of leadership instead men were obsessed with business and with making money while their children he said were demanding and dirty so at least children have remained the same between then and today they were not like his Virginians professionally of course these best interests lay with the wigs after all those internal improvements they wanted to fund the roads and canals and the bridges would largely be constructed by his branch of the service the Army Corps of Engineers which meant that while the Democrats largely resented the professional army that employed him the Whigs were anxious to keep him employed building their public projects in short the Whigs muttered Lee's sight of the brand in the shifting and increasingly confused maelstrom of American politics the 1840s brought some interesting nuances to these Whig chantin sees with a Democratic president James Polk commenced war with Mexico in 1846 Lee liked the Whigs doubted the justice of the cause but as a serving officer he still of course were where his government sent him he might disagree with the war that he knew that it was a soldier's duty to implement government policy and not to try to influence it of course the war made Lee professionally made him a national hero and brought him into the intimate circle of General Winfield Scott who had become almost a second father to him and after the war when another war hero Zachary Taylor runs for the presidency as a Whig Lee will actually be one of the organizational members planning and inaugural ball for Taylor now we don't know if he was appointed to this because of Lee's own Whig tendencies or if it's because we was also a war hero but nevertheless he was associating with a lot of wigs at that same time four years later when Winfield Scott was the Whig nominee he couldn't have voted for him from his post in New York but it seems to be inconceivable that he did not favor Scott for the presidency in fact from early manhood Lee seems not to have had a very high opinion of politicians in general and he most definitely believe that military men had no business dabbling in politics in 1843 when he's serving in st. Louis a fellow officer while still a serving officer ran for a public office in the city Lee cited him that to become a political partisan would be derogatory to your office and profession which I hope you will never descend to in your attending to your duties in all professional matters your opinions and acts should be grounded by your judgment and not with a benefit to this or that party revealing his clear conviction that military officers should not speak out on public issues he told that friend it would not be proper for you to make use of your office to influence the vote of any man or to support or advance any party it's no surprise that I think that least stayed quiet among friends associates and the civilian community at large on significant public issues even after he became the most popular man in the Confederacy and arguably the most influential he still would not blend the prestige of his name to any side on any public question typical of his class he clung to tradition and the status quo largely as a means of preserving order and harmony there late one of his reasons for distrusting the cry of the masses and more than once his disdain for some common voters especially the foreign-born as this and these sentiments begin to creep into his correspondence as he views them as a clamorous mob who disturbed the peace and were cynically manipulated by scheming politicians were up not for those two self-serving entities in his view the passage of time might have settled amicably the differences between north and south rather as abraham lincoln viewed his own course in the first years of the war to come Lee was content to allow himself to be propelled by events rather than seek to influence them a patrician by nature he expected that the lower classes ought to defer because to those who had the intellect ability and the hereditary tradition of leadership necessary to do what was right for all and this is not necessarily an elitist viewpoint this is very widespread in common north and south alike but of course that's no longer the way American politics worked we good Democrats do strange things sometimes he wrote in 1843 meaning not Democrats with a capital D but rather the entire voting population practicing democracy and an a thinly veiled reference to the means by which politicians could appeal to the masses to manipulate them for their ends he added in a rare display of sarcasm that any officer who entered politics would have no choice but to quote throw up your hat with the highest and hurrah with the loudest in short you must make yourself one with the noisy mob if you hope to get elected lee's opinion of soldiers mixing in politics didn't soften with the passing years jumping ahead to the civil war in 1862 he commented I think the military and civil talents are distinct if not different and full duty and either sphere is about as much as one man can qualify himself to perform beside that his opinion of the men who sought and held public office only worsened politicians he said in 1863 are more or less so warped by party feeling by selfishness or prejudices that their minds are not altogether balanced they are the most difficult to cure of all insane people politics having so much excitement in them if you've been watching TV lately you know it hasn't changed perhaps it was easier for Lee to dismiss politicians as a class and politics itself because he seems to have devoted little if any effort to studying or understanding the men and issues hurtling the nation toward the brake on those few occasions when he did leave behind an opinion on a public issue he revealed at times an unsophisticated view and sometimes an almost simplistic take on what was happening around him to him slavery had nothing to do with driving a wedge between north and south rather it was the argument over slavery practiced by cynical popular leaders popular leaders on both sides the fomented the crisis we recognized that slavery was not a good thing however given the assumption on his part and again he's part of the mainstream with his culture then given the assumption of the mental and moral inferiority of Africans he saw slavery as a good means of elevating that race while at the same time preserving a social order in which white and black could peacefully occupy the same continent until the Almighty not man ultimately decided the Negroes place in America nothing survives to suggest that Lee ever even considered or was aware a broader issues such as what we would call human rights or the adverse impact of slavery on the Union standing and prestige in a Western culture that by 1860 had universally rejected Human Bondage more than a generation before the inherent contradiction of a society than on expressions of liberty and equality engaging in human traffic seemed not to perturbed him the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution after all were framed by upper and upper middle class men for apology they were to govern and which believed which we believe they were best suited still to govern may be the most telling example of his lack of engagement with the politics of his time came in an interview in fact he gave here in Lexington in 1868 when he commented that before the war Jefferson Davis to be assumed to be president of the Confederacy had been I quote of course one of the extremist politicians unquote only Yankees or southerners quite unaware of what was said and done in Washington in the 1850s could accuse Davis of being an extremist in fact he had been one of the more moderate southern leaders slow to embrace even the threat of secession and even then sincerely anxious to find some means of compromise between the sections short of separation to some degree like Lee himself Davis was a conditional unionists for who the session was always a last resort and never a desirable end in itself the real extremists the so-called fire-eaters who actively sought secession distrusted Jefferson Davis from the moment he became president of the Confederacy and in a system that was supposed to have only one party government a second party did arise it's simply the anti Jefferson Davis party populated entirely by these same extremists they and Davis had nothing whatever in common and that alone should have told Lee that Davis was cut from different cloth but then virtually all of them both Davis and the real secessionists were not these kind of people with only a couple of exceptions and certainly they were not Virginians Davis had been at West Point but Lee didn't know him well there and Davis had when the Davis was here Lee's a model student while Davis was a rebellious student who got kicked out of West Point twice Davis had been a commander of volunteers in the war with Mexico and at that time lead like most professional officers felt some degree of distrust of volunteer soldiers they were not reliable they thought at the time that Lee's grandfather had been a wealthy tobacco planter in Tidewater Virginia and a civic leader in the House of Burgesses during the revolution Davis's grandfather was a poor scarcely visible itinerant farmer wandering from Pennsylvania to South Carolina to Georgia no wonder it was easy for Lee to lump Davis in with those other nouveau riche southern Democratic demagogues and the masses they agitated for their own ends as intimately as Lee worked with Davis during the civil war and it was truly almost a model civil military relationship in later years still Lee would remain strangely muffled in expressing any opinion of Davis by 1865 the Confederate President regarded Lee as a close friend Jeff there is no evidence that survives of what leave felt internally personally about Jefferson Davis now lest I give you the wrong impression Lee was not a snob he carried himself with dignity and with reserve as befit a man of his blood he showed respect and courtesy to all but it was a demeanor founded I think more on his confirmed belief in noblesse oblige than on notions of complete social equality we would never have insulted or mistreated a poor illiterate farmer or a common laborer any more than as during the war years he would have mistreated a common soldier yet he also felt uneasy about such men voting and determining the course of the Union he was an old-fashioned high federalist Whig almost through-and-through or almost there is no question and he did speak out on this that he had no use for secession in 1857 he told his family that I know no other country no other government in the United States and their constitution but then in 1860 with a Democratic Party split virtually ensuring victory for the Republican nominee Lincoln Lee did these seemingly improbable being resolved that slavery was an acceptable perhaps even a necessary evil that brought much good with it he supported the right of slaveholders to take their property with them into the New Territories to the west the issue that will power the political debate destroy the Whig party and eventually lead to the breakup of the Union when the Democratic Party split I'm sorry when when the Republican Party in 1860 of course adopts opposition to the spread of slavery as the main plank in this platform so even though the Republicans represent much of the old Whig membership there's no place in the Republican Party or its ideology for Lee he has only two alternatives in the 1860 election one was John bells constitutional Union Party a hodgepodge of old wigs and others who thought the best thing to do was to take no stand on anything but if you ask that the Sun was shining they were declined to make a comment or risk an opinion simply asserting that everybody should remain true to the Constitution without explaining how that's going to avert a crisis the other option was that same Democratic Party that Lee had so often dismissed as a populist mob driven machine and then as I said in 1860 the Democrats split over the issue of extension of the slavery to the territories one faction will nominate Stephen Douglas representing mostly northern viewpoints and interests on the issue the other faction will nominate John C Breckinridge of Kentucky representing mostly southern viewpoints on the issue it's - takes too long to get into the crucial differences between there between their their platforms but essentially the Democrats we're not going to be able to get back together on this leave cited with Breckenridge now Breckinridge himself interestingly is a man like me Lee a man in the middle a conditional unionists he didn't want his nomination but he accepted it being persuaded that if he accepted the nomination of his wing of the party that would force Stephen Douglas to withdraw his nomination from the other wing they could both resign together and a single candidate who could be could be found who would unite the party again that was certainly Lee's hope but of course it wasn't going to happen because Steven Douglas had spent 20 years trying to get a presidential nomination and now that he finally had one he wasn't going to give it up the irony however is that because of his ideological views on taking slavery into the territories Lee found himself now aligned at least in his mind with the southern branch of the party the Breckinridge wing of the party which included all the very hot heads and demagogues he had so long despised he never expected Douglas would quit the race because as he put it politicians are too selfish to be martyrs for the southern states called conventions to consider a secession after the election of Lee Lincoln Lee wrote on December 14 1860 the week before South Carolina's convention was to meet I am not pleased with the course of it cotton states secession he said is nothing but revolution speaking to his son Rooney Lee six weeks later after Louisiana had become the sixth state to secede he said in the early days of the Republic secession was treason what can it be now he would soon find out and now commenced that tragic season the decision in which Lee found himself a man-in-the-middle forced to confront and balance his loves did his loyalties his patriotism and a sense of where he fit into a union that was no longer what he fondly remembered from his youth already on December 3rd 1860 confronting the virtual certainty that South Carolina was going to secede and that in all probability more states would follow Lee wrote I prized the union very highly and know of no personal sacrifice that I would not make to preserve save that of Honor through more than 30 years of military experience military service to his country through administrations he had liked and some he deplored one fixed point in Lee's ever-changing universe was his unwavering loyalty to the Union but now and apparently for the first time he placed a condition on that loyalty save that of Honor he didn't precisely say what there was relating to his honor that might cause the exception but that was coming On January 16th 1861 three months before he ultimately resigned Lee wrote to his cousin Annette Carter that if the Union is dissolved I shall return to Virginia and share the fortune of my people at that point of course the Union was dissolved four states had already seceded Georgia was on the verge of doing so and conventions in Louisiana and Texas were set to follow suit so it's something more than just the secession of several states that constituted in Lee's mind a dissolution of the Union but he didn't say what nor did he say in what capacity he would return to Virginia though the only inference is that he would no longer be a soldier a week later with Georgia seceded he cleared the matter when he wrote to another cousin that if a disruption takes place I shall go back and sorrow to my people and shared the misery of my native state just why Virginia should be miserable because other states seceded he didn't say but the only meeting that fits is the contingency that Virginia herself might secede that was the dissolution Lee had in mind his union was broken up Quinn and if Virginia seceded only that could sever his allegiance to the United States he went on to remove any doubt as to what course would his course would be when he had that save in her defense her being Virginia there will be one soldier less in the world than there is now that was clear enough if Virginia seceded Lee intended to resign his commission and be that one soldier less unless he had to take arms to defend his state if there were any remaining doubt as to what Lee intended to do On January 29th he wrote to his son Rudy that save in Virginia's defense I shall draw my sword no more there's that drawing his sword he's going to go play college athletics now they're finally and unequivocally v at the end of January confirmed that he had made the decision that he's supposed to have anguished over ten years later ten to ten weeks later if Virginia seceded and the Union attempted by force of invasion to keep her in the Union he would fight against the men who were now his comrades in arms and against the flag he had served so nobly all of his adult life all that was needed to precipitate his action was Virginia's secession and unless and until that happened he would remain in the middle in the army hoping for some miraculous accommodation that might spare the Union Virginia and his career in a service that he loved yet he said passively by and watched events unfold his actual engagement of the public crisis limited to some wishful thinking and his trust in his God On February 23rd 1861 with seven states now out of the Union and a new Confederate government formed in Montgomery Alabama Lee said I must try and be patient and await the end before I can do nothing to hasten or it it was all beyond his control or even his involvement where he has civilian then as a sign of one of the great families of Virginia he could have spoken out were he not restrained by his uniform and his very proper concept of the limitations that it placed upon him he was like hundreds of thousands of men in the middle torn between their genuine love of and loyalty to the Union and their suspicion or even dislike for the extremists on both sides whom they saw promoting a crisis for their own ends and their heartfelt allegiance to the places of their nativity the friends the family the extended cords of loyalty to a peoples of their home states he like they fervently hoped that somehow a middle course might prevail though it had no policy or program nor any cogent plan other than the prayer that if people just waited for passions to cool then somehow some unforeseen compromise might get avert disaster but privately the Lee who so often avert that secession was illegal had decided to acquiesce in it if he had no choice and to raise his sword against the Union rather than see that Union maintained at the point of a bayonet as late as April 25th after Virginia had seceded and Lee had resigned his commission to accept command of Virginia state forces he still hoped somehow for compromise so long as actual fighting did not break out there's a considerable number of leaders in the South who have this same hope as long as we don't start shooting we can still talk a few days earlier when his course was not yet known the editor of the Alexandria Gazette declared that in this crisis Lee's reputation his acknowledged ability his chivalric character his probity honor and may we add to his eternal praise his Christian life and conduct make his very name a tower of strength yet when it was suggested that lead lend that name and that influence to act as an arbiter now in the crisis he declined the fatalism that apparently dominated him throughout the sectional controversy wedded to his abiding conviction that there was nothing he could do left him believing there was no point in making the effort it seems a strangely passive stance for a man who would soon demonstrate how dynamic Lee he could act on the battlefield and how he could indeed influence political events far beyond the sound of his guns but then Lee felt at home in uniform not at the lectern or the Legislative Hall in his view now he like everyone else like all the men in the middle was a victim of history and the inscrutable workings of all the Almighty to paraphrase Freeman Lee was born to abide by the decision his God made for him thank you all for listening you

Channel: Washington and Lee University

Views: 38,585

Keywords: Robert E. Lee, Washington and Lee University, Dr. William C. Davis, Lee Chapel

Id: xszXE2kp9ko

Length: 51min 18sec (3078 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2010