When Johnston was wounded and taken from the field, Davis asked Lee to assume command of the army. Knowing he could not win by retreating into defensive works, within three weeks Lee took the offensive, initiating the Seven Days Battle, a series of fights that drove the Federals back down the peninsula.
In the final battle, Malvern Hill, Lee threw his men in a series of costly charges against strong Union positions but failed to take the hill. Whatever his reason, the Seven Days showed both his capacity for maneuver and surprise and his willingness to sustain significant losses in pursuit of victory, traits that would arise again.
Lee had driven the enemy away from the gates of Richmond, however, and his star began to rise in the South. James Longstreet, and the other under Lt. Thomas J. John Pope. A month later, September , Lee led his army in its first excursion onto Northern soil, crossing the Potomac into Maryland. That campaign ended at the Battle of Antietam Sharpsburg on September 17, the bloodiest single day in all of American history. Ambrose Burnside, stole a march on Lee but failed to cross the Rappahannock River promptly.
At the end of April , a fourth Union commander, Maj. Joseph Hooker, tried to outflank and defeat Lee. In June, Lee again led his troops in an invasion of the North, this time striking into Pennsylvania.
He was not well, physically or emotionally. The symptoms of heart disease were becoming evident, and the general still grieved the death of his year-old daughter, Anne Carter Lee, the previous October. Lee had always shown an inclination to issue orders that gave subordinates significant latitude in carrying them out. During the Gettysburg campaign, that proclivity allowed his cavalry commander, J.
There, he repeated his mistake of Malvern Hill, sending the divisions of Maj. George Pickett and Brig. James Pettigrew across a mile and a quarter of open ground against a strong Union position on Cemetery Ridge. In November he turned back an indecisive movement by Maj. Lieutenant General Ulysses S.
Always, Lee was able to withdraw after inflicting severe casualties on the Federals, but they could replace their fallen better than the South could. Finally forced back to the Petersburg—Richmond area, Lee again used his engineering skill to create extensive defensive works that held back his opponents until the spring of He was named commander-in-chief of all Confederate armies on January 23, , but it was too late for coordinated action between the theaters and the dangers in Virginia occupied most of his attention.
Finally forced out of his defensive works, he surrendered to Grant on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, though some of his commanders had urged him to lead a guerrilla war in the mountains. Other Confederate armies soon capitulated as well.
Lee and his family lived in Richmond until he accepted a position as president of Washington College later renamed Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, later in On October 2, , the heart disease that had plagued him for at least seven years finally claimed the old warrior. He had become a symbol of Southern resistance to the Union armies and was made an icon of the Lost Cause in the post-war South.
He applied for restoration of his American citizenship, but the papers were lost until the s, when his wish was granted. The afternoon of July 3, , near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, promised to be hot. A town resident with a scientific bent would record a high temperature of 87 degrees for this day. At his headquarters just west of town, alongside the Chambersburg Pike, Gen. Lee was feeling a heat that had little to do with the sun. Everywhere he looked men, animals, and weapons were moving with a sense of purpose instilled by orders he had given just a short time before.
A climax to two days of battle was coming, announced by an action sure to be bloody, and certain, he fervently hoped, to be decisive. Over the course of the morning, an unnatural peacefulness had spread across the battlefield save for the occasional pop of a distant rifle firing. No one needed to tell him what it meant. The attack that was to decide the battle, and perhaps the war, was beginning. A great deal would be written about the events at Gettysburg. Lee himself would submit three different reports explaining the critical decisions he made this day and the two days immediately before it.
In them he would imply that his principal lieutenants had come up short, and would even wonder if he had asked his men to do too much. But missing from his analysis was any recognition that he based his plans on a great deal of field intelligence that he might have guessed was flat-out wrong, that, given the circumstances especially the absence of his favored cavalry chief, which forced Lee to rely on information from less trustworthy substitutes he should at the very least have treated with far more caution.
Nor does it indicate that General Lee ever asked himself if he could have done more to ensure that those empowered with executing his orders fully understood his intentions.
Lee had been on the road to Gettysburg from the start of the conflict. Even as he struggled to hold back a massive Federal army under Maj.
McClellan that was threatening Richmond in , he tried to assemble a sufficiently strong force for Lt. When he led Confederate forces into Maryland in September , in the operation climaxing at Antietam, he intended to press through the border state into Pennsylvania. Once again, circumstances forced him to divert. Following the battle of Chancellorsville May 1—3, , Lee found himself in an administrative tug-of-war with Richmond over the control of his army.
Certain powerful officials wanted to detach pieces of it to prevent the loss of Vicksburg in Mississippi. Despite his promise, Lee never seriously considered halting the campaign once he commenced disengaging from the Union Army of the Potomac near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Even a wholehearted Federal strike at his cavalry force camped around Brandy Station, Virginia, on June 9, did not deter him. By June 16, the entire Army of Northern Virginia 70, men, comprising three infantry corps plus cavalry and artillery was stretched out in a long column whose tail was just departing Fredericksburg even as its head was approaching the Pennsylvania border.
Six days later his advance commander—Lt. Richard S. Ewell, in charge of the Second Corps—was handed instructions sanctioning the capture of Harrisburg should the situation become favorable. On June 28, headquartered outside Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Lee was poised to commit his force to a broad sweep to the east as far as the Susquehanna River.
His goal was not to take northern territory, but to hurry the Army of the Potomac into a showdown. But several days earlier he had made a fateful decision that would afterward be seen as critical to the outcome of this operation, and a significant factor in the intelligence failures at Gettysburg.
His cavalry, under Maj. Stuart departed with most of his riders early on the morning of June Three days later, there was no word from Stuart and no reliable information as to where he was. In the absence of intelligence, Lee assumed that all was going according to plan and that his opponent was spread thin in a protective arc shielding the immediate approaches to Washington, leaving the way clear for his advance to the Susquehanna River.
His mental image of an enemy disorganized and hesitating to intervene seemed borne out. But it was on this very night of June 28 that he learned from an irregular scout employed by Longstreet, his First Corps commander, that the Union army was much closer and more concentrated than he had imagined. Lee had no recourse but to dramatically alter plans. A phalanx of couriers hurried out from headquarters with fresh instructions for the army to draw together.
Confident he would have his army well in hand before the Federals began arriving in strength, he still anticipated attacking and defeating them a piece at a time as they scrambled to confront him. When Lee entered the western end of the Cashtown Pass on the morning of July 1, everything was going according to the new plan. Union cavalry had been reported in the area, so when Lee reached the midpoint and heard distant gunfire toward the east he was not alarmed.
But by the time he had nearly cleared the pass, the faraway musketry had been joined by the deeper rumble of cannon fire, indicating something more than a light skirmish was taking place. Arriving in Cashtown, Lee checked with General Hill, who was suffering from one of his periodic bouts of illness and clearly out of touch with events.
Hill had no idea what all the firing was about, but one of his three divisions that commanded by Maj. Henry Heth was supposed to be investigating reports of Federal horsemen in the town of Gettysburg.
He left to find out what was happening, while Lee slowly followed. Approaching the outskirts of Gettysburg it became apparent that a fight of some magnitude had taken place earlier this day. When Hill appeared with Heth in tow, Lee heard a confused tale of a small scrap against cavalry that had suddenly escalated into a full-blown battle when the Yankee horsemen had been reinforced by veteran infantry. Based on the flags displayed and prisoners taken, he was facing one Union corps.
At this point approaching midday, he preferred to let combat end. There was ample reason to use the rest of July 1 to consolidate his army. While the first two days of battle at Gettysburg were draws, July 3 ended with a terrible defeat for the Rebels. This brought his leading elements into contact with the Union infantry that had bested Heth shortly after midday. Unwilling to stand idly by while one of his corps was engaged, he reluctantly allowed Hill to press the attack.
The result was some hard fighting on both the western and northern fronts that eventually compelled the Yankees to retreat through Gettysburg, closely pursued by jubilant Rebels.
Lee rode forward to Seminary Ridge, the ridge closest to the town. There he could observe that the defeated enemy soldiers were regrouping on the high ground of Cemetery Hill just to the south of the town. This would not do, but how to prevent it? Lee appears to have made no adjustment to having a different personality in charge.
His trust in Jackson had been implicit. By what can we know of him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs.
And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters—a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration—and he wrote official dispatches that are so impersonal and generally unselfserving as to seem above the fray.
During the postbellum century, when Americans North and South decided to embrace R. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antislavery. This assumption rests not on any public position he took but on a passage in an letter to his wife.
It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand. Perhaps it broke many years before the war. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken.
Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken. One thing that clearly drove him was devotion to his home state. But if she secedes though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution , then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life. The North took secession as an act of aggression, to be countered accordingly. When Lincoln called on the loyal states for troops to invade the South, Southerners could see the issue as defense not of slavery but of homeland.
A Virginia convention that had voted 2 to 1 against secession, now voted 2 to 1 in favor. Army commission he had held for 32 years. The days of July , , still stand among the most horrific and formative in American history.
Lincoln had given up on Joe Hooker, put Maj. George G. Lee had actually advanced farther north than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was south of him, threatening his supply lines. So Lee swung back in that direction. On June 30 a Confederate brigade, pursuing the report that there were shoes to be had in Gettysburg, ran into Federal cavalry west of town, and withdrew.
It was almost a rout, until Maj. Howard, to whom Lee as West Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. Winfield Scott Hancock rallied the Federals and held the high ground.
Excellent ground to defend from. That evening Lt. James Longstreet, who commanded the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, urged Lee not to attack, but to swing around to the south, get between Meade and Washington, and find a strategically even better defensive position, against which the Federals might feel obliged to mount one of those frontal assaults that virtually always lost in this war. Still not having heard from Stuart, Lee felt he might have numerical superiority for once.
The next morning, Lee set in motion a two-part offensive: Lt. To get there Longstreet would have to make a long march under cover. Longstreet mounted a sulky objection, but Lee was adamant. And wrong. It nearly prevailed anyway, but at last was beaten gorily back. So Lee was forced to improvise. Confederate artillery would soften it up, and Longstreet would direct a frontal assault across a mile of open ground against the center of Missionary Ridge. Before Gettysburg, Lee had seemed not only to read the minds of Union generals but almost to expect his subordinates to read his.
He was not in fact good at telling men what to do. Martin Luther King Jr. One of the greatest breakthroughs accompanying the destruction of Jim Crow was registered in opinion surveys, which since the late s have consistently shown blacks about as likely as whites to identify themselves as southerners.
This does not mean, however, that the two always agree on how that identity should be represented. We won. Ulysses S. Yet, for all these associations with unsavory actors and hurtful causes, not to mention the determined efforts of a bevy of historians obsessed with finding fault, a survey indicating that he was still admired by 64 percent of respondents in the South and 60 percent of those outside it suggests that, for many Americans, Robert E. Lee remains something of a Teflon icon.
Understandably, they would prefer to see other, more affirmative icons front and center in a hotly contested public memory that frequently tells us less about a broadly defined past than the aims and sensibilities of those who seem to hold sway in the present.
Doing full justice to such a past makes stark juxtapositions and contrasts inevitable. It is not necessarily a bad thing that the Martin Luther King Jr. Finally, there is surely polarization enough over the far more substantive and urgent concerns of a needful present without incessant quarreling over how the past is represented.
For all his apparent personal virtues, there is no denying Robert E. If it would, ironically enough, Lee—at least the one Dwight Eisenhower saw in the portrait on his wall—would likely be the first to join Douglass in endorsing the move. Historian James C.
Skip to main content. The National Endowment for the Humanities. Portrait of Robert E. Twitter Facebook. Photo caption.
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