December 18, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, most people's knowledge of Robert E. Lee starts with his decision to reject command of the Union Army and ends at Appomattox—but there's so much more to his story than that. Dr. Allen C. Guelzo, author of Robert E. Lee: A Life, tells the story of a complicated man whose decision-making was heavily influenced by where his house was and where his family was. We thank the great folks at the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this remarkable audio—originally part of their Scholar Talks Series on YouTube.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, the
story of one of the most controversial, beloved and complex
generals in American history. Here to tell the true story
of Robert E. Lee is Alan C. Kelzo, author of
Robert E. Lee, A Life. We'd like to thank the
(00:30):
folks at the Bill of Wrights Institute for allowing us
to use this audio, originally a part of their scholar
Talk series Take it Away, Alan.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Robert E. Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline,
was born in eighteen oh seven at Stratford Hall on
the Northern Neck of Virginia, which had been the ancestral
home of many of the Lee family, a family which
had roots in Virginia back into the seventeenth century. He
attends West Point. He is class of eighteen twenty nine
graduates second in his class. When I say second, he
(01:04):
missed graduating first really by a couple of digits. It
was like one of those batting average contests where you
have to take it out to the fourth digit to
determine who the winner is. And is posted to the
elite Corps of Engineers and spends a good deal of
the rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps
(01:25):
of Engineers doing really corp of engineering things. He mainly
is devoted to fortification construction, and as a specialty within that,
Coastal fortification is something of a specialty within that kind
of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination. And
it has to be said that Lee was a very
(01:46):
good engineer and a very dedicated engineer. He also was
a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the Army as
a whole and in the corp of Engineers was sclerotic,
to say the lead. The great advantage of army employment
was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside was
(02:07):
that it was slow. And Lee experiences this and it's
a source of great frustration. He would like to move up.
When the Mexican War comes, he sees this as an
opportunity and he grabs it. He's sent off on one
engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising, but then he
is seconded to the staff of Winfield Scott. Winfield Scott
(02:27):
is about to mount one of the most adventurous, amphibious
expeditions in American military history, and that is the Joint
Army Navy landing at Vera, Cruz on the eastern coast
of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as an
up and coming person and becomes a major part of
(02:50):
Scott's staff as a major assistance to Scott in the
capture of Vera Cruz accompany, Scott's invasion of Mexico, pass
the battle at Sara Gordo, up to the battles around
Mexico City, which eventually end in the surrender of Mexico
City and the end of the Mexican War with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hitdalgo. All through it, Lee is very
(03:13):
much Winfield Scott's right hand man, and Scott would later
say years later that all of the plaudits he Scott
won in the Mexican War were really due to the
advice that he garnered from Robert E. Lee. But the
war is over, Lee goes back to doing coastal and
fortification with corp of Engineers. Is not terribly exciting, and
(03:35):
in fact it gets off anything. It gets worse because
in eighteen fifty two he's assigned to become superintendent of
West Point. Now that I know that it sounds glamorous
on the surface of it, in eighteen fifty two it wasn't.
At this point, West Point is still very much a
corp of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee
(03:55):
is the superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what
to do. He is micromanaged for three years by the
chief Engineer in Washington, DC, and finally, at the end
of it, he is only too happy to grab an
opportunity to transfer out of the Corps of Engineers and
accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the second Cavalry
(04:18):
in Texas. Texas is not what you would call in
those days an ideal posting. It gives you an idea
of some degree of his frustration that he's willing to
accept this. But off to Texas he goes as lieutenant
colonel of the second Cavalry, and there he really does
nothing more than chase commanches and various outlaws around the
(04:42):
countryside to no very particular purpose. He never really fires
a shot and anger himself. It is not intol eighteen
sixty one, the things begin to warm up. In eighteen
sixty one, he's recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly
to help rewrite the army regular relations, but really Scott
wants him in Washington, because the country is splitting apart.
(05:06):
Seven southern states have seceded from the Union. There is
a possibility of conflict. Scott wants Lee in Washington because
Scott's feeling is that if anyone should take command of
federal forces in dealing with secession, it should be Robert E. Lee.
The firing on Fort Sumter takes place, and indeed Abraham
(05:26):
Lincoln puts into process an invitation to Lee. It comes
through Old Francis Preston Blair, one of the great political
wire pullers of Washington. Blair sits down with Lee and
it basically says to Lee, President lincol would like you
to take command of the armies in the field. And
Lee says no, which is a great surprise. But Lee
(05:48):
explains it this way, I cannot raise my hand against
my native state. Now Virginia at that point had not
yet seceded, but it was hovering on the of doing so.
And Lee simply says, I can't. I can't do that.
What Lee does, in fact, is not only refuse that invitation.
(06:11):
He then goes home and writes out a letter of
resignation from the army. And he might have stopped right there,
but at that same moment he receives an invitation from
the state authorities, the Virginia State authorities in Richmond, to
come there and help them oversee the organization of state forces,
and he agrees to do that. So he goes to Richmond.
(06:34):
He is commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia Forces.
When Virginia joins the Confederacy, he's made a general in
the Confederate Army, and from that point he takes off,
he becomes General Lee. A lot of interpreters of Lee
had wanted this to be, as Douglas Southall Freeman once
put it, the decision he had to make, the decision
(06:56):
he was made to make. And I don't really think
that's the case at all. I think that Lee found
himself staring at not just one decision, but several decisions,
and each one of them was a swamp. For one thing.
Robert E. Lee had been serving in the United States
(07:16):
Army for thirty years when he confronted this crisis, and
he understood that secession from the Union was a dodge
the southern slave states, which couldn't abide the election of
Abraham Lincoln and were determined to break up the Union
rather than tolerate Lincoln's presidency. Tried to explain what they
(07:38):
were doing as secession. They argued six ways to Sunday
that this is somehow constitutional. Nobody but they really believed that,
And Robert E. Lee didn't believe it. He characterized what
they were doing pretty frankly as revolution. But characterizing it
that way was the easy part. The hard part was
going to come if he was expected to do something
(08:01):
about it, And of course that's what he was. That's
what the Francis Preston Blair offer was about, and that
was where he had to make the first decision because
Lee balks. At that point, Lee makes it clear to
Blair he's not refusing this offer out of any interest
in slavery. He says to Blair, if I could free
all of the South slaves in order to avert the
(08:23):
crisis being posed by secession, I'd do it. I would
do it. Yet he says, I can't draw my sword
against my native state, against Virginia, which is a little odd.
And there are odd things about this decision process that
poke out at every point. He says he couldn't raise
his sword against Virginia. That's odd. Because actually Virginia had
(08:43):
not yet seceded when he has this interview with Blair.
Not only had it not succeeded, but the secession vote
that the Virginia Secession Convention does take actually has to
go through a referendum process that will not conclude until
the twenty fifth of May. So strictly speaking, he is
not in a position where he necessarily has to draw
(09:06):
his sword against Virginia because Virginia is not out of
the Union yet. The odder thing still is Lee talks
about Virginia as his native state, but the truth is
he hadn't lived in Virginia for most of his life.
In fact, if you add up the exact amounts of time,
I think it's safe to say he probably spent more
of his life in New York. So that's an odd
(09:28):
argument as well. How do you untangle these arguments?
Speaker 1 (09:32):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, this
complicated and rich story of General Robert E. Lee. His
story continues with Alankelzo here on our American Stories, and
(10:09):
we returned to our American stories and with Alan Galzo
telling the story of Robert E. Lee. When we last
left off, Lee had made a decision that would alter
the course of his life and history itself. He rejected
command of the Union Army and resigned from the military.
His stated reasoning that he could not possibly raise his
(10:32):
sword against his home state of Virginia. And while that
may be true, it's not the full story. Here again
is Alan Gelzo.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He says he couldn't raise his sword against Virginia. That's
odd because actually Virginia had not yet seceded, So strictly speaking,
he is not in a position where he necessarily has
to draw his sword against Virginia, because Virginia is not
out of the Union yet. The odd thing still is
Lee talks by Virginia as his native state. But the
truth is he hadn't lived in Virginia for most of
(11:04):
his life. How do you untangle these arguments? I think
you untangled him this way. First of all, he himself
may not have lived all that long in Virginia, but
he did have an enormous sway of relatives in Virginia.
These were relatives who had come to the rescue of
his family when it was on hard times in Alexandria.
(11:25):
These were people he owed big time. When I say relatives,
I don't mean just someone that he exchanged a Christmas
card with and there were a lot of them. He
had eighty first cousins. I think it could be safely
said that if Robert E. Lee had thrown a brick
down a street in Alexandria, he would have hit one
of his relatives. And when he says he can't raise
(11:47):
his hand against Virginia, I think that's the Virginia he's
talking about. It's the Virginia of that family. But there's
another complication that also enters into this, and that's Arlington. Today.
When we think of Arlington we think of the National Cemetery,
But before it was National Cemetery, it was Arlington House,
and he called Arlington home for a lot of his
adult life, yet it was never actually his property. He
(12:10):
is there because he married into the family of George
Washington Park Custos, who did own Arlington. Mary was as
wedded Arlington her parents' home, as she was to her husband.
It's a really obsessive relationship. When Lee is put to
this situation in eighteen sixty one, what he has to
(12:32):
calculate is what is going to happen to my family?
What is going to happen to the property If I
make a decision in a certain way. If I decide
to accept command of the Union armies, doubtless Virginia will
confiscate Arlington. Sure it will, because Arlington sits on this
bluff overlooking the Potomac River. I mean, it's the perfect
(12:53):
place to put artillery to bombard the national capital. People
were calling in Richmond for the seizure and fortification of Arlington.
So if he makes a move like that, kiss goodbye
to Arlington. On the other hand, if he goes to Richmond,
or if he declares neutrality, then maybe there won't be
(13:15):
a war, there won't be a federal occupation of Arlington,
and he can squeeze through the cracks and preserve the
property for his family, and in large measure, I think
that's what he intends to do. A lot of the
evidence suggests that Lee goes to Richmond with a view
towards thinking that he's going to act as some kind
of peace broker. Because all along in this process, in
(13:38):
the months prior, people had talked incessantly about the Union
breaking up, about it organizing itself into one, two, three, four,
five different confederacies. But then after a period of time,
everyone cooling off and getting together in a constitutional convention
and reconstructing the union. By the way, that's where the
(13:58):
term reconstruction first it's used. And there's evidence that Lee
saw himself as being part of a process like that,
that he would help to guide the reunification process once
the secession fervor had worn off, and by May of
eighteen sixty one, it's clear there isn't going to be
any reconciliation. It's clear that Virginia is going to unite
(14:19):
itself to the Confederacy. At that point, he actually writes
to his wife and says, well, maybe it's maybe I
should just resign now, maybe I should just retire and
wash my hands of all this. But by that point
it's too late. So he finds himself now an advisor
to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and a Confederate general. But
it's the kind of process you watch him going through
(14:42):
and it looks like he's shadow walking, always thinking that
the result is going to be different, but the result
never is different. So it's not a one off, one
time dramatic movie edit decision, and it's certainly not as
Freeman made it look. The decision he was doomed to
make from the very beginning in his life. It's an incremental,
(15:05):
step by step getting sucked further and further in kind
of decision. When you watch Robert E. Lee in action
as a general, bear in mind that this man learned
the practicalities of real war under Winfield Scott in Mexico,
(15:29):
and the primary lesson he learns from Scott in Mexico
is the importance of the continuous offensive. Even if the
numbers are not on your side, keep the initiative in
your hands, keep moving onwards, because that is what will
eventually demoralize an enemy and allow you to destroy the
nime army. That is the rule by which Lee took
(15:54):
his army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac in eighteen
sixty two, and probably would have taken it into Pennsylvania
at that point. There might have been a Battle of
Gettysburg in September of eighteen sixty two. Instead, there's the
famous incident of the Lost Orders. The terrible intelligence coup,
which allows the Federal commander, General McClellan to understand what
(16:16):
Lee's plans are results in the Battle of Antietam, and
Lee is forced to retreat into Virginia, but Lee never
loses sight of the need for taking the war northwards.
Lee understood, and I think he understood this better almost
than any other Confederate leader, that the Southern Confederacy's resources
(16:37):
were too meager to last for a fifteen round heavyweight
bout with the North. He'd lived in the North quite
long enough to know what the North's resources were like,
and he knew that the souths could not compare to those.
If the South was to win its independence, it would
need to score an early knockout in the early rounds,
(16:58):
a surprise knockout, and the only way to do that
would be get across the Potomac, get up into Pennsylvania
and either win a battle there, or even if you
didn't fight a battle at all, just run around the
countryside showing how the Lincoln administration was incapable of defending
its own home turf. That would then have a political
(17:21):
knock on effect. It would convince the Northerners that the
Lincoln administration was incapable of defending them and that the
war really ought to be brought to an end, because
there is really no way to subdue the Confederates in
the fall elections of eighteen sixty two, Lincoln has just
issued the Emancipation Proclamation and he is punished for it.
(17:42):
The Republican Party loses thirty four seats in the House
of Representatives. It loses two key northern governorships in New
York and New Jersey. That's eighteen sixty two. In the
summer of eighteen sixty three, there are two more key
Northern governorships up for grabs, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and both
(18:05):
have serious Democratic anti administration contenders, Clement Volandigum in Ohio
and George Woodworth in Pennsylvania. If Lee is able to
score a victory in Pennsylvania, or even just use Pennsylvania
as a base of operations that the Union Army can't
nudge him from, then when the gubernatorial elections take place
(18:27):
in Ohio and Pennsylvania, people will turn out and vote
for Democrats, to vote for the end of the war.
And if you have a corps of states at the
center of the North, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania
with Democratic anti Lincoln governors, they're going to fold their
arms and say we're not cooperating with this bloodshed anymore.
This is a useless war which is being foisted on
(18:49):
us by radical abolitionists. We want an end to this war.
We're not sending any more troops. We're not permitting any
more supplies to go to Lincoln's army. You have to
open negotiation with the Confederates. Well, once you opened negotiations
with the Confederacy, they weren't going to go back to shooting,
and the independence of the Confederacy would virtually be conceded.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When we come back more of Alan Galzo's storytelling on
Robert E. Lee here on our American stories, and we
(19:38):
returned to our American stories and the final portion of
our story on Robert E. Lee telling the story Alan Gelzo,
author of Robert E. Lee, A Life. When we last
left off, Lee had determined that what the Confederacy needed
to win or at least draw even with the Union,
was to plunge the army of Virginia deep into the
(20:00):
north to so chaos that perhaps would cause the governors
in the area Pennsylvania and Ohio, or Lincoln himself to
be voted out of office. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
That was Lee's strategy, and he saw that that making
war in effect on the political will of the North
was the way for the South to win the Civil War.
Lee crosses the Potomac substantially ahead of the Federal Army
of the Potomac, and his army arcs northwards through the
(20:33):
Cumberland Valley all the way up to the Susquehanna River,
just across from the Pennsylvania capital at Harrisburg. But his
real goal is not Harrisburg. His real goal is to
make the Army of the Potomac chase him so far
and so fast that it becomes winded, exhausted, disorganized, and disconnected.
(20:55):
And when it does, then he can turn and concentrate,
pick off peace of the Federal army one by one,
and defeat them in detail. And that is what he
has in view as a military plan. He puts his
finger down on Gettysburg on a map and says, this
is where we will probably meet the Federal army and
(21:17):
defeat it. Well, he was close. He planned to concentrate
his army at Gettysburg on the first of July and
then wait for this straggling Federal army to come up
and get its nose bloodied piece by piece. What put
that out of kiltr was that pieces of the Federal
Army got to Gettysburg first, got there on June thirtieth,
(21:38):
and were prepared to hold on to Gettysburg as tightly
as they could until the rest of the Army at
the Potomac could come up and support them. This surprised
and discomfidently, but there weren't that many Federals holding Gettysburg,
so he decides to push ahead with his plan and
push the Federals out of Gettysburg. He succeeds in doing
(22:02):
and in the process he basically ruins two of the
seven army corps of the Federal Army of the Potomac.
He ruins the first Corps, he ruins the eleventh Corps.
He probably would have mopped them up completely but for
the fact that his army had been marching all day,
fighting all day, dusk was coming on because it was
an overcast day up, dusk was coming in somewhat early.
(22:25):
The Federal forces managed to regroup on Cemetery Hill south
of the town, and Lee's feeling is, all right, well,
we're not going to try and push head now. Let's
regroup and tomorrow morning we'll finish them off and be
in a position to deal with the next parts of
the Federal Army as it comes up the road. Well,
that was a mistake, because by the next day the
(22:47):
other parts of the Federal Army had in fact gotten
to Gettysburg, and when he launches an attack on July second,
to his surprise, he finds out that there are three
more pieces of the Army of the Potomac in place
in his path. Even so, his attack almost succeeds on
July second, it really comes within inches of a complete
(23:09):
destruction of the Army of the Potomac. So his solution
is that, all right, tomorrow, we will finish them off
tomorrow July third. He wasn't entirely wrong either, because by
the morning of July third, of those seven infantry corps
in the Federal Army of the Potomac, basically five of
them were out of action, one of them was being
(23:29):
held in reserve, and the other one only had about
parts of two divisions prepared to defend the rear of
Cemetery Hill, whereas Lee had an entirely fresh, untested division
that belonging to George Pickett. So on July third, he
launches George Pickett's division, along with some supporting troops at
(23:52):
these remnants, holding onto Cemetery Hill, and it fails. It
fails against every expectation, and at that point Lee realizes
he has no more wherewithal to continue this fight and
begins a withdrawal back across the Potomac into Virginia and Gettysburg,
(24:13):
very much to many people's surprised, turns out to be
a Union victory. People often asked after the battle, and
continue to ask to this day, what caused the Confederacy?
What caused Robert E. Lee to lose the Battle of
Gettysburg when it seemed like he had everything going for him.
George Pickett answered that question, and I think he gave
(24:34):
probably the best answer that could be given. I think
the Yankees had something to do with it. It was
a tenacious fight on the part of the Army of
the Potomac, and that is really the best explanation I
think that people can come up with. It was pivotal,
but it was also not pivotal. Let me at least
do the pivotal part first, What if, in fact Lee
(24:54):
had been victorious at Gettysburg. If he had, I think
there's a of strong possibility that the Army of the Potomac,
which had met with so many defeats Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg. I
think the Army of the Potomac might very easily have
gone to pieces like Napoleon's army after Waterlow. It had
(25:15):
just been defeated so many times under so many generals.
It had just seemed like it was no longer worth it.
Some parts of it would have cohered, but other parts
of it would simply have walked away as from a
lost game. At that point, Lee would have been able
to threaten Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia. There would probably have been
political uprisings in the North demanding an end of the war.
(25:39):
I mean, as it was only two weeks after the
Battle of Gettysburg. There's a major draft riot in New
York City that turns New York City upside down. New
York City is not the only place where riots like
that take place. We call them riots. Well, yeah, they
were draft riots. They were also racial pegrums. But the
fundamental message was we're not going to be We don't
want to fight this war anymore. This war is hopeless,
(26:01):
it's lost. We might as well admit it. And if
Lee had been victorious at Gettysburg, Lincoln might well have
had no choice politically speaking, either to resign or to
have opened those negotiations with the Confederacy. As it was,
Jefferson Davis had sent his vice president Alexander Stevens in
a messenger boat into the Chesapeake with a request to
(26:24):
come up to Washington. Now, the ostensible request was to
discuss prisoner exchanges, but a lot of people suspected that
what Alexander Stevens had up his sleeve was some kind
of document from Davis for Lincoln saying all right, let's
open negotiations. That might well have happened. So that is
a pivotal battle, and in fact, the military fortunes of
(26:44):
the Confederacy go nowhere but into a slow slide down
hill after that. But here's the other side of the coin.
In some senses, it wasn't pivotal, because the Civil War
is going to go on for another twenty two months.
And Gettysburg turns out not to be pivotal, basically for
(27:05):
two reasons. One is Lee does escape. George Gordon Meade,
the commander of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg,
was a cautious soul. He was a Democrat politically who
was convinced that the Lincoln aministration was interested in nothing
but embarrassing him and taking credit for itself. So he
was not going to shinny out on any strategic limbs.
(27:28):
He does not pursue Lee in the way that let's say,
the Duke of Wellington pursues Napoleon after Waterloop. There's none
of this up Guards and Adam in George Mead. Mead
is content to let Lee get across the Potomac and
that's the end of the campaign. This infuriates Lincoln, but
(27:48):
there's not too much Lincoln could do about it, because look,
here's a general who won a battle. Here's a federal
general finally won a battle. What is he going to
do pun assume. Eh So there's not too much there's
not too much wiggle room politically speaking for for President
Lincoln at that point. But it does mean the war
is going to go on. It's going to drag on
through eighteen sixty four. It's going to drag on through
the Overlain campaign. It's going to drag on really right
(28:10):
up until Lincoln is re elected in November of eighteen
sixty four. And it's when Lincoln is re elected that finally,
the handwriting is on the wall for the Confederacy. People
often ask me what I think the turning point of
the Civil War was, and they expect me to say Gettysburg,
and I don't. I tell them turning point of the
Civil War Appomatic Courthouse. And I say this partly to
(28:34):
be snarky, but also partly in a serious frame, because
in the summer of eighteen sixty four, the campaigns that
Lincoln was responsible for were going so poorly that Lincoln
himself did not expect to be re elected. If he
was dumped by the voters in November of eighteen sixty four,
(28:58):
the new president would be George mclach and McClellan would
from a variety of forces operative on him from the
Democratic Party. I have been forced to come to some
kind of negotiations with the Confederacy. And as soon as
you started those negotiations, that was the end. That would
mean the independence of the Confederacy. So even though Gettysburg
(29:19):
is a pivotal battle in preventing something like that from
happening in eighteen sixty three, it's not quite pivotal enough
to have prevented something like that from happening in eighteen
sixty four, and we really don't get the handwriting on
the wall until after the election of Lincoln, and then
it becomes clear that the Confederacy is really on the ropes.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to the
Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this
audio originally a part of their Scalar Talk series, which
can be found on YouTube. Simply look up Bill of
Rights Institute Scalar Talks to take a listen. Story of
Robert E. Lee is told by Alan Gelzo here on
(30:05):
our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, the
story of one of the most controversial, beloved and complex
generals in American history. Here to tell the true story
of Robert E. Lee is Alan C. Kelzo, author of
Robert E. Lee, A Life. We'd like to thank the
(00:30):
folks at the Bill of Wrights Institute for allowing us
to use this audio, originally a part of their scholar
Talk series Take it Away, Alan.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Robert E. Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline,
was born in eighteen oh seven at Stratford Hall on
the Northern Neck of Virginia, which had been the ancestral
home of many of the Lee family, a family which
had roots in Virginia back into the seventeenth century. He
attends West Point. He is class of eighteen twenty nine
graduates second in his class. When I say second, he
(01:04):
missed graduating first really by a couple of digits. It
was like one of those batting average contests where you
have to take it out to the fourth digit to
determine who the winner is. And is posted to the
elite Corps of Engineers and spends a good deal of
the rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps
(01:25):
of Engineers doing really corp of engineering things. He mainly
is devoted to fortification construction, and as a specialty within that,
Coastal fortification is something of a specialty within that kind
of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination. And
it has to be said that Lee was a very
(01:46):
good engineer and a very dedicated engineer. He also was
a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the Army as
a whole and in the corp of Engineers was sclerotic,
to say the lead. The great advantage of army employment
was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside was
(02:07):
that it was slow. And Lee experiences this and it's
a source of great frustration. He would like to move up.
When the Mexican War comes, he sees this as an
opportunity and he grabs it. He's sent off on one
engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising, but then he
is seconded to the staff of Winfield Scott. Winfield Scott
(02:27):
is about to mount one of the most adventurous, amphibious
expeditions in American military history, and that is the Joint
Army Navy landing at Vera, Cruz on the eastern coast
of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as an
up and coming person and becomes a major part of
(02:50):
Scott's staff as a major assistance to Scott in the
capture of Vera Cruz accompany, Scott's invasion of Mexico, pass
the battle at Sara Gordo, up to the battles around
Mexico City, which eventually end in the surrender of Mexico
City and the end of the Mexican War with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hitdalgo. All through it, Lee is very
(03:13):
much Winfield Scott's right hand man, and Scott would later
say years later that all of the plaudits he Scott
won in the Mexican War were really due to the
advice that he garnered from Robert E. Lee. But the
war is over, Lee goes back to doing coastal and
fortification with corp of Engineers. Is not terribly exciting, and
(03:35):
in fact it gets off anything. It gets worse because
in eighteen fifty two he's assigned to become superintendent of
West Point. Now that I know that it sounds glamorous
on the surface of it, in eighteen fifty two it wasn't.
At this point, West Point is still very much a
corp of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee
(03:55):
is the superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what
to do. He is micromanaged for three years by the
chief Engineer in Washington, DC, and finally, at the end
of it, he is only too happy to grab an
opportunity to transfer out of the Corps of Engineers and
accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the second Cavalry
(04:18):
in Texas. Texas is not what you would call in
those days an ideal posting. It gives you an idea
of some degree of his frustration that he's willing to
accept this. But off to Texas he goes as lieutenant
colonel of the second Cavalry, and there he really does
nothing more than chase commanches and various outlaws around the
(04:42):
countryside to no very particular purpose. He never really fires
a shot and anger himself. It is not intol eighteen
sixty one, the things begin to warm up. In eighteen
sixty one, he's recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly
to help rewrite the army regular relations, but really Scott
wants him in Washington, because the country is splitting apart.
(05:06):
Seven southern states have seceded from the Union. There is
a possibility of conflict. Scott wants Lee in Washington because
Scott's feeling is that if anyone should take command of
federal forces in dealing with secession, it should be Robert E. Lee.
The firing on Fort Sumter takes place, and indeed Abraham
(05:26):
Lincoln puts into process an invitation to Lee. It comes
through Old Francis Preston Blair, one of the great political
wire pullers of Washington. Blair sits down with Lee and
it basically says to Lee, President lincol would like you
to take command of the armies in the field. And
Lee says no, which is a great surprise. But Lee
(05:48):
explains it this way, I cannot raise my hand against
my native state. Now Virginia at that point had not
yet seceded, but it was hovering on the of doing so.
And Lee simply says, I can't. I can't do that.
What Lee does, in fact, is not only refuse that invitation.
(06:11):
He then goes home and writes out a letter of
resignation from the army. And he might have stopped right there,
but at that same moment he receives an invitation from
the state authorities, the Virginia State authorities in Richmond, to
come there and help them oversee the organization of state forces,
and he agrees to do that. So he goes to Richmond.
(06:34):
He is commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia Forces.
When Virginia joins the Confederacy, he's made a general in
the Confederate Army, and from that point he takes off,
he becomes General Lee. A lot of interpreters of Lee
had wanted this to be, as Douglas Southall Freeman once
put it, the decision he had to make, the decision
(06:56):
he was made to make. And I don't really think
that's the case at all. I think that Lee found
himself staring at not just one decision, but several decisions,
and each one of them was a swamp. For one thing.
Robert E. Lee had been serving in the United States
(07:16):
Army for thirty years when he confronted this crisis, and
he understood that secession from the Union was a dodge
the southern slave states, which couldn't abide the election of
Abraham Lincoln and were determined to break up the Union
rather than tolerate Lincoln's presidency. Tried to explain what they
(07:38):
were doing as secession. They argued six ways to Sunday
that this is somehow constitutional. Nobody but they really believed that,
And Robert E. Lee didn't believe it. He characterized what
they were doing pretty frankly as revolution. But characterizing it
that way was the easy part. The hard part was
going to come if he was expected to do something
(08:01):
about it, And of course that's what he was. That's
what the Francis Preston Blair offer was about, and that
was where he had to make the first decision because
Lee balks. At that point, Lee makes it clear to
Blair he's not refusing this offer out of any interest
in slavery. He says to Blair, if I could free
all of the South slaves in order to avert the
(08:23):
crisis being posed by secession, I'd do it. I would
do it. Yet he says, I can't draw my sword
against my native state, against Virginia, which is a little odd.
And there are odd things about this decision process that
poke out at every point. He says he couldn't raise
his sword against Virginia. That's odd. Because actually Virginia had
(08:43):
not yet seceded when he has this interview with Blair.
Not only had it not succeeded, but the secession vote
that the Virginia Secession Convention does take actually has to
go through a referendum process that will not conclude until
the twenty fifth of May. So strictly speaking, he is
not in a position where he necessarily has to draw
(09:06):
his sword against Virginia because Virginia is not out of
the Union yet. The odder thing still is Lee talks
about Virginia as his native state, but the truth is
he hadn't lived in Virginia for most of his life.
In fact, if you add up the exact amounts of time,
I think it's safe to say he probably spent more
of his life in New York. So that's an odd
(09:28):
argument as well. How do you untangle these arguments?
Speaker 1 (09:32):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, this
complicated and rich story of General Robert E. Lee. His
story continues with Alankelzo here on our American Stories, and
(10:09):
we returned to our American stories and with Alan Galzo
telling the story of Robert E. Lee. When we last
left off, Lee had made a decision that would alter
the course of his life and history itself. He rejected
command of the Union Army and resigned from the military.
His stated reasoning that he could not possibly raise his
(10:32):
sword against his home state of Virginia. And while that
may be true, it's not the full story. Here again
is Alan Gelzo.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He says he couldn't raise his sword against Virginia. That's
odd because actually Virginia had not yet seceded, So strictly speaking,
he is not in a position where he necessarily has
to draw his sword against Virginia, because Virginia is not
out of the Union yet. The odd thing still is
Lee talks by Virginia as his native state. But the
truth is he hadn't lived in Virginia for most of
(11:04):
his life. How do you untangle these arguments? I think
you untangled him this way. First of all, he himself
may not have lived all that long in Virginia, but
he did have an enormous sway of relatives in Virginia.
These were relatives who had come to the rescue of
his family when it was on hard times in Alexandria.
(11:25):
These were people he owed big time. When I say relatives,
I don't mean just someone that he exchanged a Christmas
card with and there were a lot of them. He
had eighty first cousins. I think it could be safely
said that if Robert E. Lee had thrown a brick
down a street in Alexandria, he would have hit one
of his relatives. And when he says he can't raise
(11:47):
his hand against Virginia, I think that's the Virginia he's
talking about. It's the Virginia of that family. But there's
another complication that also enters into this, and that's Arlington. Today.
When we think of Arlington we think of the National Cemetery,
But before it was National Cemetery, it was Arlington House,
and he called Arlington home for a lot of his
adult life, yet it was never actually his property. He
(12:10):
is there because he married into the family of George
Washington Park Custos, who did own Arlington. Mary was as
wedded Arlington her parents' home, as she was to her husband.
It's a really obsessive relationship. When Lee is put to
this situation in eighteen sixty one, what he has to
(12:32):
calculate is what is going to happen to my family?
What is going to happen to the property If I
make a decision in a certain way. If I decide
to accept command of the Union armies, doubtless Virginia will
confiscate Arlington. Sure it will, because Arlington sits on this
bluff overlooking the Potomac River. I mean, it's the perfect
(12:53):
place to put artillery to bombard the national capital. People
were calling in Richmond for the seizure and fortification of Arlington.
So if he makes a move like that, kiss goodbye
to Arlington. On the other hand, if he goes to Richmond,
or if he declares neutrality, then maybe there won't be
(13:15):
a war, there won't be a federal occupation of Arlington,
and he can squeeze through the cracks and preserve the
property for his family, and in large measure, I think
that's what he intends to do. A lot of the
evidence suggests that Lee goes to Richmond with a view
towards thinking that he's going to act as some kind
of peace broker. Because all along in this process, in
(13:38):
the months prior, people had talked incessantly about the Union
breaking up, about it organizing itself into one, two, three, four,
five different confederacies. But then after a period of time,
everyone cooling off and getting together in a constitutional convention
and reconstructing the union. By the way, that's where the
(13:58):
term reconstruction first it's used. And there's evidence that Lee
saw himself as being part of a process like that,
that he would help to guide the reunification process once
the secession fervor had worn off, and by May of
eighteen sixty one, it's clear there isn't going to be
any reconciliation. It's clear that Virginia is going to unite
(14:19):
itself to the Confederacy. At that point, he actually writes
to his wife and says, well, maybe it's maybe I
should just resign now, maybe I should just retire and
wash my hands of all this. But by that point
it's too late. So he finds himself now an advisor
to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and a Confederate general. But
it's the kind of process you watch him going through
(14:42):
and it looks like he's shadow walking, always thinking that
the result is going to be different, but the result
never is different. So it's not a one off, one
time dramatic movie edit decision, and it's certainly not as
Freeman made it look. The decision he was doomed to
make from the very beginning in his life. It's an incremental,
(15:05):
step by step getting sucked further and further in kind
of decision. When you watch Robert E. Lee in action
as a general, bear in mind that this man learned
the practicalities of real war under Winfield Scott in Mexico,
(15:29):
and the primary lesson he learns from Scott in Mexico
is the importance of the continuous offensive. Even if the
numbers are not on your side, keep the initiative in
your hands, keep moving onwards, because that is what will
eventually demoralize an enemy and allow you to destroy the
nime army. That is the rule by which Lee took
(15:54):
his army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac in eighteen
sixty two, and probably would have taken it into Pennsylvania
at that point. There might have been a Battle of
Gettysburg in September of eighteen sixty two. Instead, there's the
famous incident of the Lost Orders. The terrible intelligence coup,
which allows the Federal commander, General McClellan to understand what
(16:16):
Lee's plans are results in the Battle of Antietam, and
Lee is forced to retreat into Virginia, but Lee never
loses sight of the need for taking the war northwards.
Lee understood, and I think he understood this better almost
than any other Confederate leader, that the Southern Confederacy's resources
(16:37):
were too meager to last for a fifteen round heavyweight
bout with the North. He'd lived in the North quite
long enough to know what the North's resources were like,
and he knew that the souths could not compare to those.
If the South was to win its independence, it would
need to score an early knockout in the early rounds,
(16:58):
a surprise knockout, and the only way to do that
would be get across the Potomac, get up into Pennsylvania
and either win a battle there, or even if you
didn't fight a battle at all, just run around the
countryside showing how the Lincoln administration was incapable of defending
its own home turf. That would then have a political
(17:21):
knock on effect. It would convince the Northerners that the
Lincoln administration was incapable of defending them and that the
war really ought to be brought to an end, because
there is really no way to subdue the Confederates in
the fall elections of eighteen sixty two, Lincoln has just
issued the Emancipation Proclamation and he is punished for it.
(17:42):
The Republican Party loses thirty four seats in the House
of Representatives. It loses two key northern governorships in New
York and New Jersey. That's eighteen sixty two. In the
summer of eighteen sixty three, there are two more key
Northern governorships up for grabs, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and both
(18:05):
have serious Democratic anti administration contenders, Clement Volandigum in Ohio
and George Woodworth in Pennsylvania. If Lee is able to
score a victory in Pennsylvania, or even just use Pennsylvania
as a base of operations that the Union Army can't
nudge him from, then when the gubernatorial elections take place
(18:27):
in Ohio and Pennsylvania, people will turn out and vote
for Democrats, to vote for the end of the war.
And if you have a corps of states at the
center of the North, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania
with Democratic anti Lincoln governors, they're going to fold their
arms and say we're not cooperating with this bloodshed anymore.
This is a useless war which is being foisted on
(18:49):
us by radical abolitionists. We want an end to this war.
We're not sending any more troops. We're not permitting any
more supplies to go to Lincoln's army. You have to
open negotiation with the Confederates. Well, once you opened negotiations
with the Confederacy, they weren't going to go back to shooting,
and the independence of the Confederacy would virtually be conceded.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When we come back more of Alan Galzo's storytelling on
Robert E. Lee here on our American stories, and we
(19:38):
returned to our American stories and the final portion of
our story on Robert E. Lee telling the story Alan Gelzo,
author of Robert E. Lee, A Life. When we last
left off, Lee had determined that what the Confederacy needed
to win or at least draw even with the Union,
was to plunge the army of Virginia deep into the
(20:00):
north to so chaos that perhaps would cause the governors
in the area Pennsylvania and Ohio, or Lincoln himself to
be voted out of office. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
That was Lee's strategy, and he saw that that making
war in effect on the political will of the North
was the way for the South to win the Civil War.
Lee crosses the Potomac substantially ahead of the Federal Army
of the Potomac, and his army arcs northwards through the
(20:33):
Cumberland Valley all the way up to the Susquehanna River,
just across from the Pennsylvania capital at Harrisburg. But his
real goal is not Harrisburg. His real goal is to
make the Army of the Potomac chase him so far
and so fast that it becomes winded, exhausted, disorganized, and disconnected.
(20:55):
And when it does, then he can turn and concentrate,
pick off peace of the Federal army one by one,
and defeat them in detail. And that is what he
has in view as a military plan. He puts his
finger down on Gettysburg on a map and says, this
is where we will probably meet the Federal army and
(21:17):
defeat it. Well, he was close. He planned to concentrate
his army at Gettysburg on the first of July and
then wait for this straggling Federal army to come up
and get its nose bloodied piece by piece. What put
that out of kiltr was that pieces of the Federal
Army got to Gettysburg first, got there on June thirtieth,
(21:38):
and were prepared to hold on to Gettysburg as tightly
as they could until the rest of the Army at
the Potomac could come up and support them. This surprised
and discomfidently, but there weren't that many Federals holding Gettysburg,
so he decides to push ahead with his plan and
push the Federals out of Gettysburg. He succeeds in doing
(22:02):
and in the process he basically ruins two of the
seven army corps of the Federal Army of the Potomac.
He ruins the first Corps, he ruins the eleventh Corps.
He probably would have mopped them up completely but for
the fact that his army had been marching all day,
fighting all day, dusk was coming on because it was
an overcast day up, dusk was coming in somewhat early.
(22:25):
The Federal forces managed to regroup on Cemetery Hill south
of the town, and Lee's feeling is, all right, well,
we're not going to try and push head now. Let's
regroup and tomorrow morning we'll finish them off and be
in a position to deal with the next parts of
the Federal Army as it comes up the road. Well,
that was a mistake, because by the next day the
(22:47):
other parts of the Federal Army had in fact gotten
to Gettysburg, and when he launches an attack on July second,
to his surprise, he finds out that there are three
more pieces of the Army of the Potomac in place
in his path. Even so, his attack almost succeeds on
July second, it really comes within inches of a complete
(23:09):
destruction of the Army of the Potomac. So his solution
is that, all right, tomorrow, we will finish them off
tomorrow July third. He wasn't entirely wrong either, because by
the morning of July third, of those seven infantry corps
in the Federal Army of the Potomac, basically five of
them were out of action, one of them was being
(23:29):
held in reserve, and the other one only had about
parts of two divisions prepared to defend the rear of
Cemetery Hill, whereas Lee had an entirely fresh, untested division
that belonging to George Pickett. So on July third, he
launches George Pickett's division, along with some supporting troops at
(23:52):
these remnants, holding onto Cemetery Hill, and it fails. It
fails against every expectation, and at that point Lee realizes
he has no more wherewithal to continue this fight and
begins a withdrawal back across the Potomac into Virginia and Gettysburg,
(24:13):
very much to many people's surprised, turns out to be
a Union victory. People often asked after the battle, and
continue to ask to this day, what caused the Confederacy?
What caused Robert E. Lee to lose the Battle of
Gettysburg when it seemed like he had everything going for him.
George Pickett answered that question, and I think he gave
(24:34):
probably the best answer that could be given. I think
the Yankees had something to do with it. It was
a tenacious fight on the part of the Army of
the Potomac, and that is really the best explanation I
think that people can come up with. It was pivotal,
but it was also not pivotal. Let me at least
do the pivotal part first, What if, in fact Lee
(24:54):
had been victorious at Gettysburg. If he had, I think
there's a of strong possibility that the Army of the Potomac,
which had met with so many defeats Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg. I
think the Army of the Potomac might very easily have
gone to pieces like Napoleon's army after Waterlow. It had
(25:15):
just been defeated so many times under so many generals.
It had just seemed like it was no longer worth it.
Some parts of it would have cohered, but other parts
of it would simply have walked away as from a
lost game. At that point, Lee would have been able
to threaten Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia. There would probably have been
political uprisings in the North demanding an end of the war.
(25:39):
I mean, as it was only two weeks after the
Battle of Gettysburg. There's a major draft riot in New
York City that turns New York City upside down. New
York City is not the only place where riots like
that take place. We call them riots. Well, yeah, they
were draft riots. They were also racial pegrums. But the
fundamental message was we're not going to be We don't
want to fight this war anymore. This war is hopeless,
(26:01):
it's lost. We might as well admit it. And if
Lee had been victorious at Gettysburg, Lincoln might well have
had no choice politically speaking, either to resign or to
have opened those negotiations with the Confederacy. As it was,
Jefferson Davis had sent his vice president Alexander Stevens in
a messenger boat into the Chesapeake with a request to
(26:24):
come up to Washington. Now, the ostensible request was to
discuss prisoner exchanges, but a lot of people suspected that
what Alexander Stevens had up his sleeve was some kind
of document from Davis for Lincoln saying all right, let's
open negotiations. That might well have happened. So that is
a pivotal battle, and in fact, the military fortunes of
(26:44):
the Confederacy go nowhere but into a slow slide down
hill after that. But here's the other side of the coin.
In some senses, it wasn't pivotal, because the Civil War
is going to go on for another twenty two months.
And Gettysburg turns out not to be pivotal, basically for
(27:05):
two reasons. One is Lee does escape. George Gordon Meade,
the commander of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg,
was a cautious soul. He was a Democrat politically who
was convinced that the Lincoln aministration was interested in nothing
but embarrassing him and taking credit for itself. So he
was not going to shinny out on any strategic limbs.
(27:28):
He does not pursue Lee in the way that let's say,
the Duke of Wellington pursues Napoleon after Waterloop. There's none
of this up Guards and Adam in George Mead. Mead
is content to let Lee get across the Potomac and
that's the end of the campaign. This infuriates Lincoln, but
(27:48):
there's not too much Lincoln could do about it, because look,
here's a general who won a battle. Here's a federal
general finally won a battle. What is he going to
do pun assume. Eh So there's not too much there's
not too much wiggle room politically speaking for for President
Lincoln at that point. But it does mean the war
is going to go on. It's going to drag on
through eighteen sixty four. It's going to drag on through
the Overlain campaign. It's going to drag on really right
(28:10):
up until Lincoln is re elected in November of eighteen
sixty four. And it's when Lincoln is re elected that finally,
the handwriting is on the wall for the Confederacy. People
often ask me what I think the turning point of
the Civil War was, and they expect me to say Gettysburg,
and I don't. I tell them turning point of the
Civil War Appomatic Courthouse. And I say this partly to
(28:34):
be snarky, but also partly in a serious frame, because
in the summer of eighteen sixty four, the campaigns that
Lincoln was responsible for were going so poorly that Lincoln
himself did not expect to be re elected. If he
was dumped by the voters in November of eighteen sixty four,
(28:58):
the new president would be George mclach and McClellan would
from a variety of forces operative on him from the
Democratic Party. I have been forced to come to some
kind of negotiations with the Confederacy. And as soon as
you started those negotiations, that was the end. That would
mean the independence of the Confederacy. So even though Gettysburg
(29:19):
is a pivotal battle in preventing something like that from
happening in eighteen sixty three, it's not quite pivotal enough
to have prevented something like that from happening in eighteen
sixty four, and we really don't get the handwriting on
the wall until after the election of Lincoln, and then
it becomes clear that the Confederacy is really on the ropes.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to the
Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this
audio originally a part of their Scalar Talk series, which
can be found on YouTube. Simply look up Bill of
Rights Institute Scalar Talks to take a listen. Story of
Robert E. Lee is told by Alan Gelzo here on
(30:05):
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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