Black Bart Uncovered: The True Story of the Old West’s Most Unlikely Outlaw

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 folks at the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this audio, originally a part of their ScholarTalk series. Take it away, Alan.

Robert E. Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline, was born in 1807 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 17th century. He attends West Point. He is Class of 1829, graduates second in his class. When I say ‘second,’ he 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 of Engineers, doing really Corps 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 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 Corps of Engineers was sclerotic, to say the least. The great advantage of Army employment was that it was guaranteed and secure. The downside was 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 is about to mount one of the most adventurous, amphibious expeditions in American military history, and that is the Joint Army-Navy landing at Veracruz on the eastern coast of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as an up-and-coming person and becomes a major part of Scott’s staff as a major assistant to Scott in the capture of Veracruz, accompanying Scott’s invasion of Mexico, past the battle at Cerro 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 Hidalgo. All through it, Lee is very 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 the Corps of Engineers. It’s not terribly exciting, and in fact, if anything, it gets worse because in 1852 he’s assigned to become Superintendent of West Point. Now, I know that it sounds glamorous on the surface of it; in 1852, it wasn’t. At this point, West Point is still very much a Corps of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee is the Superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what to do. He is micromanaged for three years by the Chief Engineer in Washington, D.C., 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 2nd Cavalry 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 2nd Cavalry, and there he really does nothing more than chase Comanches and various outlaws around the countryside to no very particular purpose. He never really fires a shot in anger himself. It is not until 1861 that things begin to warm up. In 1861, he’s recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly to help rewrite the Army regulations, but really Scott wants him in Washington because the country is splitting apart. 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 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 Lincoln would like you to take command of the armies in the field.’ And Lee says no, which is a great surprise. But Lee 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 brink 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. 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. 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 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 Army for 30 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. They tried to explain what they were doing as secession. They argued six ways to Sunday that this was 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 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’s slaves in order to avert the 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 not yet seceded when he has this interview with Blair. Not only had it not seceded, but the secession vote that the Virginia Secession Convention does take actually has to go through a referendum process that will not conclude until May 25th. 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 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 argument as well. How do you untangle these arguments?

When we come back, more of this remarkable story, this complicated and rich story of General Robert E. Lee. His story continues with Alan Kelzo here on Our American Stories, and we return 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 sword against his home state of Virginia—and while that may be true, it’s not the full story. Here again is Alan Gelzo.

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 about Virginia as his native state. But the truth is, he hadn’t lived in Virginia for most of his life. How do you untangle these arguments? I think you untangle them 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. 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 80 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 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 is there because he married into the family of George Washington Parke Custis, who did own Arlington. Mary was as wedded to Arlington, her parents’ home, as she was to her husband. It’s a really obsessive relationship. When Lee is put to this situation in 1861, what he has to 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 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 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 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 term ‘Reconstruction’ first gets 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 1861, it’s clear there isn’t going to be any reconciliation. It’s clear that Virginia is going to unite itself to the Confederacy. At that point, he actually writes to his wife and says, ‘Well, 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, 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, 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 learns the practicalities of real war under Winfield Scott in Mexico, and the primary lesson he learned 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 enemy army. That is the rule by which Lee took his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac in 1862, and probably would have taken it into Pennsylvania at that point. There might have been a Battle of Gettysburg in September of 1862. Instead, there’s the famous incident of the ‘Lost Orders,’ the terrible intelligence coup which allows the Federal commander, General McClellan, to understand what Lee’s plans, 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 were too meager to last for a 15-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 South’s 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, a surprise knockout, and the only way to do that would be to 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 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 1862, Lincoln has just issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and he is punished for it. The Republican Party loses 34 seats in the House of Representatives. It loses two key Northern governorships in New York and New Jersey. That’s 1862. In the summer of 1863, there are two more key Northern governorships up for grabs—Pennsylvania and Ohio—and both have serious Democratic, anti-administration contenders: Clement Vallandigham in Ohio and George Woodward 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 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 core 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 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.

When we come back, more of Alan Galzo’s storytelling on Robert E. Lee here on Our American Stories, and we return 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 North to sow 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.

That was Lee’s strategy, and he saw that that making war, in effect, on the political will of the