Profiles in Character: Robert E. Lee After the Civil War
On August 5, 1975, President Gerald Ford restored the citizenship of General Robert E. Lee, 110 years after Lee applied for a pardon and submitted the required Oath of Allegiance to the United States. The Oath had been lost (deliberately hidden?) among State Department records which ended up in the National Archives and was not discovered until 1970. Many Americans welcomed this belated acknowledgement of Lee just as many were angered that he didn’t deserve it. Can a leader of the rebellion against his country, a slaveholder who emancipated his slaves only in late 1862 and a man who considered them unprepared for full citizenship still offer us any example of good character?
On the morning of April 9, 1865, as he prepared to meet with General Ulysses Grant to discuss terms for surrendering his army, Lee listened to a proposal from Confederate General Porter Alexander. Porter argued that Lee could engage the remnant of his army in protracted guerilla warfare rather than surrender. Knowing that Confederate President Jefferson Davis abhorred the idea of surrender, Lee nevertheless rejected Alexander’s idea. Foreseeing, as he told Alexander, that this would turn his soldiers into “bands of marauders” who would be compelled “to rob and steal in order to live,” he noted that this would not only prolong the fighting but lead to devastation of parts of the country that had been thus far spared. So he told the young artillery officer “you and I as Christian men have no right to consider only how this would affect us” but must “consider its effects on the country as whole.” So he mounted Traveller, rode to Appomattox Court House and agreed to Grant’s terms. Beaten in battle, he chose the path to peace and reconciliation, setting an example to encourage similar behavior across the Confederacy.
That was not to be the last test of character amidst defeat. Lee left his encampment on April 12 and made his way to Union-battered Richmond where he accepted the offer of a small cottage for him and his family at Oakland plantation, fifty miles west of the city. Its owner, Elizabeth Cocke invited the Lees to dine and during one meal, her butler, now a freedman, entered the room to say goodbye as he began his emancipated life. As recounted in Michael Korda’s biography (Clouds of Glory), Lee rose from the table, shook the man’s hand, offered words of advice and “asked Heaven to bless him.”
Lee held racist views, but he understood that all humans deserve to be treated with dignity. In another instance recounted by Korda:
"Lee had not hesitated to shake a black man's hand, and when another black man had entered St. Paul's Church in Richmond and walked to the chancel rail to receive communion before a shocked, indignant, silent white congregation. Lee rose from his pew, joined the man, and knelt beside him.”
On September 1, 1865 Lee was offered the presidency of Washington College, located in Lexington, Virginia. Named after the general Lee greatly admired, he accepted and would spend the last five years of his life there. Part of his justification, as he wrote in his letter of acceptance, was “to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony” in the nation. A former Superintendent at West Point, Lee was no stranger to higher education, but this time his students would be groomed not to fight but to rebuild. In his efforts at reconciliation, he recruited students from the North to learn alongside their Southern peers.
Lee sought neither fame nor money in the task of repairing the wounds of war. He turned down the offer of a $10,000 salary at an insurance company, more than six times his pay at the college. He felt the college needed his full time attention. “But General,” the insurance salesman who offered the job said, “we do not want you to discharge any duties. We simply wish the use of your name; that will abundantly compensate us.” “Excuse me, sir,” Lee replied, “I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render.”
Statues and memorials to Robert E. Lee, understandably, have been removed in many states. We should not honor leadership which violated the Constitution and sought to create a separate nation dedicated to maintaining slavery. Yet we can still learn from his demonstration of character in peacetime efforts to rebuild the society which his military leadership threatened. Many figures in American history have moments we cringe but need to recall, but some also have moments that exemplify good character. Until the middle of the Civil War, for example, Abraham Lincoln supported sending freed slaves outside the United States believing they could not live side-by-side with white Americans. Yet by war’s end he saw the dishonor in that, championed the 13th Amendment and no longer talked of colonization. For Robert E. Lee, the character he demonstrated in defeat is worth noting.
Photo Credit: Robert E. Lee in 1870, commons.wikimedia.org
