On Hallowed Ground (2 page)

PART I

DISUNION

1

LEAVING ARLINGTON

COL. ROBERT E. LEE FINISHED a fateful round of interviews and rode away from Washington, D.C., crossing the Long Bridge to Alexandria on April 18, 1861. It was a beautiful spring day, with the trees in young leaf and the Potomac River reflecting a benign sky, but there was no joy in Lee’s journey home. He had just turned down a major Army promotion, and now, headed back across the river, he struggled with a momentous decision: should he remain in the Army, which he had served faithfully for thirty-two years, or should he resign his commission to avoid the coming war, which threatened to break apart the country he loved?

The conflict between North and South, brewing for months, would trap Lee between his loyalties to the Union and allegiance to his family, his neighbors, and his home in Virginia, where the Lees had shaped events since 1641. “All the Lees had been Americans,” wrote Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s biographer, “but they had been Virginians first.”
¹

Lee brooded over these matters as he crossed the bridge that day, determined to stay with the Union if Virginia remained loyal,
to leave if Virginia joined the growing list of southern states plunging toward rebellion. He hoped that some last-minute
compromise would avert the conflict, but this was not to be: unbeknownst to Lee, a convention meeting in Richmond had voted
to secede the day before and announced its decision at noon, as Lee made his rounds in Washington.
²

The capital had already begun preparations for war. Workers on Pennsylvania Avenue piled sandbags on the piazza of the Treasury
Building, where iron bars had been hastily plugged into the windows. Others sweated in the building’s dim basement, stacking
barrels of flour for an expected siege. Union troops guarded the White House, newly occupied by President Abraham Lincoln.
Next door at the War Department, government clerks mustered in the courtyard for volunteer duty, fumbling with unfamiliar
weapons and adding to the city’s sense of doom. One lonely Navy sloop patrolled the Potomac River; from his office window
President Lincoln could glimpse it bobbing like a clockwork toy in the distance. Women and children made plans to flee the
city.
³

This flurry of activity had been sparked when federal forces surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederates in South Carolina a few
days before, prompting President Lincoln to call up 75,000 troops to defend the capital. Volunteers and regulars from Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Kansas answered his summons and began trickling into Washington as the spring season unfolded. They set up camp in the Capitol building, where they barricaded the doors with tubs of cement
and slept on the floor of the old House chamber. Like the country itself, the building was a work in progress. The new House
and Senate wings were not yet finished, and the Capitol’s truncated dome described an iron skeleton on the skyline. New troops
patrolled the city’s thoroughfares and river crossings, set up artillery pieces, established their pickets, and scrutinized
the Virginia hills for signs of trouble.
⁴

Lee rode past them, crossed into Virginia, and turned up the road from Alexandria to Arlington, the 1,100-acre family estate
dominating the rolling green landscape just beyond the river. The very sight of Arlington seemed to gladden Lee, who affectionately
referred to the place as “our dear home” or “old Arlington” in correspondence.
⁵
It was there, he said, “where my attachments are more strongly placed than at any other place in the world.”
⁶
It was easy to see why: Arlington floated in the hills like a Greek temple, sheltered by old oaks and sprawling elms. Looking
as if it had been there forever, it peered down from its eminence upon the raw, half-finished capital at its feet.

Although Lee’s father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had been a commanding presence in the formative years of the United
States—a friend and comrade of George Washington, a hero of the Revolution, a governor of Virginia, a member of Congress, a champion of the Bill of Rights—he had left his
son and family with very little aside from his legend. The elder Lee spent impetuously in land speculation, drew little income,
and was finally imprisoned for debt. He fell into ill health. He abandoned the family for the West Indies, where he lived
for several years. He was returning to Virginia in 1818, still broken and poor at age sixty-two, when he died at Cumberland
Island, Georgia. His son Robert, who had been six when his father sailed away, was eleven when word of his death reached home.

This straitened legacy, combined with Robert E. Lee’s career as a professional soldier, had kept him functionally homeless
for most of his adult life. Living out of trunks, sleeping in tents, lodging in a succession of borrowed houses, he finally
found a home in Arlington—along with a web of domestic, moral, and business entanglements—when his wife, Mary Custis Lee,
inherited a life interest in the estate, along with 196 slaves and a portfolio of scattered Virginia properties, upon the
death of her father in 1857.
⁷

That father, George Washington Parke Custis, was the grandson of Martha Washington and also the adopted son of George Washington. Custis had become the designated heir to the Arlington plantation from his biological father, John Parke Custis, who had
been an aide-de-camp to General Washington. The elder Custis died in 1781, before his son was a year old, at which point Washington took charge of the boy. After George and Martha Washington died, Custis was left holding not only the land at Arlington but also some seventeen thousand acres that included two forested
islands and two plantations of some four thousand acres each; known as White House and Romancock, both farms were located
on the Pamunkey River in eastern Virginia.
⁸

G. W. P. Custis, a dilettante who dabbled at painting, public oratory, experimental sheep farming, milling grain, ferry operations,
real estate development, and a hundred other business schemes that went nowhere, determined to build a grand dwelling for
himself on the Potomac River. He began construction on a wing of the house in 1802, and in 1804 hired George Hadfield, an
important English architect originally commissioned to supervise the building of Washington’s Capitol, to design his Arlington House. Construction resumed that year, proceeding in fits and starts until the home was
finally finished in 1818. Inspired in part by the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, the Custis mansion displayed the clean lines
and balanced appearance of a neoclassic edifice, anchored by a prominent central hall, and offset with low wings spreading
to the north and south. Perched on a hill with a view clear down to the river, the mansion was meant to be seen, a symbol
of its owner’s refinement and taste.

“It is visible for many miles,” a British visitor wrote, “and in the distance has the appearance of a superior English country
residence beyond any place I had seen in the states.” But he added, “As I came close to it, I was woefully disappointed.”
⁹
The mansion’s thick Doric columns, which appeared to be marble when seen from a distance, turned out to be rough stucco,
with dark veins painted in to fool the eye. And once you passed Arlington’s majestic portico and crossed the threshold, the
rooms inside were dark and cramped—and all out of proportion to the mansion’s external promise.

Robert E. Lee felt the weight of family obligation when Mary Anna Custis Lee inherited the plantation, and he acquired the
dubious honor of serving not only as Arlington’s master but also as the chief executor of his late father-in-law’s tangled
will. The mansion and surrounding grounds at Arlington had fallen into decline during Custis’s final years. The big house
leaked, the slaves were restless, the fields were sodden and unproductive. Beginning in 1857, Lee took an extended leave from
his Army duties and set about putting the place in order. Using as many of Arlington’s sixty-three slaves as he could press
into service, Lee drained and fertilized the fields, planted oats and corn, restored the fences, attacked encroaching brush,
laid the foundations for a new barn, repaired the gristmill, roofed the mansion with new slates, and shored up its rafters.
¹⁰
He made the dank old house more family-friendly, installing its first water closet and wood-burning furnace.
¹¹
Mrs. Lee’s garden flourished with jasmine, honeysuckle, moss roses, and the colonel’s favorite, the delicate Safronia rose,
which Lee made a ritual of gathering before breakfast, leaving a rosebud for each of his daughters at the table.
¹²
Arlington began to feel like home.

It was a mixed blessing. “I am getting along as usual, trying to get a little work done and to mend up some things,” he wrote
his second son, William Henry “Rooney” Fitzhugh Lee, in 1858. “I succeed badly.”
¹³
Never run for profit in Custis’s lifetime, the Arlington plantation had been subsidized by his working farms at White House
and Romancock in previous years. This triangular arrangement ended with Custis’s death. His will left those subsidiary plantations
to Lee’s second and third sons, Rooney and Robert, with Arlington intended for George Washington Custis Lee, the eldest heir, upon the death of Mrs. Lee. With the division of the three properties, each thus had to become
self-sufficient. To accomplish this, the slaves had to work harder—that, at least, was the view of Robert E. Lee, who felt
that his late father-in-law had been too indulgent with workers, allowing them to coast through his declining years. Some
slaves, bristling at Lee’s more demanding style, tried to escape after he took charge.
¹⁴
On at least three occasions, he hired agents to chase them down and put them in jail until they could be returned to Arlington.
¹⁵
In one instance from 1859, the antislavery
New York Tribune
reported that Lee supervised the whipping of three escapees—including a woman stripped to the waist—and poured brine into
their wounds.
¹⁶
The story was quickly picked up and disseminated in other papers—much to the distress of Lee, who coldly dismissed the charges.
“The
New York Tribune
has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply,” he wrote to his son Custis at the
time.
¹⁷
The story would resurface to haunt Lee many years later, after the Civil War. Lee seemed to dispute the account. “There is
not a word of truth in it, or any grounds for its origins,” Lee wrote a friend. “No servant, soldier, or citizen, that was
ever employed by me can with truth charge me with bad treatment.”
¹⁸
Yet the particulars in the slave’s account were confirmed by multiple witnesses and by the public record. Who told the truth?
It is impossible to know, but this much is documented: Lee sent agents to capture Arlington’s runaway slaves on at least three
occasions, he had them thrown in jail to await transport back to Arlington, and he had troublesome slaves banished to other
plantations, where they would be out of his sight and farther from the temptations of freedom.
¹⁹
Such treatment, while not as salacious as the whipping scene, is no less repugnant, and it provides insight into Lee’s dubious
moral inheritance at Arlington.

On an intellectual level, Lee deplored the institution of slavery, which he believed to be “a moral & political evil in any
Country.”
²⁰
At the same time, he supported the extension of slavery in the territories, and, like many of his contemporaries, he viewed
blacks as inferior to whites. He believed that African Americans were ill prepared for citizenship. On a personal level, he
felt duty-bound to protect the Custis family property—slaves included—until his father-in-law’s estate could be settled and
properly divided. Given the messy nature of Custis’s business affairs and the conflicting requirements of his will, this would
take years to unscramble. Custis had, for instance, flamboyantly left his four Lee granddaughters legacies of ten thousand
dollars each, but with no funds to pay for them. His estate was ten thousand dollars in debt when Lee stepped in as executor.
In one part of the will, Custis suggested that money for the legacies could come from selling land; a few paragraphs later,
that the legacies be paid from operations on the Romancock and White House estates. To complicate matters, Custis directed
that his slaves should be freed within five years of his death, after the debts of his estate had been cleared. Lee made a
choice. Instead of selling land, he intended to keep the slaves in bondage until they could work off their late master’s debt
and pay the bequests for the Custis granddaughters.

“He has left me an unpleasant legacy,” Lee told his eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, in 1859.
²¹
The moral burden was onerous, as were the complications of farm and family life. After a few years on leave at Arlington,
Lee longed for the simplicity of soldiering. “I am no farmer myself, & do not expect to be always here,” he wrote a cousin.
²²
He told another relative that he felt “very much in the way of everybody” at Arlington.
²³
Having restored the old place to a respectable degree, whittled down Custis’s debts, planned for his daughters’ legacies,
and placed Romancock and White House on a functioning basis, Lee declared provisional victory and decamped from Arlington
in February 1860 to rejoin his cavalry unit in Texas. The slaves were not yet liberated, but it appeared to Lee that they
soon would be.

Within a year, however, events pulled Lee back to Washington, where the Civil War was about to break upon the nation. Texas had seceded in February 1861, declaring itself an independent
republic and ejecting Union forces—including Lee’s cavalry regiment. Six other states from the Deep South had already joined
the Confederate States of America. With his native Virginia still on the fence, Lee made a slow and sorrowful journey across
the country, wrestling with the hard choices he would face at home.