Robert E. Lee: General Order No. 9

About the Author

Robert E. Lee was born on January 19, 1807, on the plantation of Stratford Hall, Virginia, just south of the Potomac River. Lee's father died in disgrace and disrepute when his son was eleven years old, a victim of bad business decisions and poor health, leaving Lee to be brought up by his mother in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1825 he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he achieved exceptional marks, graduating second in the class of 1829. Assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers, Lee spent much of the next sixteen years shifting from post to post, performing noteworthy work on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers as well as the harbor facilities at St. Louis between 1837 and 1840.

In 1846 Lee jumped at the chance to see action in the Mexican-American War; early the following year he was assigned to the staff of Winfield Scott, and he distinguished himself during Scott's campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. After the war, he won appointment as superintendent at West Point, a post he held from 1852 to 1855, and then became a lieutenant colonel assigned to the newly established Second U.S. Cavalry. Upon the death of his father-in-law in 1857, Lee returned home to Virginia and established a residence at Arlington, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. He found managing the slaves at Arlington an onerous business and gained notoriety in 1859 when the New York Tribune reported that Lee had whipped some of the very slaves that he was supposed to free under the terms of his father-in-law's will. Later that year, he hurried west to Harpers Ferry to take command of a detachment of U.S. Marines to subdue the abolitionist John Brown, who had seized a federal arsenal as the first step in his plan to incite a slave insurrection.

Lee anxiously watched as several southern states declared that they were seceding from the United States in the aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln. As of early 1861 Lee was determined not to take part in any conflict so long as Virginia remained in the Union. On the heels of Virginia's decision to secede, made in the wake of Lincoln's call for troops after the Union surrender of Fort Sumter, Lee turned down a general's commission in the U.S. Army, resigned his colonelcy, and joined first the Virginia militia and then the Confederate forces, winning elevation to general in a matter of months. From June 1862 until April 1865 he led the Army of Northern Virginia, winning plaudits for his generalship, but he found himself forced to surrender to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. After the war, Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College (which was renamed Washington and Lee University after his death), in Lexington, Virginia. Although he advised his fellow former Confederates to accept the outcome of the war, he remained uneasy about emancipation and contemplated writing a history of his army's operations to suggest that the South had been overwhelmed and not outfought. After a short illness, he died on October 12, 1870.