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Vote: | A true man of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others. |
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Vote: | Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less. |
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Vote: | Duty is the sublimest word in the language. You can never do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less. |
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Vote: | Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less. |
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Vote: | I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving. |
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Vote: | I like whiskey. I always did, and that is why I never drink it. |
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Vote: | In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength. |
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Vote: | It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it. |
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Vote: | Let the tent be struck. |
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Vote: | My experience through life has convinced me that, while moderation and temperance in all things are commendable and beneficial, abstinence from spirituous liquors is the best safeguard of morals and health. |
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Vote: | The education of a man is never completed until he dies. |
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Vote: | The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides. |
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Vote: | We failed, but in the good providence of God apparent failure often proves a blessing. |
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Vote: | We have fought this fight as long, and as well as we know how. We have been defeated. For us as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation. |
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Vote: | What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. |
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Vote: | What a cruel thing is war... to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. |
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Vote: | What a cruel thing war is... to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors. |
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Vote: | Whiskey - I like it, I always did, and that is the reason I never use it. |
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Biography
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Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a career army officer and the most successful general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. He eventually commanded all Confederate armies as general-in-chief. Like Hannibal earlier and Rommel later, his victories against superior forces in an ultimately losing cause won him enduring fame. Lee remains an iconic figure of the Confederacy to this day.
Early life and career
Lee was born at Stratford Hall Plantation, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the fourth child of Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee ("Lighthorse Harry") and Anne Hill (Carter) Lee. He entered the United States Military Academy in 1825. When he graduated (second in his class of 46) in 1829 he had not only attained the top academic record but was the first cadet (and so far the only) to graduate the Academy without a single demerit. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.
Lee served for seventeen months at Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island, Georgia. In 1831, he was transferred to Fort Monroe, Virginia, as assistant engineer. While he was stationed there, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. They lived in the Custis mansion, located on the banks of the Potomac River in Arlington, just across from Washington, D.C.. They eventually had three sons and four daughters: George Washington Custis, William H. Fitzhugh, Robert Edward, Mary, Agnes, Annie, and Mildred.
Engineering
Lee served as an assistant in the chief engineer's office in Washington from 1834 to 1837, but spent the summer of 1835 helping to lay out the state line between Ohio and Michigan. In 1837, he got his first important command. As a first lieutenant of engineers, he supervised the engineering work for St. Louis harbor and for the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. His work there earned him a promotion to captain. In 1841, he was transferred to Fort Hamilton in New York Harbor, where he took charge of building fortifications.
Mexican War, West Point, and Texas
Lee distinguished himself in the Mexican War (1846–1848). He was one of Winfield Scott's chief aides in the march from Veracruz to Mexico City. He was instrumental in several American victories through his personal reconnaissance as a staff officer; he found routes of attack that the Mexicans had not defended because they thought the terrain was impassable.
He was promoted to major after the Battle of Cerro Gordo in April, 1847. He also fought at Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec, and was wounded at the latter. By the end of the war he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel.
After the Mexican War, he spent three years at Fort Carrol in Baltimore harbor, after which he became the superintendent of West Point in 1852. During his three years at West Point, he improved the buildings, the courses, and spent a lot of time with the cadets. Lee's oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, attended West Point during his tenure. Custis Lee graduated in 1854, first in his class.
In 1855, Lee became Lieutenant Colonel of the Second Cavalry and was sent to the Texas frontier. There he helped protect settlers from attacks by the Apache and the Comanche.
These were not happy years for Lee as he did not like to be away from his family for long periods of time, especially as his wife was becoming increasingly ill. Lee came home to see her as often as he could.
He happened to be in Washington at the time of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1859, and was sent there to arrest Brown and to restore order. He did this very quickly and then returned to his regiment in Texas. When Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, Lee was called to Washington, DC to wait for further orders.
Custis's Slaves
As a member of the Virginia aristocracy, Lee had lived in close contact with slavery all of his life, but he never held more than about a half-dozen slaves under his own name — in fact, it was not positively known that he had held any slaves at all under his own name until the rediscovery of his 1846 will in the records of Rockbridge County, Virginia, which referred to an enslaved woman named Nancy and her children, and provided for their manumission in case of his death. (http://www.nathanielturner.com/willofgeorgewashingtonparkecustis2.htm)
However, when Lee's father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died in October 1857, Lee came into a considerable amount of property through his life, and also gained temporary control of a large population of slaves — sixty-three men, women, and children, in all — as the executor of Custis's will. Under the terms of the will, the slaves were to be freed, with the executors given five years to arrange the necessary legal processes for manumission:
Custis's will was probated on December 7, 1857. Although Robert Lee Randolph, Right Reverend William Meade, and George Washington Peter were named as executors along with Robert E. Lee, the other three men failed to qualify, leaving Lee with the sole responsibility of settling the estate, and with exclusive control over all of Custis's former slaves. Although the will provided for the slaves to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper", Lee found himself in need of funds, and decided to make money by hiring out the slaves to neighboring plantations and eastern Virginia during the five years that the will had granted him control of them. The decision caused dissatisfaction among Custis's slaves, who had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died. In 1859, a few of his slaves decided to leave and fled for the North; an 1859 letter to the New York Tribune records that they were captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and returned to Lee, who had them whipped and returned to his Arlington plantation, after which he hired them out in the area surrounding Richmond. The three slaves turned out to be a man named Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs; in 1866, Norris recounted the incident in an interview:
Lee released Custis's slaves at the end of the five year period in the winter of 1862, and had the deed of manumission recorded at the court in Richmond, where it was acknowledged by the judge on December 29, 1862—five years, two months, and nineteen days after Custis's death.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert E. Lee".
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