The war dragged on for two more years until a victory for Lee became impossible. The battles continued through the cold, harsh winter and into the summer of 1863, when Lee’s troops challenged Union forces in Pennsylvania during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, which claimed 28,000 Confederate soldiers’ lives and 23,000 casualties on the Union side. Less than a week later, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, Lee made his first attempt at invading the North in the bloodiest single day of the war.Īntietam ended with roughly 23,000 casualties and the Union claiming victory for General George McClellan. Lee has been widely criticized for his aggressive strategies that led to mass casualties. Lee wasn’t a secessionist, but he immediately joined the Confederates and was named general and commander of the South’s fight for secession. When he was asked to lead Union forces, he resigned from military service rather than fight against his Virginia friends and neighbors. Lee’s home state of Virginia seceded less than a week later, creating the defining moment of his career. The first attack of the Civil War came on April 12, 1861, when Confederates took control of South Carolina’s Fort Sumter. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America. The following year, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, prompting seven Southern states - Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas - to secede in protest. Lee entered the fray by halting a raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, capturing radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers. Lee at Harpers Ferryĭuring the 1850s, tensions between the abolitionist movement and slave owners reached a boiling point, and the union of states was near a breaking point. While historical accounts vary, Lee’s treatment of the enslaved peoples was described as being so combative and harsh that it led to revolts. Lee executed his father-in-law's will, which included Arlington House near Washington, D.C., a poorly managed plantation with debts and nearly 200 enslaved people, whom Custis wanted freed within five years of his death.Īs a result of his father-in-law, Lee became owner of hundreds of enslaved workers. Lee did not grow up on a large plantation, but his wife inherited an enslaved worker in 1857 from her father, George Washington Park Custis. Scott once declared that Lee was “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.”Īmerican Civil War History Was Robert E. He first distinguished himself in battle during the Mexican-American War under General Winfield Scott in the battles of Veracruz, Churubusco and Chapultepec. The pair married in 1831 Lee and his wife had seven children, including three sons, George, William and Robert, who followed him into the military to fight for the Confederate States during the Civil War.Īs the couple were establishing their family, Lee frequently travelled with the military on engineering projects. Given his father’s diminished reputation, Lee had to propose twice to win approval to wed Mary, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and the step-great-granddaughter of President George Washington. Army Corps of Engineers.Ī year later, he began courting a childhood connection, Mary Custis Washington. Lee's ChildrenĪfter graduation, Lee’s military career quickly took off as he chose a position with the U.S. He did not receive a single demerit during his four years at the academy. Lee graduated second in his class from West Point. He graduated second in his class in 1829-and the following month he would lose his mother.ĭid you know? Robert E. Military Academy at West Point for a military education. With little money for his education, Lee went to the U.S. He fled to the West Indies and died in 1818 while trying to return to Virginia when Lee was barely a teen. His mother, Anne Hill Carter, also grew up on a plantation and his father, Colonel Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was descended from colonists and become a Revolutionary War leader and three-term governor of Virginia.īut the family hit hard times when Lee’s father made a series of bad investments that left him in debtors’ prison. Robert Edward Lee was born in Stratford Hall, a plantation in Virginia, on January 19, 1807, to a wealthy and socially prominent family.
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