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The Nation Memorializes LeeArlington House is the nation’s memorial to Robert E. Lee. For generations, Americans have struggled over how to remember this complicated soldier, father, slaveholder, and educator. After the Civil War, Southern groups fought to preserve Arlington House, then under control of the US Army. Their goal was to present Lee as a man who fought for honor and home, not slavery. Lee proved to be a gifted strategist, thwarting Union efforts to capture the Southern capital of Richmond again and again. As bad as it is, they have fought for it with a gallantry worthy of a better.”–Union Army Commander Ulysses S. Grant, 1864The Greatest MistakeWhen Virginia seceded in April 1861, Lee went to see his commanding officer, General Winfield Scott.
Civil War
He disliked the institution—more for its inefficiency than from moral repugnance—yet defended it throughout his life. Custis, however, had liberated his slaves in a messy will that stipulated that they be released within five years. Lee interpreted this to mean that the slaves could be held for the entire period. The slaves, believing they were already free, accosted Lee and escaped in large numbers. Lee responded by hiring out many Arlington slaves, breaking up families that had been together for decades. Only when the courts ruled against him did Lee finally free the slaves.
Gettysburg to the End of the War
In 1865, Lee became president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia; as president of the college, he supported reconciliation between the North and South. Lee accepted the termination of slavery provided for by the Thirteenth Amendment, but opposed racial equality for African Americans. After his death in 1870, Lee became a cultural icon in the South and is largely hailed as one of the Civil War's greatest generals. As commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, he fought most of his battles against armies of significantly larger size, and managed to win many of them. Lee built up a collection of talented subordinates, most notably James Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, and J.
Recent history
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The South went into universal mourning and Lee became a charismatic symbol of honor and sacrifice in the region. In the nineteenth century, proponents of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War used both myth and fact to mold a public image of Lee as a titan of personal virtue and military genius. Early in the twentieth century, several national figures, including U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, praised him as a unifying personality, citing his efforts to pacify the South after the war. Recent scholarship has more-closely probed Lee’s motives and battlefield decisions, as well as his support for a racially stratified society. Since his decision to withdraw from the Union in 1861, his actions have provoked controversy. Yet Lee remains a significant historical figure, whose importance lies as much in the questions he prods Americans to ask about patriotism and loyalty as it does in his battlefield prowess.
Virginia mansion that was once home to Robert E. Lee reopens with new focus on the enslaved
Sheridan was the highest-ranking general at the time to be buried at Arlington. Stephen Hammond is Charles Syphax's great-great-great-nephew and a family historian. "This is an incredibly important time in the history of our country. We are evaluating the long-term legacies of that time and this house." Those choices are part of institutionalized racism that has impacts to this day. Some of the original housing for enslaved people, for example, once served as a gift shop, and much of the information about their lives has been lost because no one cared to preserve or remember it. Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, reopened to the public for the first time since 2018 on Tuesday.
Life
After the war, an estimated 2,111 unknown bodies were exhumed from battlefields and reburied in a mass grave deliberately placed in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden. This Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns, dedicated in September 1866, was intended to further mark the Lee property with the grim reality of war, Dodge says. The Lees would never return to live at Arlington Estate, which was completed in 1818. But federal troops, under orders from Georgia-born Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs, made the property difficult to return to by burying the bodies of Union soldiers near the house.
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Lee’s generalship was characterized by bold tactical maneuvers and inspirational leadership; however, critics have questioned his strategic judgment, his waste of lives in needless battles, and his unwillingness to fight in the Western Theater. In 1865, his beloved home at Arlington having been turned into a national cemetery, Lee became president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington. There he promoted educational innovation and presented a constructive face to the devastated Southern public. Privately Lee remained bitter and worked to obstruct societal changes brought about by the war, including the enfranchisement of African Americans.
The Robert E. Lee Memorial
Archivists were able to trace some of the enslaved inhabitants, and their names are written on plastic sheets preserving the walls. Some people are known only by the work they performed, such as "Gardener," or by their relation to another, such as "Mary's Child." Many names have been lost forever. Finding a way to memorialize Robert E. Lee while acknowledging his role in leading the Confederacy and upholding slavery is not an easy line to walk. Since 1983, Arlington House has served as the official symbol of Arlington, Va.
Army of Northern Virginia commander (June 1862 – June
He served across the United States, distinguished himself extensively during the Mexican–American War, and was Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. He married Mary Anna Custis, great-granddaughter of George Washington's wife Martha. While he opposed slavery from a philosophical perspective, he supported its legality and held hundreds of slaves. When Virginia declared its secession from the Union in 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command.
He realized his wife and children would have to leave the plantation, sacrificing their home and livelihood. In the months leading up to the war, Lee said that he could not raise arms against the United States. “I will follow my native State with my sword,” he declared, “and, if need be, with my life.”A Federalist FamilyRobert E. Lee hailed from one of the nation’s founding families. Lee’s father fought alongside George Washington and shared Washington’s nationalist beliefs. Lee’s in-laws, the Custises, descended from Martha Washington and upheld the family’s nation-building principles.
In 1857, his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis died, creating a serious crisis when Lee took on the burden of executing the will. After seven years of planning and $12.5 million in restoration work, the National Park Service reopened the former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Tuesday. The mansion — officially called the Robert E. Lee Memorial — was built by enslaved people more than 200 years ago.
Lee won two major victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before launching a second invasion of the North in the summer of 1863, where he was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg by the Army of the Potomac under George Meade. He led his army in the minor and inconclusive Bristoe Campaign that fall before General Ulysses S. Grant took command of Union armies in the spring of 1864. George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington, built the mansion as a memorial of sorts to the country’s first president. Robert E. Lee came to Arlington House after he married Custis’ daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Meigs himself was buried in Arlington National Cemetery behind the house when he died in January of 1892, and Meigs lived to see the cemetery start to gain prestige, Dodge says. Meigs’ death came a few years after General Philip Sheridan was interred near the front of the Arlington house upon his death in August of 1888.
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