Robert E. Lee

Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) is best known for commanding the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. He was a career United States Army officer until the outbreak of the war when he resigned to accept a commission as the commander of Virginia state troops. He was an engineer, and among the most celebrated generals in American history. Lee was the son of Major General Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III (1756–1818), Governor of Virginia, and his second wife, Anne Hill Carter (1773–1829). He was also related to Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809).

Graduated 2nd in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Lee distinguished himself as an exceptional soldier in the U.S. Army for thirty-two years.

In early 1861, President Abraham Lincoln invited Lee to take command of the entire Union Army. Lee declined because his home state of Virginia was seceding from the Union, despite Lee's wishes. When Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state. Lee eventually became General-in-Chief of all Confederate armies. Lee's first field command for the Confederate States came in June 1862 when he took command of the Confederate forces in the East (which Lee himself renamed the "Army of Northern Virginia").

Lee's greatest victories were the Seven Days Battles, the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Battle of Chancellorsville, but both of his campaigns to invade the North ended in failure. Barely escaping defeat at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Lee was forced to return to the South. In early July 1863, Lee was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. However, due to ineffectual pursuit by the commander of Union forces, Major General George Meade, Lee escaped again to Virginia.

In the spring of 1864, the new Union commander, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, began a series of campaigns to wear down Lee's army. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864–1865, Lee inflicted heavy casualties on Grant's larger army, but was unable to replace his own losses. In early April 1865, Lee's depleted forces were turned from their entrenchments near the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and he began a strategic retreat. Lee's subsequent surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865 represented the loss of only one of the remaining Confederate field armies, but it was a psychological blow from which the South could not recover. By June 1865, all of the remaining Confederate armies had capitulated.

Lee's victories against superior forces won him enduring fame as a crafty and daring battlefield tactician, but some of his strategic decisions, such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863, have been criticized by many military historians.

In the final months of the Civil War, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee adopted a plan to arm slaves to fight on behalf of the Confederacy, but this came too late to change the outcome of the war. After Appomattox, Lee discouraged Southern dissenters from starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war, and encouraged reconciliation between the North and the South.

After the war, as a college President, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged them to re-think their position between the North and the South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North as well after his death in 1870. He remains an iconic figure of American military leadership.

Timeline

1831: Helps construct Fort Monroe and Fort Calhoun
1835: Assists in defining state line between Ohio and Michigan
1846-1848: Fights in Mexican-American War
1852: Becomes superintendent of West Point
1861: Resigns from U.S. Army to command state military of Virginia
1863: Defeated at Gettysburg
1865: Becomes general-in-chief of Confederate army
October 2, 1865: Becomes president of Washington College

Allegiance to Virginia

Lee criticized the secession of Southern states from the Union and was desired by Abraham Lincoln to be a leader of the Northern army. However, Lee was loyal to his home of Virginia and consequently fought for the Confederacy after the state seceded.