No one who ever met Robert Edward Lee — whatever the circumstances of the meeting — failed to be impressed by the man. From his earliest days as a cadet at West Point, through 25 years as an officer in the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers and six more as a senior cavalry officer, and then as the supreme commander of the armies of the Confederacy, Lee’s dignity, his manners, his composure, all seemed to create a peculiar sense of awe in the minds of observers. In the midst of the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Lee astonished Francis Charles Lawley, the London Times’ special correspondent in America, for “the serenity, or, if I may so express it, the unconscious dignity of General Lee’s courage, when he is under fire.” Abraham Lincoln remarked that a photograph of Lee showed that Lee’s “is a good face; it is the face of a noble, noble, brave man.” Not even Ulysses Grant could escape the sense of being upstaged by Lee when they met at Appomattox. “He was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face,” Grant wrote in his memoirs, “dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new” and “wearing a sword of considerable value,” while Grant was self-conscious of “my rough travelling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general” sewn on. “I must have contrasted strangely,” Grant admitted, “with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form.”
These impressions appear so consistent, and over so many years, that it has been easy to conclude that dignity, manners, and composure simply were the man, that there was (as Douglas Southall Freeman insisted at the end of his four-volume biography of Lee) “no mystery” at all to Robert E. Lee. Or, as Burton Hendrick wrote (in The Lees of Virginia), that “Lee’s character” was ruled by a “great simplicity,” or that (in the words of an even more worshipful biographer, Clifford Dowdey) Lee “could rest totally . . . in very simple things.”
However, this picture of straightforward, well-nigh angelic serenity sits uneasily beside moments when cracks and inconsistencies in that fabled serenity appeared. For instance: Lee worried constantly and insistently about money, even though he had married into one of the most prominent families in the Washington orbit — that of George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of George Washington, and his wife Mary Fitzhugh Custis, who owned the palatial estate they called Arlington, perched Palatine-like on the Potomac bluffs overlooking the capital city. In fact, Lee worried about money even though, according to the will he filed before going off to fight in the Mexican War, he had actually inherited quite a healthy sum from his mother, Ann Carter Lee, and had invested with enough success to have acquired a portfolio worth $38,750 (almost $1.2 million in 2020).