BLAKE HAWKINS: Good evening.
I'm Blake Hawkins.
And I am a sophomore accounting
major from Omaha, Nebraska.
And tonight, I have the honor
of introducing our speaker.
Our speaker is Allen C. Guelzo.
He is a Senior Research Scholar
in the Council of Humanities
and a Director of the Initiative
on Politics and Statesmanship
in the James Madison program
at Princeton University.
Dr. Guelzo earned his MA
and PhD from the University
of Pennsylvania.
In September 2005,
he was nominated
by President Bush to the
National Council on Humanities.
His articles and
essays have appeared
in numerous publications,
including The Wall Street
Journal, the Christian Science
Monitor, The New York Times,
The Atlantic and the
Los Angeles Times.
He is the author
of several books,
including Abraham Lincoln--
Redeemer President,
Lincoln and Douglas--
The Debates that
Defined America,
and Fateful Lightning--
A New History of the
History of the Civil War
and Reconstruction.
Without further ado, Dr. Guelzo.
[APPLAUSE]
ALLEN GUELZO: Before I begin
to talk about General Lee
this evening, I want
to say a word of thanks
for the opportunity to be here
at Hillsdale College, which
is such a remarkable,
remarkable institution.
I wandered around a
little bit this morning.
I went over to see the
chapel, and then I went over
to the student center.
And there, I saw
something I had not
seen in many, many, many years.
I saw students diligently
bent over tables
with cups of coffee, reading
Homer, Pope, Latin, and not
only students, but some
faculty, people of my vintage,
so to speak.
And I saw male and female
students talking to each other
and in an innocence that
brought to mind what it must
have been like before
the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.
[LAUGHTER]
But it was a
wonderful and for me a
touching moment to
see that kind of thing
because it has become
sad to say so very rare.
There's a description in
Roger Scruton, the late Roger
Scruton.
And I say that with great
sorrow because he's now
only just in the past
two weeks, of course,
become the late Roger Scruton.
And he leaves quite a space,
quite a space against the sky.
But in his little book on
hunting of all subjects,
he had this to say.
"Students today, their
studies in victimology
have all but deprived
them of words.
And their empty slogans
and witless sneers
make me both ashamed for them
and anxious to invite them
home for some tutorials.
Between bouts of pop
music and television,
they are handed
jargon-ridden drivel
by outdated Parisian
gurus, impenetrable texts
of sociology, the half
articulate leavings
of the grievance trade."
Scruton said what young people
need is nothing so much as wit,
allusion, and style.
They should be studying
advocacy and argument.
They should be reading
poetry, criticism,
and the authors who have
said things clearly and well.
Thank you, Larry Arnn.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Larry Arnn.
Thank you, faculty of Hillsdale.
Thank you, trustees.
Thank you all who are friends
and supporters of Hillsdale
for making what
Scruton described
as the real goal for education
and students a real place here.
In Ray Bradbury's dystopian
novel Fahrenheit 451,
he described a world in
which books were bunrt.
They were destroyed
because, of course,
they might contain very
dangerous things like ideas.
One fireman who had grown
disenchanted with this
ran away and ran in
pursuit of a rumor
that somewhere
out in the swamps,
there were small colonies
of scholars and academics
and other runaways who preserved
the books by memorizing them.
And this runaway fireman
found one of these colonies
in the swamps.
And he was introduced
to the people there.
And they would step up and
say, hello, I'm Descartes.
I'm Descartes on
first principles.
Or hello, I'm Plato,
The Symposium.
They had memorized
them to preserve them
and hand them down until
a better time would
come when once again these
works could be printed,
and read, and treasured.
And I thought today was a little
bit like being in that swamp.
Much more upscale,
but the spirit,
the spirit was the same.
And it has been a joy to be
here and be in the midst of it.
[APPLAUSE]
No one who met Robert
Edward Lee no matter
what the circumstances
of the meeting
ever seemed to fail to
be impressed by the man.
His dignity, his manners,
his composure all
seemed to create a
peculiar sense of awe
in the minds of observers.
As a cadet at West
Point in the 1820s,
his classmate and later fellow
Confederate General Joseph E.
Johnston spoke of Lee
having a dignity which
was as much a part of himself
as the elegance of his person,
which evidenced a superiority
that everyone acknowledged
in his heart.
In the 1840s, when he was posted
as the engineering officer
at Fort Hamilton
guarding the approaches
to The Narrows of New York
City, one woman visitor
described Lee as a most
elegant man, quite the ideal
of a military hero who
received me with something more
than military courtesy,
bending his clear, handsome eye
upon me.
10 years later, as
the superintendent
of West Point from
1852 to 1855, he
appeared to the young
John Schofield, who
would go on to carve out a
distinguished career of his own
in the army, as the
personification of dignity,
justice, and kindness and
was respected and admired
as the ideal of a
commanding officer.
Even in the midst of
battle at Fredericksburg
in December of 1862, Lee
awed Charles Francis 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.
Not even our friend
Ulysses Grant
could escape the sense of being
upstaged by Lee 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 traveling 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 and manners and
composure simply were the man
and 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 despite the fact
that he had married into one
of the most prominent families
in the Washington, DC, orbit--
that of George Washington
Parke Custis, the step-grandson
of George Washington, and
his wife Mary Fitzhugh
Custis, who owned the palatial
estate that they called
Arlington perched
palatine-like on the Potomac
bluffs overlooking
the capital city.
In fact, Robert E. 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
and Carter Lee and had
invested with enough success
to have acquired a
portfolio worth $38,750.
Translated into
2020 dollars, that's
worth about $1.2 million.
It made no difference.
At the same moment, he assured
his West Point classmate Jack
Mackay that, "It
was as much as I
could do to make both
ends meet this year,
and I am anxiously looking for
the dividend of the Virginia
bank to enable me to
square off all scores."
When Lee left Fort
Hamilton in 1847
for duty in the Mexican War,
he complained to his brother
that, "I fear I have
not enough to take
me and my servant to the
Army and purchase my horses."
When he transferred out of
the Corps of Engineers in 1855
to become Lieutenant Colonel
of the 2nd cavalry in Texas,
he insisted on writing
checks on his Alexandria bank
from Texas for his wife at
Arlington to deposit for cash
and all the while chiding her to
be "very particular, dear Mary,
when you deal in money matters
and to keep a memorandum book
and set everything down."
His advice for his
youngest son in 1856
was to cultivate
industry and frugality,
and be prudent
before he is liberal,
and be just before
he is generous.
Other kinds of cracks
opened under pressure.
Trained as an engineer
and the director
of a series of demanding
coastal engineering
projects from controlling the
silting up of the St. Louis
waterfront to the construction
of Fort Carroll in Baltimore
Harbor, Lee was at his happiest
with a draftsman's notebook
in hand and impatient at
every other sort of paperwork.
"I abhor the sight of pen
and paper," he admitted.
"And to put one to
the other requires
as great a moral effort as for
a cat to walk on live coals."
This did not prevent
him from writing over
4,000 letters in his
lifetime, but that
was personal correspondence.
Official papers were his bane.
He also grew impatient
when matters spilled out
of the kind of perfection that
tea squares and equations can
impose.
After the close of the
Maryland campaign in 1862,
he unleashed on his two chief
subordinates, James Longstreet
and Stonewall Jackson,
a long lecture
by letter on the
depredations committed
by this army, its
daily diminution,
and a loss of arms thrown
aside as too burdensome
by stragglers.
It would be impossible to
imagine Ulysses Grant writing
a letter like this to William
Tecumseh Sherman or James B.
McPherson.
But for Lee, no shortcoming
in either of these commanders
missed his perfect eye.
"Roll calls are neglected.
And officers of
companies and regiments
are ignorant of the true
condition of their commands
and are unable to account
properly for absentees."
He now wanted a brigade
guard to bring up
the rear of each brigade
to keep up the ranks,
drive up all stragglers
irrespective of commands
and all leaving the ranks.
"We must," he demanded,
"infuse a different spirit
among our officers,"
which was more or less
what he found a begging in
the Confederacy as a whole.
"Our people are so
little liable to control
that it is difficult to get
them to follow any course not
in accordance with
their inclination,"
he admitted to Justus Scheibert,
the Prussian military observer.
And when Scheibert expressed
frankly my admiration
for the lion-like bravery
of his men, Lee disagreed.
"Give me also Prussian
discipline and Prussian forms.
And you would see quite
different results."
That perfectionism was linked
to a more easily agitated temper
than easily met the eye.
Walter Taylor, who as Lee's
adjutant during the Civil War
had to sort and docket
the incoming mail,
discovered that Lee had lost
nothing of his engineer's
distaste for office
work, especially
if it was "heavy with
matters of detail coming
from the personal
commands of our army
which demanded the personal
consideration and decision
of the commander of the Army."
If Taylor brought him some
case of a vexatious character,
Lee's irritation would
flare up gradually,
beginning with a little nervous
twist or jerk of the neck
and head and eventually erupting
into a full-fledged argument.
"He is so unreasonable
and provoking,"
Taylor raged to his
fiancee in a letter.
"I never worked so hard to
please anyone and with so
little effect as General Lee."
Charles Marshall, who handled
Lee's outgoing correspondence,
had an only slightly easier
task because Lee either
dictated first drafts or allowed
Marshall to draw up documents
himself.
But then Lee "weighed
every sentence
I wrote, frequently making
minute verbal alterations
and questioned me closely
as to the evidence
on which I based
all statements which
he did not know to be correct."
He did not allow any friend
of soldiers condemned
by court martial to reach
his tent for personal appeal,
remembered Charles
Venable, another member
of his civil war staff.
And when such a disappointed
man elbowed their way
into his presence,
Lee would bark
not only at the
petitioner, but at Venable
for not preventing
the annoyance.
"Why did you permit that
man to come to my tent
and make me show my temper?"
One of Stonewall
Jackson's staff officers
asked an innocent question
while making a report to Lee.
And Lee's response
at this impertinence
was so frosty that the
staffer remarked, "I never
felt so small in my life."
Even Lee's son, George
Washington Custis Lee,
who was attached to Confederate
President Jefferson Davis's
personal staff, had to endure
his father's flare-ups,
reading letters from
his father complaining
that he was so tired
of the pettiness
of the Confederate
Congress that he wished
they "would pass
a law relieving me
from all duty and legislating
someone in my place
better able to do it.
I fear you will think
I am in a bad humor.
And I fear I am."
But the deepest mark of
the depths of Lee's temper
occurred in the spring of 1859.
When his father-in-law
died in 1857,
Lee was named executor of
the Custis estate, which
to his surprise required him
to superintend the emancipation
within five years of all the
Custis slaves at Arlington
and two other
Custis-owned properties.
Lee could not hurry to
execute this emancipation
because the will also
mandated that four $10,000
legacies be paid to
each of Lee's daughters.
Since the properties had been
run haphazardly for years
by old Custis, Lee
would need to turn them
into engines of efficiency
to pay the required legacies.
And that he did with an
engineer's sense of precision.
But the Custis slaves did
not share his interest
in making Arlington and the
other places profitable.
They believed that the
Custis will had in fact
emancipated them at once.
And in 1858, three of
them, two men and a woman,
acted on that belief and fled
to Westminster, Maryland,
where they were eventually
apprehended and returned
to Arlington.
His fabled self-control
teetering unsteadily,
Lee demanded of the
three why they ran away.
Because, they replied, frankly,
we considered ourselves free.
That to Robert E. Lee was not
merely a legal misapprehension.
It was a threat to his own
integrity as the Custis will's
executor and the future
of his daughters.
He then told us
he would "teach us
a lesson we would never
forget," and ordered
the three stripped to the waist,
and directed the Arlington
overseer, John McQuinn, to give
the men 50 lashes each and 20
to the woman.
McQuinn balked and had
sufficient humanity to decline.
So Lee turned to Richard
Williams, the Arlington
Constable who had brought
the fugitives back,
and had him perform
the whipping while Lee
demanded he lay it on well.
By one account, Lee took
the whip in his own hands
and flayed them himself.
Afterwards, he was so
appalled at his own rage
that he could not admit the
full extent of what he had done,
even to his son Custis,
who read about the incident
in the newspapers.
"The New-York Tribune
has attacked me
for my treatment of your
grandfather's slaves,"
he conceded to Custis.
"But I shall not reply.
Your grandfather," he
added, "has left me
an unpleasant legacy."
Robert E. Lee's anxieties, his
impatience, and his dark temper
have, since the publication
of Thomas Connolly's
melodramatic recasting of
Lee's historical reputation
in The Marble Man--
Robert E. Lee and His Image
in American Society in 1977,
been seized upon as a
triumphant contradiction
of the legendary Lee who so
impressed his contemporaries
civilian and military.
To Alan Nolan in 1991, Lee
was just a typical southern
partisan with all the
southern aristocrats' feeling
for the inferiority
of northern people.
To Michael Fellman in
2000, Lee was really
an exemplar of the dark side
of the white supremacist road.
To Roy Blount, probably
the most unlikely
of all Lee biographers,
in 2003, Lee
was mentally and
pathologically disturbed.
But casting Lee in contradiction
as either saint or as sinner,
as either simple
or pathological,
is in the end less profitable
than seeing his anxieties
as a counterpoint to his
dignity, his impatience
and his temper as a
match to his composure.
To begin to understand the
mystery of Robert E. Lee
is to begin with three
large-scale factors lodged deep
in the man's personality.
One of these was the
desire for perfection,
then the desire
for independence,
and then the desire
for security.
All three were rooted in
the early trauma inflicted
by one of the more remarkably
dysfunctional families
of the early Republic.
Up through the revolution,
the Lees of Virginia
had been one of the first of
American families presiding
over large properties on the
northern neck of Virginia.
And in the case of
the four Lee brothers
who straddled the revolutionary
years, Richard Henry
Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee,
Arthur and William Lee,
they were that band
of brothers, according
to John Adams, intrepid
and unchangeable
who stood in the gap in
defense of their country
from the first glimmering
of the revolution
through all its rising
light to its perfect day.
Richard Henry Lee and
Francis Lightfoot Lee
both served in the
Continental Congress
at the outbreak
of the revolution.
And they are the
only brothers who
appear as signers of the
Declaration of Independence.
Arthur Lee would turn into
an outstanding diplomat
in Spain and France.
And William Lee would
represent American interests
in the German
states and Austria.
But something in the succeeding
generation of Lees snapped.
And nowhere was the snap
louder than in the gentleman
whose picture is on the screen
behind me, that of Henry Lee
the third, Robert's father.
Henry Lee was a graduate
of Princeton, my employer,
in the same class of
1771 as James Madison.
Henry Lee served George
Washington so effectively
as a cavalry leader that he won
the nickname Light Horse Harry.
And in the glow
of the revolution,
Light Horse Harry captured not
only the hand of his cousin
Matilda and her family's
estate Stratford Hall,
but he also captured the
governorship of Virginia.
Nothing seemed beyond his grasp.
After that, however, Light
Horse Harry disintegrated.
His ardent federalism
antagonized
Virginia's Jeffersonians.
His harebrained investment
schemes bankrupted him.
After Matilda's
death, he attempted
to recoup his fortune
by marrying a Virginia
Carter, Anne Hill Carter.
But he burned
through her cash too
or at least the
limited amount of cash
her father had prudently put
at the newlyweds' disposal.
If Henry Lee were
alive today, he'd
invest in ski resorts
in Bangladesh.
After he spent a stint
in debtor's prison,
the sadder but wiser
Anne Carter Lee
demanded that her family,
which now numbered
three sons, including
Robert, and two daughters,
move to more manageable
quarters in Alexandria.
But Light Horse Harry could
not shake his penchant
for disaster.
After being beaten within
an inch of his life
in an Anti-Federalist
riot in Baltimore in 1812,
Light Horse Harry decamped
the following year
for the safety of
the West Indies.
Robert never saw
his father again.
He was six years old.
Light Horse Harry only returned
to America fatally ill in 1818,
barely making
landfall in Georgia
before dying and leaving Robert
to grow up in literal as well
as figurative terms fatherless.
"There is," wrote
the literary critic
Leon Edel, "no hurt
among all the human
hurts deeper and less
understandable than the loss
of a parent when one is
not yet an adolescent."
And Robert E. Lee offers
us a textbook case
in the truth of that saying.
Until he achieved fame
in his own right in 1862,
people invariably
referred to Robert
as the son of the famed
Light Horse Harry,
but he never did, except
in his application letter
to West Point.
He did not visit
his father's grave
until the winter of 1861 to 62
even though his first posting
out of West Point
to Cockspur Island
was only a few miles away.
He was instead his mother's
son, becoming the de facto head
of household in Alexandria.
It was Robert who carried
the keys, attended
to the marketing, managed
all the outdoor business,
and took care of
his mother's horses.
When his mother was
ill, it was Robert
who ordered up the
family's shabby brougham
and then would be seen carrying
her in his arms to the carriage
and arranging her cushions
with the gentleness
of an experienced nurse.
One of the flock of Lee
cousins in Alexandria
remembered that Robert became
legendary for his devotion
to his mother and
the great help he
was to her in all her
business on household matters.
Years later, he would
simply describe himself
as my mother's outdoor agent
and confidential messenger.
He would in other
words fulfill the role
his father had abandoned.
He would sacrifice
himself in order
to perfect the
imperfections Light Horse
Harry had visited on the Lees.
This pursuit of
redemptive perfection
lies behind much of
the marble model that
met so many people's eyes.
And it was Lee's determination
to be not Light Horse Harry
when everyone expected
him to be a reprise of his
ne'er-do-well father which fired
his impatience and eventually
his ferocious outburst
of temper at his own
and others' imperfections.
That did not mean that Robert
would enjoy the shackles
and demands of perfection.
And it came as a shock
to Anne Carter Lee
when, in 1824, Robert
announced his desire
to leave her home in Alexandria
and attend West Point.
"How can I live without Robert?"
she wailed.
"He is both son and
daughter to me."
She would have
been more disturbed
if she could have
sensed how much Robert,
for all of his uncomplaining
self-sacrifice,
longed to be free and
unencumbered of his mother
as much as his father.
"I thought," he wrote, "and
intended always to be one
and alone in the world.
I am fond of
independence," Lee wrote.
And that, as he
explained in 1851,
was linked to his
perfectionist impulse.
"It is that feeling that
prompts me to come up strictly
to the requirements of
law and regulations.
I wish neither to seek or
receive indulgence from anyone.
I wish to feel under
obligation to no one."
The problem with
longing for independence
is that it does not
guarantee security.
And security was precisely
the damaging subtraction
Light Horse Harry
made in Robert's life.
So as much as Robert Lee
longed to be his own man,
he was also aware that the
independent man could very well
be the impoverished,
lonely, neglected man.
And he did not
want that, either.
One of the major attractions
of a career in the US Army
was its guarantee of
lifetime employment security.
For the tiny cadre of officers
who commanded the pre-Civil War
army, there was no
retirement system.
Once in, many stayed
in and at paid rank
until their last breath.
The army was not generous.
And promotion was
agonizingly slow.
But it was one of
the few professions
in the pre-Civil War
republic which was secure.
"All my schemes of
happiness," he wrote,
"depend on retiring to some
quiet corner among the hills
of Virginia, where I can
indulge my natural propensities
without interruption."
But when his older
brother Carter
tried to persuade
him to leave the army
and do just that with the
17,000 acres in hardy Patrick
and Shenandoah
counties that they
had inherited from their
father, Robert hesitated.
"Perhaps the charms
of your establishment
may win me from Uncle Sam,"
he replied to Carter in 1832.
But in the end, he decided not.
The army was his place
"for better, for worse,
as we say in matrimony."
And he would have to
relinquish such prospects
as Western Virginia offered
to "bachelors like yourself."
Matrimony was yet
another path to security.
For in 1831, Lee married
Mary Anna Randolph Custis,
the sole surviving child
of the Arlington Custises,
and thereby won himself a
permanent home at Arlington
for the next 30 years.
The difficulty was that
the security represented
by the Custis marriage
and Arlington did not
sit very easily beside Lee's
yearning for independence.
His Custis in-laws made
no secret of their desire
to withdraw Robert from
his present professions
and yield to him the
management of affairs.
But Lee had no desire to
abandon the army merely
to become the glorified
overseer of the Custises.
Despite his very real affection
for his mother-in-law,
Lee found his father-in-law
an amiable but annoying dunce.
"The major," the elderly
Custis's honorary militia
title, "the major is busy
farming," Lee wrote to Carter.
Busy was sardonic.
"His cornfield is not
yet enclosed or plowed,
but he is rushing
on all he knows."
The old man had tried his
hand at writing a Sir Walter
Scott-ish play about 13th
century Scotland, which
he called Montgomerie or
The Orphan of a Wreck.
It ran for four nights.
And so as Lee chuckled,
Montgomerie failed.
Worse still, one of Custis's six
amateurish history paintings,
the Battle of Trenton, has
been exhibited in the capital
and met with more or
less the same response.
It attracted some
severe animant versions
from the critics, which he says
were leveled at his politics.
Lee knew better.
Seven months into
the Civil War, when
Arlington had been lost
to union occupation,
Lee shrugged off
the estate's loss
and turned his attention
to the possibility
of acquiring another
property, nothing less
than his one-time boyhood
home, Stratford Hall.
"Stratford," he wrote,
"is endeared to me
by many recollections.
And it has always been a
great desire of my life
to be able to purchase it."
He might have found security
in attaching himself
to the Custises, but he
yearned for the independence
of being a Lee.
And nothing symbolized
that more than Stratford.
And perhaps it
was no coincidence
that two months later,
Robert E. Lee finally
paid his father's
grave on Cumberland
Island a long delayed visit.
Robert E. Lee was not
a profound thinker.
His compulsive letter writing
betrays little evidence
of reading beyond the
demands of his profession.
But he was a clear thinker.
And much of that thinking
oscillated among the poles
he had set up for himself
of perfection, independence,
and security.
And that was particularly
true in his role
as the Confederacy's most
successful and influential
soldier.
Lee was incessant in his
demands on the Confederacy's
civilian leadership for
supplies, conscripts,
and recruits, and
for the perfection
on the part of his officers.
Time and again, Lee complained,
"Beaten federal armies will get
away because I cannot have
my orders carried out."
When one hapless brigadier had
to report the federal escape
after Chancellorsville,
Lee's fury was volcanic.
"General Pender, that is
what you young men always do.
You allow those
people to get away."
But beyond the demand
for perfection,
Lee also saw more clearly than
any other Confederate leader
that the South could not
survive a long, drawn-out bout
with the North.
Independence and
security both dictated
that Southern armies must cross
Maryland into Pennsylvania
and there convince
Northerners, either by battle
or by simple occupation,
to agree to peace
and Southern independence.
He would attempt this
twice in 1862 and 1863.
And he was ready for a
third attempt in 1864
when Grant's Overland Campaign
struck that option away.
This strategy, which some have
characterized as audacity,
was for Lee merely logic.
Lee's modern critics
have railed against what
they decry as Lee's
obsession with Virginia
at the expense of the
rest of the Confederacy.
But Lee understood
that the Confederacy
could lose Tennessee,
Mississippi, Alabama, even
Georgia, and still win.
Losing Virginia meant
losing nearly 20%
of the Confederacy's
white population,
17% of its banking capital, a
third of its industrial goods,
and 40% of its wheat.
Richmond alone held the
Confederacy's depots
and arsenals.
And through Richmond, Lee's
army had its chief means
of access to sources of
supply further south.
He dreaded nothing
more than being forced
into a siege of Richmond.
"He frequently spoke,"
recalled Charles Marshall,
"to the effect that if
the siege of Richmond
were once undertaken by an army
too strong to be beaten off,
the fall of the place
would be inevitable.
And with it would go Virginia
and the Confederacy," which
in 1865 is exactly
what happened.
Lee had foreseen it
all and understood it
as a failure to meet the
standard of perfect commitment.
"It is so difficult,"
he admitted to his wife,
"to get our people unaccustomed
to the necessities of war
to comprehend the measures
required for the occasion.
Instead, they failed the
standard of perfect commitment
that independence and
security required."
Lee told William
Mahone at Appomattox
that he had advised the
Confederate authorities
at the start that the contest
on which we had entered
could not be overestimated.
And our chance to
win was to be found
by throwing the whole
military or fighting
power of the Confederacy
into the struggle.
And this, he said,
manifestly had not been done.
Yet, this was not the final
chapter for Robert E. Lee.
In the summer of 1865, he
was made the unlikely offer
of the Presidency of Washington
College in far away Lexington,
Virginia.
Almost as unlikely, he accepted.
And in the final five
years of his life,
he managed to achieve the
resolution of the impulses
to perfection, independence,
and security that he
had spent a lifetime seeking.
The trustees of the
college were congratulated
on acquiring a figurehead.
But Lee made them
the figureheads.
And he turned the
nearly bankrupt college
into a southern
educational powerhouse,
outstripping even the
University of Virginia.
When he assumed the
presidency in 1865,
Washington College had only
17 students on the rolls.
After one year, Lee
had built that to 146.
By 1868, enrollment
stood at 411.
He also took in hand
the reconstruction
of the curriculum, sidelining
the traditional studies
of Greek and Latin, one thing
for which I have not yet
forgiven him, in favor
of recreating Washington
College as a commercial
school to give instruction
in bookkeeping and the forms
and of details of business.
"No wonder," he would
remark looking back that,
"the great mistake
of my life was
taking a military education."
A small, remote college
would become instead
the place where he
would find independence
to run matters as he saw
fit, security for himself
and his family, and
perfection in what he
could demand of his students.
Perhaps, in
retrospect, we can say
that Robert Lee should
have shrugged off
the shadow of Light Horse Harry.
Perhaps, he should
have left the army
and built a real estate
empire in Western Virginia.
Perhaps, he should have become
the handsome but aloof family
overseer of Arlington and let
the Civil War wash past him,
but he did not.
And the forces that made
him what he was in the past
governed the extraordinary
skill with which he managed
Confederate military affairs.
Those forces did not,
however, make him a happy man.
That only came at
the end in Lexington,
but it was a perfect end.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Dr. Guelzo.
We now have time for Q&A. Please
make your way to the microphone
if you have a question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, doctor.
I'd like you to comment on a man
who is often quoted as saying,
do your duty in all things.
You can never do more.
You should never do less.
And then he violated his
oath to the Constitution
of the United States.
ALLEN GUELZO: When I look at
the figure of Robert E. Lee,
I look at it--
and this will surprise nobody--
as a Yankee from Yankee land.
So I am an unlikely Lee
biographer to say the least.
And that never comes more to
a point than on the question
that I'm probably most
frequently asked this way.
Did Robert E. Lee
commit treason?
And I think there's
only one answer to that.
And it's inescapable.
The answer is yes.
Yes, he committed treason.
He had served in the United
States Army for 30-some years.
He had sworn the oath.
He had fought under the
stars and stripes in Mexico.
And he consciously turned
against all of that.
And I don't have another
way of speaking of Lee
except to use that word.
It is the Constitution's
definition.
Constitution defines treason as
making war against the United
States and giving aid and
comfort to its enemies.
I don't have some mystical way
of being able to get around
that and seeing Robert E. Lee
as not capturing precisely
that reprehensible behavior.
I understand that there
were many contingencies.
And there were many
qualifications which
went into his decision in 1861.
Yet, at the same time,
I have in past time
sworn an oath to preserve,
protect, and defend
the Constitution.
My father swore that oath.
My son has sworn that oath.
And whether it's
Robert E. Lee or not,
when you raise your
hand against that flag
and that Constitution,
you are my enemy.
And I will regard you as such.
And I do not
hesitate to say that
if by some odd
transposition of time
I should find myself with
Robert E. Lee in my gun sights,
I would not hesitate
to pull the trigger.
I don't say that with
pride or pleasure,
but I say it as a
reality recognizing
the seriousness of what he did.
He was at the close of the
war indicted for treason.
It never came to trial.
There were a number
of legal complications
which got in the way
of anything like that.
But if we are to
look at Robert E. Lee
and see him as we
should see him,
as a citizen who has obligations
under the Constitution
of the United States,
then there really
is no other word that
we can use and no way
to escape from that word.
Robert E. Lee committed treason.
I don't have a better
way of putting it.
I hope that answers
the question.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: We have time
for one more question.
AUDIENCE: There are historians
in the medical military history
that speak to Robert E.
Lee's state of health,
especially his problems with
congestive heart failure
and how they may have
affected his judgment
and his ability to
command during Gettysburg.
Could you comment on that?
ALLEN GUELZO: Robert E. Lee
began suffering symptoms
of angina in the 1850s when
he was then Lieutenant Colonel
of the 2nd cavalry in Texas.
It was referred to
then as rheumatism.
But knowing the
subsequent developments
of his medical history,
it seems pretty plain
that these are the first
symptoms that we begin to see.
And it shows up
more dramatically
in the spring of 1863 when
he has a heart attack.
He has all the classic symptoms.
He's bedridden for
almost a month.
And he tries to, in
letters to his wife, he--
because he stays with the army.
He doesn't go back
to Richmond and let
family take care of him.
He stays with his army.
But the letters
that he writes, he's
always trying to downplay
the seriousness of what
has happened.
"Well, I've got a very bad cold.
The doctors have been thumping
me like an old steam boiler."
But it was a heart attack.
He had a second one
in the fall of 1863,
less severe, but severe
enough that he could not ride.
He had to get around in
a wagon or an ambulance.
And the terms wagon and
ambulance and the Civil War
are almost interchangeable.
He has a case of dysentery
in the spring of 1864
at the apex of the
Overland Campaign.
And one reason why Grant is able
to move as fast as Grant does
and move around Lee is
that Lee is just not
up to par in terms of health.
So there are repeated health
problems that Lee deals with
and which plague him and
affect his performance.
Bear in mind that he
is the oldest field
commander in the Civil War.
He is 56 years old at the time
of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Ulysses Grant, by contrast, is
41, William Tecumseh Sherman,
43.
You go down the list
of other major figures
in the Civil War, same thing.
George McClellan was 39.
Lee is the oldest
and in some respects,
given the rigors of 19th century
campaigning which is literally
living in the rough, it takes
its toll on him physically.
And it is a toll
which he probably
should have recognized.
And it leads him in August
of 1863, partly because
of the defeat at
Gettysburg but also
partly because of his
health considerations,
to offer his resignation
to Jefferson Davis.
Davis refuses.
"Where," Davis says
in reply, "where
would I find someone
more capable of command
than yourself?"
And that was true.
Because even Robert E.
Lee, plagued with angina,
was infinitely more
resourceful than
any other secondary
commanders who could
have been put into his place.
When he complained about
officers and generals not
taking his orders seriously,
not carrying them out perfectly,
he was not exaggerating.
Who would have
taken Lee's place?
There was no deep bench
in the Confederacy.
So Lee soldiers on.
And he goes all the
way to Appomattox.
And what I think is poignant
is that he goes to Appomattox
saying to William
Nelson Pendleton,
"I always knew that it
would turn out this way."
He saw it from the beginning.
AUDIENCE: Please join me
in thanking Dr. Guelzo.
ALLEN GUELZO: Thank
you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
