To efface the squalor and horror of the war, we have the image of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, and we have the image of Robert E. Henry, the scion who was to become known in the Revolutionary War as Light-Horse Harry, was born in Washington became his patron and close friend. With the war nearly over, however, Harry decided he was underappreciated, so he impulsively resigned from the army.
In , he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in he was elected governor of Virginia. In Washington put him in command of the troops that bloodlessly put down the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. In he was elected to the U. He and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee, and their children departed the Lee ancestral home, where Robert was born, for a smaller rented house in Alexandria. Under the conditions of bankruptcy that obtained in those days, Harry was still liable for his debts.
He jumped a personal appearance bail—to the dismay of his brother, Edmund, who had posted a sizable bond—and wangled passage, with pitying help from President James Monroe, to the West Indies. In , after five years away, Harry headed home to die, but got only as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he was buried. Robert was Robert appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy.
Not according to him. According to him, he was not fine enough. When he was superintendent of the U. Military Academy, Lee acquiesced to Mrs. By what can we know of him? The works of a general are battles, campaigns and usually memoirs. And he wrote no memoir. He wrote personal letters—a discordant mix of flirtation, joshing, lyrical touches, and stern religious adjuration—and he wrote official dispatches that are so impersonal and generally unselfserving as to seem above the fray.
During the postbellum century, when Americans North and South decided to embrace R. Lee as a national as well as a Southern hero, he was generally described as antislavery. This assumption rests not on any public position he took but on a passage in an letter to his wife. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel. His heart, on the other hand. Perhaps it broke many years before the war.
He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken. One thing that clearly drove him was devotion to his home state. But if she secedes though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution , then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.
The North took secession as an act of aggression, to be countered accordingly. When Lincoln called on the loyal states for troops to invade the South, Southerners could see the issue as defense not of slavery but of homeland. A Virginia convention that had voted 2 to 1 against secession, now voted 2 to 1 in favor. Army commission he had held for 32 years. The days of July , , still stand among the most horrific and formative in American history.
Lincoln had given up on Joe Hooker, put Maj. George G. Lee had actually advanced farther north than the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned that Meade was south of him, threatening his supply lines.
So Lee swung back in that direction. Community Connect. People Making a Difference. Points of Progress. A Christian Science Perspective.
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Today's Highlights. Christian Science Perspective. The University of North Carolina Press. July 28, By Steve Donoghue Correspondent. And, infamously, Meade let him go. That will always be his defining moment. You've read of free articles. Subscribe to continue. Ricks' daily take on national security. By Thomas E. April 7, , AM. Library of Congress. Thomas E. Ricks covered the U. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment gmail. Twitter: tomricks1.
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