Robert E. Lee's Favorite Job Was... Being a College President?

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Take it away, Dr. Gelzo. Robert E. Lee, just to give you the basic skeleton outline, was born in 1807 at Stratford Hall on the northern neck of Virginia, which had been the ancestral home of many of the Lee family, a family which had roots in Virginia back into the 17th century. He attends West Point. He is class of 1829, graduates second in his class. When I say second, he missed graduating first really by a couple of digits.

It was like one of those batting average contests where you have to take it out to the fourth digit to determine who the winner is. And is posted to the elite Corps of Engineers and spends a good deal of the rest of his professional life in the Army's Corps of Engineers doing really Corps of Engineering things. He mainly is devoted to fortification construction.

And as a specialty within that, coastal fortification is something of a specialty within that kind of engineering, which requires a great deal of imagination. And it has to be said that Lee was a very good engineer and a very dedicated engineer. He also was a very frustrated engineer because promotion in the Army as a whole and in the Corps of Engineers was sclerotic, to say the least. The great advantage of Army employment was that it was guaranteed and secure.

The downside was that it was slow and Lee experiences this and it's a source of great frustration. He would like to move up. When the Mexican War comes, he sees this as an opportunity, and he grabs it. He's sent off on one engineering assignment, which doesn't look terribly promising, but then he is seconded to the staff of Winfield Scott. Winfield Scott is about to mount one of the most adventurous amphibious expeditions in American military history.

And that is the joint Army-Navy landing at Veracruz on the eastern coast of Mexico. Lee is immediately ticketed by Scott as an up-and-coming person and becomes a major part of Scott's staff, as a major assistance to Scott in the capture of Veracruz, accompanies Scott's invasion of Mexico, past the battle at Cerro Gordo, up to the battles around Mexico City, and eventually end in the surrender of Mexico City and the end of the Mexican War with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. All through it, Lee is very much Winfield Scott's right-hand man.

And Scott would later say years later that all of the plaudits he, Scott, won in the Mexican War were really due to the advice that he garnered from Robert E. Lee. But the war is over. Lee goes back to doing coastal fortification with Corps of Engineers. It's not terribly exciting. And in fact, it gets, if anything, it gets worse because in 1852, he's assigned to become superintendent of West Point.

Now, I know that sounds glamorous on the surface of it. In 1852, it wasn't. At this point, West Point is still very much a Corps of Engineering school, which means that even though Lee is the superintendent, he has virtually no discretion about what to do. He is micromanaged for three years by the chief engineer in Washington, D.C. And finally, at the end of it, he is only too happy to grab an opportunity to transfer out of the Corps of Engineers and accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the Second Cavalry in Texas. Now, Texas is not what you would call in those days an ideal posting. It gives you an idea of some degree of his frustration that he's willing to accept this. But off to Texas he goes as lieutenant colonel of the Second Cavalry. And there he really does nothing more than chase Comanches and various outlaws around the countryside to know for a particular purpose.

He never really fires a shot at anger himself. It is not until 1861 that things begin to warm up. In 1861, he's recalled to Washington by Winfield Scott, ostensibly to help rewrite the Army regulations. But really, Scott wants him in Washington because the country is splitting apart.

Seven southern states have seceded from the Union. There is a possibility of conflict. Scott wants Lee in Washington because Scott's feeling is that if anyone should take command of federal forces in dealing with secession, it should be Robert E. Lee. The firing on Fort Sumter takes place, and indeed, Abraham Lincoln puts into process an invitation to Lee.

It comes through old Francis Preston Blair, one of the great political wire pullers of Washington. Blair sits down with Lee and basically says to Lee, President Lincoln would like you to take command of the armies in the field. And Lee says no, which is a great surprise. But Lee explains it this way.

I cannot raise my hand against my native state. Now, Virginia at that point had not yet seceded, but it was hovering on the brink of doing so. And Lee simply says, I can't, I can't do that. What Lee does, in fact, is not only refuse that invitation, he then goes home and writes out a letter of resignation from the Army. And he might have stopped right there, but at that same moment, he receives an invitation from the state authorities, the Virginia state authorities in Richmond to come there and help them oversee the organization of state forces.

And he agrees to do that. So he goes to Richmond. He is commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia forces. When Virginia joins the Confederacy, he's made a general in the Confederate Army. And from that point, he takes off. He becomes General Lee. He becomes the man who is the victor in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, victor at Second Bull Run, escapes near destruction at Antietam, victor at Chancellorsville in Fredericksburg, near victor at Gettysburg, fights things out against Ulysses Grant in 1864 and the Overland Campaign, undergoes the siege of Richmond and finally surrenders to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th, 1865.

And that is usually where people think the bookend occurs in Lee's life. Actually, it's not because he's offered and it's a very strange offer. He's made the offer by Washington College in the Upper Shenandoah to become their president.

It was an act of desperation on their part. This was a small college which hardly, hardly had a pulse. The surprising thing is that Lee accepts. He becomes president of Washington and to everybody's surprise, turns into a remarkably successful college president, completely revamps the curriculum. He gets, starts moving people away from the traditional Greek and Latin classics curriculum to a more vocationally oriented curriculum with engineering and journalism and business. He is enormously successful in raising money and in bulking up the student body to the point that by the time of his death in 1870, he has made Washington College an educational powerhouse on a par with the University of Virginia. Those last five years of his life were really the most successful years of his life. And curiously, he shocked one student when he said, the great mistake of my life was taking a military education.

In other words, I should have been doing something like this all of my life. So Robert E. Lee then, who had suffered over the years increasingly from heart trouble, heart attacks, finally succumbs to a stroke and a heart attack and dies on October 12, 1870 and is buried there on the campus of the college, which then renames itself as Washington and Lee University. And a terrific job on the editing by our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to use this phenomenal audio, which was originally a part of their scholar talk series. And of course, a special thanks to Dr. Alan Gelzo for all of his work on the Civil War and that period.

There's simply no one better. A short history of Robert E. Lee here on Our American Stories. We've all got a thing, an obsession. For some of us, it's vintage fashion, our cars, anything we can collect. They all live under one roof, eBay. It's where closets get filled with statement pieces and vintage finds, where must have sneakers wait for you and designer handbags are the real deal. On eBay, doors open to stacks of the rarest trading cards and a garage stocked with all the car parts you need for any DIY job. eBay's home to whatever thing you're into that keeps you up at night. eBay.

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