What kind of general was robert e lee

During the s, tensions between the abolitionist movement and slave owners reached a boiling point, and the union of states was near a breaking point. Lee entered the fray by halting a raid at Harpers Ferry in , capturing radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers. When he was asked to lead Union forces, he resigned from military service rather than fight against his Virginia friends and neighbors.

Lee has been widely criticized for his aggressive strategies that led to mass casualties. In the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, , Lee made his first attempt at invading the North in the bloodiest single day of the war.

Antietam ended with roughly 23, casualties and the Union claiming victory for General George McClellan. Less than a week later, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The war dragged on for two more years until a victory for Lee became impossible. At the start of the war, Lee and his family headed South, leaving Arlington House, but they did not reclaim their property. The federal government seized the estate now known as Arlington National Cemetery and used it for military graves for thousands of fallen Union soldiers, possibly to prevent Lee from ever returning home.

Lee Memorial , and is open to the public for tours. As a well-educated man with considerable social and military experience, Lee is celebrated for many of his quotes regarding slavery , duty, honor and military service, including:. In August of , soon after the end of the war, Lee was invited to serve as president of Washington College now Washington and Lee University , where he and his family are buried.

Since his death at age 63 on October 12, , following a stroke, he has retained a place of distinction in most Southern states. Statues and other memorials built in his honor have become flashpoints in cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana, Baltimore, Maryland, and Dallas, Texas. Many Robert. While Lee did not support secession, he never defended the rights of slaves. 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. On June 30 a Confederate brigade, pursuing the report that there were shoes to be had in Gettysburg, ran into Federal cavalry west of town, and withdrew. It was almost a rout, until Maj. Howard, to whom Lee as West Point superintendent had been kind when Howard was an unpopular cadet, and Maj. He transformed from reluctant secessionist to adamant supporter of the Confederate Cause. Lee became one of the most successful Confederate generals, winning several major battles against larger Union forces at Seven Days, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville.

His daughter-in-law also died during the war, while his son Rooney was captured and held prisoner. Continual fighting and mass desertions saw the Army of Northern Virgina reduced to less than 30, soldiers.

In his farewell address to Confederate troops, formally known as General Order No. His declaration set the framework for how many Confederate veterans perceived the War in the decades that followed.

Following the Civil War, Lee was famously subdued in his political commentary. He was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in Nonetheless, Lee responded with increasing frustration to Reconstruction policies of protecting African American voting rights and military occupation of the South. Rosecrans and Gen. Lee remained a prominent figure in the post-war South. He served as president of Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia.

Though President Davis named the Virginian General-in-Chief of all Confederate forces in February , only two months later, on April 9, , Lee was forced to surrender his weary and depleted army to Grant at Appomattox Court House , effectively ending the Civil War.

Lee returned home on parole and eventually became the president of Washington College in Virginia now known as Washington and Lee University. He remained in this position until his death on October 12, in Lexington, Virginia. Civil War Biography. Robert E. Title General. Date of Birth - Death January 19, — October 12, Topic s :. Related Biographies. View All Related Resources. Appomattox Court House.