Robert E. Lee as a Product of His Environment
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By means of an unusual combination of circumstances and personal abilities Robert E. Lee (1807-70), more than any man in American history, earned a simultaneous reputation as a hero and a traitor. On the surface, of course, this is easily explained by the fact that he left the United States army to eventually become the commander of the Confederate forces. But Lee was also a general who did not believe war was a solution to political problems, a hero of the secessionists who held that secession was unconstitutional, the son of a hero of the American Revolution who worked hard to break the country apart, and a born aristocrat who believed that the Union, despite its Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, should be kept intact. It was Lee's fate, however, to be "the best representative of the aristocratic principle in all American history," which meant that he was loyal to the system that bred him--the oligarchy of the state of Virginia (Dodd 177). As a product of this environment Lee believed that honor meant loyalty to its code and, against his better practical instincts, was forced to accept his state's decision to withdraw from the Union and the Confederacy's decision to pin its highest hopes on his skills as a military leader. Robert Edward Lee was born into a society that ran itself on aristocratic principles and adhered to a code of honor that was deliberately broken only by those who had no further desire to share in the power and prestige that went with belonging to
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r with his teenage sister-in-law Elizabeth McCarty, "an heiress in her own right." Elizabeth became his legal ward and moved into Stratford Hall, where Harry Lee was in possession. He used the McCarty money to restore the home, and when his wife and sister-in-law left he was sued for the return of the money. He was thus forced to sell the home which Robert E. Lee, though he had only lived there for a few childhood years, always referred to as "home." In the Virginia world of landed gentry the Stratford estate was "the place that linked him to the plantation South" and the loss of an ancestral home was a blow to all the Lees' pride (Casdorph 24).
His father's disreputable behavior, his half-brother's unforgivable scandal, the sale of the family home, and the genteel poverty in which he was reared had a strong effect on Robert Lee. From the time of his half-brother's disgrace he became "a man whose life had no closets [and] nothing to hide from that moment forward" (Casdorph 24). It was Lee's character, as much as his military abilities, that prompted the immense loyalty of the troops he was to command in his military career. As Lieutenant-Colonel A. S. L. Fremantle said of Lee,
He is a perfect gentleman in every respect.
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1697
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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