Beliefs of Robert E. Lee

From the day that General Robert E. Lee left the army to become once again a private citizen he believed that it was the duty of the southern people to rebuild their homes and churches, and the duty of the nation to unite in a spirit of cooperation to put the Civil War behind them and seek a just and lasting peace.

Although he was offered large salaries many times to leave the state of Virginia, he declined all offers and elected to stay and take a position as an educator. The college walls at Lexington were still standing, but that was about all. There was only a faint flicker of life anywhere, and there were only a few people left with connections to the school. However, despite this fact, Lee elected to become President of Washington College and his example made hard work much easier for everyone (Wells, 1950, pp. 186-188).

Because of Lee's connection with the school, the trustees waged a very active campaign to raise funds, using the General's name as an enticement to the few wealthy Southerners left, to give funds (Freeman, 1935, Vol. IV, p. 1030).

Lee's ultimate goal, it seems, was to make the college more useful to the country. In addition to courses intended for cultural education, the General wanted s

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are seen frequently in his writing (Lee, 1924, p. 301). Lee became a person who had made a conscious decision to subject his life and guide it by strict conformity to certain principles. No doubt his ideals and his concern for duty had roots much deeper than his state of mind during the 1850s. Yet the rigid personality which seems to have emerged after the Mexican War appeared almost a deliberate effort to adopt a code of conduct. Duty became obsessive. The notes in Lee's diary on "education" are replete with demands for blind obedience to duty, as were his letters to his children (Lee, 1924, p. 303). Lee apparently learned his sense of duty from his mother, or, as Douglas Freeman (1935, Vol. I, p. 76) suggested, absorbed it as a tenet of the aristocratic society in which he was born and raised. Still, the stress of the ideal may have been an element used by Lee for compensation, since the General was frequently plagued by the disease of extreme homesickness (Connelly, 1977, p. 189). More than once Lee explained that despite deep yearnings for family and Virginia, duty demanded that he remain absent and unhappy (Smith, 1984, p. 153). Lee transformed a long-held attitude into a rigid principle. It produced a rationale
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Approximate Word count = 1950
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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