General Notes

The Confederacy's greatest soldier, Robert E. Lee, was descended from an
old and honoured family. Several of Lee's forebears had played distinguished
roles in Virginia's history. His father was the Revolutionary War hero
Light-Horse Harry Lee, a friend of George Washington.

Robert Edward Lee was born in Stratford, Virginia, the
fourth of five children.  Robert was educated at the US Military Academy,
West Point. He graduated second in his class in 1829; being commission as
Second Lieutenant in the US Army Engineers.

On 5 Jul 1831, he married Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Washington's
wife and heiress of the estate of Arlington, across the Potomac from
Washington. The Lees had seven children. He was promoted First Lieutenant
in 1836, and Captain in 1838. He distinguished himself in the battles of the
Mexican War, was wounded in the storming of Chapultepec in 1847; his
meritorious service earned him brevet promotion to Major.

He became Superintendent of West Point. Later he was appointed Colonel of
cavalry. He was in command of the Department of Texas in 1860. Early the
following year, was summoned to Washington, DC, when war between the
states seemed imminent. President Abraham Lincoln offered him the field
command of the Union forces, but Lee declined. On 20 Apr, three days after
Virginia seceded from the Union, he submitted his resignation from the US
Army.

On 23 Apr 1861, he became Commander-in-Chief of the military and naval
forces of Virginia. For a year, he was military adviser to Jefferson
Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and was then placed
in command of the Confederate army in Northern Virginia. In February 1865
Lee was made commander-in-Chief of all Confederate Armies; two months
later the war was virtually ended by his surrender to General Ulysses S
Grant at Appomattox Court House. His great battles included those of
Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg.

The masterly strategy of Lee was overcome only by the superior resources
and troop strength of the Union. His campaigns are almost universally
studied in military schools as models of strategy and tactics. He had a
capacity for anticipating the actions of his opponents and for
comprehending their weaknesses. He made skillful use of interior lines of
communication and kept a convex front toward the enemy, so that his
reinforcements, transfers, and supplies could reach their destination
over short, direct routes. His greatest contribution to military practice,
however, was his use of field fortifications as aids to maneuvering. As
a trained military engineer, he recognized that a small body of soldiers,
protected by entrenchments, can hold an enemy force of many times their
number, while the main body outflanks the enemy or attacks a smaller force
elsewhere. In his application of this principle, Lee was years ahead of
his time; the tactic was not fully understood or generally adopted until
the 20th century.

Lee applied for but was never granted the official post-war amnesty. He
accepted the presidency of Washington College, now Washington and Lee
University, in 1865; within a few years it had become an outstanding
academic institution. He died there on 12 Oct 1870. Lee has long been
revered as an ideal by southerners and as a hero by all Americans. His
antebellum home is now known as Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee
Memorial, and is a national memorial. In 1861, after the outbreak of the
American Civil War, the mansion and grounds were confiscated by the Union
government. The house was converted to a hospital, and in 1864 the
grounds were first used as a military cemetery. After the Civil War, the
US Supreme Court ruled that the house was the property of George
Washington Custis Lee (1832-1913), son of Robert E. Lee. He sold it to the
federal government in 1883, who developed it as Arlington National
Cemetery, a federal burial ground administered by the US Army.

In 1975, Lee's citizenship was restored posthumously by an act of the
US Congress.

{Chamber's Biographical Dictionary}