Opinion: Washington, Lincoln, Lee—a U.S. Trinity

Edward C. Smith
for National Geographic News

January 18, 2002

One hundred and forty years ago, the United States went to war against
itself. When Southern secessionists fired on Fort Sumter, South
Carolina, in April 1861 in their first blow for independence from the
Union, President Abraham Lincoln sent for Robert E. Lee, a colonel in
the United States Army.

Calling for Lee was the logical thing for
Lincoln, as commander-in-chief, to do. The Lee family had played a
prominent role in the American Revolution, and Lee, with more than 30
years in the military, was a highly regarded soldier.

Lee had commanded troops in the autumn of 1859 in response to John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later to become West Virginia when the state seceded from Virginia in 1862).

At the behest of President James Buchanan, Lee's men quickly overpowered and captured Brown, a religious crusader radically opposed to slavery. Brown was tried for treason and executed, providing the growing abolitionist movement in the North with a nationally known martyr.

Less than two years later, Lincoln asked Lee to command the 75,000 volunteers that would be raised to crush the rebellion begun at Fort Sumter. The president naively calculated that the war would be over in no more than 90 days.

Lee rejected the president's offer.

Never before had this most loyal of Americans disobeyed a superior. Motivated solely by the need to choose correctly between duty and desire, Lee returned home and resigned his commission. Several days later Virginia seceded from the Union and Lee announced that he would fervently follow the fate of his state. Lincoln was devastated by the decision.

State's Rights and Slavery

Contrary to what most Americans are taught, the Civil War did not begin with the goal of destroying slavery. It was begun, first and foremost, to preserve the Union and to do so at all costs.

Lincoln's decision to abolish slavery was not announced until April 16, 1862, a year after the firing on Fort Sumter. The Final Draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam, which was fought only 75 miles from Washington, D.C. The battle marked the pivotal point of the war. Although fighting would continue for nearly three more years, the tide had turned at Antietam, and Union victory became inevitable.

The proclamation didn't enter into effect until January 1, 1863, 21 months after the war began. Furthermore, the document had absolutely no application whatsoever to the four slave-holding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky (the president's home state), which remained in the Union.

Always politically astute, Lincoln once half-jokingly told Fredrick Douglass, a former slave who rose to prominence in the abolitionist movement: "I've always wanted God on our side in this affair, but we absolutely must have Kentucky."

Sadly, the war was not over in 90 days. It raged for four bloody years, inflicting a degree of carnage over vast expanses of southern territory on a scale entirely beyond any American's imagination. Such destruction would not be seen again until the aftermath of World War II.

The two pivotal personalities in the great conflict were Lincoln and Lee.

Lincoln fought to save the Union that George Washington had co-founded and fathered during its perilous infancy. Lee fought against the Union because he, like so many others in both the North and the South, truly believed that each individual state was sovereign unto itself and should not be forced to remain in the Union if it elected to exit.

Lee: Life After War

After his surrender at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, General Lee had plenty of time to think through the events of the past four years and reflect deeply on the decisions he had made that so heavily impacted the lives of so many others.

I believe that at some point during this period Lee privately acknowledged that the Union that George Washington, a father figure for Lee, had helped create was unprecedented in human history, precious, and deserving of lasting preservation. In other words, I am convinced that Lee concluded that Lincoln, not he, had fought for the just cause.

Lee's reputation and stature as a leader were such that he engendered a great deal of loyalty among his men. What he thought, or what guilt he may have felt about the soldiers who sacrificed their lives fighting for him during the later years of the war, we will never know.

Lee wrote no memoirs and only rarely spoke, even to his most intimate friends, about his wartime trials and tribulations.

We do know that before he went to meet with General Grant he asked Confederate General Wise, "What will the country think of me?" Wise answered: "What country? There has not been a country for more than a year. For these men, you are the country."

Return of the Prodigal Son

Lee, like the prodigal son in the Bible, had left his father's home—in this case, the country that Washington had helped found—in rebellion and had squandered the riches of the South in lost lives and land.

To atone for the sin of waging civil war, he humbly returned to his father's home, in a manner of speaking, by accepting the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. He devoted the remainder of his life to educating young Virginians to become, in his words, "good Americans." After his death on October 12, 1870, the school was renamed Washington and Lee University, linking "father" and "son" forever together.

Lee never returned to his 1,100-acre (445-hectare) estate in Arlington, Virginia, although he did return to Washington, D.C., to visit President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. The two former generals, both West Point graduates who had fought together in the Mexican War of 1846, had not seen each other since their fateful meeting at Appomattox Court House. We can only imagine their conversation.

Today Lee is justly honored with a statue in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, alongside one of George Washington. Both men are memorialized as well by statues in the Virginia State Capitol.

Interestingly, both men were once traitors—one to the king, the other to the president.

Grant was prescient when he predicted: "If the South follows the example of Lee, eventually all will be well with the country."

Most southerners have done just that, by accepting defeat and embracing reunification, while at the same time cherishing the heritage of the "Lost Cause." There remains a prominent minority, however, who have not. Nor apparently will they ever accept defeat, much less recognize—or respect—Union victory. Instead, they continue to see themselves as residents of a conquered southern nation, not a reunited nation, whose passion is unleashed publicly and privately whenever their flag of independence is assaulted.

To me, they have forfeited any right to claim themselves as followers of General Lee.

Edward C. Smith is the director of American Studies at American University.