Confederate general and commanding symbol of the Lost Cause
Appears in 1 documentary
Few figures in American history cast as long a shadow as Robert Edward Lee. Born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he was the son of Revolutionary War hero “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and grew up in the long tradition of Virginia aristocracy. That inheritance — of honor, duty, and a particular idea of Southern identity — would shape everything that followed, including his complicated and consequential place in the American memory.
Lee graduated second in his class from West Point in 1829, a distinction made more remarkable by the fact that he received zero demerits during his entire time there. He served with distinction in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), earning the attention of General Winfield Scott, who later called him the greatest soldier he had ever seen. By the time the Civil War erupted in 1861, Lee was considered one of the most capable officers in the United States Army.
His resignation from that army — and his decision to lead Confederate forces — was not made lightly. Personally opposed to secession, Lee nonetheless declared that he could not draw his sword against Virginia. On June 1, 1862, he assumed command of what he called the Army of Northern Virginia and almost immediately transformed it from a defensive force into an aggressive fighting machine. His campaigns in the Seven Days Battles, at Second Bull Run, and at Chancellorsville — where he divided an already outnumbered army to rout a force twice his size — established him as one of history’s most daring battlefield commanders.
The episode that may best illustrate the razor-thin margins on which history turns came in September 1862, during Lee’s first invasion of the North. On September 13, Union soldiers resting in a Maryland field near Frederick discovered a copy of Special Order 191 — Lee’s complete operational plan for the invasion — lying in the grass, wrapped around three cigars. The document revealed that Lee had split his army into multiple columns spread across difficult terrain, a catastrophic vulnerability if Union General George McClellan moved quickly to exploit it.
McClellan did move, though not quickly enough to destroy Lee entirely. The resulting Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, became the bloodiest single day in American military history, with approximately 22,717 casualties on both sides. Lee’s army survived largely because McClellan’s notorious caution prevented him from committing his full force. The lost order episode is a reminder that the Civil War’s outcome was never inevitable — it turned on chance, timing, and the decisions of individuals under extreme pressure.
Lee continued fighting for nearly three more years, inflicting staggering losses on Union forces even as Confederate resources dwindled. He surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
Robert E. Lee died on October 12, 1870, in Lexington, Virginia, where he had served as president of Washington College in his final years. He was 63. The war had ended, but the argument about what Lee represented was just beginning.
Within decades of his death, Lee had been elevated by Lost Cause mythology into something approaching sainthood — a noble soldier who fought not for slavery but for home and honor. Statues went up across the South, many of them erected not in the immediate aftermath of the war but during the Civil Rights era of the 20th century, a timing that says as much about their purpose as their subjects.
Modern scholarship has challenged the myth without erasing the man. Lee was a genuinely gifted commander, but he was also a slaveholder who made a deliberate choice to fight for a government whose cornerstone, in Vice President Alexander Stephens’s own words, was the permanent enslavement of Black Americans. The tension between those two realities is not a paradox to be resolved — it is the central fact of his legacy.
Lee matters historically not just as a general but as a mirror. The way each generation has chosen to remember him — hero, traitor, tragic figure, symbol — reveals more about American anxieties over race, defeat, and identity than about the man himself. He remains one of the most contested figures in the national memory precisely because the questions his life raises have never been fully settled.
Robert E. Lee's entire battle plan for the Confederate invasion of the North, Special Order 191, was found by a Union soldier lying in a Maryland field wrapped around three cigars, days before Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American military history.